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Follow the Science or Follow the Evidence?

Comment on Lord Sumptions’s Times editorial

By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan | Trust the Evidence | August 29, 2022

Throughout restrictions which Lord Sumption called a “catastrophe”, we were exposed to the mantra of “follow the science”. But unfortunately, the only “science” that seems to have been followed in the major decisions is that of modellers and government departments.

Models are akin to opinions. If they are science, the evidence they provide sits on the lowest rung of the ladder. Modellers are accountable to no one; most have never seen a patient in their lives as they have no clinical background, which impedes their understanding of how people behave. Individuals are not herds of buffalos. Some modellers have a consistent track record of getting their predictions dramatically wrong with (again) catastrophic consequences.

Since the start, we have looked at the evidence underpinning the fear-generating narrative pushed by the government, some politicians, the media and many Twitterati, who overnight forgot the principles of scientific investigation, equipoise or uncertainty and the work of many pioneers in respiratory virus epidemiology spanning a century.

The psychotic narrative rests on three legs of what we call the Covid narrative stool.

The first leg is the number of cases. We have shown that misuse of polymerase chain reaction based on a superficial understanding amplified the number of “cases” as many of these were not likely to be infectious at all.

The second leg was the hospital pressure theme. Here using data which should have been available (but is not), we have shown that up to 40% of hospital cases were infected, a phenomenon which shows no sign of abating.

The data from three devolved nations and our interpretation have been serialised on this website.

Finally deaths. A death in epidemiology is the one inevitable outcome you can observe and tally. The question is: what caused it? This is called attribution. Looking at the data from freedom of information requests made by an alert public and the response at times by patronising authorities, we counted 14 different ways of attributing deaths to Covid-19. The first prize for the most bizarre was the Care Quality Commission’s: they left it to the care provider to decide the cause of death. So it is possible that administrators decided what role SARS-CoV-2 played in your grandmother’s death. In one health authority’s case, deaths of people who tested “negative” were rolled into the Covid total.

So the catastrophe described by Lord Sumption was underpinned by very weak evidence; science was nowhere to be seen. Consequently, it remains impossible to separate the impact of SARS-CoV-2 from that of the policies designed to “combat” it.

As the usual sources start gearing up to call for a new round of interventions and restrictions, have these massive cracks in evidence gathering and interpretation been tackled?

Hands up, who’s got the answer?

August 30, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Who Owns UK’s Offshore Wind Farms?

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | August 30, 2022

https://ref.org.uk/generators/search.php

I wrote yesterday about the ownership of the London Array offshore wind farm, To recap, London Array is jointly owned by the German owned RWE, the Canadian investor CDPQ, Orsted the Danish state owned energy company and he strategic investment company of the Government of Abu Dhabi, MASDAR. At current wholesale prices, London Array is making about £800 million a year more than they would have at 2019 prices.

None of the consortium are retail electricity suppliers in the UK, so would be shielded from any windfall tax on or nationalisation of energy suppliers, as has been suggested.

I thought I would look at some of the other big wind farms, which are subsidised by ROCs. The chart above is provided by the Renewable Energy Foundation, and I have listed below the owners of the eight other wind farms with capacity of 300 MW and over.

Race Bank – Macquarie, Orsted, Sumitomo Bank

Greater Gabbard – RWE Renewables, SSE Renewables

Gwynt y Mor – RWE Renewables, Stadtwerke Munchen, UK Green Investment Bank

Rampion – RWE Renewables, Enbridge, Offshore Wind Company

Galloper – RWE Renewables, Siemens, Macquarie, ESB, Spring Infrastructure

West Duddon – Scottish Power, Orsted

Thanet – Vattenfall

Sheringham – Equinor, Statkraft, UK Green Investment Bank

In short, they are nearly all wholly owned by a mix of foreign energy companies, banks and other infrastructure investors. As with the London Array, all of these wind farms/owners would be unaffected by taxes on energy retailers, with the exception of SSE and Scottish Power.

The combined output of these eight and London Array is about 16 TWh a year. At current prices of £375/MWh, the excess profit now being “earned” is around £5 billion a year.

August 30, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | | Leave a comment

The Startling History of Polio Vaccination

By Dr. Vernon Coleman – 21st Century Wire – August 27, 2022

Extract from Vernon Coleman’s bestselling book on vaccination:

‘Doctors trying to promote vaccines often claim that the disease poliomyelitis was eradicated by the use of a vaccine. This is, to put it politely, a barefaced lie. I know facts are unfashionable with the medical establishment these days but the hard evidence shows quite conclusively that the polio vaccine has endangered vast numbers of healthy people, still kills healthy people and played no part in eradicating the disease.

Proof that the introduction of the polio vaccine wasn’t the success it is often made out to be isn’t difficult to find. In Tennessee, USA, the number of polio victims the year before vaccination became compulsory was 119. The year after vaccination was introduced the figure rose to 386. In North Carolina, the number of cases before vaccination was introduced was 78, while the number after the vaccine became compulsory rose to 313. There are similar figures for other American states. If you don’t believe me, check out the figures. The evidence isn’t that hard to find. In America, as a whole, the incidence of polio increased dramatically (by around 50 per cent) after the introduction of mass immunisation. The number of deaths from polio had fallen dramatically before the first polio vaccine was introduced.

The truth is that as with other infectious diseases the significance of polio dropped as better sanitation, better housing, cleaner water and more food were all made available in the second half of the 19th century. It was social developments rather than medical ones which increased human resistance to infectious diseases. But the profitable vaccine is still popular. Today, paralysis caused by poliomyelitis is unheard of in many countries. But every year there are cases of paralysis probably caused by the oral polio vaccine.

However, whether or not the polio vaccine actually works is, for many people, a relatively unimportant health issue.

Of far more significance is the fact (revealed in my book Why Animal Experiments Must Stop in 1991) that millions of people who were given polio jabs as children in the 1950s and 1960s may now be at a greatly increased risk of developing cancer.

The problem is that although the first breakthrough in the development of a poliomyelitis vaccine was made in 1949 with the aid of a human tissue culture, when the first practical vaccine was prepared in the 1950’s monkey kidney tissue was used because that was standard laboratory practice. Researchers didn’t realise that one of the viruses commonly found in monkey kidney cells can cause cancer in humans.

If human cells had been used to prepare the vaccine (as they could and should have been and as they are now) the original poliomyelitis vaccine would have been much safer.

(As a side issue this is yet another example of the stupidity of using animal tissue in the treatment of human patients. The popularity of using transplants derived from animals suggests that doctors and scientists have learned nothing from this error. I sometimes despair of those who claim to be in the healing profession. Most members of the medical establishment don’t have the brains required for a career in street cleaning.)

Bone, brain, liver and lung cancers have all been linked to the monkey kidney virus SV40 and something like 17 million people who were given the polio vaccine in the 1950s and 1960s are probably now at risk (me included). Moreover, there now seems to be evidence that the virus may be passed on to the children of those who were given the contaminated vaccine. The SV40 virus from the polio vaccine has already been found in cancers which have developed both in individuals who were given the vaccine as protection against polio and in the children of individuals who were given the vaccine. It seems inconceivable that the virus could have got into the tumours other than through the polio vaccine.

The American Government was warned of this danger back in 1956 but the doctor who made the discovery was ignored and her laboratory was closed down. Surprise, surprise. It was five years after this discovery before drug companies started screening out the virus. And even then Britain had millions of doses of the infected polio vaccine in stock. There is no evidence that the Government withdrew the vaccine and so it was almost certainly just used until it had all gone. No one can be sure about this because in Britain the official records which would have identified those who had received the contaminated vaccine were all destroyed by the Department of Health in 1987. Oddly enough the destruction of those documents means that no one who develops cancer as a result of a vaccine they were given (and which was recommended to their parents by the Government) can take legal action against the Government. Gosh. The world is so full of surprises. My only remaining question is a simple one: How do these bastards sleep at night?

Oh, I do have one other question.

Did your doctor, practice nurse or eager health visitor mention any of this when extolling the virtues of vaccination?’

Taken from Dr Vernon Coleman’s book Anyone who tells you vaccines are safe and effective is lying: Here’s the proof. (First published in 2011 and available as a paperback and an eBook).

August 30, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Brits told to get used to drinking recycled sewage

By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 29, 2022

British Environment Agency CEO James Bevan says that Brits should get used to the idea of having to drink recycled sewage in times of water uncertainty.

“We need to treat water as a precious resource, not a free good,” writes Bevan in The Sunday Times. “We will have to be more selective about what we use drinking water for. It makes no sense to use it to clean the car or water the lawn.”

“We will need to be less squeamish about where our drinking water comes from. Part of the solution will be to reprocess the water that results from sewage treatment and turn it back into drinking water — perfectly safe and healthy, but not something many people fancy.”

Bevan continues, explaining that, besides getting Brits to drink recycled sewer water, the government is specifically looking into ways to “help reduce personal water consumption” through measures such as “mandatory water-efficiency labelling for household goods.”

Bevan says that due to droughts and record low rainfall, rivers and reservoirs have fallen to dangerously low levels (not just in the UK but in several European nations), which the government has so far addressed by applying a hosepipe ban on millions along with several other restrictions.

As the UK struggles to keep up with the demand of its growing population — with most growth mainly being a result of immigration — and due to the impact of supposed climate change, he now expects that water security will be one of the government’s chief concerns over the coming years.

“Having enough water is at the heart of the climate emergency and an existential challenge,” Bevan writes. “If we don’t change gears and step up now, we will hit what I’ve called the “Jaws of Death.”

August 29, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Johnson Predicts Harsh Months for UK Due to ‘Eye-Watering’ Energy Bills

Samizdat – 28.08.2022

Outgoing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in an op-ed that a few coming months will be tough for the British due to high energy prices.

“The months ahead are going to be tough, perhaps very tough,” Johnson wrote in an article, published by Daily Mail newspaper on Saturday. “Our energy bills are going to be eye-watering,” he said, adding “for many of us, the cost of heating our homes is already frightening.”

According to Johnson, the beginning of Russia’s special operation in Ukraine significantly affected the energy markets. However, he claims that the UK will emerge from the crisis stronger and more prosperous.

The UK prime minister said, referring to the confrontation with Russia, that “in this brutal arm-wrestle, the Ukrainian people can and will win. And so will Britain.”

The outgoing prime minister promised that whoever will be his successor, they will announce new measures of financial support for fellow citizens to tackle surging electricity prices.

On Friday, the UK energy regulator Ofgem announced an 80% increase in the energy price cap to 3,549 pounds ($4,194) per year starting October 1 due to rising global energy prices. Since its last revision in April, the energy price cap has stood at 1,971 pounds. In October 2021, the price cap was 1,277 pounds.

Ofgem chief executive Jonathan Brearley warned that energy prices are likely to continue to rise, and called on the country’s future prime minister to take new measures to tackle the problem.

August 28, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Sanctions against Russia damage Western business

By Lucas Leiroz | August 26, 2022

The West itself appears to be the party most harmed by the sanctions it has chosen to impose against Russia. As well known, the US, UK and EU are facing a wave of inflation with all-time highs. And in the same sense, the business world is collapsing in Western countries. The business losses with the end of participation of some Western companies in the Russian market are extremely significant and are causing serious problems for the economy of many countries, with losses accumulating exorbitant amounts.

It is estimated that American, European, British, and Japanese companies have already lost more than 70 billion dollars since February. The losses are a consequence of the packages of sanctions imposed by Western countries on Moscow in response to the start of the special military operation in Ukraine. Many corporations withdrew from Russia or had their activities frozen, losing insertion in the powerful market of consumption, work and raw materials offered by Russia.

As expected, the most affected sector is the energy one, whose losses are estimated at almost 55 billion dollars, generating a series of problems for Western societies. Relations between Russia and Western Europe in the energy sector have always been a central strategic point in the international economic balance and now seem more threatened than ever. However, other sectors are also in similar situations. 

Agricultural commodity, food and tobacco markets achieved losses of almost 8 billion dollars. In the same sense, in the technology and IT sector, 5 billion dollars of losses have already been accumulated. And there is also the vital banking sector, whose side effects of anti-Russian financial coercive measures have already led to a loss of 3,7 billion dollars – most of this amount belonging to Société Générale, the only banking group to have left Russia completely so far.

With regard specifically to the energy sector, the European and British companies most affected were BP, Linde, Uniper and Total Energies, whose billions of dollars in assets were harmed as a result of the suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and other Russian-European projects of cooperation. The process of disintegration of the Russian and European energy markets will not be so easily completed, as it is necessary to reverse a scenario of decades of cooperation, which will undoubtedly take time. 

For example, BP, which announced its unconditional withdrawal from the Russian market in February, still remains one of Rosneft’s main partners, owning 19.75% of its shares. However, the process of disintegration has progressively advanced. BP itself revealed a loss of more than 25 billion dollars due to the freezing of its activities in Russia, pointing to a scenario that indicates a path towards the end of the cooperation in the near future.

American and Japanese energy companies are heading in the same direction. ExxonMobil, Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi Corporation were some of the companies that had the most losses in recent months, mainly as a result of the effects that the coercive measures had on the Sakhalin-I and Sakhalin-II projects. Obviously, other energy companies were also affected by the packages of sanctions, albeit on a smaller scale, showing a scenario of generalized losses for this sector’s businesses.

For Russia, however, the deficits are much smaller and almost never imply real losses, but market restructurings. In energy, Russian oil and gas production remains strong and active, unaffected by the departure of some Western companies. The withdrawal of these companies makes room for other markets, such as the Chinese and Indian, which are the ones that have stood out in the search for Russian oil and gas in recent months. Meanwhile, Western companies lose important sources of supply that will not be easily resolved.

As for market sectors in which Russian consumption was of interest to Western companies, there are even fewer losses. The corporations that withdrew from Russia left their physical production structures there, which could be used by Moscow, generating employment for the Russian population, internal circulation of capital and economic progress. 

For example, McDonald’s lost more than one billion dollars with its adherence to anti-Russian measures, but its withdrawal from the local market made room for the nationalization of the company’s production structures, and a Russian national company was created to sell fast food for Russian citizens. The same is currently happening with other Western companies that have left the Russian market. In short, the West lost a rich consumer market and handed over to Moscow all the necessary means for Russians themselves to supply their population with such goods and services.

In practice, all these facts simply mean damage to Western business. Entrepreneurs do not appear to have been consulted by heads of state on whether or not sanctions were in their best interest. The measures were simply imposed unilaterally to meet NATO’s geopolitical plans, without considering the opinion of companies that generate jobs for Western citizens. Currently, there are still plans to completely ban the entry of Russian citizens into Europe, which according to estimates will generate losses of more than 20 billion euros, harming the entire European market.

In fact, western sanctions, if not reversed, will lead the world into a global recession in which the most affected will be the western countries themselves. To avoid this, the business sector must mobilize to demand an end to sanctions.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. 

August 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Watch the New Film About Cartoonist Bob Moran

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 22, 2022

A talented filmmaker called Keith Craig has made a film about Bob Moran, the brilliant, acerbic, passionate cartoonist who lost his job at the Telegraph for being too outspoken and uncompromising in his opposition to the lockdown policy. Most of this site’s long-term readers will be familiar with Bob’s work, which we have used many times and continue to use in our Archive section. They’ll also be familiar with the cast of talking heads in this film – James Delingpole, Bev Turner, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Bernie Spofforth, Tonia Buxton and more.

This hugely enjoyable, lovingly-made film is very much worth watching in full. Deserves to become a cult classic.

August 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

The latest on vaccination of 5-11 year-olds

When will the onslaught on children end?

Health Advisory & Recovery Team | August 23, 2022

In February 2022, the JCVI in their wisdom, made a ‘non-urgent offer’ of Covid-19 vaccination for healthy children aged 5-11, scheduled to begin in April. It is worth reading the full statement, which hardly makes a strong case. Here are a few quotes.

  • In comparison to the rest of the population / older age groups, evidence indicates that children aged 5 to 11 are at the very lowest risk from COVID-19. Rates of hospitalisation, paediatric intensive care admission and death are lower in this age group than in all older age groups. In addition, the high level of prior infection in this age group of children can be expected to contribute towards their natural immunity against reinfection. There are some data to suggest that natural immunity may last longer than vaccine-induced immunity against non-severe infection.
  • The impact of vaccination on school absences was indeterminate; the balance between school absences due to reactions following vaccination versus school absences avoided due to prevention of infection is highly influenced by the uncertain timing of any future wave of infection and of the vaccination programme.
  • vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection due to Omicron (Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine) wanes over time from around 70% shortly after 2 vaccine doses to around 25% after 10 weeks and 10% after 20 weeks.
  • [myocarditis] medium to long-term (months to years) prognosis remains less certain.
  • It is estimated that over 85% of all children aged 5 to 11 will have had prior SARS-CoV-2 infection by the end of January 2022

This last point makes the programme for this age group even more ridiculous – the 85% estimate of January 2022 has now risen to 99%, and is perhaps the main reason why parents have not been clamouring to get their children vaccinated (10% to date). Despite this, the government is planning an enhanced programme this September to reach all the currently unvaccinated, in particular primary school children.

Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (NHS Kernow) are leading the way with advertisements and pop up clinics because of ‘a rise in cases’. As previously, petting dogs have been enrolled, and advertisements such as the one pictured here, are falsely claiming that somehow vaccinating small children who are already immune, will magically protect their grandparents.

Legal challenges: Meanwhile, disappointingly though not surprisingly, the Court has thrown out the request for a judicial review of the MHRA, the JCVI, and Secretary of State’s decision to vaccinate this age group and for the 12-15s another judge likewise rejected the legal challenge. A member of the legal team involved has published his response to these judgements here but in effect both judges were saying that the MHRA, the JCVI and the CMOs are self-evidently “experts”, thus the Secretary of State is clearly acting correctly to accept their advice, irrespective of whether their advice is sound. This is a bad day for UK citizens since it appears that drug regulators are now unaccountable.

The political route: The Children’s Covid Vaccines Advisory Committee (CCVAC) who helped with these cases, have recently sent a summary of all their concerns to Stephen Barclay, the latest Secretary of State for Health & Social Care. A reply has been received giving the usual bland “Vaccines are now safer than ever before.” and quoting the same data presented by the JCVI a year ago, totally failing to grasp that the current data give a very different risk:benefit balance. The CCVAC team have also drafted a letter for the new Prime Minister and they are seeking health professionals to add their signatures ready to have a very large letter to deliver to the new incumbent of No 10 in early September. The letter calls on the Prime Minister to halt the vaccination of children pending a full and independent safety review. Is there any chance that the new British Prime Minister will follow the lead taken by several Scandinavian countries? The Director of Denmark’s Board of Health for example was recently on record saying that the vaccination of children had achieved nothing. Meanwhile a report from Iceland shows that in their ~60,000 child population, serious vaccine injuries (eleven) far outweighed Covid-19 hospital admissions (zero).

Readers are invited to share this letter with any health professionals they know, including staff at their local medical centre.  Letter to incoming PM: apply the precautionary principle (childrensunion.org)

August 24, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Israel Conquers the World

Fealty to Israeli and Jewish interests is the new normal

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • AUGUST 23, 2022

I have to confess a certain liking for Russian President Vladimir Putin. No, it’s not over his actions in Ukraine, nor his authoritarian tendencies domestically. It is due to the fact that he sometimes articulates the hypocrisy of foreign countries and leaders in a pithy and take-no-prisoners fashion. He has lately been brave enough to compare and contrast what the Russian military has been accused of in Ukraine with what Israel has been doing to Gaza. He has done so by asking a series of questions that together demonstrate the hypocrisy of Washington and of some Europeans over what constitutes war crimes or crimes against humanity. The questions were “First, are there any sanctions against Israel for the murder and destruction of innocent Palestinian women and children? Second, are there any sanctions against the United States for killing and destroying lives of innocent women and children in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam, and even stealing their diamonds and gold? And third, were there any sanctions against the US and France over the killing of Muammar Gaddafi and the destruction of Libya?”

Russia, of course, has been on the receiving end of sanctions and boycotts and even official theft of the money that it had in US and European banks. It has also had to deal as well with military support provided by NATO to the Volodymyr Zelensky regime in Ukraine. Last month the US Senate unanimously passed a ridiculous nonbinding resolution declaring Russia to be a “state sponsor of terrorism,” which, if endorsed by the White House, would inevitably lead to still more sanctions and increasing aid to Zelensky and his corrupt cronies in an openly declared attempt to weaken Russia and bring down Putin. It would also mean that a future functional diplomatic relationship between Moscow and Washington would become impossible. Implicit in Putin’s questions is the clear accusation that there is a double standard on what constitutes national security. The West supports military resistance by Ukraine against Russia but does not support the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves when attacked by Israel, as took place on August 5th, an unprovoked attack that killed inter alia 17 Palestinian children.

The Russian Foreign Ministry followed-up with a statement first posted on its Egyptian Embassy social media accounts. The statement included a screenshot of a tweet Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid posted April 3rd on the claimed killing of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, attributed by Lapid and the western media to Russian forces. Lapid declared “It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kiev, from after the Russian army left. Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it.” The Russian post observed how one might “Compare Yair Lapid’s lies about [Ukraine] in April and attempts to place blame and responsibility on [Russia] for the deaths of people in Bucha brutally murdered by the Nazis with his calls in August for bombing and strikes on [Palestinian] land in the Gaza Strip. Isn’t that a double standard, complete disregard and contempt for the lives of Palestinians?”

The point about a double standard is particularly relevant as Ukraine, which claims to be enduring a brutal Russian assault replete with war crimes, has openly endorsed Israel’s bombing and shooting of the unarmed Palestinians. Two weeks ago, Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk expressed his full support for Tel Aviv, saying “As a Ukrainian whose country is under a very brutal attack by its neighbor, I feel great sympathy towards the Israeli public. Attacks on women and children are reprehensible. Terrorism and malicious attacks against civilians are the daily reality of Israelis and Ukrainians and this appalling threat must be stopped immediately.”

Korniychuk’s odd, and manifestly false, comment takes reality and turns it upside down. But nevertheless, to be sure, Israel’s recent bloody assault on Gaza did not earn it much favor from a global audience that has become tired of the Jewish state’s belligerency and self-serving flood of disinformation. A number of human rights organizations and even some churches responded by declaring Israel to be an “apartheid state.” Some critics of the Israelis have also been pleased to observe that ordinary voters in the US Democratic Party in particular have moved away from knee-jerk support of Israel and have accepted that it is racist and undemocratic. Even a considerable number young Jews, many of whom have protested against the Israeli automatic resort to gunfire and bombs in suppressing the Palestinians, have broken with their parents over the issue of what constitutes the legitimate “right” of Israel to “defend itself.”

Israel is far from defeated, however, and it has struck back in the time-honored fashion, using the Jewish diaspora and its vast wealth to buy up or leverage the media, to corrupt politicians at all levels, and to propagate a narrative that always depicts Jews sympathetically as perpetual victims. That narrative relies on the so-called holocaust and the slogan “never again” to generate the moral authority and outrage that makes the entire otherwise unsustainable imposture work.

What might be plausibly described as an International Jewish Conspiracy directed from the Israeli government’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and from the think tanks, banks and investment houses on Wall Street and K Street is working hard to make it illegal to criticize Israel and is enjoying considerable success. Israel’s recent and continuing slaughter of Gazans and West Bank villagers has not induced the thoroughly controlled governments and media outlets that the Jewish state dominates that there is anything seriously wrong going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, only business as usual.

Israel appears to be winning its war against the Palestinians (and let’s not forget the Iranians) where it matters most, among the power brokers in both the US and elsewhere. Witness for example the reaction of the US government to the killing of the Gazans. President Joe Biden declared that Israel has a “right to defend itself,” the standard line also parroted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. Thirty-four congressmen meanwhile signed on to a letter calling on the United Nations to disband a UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israel following recent controversial remarks by one of the commission’s members. The COI was set up to investigate possible Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied territories and Gaza.

The signatories particularly objected to what the always vigilant Anti-Defamation League has described as anti-Semitic statements by COI member Miloon Kothari, an Indian human rights expert and investigator. In a podcast Kothari observed that Israel routinely “practiced apartheid and settler colonialism against the Palestinians,” before rejecting criticism of his commission as the work of the Jewish lobby that controls the media, saying “We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” adding that “a lot of money is being thrown at trying to discredit the commission’s work.”

Jewish power particularly in the anglophone world was also on display recently in Canada. The painfully politically correct Justin Trudeau regime has succumbed to the example set by Germany and several other European states in enshrining the official Jewish organizations’ perpetual victim narrative in the Canadian Criminal Code, s. 319. Henceforth

(2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust

  • (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
  • (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

So, from now on in Canada, if you question the claimed facts surrounding the approved so-called holocaust narrative you can be sent to prison for two years. So much for free speech or the right to challenge disinformation.

Finally, in Britain, the two contenders for the position of Prime Minister replacing the disgraced Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, were boasting of their pro-Israel credentials over the very weekend when Israel was killing more than fifty Palestinians, including 17 children, while wounding scores more. Truss and Sunak played the Israel/Jewish card big time, with Truss asserting that “The UK should stand side by side with Israel, now and well into the future. As Prime Minister, I would be at the forefront of this mission.” Truss has also hinted that she would follow the Zionist stooge Donald Trump’s lead in moving the British Embassy to Jerusalem and she has supported a Free Trade Agreement between the UK and Israel, which would primarily benefit the Israelis. She has also declared that any criticism of Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism, a popular line that is also being extensively promoted in the United States.

The two dominant parties in the UK’s parliamentary system are the Conservatives (Tories) and Labour. Both parties have organized “Friends of Israel” groups that have as members a majority of parliamentarians, including more than four out of every five Tories, who currently form the government. Recently, the Labour Party ousted leader Jeremy Corbyn because he dared to express sympathy for the Palestinians and replaced him with Keir Starmer, who is as close to Israel and the powerful British Jewish community as, well… choose your metaphor. For what it’s worth, Truss, Sunak and Starmer all support a hard line against Russia in Ukraine and also advocate putting extreme pressure on Iran, Israel’s declared regional enemy. They also all support using the British veto in the United Nations to protect the Jewish state against critics.

In 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon angrily admonished his colleague Shimon Peres, who was arguing that Israel should heed US calls for a cease fire, saying “I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” It now appears that the US, Canada, and Great Britain, joined by other anglophone states like Australia and New Zealand, are riding on the same horse when it comes to sacrificing actual national interests to pander to a foreign nation which can rightly be regarded as both a habitual war criminal and manifestly racist. The British and Canadian politicians on both sides of the aisle have now become like their American counterparts in allowing themselves to be corrupted by money and media influence, making an uncritical and near total commitment to Israel the defining issue in any political campaign for high office.

Modern Jewish power as a global phenomenon is a cancer that was in a certain sense made in America and has spread worldwide. But, fortunately, the smearing of critics as anti-Semites is beginning to wear thin. As Chris Hedges observed in March 2019 “The Israel Lobby’s buying off of nearly every senior politician in the United States, facilitated by our system of legalized bribery, is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. The lobby’s campaign of vicious character assassination, smearing and blacklisting against those who defend Palestinian rights… is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact. Twenty-four state governments’ passage of Israel Lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is not an anti-Semitic trope. It is a fact.”

It should also be a fact that Americans are beginning to rally against their government being manipulated by the unregistered insidious agents of a foreign government, but that will have to wait presumably. For the moment, Israel and its fifth column have key elements in both government and in the public space in their iron grip. It might require something like a revolution to loosen that.

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.

August 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The media are (finally) admitting lockdown is worse than “Covid”… but why?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | August 19, 2022

The latest figures from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) suggest that the knock-on effects of lockdown may be harming more people than “Covid” ever did, or so the press are saying anyway.

The ONS’s weekly data apparently shows over 10,000 more reported deaths than expected.

Since none of these excess deaths has been “linked with Covid”, the press is calling them the “true cost of lockdown”, with some papers suggesting lockdown is “killing more people than Covid”.

To which the only proper response is: “No shit.”

Even for those who still cling to the orthodoxy that “Covid” actually exists, the fact lockdown was going to do more damage than it prevented was obvious from the moment early mortality studies showed “Covid” had a 99.5% survival rate, back in the spring of 2020.

Many experts in economics, statistics, epidemiology and virology voiced this opinion, and were vilified and abused for their trouble.

And, really, anyone with the smallest shred of common sense could figure it out for themselves. Shutting down the health service and crashing the economy is never going to end well (unless you want to kill people, then it’s a great plan).

Even Dr David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19, described lockdowns as a “global catastrophe” in October 2020:

We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of the virus[…] it seems we may have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition […] This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe.”

So the question is not “Is lockdown worse than Covid?” The answer to that is “yes”, and we’ve known that for over two years.

The real question is: why are they finally admitting it?

It’s not just this week’s excess deaths either. Elsewhere the media is concerned about the mental health impacts of lockdowns, delays in cancer treatments, the “lockdown drinking”, the impact on children missing school, teenagers self-harming and so and so on.

Professor Karol Sikora – one of those vilified experts I mentioned earlier – has even been given space in the Telegraph to write a 2000 word “I told you so”.

Why?

Perhaps the answer to that lies not in what they’re talking about, but in what they are most pointedly not talking about.

The excess deaths are being very definitely laid at the feet of lockdowns, not the experimental “vaccines”.

Now, were the deaths really caused by the lockdown? Or by the “vaccines”? Or a mix of both? We don’t know, and can likely never know.

At this point our collective trust in institutions and official figures should be low enough to question if there were any excess deaths. Maybe they just made them up. They do that.

Regardless of the truth of it, the narrative is certainly shifting to highlight “the true cost of lockdowns”.

This could be about disguising the harm done by untested vaccines, admitting to potentially deleterious effects of lockdown to spare Pfizer’s blushes.

There’s a lot more invested in the vaccines than the lockdown – in every sense of the word – and if something has to be blamed it makes sense they would much rather it be lockdowns than jabs.

That’s a decent explanation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more to it.

This narrative could be about setting up the public for the next “covid” wave or some new “pandemic”.

Consider how quickly the “true cost of lockdown” story could be parlayed into a new mainstream consensus that “Lockdown was so damaging, we must do whatever it takes to avoid another“.

Then consider how “Whatever it takes” could take the form of quarantine camps for the unvaccinated, vaccines mandates, enforced testing and surveillance…or whatever the hell else they want.

August 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | Leave a comment

Is That True Or Did You Hear It On The BBC?

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | August 19, 2022

I have just bought this book, which includes some good stuff on the BBC’s climate lies and misinformation.

I have only read the first couple of chapters, but I would thoroughly recommend it.

This is the Amazon summary:

… not only does the BBC diligently protect power from scrutiny, it attacks and attempts to discredit those who dare to challenge the status quo.

Formed in 1922 by the British establishment, the BBC has always been a reliable ally of ultra-wealthy and powerful interests. Indeed, the broadcaster occupies a pivotal position within an international corporate-political alliance which promotes only those narratives which consolidate the ‘global order.’

Using multiple examples of BBC reporting, the author argues that the tax-payer funded broadcaster is a proxy which acts on behalf of a tiny, but very powerful clique – a role which compels it to pump out disinformation on an industrial scale, misleading all those who consume its content.

The book includes sections on:

  • Climate Change
  • Brexit
  • COVID
  • Trump
  • NHS

Sedgwick’s premise is an interesting one that the BBC has always protected the establishment. One implication from this is that this same establishment has morphed over the years, from a reactionary one of the past to the left wing, big government, global world order one of today.

August 20, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Europe decreasing support to Ukraine

Data shows that European countries did not offer new military aid to Kiev in July

By Lucas Leiroz | August 18, 2022

Apparently, European countries are understanding that the path to peace in Ukraine requires stopping military aid. Data show that in July the six major European powers abstained from making new military agreements with Kiev. It was the first month without European aid pledges to Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian special military operation, in February. In fact, this indicates that Western support is on decline, leaving only Kiev to decide whether or not to continue with the conflict.

The news was announced by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy – more specifically through Ukraine Support Tracker, which operates within the Institute. According to the researchers, European authorities have become unable to keep up with the speed with which the US, UK and Poland send military aid. This situation has led to a slow decline in the supply of money, weapons and equipment, resulting in July’s absolute absence of support contracts. 

The decline has been occurring since April. Looking from a realistic point of view it is possible that the Russian advance may have discouraged European leaders from maintaining high spending on the conflict, considering it as simply “lost”. Also, the discouragement may have been intensified especially after the Russian victory at the battle of Azovstal in May, when Western analysts finally began to admit that Kiev is losing the conflict.

More than geopolitical realism, there is also the direct pragmatic factor: Europe cannot promise Kiev more than it currently promises simply because it cannot give Kiev more than it currently does. Americans, British and Poles are managing to fulfill their promises because they have taken the Ukrainian situation as a national emergency and are mobilizing their productive forces to meet this demand. However, the EU has many other priorities that make it impossible to give more help to Kiev. In other words: whatever is happening at the front, Europe is not promising Kiev any more aid simply because it can no longer help.

Obviously, the situation will not lead to an abrupt interruption of aid, but a gradual decline. Certainly, the end of support will not be definitive or linear, having expectations for modest resumptions and new interruptions again. For example, at the beginning of August, there was a meeting between European authorities in Copenhagen to re-discuss aid strategies. It was decided that an amount of 1.5 billion euros would be sent. Although the act somehow means that Europeans still “care” about Ukraine, the number is far lower than previous conferences’ packages.

Commenting on the topic, Christoph Trebesch, head of the team compiling the Ukraine Support Tracker, said: “Despite the war entering a critical phase, new aid initiatives have dried up. (…) When you compare the speed at which the checkbook came out and the size of the money that was delivered, compared to what is on offer for Ukraine, it is tiny in comparison (…) I would say [current European support is] surprisingly little considering what is at stake (…)“. 

Trebesch believes that the correct European stance would be to invest in the Ukrainian conflict the same amount of money invested in overcoming previous events, such as the eurozone crisis and the new coronavirus pandemic. Trebesch’s opinion reiterates that of many other pro-Kiev activists, who believe that a Russian victory would be an absolute disaster for the entire Europe and lead to the bloc’s collapse, which is why every possible effort should be made now in order to prevent Moscow from reaching its goals.

And even though political realism is growing among Europeans, many authorities still think like Trebesch. For example, Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks asked: “If we are wanting the war to end as soon as possible, they need to ask themselves, are they doing enough?”. 

In fact, realism may overcome ideological or humanitarian arguments. The EU certainly has other priorities to address. The conflict itself brings with it many problems, such as the energy and food supply crisis. Thinking about solutions to problems that affect Europeans should be a priority over thinking about strategies to reverse the military scenario.

Furthermore, the argument that the current crisis should receive the same investment funds from previous crises is unfounded. The conflict in Ukraine, as much as it worries the EU, is a foreign matter and cannot be a priority now. If the US, UK and Poland keep Ukraine as a priority, it is because these countries maintain a geopolitical and ideological rivalry against Russia, which is not the case in Europe.

Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

August 18, 2022 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

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