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Brits could lose passports for using drugs

Samizdat | July 19, 2022

Recreational drug users in the UK could soon be stripped of their passports or driving licenses under a series of new laws proposed by the Home Office on Monday.

In the document titled ‘SWIFT, CERTAIN, TOUGH New consequences for drug possession,’ the Home Office proposes introducing three tiers of punishments for possession of illegal drugs such as cocaine and cannabis.

The penalties vary from being forced to pay for a drug awareness course to being issued with a hefty fine, and could even result in the loss of an offender’s passport and driving license.

“Tier 1: A person should be issued with a fixed penalty notice as an alternative to prosecution, which requires them to attend and pay for a drugs awareness course,” the white paper suggests, adding that if the individual does not attend the course, they will be forced to pay an increased fine.

The second tier suggests that persons caught with illegal drugs could be offered a caution which could include “a period of mandatory drug testing alongside attendance at a further stage drugs awareness course.”

Under the third tier, the person would “likely” be charged for their offense, and, on conviction, could be faced with an exclusion order, drug tagging, passport confiscation, and driving license disqualification.

Home Secretary Priti Patel explained the need for harsher punishments for drug-related offenses by insisting that “illicit drugs are at the root of untold harm and misery across our society.”

She added that more people die every year as a result of drug misuse than from “all knife crime and traffic accidents combined.”

“Drugs also cause enormous harm to children and young people, impacting on their health and their ability to work and learn. The total cost to society and taxpayers is huge too, running close to £22 billion ($26.4 billion) a year in England alone,” she wrote in the document.

Patel stated that the purpose of this newly proposed legislation is to ensure that drug users are “more likely to be caught” and face “tougher and more meaningful consequences.”

“We want to see swift and certain interventions delivered which can deter drug use and, alongside other measures, reduce demand for drugs,” she concluded.

The document sets out a goal of clamping down on the “cohorts of so-called recreational users” and driving down demand for illicit substances. However, it does not seek to address illicit drug use among children or adults with drug addiction.

It also notes the dangers of the drug trade, stating that “too often, individuals who choose to use drugs casually are sheltered from or wilfully ignore the human cost of the drugs trade which is immediately around them. They are putting money into the pockets of dangerous drug gangs and fueling violence, both in the UK and across the globe. We want this to change.“

According to the document, in 2019/20, over three million people in England and Wales reported using drugs in the last year. The Home Office argues that these people were putting themselves at risk, making communities less safe and handing lucrative profits to criminals driving a violent and exploitative supply chain.

July 22, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Watershed Moment for Sceptics as PM Candidate Rishi Sunak Makes Election Pitch Saying “I Stopped Lockdown”

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC |  JULY 21, 2022

In a watershed moment for lockdown sceptics, Prime Minister candidate Rishi Sunak has said his opposition to lockdown is a reason that Conservative members should vote for him to lead the country.

In an interview with Andrew Marr on LBC, the former Chancellor said that last December he cut short an overseas trip and flew back to London to intervene and “stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown”.

“We were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron,” he said. “And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.”

It is the first time a leading politician, whether from the Government or opposition, has suggested that being opposed to lockdown is a reason to vote for him or favour him for office. It is indicative of a significant shift in public opinion about Covid restrictions, particularly that Sunak felt able to be so bold in trumpeting his opposition to lockdown and his role in defeating it without a need to couch it in careful language about taking the virus seriously and being cautious. That his interviewer, Andrew Marr, didn’t challenge him on it is further indication of how opinion has changed. This is despite a number of recent high profile calls for restrictions to be reintroduced, most recently by the editors of the BMJ and HSJ.

It offers hope that the future lies with politicians willing to turn their back on the ruinous and illiberal restrictions of 2020 and 2021.

Here is what Rishi said in full.

I’ll tell you what I was doing in December, though, because I still remember it quite vividly. You know what I did in December was fly back from a Government trip I was on overseas and I flew back to this country to stop us sleepwalking into a national lockdown. Because we were hours away from a press conference that was going to lock this country down again because of Omicron. And I came back and fought very hard against the system, because I believe that would be the wrong thing for this country, with all the damage it would have done to businesses, to children’s education, to people’s lives.

That’s really important in December Andrew because we were hours away, we were hours away from a national lockdown, but I came back and challenged the system, and said this is not right and we don’t need to do this and I’m glad I won the argument. But it should give people some confidence that in the same way I stood up for Brexit, in the same way I did that, I am prepared to push hard and fight for the things that I believe in even when that’s difficult.

Watch it here (from 28:45).

July 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

UK pumping more arms into Ukraine

Samizdat | July 21, 2022

The UK will send Ukraine anti-tank weapons, drones, artillery guns and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told Parliament on Thursday. Ukraine will receive more than 20 M109 and 26 L119 artillery guns, as well as counter-battery radar systems and more than 50,000 rounds of ammunition for its existing Soviet-era artillery systems.

The UK will also send 1,600 anti-tank weapons as well as drones, including hundreds of “loitering aerial munitions,” more commonly known as “suicide drones.”

The arms will be sent to Ukraine in the coming weeks, and Wallace’s announcement comes several weeks after outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged an additional £1 billion ($1.2bn) in military support to Vladimir Zelensky’s government. In total, the UK has spent £2.3 billion on weapons and training for Kiev’s military since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began in February.

This money has already paid for nearly 7,000 NLAW, Javelin and other anti-tank missiles, 16,000 artillery rounds, six mobile anti-air missile launchers, as well as a number of M270 rocket artillery systems and 120 armored vehicles.

The impact of these shipments on the battlefield, however, has been debatable. Captured Ukrainian troops have described the Javelin missile launchers – sent by both the UK and the US – as “completely useless” in urban combat, while soldiers are reportedly encountering battery issues with the NLAW “making it impossible to use.” Russia’s military doctrine also favors heavy artillery bombardment of enemy positions from far beyond the NLAW’s 600 meter range.

Both sides have leaned heavily on artillery as fighting rages on in eastern Ukraine and the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Utilizing superior firepower, Russian and allied troops recently brought the entirety of the Lugansk People’s Republic under their control and seized operational control of Seversk, which is within striking distance of the major cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.

Ukraine has received a dozen M142 HIMARS rocket artillery systems from the US. While US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described these weapons as making “such a difference on the battlefield,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov claimed this week that his forces need at least 50 of the systems to hold back Russia’s advances and 100 – around a third of the US’ entire stockpile – to conduct a counteroffensive.

In terms of conventional artillery, the 50,000 shells promised by Wallace is enough to keep Ukraine’s guns firing for roughly eight days. As of last month, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence estimated that his forces were expending 6,000 shells per day, and that Ukraine has one artillery gun for every 15 fielded by Russia.

Meanwhile, a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank, claims that Russia is firing approximately 20,000 artillery shells per day.

July 21, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Soft-launch for climate lockdown

By Alexander Adams | BOURNBROOK | July 19, 2022

Once upon a time, news that a top-level COBRA meeting was held at Downing Street – in the midst of a government re-shuffle – would stir a flicker of alarm or excitement (depending on one’s temperament). Now, when COBRA meetings are called due to a spike in positive tests for a strain of flu, we know that the government is more interested in showing it is responding rather than actually responding or indeed having anything worth responding to.

The reason for the cabinet-level emergency meeting was the arrival of summer. You might have thought that aides could have briefed senior government figures privately on a brief period of warm-to-hot weather that some years occurs over July and August in the British Isles. No doubt the aides had been watching weather maps on television news which have been showing the country seared scarlet, despite the fact that the temperature has been as expected. The establishment, which has been both pushing the idea of a climate crisis and has come to believe its own alarmism, takes the normal heatwaves as evidence of a climate emergency. To be fair, if you consume mainstream television news and radio – plus factual programmes – at high levels, your residual belief in climate emergency will have reached near unbreakable levels.

The Met Office – an arm of the scientific-governmental-media complex – has issued amber and red alerts for sunny days last week. Even GBNews has been running a chyron of dire warnings advising against unnecessary travel. The gleeful doomsayers of the mainstream media have been playing up the dangers of hot weather, adding obligatory comments about anthropogenic global warming. Some exaggerate for tactical effect – to scare people into new types of behaviour – while others simply follow the herd, led by untested assumptions and a climate of fear.

COVID hysteria is not as potent a tool of control and fear as it once was. News reports of a rise in positive tests (caused due to COVID becoming an endemic, mild infection) – which were notably not accompanied by data suggesting increased deaths – generated only a brief uptick in mask-wearing by the “doing their part” crowd. There will be another push to impose a COVID lockdown this winter, but the government, NGOs and international bodies wanting to use lockdown as a tool for restricting the freedom and independence of people are looking for extra excuses. Marburg virus and Monkey Pox have both been pitched as potential reasons to restrict freedom but seem to have been met with muted responses.

So, while authorities worldwide tinker with their systems of control, climate emergency looks like a viable route. It has already been used to promote green policies, lower vehicle emissions, stringent insulation regulations, phasing out of gas boilers. The aim is to restrict means of private travel, monitor energy consumption and use digital identities and social-credit systems to micromanage people, using all-pervading systems to instil fear and obedience. It seems likely that air-quality readings may be used to restrict non-electric vehicle use in cities. Expect this winter to see more “stay at home” advisory notices due to cold weather – essentially for any days with road ice – but a big push next summer for not only advisory notices but action. This may include local or national government imposing fines on businesses which “irresponsibly” remain open during hot weather, as well as more vehicle restrictions.

The government and its medical-environmental partners use fear and coddling to direct a compliant population away from free choice and towards authoritarianism. The exaggerated heat warnings have been a feature of British mainstream news and activist press releases for many years, mainly as a means of reinforcing the necessity of environmental measures. However, the government and its partners have seen how compliant and fearful the population is and are ready to use weather as a tool for population suppression via the means of lockdown.

Be watchful and notice how the mass-media, establishment science, giant corporations and government work together to knit ever tighter the control of the managerial elite in order to remove your ability to judge risk for yourself, travel independently and run your businesses.

July 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Independent SAGE’s Dumb “Seven-Point” Covid Plan

By Igor Chudov | July 19, 2022

Many of my readers had one Covid a long time ago, or never had Covid, are not having another Covid so far, and may not realize how badly are things going in Covid-land in Europe and highly vaccinated areas of USA.

More than one out of 15 Brits is having COVID today (Jul 19, 2022). This is higher than ever before. An “unexpected” largest-ever wave of a yet-another variant Ba.5 is reinfecting highly-vaccinated countries one more time. Hospitals are strained, because sick, force-injected health care workers are staying home due to their Covid reinfections, and patients are hospitalized at record rates. Excess mortality is rising.

People are, naturally, becoming worried as they or their relatives have two-week-long bouts of Covid reinfections that do not feel mild to them and leave them exhausted. My own opinion is that we are on the verge of significant increases in overall mortality. I am quite worried about that.

Rumblings of discontent are appearing. The powers-to-be are wondering what to do.

So, the so-called “Independent SAGE” just came up with a “seven-point plan” to combat COVIDThe plan is so spectacularly stupid that it reads like a parody. Here it is, from the British Medical Journal no less.

This plan is the product of supposedly the “best Covid minds”, the leading thinkers of UK science, whose recommendations influence UK policy. What did these minds produce? Let’s look.

They are proposing to do more of same!

The “clear and consistent messaging” is a theme of the pandemic, it relates to a bad idea that all officials should parrot one line during a so-called “emergency”, to avoid confusing the public. The result of this policy was a lack of independent thinking, as well as censorship of any dissenting voices, that led to groupthink. What message, pray tell, should such “clear and consistent messaging” convey? The seven-point plan?

The efforts to promote “vaccine uptake” are particularly laughable in July of 2022. Here’s how vaccine uptake looks in the UK:

Of special interest is a need to have a “clear long-term plan to address waning immunity and immune escape”. What they are saying is that they do not have such a plan. They merely want to have a plan, which they do not have, as of now.

The concept of “air filtration” refers to a sincerely expressed, but misguided idea that retrofitting buildings with “air filtration devices” will stop the pandemic. While I personally like almost all people who advocate it, I also recognize that it is largely futile, for many reasons having to do with physics and gas dynamics.

Air filtration that could effectively capture airborne virions, would need to turn over enormous volumes of air every minute, through the finest filters, continuously. This is not compatible with existing buildings’ HVAC systems. It would also cost a fortune in electric bills and create a lot of heat. I do not want to get into this discussion too much, but “air filtration” of that kind is not possible in most establishments or homes.

The “FFP3 masks” are obvious non-starters because of difficulties wearing them. Making the public wear such masks in 2022 is impossible.

The worst part of this proposal is the so-called “equitable global provision of vaccines”. This is a code word for bribing governments of poor countries into forcing their citizens to take “vaccines” that these wise but poor people refuse to take voluntarily. The countries with unvaccinated majorities are the future of humanity, in my opinion. They are largely at herd immunity precisely because they refused to vaccinate. Yet, Independent SAGE wants to inject them with non-working “vaccines” in the name of “equity”. Why?

The crazy “Independent SAGE” advisers are anything but sage, are actually stupid, and I am very sorry that they have been UK’s thought leaders since 2020.

Here’s a clip from “Idiocracy”. While it is funny, it shows President Camacho actually solving his country’s problem of dying plants, with his three-point plan of hiring the smartest person in the world named Not Sure. Not Sure figured out the problem and proceeded to stop using Brawndo to water plants.

Brawndo’, which owned the FDA, went bankrupt. The plants started growing, given clean water. Any parallels with the present?

P.S. Please do not think that I am badmouthing the UK by criticizing British Covid experts: Covid experts in the USA are so much worse and could not even come up with a “seven-point plan”. So there is no “USA Covid plan” that I could criticize.

July 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

US and UK want ‘real war’ between Russia and EU – Lavrov

Samizdat | July 20, 2022

The US and UK want to escalate the Russia-Ukraine conflict into a larger confrontation between Moscow and members of the European Union, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday in an interview with RT and Sputnik.

“Our American counterparts, British counterparts… with active support from Germans, the Polish and the Baltic states, they really want to turn this war into a real war and start a confrontation between Russia and European states,” Lavrov told RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan.

The Western governments are “keeping Ukraine from any constructive steps” towards a peace settlement, Lavrov argued. “[Ukraine is] not just [being] pumped with weapons. They are forced to use these weapons in an increasingly riskier way.”

Russia launched its military operation in the neighboring country in late February. Many countries, including NATO members, imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow and have been supplying Kiev with heavy weapons. The latest deliveries include US-made M142 HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and M777 howitzers.

Lavrov claimed that the US and Britain were acting to their own advantage in the conflict between Russia and the EU because the economies of the bloc’s members are bearing the brunt of the sanctions. He added that the US has been acting “irresponsibly” by stoking tensions with Russia.

They are playing a very dangerous game. I don’t think they understand it themselves. But then, in Europe, a lot of people are starting to understand that.

US President Joe Biden said last week that Russia must suffer “a strategic failure” in Ukraine and vowed more support for Kiev.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”

In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.

July 20, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

WHO Used Bad Measure of Excess Mortality

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC |  JULY 18, 2022

As I’ve repeated ad nauseum here at the Daily Sceptic, excess mortality provides a far better measure of the pandemic’s impact on mortality than the ‘official’ Covid death rate.

When it comes to cross-country comparisons, the ‘official’ Covid death rates are particularly deficient. Testing and diagnosis vary dramatically, so two countries with the same actual death tolls may still have very different ‘official’ death tolls – just because one tested more or had broader criteria for diagnosis.

Excess mortality, as most readers are no-doubt aware, is the difference between the number of deaths observed during the pandemic and the number that were expected, based on previous years. A five-year average is often used for the number of expected deaths – though one can use a linear trend or more complicated extrapolation instead.

Here’s a very simple example. Suppose a country had roughly 100,000 deaths per year in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Then in 2020, it records 120,000 deaths. In that case, excess mortality would be 20,000 deaths.

But of course, if we want to compare this country to other countries, the ‘20,000 deaths’ isn’t very useful. Larger countries will have more excess deaths just because there are more people at risk of death. And this is something we need to account for when making comparisons, or else we’ll conclude that all the small countries did well and all the large ones did badly.

So why not just divide the ‘20,000 deaths’ figure by the country’s population, thereby obtaining ‘excess deaths per 100,000 people’? Indeed, that’s exactly what the WHO did for its recent estimates of excess deaths associated with the pandemic (which were widely covered in the media).

Well, there’s a problem with this method of adjustment: countries have different age structures. And this matters because the risk of death (from both Covid and everything else) is far higher in older age-groups than in younger age-groups.

Consider two countries with the same number of excess deaths, say 20,000. One has a population of 10 million and one has a population of 12 million. Suppose the 2 million ‘extra’ people in the second country are all under the age of 40. So above the age of 40, the two countries have identical age structures.

Using the WHO’s method of adjustment, excess mortality would be 200 per 100,000 in the first country, but only 167 per 100,000 in the second country. Yet this clearly ‘rewards’ the second country. Why? Very few deaths occur among people under 40, so including them in the denominator artificially pulls down the rate of excess mortality.

Rather than dividing by the country’s population, there’s a much better way of making excess mortality figures comparable: divide by the number of expected deaths. This gives you a percentage, which is neither biased against large countries, nor against countries with aging populations.

As a matter of fact, the WHO’s decision to divide by the country’s population may help to explain its widely-reported (but almost certainly wrong) finding that Britain had less excess mortality than Germany. Estimates based on percentages clearly show that Britain had more excess mortality. Yet because Germany’s population pyramid has a narrower base, the denominator in the WHO’s calculation will have been smaller.

Having said that, I doubt the WHO’s estimates are substantially different from those based on percentages. But that’s not the point. The point is they used a bad method of adjustment, when an equally simple and better one was available.

July 19, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

UK testing drone swarms in Ukraine might lead to escalation

By Drago Bosnic | July 18, 2022

Air superiority is how the political West wages war. US and UK air power has been instrumental in all wars waged by the two leading Western imperialist thalassocracies since the Second World War to this day, although it existed doctrinally since at least the 1920s. This is so ingrained in their concept of warfare that it’s considered nearly impossible for them to lead a successful military campaign without it. This stands in stark contrast to most other comparable military doctrines, particularly the Russian one.

The Nazi onslaught destroying much of their air force before it got the chance to take off forever changed the way Russians see air power. Realizing (over)reliance on it can have a detrimental effect, coupled with the devastating consequences of American and British firebombing of German cities, which in some cases had an effect no less destructive than nuclear weapons (minus the radiation), Russia’s post-WWII military doctrine adopted a distinct and (up until recently) unique focus on advanced air defenses. Since then, Russia has been developing top-notch SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, some of which are so advanced they effectively nullify the entire Western air dominance concept. And although Western state-run mass media love to downplay this, the very fact US legislation directly and very specifically targets these systems with sanctions speaks volumes.

The proliferation of these systems is a strategic nightmare for aggressive Western planners, who can’t simply bypass them without incurring “unacceptable losses”. In order to counter Russian SAMs, Western Military-Industrial Complexes have been working on a plethora of new systems. Some prominent examples include advanced drones, particularly miniature ones, which are also planned to operate in swarms, saturating hostile air defenses and paving the way for the more traditional aviation to bomb its way through enemy ground forces.

RAF (Royal Air Force) experiments with drone swarms show “they can overwhelm enemy defenses” and the concept would be ready for action in a war, according to the UK military service’s Chief of Staff. Air Chief Marshall Sir Mike Wigston told the Global Air and Space Chiefs’ Conference 2022 in London last week that the RAF’s 216 Test and Evaluation Squadron and the Rapid Capabilities Office trialed five drone types in 13 experiments with various payloads and equipment over three years. According to Wigston, this yielded enough insights for the service to declare an “operationally useful and relevant capability,” using its current fleet of drones.

“We are exploring new models of capability delivery and accelerated production ‘when we need them’ rather than ‘in case we need them,’ from the twin jet 3D-printed Pizookie, to commercially available large drones fitted with novel payloads, to large quadcopters,” Wigston stated.

“The problem of overcoming air defenses is a key obstacle to employing [air] power. Planning for air operations increasingly entails ensuring that planes can fly safely in the first place, putting at risk untold amounts of money that militaries have pumped into beefing up their fleets to fourth- and fifth-generation technology. That conundrum is on display in Ukraine, where Ukrainian and Russian air-defense capabilities are effectively canceling out the other side’s air power arsenal,” according to Justin Bronk, a defense analyst with the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

“The fact air power has been mutually denied, relatively speaking, in Ukraine by both sides has far more serious implications for us than for either [Russians or Ukrainians]. That’s because both militaries are ultimately dependent on massive land manpower and artillery, whereas joint forces of the UK and other Western powers are critically dependent on having air access and air superiority,” Bonk said at the London conference on July 13.

“Swarming, which means throwing enough expendable drones at a defensive radar and interceptor position so as to overwhelm them, can be effective, but only to a point. The idea of small and cheap drones attacking air defenses by way of swarming may not be feasible because those drones lack the requisite range and speed. If you want things to go fast and far, they’re going to be jet-propelled and they’re going to cost a fair bit. Getting drone swarms close enough to sophisticated air defenses with a range of hundreds of kilometers requires risky and potentially pricy insertion tactics that negate the widely cited cost benefit of cheap, small drones,” he added.

Western strategists are closely following their latest proxy war against Russia, trying to devise new strategies to fight the Eurasian giant. The deployment of never-before-seen ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets around Russia’s borders is a testament to that. In addition, increasing reliance on unmanned systems isn’t just the result of Western militaries trying to adopt new technologies. With NATO having severe manpower problems, drones might be the only way for members to have functional militaries in the near future. The UK itself is faced with this issue, having a very limited ground force with barely a few combat-ready brigades, to say nothing of other micro-satellites carved up after the dismantling of post-socialist federal states.

What’s truly dangerous at this point is the possible deployment of these systems to Ukraine. Most NATO weapons deliveries happened weeks or months before they were officially announced. Thus, it’s highly likely the same is true in this case. How Russia might react is up for debate, but it most certainly won’t take it kindly, which opens up new possibilities for escalation, particularly in the context of the latest controversial statements coming from the UK.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

July 18, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Eighty Times More Excess Deaths Associated With Cold Each Year than Heat

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 17, 2022

Amid all the hysteria about next week’s extreme temperatures – which could climb to 41°, according to the Met Office – it’s worth bearing in mind that many, many more excess deaths in England and Wales are associated with cold each year than with heat. According to a recent study in the Lancet Planetary Health, between 2000 and 2019, there were an average of 65,000 excess deaths per year in England and Wales associated with cold, but fewer than 800 a year associated with heat. In other words, roughly 80 times more deaths per year are associated with cold than heat.

Needless to say, the report’s authors blame these excess deaths on ‘climate change’ in general and have nothing to say about the likelihood of the 65,000 figure increasing next winter as a result of rising energy bills.

The researchers analysed 10.7 million deaths that occurred in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019 across over 37,473 small areas that include around 1,600 residents, also known as lower super output areas (LSOAs). They then linked these data with high-resolution gridded temperature maps and potential drivers of vulnerability to heat and cold, including demographic and socio-economic factors, health and disability, housing and neighbourhood, landscape, and climatological characteristics. This allowed the researchers to characterise differences across small areas and map variation in temperature-related mortality risks across the two countries.

Dr Pierre Masselot, Research Fellow in in Environmental Epidemiology and Statistics at LSHTM and co-author of the study, said: “The results come at a critical time as countries and communities face increasing health impacts due to climate change and need to find effective ways to adapt to changing temperatures. The analytical framework also provides a flexible tool that can be adapted for future studies which aim to model temperature-related risks and impacts at small-area level under different climate change scenarios.”

The authors emphasised that, while the research showed that excess mortality attributed to cold was significantly higher than that attributed to heat, these results should be interpreted with caution as more cold than hot days were recorded throughout the year. Despite this, they highlighted that cold-related mortality is evidently a considerable health burden, particularly in deprived areas, and should be addressed with targeted public health interventions.

Nevertheless, any un-biased person reading this report cannot help but conclude that the rising cost of utility bills caused, in part, by the Government’s pursuit of ‘net zero’ will result in far more deaths than next week’s heat wave.

If you really care about reducing deaths due to extreme temperatures, shouldn’t you focus your energies on getting the Government to scrap its ‘net zero’ target, lift the ban on Fracking and start investing billions in nuclear[?], instead of disrupting traffic and sporting events?

You can read the Lancet Planetary Health study here.

July 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Scotland to scan vehicle license plates to enforce “low emission” zones

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 13, 2022

In the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, in Scotland, Low Emission Zones (LEZs) have been launched – however enforcement will not begin until June 1, 2024 for Aberdeen and Edinburgh, June 1 2023 for Glasgow, and May 30 2024 for Dundee.

Transport Scotland said the grace period will allow ample time for compliance. Enforcement of the LEZs will be facilitated by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems.

Vehicles entering the LEZs will be required to meet the Euro VI standards. Those that do not meet the standards are not allowed in the LEZs.

Penalties for non-compliance will be cumulative. The first incident of non-compliance would result in a £60 fine. Subsequent violations will result in a fine double the previous one up to a maximum of £960. The fine is reduced by half if paid within two weeks. The starting fine is reset if there are no subsequent violations within a 90-day period.

There has been a low emission zone in Glasgow that applies to buses since 2018.

July 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

“Made in America” Mini-nukes to be used in a “Nuclear First Strike” coming soon to Italy, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands.

By Manlio Dinucci – byoblu – July 15, 2022

“Production of the B61-12 nuclear bomb begins,” Sandia National Laboratories announced from the United States. The B61-12, which replaces the previous B61 deployed by the U.S. at Aviano and Ghedi and other European bases, is a new type of weapon. It has a nuclear warhead with four power options, selectable depending on the target to be destroyed. It is not dropped vertically, but at a distance from the target on which it is directed guided by a satellite system. It can penetrate underground, exploding deep to destroy command center bunkers in a nuclear first strike.

The B61-12s, classified as “non-strategic nuclear weapons,” are deployed in Europe — in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and probably other countries — at distances far enough to strike Russia. They thus have offensive capabilities similar to those of strategic weapons.

Another nuclear weapon system, which the United States is preparing to install in Europe against Russia, is ground-based intermediate-range missiles. They can also be launched from “anti-missile shield” installations, deployed by the U.S. at bases in Deveselu in Romania and Redzikowo in Poland, and aboard five warships cruising in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Baltic Sea close to Russia.

That such installations have offensive capabilities is confirmed by Lockheed Martin itself. Outlining the characteristics of the Mk 41 vertical launch system, used in both land and naval installations, it specifies that it is capable of launching “missiles for all missions, both defense and long-range attack, including Tomahawk cruise missiles.” These can be armed with nuclear warheads.

Europe is thus being turned by the U.S. into the front line of a nuclear confrontation with Russia, even more dangerous than that of the Cold War.

July 15, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

UK Government considered tearing ‘Covid positive’ people from their homes

By Michael Curzon | Bournbrook | July 12, 2022

‘Boris’ Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries appears to have admitted that the Government, which now prides itself on having imposed restrictions more lightly than others, considered tearing “mothers and fathers and families and children” from their homes if they ‘tested positive’ for Covid during lockdowns to be sent to isolation centres.

A health minister at the time, Ms Dorries was approached by former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and told to adopt this ‘zero Covid’ approach, she told GB News.

The now-Culture Secretary told Dan Wootton, who decided not to dig deeper into the claims:

“[Jeremy] said ‘you’ve got to speak to Matt [Hancock]’. It was at the time Nightingale hospitals were being built. ‘You’ve got to tell him that you don’t put sick people in the hospitals, you follow a “zero Covid” policy… When someone tests positive, you take them from their home and you take them to an isolation centre and you leave them there… That’s the only way you can beat Covid.’”

Ms Dorries said she responded:

“‘The British public will not stand for mothers and fathers and families and children being removed from their family and their home and put in isolation.’ He said: ‘Who said they won’t?’ I said: ‘The behaviour and insights team who I’ve discussed this with. They won’t wear it.’” (My emphasis – video below)

This is quite revealing. Anyone with an ounce of humanity would have rejected this outright, whether they thought the public would accept it or not.

Remember, also, that those officials in SAGE believed the British people wouldn’t accept being ‘locked down’ at all until Italy made it clear that they would.

Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times in December 2020:

“[China] is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

So has Ms Dorries revealed that the only reason we weren’t pulled away from our families after seeing two red lines was because other Europeans weren’t first?

July 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment