PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-07
We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.
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Arkansas becomes first state to ban surgery, hormones and puberty blockers for transgender youths
"Lawmakers in Arkansas voted on Tuesday to override a veto from Gov. Asa Hutchinson on banning surgery and treatment for transgender minors.
The Republican-controlled House and Senate in the state approved the measure despite objections from the governor and activists. The measure bans doctors from providing surgery, hormonal treatment, or puberty blockers to transgender youths if they are below 18 years of age.
The override was pushed through with a 72-25 vote in the House and 25-8 vote in the Senate.
The Republican governor vetoed the legislation on Monday, saying it creates “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters involving young people.” He also said the bill does not “grandfather those young people who are currently under hormone treatment.”"
The Arkansas legislature will now be called a bunch of backcountry bigots and far worse by every mainstream outlet for weeks. But I say: Go Arkansas! They get it: Don't Drug Kids.
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Biden’s ‘gold’ name landed Hunter Biden $50K per month Burisma job, president’s son reveals in interview
"President Joe Biden’s son Hunter said that he got a well-paid job with Ukrainian gas company Burisma – despite having no experience in the energy industry – due to his father’s surname being “synonymous with democracy.”
Hunter Biden had joined the company’s board of directors in 2014 after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted and exiled to Russia, with the Obama administration supporting the protesters. Joe Biden oversaw US policy in Ukraine during his time as vice president between January 2009 and 2017.
Despite accusations of nepotism and corruption, Hunter Biden said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday that he received the position due to his last name being seen as “synonymous with democracy and transparency.”
“I think that they saw my name as gold,” Biden said, adding that “one of the reasons” they hired him was because Burisma “wanted to create a bulwark” against “Russian aggression.”
“They knew that they had to expand internationally and into other sectors in order to diversify and protect themselves... The Biden name is synonymous with democracy and transparency,” Biden concluded. “That’s why I said it was gold to them.”
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Biden also told the BBC that he “missed” the “perception” that taking such a role would create. In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, however, Biden said he did not think that taking the job was a mistake in itself, and instead only focused on the perception that taking the job made.
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...Hunter Biden admitted to CBS News this week that he had previously been struggling so much with his drug addiction that he wasn’t “keeping tabs on possessions” like his laptop. According to the New York Post, the laptop had been taken to a repair shop but Biden never returned to collect it."
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UK Government Has Planned For Vaccine Passports All Along
"Despite consistently denying it, the UK government has planned for the rollout of vaccine passports all along, prompting charges that the “Covid passes are shrouded in government cover ups, lies and shady contracts.”
Privacy Watchdog Big Brother Watch points to an article in the London Guardian today that details how the vaccine passport system was in advanced stages back in December at the same time as ministers were telling the public there were no plans for them.
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The plan was always to develop an app based system to integrate a QR code linking to a digital passport, which will be used to gain entry into clubs, venues, cinemas, basically anywhere in public.
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It is not too late to stop this nightmare future from unfolding.
UK Ministers are set to vote on the vaccine passport system, and could defeat it, killing off the system, at least in the short term.
Groups such as Big Brother Watch need support in their efforts to stave off a two tier society."
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Forbes privates video being used to debunk 60 Minutes’ DeSantis claims
"CBS is being accused of manipulatively editing a heated exchange between one of its reporters and Gov. Ron DeSantis over an alleged “pay for play” scheme involving supermarket chain Publix. The interview, from a press conference last month, featured in the episode of “60 Minutes.”
CBS News’ reporter Sharyn Alfonsi pressed the governor over allegations that he awarded Publix the opportunity to distribute COVID-19 vaccines in Palm Beach County after a sizable donation.
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CBS edited out several minutes of DeSantis explaining why he believes the claims were wrong.
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In the missing portion of the exchange, DeSantis said:
“First of all, the first pharmacies that had [the vaccine] were CVS and Walgreens and they had a long-term care mission, so they were going to the long-term care facilities. They got the vaccine in the middle of December, they started going to the long-term care facilities the third week in December to do LTCs. So that was their mission, that was very important and we trusted them to do that. As we got into January, we wanted to expand the distribution points.
“So yes, you had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more. So we reached out to other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission and we said we’re going to use you as soon as you’re done with that.”
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Forbes hasn’t commented on why the video was debunking 60 Minutes’ narrative, that had been online for several weeks, was privatized after it started to gain traction following the airing of the episode."
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YouTube deletes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s public health roundtable with Dr. Scott Atlas
"YouTube has censored a video of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s March 18 public health roundtable which featured former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas and the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration – an anti-lockdown statement from Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Martin Kulldorff.
During the roundtable, the panelists advised against lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates and warned that these measures were often harmful. They also called for schools to be reopened.
The video of the roundtable had accumulated more than 500,000 views and lots of positive feedback before it was taken down by YouTube for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
The removal of the video is the latest of many examples of YouTube removing videos under its far-reaching rules that prohibit anything that goes against the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO)."
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“Fact-Checking Festival” with Stelter and Fauci is the $100 VIP experience you didn’t know you were missing
"Those in need of a little levity in their news during these trying times, might find it in the announcement of something called “United Facts of America – A Festival of Fact-Checking” – an upcoming online event that will feature none other than CNN’s Brian Stelter.
Stelter will be joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci as one of the guests of the four-day “festival,” – but not only that. Tickets sell for $25-50, while the “VIP experience” will cost you $100 – and it includes a private virtual happy hour with Stelter.
The whole thing is organized by PolitiFact, a fact-checking operation of the Poynter Institute, which is also responsible for launching the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This group certifies fact-checkers that are then hired by Big Tech to produce some of the biggest controversies around the stifling of free speech that have plagued the internet in recent years."
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Bill Gates and His Empires. “Ushering In the Great Reset”
"We’re currently facing enormously powerful technocrats who are hell-bent on ushering in the Great Reset, which will complete the ongoing transfer of wealth and resource ownership from the poor and middle classes to the ultra-rich. Perhaps the most well-known of the individuals pushing for this is Bill Gates who, like John Rockefeller a century before him, rehabilitated his sorely tarnished image by turning to philanthropy.
However, Gates’ brand of philanthropy, so far, has helped few and harmed many. While his PR machine has managed to turn public opinion about him such that many now view him as a global savior who donates his wealth for the good of the planet, nothing could be further from the truth.
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When then-President Trump halted U.S. funding of the WHO in 2020, Gates became the biggest funder of the WHO. As explained in “WHO Insider Blows Whistle on Gates and GAVI,” the WHO has turned global health security into a dictatorship, where the director general has assumed sole power to make decisions that member states must abide by, but according to a long-term WHO insider, Gates’ vaccine alliance GAVI actually appears to be the directing power behind the WHO.
The two — Gates and the WHO — have been working hand in hand pushing for a global vaccination campaign, and Gates has a great deal of money invested in these vaccines. We’ve also seen extraordinary efforts to censor natural alternatives and inexpensive, readily available and clearly effective drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and it appears the reason for this is probably because they’re competitors to the vaccine.
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In 1910, Rockefeller and Carnegie produced The Flexner Report, which was the beginning of the end for natural medicine in the conventional medical school curriculum. They eliminated it because it saw natural medicine as a hugely competitive threat to the new pharmaceuticals that were primarily derived from the oil industry.
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Gates hails synthetic fertilizer is the greatest agricultural invention. “Doesn’t he realize synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are creating desertification, dead zones in the ocean, and nitric oxide, which is a greenhouse gas?” Shiva says. In short, he’s offering the problem as the solution. Gates also, apparently, does not understand that nitrogen-fixing plants can fix nitrogen. He incorrectly claims that plants cannot fix nitrogen.
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The answer to the environmental problems we face is not more of the very things that created the problems in the first place, which is what Gates proposes.
The answer is regenerative agriculture and real food.
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What does digital agriculture entail? For starters, it entails the introduction of a digital surveillance system. So far, Shiva’s organization has managed to prevent Gates from introducing a seed surveillance startup, where farmers would not be allowed to grow seeds unless approved by Gates surveillance system.
The data mining, Shiva says, is needed because they don’t actually know agriculture. This is why Gates finances the policing of farmers. He needs to mine their data to learn how farming is actually done. This knowledge is then repackaged and sold back to the farmers. It’s evil genius at its finest.
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"So, you finance the research. Then you finance the public institutions, whether they be national or international. You invest and force them down the path where they can only use what is your patented intellectual property. And, as he has said in an interview, his smartest investment was vaccines, because it is a 1-to-20 return. Put $1 in and make $20. How many billions of dollars have been put in? You can imagine how many trillions will be made."
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As it stands right now, ordinary people are forced to fight battles that are in actuality rooted in institutional, structural and societal crimes. These crimes really need to be addressed the way Rockefeller’s Standard Oil empire was addressed. In the case of Gates, his empire is actually multiple empires, and they all need to be dismantled...."
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Espionage Act banned me and now Daniel Hale from defending ourselves – Kiriakou on first whistleblower to be convicted under Biden
"The Biden administration is set to see its first conviction over a leak proclaimed to be a violation of the Espionage Act. Daniel Hale faces the same unfair system as others before him, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou told RT.
Hale, 33, pleaded guilty last week to one count of violating the archaic US Espionage Act. He is facing up to 10 years in prison after sentencing, which is scheduled for July 13. His alleged crime was leaking classified documents on US drone warfare programs to a journalist, identified by the media as an Intercept reporter. His likely conviction would be the first of its kind under President Joe Biden – but one of many similar cases in the US.
Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst who likewise was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for exposing US torture of terror suspects under George W. Bush, says the 1917 law is inherently unfair to whistleblowers like Hale or himself. It prohibits them from explaining their motives for leaking during trial – which means they cannot argue a public-interest defense.
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Kiriakou says he had little doubt that Joe Biden would continue to prosecute whistleblowers under the Espionage Act the same way other presidents did before him. A clear indicator was the continued attempt to extradite arguably the most famous target of such tactics – WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange."
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FBI Data Shows Knives Kill More People Than Rifles
"The most recent data from 2019 shows that although firearms do account for the majority of homicides – 10,258 – the number of homicides committed using a rifle – 364 – is much smaller, according to the Daily Caller.
Handguns were listed as the primary weapon in 6,368 cases, while shotguns accounted for an additional 200. 45 cases named “other gun” as the weapon and in 3,281 cases, the type of firearm was not listed.
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Meanwhile, a whopping 600 people were killed with what the FBI calls “personal weapons,” including hands, fists or feet.
Knives, evidently, accounted for 1,476 homicides.
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A “mass shooting” is defined as any scenario in which at least four people are killed. This means that numbers can be dramatically skewed by gang-related and drug-related activity."
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Russia’s Lavrov Warns of Surging Anti-White Racism in U.S.
"Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says there is surging “aggression against white people” in the United States and that it is harming efforts to fight racism.
Lavrov made the comments during an interview with political scientists that was broadcast on national television.
“We were pioneers of the movement promoting equal rights of people of any skin color,” said Lavrov, adding that “everyone wants to get rid of racism.”
However, he emphasized how it was important “not to switch to the other extreme which we saw during the ‘BLM’ (Black Lives Matter) events and the aggression against white people, white U.S. citizens.”
Lavrov also insisted that forces within the U.S. were trying to spread a “cultural revolution” around the world by forcing “diversity” down everyone’s throats.
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“I’ve seen Black people play in Shakespeare’s comedies. Only I don’t know when there will be a white Othello,” Lavrov said.
“You see this is absurd. Political correctness taken to the point of absurdity will not end well,” he concluded."
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Poll: Fewer than half of likely voters support vaccine passports
"A new poll indicated a majority of Americans do not believe vaccine passports are a good idea.
The survey released on Thursday from Rasmussen asked if requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination to return to pre-pandemic activities was a good or bad idea. A mere 44 percent of likely voters said it was a good idea, with 57 percent of Democrats supporting vaccine passports and 33 percent of Republicans."
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The PCR False Positive Pseudo-Epidemic. Dr. Mike Yeadon
"In Spring 2020 a novel coronavirus swept across the world: novel, but related to other viruses. In the UK, unknown at the time, around 50% of the population were already immune. The evidence for this is unequivocal and arose due to prior infection by common cold-causing coronaviruses (of which four are endemic). This prior immunity has been confirmed around the world by top cellular immunologists. There is even a very recent paper from Public Health England on the topic of prior immunity and a wealth of other evidence from studies on memory T-cells, studies on household transmission and on antibodies.
Because of the extent of the prior immunity, and as a result of heterogeneity of contacts, once only a low percentage of the population, perhaps as low as 10-20% had been infected, “herd immunity” was established. This is why daily deaths, which were rising exponentially, turned abruptly and began to fall, uninterrupted by street protests, the return to work, the reopening of pubs and crowded beaches during the summer....
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Immunity to ordinary respiratory viruses occurs mainly through T-cells which ‘take a picture of the invader’ at a molecular level, ‘reproduce’ it on certain immune cells and essentially ‘never forget a face’. This T-cell immunity is robust and durable. Those exposed to the highly related SARS virus in 2003 still have this immunity 17 years later. In relation to SARS-CoV-2, the pattern of immunity to date is identical and after around 800 million infections across the world, there is no convincing evidence for significant levels of re-infection. Not only are those who’ve been infected and have now recovered immune (they cannot get ill again with the same virus), but importantly they do not participate in transmission....
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But due to extraordinary errors in modelling created by unaccountable academics at Imperial College, the country was told to expect over a half a million deaths. Three Nobel prize-winning scientists wrote to that modelling team in February correcting their errors. This was done confidentially. This expert, third-party estimate was remarkably accurate – it predicted that there would be a total of 40k deaths from COVID-19. I believe this is in fact correct and is what has happened. While I have no proficiency in modelling, I can distinguish predictions that are biological plausible from those which are literally incredible. When inputs to a model are wrong or missing, their outputs cannot be trusted. The Imperial model made the extreme assumption that there was zero prior immunity in the population or social contact heterogeneity.
It is now appreciated that this virus is less of a threat to those under 70 than seasonal flu...
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The ease with which humans develop immunity to this virus is striking. Incidentally, it is this immune adeptness which has probably played an important role in why, against prior pessimism, many vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 have apparently ‘worked’ (though there is much to criticise about how efficacy has been defined, because a reduction in the propensity to become PCR positive has not previously been regarded as a leading indicator of the degree to which a vaccine will protect a population against severe illness).
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In any other year, that would be the end of the tale. Neither the existence of prior immunity nor that herd immunity can be readily reached without us noticing are new.
What was new was the belief that forcing citizens to run and hide from a respiratory virus with greater contagiousness than ‘flu was other than a fool’s errand....
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...As an important aside, I’ve invited many to consider how long it takes for an influenza epidemic, which we experience most years, to criss-cross the country before apparently burning out, only to occur the next year, because it’s one of the few respiratory viruses which mutates so quickly that, by the time a year has gone by, it’s sufficiently different from what our immune systems have seen before that it can wreak brief havoc upon us once again. The answer to that time question is variously given as three to four months.
I ask readers to consider how long might it be expected to take for a more contagious respiratory virus like SARS-CoV-2 to thoroughly criss-cross the country. It seems hard to credit that with taking longer than four months. We know the virus was in the UK at least by February 2020 (potentially earlier) and so by June it’s not at all unlikely that it had travelled almost everywhere. It has been argued that perhaps lockdown was very effective and so many people will still be susceptible, as SAGE claims. We know that is not correct. Lockdown was started far too late to repress the spread of the virus, as even Professor Whitty agreed in giving testimony to a parliamentary select committee in the summer. As he said, the lockdown began after the peak of infection – the outbreak was already in retreat by Mar 23rd.
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Viruses don’t do waves (beyond the secondary ripple concept as outlined above). I have repeatedly asked to see the trove of scientific papers used to predict a ‘second wave’ and to build a model to compute its likely size and timing. They have never been forthcoming. It’s almost as if there is no such foundational literature. I’m sure SAGE can put us right on this.
The post-WW1 “Spanish flu” appears to be all there is where it comes to evidence of waves. Most scholars accept that what most likely happened was that more than one infectious agent was involved. It was 102 years ago and no molecular biological techniques indicate multiple waves of a single agent then or anywhere else. In any case, that was influenza. There have been no examples of multiple waves since and the most recent novel coronavirus with any real spread (SARS) performed one wave each in each geographical region affected. Why a model with a ‘second wave’ in it was even built, I cannot guess. It seems completely illogical to me. Worse, as far as the public can discern, the model fails to account for the unequivocally demonstrated population prior immunity, to which must be added the recently-acquired immunity arising from the spring wave. This is why I’m reasserting what I’ve been argued for months – a ‘second wave’ cannot happen and must, perforce, not be happening as described
Despite the absence of any evidence for a ‘second wave’ – and the evidence of absence of waves for this class of respiratory virus – there was an across-the-board, multi-media platform campaign designed to plant the idea of a ‘second wave’ in the minds of everyone. This ran continually for many weeks. It was successful: a poll of GPs showed almost 86% of them stated that they expected a ‘second wave’ this winter.
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PCR is a quite remarkable technique, which has unparalleled ability to find truly tiny quantities of a fragment of a genetic sequence, right down to the level of finding a single, broken fragment of a virus in a messy biological sample. There are notable limitations, well known to those who’ve personally used PCR in a research context. The most important one is its propensity to suffer from contamination, and the integrity of a PCR is very easily destroyed by invisible levels of contamination even in the hands of an expert, working alone and on a small handful of samples.
This is a good moment to mention that the PCR test protocol for SARS-CoV-2, which everyone in the world is now using, was invented in the lab of Prof Drosten in Berlin. The scientific paper in which the method was described was published in January 2020, two days after the manuscript was submitted. One of the authors of the paper is on the editorial board of the journal that published it. There is concern that this extremely important article, which contains a PCR test protocol that has been used to run hundreds of millions of PCR tests across the world, including the UK, was not peer-reviewed. No peer review report has been released, despite many requests to do so. Furthermore, as a method, it contains numerous technical weaknesses, some of which are serious and highly complex....
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There are deep concerns internationally about the reliability and selectivity of this PCR test protocol and this should be borne in mind through the rest of this article.
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...The only reason one might even consider mass testing of those without symptoms is if you were convinced that those without symptoms were significant sources of transmission. This has always seemed to me to be a very tenuous assumption. Specifically, respiratory viruses are spread by droplets of secretions and generally the expulsion of these is linked to the symptoms of infection – coughing in particular. Humans have evolved over millions of years to recognise threats to health by close observation of the health status of others. It works well. We’re familiar with avoiding those with flu-like symptoms in winter and behaving responsibly by staying away from work and vulnerable people when we are symptomatic. The burden of proof rests with those claiming something very different in the case of SARS-CoV-2 to show conclusively that asymptomatic people are indeed major sources of transmission. I don’t think that case has at all been made. The medical literature on this is contradictory but almost all the papers claiming such transmission originated in China.
Consequently, there is simply no need to get into the business of mass testing the population. Indeed, as we will see, such mass testing brings with it, when using PCR as the method, a severe risk of what we call a “PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic”. This could never happen if we were not using PCR mass testing of the mostly well. So, for whatever reason and against all historical precedent and immunological reasoning, a major initiative was launched with the goal of reaching 500,000 tests a day by year’s end. Again, unaccountably, the Government didn’t just get on and build these new labs, working in parallel with the available NHS capabilities. Instead, responsibility for testing was swept out from 44 NHS labs, with skilled and accredited staff who’d already been running SARS-CoV-2 PCR. In their place, new labs were created, outside the help and control network of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences. These Lighthouse Labs are still not all fully accredited under UKAS to ISO 15189, a quality management system accreditation relating to medical laboratories.
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At the end of October, the British Army was called in to help Liverpool City Council find the cases which the ONS PCR testing survey predicted should be there but which were no longer being found in the numbers expected. It was possible that people were no longer coming forward to be tested, though there is no way to be sure of this. Despite not having sought consent from the parents of school children and the absence before the survey began of proper protocols and ethics review, scores of thousands of people were tested using a lateral-flow test (LFT). (See here and here for more details on the LFT.) These look rather like the familiar pregnancy test kits you can purchase over the counter. They look similar, because they use related tried and trusted technology to detect virus proteins in the swab, not RNA. All tests have limits and weaknesses. However, the LFTs are not subject to the same flaws as PCR – specifically the risk of over-amplification and of cross-contamination before the test is actually run....
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In brief, the army found very few people with positive LFT results, only slightly higher than the background operational false positive rate: just over 0.3%, values expected when the tests are used in the real world. Since testing began, the positive rate has tended to a mean of 0.7% which might mean a few people were positive. My own experience of reading around this area is that this (around 0.7%) is almost certainly the true false positive rate when, in the real-world, careful but inexpert people administer the LFT. It meant that, in the city in the centre of the national hotspot for COVID-19, almost no one had the virus. This experiment has been repeated for 8,000 people in Merthyr Tydfil resulting in 0.77% testing positive. That these two test series have returned such similar values suggests that this is indeed the true, operational false positive rate for the LFT, though another test series will be helpful in refining that possible interpretation. Some leapt to criticise the LFT, as if it was its fault that it couldn’t find the expected cases. Of course, to many of us, the results were exactly what we’d expected, because we were by then sure that PCR was wildly over-reading. PCR has gone wrong before and Occam’s razor indicated that this was by far the most likely explanation for the otherwise inexplicable failure of PCR “cases” to correlate with symptomatic disease. These are the kind of results expected in populations protected by herd immunity. They’re completely inconsistent with a city and town in the grip of a highly-infectious respiratory virus.
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It’s important to appreciate while digesting this counter-narrative which, unlike the official line, is at least internally consistent, that the only data suggesting a ‘second wave’ is upon us are PCR results. Everything is dependent on this. A “case” is a positive PCR test. No symptoms are involved. A “COVID-19 admission” to a hospital is a person testing positive by PCR before, on entry or at any time during a hospital stay, no matter the reason for the admission or the symptoms the patient is presenting. A “COVID-19 death” is any death within 28 days of a positive PCR test. If there is any doubt about the reliability of the PCR test, all of this falls away at a single stroke.
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In brief