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A bird's eye view of the vineyard

offsite link Who Really Runs the Middle East? Sat Sep 25, 2021 22:36 | amarynth
By Cynthia Chung for the Saker Blog Afghanistan is on many people?s minds lately, though the sentiment is rather mixed. Some think of it as a cause for celebration, others

offsite link Russian Federation ? Minister of Foreign Affairs Addresses United Nations General Debate Sat Sep 25, 2021 22:25 | amarynth
English #UN Charter is our rules.   Russian

offsite link Eurasian consolidation ends the US unipolar moment ? Part 2 of 2 Fri Sep 24, 2021 18:32 | amarynth
By Pepe Escobar, posted with permission and first posted at Asia Times Part 1 is here The 20th anniversary summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, enshrined

offsite link Political Declaration adopted during the first ministerial meeting of the Group of Friends in Defens... Fri Sep 24, 2021 17:49 | amarynth
https://www.mid.ru/en/forei... 1. We, representatives of Algeria, Angola, Belarus, Bolivia, Cambodia, China, Cuba, the Democratic People?s Republic of Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, the Lao People?s Democratic Republic, Nicaragua, the State

offsite link China in Action ? Carbon Neutral by 2050 Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:13 | amarynth
By Peter Koenig for the Saker Blog Transcript of a presentation at a Webinar sponsored by the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing 23 September 2021 An early priority for

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Public Inquiry
Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005

offsite link Allegations of political criminality reported to An Garda Siochana

offsite link Minister Catherine Martin: Not fit to serve Anthony

offsite link Establishment media and delusional analysis Anthony

offsite link Youth power – Don’t ask – Take Anthony

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Public Inquiry >>

Lockdown Skeptics

The Daily Sceptic

offsite link How Can a Book About Science Denialism Ignore the Most Pervasive Forms of Science Denialism? Sun Sep 26, 2021 14:58 | Toby Young
We're introducing a new section to the Daily Sceptic today: Reviews. We're also publishing our first ever book review in which Dr. Bo Winegard writes about How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre. It's a stinker!
The post How Can a Book About Science Denialism Ignore the Most Pervasive Forms of Science Denialism? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Lancet?s Panel Investigating Covid Origins Disbanded Because of Ties to Peter Daszak Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:45 | Michael Curzon
A panel of scientists affiliated to the Lancet which has been investigating the origins of Covid has been disbanded because of its ties to Peter Daszak, the President of EcoHealth Alliance.
The post Lancet?s Panel Investigating Covid Origins Disbanded Because of Ties to Peter Daszak appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Does COVID-19 Have a Hidden Helper That Sometimes Makes it Deadly? Sun Sep 26, 2021 07:00 | Will Jones
The Spanish flu and Swine flu are both made much worse when a particular bacterium is present at the same time. Could Covid behave similarly?
The post Does COVID-19 Have a Hidden Helper That Sometimes Makes it Deadly? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link News Round-Up Sun Sep 26, 2021 00:01 | Michael Curzon
A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about politicians? efforts to control the virus ? and other acts of hubris and folly ? not just in Britain, but around the world.
The post News Round-Up appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

offsite link Dutch Protest Against Vaccine Passports Sat Sep 25, 2021 22:12 | Michael Curzon
People have gathered in The Hague, Netherlands, to protest against the "medical apartheid" barring those who haven't been vaccinated or tested for Covid from bars, restaurants and theatres.
The post Dutch Protest Against Vaccine Passports appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Lockdown Skeptics >>

Why Is Everyone in Texas Not Dying?

category international | health / disability issues | other press author Tuesday April 06, 2021 22:47author by 1 of indyReport this post to the editors

News from Texas where all lockdowns and restrictions have been removed

"What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them"

This report clearly shows that as with Florida where there is no lockdown, restrictions or masks, people are not dying. Now Texas has reversed all the Orwellian draconian rules and cases are falling. There is NO disaster. The doom sayers are completely wrong

texas-covid-neanderthals-president-joe-biden.jpg

I’m sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically.

If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.

There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control.

After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office.

At that moment, a friend remarked to me that this would be the test we have been waiting for. A complete repeal of restrictions would lead to mass death, they said. Would it? Did the lockdowns really control the virus? We would soon find out, he theorized.

I knew better. The “test” of whether and to what extent lockdowns control the virus or “suppress outbreaks” (in Anthony Fauci’s words) has been tried all over the world. Every serious empirical examination has shown that the answer is no.

The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states.

So it was in Texas. Thanks to this Twitter thread, and some of my own googling, we have a nice archive of predictions about what would happen if Texas opened.

  • California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
  • Gregg Popovich, head coach of the NBA San Antonio Spurs, said opening was “ridiculous” and “ignorant.”
  • CNN quoted an ICU nurse saying “I’m scared of what this is going to look like.”
  • Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
  • There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
  • Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans … for political gain.”
  • James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
  • Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the government “murderous.”
  • Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralizing.”
  • Pundit Bill Kristol (I had no idea that he was a lockdowner) wrote: “Gov. Abbott is going to be responsible for more avoidable COVID hospitalizations and deaths than all the undocumented immigrants coming across the Texas border put together.”
  • Health pundit Bob Wachter said the decision to open was “unforgivable.”
  • Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
  • Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
  • Nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding said that the decision makes him want to “vomit so bad.”
  • The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
  • Other state Democrats said in a letter that the decision was “premature and harmful.”
  • The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”

There are probably hundreds more such warnings, predictions, and demands, all stated with absolute certainty that basic social and market functioning is a terrible idea. The lockdown lobby was out in full force. And yet what do we see now more than two weeks out (and arguably the lockdowns died on March 2, when the government announced the decision)?

Here are the data.

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The CDC has a very helpful tool that allows anyone to compare open vs closed states. The results are devastating for those who believe that lockdowns are the way to control a virus. In this chart we compare closed states Massachusetts and California with open states Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.

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What can we conclude from such a visualization? It suggests that the lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.

On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.

As for Texas, the results so far are in.

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I’m making no predictions about the future path of the virus in Texas. Indeed for a full year, AIER has been careful about not trying to outguess this virus, which has its own ways, some predictable and some mysterious. The experience has, or should have, humbled everyone. Political arrangements seem to have no power to control it, much less finally suppress it. The belief that it was possible to control people in order to control a virus produced a calamity unprecedented in modern times.

What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.

The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.

Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Related Link: https://anti-empire.com/why-is-everyone-in-texas-not-dying/
TAGS: Covid
author by John's Hopkins.publication date Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:52author address author phone Report this post to the editors

According to Johns Hopkins University of medicine there has been 112,611 new infections and 3,325 deaths in Texas in the past month.
Has Indymedia Ireland been infiltrated by rightist Trump supporters or something pedaling bullshit about the Virus? No new reported deaths in Texas since the lifting of the mask mandate?! WTF is this? There have been 3325 new deaths since the lifting of the mask mandate and 112,611 new infections!
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/region/us/texas
Yet some of the writers on this message board are starting to believe the right wing and Russian Fancy Bear GRU hate farms now trying to cause as much confusion and chaos in the west as they can? You do realize they are amassing on the border with Ukraine right now right?

Have you forgotten what France Boyle warned last year in March about this being a bioweapon? Look I've been around since the 1999 WTO days and used to contribute to Indymedia and was just checking in but what I am seeing is fucking nuts. I was around for the prescreening of Berlusconi's Mousetrap and the violent riots in Genova in 2001 when someone from Indymedia Ireland came to my locale and showed a viewing of it at the local university's auditorium. Anyway Francis Boyle is the International Law professor that had warned that there were preparations for war in Afghanistan and Iraq long before 9/11/2001 happened. This virus COULD be a bioweapon (he says it is) released from the Wuhan lab and the WHO had known about it all along. According to him it was developed in Canada with the help of US researchers and transported to China. It's absolute nonsense that it came from a wet market. It was created in a program searching for infectious diseases and weaponized by making them airborne and nondetectable during the beginning phases of contagion. That's nothing to snort at. Wear your damn masks. The current variant is now killing young people including the stupid ones and a friend of mine who was denying it existed just got through three weeks of hell with it. He wouldn't wear a mask. Well he's changed his mind now! He experienced fever dreams and there are reports now that 1/3 of those infected could suffer a lifetime of brain disease. I know a nurse in a major university medical system who says this is nothing to joke about. Health care workers are experiencing serious burnout from the constant barrage of COVID19 patients. I'm not going to say anymore because this is as far as I go but it's sad what a sour patch of sycophants the Irish Indymedia has become.

author by Tpublication date Sun Apr 11, 2021 12:18author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The number of cases has fallen since the opening. The figures you quote are for a whole month. If you check the daily figure it has been falling steadily and this is the same for deaths.

All the doomsayers said the death rate and meaningless case rate would soar. They did not.

And as usual we have to remember that first of all a case refers to something who tested positive using the highly unreliable PCR test and as famously stated by the inventor of the PCR test, it should be never used in a medical setting as it is more a research tool and requires great care. The PCR test generates lots of false positive. In fact more false positives than real detections. In addition many of those claimed cases, the person is not even ill and it does not mean they have covid. The test will pick up all sorts of viral fragments. The test and the results from it are completely bogus amd meaningless. They are used purely for maintaining the hype and fear.

Now to the daily death rate. In many countries, the excess death counts for last year have barely risen at all. It is well known at this stage that in every country the way death certs are now being written are highly biased towards Covid as a cause of death. In every country those for who it is claimed they have died with Covid, well over 90% have at least two co-mobidities. Many of those dying from Covid are in fact dying from cancer, heart disease and a host of other things.

I have found the death figures which are claimed to be from Covid but we know this is overcounted through mis-classification. Just like the Irish health authorities they give a cumulative figure for each day because they make it as hard as possible for people to extract the daily data from that. But it can be done through a spreadsheet and doing a difference between each day. The image attached is the daily (Covid) deaths for Texas from last year to the present. As you can see it peaks in January which is the winter month where Vitamin D is at it's lowest and every single year in practically every Northern hemisphere country there is a peak in deaths. We see this in Texas. The deaths have plummented since then. There is no glitch from when the lockdown was lifted. It continued to fall as expected. The Covid doomsayers predicted the opposite. The point of websites like the John Hopkins one is to just give you figures out of context. They make it hard to compare monthly to month. This is called lying with statistics and they are doing the exact same thing here in Ireland too.

If a government really cared about people, their statistics would be clear. They would have the most important statistic up front and that would be the deaths and they would have a clear breakdown by age. Instead they focus everywhere on meaningless case number where as the chief medical officer for the UK said back in April 2020, 80% of these people do not have symptoms and feel nothing, most of the remaining might have a slight fever or head cold, a smaller fraction end up in hospital, a smaller fraction in ICU, and a still smaller fraction dead. The campaign has been in every country nothing but deceptive statistics combined with fear. In Ireland as I am sure they do in the USA, the read out the case numbers then the mean age which is usually anywhere from mid 30s to mid 40s' of the meaningless cases and then the deaths. And because all three are said in a row people automatically think the mean age they just heard is of the deaths. Many people have tried to convince me the mean age is lower, yet the official figures show it hovers around 84 and highly likely the same in Texas too.

Lets continue, Texas with a population of 29 million has approximately 197,000 deaths every year. That works out at 16,416 per month. That now puts the 3000+ you quote in context and as before you can be darn sure 90% of those 3000+ either really died of cancer or heart attacks or whatever and were already on their way out. It is also true that the health authorities have refused to authorise the use of cheap generic drugs which are effective. This is part of their efforts to try push the death rate up, increase the fear and force people to take the experiment gene therapy which they are calling vaccines, which they are not.

The second part of your argument uses the same technique as the media. It tries to use isolated sob stories for the sake of emotional mannipulation. I have heard many of those stories about a friend of this or that but invariably when one makes an effort to hunt down the actual source and real story behind it, they simply do not stack up. Besides whether one person dies an awful death is not reason to lock up entire nations and watch suicide rates soar. Every day on cancer wards there are truly awful and sad things happening. Why don't you focus on that?

plot_of_deaths_by_day_in_texas.png

author by anonpublication date Sun Apr 18, 2021 13:25author address author phone Report this post to the editors

LEADING CORONER SAYS COVID DEATH FIGURES RELEASED BY NPHET “DO NOT HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS”. KILDARE CORONER SAYS 99% OF COVID RELATED DEATHS HAD UNDERLYING CONDITIONS LIKE CANCERLouise Roseingrave reports in today’s Sunday Times that the death figures reported by Nphet “do not have a scientific basis”, according to the Mayo coroner Patrick O’Connor.She writes:“He claims that many of those recorded as having died from Covid-19 were already suffering with other underlying illnesses that may have caused their deaths. O’Connor, who acts as a public information officer for the Coroners Society of Ireland, said that recording Covid-19 as the principal cause of death when a person was already terminally ill raised questions about the accuracy of the figures.Since the start of the pandemic 4,831 Covid-19 deaths have been recorded in Ireland.“In reality, a lot of people have terminal cancer or multiple serious co-morbidities.People can die from Covid or with Covid.I think numbers that are recorded as Covid deaths may be inaccurate and do not have a scientific basis,” O’Connor said.“When a person is suffering from a number of medical conditions which will or may lead to their death at some short time in the future, if they are unlucky enough to be infected by the Covid virus, that is recorded as the principal cause of death.” Denis Cusack, the Kildare coroner, presented evidence in a report published last week that 99 per cent of the 230 Covid-related deaths in the county were of people with underlying conditions.“The associated or underlying medical conditions reported in the 230 persons who died directly from Covid-19, or whose death had Covid-19 as a contributory cause, were taken from the original reports to the coroner,” Cusack’s report states.Of the 230 deaths notified, 228 had underlying conditions including 132 cardiovascular, including hypertension; 120 dementia; 58 respiratory; 36 oncological; 30 neurological; 25 diabetes and 23 renal.While all Covid-related deaths must be reported to the coroner, they do not require inquests because the illness is considered a pneumonia and therefore a natural cause.However, a coroner can direct an inquest based on individual circumstances. O’Connor has opened two such inquests in Co Mayo, into the deaths of a 17-year-old Ballyhaunis student, Sally Maaz, and John Carolan, 79, from Ballina.Both died after contracting the virus at Mayo University Hospital and these inquests have been adjourned for mention on June 21.“These two inquests are taking place because of the individual circumstances of each person at the time of their death.The inquests directed by me were deemed to be in the public interest,” O’Connor said.https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a924df02-9fc8-11eb-9528-e3733dc789af

mayo_cororner_many_did_not_die_from_covid_as_claimed_by_nphet.jpg

 
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