Category Archives: Media

Exposing the Banality of ESG and the Woke Movement

Laurence Fox with James Lindsay

In this episode of #TheLaurenceFoxShow, Fox and Lindsay dissect the complexities surrounding ESG and the woke movement. Here are the key points covered in this gripping conversation:

Origins of ESG: Uncover the origins and evolution of the ESG framework, examining its impact on business practices, investment strategies, and the broader social landscape.

The Woke Movement Unveiled: Delve into the woke movement, exploring its ideological foundations, cultural influence, and the implications it has on free speech, critical thinking, and societal cohesion.

The Banality of ESG: Expose the inherent banality that underpins the ESG movement, highlighting the potential dangers of reducing complex issues to simplistic metrics and virtue signalling.

Ideological Challenges: Investigate the ideological underpinnings of both ESG and the woke movement, uncovering the potential pitfalls of dogmatic adherence to particular narratives and the suppression of dissenting voices. Critical Analysis and Solutions: Engage in a critical analysis of the ESG and woke phenomena, while exploring alternative approaches that emphasise nuance, individual autonomy, and genuine progress.

Video here. (58 minutes)

The BBC’s position on Climate Change

Established in September 2018

Writes “carbonbrief.org”:

The move follows a ruling earlier this year by Ofcom, the UK’s broadcasting regulator, which found that BBC Radio 4’s flagship current-affairs programme Today had breached broadcasting rules by “not sufficiently challenging” Lord Lawson, the former Conservative chancellor.

Here are the essentials of the ruling:

What’s the BBC’s position?

  • Man-made climate change exists: If the science proves it we should report it. The BBC accepts that the best science on the issue is the IPCC’s position, set out above.
  • Be aware of ‘false balance’: As climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate. Although there are those who disagree with the IPCC’s position, very few of them now go so far as to deny that climate change is happening. To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken. However, the BBC does not exclude any shade of opinion from its output, and with appropriate challenge from a knowledgeable interviewer, there may be occasions to hear from a denier.
  • There are occasions where contrarians and sceptics should be included within climate change and sustainability debates. These may include, for instance, debating the speed and intensity of what will happen in the future, or what policies government should adopt. Again, journalists need to be aware of the guest’s viewpoint and how to challenge it effectively. As with all topics, we must make clear to the audience which organisation the speaker represents, potentially how that group is funded and whether they are speaking with authority from a scientific perspective – in short, making their affiliations and previously expressed opinions clear.

Robert Kennedy Jr exposes the results of the Pfizer trial

I’ve seen this data published before, but it’s worth repeating:

~ 22,000 were injected with the Pfizer vaccine and 22,000 took the placebo (saline)…

~ Results showed the NNTV (Number needed to vaccinate to save one life) was 1 in 22,000…

~ The vaccinated group were 21% more likely to die over the next 6 months from all cause mortality…

~ The vaccinated group was 400% more likely to suffer a cardiac arrest in the next 6 months.

See the short Twitter video here.

Deconstructing Marianna in Conspiracyland – Introduction

“Conspiracyland” is a disinformation and propaganda campaign designed to mislead the BBC audience into accepting dictatorship

So says Ian Davis in this article.

Excerpt:

Faced with the prospect of no one bothering to pay for their propagandists, so wedded is the government to ensuring that its BBC “programming” continues that it has frozen the current license fee for two years, in the hope of enticing people to stay, while it desperately tries to figure out how it is going to fund its State media operation.

Currently the proposed government solution looks likely to be a direct tax:

Our evidence was clear that some form of public funding for the BBC remains necessary. [. . .] A universal household levy linked to council tax bills is one option which could take greater account of people’s ability to pay. A ring-fenced income tax is another.

As the effectiveness of its threats and menaces wanes, it is clearly essential, from the government’s perspective, that all choice be removed. Taxation at source has the added advantage of stealing money from people who can’t abide the BBC and wouldn’t choose to support it if you paid them.

Update: Breitbart claims there was a host of disinformation in the first instalment of this program.

WHO launches new “digital health initiative”

Chalk up another “I told you so” for the Conspiracy Theorists.

Writes Kit Knightly:

On Monday, the World Health Organization and European Union announced the launch of their new “partnership”, building on the EU’s “highly successful” digital certification network, which was introduced during the “pandemic”.

From the WHO’s website [emphasis added]:

WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility…

This would be those digital health passports that “conspiracy theorists” warned about, but which we were all told weren’t ever going to be a thing.

Continue reading here.

Can we finally tell the truth about lockdown?

This inhuman experiment must never be repeated.

Writes Fraser Myers:

There have been a number of different attempts to estimate excess deaths during the pandemic period, but whatever methodology is used, the data always show two significant things. Firstly, there is no obvious correlation between the length or stringency of a nation’s lockdowns and the level of excess deaths. Secondly, Sweden, which infamously shunned hard lockdowns, has ended up with some of the lowest excess deaths from the pandemic in Europe. Whichever calculation of excess deaths you use, whether it’s from the Lancet, The Economist, the Spectator or the World Health Organisation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that lockdown brought little gain for a lot of pain.

Proponents of lockdown see things differently, of course. As early as June 2020, an Imperial College London study declared the UK’s first national lockdown a stunning success, claiming that it had saved a whopping 470,000 lives. This figure relied on a model Imperial had produced, which predicted that 500,000 people would die from Covid unless severe restrictions were imposed. The actual number of deaths (around 30,000 at the time) was then subtracted from the projection. The trouble is, when applied to Sweden, the same modelling assumptions predicted 96,000 deaths by summer 2020. The actual death toll by that point, despite there being no lockdown in Sweden, was 6,000. Nevertheless, these highly questionable models were used to justify new lockdown measures throughout the pandemic. And they have since been held up as ‘proof’ that lockdowns saved countless lives.

Reade the rest here.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

>>>>>>

Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

<<<<<<

Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

On Broken Science

"More research is needed."

Paper published by Net Zero Watch (PDF).

Introduction:

A fascinating experiment was conducted not too long ago. An experiment about experiments. About how scientists came to conclusions in their own experiments. What happened was this: social scientist Nate Breznau and others handed out identical data to a large number of researchers and asked each group to answer the same question. The question was: Would immigration reduce or increase ‘public support for government provision of social policies’?

That can be difficult to remember, so let’s reframe this question in a way more memorable, and more widely applicable to our other examples. Does X affect Y? Does X, more immigration, affect Y, public support for certain policies?

That’s causal language, isn’t it? X affects Y? These are words about cause, about what causes what. Cause, and knowledge of cause, is of paramount importance in science. So much so that I claim – and I hope to defend the idea – that the goal of science is to
discover the cause of measurable things. We’ll get back to that later.

Just over 1200 models were handed in by researchers, all to answer whether X affected Y. I cannot stress enough that each researcher was given identical data and asked to solve the same question.

Breznau required each scientist to answer the question with a ‘No’, ‘Yes’, or ‘Cannot tell’. Only one group of researchers said they could not tell. Every other group produced a definite answer. About one quarter – a fraction we should all remember –answered ‘Yes’, that X affected Y – negatively. That is, more X, less Y.

Now researchers were also allowed to give some idea of the strength of the relationship, along with whether or not the relationship existed. And that one-quarter who said the relationship between X and Y was negative ranged anywhere from a strongly negative, to something weaker, but still ‘significant’. Significant. That
word we’ll also come back to.

You can see it coming…about another quarter of the models said ‘Yes’, X affects Y, but that the relation was positive! More X, more Y, not less! Again, the strength was anywhere from very strong to weak, but still ‘significant’.

The remaining half or so of the models couldn’t quite bring themselves to say ‘No’: they all still gave a tentative ‘Yes’, but said the relationship was not ‘significant’.

You see the problem. There is, in reality, only one right answer, and only one strength of association, if it exists. That a relationship does not exist may even be the right answer. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know only one can be. Yet the answers – the very confident, scientifically derived, expert-investigated answers –
were all over the place and in wild disagreement with each other.

Every one of the models was science. We are told we cannot deny science. We are commanded to Follow The Science.

But whose science?