Last Tuesday, I reported on the Mirror story that much of London could disappear beneath the water within 80 years. One might suppose that a crack team of investigative reporters had sifted through hundreds of years of meteorological records and consulted numerous scientific authorities to come up with a eureka revelation that Nelson’s Column will disappear beneath the waves before the century is out. Of course, that didn’t happen. The newspaper was simply publishing custom-produced catastrophe copy from a heavily-funded green agitprop operation called Climate Central. Similar climate catastrophe stories are ubiquitous throughout mainstream media, and there are of course serious doubts about many of them, not least because they are designed to promote the Net Zero political agenda.
New Jersey-based Climate Central is open about its mission. Starting in 2008, it notes that it has grown from working with just a handful of media organisations “to collaborating with hundreds and making a mark on thousands”. It boasts of creating “fully produced” stories that “support” countless storytellers and stake holders in media, social media, government, business and NGOs. It specialises in targeting both national and local media with the pictures to tell a climate disaster story – “all for free”. Although it seems to operate mainly in the U.S., a number of local U.K. newspapers have run improbably flood stories suggesting area landmarks will soon vanish.
The operation is well funded and is supported by numerous left-wing foundations, including the Schmidt Family, the Grantham Foundation (active in the U.K. with three university Institutes) and the Hewlett Fund. (A fuller list can be found here.) Eric Schmidt ran Google until recently, and Wendy Schmidt is listed as a founding board member.
It is not just legacy media that’s being targeted. Climate Central runs a unit called Climate Matters that has established close links with American TV weather presenters over the last decade. It is now common for American weather forecasts to include references to climate change. In the U.K., of course, the Met Office needs little help in ramping up fear by directly linking single weather events and trends to long term changes in the climate. But America has many local broadcasting stations all supplying weather information. Climate Matters aims to bring climate change into weathercasting “via local voices highly trusted by Americans everywhere”.
A recent article in the Washingtonian highlighted the work of Professor Ed Maibach in creating a propaganda strategy aimed at U.S. weathercasters. Over a decade, it is reported, he has produced a “weather underground” said to be “a coast-to-coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audiences about global warming is as crucial as telling them when to bring an umbrella”.
The magazine notes that local news consumers across the country don’t know that behind that telegenic meteorologist is a social scientist and a team of academic researchers, data crunchers and ex-weathercasters, i.e., the staff of Climate Matters. “To a lot of our viewers, it’s lost on them how much Climate [Matters] really is doing,” says Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9. “But it is so far from lost on us.”
Of course, we could ask why newspapers and American TV stations are employing lazy people who just sub the press release, and spout on air pre-prepared green agitiprop (the green equivalent of churnalism). Communicators who fail to investigate the science behind climate change and just accept the unproven hypothesis that humans are solely responsible for any recent warming of the atmosphere are making a very easy living.
The Westminster University economist Dr. Deborah Ancell noted recently in the Conservative Woman that national broadcasters are staffed with journalist advocates, whose exhortations lead to money being wasted “chasing rainbows, pixies and unicorns in fairy dells”. In Dr. Ancell’s opinion, the impact of lazy journalism has contributed to wrecking economies. “The damage includes reducing energy capacity; over-hyping electric vehicles; restricting agricultural production; taxing aviation emissions; operating fraudulent CO2 offset schemes; abandoning fossil fuels and pursuing unachievable Net Zero,” she explained.
Many legacy media brands are dying on their feet, a fate that in time might affect complacent state broadcasters such as the BBC. Needless to say, this state of affairs has not escaped the attention of billionaires looking for suitable recipients of vast quantities of free cash. Just one source, the Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to media operations over the last decade.
Last year, the investigative publication Mint Press News (whose account has been closed by PayPal), put the Gates spend on media projects at around $300 million, but noted the amount could be much higher once sub-grants are taken into account. Among the broadcasters receiving money were the BBC ($3.67 million), CNN ($3.6m) and NBC Universal ($4.37m). In the U.K., the Guardian collected $12.95m, while the less well known green, woke blog The Conversation was granted $6.66m. The Telegraph collected £3.45m, but that doesn’t include a recent $2.43m grant for “global policy and advocacy”. In Europe, Der Spiegel ($5.44m), El Pais ($3.97m) and Le Monde ($4m) all received money. Gates has also given money to charities run by media operations, with a massive $53m provided for BBC Media Action. Large grants are also provided for journalistic training purposes. The full list is available here.
Mint Press News looked at 30,000 individual grants and concluded that the Gates Foundation was underwriting a “significant chunk” of the media eco-system. It argued that this caused serious problems with objectivity when it comes to covering subjects close to Bill Gates’s heart, adding that the money spent by billionaires “allows them to set the public agenda, giving them enormous power over society”.
For some inexplicable reason, the Daily Sceptic is not on the Gates handout list. Curiously, the large bung from Big Oil, which many of our social media commentators routinely accuse us of taking, is also notable for its absence.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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I think this is another area of life where we’ve normalised nonsense. The people I know who take these things, the fact that they’re happy to let you know shows just how ‘normal’ it’s become, are invariably covid/lockdown zealots. So many just need a life, friends, exercise, sunshine, none of which are available in a bottle of pills.
Agree 100%. Severe Depression is actually quite a rare illness, and I would bet most people have never been around anyone who has genuine symptoms of this.
The diagnostic parameters for a lot of what were disabling but rare conditions such as Depression, Bi-polar disorder, (itself rebranded from Manic Depressive Psychosis to include those not actually psychotic), General Anxiety Disorder, Autism have been widened to such a degree by complicit Psychiatrists and GP’s (and promoted to the public as “normal” by celebrity “sufferers”), that mental health services in the main are now using up their resources on the worried well, the disgruntled, the lonely and those in some kind of social crisis. Meanwhile the severe mentally ill are sitting quietly at the back of the queue, often with no insight and therefore not realising the need for help, slowly getting less well.
That’s before we get into the new kid on the block “disorders”, that seem to exist simply to medicalise (and excuse) every form of (mostly childhood) behaviour that is undesirable, but was managed in previous decades by sensible parenting; Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Oppositional Disorder, Adult ADHD etc, etc.
I’m not saying the worried well, the lonely, those in social crisis etc don’t need help, empathy and support; it just shouldn’t come from a service whose remit is to diagnose and treat Severe and Enduring Mental Illness, (and it should not necessitate the used of medications).
All IMHO, and yes, I am aware my rant has wandered quite a bit off topic!
thefoostybadger, you say you bet most people have never been around anyone who has genuine symptoms of severe depression. Well I definitely have – two family members at different times, my mother and my brother.
However, I am convinced that in the case of my brother, and probably also my mother, what started off as troublesome but relatively mild depression, developed into severe depression after and because they started taking antidepressants.
Antidepressants may help some people, but there is still immense ignorance about the very real possibility that these powerful psychiatric drugs can make depression far worse, and cause various severe adverse effects, which are then thought to be due to ’the illness’, and so the doctor increases the dose, and it’s a vicious circle.
Meanwhile – unless the patient is lucky enough to find a good therapist – the causes of the original depression get ignored.
Hi there. Sorry to hear about your relatives, I hope that they are okay now.
It depends on how you define mild, mild to moderate, moderate to severe, and severe depression.
I suspect my definitions are pretty much obsolete in today’s clinical arena.
To me, severe depression is someone who is slowed both physically and mentally, poorly motivated to the extent they will not get up out of bed, take care of themselves, lose interest in pretty much everything, and possibly even have psychotic features such as delusions of unworthiness. Negativity will pervade every thought.
In 35 years working in acute psychiatry, I saw 3 or 4 patients like this; the majority would present with mild to moderate/moderate to severe…..bad enough!
I agree 100% with your main point, inappropriate use of anti-depressants would be counterproductive and bring their own problems, whereas for that small group I mentioned medication is essential, (as well as the non pharmacological interventions of course).
My mother’s depression was many years ago, and she eventually recovered quite well, but died not long after.
My brother suffered severe depression during the first lockdown (not for the first time) and you have described him perfectly in your description of severe depression, but it was relatively mild to begin with and only became severe after he started taking antidepressants. His doctor kept telling him to give the antidepressants time to work, and increased the dose, but he got worse and worse, including suffering some very bizarre symptoms.
He was vehemently opposed to seeing a counsellor (even though rich enough to easily afford it) because he was convinced there was something chemically wrong with his brain which only a drug could rectify.
After several weeks of going through hell, he was eventually convinced by me and my sister that he would have nothing to lose by attending counselling, and to his amazement, very soon after he began to attend, he very quickly began to improve, and was quite soon back to normal.
I don’t know if he continued taking the antidepressants, as I didn’t want to intrude too much, as he has the right to freely make up his own mind, but I just pointed out the potential adverse effects, and I suggested either coming off the antidepressants under supervision or to get his doctor to change his antidepressants. It’s too much of a sensitive subject for me to ask him if he did either, but he’s fine now, back to his normal self.
I agree. I have a friend who has suffered with mild anxiety in the past. As a result of the Covid PsyOps campaign, her anxiety returned and she told me she felt depressed. Normally a very sociable person, the suspension of her social life had a negative effect …. but one you would expect to resolve itself once the restrictions were lifted.
Instead of making the best of the situation she went, as she said, “on the happy pills” and is now terrified of coming off them again.
What a surprise. A cynic might note that the manufacturers of such drugs are winning both ways, to some extent.
SSRIs are barely better than placebo https://sebastianrushworth.com/2021/04/30/do-anti-depressants-work/ and create dependency.
Some of them work well for COVID, though!
I wonder how often this is the result of lazy ‘doctoring?’
1 in 8?
Good god. I knew out society was sick, but I’m astounded. I guess I’m not the cynic I thought I was.
I would really be interested in finding out what percentage of the population are not on any kind of long term medication.
I fear it is a minority.
In his discussions about the mass formation which emerged at the beginning of 2020 and resulted in the hysterical response to SARS-COV-2, Mattias Desmet talked about how one of the contributory factors to the conditions for this mass hypnosis being possible was a crisis of loneliness in society – people lacking close social bonds with friends, neighbours, family, their local community. And points out the huge scale of anti-depressant prescriptions even before the virus arrived.
Desmet points out that ironically the arrival of COVID temporarily solved this problem, or appeared to, as getting together with other COVIDians to “fight the virus” gave people a group identity and some sense of purpose in life. Like many people in a crisis situation, they felt more alive than ever. But Desmet says this feeling is illusory because people feel bound to the collective – the group following the COVID narrative – not individuals, and so they aren’t really creating new bonds with individual people (which would ultimately help them and alleviate their depression). As a consequence, when the mass hypnosis fades, people will be even more lonely than before.
Desmet says society will repeatedly experience these mass hypnosis events until the root causes (lack of social bonds, lack of meaning in life (bullshit jobs) and free-floating anxiety and frustration) are addressed. In his view all of these things are a consequence of our very materialistic and mechanistic lives. Too much technology, not enough humanity.
Antidepressants? Why? They don’t work. Just one more pharma disaster. I have an idea, how about if the governments in the free world actually reinstated our freedoms. No lockdowns, no masks, no dangerous experimental biologicals, no social distancing, no school closures, no working from home, no food and fuel shortages, no track and trace, no vaxx passports, no chem trails. Did I leave anything out
Once again, Big Pharma is making £millions …. with the NHS pushing drugs most people will derive little or no benefit from.
Mild to moderate depression doesn’t need pills ….. it needs motivation: exercise; walks in the countryside; gardening; someone to talk/listen to you; things to look forward to. None of these are found in a bottle of magic pills.
And these anti-depressant pills can be dangerous. My late mother suffered a breakdown and depression. She was put on anti-depressants and after two dreadful years of decline, committed suicide at the 3rd attempt (around 16 years ago). A couple of years’ after her death it was admitted that the pills she’d been put on were linked to an increase in the likelihood of suicide.
There will be many more suicides and deaths as a result of depression and over-reliance on anti-depressants but really caused, once again, by the Covid Lockdowns.