Christopher Hitchens on religion…
Author: HP McLovincraft
Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.
Massive spike in excess deaths sparks calls for an ‘urgent investigation’: NHS crisis is blamed for nearly 3,000 more Brits than usual dying each week
MPs have called for an urgent investigation into Britain’s soaring death rates as thousands more people than usual are dying each week.
Some 17,381 deaths were registered in England and Wales in the seven days to January 13 – 2,837 above average for the time of year.
This is the highest number of excess deaths since 3,429 in the week to February 12, 2021, when the UK was experiencing its second wave of Covid-19 infections and vaccination had only just begun.
On that occasion, deaths involving coronavirus accounted for 37 per cent of all those registered, according to the Office for National Statistics.
But in the most recent week, Covid-19 accounted for just 5 per cent of the total – meaning other factors are likely to be driving the high level of mortality.
Health experts say this could include ambulance delays, long waits in A&E, unmet need during the pandemic and major backlogs for routine NHS care.
Excess deaths, sometimes known as extra deaths, are the number of deaths that are above the average for the same period in previous years.
This winter has seen a sharp spike in the figures, with deaths 21 per cent and 20 per cent above average in the last two weeks of December, followed by 14 per cent and 20 per cent in the first two weeks of January.
The New York Times Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.”
~ George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the US Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a US war, as has always been TheTimes’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a US proxy war waged via Ukraine by US/NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” US/NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the US engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The US, together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.(Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
Virginia Democrat Introduces Bill to ‘Remove Hate Speech From Public Places’
A Virginia Democrat has introduced a bill to “remove hate speech from public places.”
Del. Suhas Subramanyam introduced the bill in response to “antisemitic incidents” in the state.
If passed, the bill will require the government to remove any graffiti that is deemed to be hateful on the taxpayer’s dime, including on private property, if the owner fails to do so themselves.
“It’s been bad enough that we had to endure these incidents of racist and antisemitic graffiti, but it’s made worse when no one takes responsibility for the clean up and they remain in the public’s eye,” Subramanyam told WUSA9. “This bill would address that. Hate has no place in Virginia, and our diversity and unity is what makes us strong.”
Ira Glasser on censorship…
Bill Gates warns Australia to prepare for the next pandemic – which could be man-made and far more brutal than Covid
Tech billionaire Bill Gates has warned Australia to be ready for the next pandemic, which could be man-made and far more brutal.
Mr Gates told the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney on Monday that political leaders needed to set aside their differences and work together to prepare for the next virus.
He called for greater global cooperation using the Covid-19 pandemic as an example of how countries could improve on their response if they worked together.
‘Compare the economic cost of being prepared for the next one to the cost of this one, over $US10trillion economic loss,’ he said.
‘With the pandemic we were foolish not to have the tools, the practice and global capacity to be on standby like we do with fire or earthquakes.’
Mr Gates praised Australia’s policies in helping to keep infection rates low before vaccines were rolled out.
‘Some of the things that stand out are that Australia and about seven other countries did population scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies,’ he said.
‘That meant you kept the level of infection low in that first year when there were no vaccines.’
WSJ Shreds Vaccine Makers, Biden Admin Over “Deceptive” Booster Campaign
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley has taken a flamethrower to vaccine makers over their “deceptive” campaign for bivalent Covid boosters, and slams several federal agencies for taking “the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy.”
You might have heard a radio advertisement warning that if you’ve had Covid, you could get it again and experience even worse symptoms. The message, sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, claims that updated bivalent vaccines will improve your protection.
This is deceptive advertising. But the public-health establishment’s praise for the bivalent shots shouldn’t come as a surprise. -WSJ
The narrative behind the campaign was simple; mRNA Covid shots could simply be ‘tweaked’ to to target new variants – in this case, the jabs were claimed to confer protection against BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants, along with the original Wuhan strain.
To call this wishful thinking would be extremely generous.
CDC Officials Who Spread Misinformation Apologized to Source of False Data but Not to Public
U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.
Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.
The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.
Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.
“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”
“I am also sorry that you got pulled into the attention around the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings,” Fleming-Dutra added. She had presented the data to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC.
Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, and Flaxman did not respond to requests for comment.
Dem Rep Lauds Bill To Make It Criminal For White People To Criticise Non White People
Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee suggested Monday that Tucker Carlson could be the first to be prosecuted under legislation she has introduced that would see any white person talking about ‘replacement theory’ be criminalized.
As previously noted, the legislation, known as The Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023, would categorise any speech that is found to have “inspired” a racially motivated crime as a ‘hate crime’.
The draconian law would effectively make an individual responsible for someone else’s crime if prosecutors were able to successfully argue that their political rhetoric was a motivating factor.
The bill also targets speech that “vilifies or is otherwise directed against any non-white person or group” on social media.
If such content is “read, heard, or viewed by a person who engaged in the planning, development, preparation or perpetration of a white supremacy inspired hate crime,” even if misinterpreted, the creator of such content is guilty of conspiracy.
Appearing on perpetual race baiter Joy Reid’s show, Jackson Lee was asked “Does this bill allow potential prosecution of people like Tucker Carlson?”
“Because he is one of the people who promotes white supremacist ideology,” Reid further claimed.
“The bill has nothing to do with speech,” Lee asserted, adding “I was thinking about the pledge of allegiance and it says justice and equality for all. and I would offer to say that everyone deserves justice and equality.”
“It seems that the right wing extremists, the violent extremists, don’t want that to happen,” she further suggested.
Doctors in USA admit they killed Patients during the Pandemic by putting them on Ventilators
In a jaw-dropping article published by The Wall Street Journal – ‘Hospitals Retreat From Early Covid Treatment and Return to Basics’ – physicians admit to ventilating patients who did not need it as a step in their protocol – get this – not as a treatment that was likely to benefit the patient, but rather as a fruitless and callous way of attempting to stop the spread of covid-19.
Last spring, with less known about the disease, doctors often pre-emptively put patients on ventilators or gave powerful sedatives largely abandoned in recent years. The aim was to save the seriously ill and protect hospital staff from Covid-19.
Now hospital treatment for the most critically ill looks more like it did before the pandemic. Doctors hold off longer before placing patients on ventilators. Patients get less powerful sedatives, with doctors checking more frequently to see if they can halt the drugs entirely and dialling back how much air ventilators push into patients’ lungs with each breath.
“We were intubating sick patients very early. Not for the patient’s benefit, but to control the epidemic and to save other patients,” Dr. Iwashyna said “That felt awful.”
Yes, euthanising humans is illegal. Especially for the benefit of other patients. It should feel awful.
Last spring, doctors put patients on ventilators partly to limit contagion at a time when it was less clear how the virus spread when protective masks and gowns were in short supply. Doctors could have employed other kinds of breathing support devices that don’t require risky sedation, but early reports suggested patients using them could spray dangerous amounts of virus into the air, said Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at University of Michigan and Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Subsequent research found the alternative devices to ventilators, such as delivering oxygen through nasal tubes, weren’t as risky to caretakers as believed. Doctors also gained experience with covid-19 patients, learning to spot signs of who might suddenly turn seriously ill, some said.
The WSJ article describes a study conducted that now allows doctors to predict who needs a ventilator and who does not:
It found more doctors now follow the pre-pandemic protocols, which have reduced the number of deaths and shortened the time patients spend on ventilators, HCA’s chief medical officer said.
Before the pandemic, between about 30% to more than 40% of ventilator patients died, according to research. Numbers were sharply higher in the pandemic’s early hot spot in Wuhan, China. As the pandemic grew, hospitals in the US reported death rates in some cases of about 50% for ventilated covid-19 patients.
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