Blog

No Evidence Of Foreign Interference In U.S. Elections, U.S. Intelligence Says

Yesterday the mislabeled U.S. ‘Intelligence’ Agencies trotted out more nonsense claims about foreign interferences in U.S. elections.

The New York Times sensationally headlines:

Russia Continues Interfering in Election to Try to Help Trump, U.S. Intelligence Says
But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But when one reads the piece itself one finds no fact that would support the ‘Russia Continues Interfering’ statement:

Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.

At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.

But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike Mr. Trump, the officials said.

The assessment, included in a statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.

The authors emphasize the scaremongering hearsay from “officials briefed on the intelligence” – i.e. Democratic congress members – about Russia but have nothing to back it up.

Keep reading

US Intelligence: If Trump Wins Russia Did It, If Biden Wins It Was China And Iran

What this completely unsubstantiated narrative means, of course, is that no matter who wins in November America’s opaque government agencies will have already primed the nation for more dangerous escalations against countries which have resisted being absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire. If Trump wins we can expect his administration to continue its escalations against Russia in retaliation for its 2020 “election interference”, and if Biden wins we can expect his cabinet of Obama administration holdovers to ramp up escalations against China in the same way while Joe mumbles to himself off to the side as his brain turns to chowder.

Keep reading

Censored: A Review Of Science Relevant To COVID-19 Social Policy And Why Face Masks Don’t Work

Masks and respirators do not work.

There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.

Furthermore, the relevant known physics and biology, which I review, are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective dose is smaller than one aerosol particle.

The present paper about masks illustrates the degree to which governments, the mainstream media, and institutional propagandists can decide to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests. Such recklessness is also certainly the case with the current global lockdown of over 1 billion people, an unprecedented experiment in medical and political history.

Keep reading

NPR: “Mounting Evidence” Suggests COVID Not As Deadly as Thought. Did the Experts Fail Again?

In April 2005, Charles Duelfer, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq, admitted in the CIA’s final report that after an extensive search, no weapons of mass destruction could be found.

“After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Duelfer, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group. “As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible.”

Today it’s generally accepted that the presence of WMD was the primary basis for the Iraq War. Naturally, the absence of such weapons shook the world. The media blamed the politicians, the politicians blamed US intel, and the intelligence actors involved mostly defended their work.

The official word, chronicled in the Robb-Silberman report, concluded that “the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had—or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence.”

The Iraq War WMD debacle is arguably the greatest expert “fail” in generations. The holy triumvirate—lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—all failed to sniff out the truth. If any of them had, a war that cost trillions of dollars and claimed the lives of 100,000-200,000 people likely could have been avoided.

It would be difficult to surpass the Iraq blunder, but emerging evidence on COVID-19 suggests the experts—again: lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—may have subjected us to a blunder of equally disastrous proportions.

A new NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been reached on a flawed premise.

Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.

The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person’s blood rather than the virus itself.

The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.

“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.

Many people will recall the fatality risk debate that took place prior to and in the early stages of the lockdowns. There was much discussion over how deadly the virus was and what the collective response to the virus should be.

Some voices exercised caution.

“The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people,” Jeremy Samuel Faust an emergency medicine physician and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate. “Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold.”

Similarly, on March 5 vaccine expert Paul A. Offit, who holds the Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Factcheck.org that he believed that the World Health Organization’s 3.4 percent fatality rate figure was too high, suggesting it was well below 1 percent.

“We’re more the victim of fear than the virus,” Offit said, adding that the world was witnessing a “wild overreaction” to the disease.

Voices like those of Faust and Offit were quickly drowned out, however. The 24-hour news cycle fanned collective fear and outrage that more was not being done. Runs on toilet paper and masks ensued. Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, predicted millions would die in the “best-case scenario.”

Following the example of China, one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, most of the developed world was placed in indefinite lockdown by their own governments.

The social and economic costs of the lockdowns soon became apparent. The US alone has seen 40 million jobs lost, many of which aren’t coming back. Recession looms. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have already been wiped away. The federal debt has surged to $26 trillion.

Unfortunately, the COVID disaster and the aforementioned Iraq War fit a familiar pattern. As the historian Paul Johnson has observed, most of the worst events of the 20th century were perpetrated by experts who used collective power to shape world events in a direction they believed was beneficial.

Keep reading