A vast field is filled as far as the eye can see with miserable and gaunt men in remnants of military uniform. It’s May 1945 and the war in Europe has ended. By rights, these surrendered soldiers will be allowed to return to their families, but many will not leave this muddy ground alive. There is no food, no shelter, and no medicine. The Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps) were the killing fields of one of the worst war crimes in modern history, committed by General Dwight Eisenhower and the US Army.
The cull of German troops was a closely-guarded secret until four decades after the war, when a Canadian researcher was writing a book on a French resistance hero. James Bacque found that his subject, Raou Laporterie, had been saved by a German soldier, Hans Goertz. In gratitude, in 1946, Laporterie got Goertz out of a French prison camp to work in his chain of drapery stores. Goertz told of mass deaths of inmates through lack of sustenance.
After pursuing leads in the French records, Bacque came to realise that Allied military leaders had ‘committed an appalling crime against humanity’. His investigation culminated in Bacque’s harrowing book Other Losses: The Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths Of Disarmed German Soldiers And Civilians Under General Eisenhower’s Command (1989). The foreword to this expose was written by Ernest Fisher, a retired colonel of the US Army, and war historian noted for his book Cassino to the Alps. Fisher set the scene: –
‘Over most of the western front in April 1945, the thunder of artillery had been replaced by the shuffling of millions of pairs of boots as columns of disarmed German soldiers marched wearily towards Allied barbed wire enclosures. Scattered enemy detachments fired a few volleys before fading into the countryside and eventual capture by Allied soldiers.’
As Fisher explained, German soldiers did everything they could to evade capture by the Russians, who raped and pillaged as they advanced over eastern Germany:
‘The mass surrenders in the west contrasted markedly with the final weeks on the eastern front where surviving Wehrmacht units still fought the advancing Red Army to enable as many of their comrades as possible to evade capture by the Russians. This was the final strategy of the German High Command then under Grand Admiral Doenitz who had been designated Commander-in-Chief by Adolf Hitler.’
But crossing to the Allied side was not the sanctuary that the defeated Germans expected, due to the visceral hatred of Eisenhower. The supreme military commander, of Swedish-Jewish background, had wriiten in a letter to his wife ‘God, I hate the Germans’. In September 1944, in the presence of the British ambassador to Washington, Eisenhower proposed that the entire German general staff, all officers of the Gestapo and all leaders of the Nazi party from mayor upwards should be exterminated (around a hundred thousand men).
Fisher had met Bacque in Washington in 1987 where they uncovered evidence, deeply buried in national archives, of a systematic slaughter. ‘More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoulder to shoulder. The ground beneath them became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation.’
Shockingly, more German soldiers died in the camps from April 1945 onwards than died in combat.
In the archives, Bacque studied each edition of the ‘Weekly Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Forces Report’, which showed a high number in the category of ‘other losses’. As escape was almost impossible, these men must have died in the camps. According to Bacque:
‘The victims undoubtedly number over 800,000 and quite likely over a million. Their deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep the prisoners alive. Relief organizations that attempted to help the prisoners in the American camps were refused permission by the army. All of this was hidden at the time; then lied about when the Red Cross, Le Mondé and Le Figaro attempted to tell the truth publicly.’
Ominously, on 26th April 1945 the combined chiefs-of-staff at Reims decided to create the status of ‘disarmed enemy forces’. This category would apply to ‘prisoners-of-war in American hands only’. No public declaration was made of this bypassing of the Geneva Convention. Mortality data were censored by the American military authorities, who exploited their control of media to push propaganda about their humane treatment of prisoners.
With German soldiers failing to come home in the months after the war ended, the myth of a ‘world food shortage’ was used, a contrived crisis blamed on the Germans. Yet despite the war, there was ample supply of wheat and corn The Swiss Red Cross had thirteen and-a-half million food parcels intended for prisoners, which would have prevented any death from starvation, but this provision was blocked. Indeed, the Red Cross was prevented from entering the camps, as Bacque explained:
‘Granting permission for the welfare agencies to visit the camps would have led to a storm of public protest against the atrocious conditions, while at the same time producing the workers and political will needed to alleviate them. It can hardly be doubted that this was why permission was not given.’
Eisenhower’s accomplice in this cruelty was an old friend of his from military training. Appointed as Eisenhower’s right-hand man, General Everett S Hughes took an extraordinary interest in prisoners’ rations, which he deviously reduced by as much as he could.
The British were innocent in this massacre, its German prisoners dying at no more than an expected rate, because they were fed and housed appropriately. Bacque’s book begins with a conversation at the banqueting table at the Yalta conference in 1943. Joseph Stalin expressed his desire to shoot a line of fifty thousand German officers. Franklin Roosevelt suggested a compromise of 49 thousand, before his son Elliott, a brigadier-general in the US Army, added to the proposed cull hundreds of thousands of Nazis. Winston Churchill stormed out, after stating ‘I would rather be taken out in the garden here and now to be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy’.
There is another part to this dark episode. General George Patton, a magnanimous victor who respected the Germans as a people, was disgusted by Eisenhower, accusing him of Gestapo practices. Patton, whose Third Army had rapidly swept through northern France after the D-Day landings, due to his brilliant tactics, made himself unpopular with the US military establishment after the war was won. A thorn in the side of Eisenhower, he suggested that the Germans be rearmed to fight the communist Russians.
As described in a Daily Mail article (21 December 2019), General Patton MURDERED? Mystery pertaining to the suspicious death of the general 74 years later, Patton’s death at the end of1945 was later suspected as an assassination. In 1979 Second World War spy Douglas Bazata claimed that he was ordered by the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) to kill Patton and make it look like an accident. Patton was driving a Cadillac in Mannheim when he collided with a military truck. He was paralysed from the head down, but recovered sufficiently in an army hospital for medical clearance to fly back to the USA. On 21st December, the day before his flight, he died suddenly. There was no autopsy, and medical records disappeared.
Was Patton killed because he knew too much about the death camps, and was as much of a maverick to risk the dirty secret coming out?
***
Niall McCrae is a researcher and educator, and author of ‘The Moon and Madness’ (Imprint Academic, 2011), and ‘Moralitis: a Cultural Virus’ (Bruges Group, 2018). See his 21WIRE archive here.
December 26, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, United States |
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The fear and panic produced by The War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 paved the way for media and government predictive programming of an imminent cyberattack. The HighWire takes a deep dive through this historical timeline.
December 25, 2023
Posted by aletho |
False Flag Terrorism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | United States, WEF |
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New Peer-Reviewed Research Shows Why the Study Was Flawed
During the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians, scientists and media organizations vilified unvaccinated people, blaming them for prolonging the pandemic and advocating policies that barred “the unvaccinated” from public venues, businesses and their own workplaces.
But a peer-reviewed study published last week in Cureus shows that a key April 2022 study by Fisman et al. — used to justify draconian policies segregating the unvaccinated — was based on the application of flawed mathematical risk models that offer no scientific backing for such policies.
Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto epidemiologist was the lead author of the April 2022 study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), which the authors said showed that unvaccinated people posed a disproportionate risk to vaccinated people.
Fisman has worked as an adviser to vaccine makers Pfizer, Seqirus, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur. He also advised the Canadian government on its COVID-19 policies and recently was tapped to head up the University of Toronto’s new Institute for Pandemics.
Fisman told reporters the key message of the study was that the choice to get vaccinated is not merely personal because if you choose to be unvaccinated, you are “creating risk for those around you.”
The press ran with it.
Headlines like Salon’s, “Merely hanging out with unvaccinated puts the vaccinated at higher risk: study,” Forbes’ “Study Shows Unvaccinated People Are At Increased Risk Of Infecting The Vaccinated” or Medscape’s “My Choice? Unvaccinated Pose Outsize Risk to Vaccinated” proliferated in more than 100 outlets.
The Canadian Parliament used the paper to promote restrictions for unvaccinated people.
However, in the new study published last week, Joseph Hickey, Ph.D., and Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., show that Fisman’s “susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR)” model, used to draw his conclusions, had a glaring flaw in one of its key parameters — contact frequency.
When they adjusted that parameter to account for real-world data, the model produced a variety of contradictory outcomes, including one showing that segregating unvaccinated people can increase the epidemic severity among the vaccinated — the exact opposite of what Fisman et al. purported to show
Hickey and Rancourt, researchers at Canada’s Correlation: Research in the Public Interest, concluded that without reliable empirical data to inform such SIR models, the models are “intrinsically limited” and should not be used as a basis for policy.
The Canadian researchers attempted to publish their paper in CMAJ, where Fisman had published his original study, but the editor — a collaborator of Fisman’s — refused even to review it.
The open-access version of CMAJ also declined to publish the article even after it received favorable peer reviews.
In a letter sent, with supporting documentation, to the CMAJ and the Canadian Medical Association, Hickey and Rancourt recounted the “tedious saga” whereby the journal editors “concocted a multitude of ancillary and unnecessary objections, apparently intended to be insurmountable barriers” to publishing their study.
They later published the study in the peer-reviewed journal Cureus.
Rancourt tweeted a link to the study results along with a montage of pandemic-era media clips scapegoating unvaccinated people.
‘A policy based on nothing’
SIR models were commonly used as the basis for pandemic policies, often with fatal flaws research has since shown.
Fisman et al. designed their study to measure the impacts of segregating two groups — vaccinated and unvaccinated people — applying a SIR model to predict whether the unvaccinated pose an undue risk to the vaccinated during a severe acute respiratory viral outbreak, based on variable degrees of mixing among the groups.
However the model, Hickey and Rancourt wrote, failed to consider the impacts of that segregation on “contact frequencies,” a key parameter in predicting epidemic outcomes.
Instead, it assumed contact frequencies among the majority (vaccinated) and socially excluded (unvaccinated) groups would be equal and constant, which “is not realistic,” Hickey told The Defender.
In other words, the model assumed the two groups would be separated, yet living the same parallel existence — socializing, working, shopping and coming into contact with others in exactly the same ways.
But in the real world, segregation meant the unvaccinated were barred from many public places, so their contact frequencies were severely curtailed.
Hickey and Rancourt implemented the SIR model again, testing for a degree of segregation that ranged from zero to complete segregation and allowing the contact frequencies for individuals in the two groups to vary with the degree of segregation.
When they ran the model using the more realistic estimation of how different segregation policies might generate different contact frequencies among the two groups, “we found the results are all over the map,” Hickey said.
By segregating unvaccinated people from the vaccinated majority, he said, “You can have an increase in the attack rate among vaccinated people or you can have a decrease.”
“Negative epidemiological consequences can occur for either segregated group, irrespective of the deleterious health impacts of the policies themselves,” they wrote.
Hickey said the variable outcomes were very sensitive to the values of the parameters in the model, namely infectious contact frequency.
But he said, in the real world there are no reliable measures for contact frequency, and without reliable measures for model inputs, the model is essentially meaningless.
They concluded that the degree of uncertainty is so high in such SIR models that they cannot reasonably inform policy decisions.
“It’s a policy based on nothing basically,” Hickey said.
“We cannot recommend that SIR modelling be used to motivate or justify segregation policies regarding viral respiratory diseases, in the present state of knowledge,” the study concluded.
‘Fisman’s Fraud’
Modeling had a major impact on the pandemic response in Canada and globally, statistician Regina Watteel, Ph.D., who chronicled the impact of the Fisman paper in her book “Fisman’s Fraud: the Rise of Canadian Hate Science,” told The Defender.
As a key figure in modeling the pandemic in Canada, Fisman “was involved in Canada’s pandemic response at all levels,” she said.
He was also influential as a public figure, making numerous disparaging comments about “anti-vaxxers” from early on and advocating policies like vaccine passports and school closures long before he received a major grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for his SIR modeling study.
Fisman was open in interviews about the fact that the point of the 2022 study was to “undermine the notion that vaccine choice was best left to the individual,” Watteel said.
The 2022 modeling paper didn’t just present mathematical results, the authors also made political claims.
The paper stated:
“The choice of some individuals to refuse vaccination is likely to affect the health and safety of vaccinated people in a manner disproportionate to the fraction of unvaccinated people in the population.
“Risk among unvaccinated people cannot be considered self-regarding, and considerations around equity and justice for people who do choose to be vaccinated, as well as those who choose not to be, need to be considered in the formulation of vaccination policy.”
Despite serious concerns raised by numerous researchers in the CMAJ article’s response section, the mainstream international press widely promoted the article as proof the unvaccinated posed a danger to the vaccinated.
Fisman publicly advocated for vaccine mandates and passports and told reporters the impetus behind the modeling study was not a scientific question of the effects of segregation on infection rates, but the political question of, “What are the rights of vaccinated people to be protected from unvaccinated people?”
A few days after the study was published, the parliamentary secretary to the Ontario Ministry of Health used the study to defend proposed travel restrictions, Watteel showed in her book.
As a result, she wrote, it “has generated a massive trail of misinformation.”
Watteel concurred that Fisman et al.’s study was based on bad modeling. She added that by omitting publicly available current data that contradicted the data they presented in the article, the study was actually “fraudulent.”
Fisman et al. published the paper during the so-called Omicron surge, which was dominated by infections among the fully vaccinated. By spring 2022, people who were boosted had disproportionately more infections than others, according to data on the government of Ontario COVID-19 website and reproduced in Watteel’s book.
However, none of that publicly available data was included in the study.
Instead, Watteel wrote:
“Fisman et al. concocted a model to generate the results they wanted, completely omitting any reference to readily available real-world data that contradicted their results (falsification). They went on to state the contrived results as facts (data fabrication) and then proceeded to inform public policy based on the fabricated results.
“The researchers continued to push the false narrative long after numerous scientists rebuked the findings and provided evidence of the findings’ falsity. This indicates a willful misrepresentation and misinterpretation of research findings.”
CAMJ editor, Fisman colleague, blocks review of Correlation article
Hickey told The Defender when they submitted their paper critiquing SIR models like Fisman’s to CAMJ in August 2022, editor Matthew Stanbrook, M.D., Ph.D. — who also works at the University of Toronto and has collaborated with Fisman on academic articles, grants and courses — rejected the article without even sending it for peer review.
Hickey and Rancourt appealed the decision and requested Stanbrook recuse himself. The journal suggested they resubmit their study to the open-access version of CAMJ, which they did. It was rejected without going through peer review.
They appealed that decision and the paper was sent for review. A few months later, they received two positive reviews with requested corrections. They responded to the reviews and made corrections to the paper, expecting publication.
The journal then informed them there had been a “technical error” and the journal — which is supposed to have an entirely transparent peer-review process — had failed to send them concerns from anonymous internal editors and an anonymous statistician.
Hickey told The Defender :
“It is their policy that the reviewers’ names are public and that the review reports and the revision, like the responses by the author, all that stuff is public. That’s the policy. There’s no escaping that.
“And yet what do they do? They use anonymous internal people to put barriers up and make pretexts to not publish even in the face of positive reviews.”
Those anonymous comments included a suggestion that they should use Fisman’s flawed mathematical analysis, Hickey said. The authors responded to those comments in what they have now also posted on their website as a stand-alone article.
Months later, they requested an update on the journal’s plans for the article and were informed that the journal decided the article would not be suitable for its audience and suggested they instead publish in a modeling journal.
All of their collected critiques of Fisman’s 2022 paper are also collected on the Correlation website.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
December 23, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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One Health issues a booklet and finally, kinda, sorta tells us what One Health is about.
“A guide to implementing the One Health Joint Plan of Action at national level”
See page 30:
I do the decoding [italics ].
- “Provide adequate guidance and tools for the effective implementation of One Health approaches to promote the health of humans, animals, plants and ecosystems and to prevent and manage risks at the human–animal–plant–environment interface.”
This drills into the reader’s brain the idea that the human-animal or human-environment interface is a dangerous place to be, that the risks must be acknowledged, and major efforts made to manage them. Note the absence of evidence supporting the assertion that major risk exist when humans are exposed to animals and nature.
- Reduce the risk and minimize local and global impacts of zoonotic epidemics and pandemics by understanding the linkages and drivers of emergence and spillover, adopting upstream prevention and strengthening One Health surveillance, early warning and response systems.
The concept that pandemics are caused by “spillover” from animals is asserted, as is the very shaky idea that one can prevent and identify pandemics early using “surveillance” “warning and response systems”—which tellingly are never defined in any detail since no methods have ever worked.
- Reduce the burden of endemic zoonotic, neglected tropical and vector-borne diseases by supporting countries in implementing community-centric, risk-based solutions, strengthening policy and legal frameworks from the local to the global level and across sectors, and increasing political commitment and investment.
Blather about helping developing nations without saying anything specific, except that they need to strengthen “policy and legal frameworks”—such as implementing legislation for authorization of unlicensed, liability-free drugs and vaccines? They need more political commitment—commitment to what, exactly, is ominously left unsaid. And naturally more investment (and commissions) are needed.
- Promote awareness, policy changes and action coordination among stakeholders to ensure that humans, animals and ecosystems achieve health and remain healthy in their interactions with and along the food supply chain.
The ominous missing information about the policy changes and action desired should make you very nervous. Now the “food supply chain” is invoked, turning food and the methods by which it travels from farm to kitchen fair game for the purveyors of One Health.
- Take joint action to preserve antimicrobial efficacy and ensure sustainable and equitable access to antimicrobials for responsible and prudent use in human, animal and plant health.
It sounds like there is a plan to withhold antibiotics from us in the name of preserving their efficacy. Pharmacists were made to monitor azithromycin use as well as hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and mefloquine use during the COVID time. Bacterial pneumonias were untreated until the victim’s lips turned blue. Expect more of this.
- Protect and restore biodiversity, prevent the degradation of ecosystems and the wider environment to jointly support the health of people, animals, plants and ecosystems, underpinning sustainable development.
This will be the justification to move people off the land in areas where species are said to be threatened. It may also lead to enforced changes in land use, based on my earlier readings of Daszak, Fauci and the Lancet One Health commission. And of course we must give up our simple pleasures in the name of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Who voted for them, and why are we being frog-marched into a SDG future, even though we don’t know where it is leading?
_________________
The cabal that delivered COVID and its pandemic response plan to us wants to solve the rest of the world’s problems for us, too. Will YOU let them?
December 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | United Nations |
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Dr. McCullough Reveals Threat of Transgender Medicine to Growing, Vulnerable Population
We are witnessing a modern day chronic disease epidemic of autism spectrum disorder. The rate has gone from 1:10,000 in the 1960’s to 1:36 today correlated with the ever increasing and intensive childhood routine vaccination schedule. The exact cause of this neuropsychiatric syndrome is not known, however, many parents are growing ever more concerned and are following advice from the World Council for Health, that is, to defer on any more routine childhood vaccination until this and a multitude of safety questions can be answered.
I was asked to give a verbal summary for REACT: Research and Education for Autistic Children’s Treatment, hosted by Andrea Dimidik. Please listen to this 5 minute capsule that makes the following points: 1) autistic children are far more likely to consider gender change than normal kids, 2) puberty blockers, androgens, and estrogens cause harm to normal growing children, 3) gender change operations performed on normal adolescents and young adults are loaded with surgical complications, disfiguring, and sterilizing, 4) as a package, transgender medicine increases the burden of psychiatric disease, and the risk of death from all causes.
For these reasons I conclude that transgender clinical programs represent unethical and harmful forms of management for gender dysphoria. I support statewide bans on transgender clinical programs for persons < 18 years old. Consenting adults with proper psychiatric care can make there own decisions on sexual preference and whether or not to pursue the fantasy of living in the appearance of the opposite gender provided it is done with full informed consent and at their own cost.
December 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Video | United States |
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“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency,” assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos declared in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, after accusing the defendant of building FTX on a “pyramid of deceit.” Much the same can be said about the foundations of Britain’s net zero experiment. Energy is complicated, and electricity is essential to modern society and our quality of life, but as with FTX, the underlying story is straightforward: wind power and net zero are built on a pyramid of deceit.
Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.
The push for net zero began in 2019, when the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80% to 100% by 2050 – i.e., net zero – was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.
During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80% target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.
The regulatory-impact assessment that Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80% – an estimate that excluded transitional costs – and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world did not. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.
The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons – a 33% reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons – a rise of 16%. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in around 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.
Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue – Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School – while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67%, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet supposedly the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.
During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.
The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer – but are not obliged to take – for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.
Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artefact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are around double those assumed in the subsidy bids.
Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at Edinburgh University and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the twelfth year of operation, rising per MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs.
The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market is not cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, around four times the typical wholesale price.
Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:
The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified . . . It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.
The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.
The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it is now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as indicating falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.
The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, are not equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.
We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, comprising only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.
Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net zero modelling. Its net zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy – all to produce 7 percent less energy.
Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for America. The physics and economics of wind power are not magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: net zero is anti-growth. It is a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the last decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.
Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth could not be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.
December 21, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | UK |
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The escalating attacks on ships in the Arabian Sea and the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait by the Houthi movement in Yemen pose a real threat to the Israeli, Western and American economies. The Red Sea is one of the world’s busiest shipping routes for oil and gas. Most of the major shipping companies, such as the world’s largest container company, Italian and Swiss-owned Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Denmark-based Maersk, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, and France’s CMA CGM have suspended their use of the Red Sea.
Due to the Houthi attacks, ships now have to go around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, adding 4,000 nautical miles to the journey. This will result in the doubling of the shipping costs, to $4,000 per forty-foot container. According to experts, this change is due to the extra fuel cost of $1 million for each vessel going via the Cape instead of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
The Houthis are apparently applying an ethically justified approach built on the same logic used by the Israeli occupation state. Israel besieges the Gaza Strip and grants itself the right to do so. With this logic, the group grants itself the right to besiege Israel and links the opening of the strait to lifting the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
As the attacks intensify and pose a real danger to maritime routes, causing many companies to fear using the Red Sea and raising the cost of insurance and transportation, the US has announced the formation of an international naval coalition intended to protect cargo vessels. Ironically, though, the US is the largest country to impose blockades on other states and use sanctions as a weapon.
While previous US presidents considered any foreign war as an opportunity to rally the American people behind them and give themselves an electoral boost, the situation under President Joe Biden is different. He is the main advocate of the war against Russia in Ukraine, which he is losing despite throwing billions of dollars into it. Engaging in an armed confrontation with the Houthis would be a resounding failure, since the group has little to lose and does not fear war. Indeed, it would gain more legitimacy as the only force in Yemen to be fighting imperialism. Moreover, its war with the Saudi-led Arab coalition, including the United Arab Emirates, has shown that it is resilient, and able to force the coalition to freeze combat missions after years of fighting.
The outbreak of another war in this region would mean serious long-term disruption and increased transportation costs, as well as rising fuel and energy costs for end users. This would have a major impact on Europe during the winter given the already suspended supplies of oil and gas from Russia. Crude oil prices are already creeping up.
The impact of a war would be challenging for Biden as well. The US president sees himself as the, not a, world leader, but he faces difficult choices. He is accused of corruption and faces domestic issues, as does his rival, former President Donald Trump. In addition, the existing wars and crises are having long-term negative impacts on Washington’s standing and international influence.
Despite this, it seems to be impossible for Americans to consider alternative, more intelligent means to approach problems instead of military “shock and awe”. The US and its protégé Israel have always tried to play the role of gods in international politics, where what they want becomes a reality regardless of international laws and conventions. This may succeed in the short term, but it backfires in the long run, as seen in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Armed interference in all of these countries has drained the US and its people, who are generally controlled by the political, economic and media elites.
These elites combined work systemically to nurture violence among American citizens, implanting a gung-ho mentality with war seen as the most effective way to solve international problems. Hollywood and video games instill the idea of US (and Israeli) exceptionalism and invulnerability in the minds of the public, so that it becomes easy to recruit them to fight and die in the elite’s battles. The US helps to spread racism in the world by creating divisions among people and inciting them against each other. The old principle well-loved by settler-colonial states is divide and rule; people are easier to manipulate, helping to ensure the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite that fosters racism.
A simple comparison with cinema in Iran — which the US designates as a sponsor of terrorism — reveals a stark difference. Iranian cinema only rarely focuses on humanitarian and social topics, and hardly ever depicts violence, unlike Hollywood, which thrives on screen violence, normalising it and de-sensitising the audience to the extent that people find it easier to harm their fellow human beings in the service and interests of the elite.
While the economy is failing and education is facing great challenges in America, the government is spending trillions of dollars on unjustified and futile wars, including the one which Israel is waging against the Palestinian people. Sinking more and more resources in the quagmire of the Middle East will only lead to more suffering within America and abroad. Likewise, what is happening in Yemen will have an impact worldwide, not just in Gaza.
The consequences of a war against the Houthis will be much broader, dragging the Zionist colonial project and Western imperialism into a hellish scenario. Regardless of what the Zionists and their supporters in the West believe, they did not create a safe haven for Jews when they created the state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world. The Houthis are turning the tables on everyone in their defence of the Palestinians against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
December 21, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Gaza, Israel, Palestine, United States, Yemen, Zionism |
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Hamas political leaders are in talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) about how to govern Gaza and the West Bank after the war with Israel ends, with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 20 December.
“We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not partisans of a zero-sum game,” Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’ Doha-based political bureau, stated. “We want the war to end.”
The Hamas leader’s statement marks a change from 7 October, when the armed wing of the group led an assault on Israeli military bases and settlements in which more than 1,200 Israelis were killed, both by Hamas and Israeli forces themselves due to the Hannibal Directive.
Hamas wished to break the 17-year siege on Gaza and put the Palestinian issue back on the table in the international arena.
During the attack, Hamas took over 200 Israeli soldiers and civilians captive hoping to exchange them for the freedom of thousands of Palestinians long held in Israeli prisons.
Now, after Israel has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’s political wing is seeking an end to the conflict.
“We want to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Badran said.
Badran also stated Hamas wishes to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represents Palestinians at the United Nations and other international forums.
“It will be a national dialogue,” Badran said. “We have always said the PLO should contain any Palestinian faction.”
Badran and other Hamas officials say the talks have also included Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza security chief with close Emirati and Egyptian support, and former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
“I am no friend of Hamas,” Dahlan said. “But do you think anybody is going to be able to run to make peace without Hamas?”
The Hamas political leaders indicated they would be willing to join the PLO and support negotiations for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
But Badran said that Hamas had no plans to recognize Israel as long as the occupation continues. “The world has no right to ask when people are being killed,” he said. “It’s not logical to ask this question at this time.”
Badran denied rumors of a division between Hamas’ Gaza branch and its political leadership in Doha. “The leadership of Hamas, both inside Gaza and outside it, is in complete agreement on strategies and political positions across various issues,” he said.
Badran says Hamas is seeking a full-scale ceasefire and a full exchange of captives from both sides. “If there is a ceasefire, our stance is crystal clear: We want an exchange of all-for-all,” he said.
Israel has for years sought to foster divisions between Hamas and the PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he has for years approved Qatari payments to Hamas in Gaza, while ensuring the PA remained weak and unable to win the establishment of a Palestinian state through peaceful diplomatic means.
Israel has also sought to use the PA security forces to dismantle Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank.
The US and Israel appear to disagree on a final solution for Gaza. The US wants a PA security force to crack down on Hamas after the war and to administer Gaza, said Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian peace negotiator. “They essentially want the PA’s role as Israel’s security subcontractor in the West Bank to be expanded into Gaza,” she said.
Buttu said the US is willing provide renewed financial and political support for the PA to maintain what New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman this summer called the “shared fiction” of a Palestinian state. “There is a longstanding and continuing false promise of Palestinian statehood,” Buttu added.
However, Israel has vowed it will not allow the PA to take control in Gaza. Numerous Israeli political and military figures have called for destroying Gaza, forcing its 2.3 million residents to flee to Egypt or Europe as refugees, and to rebuild the Jewish settlement in Gush Katif on the Gaza coast that was evacuated in 2005.
December 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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If the US decides to launch direct attacks on Yemeni forces imposing a blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, it will only make Washington’s tenuous situation in the Middle East worse and expand the conflict across the region at a time when the US public is increasingly opposed to such wars, a journalist told Sputnik.
Several major global shipping companies announced that they are to seek alternate routes from the Red Sea after the Yemeni militant group Ansarallah, better known as the Houthi movement, closed it to Israeli cargo traffic, throwing global trade into chaos. In response, the US has mobilized an international task force dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian to keep the sea lanes open.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is weighing whether its patrols will be purely defensive in nature or will also include offensive strikes against Ansarallah targets in Yemen, which the group mostly controls after eight years of brutal civil war and Saudi-led military intervention.
Ansarallah’s actions, which include capturing several Israel-linked vessels in the area in recent weeks, are in response to Tel Aviv’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced almost the entire population of 2.3 million. The group has also fired ballistic missiles at the southern Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea.
Beirut-based broadcaster and journalist Laith Marouf told Sputnik that the multinational task force assembled by the US includes several European allies but also Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf state that hosts a massive US Navy base, and the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean with a coast guard composed of nine small patrol boats used to combat piracy and illegal fishing.
“This is the alliance that the United States is going to face Yemen with to try to allow shipping to go through to the Zionist colony and not make it feel the pain that the Palestinians are feeling with the blockade in Gaza,” he said.
“The [recent] attack that the government in Sana’a did on the two ships in the Red Sea was the first attack recorded in any military of a ballistic missile hitting a naval target that is moving at 60-somewhat knots, which was [the speed at which] these ships were moving. So we see now that the Yemenis have actually some of the most advanced land-to-sea missiles in the world.
“Knowing that the American aircraft carrier is now parked on the shorelines of Somalia facing Yemen, they are in the range of these missiles. Probably the Yemenis will not need to hit this aircraft carrier if the United States actually attacks Yemen or any of the sites of launching these missiles from Yemen. The Yemeni forces, all they have to do is sink a few destroyers and that aircraft carrier will scurry running back home because it wouldn’t have any protection.”
“This is now a dangerous game that the United States is playing, all to defend this Zionist colony. And the American people hearing us right now must understand that the deaths of any American soldiers that are going to come in the next few days will be because the United States is defending the Zionist colony and is not defending itself. They will be dying for the sake of Israel,” he said.
“Canadian, French, British and American ships will be sinking if the United States or this coalition dares to attack Yemen. Yemen has been under attack for a decade by the United States and its vassals in the region, and even the vassals that were co-operating in the attacks on Yemen – namely the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates government – have refused to join this coalition. Why? Because their assets will be fried if the United States attacks Yemen. And this is why we’re seeing right now: these vassals are each one of them being given a role.”
“The Emirates and the Saudis are continuing to allow trade to come through their ports on trucks to Jordan to the Zionist colony, and they’re all going to be kept out of this war. In this situation, it’s not only that their assets, their oilfields, would be attacked if they join this coalition, but also because they need to continue to be the lifeline of the Zionist colony in terms of trade in the future as this rolls out,” Marouf said.
Marouf added that “we will be entering a new stage of this war” if Yemen fires back on the coalition ships because it will trigger wider attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria by allied militia forces, which have been happening at a somewhat low intensity since early October.
The Axis of Resistance’s regional coordination against Israel and its allies “is going to be taught in military schools and strategists’ schools for decades to come,” Marouf told Sputnik.
“What has been rolling out for the last two and a half months, clearly, the Resistance Axis that includes all these groups in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Yemen and Iran are very coordinated,” he said.
“They have all now shared all their capabilities in terms of military and training. So we see units of each one of these components that fought in the different battlefields across the last 15 years in the region. And the technology knowledge on building capabilities has been passed along across this whole region. So now we have a more kind of homogeneous coalition between these groups.
“They all have one thing that they agree on, which is ending American presence in the region and then sovereignty for the peoples. So to see them, how they are playing out right now, each one of them, their own role separately is a brilliant thing to watch. And the United States and Israel are in a quagmire, and the end is clear for everybody to see.”
Growing US Public Opposition
He likewise noted that opposition to the Israeli attack on Gaza has continued to grow in the United States, where new protests are happening daily in hundreds of cities and towns, and constituents are pressuring politicians to take a stand against the war.
“For the American voters, it’s becoming problematic as we come closer and closer to the elections in the United States. Both parties are championing genocide and the Zionist colony, and the vast majority of Americans do not want to be associated with this genocide and do not want their country to carry the brunt of financing and weaponizing this genocide,” he said.
“So what happens in the next election? I think Palestine, just like Vietnam in the 1970s, is going to be one of the decisive things that drive this election and actually the conversation of the United States as a whole. And I hope people of all walks of life take advantage of how Palestine now has exposed all the true lines of power and the limitations of the so-called ‘democracy and freedoms’ that were touted to be given to them and figure out something before the next election. Maybe to push for a third party, if that’s even possible at this moment.”
“But if the United States is in a regional war that is spilling into a global war before this election, it may be that this election will never happen in the United States. I’m maybe too pessimistic, but I see things from now till next year, if this war keeps on going in the stages that are and how long these stages are taking us, as we see it now, it’s taking us two and a half months to get to the stage of real possibility of a regional war. And once this a regional war, how long is it going to take for it to become a global world war? Those are things that may be indicating that all this experiment of democracy in the West is dead.”
Israel’s Economy in Dire Straits
Marouf noted that Israel was suffering severe economic repercussions due to the war, not just from the recently imposed Yemeni blockade, but also due to the constant bombardments from Gaza, the simmering border war with Hezbollah, and simply due to having mobilized hundreds of thousands of citizens into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
“There are 7 million ‘Jewish colonists’ in Palestine and already close to a million of them have left. And you know, many of them already have second citizenships, and we heard countries like Portugal all talk about 10,000 Israeli families applying for citizenship. These are the ones that don’t have citizenship that are already applying to European countries. And so we have an exit from the Zionist colony on a scale that we haven’t seen ever since 1948. And now we also, of course, all the economy of the state is at a total standstill because they have mobilized so many people into the military.”
“Ansarullah, the government in Yemen, has been able to shut down all trade, almost 88% of trade has stopped into the [Israeli] ports, even the ones in the Mediterranean. Because remember now, although all the ones that were supposed to go to the Red Sea port in the Aqaba Gulf had to turn around.
“So now there’s a delay in an empty space in Israeli ports for the next two weeks. So, the country is in a total standstill and it’s now living off the handouts coming from the West. And the American public has an ability to make a difference if they cut these handouts, because this country cannot continue to exist at this moment without that.”
December 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, United States, Yemen, Zionism |
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What was it like being a proverbial “canary in a coal mine” during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the face of severe restrictions, mandates and large-scale censorship? In the book, “Canary In a Covid World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World,” prominent thought leaders set out to answer that question.
Featuring essays from 34 contemporary thought leaders, “Canary In a Covid World” chronicles the authors’ personal and professional experiences dealing with several forms of censorship: in the press and mass media, on social media platforms, and within the ranks of academic, scientific and medical institutions and licensing boards.
Among the authors are figures from the realm of politics, including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), U.K. Member of Parliament Christopher Chope, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage, and Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida surgeon general and professor of medicine at the University of Florida.
Prominent doctors also contributed chapters, including Drs. Pierre Kory and Paul Marik, co-founders of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, and Dr. George Fareed, who, together with Dr. Brian Tyson, has treated over 20,000 COVID-19 patients.
Among academics and scientists, contributors included Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in the epidemiology of chronic disease at the Yale School of Public Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine, economics and health research policy at Stanford, Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” and scientist Denis Rancourt.
Vocal advocates for vaccine safety were also among the contributors, including Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, and COVID-19 vaccine injury victim-turned-activist Brianne Dressen, co-founder of React19.
In an exclusive interview, C.H. Klotz, editor of “Canary In a Covid World,” told The Defender the essays the book contains “would never find a home in mainstream media due to censorship,” adding that they “take the reader through the COVID story, from the mandates, to the vaccines, to the truckers’ protest in Canada, to off-label therapeutics, to vaccine injuries and much more.”
Klotz said that what stood out the most to him about the contributors was their courage.
“The fundamental thread that ties them together is censorship,” Klotz said. “Every voice has found themselves silenced at one point or another as the propaganda has marginalized them.”
“We wanted to diffuse the anger that often goes with discussion on the COVID narrative. We wanted to counteract brainwashing,” he said. “We felt if we could bring these voices together, to sing as one voice, others might finally be willing to listen.”
These efforts are beginning to succeed, Klotz said. The book is now available in the U.K. House of Commons Library, was hand-delivered to the wife of Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, the country’s main opposition party, and was pictured being held by Sean Buckley, leader of Canada’s National Citizens Inquiry.
According to Klotz, while he “entertained several offers to publish the book,” it was ultimately released by Canary House Publishing — to support several of the organizations that have been outspoken in countering establishment narratives.
“It seemed to make the most sense where we could ensure that $3 from each book sold could be donated to three organizations which are doing tremendous work — Children’s Health Defense, the Informed Consent Action Network and React19,” Klotz said.
In exclusive interviews with The Defender, several of the contributors to “Canary In a Covid World” talked about their experiences as “canaries” during the pandemic, and shared their views regarding the broader contribution of the book to the public debate about COVID-19.
Colin McAdam: ‘People without a voice can still be heard’
“Canary In a Covid World” opens with a chapter by internationally acclaimed novelist Colin McAdam titled, “Where Your Fear Begins.”
This essay, according to McAdam, examines “the competing views of COVID — the dominant one that exploited fear and insisted that life is about avoiding death, and the subversive one, which said that life is about living.”
In this chapter, McAdam goes on to talk about his experience participating in the trucker convoy when it reached the Canadian capital of Ottawa — an experience which “opened my eyes to many things, one of which was bravery,” he told The Defender.
Participation in the convoy “show[ed] me that it was possible and necessary to speak out,” McAdam said. “No public voice in Canada, and few people globally, had been addressing the true nature of COVID or the harms of imposing lockdowns and mandates.”
“The truckers, simply by uniting, making themselves visible and loud, were able to draw attention to public inertia, to the mendacity of the media and the government’s harmful policies,” McAdam added. “They showed me that people without a voice can still be heard.”
Addressing the reluctance of many of his peers and those in the creative industries, such as writers and musicians, McAdam said, “The COVID crisis demonstrated the power of fear, but it wasn’t simply fear of the disease. The more destructive and lingering fear has been that of being ostracized.”
“If I see that the dominant group believes in x and y, regardless of how absurd x and y might be, then my fear of losing my place in the group will override everything and I will declare my belief in x and y — at the cost of every conviction, every truth — because losing my place in the group will mean a loss of status and income,” McAdam said.
This mentality was far from limited to the creative industries, he added.
“Artists stood out to me because we are supposed to be the compassionate and curious ones. But the uncompassionate behavior of artists was not unique. Physicians are meant to treat disease, but they didn’t. University professors are meant to ask questions, but they didn’t,” he said.
“No one did what they were supposed to do because the message was that they would lose their jobs and status if they didn’t follow the dominant narrative,” he added.
For McAdam, the prevalence of this line of thinking “reveals the astonishing power of propaganda, but it also reaffirms what George Orwell observed in his preface to ‘Animal Farm’ — propaganda is most successful and sinister when it is self-imposed, when the intelligentsia believe and embrace it for the sake of their own dominance.”
Addressing the broader significance of being a “canary in a COVID world,” McAdam said, “If the message from above is to be brave, unity and kindness will emerge, but if the message is to be afraid, society will collapse.”
Dr. James Thorp: Hospitals, medical journals ‘terminally corrupt’
Missouri-based obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. James Thorp told The Defender that in his 44 years of practice, he has “never, ever … seen such rampant corruption of the government and the hospitals and the medical journals.”
Calling such entities “terminally corrupt,” Thorp said, “Their level of corruption in the last four years has accelerated on a slope that is unprecedented compared to the prior decades or centuries.”
It is this corruption that forms the basis of his chapter, titled “The Most Egregious Violation of Medical Ethics in the History of Medicine, co-written with Maggie Thorp, J.D., MACP.
“My chapter is about the travesty and the egregious violation of medical ethics by pushing a novel untested vaccine in pregnancy,” he said. “It’s the most egregious violation of medical ethics ever in the history of medicine, maybe in the history of the world.”
This was done with the guidance of government agencies and with the complicity of the mass media, Thorp said.
“Even liberal media outlets now acknowledge that $5 trillion or more … were used to push a lethal, blatantly false narrative of the COVID-19 experimental gene therapy,” he said, noting that Freedom of Information Act requests the Thorps filed revealed the funding and connections between federal agencies and medical licensing boards.
Thorp also highlighted the role of so-called “trusted community leaders” in perpetuating establishment COVID-19 messaging to the public. According to Thorp, money for such efforts was distributed through a program known as the COVID-19 Community Corps.
“They gave these bribe monies of over $13 billion to about 300 sectors, covering every stitch of the social fabric of our society,” he said. “They put up a massive number of really very lying and deceitful promotions, like, for example, ‘Go get your COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy, otherwise you will die and your baby will die.’”
“These are grossly false fear tactics that are academically false,” Thorp said.
“Just remember, he who pays the piper calls the tune,” he said, noting that with such funding, media outlets routinely “demonized” and “defamed” scientists who expressed contrary opinions regarding COVID-19.
Dr. Mary O’Connor: ‘You will lose family members and friends’
In 2021, Dr. Mary O’Connor was one of four Canadian doctors who faced legal proceedings brought by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) for issuing “false” medical exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine — with GlobalNews accusing these doctors of “undermining the fight against COVID-19.”
O’Connor’s chapter, titled “My Message to the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons,” is a response to the ordeal she faced.
O’Connor told The Defender she wanted to tell her story about her battle with the CPSO as she fought to protect her patients’ rights — “their right to choose their own medical treatment and their right of privacy of their medical history.”
“I wanted people to understand that the CPSO has been co-opted … from their original role, which was to protect patients,” she said. “Instead, they are now complicit with the injuries and deaths of many people.”
O’Connor, who saw “many adverse reactions” among her patients, said she also wanted to raise awareness about the dangers associated with the COVID-19 vaccines — and of threats to medical privacy.
“I wanted people to realize that they were coerced to take a medical treatment, i.e., injections, which were still investigational and dangerous,” she said.
O’Connor maintains that the shots were not vaccines and they failed to prevent infection or stop the spread of the virus. “The majority of the population just didn’t know, couldn’t see it. They were lied to,” she said.
“I wanted people to realize that their private medical charts are no longer safe,” O’Connor said, addressing the efforts of the CPSO to confiscate the medical records of her patients who received an exemption — demands O’Connor said she refused.
“Now, the CPSO, if they believe there is ‘an emergency,’ have given themselves the power to take and examine any patient chart,” she said.
According to O’Connor, CPSO also forbade doctors from questioning or debating official COVID-19 measures and policies. O’Connor said, “CPSO went on to threaten physicians with punishment, investigations and disciplinary action.”
“We were also forbidden to use alternate treatments to treat COVID,” O’Connor added. “Particularly forbidden were ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which I had used in my practice years before with no adverse effects.”
Instead, patients’ deaths “were hastened in hospital with use of ventilators and remdesivir,” O’Connor said. “The truth was suppressed everywhere.”
According to O’Connor, there were risks involved with being a “truth-teller,” but benefits as well.
“You will lose family members and friends. You may lose your job and income, and maybe your housing,” she said. “But there are huge rewards. You gain the serenity of knowing you are on the side of truth, and you meet a fantastic new group of friends.”
Margaret Anna Alice: ‘Mistakes were not made’
For writer and blogger Margaret Anna Alice, whose writings have focused on health, politics, mass control and propaganda, with a focus on COVID-19, silencing dissenting opinions represents a decisive step toward atrocities against humankind. She highlighted these points in her chapter, titled “A Primer for the Propagandized.”
“Totalitarianism, genocide, war — these atrocities are only possible thanks to the twin forces of propaganda and censorship: propaganda to promulgate the menticidal narrative and censorship to silence the truth-tellers exposing the lies upon which that narrative is based,” she told The Defender.
Such efforts are based on psychology, behavioral science and “nudging,” Alice said.
“Behavioral psychologists, cult leaders, and Bernaysian front groups know how to emotionally manipulate the populace into believing preposterous notions,” she said. “All it takes is a cup of fear, a pinch of rage, a dash of envy and a generous sprinkling of cognitive biases to bypass people’s critical thinking capacities, intuition and survival instincts.”
Alice said lockdowns and social distancing represent examples of such techniques.
“Biderman’s Chart of Coercion provides a manual for implementation, including isolation, a torture technique that inflicts neurological changes as Naomi Wolf and I discussed in her recent Dissident Dialogue,” she said, noting that she launched her blog in April 2021 with “A Primer for the Propagandized,” discussing such techniques.
The result of this, Alice said, was “unquestionably a religion — or, more precisely, a Covidian cult,” which she described in her chapter as an “ideological mass psychosis” with no relation to science.
“If this were about science, the Media-Pharmaceutical–Big-Tech complex would not be memory-holing every dissenting voice, vilifying every thought criminal, and censoring every legitimate inquiry in quest of the truth,” Alice wrote.
While a commonly heard narrative in the aftermath of the pandemic is that “mistakes” were made by policymakers and public health experts, Alice warned that the events of the past four years were not accidental but intentional and that the public must be more vigilant going forward.
“It is only by comprehending how the past four years occurred that we can prevent future encroachments on our rights, liberties, and lives by the ‘philanthropaths,’ tyrants, supranational entities, governments, COVID ‘kapos,’ and colluders,” she said.
“Each chapter of ‘Canary In a Covid World’ contributes a puzzle piece, and together, they form a clear picture showing that mistakes were not made — and why we must seek justice to prevent the repetition of the crimes against humanity that continue unabated to this day,” she added.
‘It’s possible, and vitally important, to speak out’
Klotz and the contributors described “Canary In a Covid World” as a book that compiles truths that were suppressed during the pandemic and urged the public to read the book.
Describing it as “one of the most important books” that has been published about COVID-19, Thorp said it contains “a compilation of experts with irrefutable credentials of truth-seeking,” who are “being persecuted because they are invoking their First Amendment right and their right as scientists to speak the truth and to interpret data.”
“This book does a lot,” McAdam said. “It informs readers about the forces that created their misunderstanding of COVID. It tells stories of suffering — vaccine injuries, losses of livelihood, destroyed reputations — that have not been broadcast in mainstream media.”
“I think one of its simplest and strongest messages is that COVID is a treatable disease — a message delivered by genuine physicians who have treated tens of thousands of patients,” McAdam added. “If this knowledge alone had been broadcast, I think the world would not have collapsed as it did.”
“We are all telling the truth,” O’Connor said. “Many of us didn’t know it at the beginning but were blessed to find it. We have told the truth in spite of huge negative consequences, and we are coming from many directions — those who didn’t know at first, those who knew and tried to tell others, experts from all walks of life.”
The contributors also shared a message of hope and optimism.
“There is a lot in the book that might and should make people angry, but overall what I feel is that it’s a book about kindness,” McAdam said. “Many of these people have stood up to incredibly powerful forces in order to truly care for people. And perhaps on the whole the book demonstrates that it’s possible, and vitally important, to speak out.”
“We are just regular people telling what we saw and learned,” O’Connor said. “We will speak out no matter what.”
Klotz told The Defender that an audiobook version of “Canary In a Covid World” was recently released, while a French language version and a sequel “focused purely on the financial interests behind COVID” are planned.
He added his hope that “Canary In a Covid World” will “open the eyes of those people who have questions and are ready to consider that the ‘truths’ their governments have told them, might not be so true after all.”
The Defender’s Michael Nevradakis was a contributing author to “Canary In a Covid World.” His chapter, “Fact-checking the ‘Fact-checkers’: Standing Up for the Truth in the Age of COVID Censorship,” focuses on the antitrust and First Amendment free speech lawsuit filed on May 31 by Children’s Health Defense against the Trusted News Initiative.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
December 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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