Given how rigid the official orthodoxy is when it comes to the public health ‘crises’, the ‘climate emergency’ and the supposed moral defects of Western civilization, it’s no surprise that the slur words of choice today are “anti-vaxxer”, “racist”, “homophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “far right” and, not least, “climate denier”.
The “climate denier” epithet is used to shut down rational debate on climate change with specious claims about “settled science”. As the physicist Steve Koonin says: “I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion [on climate change] equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.”
The scurrilous epithet resurfaced last week in an article in the Guardian entitled – cue shock, horror – “Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of U.S. Congress.”
How much longer will this heresy be tolerated?
In an interview on GB News with Andrew Doyle, British environmentalist Jim Dale demanded the criminalisation of climate denialism. He said that “climate deniers” are “dangerous” for society and their scepticism about Net Zero “pollutes the discourse”. Mr. Dale demurred in spelling out just exactly what sanctions should be applied to “illegal” opinions about climate change, stating that it would be up to politicians like Sir Keir Starmer.
That interview took place three months ago, and Starmer is now Prime Minister. Having moved from his previous role as the Director of Public Prosecutions to Parliament and then to the highest political office in the U.K., his response to last week’s riots has been to push for quick and harsh sentences, threatening freedom of speech.
Sky News reported on Thursday that a woman was arrested over a social media post on the Southport stabbing attack that killed three little girls and injured several others. Evidently, her media post was considered “dangerous” as she publicly shared a mistaken description of the perpetrator of the Southport killings. The question of her intentions did not seem to be an issue in that arrest, although she still hasn’t been charged.
The U.S. Supreme Court holds that the legal threshold from protected to unprotected speech is crossed when the words in question are “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and they’re “likely to incite or produce such action”. Both those tests have to be met for the words to lose their protected status under the First Amendment, something known as the Brandenburg test. In the U.K., the land of the Magna Carta, recent court cases suggest that no such test is necessary for criminal conviction for “stirring up violence” online or indeed even for believing in “forms of toxic ideology which has [sic] the potential to threaten public safety and security”. The blurring of the line between “criminal thought” and criminal conduct is a sad reflection of jurisprudence in the U.K.
One day before the arrest of the woman who posted inaccurate information about the Southport killer, the Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, Stephen Parkinson, warned: “We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media to look for this material, and then follow up with arrests… You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false.” UK Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told a reporter in response to a question about Elon Musk supposedly “whipping up hatred” on X: “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.”
The purpose of blaming the riots on social media, of course, is that it deflects from the real issue: a great many Britons disapprove of the government’s complicity in the scale of the mass immigration of the past two decades. That ‘thoughtcrime’ has fueled the riots in the country is reflected in the deluge of mainstream media headlines singing from the same hymn sheet:
- Reuters: “Misinformation fuels riots”
- BBC News: “Social media misinformation ‘fanned riot flames’ in North East”
- CNBC: “Online disinformation sparked a wave of far-right violence”
- Sky News: “Southport attack misinformation fuels far-right discourse on social media”
- CNN: “U.K. riots show how social media can fuel real-life harm. It’s only getting worse”
- Time: “Misinformation Stoked Anti-Migrant Riots”
In an Orwellian world where the carrying of machetes on the streets of British cities may more easily escape prosecution than the “far right thuggery” of “keyboard warriors”, Mr. Dale’s wish to criminalise “misinformation” about climate change may come true.
Dis- or misinformation is whatever the state says it is. The moral crusade is the war over disinformation with little discussion of underlying policy issues. Policy choices supportive of a Net Zero fossil fuel-free electric grid by 2030 are non-partisan “givens” – with little debate in or out of parliament – as the Covid lockdowns were when they were imposed. Thus it is no surprise that the Counter Disinformation Unit which targeted dissent during Covid has been rebooted by the Starmer government as the National Security Online Information Team to monitor social media in the wake of the riots.
Will the reborn secretive Covid-era spy agency start ‘flagging’ social media posts that question Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State at the oxymoronically named Department of Energy Security and Net Zero? Never mind that a fossil fuel-free electricity grid in Britain by 2030 – the interim goal enroute to a fully Net Zero Britain by 2050 – “is as likely as the second coming of Christ”, as David Starkey said in a recent interview.
Removal of climate contrarian posts on social media will be one thing. But will it eventually become a prosecutable offense in the UK to point out the tension between Net Zero and energy security, or to assert that Net Zero policy targets constitute an onslaught on people’s standards of living and a denial of reality? Will some future Britain sport an unelected Climate Change Committee sitting in judgement, Star Chambers-like, over climate deniers that congregate in secretive forums at 55 Tufton Street, that bastion of libertarian and right wing organizations?
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes, and a member of the CO2 Coalition.
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I know we all like to suspect the vaccines – and I don’t doubt that they are in some way responsible – but I think there may be another cause. I’ve just finished reading Malcolm Kendrick’s book on atherosclerosis, “The Clot Thickens”. One of the key drivers of heart disease is stress, and I think we can all agree the last few years have been somewhat stressful.
The example he gives is after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the rate of death from heart disease shot up in middle aged men something like 7-fold in Latvia (unlike in nearby Sweden) as the chaos and collapse of the economy took hold. Then the same effect was seen in Russia in 1991 when they had their subsequent period of chaos, and again in 1998 when the Russian banking crisis happened. I can see that many people who will have seen the collapse of their livelihoods during the pandemic will have been subject to a similar level of stress.
Thanks, lockdown lunatics! Lockdowns truly are the gift that keeps on giving.
Thanks Sophie, it’s an interesting point. I know this is purely anecdotal, but as a formerly fairly healthy 50-something, my metabolic and mental health has been severely stretched to almost breaking point these past 2.5 years.
I’m nothing unusual or special, and my circumstances are “normal”, but if I’m barely holding it together some days, I speculate there are others in slightly less-than-ideal situations that are simply overwhelmed with stress, anxiety and worry … which has causal links to poor physical health.
Sigh.
Can’t wait for September for the madness to be cranked up to 11.
Stress isn’t likely to be a cause of death for healthy cardiovascular systems.
Clotting, heart attacks are caused by physical changes in muscles in blood vessel walls and cardiac muscles, which requires an internal causal agent, and develop over time. Old age bring one cause, for example, as our muscles lose tone.
Stress is somewhat of an abstraction… how is it qualified, how quantified?
For many years stress was blamed for causing gastric ulcers with no clinical evidence just anecdotal evidence, but during the 90s it was demonstrated most gastric ulcers were caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacterium.
That bacterium is easily treated with generic antibiotics – no money in it for Big Pharma. However lots of lovely loot in anti-stress pills and H Blockers to moderate stomach acid production, so Big Pharma and their doctor cronies went to great lengths to discredit H Pylori as the cause of ulcers.
Isolating a single cause from a sea of confounding factors is likely to be misleading. Of course doing precisely that is the foundation of ‘modern’
medicine because it helps sales of drugs aimed at that alleged single cause. And it drives the climate change doom.
The mRNA reagents are shown to cause changes at cellular level, in fact designed to do just that. Specifically they have been shown to cause changes to muscle tissue, neurological tissue, male and female fertility, menstruation.
It doesn’t prove they are causing unexplained deaths, but a proper investigation into a possible link would be a good place to start.
Given Government resistance and complicity of the media in floating lots of alternative explanations… hot weather, climate change, phase of the Moon but definitely not the ‘vaccines’, my money is on the mRNA snake oil being implicated.
All I can do is suggest you read the book. It doesn’t say stress on its own is a reason, but dysregulation of the HPA axis puts the cardiovascular system under additional stress which raises one’s risk level considerably.
This paper covers similar themes (but is less of an easy read):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/07853890802508934
It’s a very informative book – as are all his books. I’m a fan.
I have a confession to make. I was completely and utterly wrong all this time and it’s time to admit it.
I honestly didn’t think it was possible for the authorities to be less interested in anything than they were about the fate of the children that where abducted, drugged, raped, and exploited by the Pakistani ‘grooming’ gangs, but I will admit that I was wrong.
I cannot see any reason for this lack of interest in a key metric other than the fact that we are dealing with exactly the same type of evil people as those who covered up what happened in Telford, Rochdale, Oldham to protect themselves and their fellow travellers.
It’s better than nothing that McVey is taking an interest but she’s asking the wrong people. It’s her colleague the “Health” minister she needs to be questioning.
Let’s face it, it would be a bit of a pointless exercise anyway. Would you believe anything the Government said about excess deaths?
I know I wouldn’t. That’s what happens when you’re systematically lied to by “experts” and politicians for a prolonged period. You don’t believe a word they say.
Huxley’s rule applies – invert any statement from officialdom to arrive at the truth.
Good articles on here re the agenda…. Depopulation is the goal.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/?d=2022-07-25
“Cancer deaths are, perhaps surprisingly given the withdrawal of healthcare access during the pandemic, broadly at normal levels, suggesting there is something other than lack of access to healthcare going on.”
All cancer sufferers die from their cancer, from metastases if not the primary, just a question of when. Cancer treatment/drugs are declared ‘successful’ if they extends life beyond the expected period of fatality without treatment/drugs.
Therefore since deaths are spread out, the death rate from cancers due to lack of treatment may not vary noticeably, whereas deaths from cardiovascular diseases tend to be more immediate.
However, for cancers, the important effect of withdrawal of medical services will be on early diagnosis. The sooner the diagnosis, usually the smaller/less metastasised the cancer, and the sooner treatment is started the better the prognosis and the longer life will be extended.
Increases in cancer fatalities most likely with appear over the next few years.
I’m quite interested to see age stratified analysis of excess deaths as well as hospitalisation.
My gut tells me the relative increases will be found further down the age brackets. This would validate the insurance industry data reported from the US that have shown massive payouts. Larger payouts occur for younger insurees.
I have reproduced one of the footnotes to the table of deaths registered in the ONS publication referenced in the article:
This breakdown would appear to support your thesis, in that the lowest increase was in care homes (4.1%) c.f. a 25% increase in private homes.
Maybe the jabs deliberately engineered dysregulation of the immune system – which no expert comes even close to understanding – has something to do with it :-
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027869152200206X
According to the paper it’s more the long term effects which are the worry.
Could this be the cause?
Vaccine produces the same spike protein
https://news.sky.com/story/scientists-identify-how-the-coronavirus-spike-protein-causes-heart-damage-12658815?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter