Christine Pulfrey remembers her mother as ‘very fit’ and ‘in good form’ when she was admitted to a private hospital in Hull for a routine knee operation. Complications arose after surgery so the 86-year-old was transferred to the Royal Hull Infirmary where, according to her daughter, in February 2017 she was ‘deliberately deprived of hydration and food and was neglected’.
‘When she died she looked as if she had been starved, like people who were starved in the concentration camps,’ said Christine.
This anecdote is from one of 17 case studies included a report called ‘When End of Life Care Goes Wrong’, which will be published on Tuesday by the Lords and Commons Family and Child Protection Group in response to a growing number of complaints made by bereaved relatives to Voice for Justice UK, a campaign group.
All the studies, drawn from more than 600 cases (a total described by the group as only ‘the tip of the iceberg’), make deeply disturbing reading.
They include, for instance, the case of a 78-year-old man called John with non-terminal lung cancer. At the Countess of Chester Hospital he was injected with both morphine and midazolam, a lethal combination in a patient like him.
This jab, in the view of Sam Ahmedzai, Emeritus Professor of Palliative Medicine who offers medical analysis for each case study, was ‘directly responsible for the cessation of breathing’ some 30 seconds later. He concluded that the family ‘were made to witness what they could only interpret as an act of involuntary euthanasia’.
The family called in their lawyers, intent on bringing about the prosecution of medics who might have killed John by a combination of drugs they knew to be lethal. According to the report, their efforts were thwarted by medical documentation they say was fabricated but which was taken at face value by the police.
Another case concerned Laura Jane Booth, 21, who had learning difficulties and Crohn’s disease. She could communicate only through limited sign language, yet her family knew her as ‘kind and caring’ and someone who ‘loved life’.
Laura was admitted to the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield for a routine eye operation and died there three weeks later. The NHS issued a death certificate attributing Laura’s demise to her conditions combined with pneumonia and respiratory failure from fluid on the lungs. Her family were convinced she was starved to death and fought for an inquest. They had to wait four and a half years for their day in court but the coroner issued a new death certificate which listed untreated ‘malnutrition’ among the causes. Jamie Bogle, a barrister and co-author of the report, identifies this case as one of a number ‘where proceedings for alleged homicide may have been indicated’.
Fat chance of that. As a journalist who spent years researching and writing about the Liverpool Care Pathway, the end-of-life care protocol scrapped in 2014 as a ‘national disgrace’, I would consider it a minor miracle if the police took such complaints seriously. My debut novel, The Beast of Bethulia Park,https://amzn.eu/d/i9rllc1 published shortly before Christmas, was written partly with the purpose of demonstrating how unscrupulous doctors and nurses could use such ‘death pathways’ to kill elderly and ‘nuisance’ patients more or less with impunity, if they chose, or indeed were encouraged, to do so.
The evils about which I had heard so many families complain over the last decade are practised in the book by two villainous characters and other manifestations of the problem, which appear in this report, are there too: falsified death certificates, fabricated or omitted medical documents, police officers unwilling or unable to investigate allegations from families, a system which callously places obstacles in the way of aggrieved relatives seeking the truth, which short-circuits their complaints or takes years to resolve them and to scant satisfaction, and which treats the bereaved, the anxious and the heartbroken as contemptuously as criminals. Common mechanisms for killing are set out: contrived prognoses of death followed by the withdrawal of food and fluid and the simultaneous use of a sedating ‘chemical cosh’, or ruses like the deliberate use of contra-indicated drugs in patients susceptible to their lethal side effects. They appear in this report as well.
What is shocking and new about the report is that all but two of the case studies have occurred since the abolition of the LCP in 2014 following the review led by Baroness Neuberger the previous year. Eleven of the patient deaths described came after new guidelines were issued in 2015 by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and four of them were within the last three years.
This would suggest that the problems that the demise of LCP was supposed to have remedied are continuing, that the protocol was damaged but far from dead, and that patients have been duped into believing they are safe.
The Rev Lynda Rose, a former barrister and the executive editor of the report, said the work of the parliamentary group showed ‘all too clearly that misdiagnoses and mis-assessments as to quality of life and proximity to dying are disturbingly common.
‘Excessive and inappropriate use of midazolam and morphine, rendering a patient comatose, coupled with the withdrawal of food and hydration, have combined to impose a death sentence on the elderly and vulnerable from which there is no right of appeal,’ she said. ‘For all our sakes we need to end the abuse now.’
The group is recommending a national inventory of local end of life care plans, policies and procedures being used in all healthcare settings; a national rapid response service to advise and support people who have a loved one experiencing poor quality end-of-life care; a fast track advice helpline for bereaved families; a national register of cases where end-of-life care has fallen below standards or breached guidelines; the urgent adoption of a uniform national system to capture patients’ preferences for end-of-life care, and further high quality research into social, medical and nursing aspects of end-of-life care.
However Professor Patrick Pullicino, a recently retired consultant neurologist who was among the senior physicians to blow the whistle on LCP abuses more than a decade ago, believes that more must be done.
‘The report flags up shortcomings of the Care Quality Commission repeatedly,’ he said. ‘This is the body that is tasked with the safety of patients in NHS. The CQC must bear full responsibility for the continued use of lethal pathways.
‘They need to make dehydration a notifiable occurrence and sanction hospitals that dehydrate patients. The one body that could force a change and stop inappropriate deaths is doing nothing despite repeated complaints made to it.
‘The sick elderly necessarily take up a lot of hospital beds and therefore consume a lot of resources. Despite the increase in the elderly population the number of hospital beds in the UK has dramatically fallen. It is impossible to avoid the connection with the widespread use of end-of-life pathways.’
Pullicino puts his finger on the nub of the problem. The real dangers of such pathways lie not inherently in the systems, the level of expertise of those who deploy them, or the extent of communication between families and medical professionals. They lie first and foremost in fallen human nature. Is it so really so difficult to accept that the ‘key workers’ of our glorious NHS are not always motivated by the best of intentions? Any system of care must not only be conceived, operated and regulated to the highest standards but sufficiently robust and transparent to withstand the designs of those who would kill from pleasure or from conviction, and from those who would permit and encourage such killings for gain and for profit. Such people will always be around.
The NHS needs to be effectively policed. The law exists, after all, to protect the innocent and to punish the perpetrator. Yet this new report would suggest that in some areas of health care it is barely present at all. That is not only a scandal, it’s a danger to all of us.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted that the option of attacking an Iranian nuclear facility in “self-defense” must be left on the table, arguing that the chief of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made an “unworthy” statement when he declared that any such strikes are banned.
“Are we forbidden to defend ourselves?” Netanyahu said on Sunday in a cabinet meeting. “Of course, we are allowed, and of course, we are doing this… Nothing will prevent us from protecting our country and preventing oppressors from destroying the Jewish state.”
Netanyahu’s rant came a day after IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi was asked by a reporter about US and Israeli threats to attack Iran if it doesn’t agree to curb its nuclear program.
“Any military attack on a nuclear facility is outlawed, is out of the normative structures that we all abide by,” Grossi said at a press briefing in Tehran after meeting with Iranian leaders. That principle applies to all nuclear facilities, including Europe’s biggest atomic facility in Zaporozhye.
Netanyahu said no such prohibition could apply to Israel. “Rafael Grossi is a worthy person who made an unworthy remark,” he said. “Outlawed by what law? Is Iran, which publicly calls for our extermination, allowed to protect its weapons of destruction that will slaughter us?”
Grossi’s trip to Tehran apparently paid dividends, as Iranian officials agreed to restore the UN watchdog’s access to some surveillance tools at the country’s nuclear facilities. The IAEA also was granted an increase in inspections at the Fordo nuclear site, as well as additional verification and monitoring activities.
“These are not words,” Grossi told reporters upon his return to Vienna on Saturday. “This is very concrete.”
Tehran has denied having any ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran signed a deal with the US and other world powers in 2015, agreeing to impose restrictions on its nuclear industry, including uranium enrichment, to allay fears about its potential for warhead development. Washington reneged on the agreement in 2018, when then-US President Donald Trump said he would instead apply “maximum pressure” through sanctions on Iran to contain its nuclear program.
Two publications by the Ministry of Health itself present evidence that within the government there is knowledge that the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine cannot be regarded as safe and effective. Therefore, from now on, there is no credible legal defence that the government can advance to cover its failure to openly inform individuals and the public at large of the inherent health risks of Covid vaccines.
Until now the government’s public announcements, including your own under the previous administration, relied on the argument that the government is ‘following the science’ and monitoring international Covid journal publishing. This was never credible, but allowed room for a fanciful defence (certainly a weak argument) of ‘accident, ignorance, misapprehension, or misdirection’ in any possible legal case brought under criminal or civil law. This can no longer be the case.
Firstly, a paper was published on February 3 2023 in the Lancet authored by our own Ministry of Health, Adverse Events Following the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine (Pfizer-BioNtech) in Aotearoa New Zealand. The paper reveals there is a statistically significant association between Pfizer mRNA vaccination and both myocarditis and acute kidney injury (AKI). The study examined the comprehensive medical records of four million NZers. There were 1,778 more cases of AKI than predicted from historical pre-pandemic rates, an alarming rate of one case for every 2,200 vaccinations. In addition to AKI and myocarditis, researchers also found elevated rates of blood clots and platelet damage.
Secondly, information concerning mortality in 2021, 2022, and 2023 correlated with vaccination status has been released by Health New Zealand following a Freedom of Information (OIA) request. The figures are signed off by Astrid Koornneef, Interim Director of Prevention, National Public Health Service.
The released figures include all NZ registered deaths by month. The figures show that for the last six months of 2022, 80 per cent of all people dying in New Zealand had received Pfizer mRNA booster shots. Yet, according to official government figures updated 14 February 2023, only 73.2 per cent of those eligible (18+ years) have received a booster. In other words, booster recipients are disproportionately represented among registered all-cause deaths. For more analysis refer here.
These two data sets certainly point towards serious risks associated with Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccination and stand in need of further investigation. The first investigated outcomes only within 21 days of Covid vaccination, the second indicates serious effects persist in the general population past 21 days. Taken together these point to a need for analysis of the causes of the current high rates of hospital admissions and deaths with reference to vaccination status.
There appears to be a misapprehension among NZ health professionals concerning the reliability of biotechnology vaccine manufacturing standards. Data points to huge variability in safety by vaccine batch. The following chart records serious vaccine injury and death by batch number in the USA sourced from publicly available VAERS data sets. You can see that the number of injuries varies hugely by batch. A few injury numbers are similar to those recorded following flu vaccination, but most batches lead to injury volumes considerably higher, up to 14 times higher.
As early as January 18 2021 Orange County California medical authorities flagged an unusually high pattern of injury and death associated with a single batch they had been administering. Pfizer should have immediately alerted New Zealand authorities to such anomalies. They probably had a contractual obligation to do so. Now that it has become a matter of public comment, it should not be possible to continue to assert Covid vaccine safety. NZ has a code of Good Manufacturing Process for pharmaceuticals. This includes a requirement for uniformity of pharmaceutical medicine contents and action. Apparently, Pfizer Covid vaccines do not meet our code.
The scientific evidence concerning the lack of Covid vaccine safety has not reduced the stitched-up action of government intelligence services, the police, and Te Punaha Matatini’s [a research centre] Disinformation Project in coordination with media and social media to monitor and reduce the reach of those raising pertinent questions. As you know, under the Prime Minister’s office there is interagency co-ordination for mis/disinformation monitoring and response. This involves multiple government departments. If these programmes and participants are not fully informed of the legitimacy of concerns about Covid vaccine safety, this amounts to misdirection and possibly harassment on the part of the Prime Minister’s office itself.
I and many others believe New Zealand has struggled to define its relationship with unregulated global influences in the modern era. There is much scope for commercial and geopolitical misdirection even via established channels of medical, military, and political cooperation. We need to be more alert as a nation to our own sovereign and economic interests especially when we consider health and the legal protections that have been afforded to multinational interests like Pfizer and others.
You are newly appointed to a position of power and influence. You have stated that you intend to reconsider the policies followed under your predecessor. It was therefore very surprising to find your Minister of Health doubling down on vaccine requirements against the weight of her own department’s findings. I urge you to look into this very thoroughly. As a lawyer, you must realise that going against the weight of safety evidence is very much a betrayal of the trust the public has placed in the government.
I hope you will announce a revision and retraction of Covid response policies in the light of the new evidence that is being published. Apparently New Zealand has acquired 1.7million doses of Pfizer bi-valent vaccines. Why? Have you considered returning them as not fit for purpose? The weight of evidence points in that direction, evidence that is accumulating by the week in learned journals.
It seems clear that we have passed a point where policy mistakes can be described as accidental. If continued, they will appear to be deliberate. The public stands in need of an honest explanation. It may take courage to speak out, but doing so will be a mark of integrity and genuine concern for health and safety.
There has been renewed discussion of the origin of Covid in the media. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the US Department of Energy has come down firmly on the side of a laboratory origin of Covid-19 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. On Fox News, the former director of US National Intelligence John Ratcliffe commented: ‘The idea that Covid-19 has a natural origin has always been at odds with our intelligence . . . it is due to a lab leak. From the beginning scientists have not been able to explain why there is a furin cleavage site within the genetic make up of Covid-19 . . . This is something that happens when scientists insert a snippet of manipulated material into viruses.’
UK commentator Piers Morgan responded: ‘I think that the truth is that science, by its very nature, will evolve with facts. And so you have to give them some leeway for that . . . So I do think in the future, we’ve got to examine the science. You’ve got to listen to all ranges of opinions, and people have got to stop being cancelled on social media for raising concerns, which now look like they were absolutely right.’
US Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson went further in a 20-minute excoriation of the Biden administration’s Covid policy. Carlson wanted to know: has the administration’s policy to fund biotechnology research in China changed? (Watch Carlson here, begins at 3 minutes).
Some, including late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert, have accused the DoE of lacking sufficient qualifications to decide on the lab leak theory, saying: ‘Stay in your lane’. (Is Colbert even vaguely qualified himself?) In fact as the authoritative Washington Post reports the DoE employed highly qualified and skilled scientists (including members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia), who undertook detailed scientific assessment of genetic evidence and classified information. After the dust of misinformation had cleared the DoE’s conclusion that there was a lab leak was inevitable.
It was the job of the FBI to investigate how the truth was being manipulated and they have also come out firmly and publicly on the side of the lab leak theory (it’s not a theory, there is overwhelming evidence). Early in 2021, a highly qualified geneticist friend wrote to me that he and many of his colleagues were sure that Covid was engineered in a lab because of its highly unusual genetic structure, but he added the codicil: please don’t mention my name. This was going on all over the world in differing forms. Some of them were verging on the corrupt.
All this information is in the public domain, but still the BBC published two dismissive articles on its home page on Wednesday. One covered the FBI announcement, but said the FBI conclusion was not backed by any evidence. The other was an explainer article entitled ‘Covid origin: Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory is so disputed‘. A more blatant attempt to muddy the waters of truth could not be imagined. The article forgot to discuss the genetic evidence which clearly points to gene-edited inserts in the virus genome.
But you might ask, why would anyone in government or science seek to hide the truth from the public? Good question. The answer possibly lies in the murky history of military involvement in genetics and the pandemic. You might recall conspiracy theories circulating since the discovery of DNA and gene editing in the 20th century. According to these ideas, military powers were supposedly going to invent weapons that would target specific ethnic groups and win wars because their genetically different opponents were all going to fall down dead, felled by a man-made virus.
In truth, all humans share so much DNA that any genetic weapon is going to affect everyone worldwide including you and me. Remember that military planners are not geneticists, but like almost everyone else on the planet, they are very susceptible to genetic fantasies. They believed wrongly that anything might be possible for genetic science. Whether their motivations were offensive or defensive was irrelevant. To counter any potential offensive weapon from the other side, they were going to have to first create possible offensive weapons, before trying to design a defensive counter. Sound familiar? Gain of function research to weaponise viruses in order to design a vaccine?
The problem we now know is that, as reported in this study, no lab is ever going to be secure. The history of recombinant DNA biotech labs contains a long list of unintended leaks and accidents. The result has been a pandemic whose final outcome still remains unknown. The military, governments, pharmaceutical companies, and scientists from a number of countries are very busy trying to hide their involvement, telling us that all this is just a natural disaster. This amounts to a giant geopolitical cover-up. The US, China, Britain and France, all of whom were involved in the creation and funding of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory, are paying for favourable comments from their media and anyone else who is corrupt enough to shill for them.
As a last resort, some people are arguing that the origin of Covid is irrelevant. It isn’t. The lab origin of Covid should bring us all together. Whether we think Covid is the main threat or the vaccine is, they both came from a biotech lab carrying out genetic experiments. We can safely forget about the geopolitical arguments explaining who was to blame: China or the USA, and instead shout loudly from the rooftops that biotech experiments have got to stop.
Research shows biotech interventions are inherently mutagenic, they have led to permanent degradation of genetic function and consequently health, as this alarming recent assessment of the Pfizer and Moderna bivalent vaccine shows (the same vaccine our government has announced it will give to everyone over 30 in New Zealand). So don’t think that by taking the latest vaccine you are helping society. The mRNA vaccines pose a danger to everyone in the world, all cultures, all races, religious or agnostic, left or right. We share DNA and we have a common interest to protect ourselves from scientists, media, and governments who are putting financial interests and political objectives ahead of the safety of the entire 8billion population of the world.
We are going through an unprecedented societal upheaval. It increasingly appears to be man-made. The repeated political mantra ‘Trust the Science’ has proven to be mere political demagoguery, devoid of real scientific content. Keeping a steady head, carefully shifting through the evidence, and applying caution are needed now. The evidence is out: with confidence we know that Covid and Covid vaccines came from laboratories whose operation is inherently dangerous. They have already killed millions, and want to be given carte blanche to do whatever they wish. Time to call a halt. For more information go to https://GLOBE.GLOBAL
America First Legal (AFL) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) related to contracts and grants to third parties to censor COVID-19 “misinformation” and criticism of the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic.
The HHS does not have the authority to regulate content or censor misinformation of any kind. However, it has been using grants and contracts to get third parties to do so on its behalf.
It has awarded millions of dollars in grants to fight what it deems “misinformation.” For instance, last October, it awarded a $1.1 million grant to the University of Texas to “better understand patterns of misinformation in social media” with the study focusing on misinformation related to Covid testing and vaccines.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is under the HHS, posted a grant opportunity for “Developing a Public Health Tool to Predict the Virality of Vaccine Misinformation Narratives.” The tool would be used to “predict misinformation trends.”
The purpose of AFL’s FOIA request is to expose the HHS for using federal funds to pay third parties to illegally censor American’s free speech and prevent open scientific debate.
“The absurdity of this Administration’s actions must not be forgotten,” said AFL vice president Gene Hamilton. “It engaged and is likely still engaging in a concerted campaign to identify and censor speech with which it disagrees.
“To silence speech it then labeled as misinformation, and to advance positions that are now known to be demonstrably false, it used private actors and taxpayer dollars to do what it could not on its own–all for the benefit of other private actors and the aggrandizement of government power. We will uncover, expose, and hold accountable these abuses of governmental power.”
Canadian and German troops teaching Ukrainians how to use Leopard tanks already qualifies as participation in the conflict, but sending fighter jets to Poland would mean “direct entry,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday.
Medvedev, who is also deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, warned the US and its allies that they can be treated as parties to the conflict “if, in addition to supplying weapons, they train personnel to operate them,” citing legal precedents from the early 20th century.
Tank training on EU territory already applies, Medvedev noted on Telegram, but if that expands to fighter jets based somewhere in Poland, “that would be direct entry of the Atlanticists into war against Russia, with all the consequences that entails.”
“Everyone who made the decision to deliver those weapons or repair them, along with foreign mercenaries and military trainers, ought to be considered legitimate military targets.”
According to Medvedev, only fear of this has so far restrained the “infantile” West from giving airplanes and long-range weapons to Kiev, though he predicted their desire to destroy Russia would prevail before long.
While the US, NATO and the EU talk about the “freedom-loving people of Ukraine,” Thursday’s attack on Russia’s Bryansk Region shows that they are supporting “Nazi bastards, terrorist scum who attack civilians,” Medvedev said.
“These are your proteges, Mr. Sunak, Macron, Scholz and Biden!” he wrote, addressing the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, and US. “And our attitude towards you is now the same as towards them. Your countries are now participants in the terrorist acts of the Ukrainian regime, and you are direct accomplices of terrorists.”
Though the West considered him a “liberal” during his 2008-2012 presidency, Medvedev has been blunt and outspoken about the military operation in Ukraine since it was launched in February 2022. Just last month, he warned the US that its talk about “strategic defeat” means Russia now sees the conflict as existential.
A group of Ukrainian soldiers crossed the border into Russia on Thursday morning, attacking two villages and shooting up a car with civilians inside. Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the “terrorist attack” and vowed to punish the perpetrators.
All drugs have a pregnancy category designation giving mothers and doctors guidance on what is known and how safe products are during pregnancy.
Category A: The possibility of fetal harm appears remote. Extremely few drugs exist in this category (e.g., multiple vitamins).
Category B: If there is a clinical need for a drug in this category, they are considered safe to use. Examples: acetaminophen, amoxicillin.
Category C:These drugs should be given only if the potential benefit justifies the potential risk to the fetus. Examples: fluoroquinolones, gentamicin, saccharin, aspirin.
Category D:There is positive evidence of human fetal risk, but the benefits from use in pregnant women may be acceptable despite the risk. They should only be used in pregnancy when the alternatives are worse. Examples: tetracyclines, ACE inhibitors, and most antineoplastics.
Category X:The risk of use of the drug in pregnant women clearly outweighs any possible benefit. The drug is contraindicated in women who are or may become pregnant. Examples: thalidomide, oral contraceptives, statins, all COVID-19 vaccines.
I published an article in 2021 with Dr. Raphael Stricker, who advises one of the largest fetal loss centers in the country, warning women that the COVID-19 vaccine should be considered pregnancy category X. This designation should have been assigned by the vaccine manufacturers and agreed to by the FDA and properly placed on all vaccine program documents since pregnancy and childbearing age without contraception were exclusions from the EUA registration trials.
Shockingly, in the very first week of mass vaccination in December of 2020, news reels depicted well-intentioned pregnant mothers getting injected with synthetic lipid nanoparticles laced with long-lasting mRNA coding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology Spike protein. How could this be happening with no mutagenicity or teratogenicity studies? How could good clinical practice by doctors be abandoned?
Pregnant mothers and vaccine center workers didn’t seem to care. There were no assurances of gestational, peripartum, or long-term safety. Would the baby be affected by this brand-new technology? The regulatory agencies and medical colleges appeared to be in a tranced oblivion.
There are more than a dozen papers that extoll the virtues of mass vaccination and quickly conclude that COVID-19 vaccines are “safe” in pregnancy. Each paper has critical flaws including: 1) not randomized, 2) no comparator group, 3) limited time window and not entire term with continued follow-up, 4) incomplete capture of clinical events, 5) conflict of interest with American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) who received an undisclosed sum of money from the White House HHS COVID-19 Community Core Fund to promote vaccination.
In drug safety research, even if it is only one abstract, manuscript, or monograph that raises a serious safety concern, it should be pursued over those which failed to find the signal. Thorp and colleagues used CDC VAERS and compared COVID-19 vaccines to influenza vaccines and found in US cases, a 27-fold higher risk of miscarriage and more than a twofold increased risk across six categories of adverse fetal outcomes. Because the mRNA is now known to circulate for 28 days or more and the Spike protein causes clotting, bleeding, and is known to damage tissues, my conservative conclusion is that COVID-19 vaccination remains pregnancy category X—contraindicated.
One person was killed and a 10-year-old child was injured after Ukrainian saboteurs opened fire on a civilian vehicle in a border village in Russia’s Bryansk Region. Retired US Marine and former weapons inspector Scott Ritter suspects the attack was not a random act of terror, but a deliberate plot to provoke Moscow.
“It’s clear there were no military objectives. This was a deliberately provocative attack, and it was an attack that was designed to anger Russia by intent. You don’t target women, children, you don’t target a civilian, a village, unless your goal is to anger Russia and provoke Russia into perhaps overreacting. I think that’s the objective,” Ritter told Sputnik after being asked to comment on Thursday’s incident in the village of Lyubechane, in Russia’s Bryansk Region.
“It’s the only thing that can explain it other than simply stating that the people involved are the criminal elements with zero redeeming qualities, purely animalistic. And I’m not going down that route. What I believe is that these people were selected to do a mission that was designed to provoke Russia into an overreaction that could then be used by the Zelensky government as justification for requesting even more military assistance,” Ritter stressed.
The observer warned that Moscow could react to the attack in a variety of ways, for example by lifting its self-proscribed restrictions on targeting decision-making centers in Kiev, or even Ukraine’s president.
“Zelensky would say ‘this war has expanded and I now need the West to step up and deliver more equipment, F-16 fighters,’ things of that nature, because right now Zelensky has hit a brick wall. He’s not getting what he believes he needs to survive. And if he doesn’t get this, he will be facing the inevitability of the strategic defeat of Ukraine. And so I think you’re going to see more and more acts of desperation like this in an effort to push Russia into overreacting so that Zelensky could use a Russian overreaction as justification for demanding even more assistance from the West,” Ritter said.
Commenting on the incident earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “terrorist act” near the border was “committed by the neo-Nazis and their masters,” and predicted that the West would ignore the crime, just as it had done with others like it. The Russian leader emphasized that those responsible “would not succeed” in their violent and criminal behavior, and that Russia would ultimately “crush them.”
Bryansk’s authorities said that along with the deadly attack on a vehicle in Lyubechane, a residential building in the nearby village of Sushany caught fire after being hit by a bomb dropped from a Ukrainian drone.
On Wednesday, Putin had instructed Russia’s Federal Security Service to step up its work along the Russian-Ukrainian border, citing the dangers to critical infrastructure posed by Western-backed radicals and extremists.
In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during Covid: that much of the time, they were wrong – writes Dr. Marty Makary in the New York Post. He sets out “10 myths told by Covid experts — and now debunked”. Here are the first four.
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary Covid vaccine series.
In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s ‘misinformation’ policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.
That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the Covid pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the Covid vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralised the virus, but they were antibodies that the Government did not recognise.
Cochrane Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.
And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on Covid transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomised controlled studies.
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomised studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channelled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission
They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.
A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.
We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the Covid vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.
Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a Covid vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had Covid.
Dr. Makary blasts the CDC for weaponising research by “putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR“.
“In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession,” he adds.
George Soros is either stunningly prescient or frighteningly influential when it comes to determining who will need to do all the bleeding and dying that he deems necessary to bring about a desirable “new world order.”
Consider the Hungarian-born billionaire’s essay on the future of NATO: “The United States would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder.”
Soros deserves credit for neatly describing the US and NATO strategy for bringing about and exploiting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The Ukrainians are providing the manpower – in other words, the cannon fodder – and the Western puppeteers can endeavor to weaken Russia and enforce their vision of a favorable world order. They also can do this without having to make the case to their citizens that this is a fight for which it is worth tolerating body bags coming home from the front.
Additionally, by sharing the burden of providing military and economic aid to Kiev, the Western powers achieve the dual benefits of prolonging their proxy war and creating the impression that the whole world is steadfastly standing with the blue and yellow. That helps underpin the narrative frame that there is no moral basis for criticizing Ukraine policy and anyone who does so is probably a Kremlin agent.
The thing is, Soros didn’t write his take on the situation this week, this month or even in the past year. He didn’t even write it back in 2014, when he was allegedly backing the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government and might have reasonably anticipated a coming conflict with Russia. No, Soros wrote this assessment in 1993, nearly 30 years ago.
Back then, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Soros wanted to prevent former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact nations from becoming nationalist countries that would be governed according to their own interests and oppose the global order that he was promoting.
Western leaders had made assurances that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward, but Soros saw the military bloc as “the basis of a new world order.” He conceded that the group would need “some profound new thinking,” given that its original mission was “obsolete,” and he insisted that the alliance must be free to invite any country to join.
In fact, he saw a great opportunity for NATO to take advantage of the security void created by the Soviet collapse if it could act quickly. “If NATO has any mission at all, it is to project its power and influence into the region, and the mission is best defined in terms of open and closed societies.”
“The countries of Central Europe are clamoring for full membership of NATO as soon as possible, preferably before Russia recovers. Russia objects, not because it harbors any designs on its former empire but because it sees no advantage in consenting. Its national pride has been hurt and it is sick and tired of making concessions without corresponding benefits.”
Soros saw NATO as both a viable platform to develop into the anti-Russia enforcer for his new world order and the bright and shiny object to lure Europe’s former Eastern Bloc states into the fold. “NATO has a unified command structure which brings together the United States and Western Europe,” he said.
“There are great advantages in having such a strong Western pillar: It leads to a lopsided structure firmly rooted in the West. This is as it should be, since the goal is to reinforce and gratify the desire of the region for joining the open society of the West.”
The goal became reality. For example, Soros noted that there was nothing to prevent countries such as Poland, Czechia and Hungary from joining NATO. The three nations became the first wave of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, joining the bloc in 1999. In fact, the bloc has since nearly doubled in size, adding 14 members by 2020 and teeing up Ukraine and Georgia as future prospects.
NATO moved right along the Russian frontier, placing strategic weapons and security guarantees on Moscow’s doorstep and helping to trigger the current crisis. As Soros acknowledged in 1993, Russia had no desire to restore the empire of Peter the Great – contrary to a popular CNN talking point. However, as the Kremlin warned repeatedly in the years leading up to the current conflict, Moscow couldn’t stand idly by while its national security interests were trampled.
It’s easy to see why Soros was and is so worried about nationalism: His vision could never sell with a government that served the interests of its own people.
NATO’s expansion binge didn’t make anyone safer. We know the little brothers, like the people of Ukraine, aren’t better off. They have the privilege of bleeding and dying as they provide the “manpower” for NATO’s proxy fight with Russia. As for the big brothers, they undermine their own security. Americans and Western Europeans are suffering the economic effects of the US-NATO sanctions war against Russia, and their governments are pushing them ever closer to a planet-ending nuclear Armageddon.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced last week that its Doomsday Clock had advanced to within 90 seconds of midnight, the latest ever, indicating that humanity stands at “a time of unprecedented danger.” The group cited the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has “challenged the nuclear order – the system of agreements and understandings that have been constructed over six decades to limit the dangers of nuclear weapons.”
Not to worry if you’re George Soros, 92 years old, and watching your geopolitical dreams come true. He and others like him can keep marching onward to perfect their world order as they see fit.
If we wonder whether NATO works on behalf of that order, we need look only at what has transpired and the framing of the current conflict. When Russian forces began their offensive against Ukraine last February, Western leaders and pundits condemned President Vladimir Putin for undermining the “rules-based international order.”
So NATO has emerged as the enforcer of the rules-based international order – the new world order, if you will – just as Soros called for three decades ago. The results of that “profound new thinking” are much the same as the political activist envisioned in 1993. He also called for expanding NATO to Asia, which hasn’t yet happened, but the bloc’s 2022 summit was enlarged to include representatives from Asia-Pacific “sentinel states” – Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Was Soros so much of a visionary that the hedge-fund investor could foresee how geopolitics would play out several decades ahead of time, or does his accuracy reflect the fact that he and his allies tend to get their way? Rather than prescience, is this situation more like the cook being a good predictor of what we’re going to have for dinner?
Soros himself offered a hint on that theory in his essay: “We have to act without full knowledge of the facts because the facts are created by our decisions.”
Anyone who suggests that Soros calls a lot of the policy shots is immediately condemned by the Western media as anti-Semitic because, after all, he has Jewish heritage. Never mind that he’s an avowed atheist who has been accused of undermining Israel’s democratically elected government and funding groups that defame the Jewish state.
So when Moldovan President Maia Sandu returns from a recent trip to Davos and promptly starts hinting about joining NATO – in violation of her country’s constitutional commitment to neutrality – we shouldn’t point out that she met with Alexander Soros, son of George Soros, during the summit. Revealing or trying to connect such dots would be anti-Semitic, according to the Western media.
It couldn’t be that George Soros wields an inordinate amount of influence over world affairs. It couldn’t be that some of his critics have legitimate and unbigoted disagreements with his ideas. It couldn’t be that his immunity to criticism is further evidence of his power.
And shut your eyes when a US watchdog group reveals that Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations worldwide and funding links to 54 prominent media figures, including such names as Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Lester Holt of NBC News and Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee.
So Soros gets to wield his influence with impunity, apparently achieving what he wants in many cases. He gets to serve the interests of billionaires, defense contractors, power-mongering politicians and social engineers. But what about the rest of us, the other 8 billion people in the world? What about those who just want to be able to support our families, pursue happiness and live in peace – without worrying that iodine pills are sold out and there might not be time to build a nuclear fallout shelter?
Soros himself might prescribe us more bread and circuses, to keep the masses distracted – as well as tribalism, to keep the people divided – at least until we’re needed to serve as “manpower” for the cause.
Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
At last week’s Rage Against the War Machine peace rally in Washington there was no shortage of speakers who denounced the Biden Administration’s hypocritical foreign policy, which essentially judges any violent action undertaken by the United States and its friends as good by definition while anything done by rivals or competitors, sometimes conveniently referred to as “enemies,” as “evil.” In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia, where the US is engaged in proxy warfare, speakers were able to cite and compare the formidable list of America’s armed interventions worldwide since World War Two ended. Neither Russia nor any other nation comes anywhere near the United States in terms of constant bellicosity, conflicts which hardly ever reflect any real vital national interest or imminent foreign threat. Throw into the hopper the 800-plus US military bases scattered around the world and a growing defense budget larger than those of the next nine nations combined, including China and Russia, and the reader will obtain some idea of the real problem: the United States has become a nation that is best described as a warfare state. That is where the tax money goes to disproportionately and the corruption it feeds produces a willingness to engage in “one more war” on the part of the coddled, protected and richly remunerated political class which in turn supports the carnage by overwhelming majorities.
Several speakers last week also cited as the real problem the media, which once upon a time sought to expose lies and subterfuges by government but now has become a partner with the White House in shaping and promoting a preferred narrative. It should also be pointed out that that media is overwhelmingly Democratic in terms of its ownership and sympathies, so much so that it collaborated in efforts to label Donald Trump and his staff as “Russian agents.”
Sometimes this promotion of a particular point of view is best accomplished using silence, i.e. by not sharing or following up on a story. There was virtually no coverage of last week’s peace rally even though speakers included a number of well-known public figures, three of whom were former congressmen. Likewise, apart from a brief mention in The Washington Post, there has been virtually no follow-up in the mainstream media on Seymour Hersh’s carefully researched and documented investigation of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines by the United States hidden behind the plausible deniability of a covert operation carried out last September.
Much of the press ignored the clear investigative line on day one when the pipeline exploded that the White House had previously been warning that it would “do something” to stop Nord Stream and that it had both the means and motive to follow through on its threat. Likewise, after the Hersh story broke and Russia sought and obtained a hearing featuring Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former CIA Officer Ray McGovern testifying before the United Nations Security Council to initiate investigation of the matter, the US media ignored the story on the evening news and did not follow-up on it on the next day or subsequently.
A major story involving what were war crimes committed both against adversary Russia and NATO ally Germany and which had nuclear conflict potential was thus made to disappear, but the US and its propaganda machine were not finished yet. The White House predictably denied any role in the pipe line destruction and Vice President Kamala Harris sought to turn the tables by declaring at the Munich Security Conference that it is Russia that is guilty of “crimes against humanity.” She claimed that “First, from the starting days of this unprovoked war, we have witnessed Russian forces engage in horrendous atrocities and war crimes. [They] have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population – gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape, and deportation. Execution-style killings, beating and electrocution. Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine to Russia, including children. They have cruelly separated children from their families.”
Harris concluded that “we” must continue to “strongly support Ukraine… for as long as it takes!” One might observe that Harris has been unable to secure the actual US borders over the course of more than two years, so “as long as it takes” by her reckoning might well run into the 2050s. And she is hardly known for her ability to discern what is and isn’t true. She might well have added spice to her tale by joking how it must keep Vladimir Putin and his cabinet up until late at night coming up with new atrocities to carry out.
Joe Biden doubled down on the Harris remarks in a speech in Warsaw a few days later, delivered on his return from the Kiev photo op with the man he loves more than any other, Volodymyr Zelensky, where he gave the diminutive comedian another half billion dollars of US taxpayer money and promised that the US will never give up until Russia is defeated. He commented somewhat hyperbolically to Zelensky that after a year of fighting “… Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you and the world stands with you.”
Biden told the Poles just before the February 24 anniversary of the conflict in Ukraine that it was a just war pitting “democracy” against “totalitarianism.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “craven lust for land and power” had only served to unite democracies around the world. “It wasn’t just Ukraine being tested. The whole world faced a test for the ages …. And the questions we face are as simple as they are profound: Would we respond, or would we look the other way? One year later, we know the answer. We did respond. We would be strong, we would be united, and the world would not look the other way.”
Demonstrating that delusion is bipartisan, the Biden visit to Kiev was followed by a group of Republican congressmen repeating the feat and traveling to Ukraine to fawn over Zelensky at his presidential palace on the following day. One wonders if there is anyone still “at home” trying to alleviate the huge toxic spill that appears about to consume Ohio? One might well ask where the US federal government gets these idiots from? Dancing around to the tune of a conflict that could have been negotiated away and winding up at the brink of a nuclear war which would in all likelihood destroy the planet is “a test for the ages?” And who pays for these useless congressional trips? More’s the pity, this is not just going on in Eastern Europe. The US is currently cooperating with France in what looks like what will become another military intervention in a perennially unstable Haiti and, of course, China is also in the cross hairs.
And then there is always the Middle East, where Israel benefits from “ironclad” commitments and “unbreakable bonds” rhetoric from Washington. When Israel commands “Jump!” the Biden regime only asks “How high?” Since the media avoids any provocative reporting about the Jewish state, how many Americans know that self-declared Zionist Joe Biden’s Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides has just given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light for attacking Iran with US support for any action taken? Nides told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem last Sunday that “Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with [in regards to Iran] and we’ve got their back.”
There is already a precedent as Israel has in fact been attacking neighboring Syria repeatedly without any comment from Washington, which actually has troops based in that country stealing Syrian oil. Nor has Washington objected when the Israeli army raided two Palestinian camps during the past month, killing respectively 10 and 11 civilians and wounding more than 100 others. To set the stage for what comes next vis-à-vis the wag the dog relationship, after Israel struck a defense compound in Iran on January 29th, the Biden administration suggested to reporters that the Israeli attack was part of a new “joint effort” by Washington and Jerusalem to contain Tehran’s nuclear and military ambitions. Secretary of State Tony Blinken elaborated on the shift on the next day while offering no criticism or concern for the destabilizing potential of the strikes, let alone a condemnation. Instead, he defended the Israeli attack, saying “[It is] very important that we continue to deal with and work against as necessary the various actions that Iran has engaged in throughout the region and beyond that threaten peace and security.”
Nides’ comment reveals that he is ignorant regarding who is causing trouble in the Middle East. It also confirms that even if there is a military action initiated by Israel that does grave damage to US interests, the White House will support the Israelis. That should surprise no one as the top three officials at the State Department are Jews, as are the top two on the National Security Staff, the Head of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, the Deputy Director at CIA, and the president’s Chief of Staff. The policy shift, for that is what it is, also gives Israel the green light to attack Iranian targets with impunity. Nides also stated that the United States is pledged to deny nuclear weapons to Iran, implying that if it believes such a development is imminent it would destroy the facilities used to create or store the weapons. He also mentioned that the US will not engage in any possible negotiations with Iran as long as it is selling weapons to Russia. Though Nides has no problem with freely killing Palestinian children, he is rather more inflexible when Persians are somehow involved, saying that “The Iranians are providing drones to Russia and those drones are killing innocent Ukrainians. There is no chance today of us going back to the negotiating table.”
So what do we have? Does anyone remember the famous quote attributed to British statesman Lord Palmerston, that “Nations have no permanent friends or allies. They only have permanent interests.” The United States, uniquely, does not even appear to have interests, apart from pandering to the various constituencies and groups that have bought or stealthily acquired control over the political system and media. So the American public, less safe and prosperous now than at any time since the Second World War, is kept in the dark about what is important and is lied to about almost everything. That is why we are on the brink of destruction in Ukraine and are slaves to the power brokers who hate Russia and favor Israel above all nations. Raging against the war machine will do little good if we are incapable of first figuring out who is screwing us and then developing the courage to put a stop to it. Starting with cutting the current tie that binds with Ukraine and Israel would be a good beginning followed by bringing the troops home from nearly everywhere. Trying the Biden Administration officials who initiated an illegal war by destroying Nord Stream and putting them all in jail would be even better. Yes, every one of them in jail with no parole, starting with mumbling Joe himself.
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 councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Back in August of 2022, I wrote a piece on Pfizer’s Paxlovid approval. I talked about how the White House awarded Pfizer billions of taxpayer dollars before producing conclusive findings of safety or efficacy to the FDA.
In approving Paxlovid, the Biden White House and the FDA also seemed to deliberately ignore hundreds of clinical trials conducted on hundreds of thousands of patients detailing the established safety and efficacy of IVM and HCQ.
Like many other things the Biden White House implements, they force through a multitude of ideas, concepts and public health mandates which “seem” like they could work, but without the requisite conclusive scientifically obtained evidence that they will work.
On top of that, the White House doesn’t seem interested in learning. They repeat their mistakes in establishing America’s policies time and time again. Emergencies or not; there is no excuse for foregoing the scientific method (or using poor testing methodologies) thereby placing the Americans at risk – especially when it comes to public health.
Paxlovid is just one of dozens of examples of public health mendacity (too many to list here) pushed by the chaotic Biden White House and its ethically pliant partisan marionettes at the FDA. In the case of Paxlovid, not only was evidence of failure deliberately ignored; prospective testing methodologies were altered mid-trial to favor a positive outcome when it became apparent that the Paxlovid trial results would not meet their original endpoints. In fact, Pfizer had already opted to stop its Paxlovid trial, but then changed their minds after the FDA intervened via the White House.
Even worse: Its not the first time the FDA has forsaken science under Biden (I warned this would be a repeating theme in early 2021). Paxlovid was a failure, but the White House had foolishly already paid Pfizer $5.3 Billion in advance. Rather than admit failure and epic waste, the FDA then stepped in and with zero transparency, altered the established clinical trial parameters mid-trial to make Paxlovid’s findings seem better than they were. Pfizer then completed the trial, declared Paxlovid a success and the White House doubled-down on its $5.3 Billion investment, spending a sickening total of $10.6 Billion on Paxlovid.
That moral and scientific decision was approved by America’s insufferable, self-righteous taxpayer-funded civil servants who proclaim the left is “the party of science” and celebrated that when Biden was elected, “the adults are back in charge.”
Even more outrageous were the number of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who witnessed – and fully recognized the scientific misconduct – but remained (and continue to remain) silent, inexplicably choosing to follow clinical recommendations from politicians, bureaucratic hospital administrators, mainstream news or social media. It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness, conformism and malpractice of these professionals in betraying their oaths to protect patients.
In reality, Americans still don’t have answers form the White House, FDA or any other HHS officials on:
1) The White House’s logic of purchasing $10.6 Billion of Paxlovid, and without concrete evidence of safety and effectiveness;
2) How many unused Paxlovid doses remain that will ultimately expire and be thrown away due to non-use, milder disease making it epidemiologically unnecessary;
3) Disclosure of the real-world incidence of “rebound” Paxlovid infections (which would be hard for drug safety epidemiologists to uncover because the White House, Pfizer and FDA have every reason in the world to under-report it, plus “rebound” is not an official [MedDRA] adverse event reporting term);
4) The current/historical prescribing and rates and other Paxlovid adverse event updates;
5) A full disclosure of communications with Pfizer, the White House and FDA officials with a scientifically legitimate explanation of why altered critical parameters of the Paxlovid were made mid-trial and in lieu of starting a completely new trial;
6) An official pharmacologic, mechanistic explanation of “Paxlovid rebound” ;
7) Why the Paxlovid trial was compared to placebo only, and had no IVM / HCQ / other comparator arms.
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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