Category Archives: Media

Across the West, People Are Dying in Greater Numbers.

Nobody Wants to Learn Why

Article by Johnathan Cook.

Excerpt:

But why are these authorities so afraid?

The answer is simple. They suspect that any research will implicate them in those excess deaths. They are frightened – rightly or wrongly – that the narrative they constructed around the pandemic, and the powers they accrued to themselves, will unravel.

The reason they are in no hurry to find out why so many extra people are dying is because they fear that significant contributory factors are either the lockdown policies they imposed or the side-effects of the vaccines they championed – or both.

Again, I’m not saying that is what I think. I have no expertise to evaluate all the possible causes, including the ongoing erosion of socialised health care in much of the Western world and its transfer to yet more corporate profiteers – for which our governments are undoubtedly responsible.

But governments and medical regulators have access to the same data and graphs as Dr Manniche, showing a relentless and near-identical rise in excess deaths beginning in spring 2021 in Denmark, Norway and Finland, in the immediate wake of the mass vaccine rollout. Similar graphs are available for other Western states.

The inference that there is a connection between the vaccines and excess deaths may be wrong. But it is not a hypothesis they wish to test. The consequences are far too serious for them. They would rather enforce general ignorance, or perpetrate a deception on the public, than risk undermining their own authority – and the crucial levers they control both to sustain their privileges and to further concentrate their wealth.

There are some uncomfortable lessons here for us all.

The truth is Western governments – all of them – dare not test the evidentiary basis for their insistence on lockdowns and experimental vaccines as the only way out of the pandemic. They dare not do so in the full glare of public scrutiny for fear that the truth will not serve them, and more likely will damage them. So they cultivate public ignorance.

The truth is that the medical regulatory authorities were long ago captured by Big Pharma, and the revolving door it offers, leading to prestigious jobs and lucrative salaries in the industry. So they favour public ignorance too.

The truth is that the media will not hold the feet of governments or the medical establishment to the fire because, whatever the media claim, they are not in the business of enforcing real, systemic accountability. The billionaire-owned media corporations are embedded in the same model of corporate profit as Big Pharma. Indeed, the media’s own corporate profits depend on the advertising and sponsorship of drugs companies – fellow corporations – like Pfizer. So they benefit from public ignorance as well.

World of illusion

We live in a world not, as we are told and tell ourselves, of democratic accountability and transparency. Beyond formal, surface appearances, the system of political, economic and social control is designed to lack all but the most minimal checks and balances, institutional safeguards and oversight.

We live in a world of illusion, of elites that look out for their own, that develop ever more sophisticated technological tools to manipulate and deceive us, and that have progressively rigged the system to accrue to themselves ever more wealth and power.

We are not, as we like to imagine, informed citizens. The system cannot afford to provide us with the information we need to be informed – information that might reveal to us that we have been duped, that the rich steal from the poor to give to themselves, that our rulers have no clue how to fix the biggest problems facing us, aside from lining their pockets with more gold as the ship goes down.

As the last year has demonstrated, our elites had no more idea how to deal with the pandemic than they currently do with the climate crisis, or with the Ukraine war (without risking nuclear conflagration), or with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence. Faced with the biggest challenges, they are like children – shouting “Follow the Science” or “Green New Deal” to distract the rest of us as they grab as many sweets as they can thrust into their pockets.

For these elites, Covid was a party – quite literally in the case of the British government – in which the biggest corporations not only profiteered but drove small businesses into the ground. Excess deaths are but a hangover, one that must be studiously ignored if the fiction of responsible, accountable, democratic government is to be maintained.

Our world has been carefully constructed to ensure we do not get to peek behind the curtain, to see the con-men at work. Unless we dispel this central illusion – that science, reason and compassion are the forces driving the West – the charlatans will take us with them over the edge of the cliff in their pursuit of suicidal “economic growth” and chimerical “progress”.

The junk science behind face masks

There is still no evidence that mask mandates limit the spread of Covid.

Article by Heneghan and Tom Jefferson.

Excerpt:

As it stands, there is simply no evidence-based case for face masks. It is possible masks may work in certain situations. But there is absolutely no certainty they work in all situations.

This matters. Mask mandates, no matter how localised, aren’t harmless measures. They affect social behaviour and help to reinforce a climate of fear. In this regard, they were indicative of the government’s mishandling of the pandemic, as it resorted to authoritarian behavioural interventions. Indeed, to ensure mask compliance, the government effectively prosecuted its own citizens [see link in original] for daring to breathe fresh air. In London alone, 4,000 people were issued with penalty notices of up to £200 for going maskless in 2022 alone.

Our hapless politicians followed the experts who claimed masks work with absolute certainty. And they ignored anyone who expressed doubts about the evidence. The result was a dubious policy that has caused plenty of damage.

Thankfully, it seems unlikely the public will be following Scottish healthcare workers and calling for the return of mask wearing. Although respiratory illnesses like Covid are always spreading, most people have decided against masking up again. As ever, there is profound wisdom in the crowd.

Covid vaccines: batch dependent safety

Dr. John Campbell explains Danish study

“Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. 71% of the suspected adverse reactions occurred in 4.2% of the vaccine batches Numbers of suspected adverse events (SAEs), after BNT612b2 mRNA vaccination in Denmark.”

Here is Campbell’s presentation on Youtube. Here on Rumble.

Here is his interview with one of the study authors/researchers, on Youtube. Here it is on Rumble.

Charlatans in Science

A real life "Uncle Andrew"

See here.

Excerpts:

As an example of [Peter] Hotez’s repeat offenses, Dore plays a compilation video of Hotez, starting with Hotez pointing out there are “unique potential safety problems” related to coronavirus vaccines in 2020. Then, something happened and Hotez never admitted the possibility of safety problems again.

Instead, he started pushing the single-dose Janssen shot, which later got pulled in several countries due to life-threatening blood clots. Then he started pushing the two-dose mRNA shots, saying they offer “long-lasting” protection. Then, when the boosters rolled out, he switched to saying “I’ve always said this is a three-dose vaccine.”

Then, he argued “a fourth immunization” would be necessary “to keep the country going.” And when hospitals continued to fill up with COVID patients, he told people to get the bivalent booster.

After that, he started saying yearly boosters would be necessary, only to later change his mind saying we may need a booster “every few months,” because the boosters “aren’t holding up as well as we’d like.”

He also pushed the COVID jab on young children, claiming COVID was “picking off young people like we’ve never seen [before].” With a track record like that, proving yourself wrong every few months, criminalizing critique would surely be nice.

The Perfect Dictatorship

According to Aldous Huxley

“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.”

Found here.

And here‘s a fitting quote from George Orwell’s “1984”.

This is more than a free speech crisis

It’s a humanity crisis, says Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi, a journalist who has been investigating how the FBI and other US authorities influenced Twitter during the pandemic to uphold a certain “narrative”, spoke recently to a Free Speech gathering in London. Below is an excerpt of what he said. The full text is here.

[. . .]

But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.

What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

[. . .]

But it goes deeper. Michael and I found correspondence in Twitter about something called the Virality Project, which was a cross-platform, information-sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook shared information about Covid-19.

They compared notes on how to censor or deamplify certain content. The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface: it was to combat “misinformation” about the pandemic, and to encourage people to get vaccinated. When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.

One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as “standard misinformation on your platform… stories of true vaccine side effects… true posts which could fuel hesitancy” as well as “worrisome jokes” or posts about things like “natural immunity” or “vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway.”

This is straight out of Orwell. Instead of having “ambiguities” and “shades of meaning” on Covid-19, they reduced everything to a binary: vax and anti-vax.

They eliminated ambiguities by looking into the minds of users. In the Virality Project if a person told a true story about someone developing myocarditis after getting vaccinated, even if that person was just telling a story – even if they weren’t saying, “The shot caused the myocarditis” – the Virality Project just saw a post that may “promote hesitancy.”

So, this content was true, but politically categorized as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation – untrue.

[. . .]

“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” wrote Graphika, in a report sent to Twitter, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

It was the same with someone who shared true research about the efficacy of natural immunity or suggested that the virus came from a lab. It all might be factual, but it was politically inconvenient, something they called “malinformation.” In the end, out of all of these possible beliefs, they derived a 1984 binary: good and ungood.

They also applied the binary to people.

This was new. Old-school speech law punished speech, not the speaker. As a reporter I was trained that if I commit libel, if I wrote something defamatory that caused provable injury to someone, I would have to retract the error, admit it, apologize, and pay remuneration. All fair!  But the court case wouldn’t target me as a person. It wouldn’t assume that because I was wrong about X, I would also be wrong about Y, and Z.

[. . .]

One last note. As Michael and I found out recently with regard to the viral origin story, things deemed politically good often turn out to be untrue, and things deemed ungood turn out to be true.

I can recite a list if need be, but many news stories authorities were absolutely sure about yesterday later proved totally incorrect. This is another characteristic Orwell predicted: doublethink.

He defined doublethink as “the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely.”

Not long ago we were told in no uncertain terms the Russians blew up their own Nord Stream pipeline, that they were the only suspect. Today the U.S. government is telling us it has known since last June that Ukrainian forces planned it, with the approval of the highest military officials. But we’re not expected to say anything. We’re expected to forget.

What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on? There are only a few options. Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private. Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.

Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget. This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing. The facts are dead! Long live the new facts!

We’re building a global mass culture that sees everything in black and white, fears difference, and abhors memory. It’s why people can’t read books anymore and why, when they see people like Russell who don’t fit into obvious categories, they don’t know what to do except point and shriek, like extras in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

We have been complaining about censorship, and it’s important to do that. But they are taking aim at people in a way that will make censorship unnecessary, by building communities of human beings with no memory and monochrome perception. This is more than a speech crisis. It’s a humanity crisis. I hope we’re not too late to fix it.