Patrick's Notebook

by Brian Maher

“Unethical”… “dystopian”… “totalitarian”…

These are the words of the British government’s primary scientific advisory bunch — the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour, by title.

These scientific advisors presently droop their heads in shame. For these are the very words they employ to describe their own conduct.

They concede: Last March their wicked counsel encouraged government officials to wildly inflate the true viral threat.

Only a pitiless torturing of facts — argued these men and women of science — could terrify the public into locking themselves in, locking themselves up, locking themselves down.

The London Telegraph:

In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.

» Read the rest of this entry «

By Bruce Abramson

Every now and then, I’m lucky enough to meet someone who “follows the science.” I count on such folks to teach me some science that I do not yet know. Being scientifically literate, I like to start by asking them some basic questions:

How are key data terms defined? How are data collected and reported? What theories guided the design of the models that process the raw data? What studies validated the models? How sensitive are the models to variations in inputs? How well do the models perform using historical data? Do the models have a track record at prediction — and if so, how well have they done? What alternative hypotheses were considered? How were the hypotheses tested?

Anyone surprised by such questions can’t plausibly claim to understand the science, much less to follow it. Most likely, they’ve confused “the science” with a selected scientist, a claimed scientific consensus, or the scientific establishment. Or, worse, partisan politics masquerading as science. » Read the rest of this entry «

By Raymond Zhong and Keith Bradsher

Apple built the world’s most valuable business on top of China. Now it has to answer to the Chinese government

On the outskirts of this city (Guiyang, China) in a poor, mountainous province in southwestern China, men in hard hats recently put the finishing touches on a white building a quarter-mile long with few windows and a tall surrounding wall. There was little sign of its purpose, apart from the flags of Apple and China flying out front, side by side.

Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said the data is safe. But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government.

Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Steve Watson

“Please, ignore the CDC guidance”

A professor with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine has said that there is a general dismissal of the fact that more than half of all Americans have developed natural immunity to the coronavirus and that it constitutes “one of the biggest failures of our current medical leadership.”

Dr. Marty Makary made the comments during a recent interview, noting that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to vilify those who don’t want the vaccine because they have already recovered from the virus.

Makary criticised “the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history” for not clearly communicating the scientific facts about natural immunity compared to the kind of immunity developed through vaccines.

“There is more data on natural immunity than there is on vaccinated immunity, because natural immunity has been around longer,” Makary emphasised.

“We are not seeing reinfections, and when they do happen, they’re rare. Their symptoms are mild or are asymptomatic,” the professor added. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Glenn Greenwald

Bolivian President Evo Morales holds a press conference at the Vienna International Airport on July 3, 2013, angrily denying any wrongdoing on Wednesday after his plane was diverted to Vienna over suspicion fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was on board

U.S. and E.U. governments are expressing outrage today over the forced landing by Belarus of a passenger jet flying over its airspace on its way to Lithuania. The Ryanair commercial jet, which took off from Athens and was carrying 171 passengers, was just a few miles from the Lithuanian border when a Belarusian MiG-29 fighter jet ordered the plane to make a U-turn and land in Minsk, the nation’s capital.

On board that Ryanair flight was a leading Belarusian opposition figure, 26-year-old Roman Protasevich, who, fearing arrest, had fled his country in 2019 to live in exile in neighboring Lithuania. The opposition figure had traveled to Athens to attend a conference on economics with Belarus’ primary opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and was attempting to return home to Lithuania when the plane was forcibly diverted. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Kyle Persaud

Law professors and left-leaning lawyers argue for strict lockdowns and quarantines during COVID-19, but those same lawyers didn’t always make pro-lockdown arguments

American legal elites have performed an about-face in their views on quarantine law. Before 2020, a large number of law journal articles argued that quarantine and lockdown unconstitutionally restricted personal liberty and were not effective at preventing the spread of disease. But, after governments began imposing quarantine and lockdown during COVID-19, the authors of these same articles began supporting the very restrictions they had once regarded as unconstitutional and ineffective.

‘Quarantine is rarely an effective public health strategy, and no evidence exists that it has proven effective in reducing morbidity and mortality in the U.S. in the last half-century,’ — Professor Wendy Parmet, Northeastern Law School, 2018.

For example, one of the most prolific scholars on quarantine law is Professor Wendy Parmet of Northeastern Law School. Parmet has been publishing on quarantine law since near the beginning of her career in the early 1980s. Before March 2020, Parmet was critical of strict quarantine measures, warning that quarantines undermined freedom. In 2018, Parmet wrote that the law of quarantine itself had been “quarantined” from the Constitution because quarantine laws did not sufficiently protect constitutional rights. Parmet wrote that quarantines “run counter to the high regard that Americans place on autonomy … quarantine is rarely an effective public health strategy, and no evidence exists that it has proven effective in reducing morbidity and mortality in the U.S. in the last half-century.” » Read the rest of this entry «

By Thomas Lifson

Jeffrey Epstein prison guards, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel

If there was a conspiracy to assassinate a man who knew compromising information about the power elite, two of the lowest-level conspirators are getting away with no jail time. The two prison guards who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to die with nobody checking up on his safety (despite having been on suicide watch) are getting a slap on their wrists: 100 hours of community service and six months of pretrial supervision. This seems a very light penalty, considering that they falsified documents attesting to their carrying out the duties that they neglected, and the profound consequences of their perjurious neglect of duty. Public confidence in the integrity of the Bureau of Prisons and the entire justice system has been tanked.

There is a faint ray of hope, however. According to a letter submitted to the court seeking approval of the arrangement, the two guards, Michael Thomas and Tova Noel, “will cooperate with a pending Department of Justice Office of Inspector General review by providing truthful information related to their employment by the Bureau of Prisons, including about the events and circumstances described in the Indictment.” » Read the rest of this entry «