While Australia is closing down its coal fire powered stations for solar and wind Net Zero ‘Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced Australia will provide further support for Ukraine as they continue to resist Russia’s invasion.
Speaking on Sunday the Prime Minister said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had asked for more Australian assistance.
“In our discussions of the last couple of weeks they have made requests for more arms, for more humanitarian support,” he said.
“They have also asked us for our coal to assist help power their resistance to help them to deal with the energy situation and needs in their own country, and so that is exactly what we are going to do.”
Mr Morrison announced Australia would answer Mr Zelensky’s calls by providing an additional $21 million in military assistance, an additional $30 million in urgent humanitarian assistance and 70,000 tonnes of thermal coal.
The military assistance will include ammunition, body armour and military equipment while the coal has been mined in Australia and will “help power up their resistance”.
‘For the last 27 years I have been a professor at Boston College, teaching a mix of literature and writing courses to thousands of students. Then along came the booster mandates.
When the initial vaccines came out, my wife and I received ours. We had strong reservations about the mRNA vaccines and had decided we weren’t going to get one. However, my getting a vaccine was a condition of employment. We weighed our decision carefully. It was the J&J, or early retirement.
We were prepared to live with whatever the gods had in store, and had actually started thinking about how to fill in the hours. As luck would have it, the vaccine on offer that day was the J&J.
We sat down and rolled up our sleeves.
Subsequent information about vaccine efficacy and side effects, of the J&J as well as the others, made us regret getting that injection. But it was done. And I was still employed.
Early last December, very few, if any, universities had a booster requirement. Then something happened. The CDC sent up one of its smoke signals, or Dr. Rachel melted down again on TV. Whatever the case, universities, “following the science,” issued a booster mandate.
I began teaching in spring semester, hoping that as the weeks went along and more information about the pointlessness of getting the booster shot came out, administrators, and the doctors whispering in their ears, would come to their senses. This is called self-deception.
Every other week I received an email telling me to update my vaccine record. I ignored them. At Boston College, parents, students and alumni had put together a petition signed by some 900 people.
That, in addition to stories of students suffering from myocarditis—I had one student who received a booster waiver because the initial vaccine had done something to his heart muscle—made me hope the booster mandate would be removed, or at the very least, moderated down to “encouragement.”
Not so. A characteristic of people who don’t know what they are doing is to double down.
And double down they did.
Eight months after we were vaccinated, my wife and I became Covid “breakthrough” cases. The virus was mild, a day or two of feeling tired. Of course, we right away started taking ivermectin. And, of course, we passed the virus on to two other fully vaccinated people.
I was aware that some researchers thought that if you had been vaccinated and then subsequently contracted Covid, getting a booster shot, at best, was pointless; at worst, it might be harmful.
The remarks of Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, and citizen of the world, when he said the vaccines offered only “limited protection” against the Omicron variant served to underline my “resistance.”
I was convinced “the science” was on my side.
The Dean insisted “the science” was on his side. I’ll let him speak for himself: “If you fail to provide HR with proof of having received your COVID booster shot before the end of the day on Friday, February 25th, you will be suspended without pay and renewal of your contract will be placed in jeopardy.”
The tone is one bullies use on recalcitrant children. Power corrupts.
Well, I was done. The school and department narrative was that I had abandoned my students. This assumes the university had no other options. They had at least two, one of which would have been to compel me to get a PCR test every time I showed up on campus.
They had other ideas.
I subsequently received a FedEx letter from the President of the University in which he said that “my refusal [to obtain a COVID-19 booster] jeopardizes the health and well-being of our academic community,” a statement so contrary to epidemiological facts as to be risible.
But this is what we are up against.
This is my small story, one of thousands. This isn’t about science. If it was about science, we never would have attempted to shut down our economy. This is about power, and politics. The mandates are just another face of the political correctness that is crippling our universities.’https://brownstone.org/articles/the-purge-call-me-ishmael/
If you live in Australia you still cannot obtain Ivermectin but ‘The New Hampshire House of Representatives has voted to make Ivermectin available at any pharmacy that wants to distribute this drug even without a prescription. It will likely pass the Senate and become law.
It’s a hugely positive breakthrough for medical and pharmaceutical freedom. It’s only tragic that this was not the situation two years ago. The doctors the world over who have rallied behind this treatment believe that many lives might have been saved. If one state in the Northeast had at least made the option available, outcomes might have been very different.
The Epoch Timesreports that “Similar bills are pending legislative approval in Oklahoma, Missouri, Indiana, Arizona, and Alaska.”
Magnificent! What’s key here is the concept of human choice.
The irony is very bitter: the vaccine mandates have been universal and people have lost careers for refusing or been rejected for participation in public life. People were forced to get shots of doubtful efficacy in most cases that many people did not want or because they did not see the need and feared their side effects.
Meanwhile, a drug they would have chosen to take was denied to them, again by force, and physicians who believed they were saving lives had their licenses taken away for using their professional discretion.
For a good part of last year, many people in the world could freely buy Ivermectin, a generic drug that at least 8 quality studies have shown to be an effective treatment for Covid-19. It has long been part of the alternative treatment protocol for Covid since it was first tried in early 2020, but never recommended by the FDA, CDC, or NIH. At some point, the CDC was tweeting denunciations of it, somehow with the implication that this treatment was distracting from the main push of vaccine fanaticism.
A very strange political war broke out in the US over the drug, however, such that people’s acceptance or rejection of it somehow signaled political loyalties – an absurdist example of how politicized the entire pandemic became. In the end, it works well or does not: biology does not care about party affiliation.
Why did this happen? There are theories. It’s generic. It’s cheap. It’s widely available. Therefore the financial interest did not favor it. Another theory is that early talk of ways to live rationally and humanely with Covid would have distracted from the main and completely implausible message of lockdowns and then mandates: the goal of everyone should be to restructure life to avoid the bug no matter what.
In most parts of Central and Latin America, plus India and Eastern Europe, the drug was freely available to anyone. And the results are suggestively positive – though it would take a specialist fully to sort through all the noise in the data. The experience of on-the-ground Covid doctors, once fully free to prescribe what they believe is best, was positive from many reports.
In the US, however, the situation was very different. Getting a prescription was hard enough. In some states, getting it filled was nearly impossible. You would get a blank stare and a negative head shake from the pharmacist. As a result, the generic became in high demand in gray markets, with people returning from Mexico with stashes and also ordering from abroad.
The situation became utterly bizarre. Meanwhile, the NIH itself, which is supposed to promote randomized trials of repurposed drugs because major manufacturers have no incentive to do so, was in no rush to find out anything about its effectiveness. The NIH’s major study of repurposed drugs is due to show results more than a year from today.
Therapeutics in general have been woefully neglected throughout the pandemic. There was no “warp speed” for them. The NIH had all of February 2020 to kick off the investigations. But this apparently did not happen. People were not only denied access to timely testing but also to basic information about what to do if you got sick! As for ventilators, the waste and mess there deserves an article of its own.
Meanwhile, to get the drug, people had to find alternative paths. The group Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance was formed to find ways around the restrictions. In the interest of saving lives during a pandemic! The group MyFreeDoctor.com formed to get people the therapeutics they needed based on symptoms and checks and contacts with various pharmacists around the country who saw this as a true emergency. They asked only for contributions, which were entirely optional.
The doctors who have rallied around this drug as part of a full suite of therapeutics estimate that tens or hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. As a complete nonspecialist in this area, I have no idea if this is correct. But we do know that the physicians who held out, stuck to their guns against all smears, and figured out a way to serve their patients, even against regulatory attacks, became models of courage.
One night early in January 2022, I caught up with Dr. Pierre Kory of New York, who sounded absolutely exhausted on the phone. He had been working for 18 hours daily, seven days per week, to see patients and take care of needs with precision and deep care, even as he had faced unrelenting attacks. No question of what drove him and does still: the desperate desire to carry out his vocation to save lives and improve public health.
Meanwhile, on the other side of this stands the CDC, NIH, and HHS. The HHS has actually just produced something of a comic book (though probably not intended as such) designed to train people to recognize “misinformation.” It has no specifics and contains no scientific studies or claims. Instead, it is page after page of hint, hint, nudge nudge. In particular, I was struck by the following frames, which seem directed precisely against all those doctors and organizations that worked so hard during the pandemic to help people.
You are welcome to peruse the entire document, the main message of which is that the government is always correct, always knows the most science at the time, while front-line doctors with experience are very likely quacks, crazies, or ruthless profiteers.
Sometimes it seems like the people who produce such propaganda are forever attempting to live in the world of the movie Contagion, where every alternative treatment is a scam promoted by a corrupt “blogger” and where the CDC knows all. This cartoon is a smear in every way.
Yet even now, after two years of incontrovertible proof of the gigantic age plus health disparity in Covid vulnerability to severe outcomes, after massive demographic data the world over that is highly consistent, Jen Psaki just today said during a press conference that “we don’t know” that Covid affects older people more than young people.
Such is the state of science at the highest levels. The deliberate cultivation of confusion is national policy. And these are the people we are supposed to trust?
This battle is much larger than the legal status of Ivermectin. That’s just one symbol. What’s really at stake here is the idea of medical freedom itself. And freedom is a precondition for scientific inquiry and the search for the truth. It is also essential for public health. This is one of many lessons of the disastrously botched pandemic.
‘The Online Safety Bill, the most far-reaching online censorship law to ever be proposed in the UK, has been presented to Parliament.
UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, said her aim with the bill was to “make the internet, in the UK, the safest place in the world for children and vulnerable young people to go online.”
However, as with many bills that are positioned as a way to keep children safe, this Online Safety Bill contains sweeping speech restrictions that will affect all UK internet users.
The bill requires Big Tech companies to take action against “priority legal but harmful” content which will be decided by the government. The DCMS Secretary of State has the power to add more categories of priority legal but harmful content via secondary legislation in the future.
According to the Financial Times, this secondary legislation “requires less scrutiny from MPs [Members of Parliament] than the original bill.”
Companies are also required to report “emerging harms” to the UK’s communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom).
Additionally, the Online Safety Bill outlaws sending “knowingly false” communications that are sent “with the intention to cause non-trivial emotional, psychological or physical harm,” requires large social media companies to introduce identity verification tools, gives Ofcom the power to force companies to use “better and more effective” proactive content moderation technology, tasks Big Tech with determining which of its advertisers are pushing scams, mandates that any website hosting pornography put “robust checks in place to ensure that users are 18 years old or over,” and more.
UK citizens who are found guilty of offenses under the Online Safety Bill can be imprisoned or fined.
Not only does the Online Safety Bill contain numerous provisions that can be used to silence UK citizens and punish them for their online speech but powerful “recognised media outlets” are exempt from any regulation in the bill. Some of the outlets that will be getting special carveouts under this bill have even been praised by politicians for pushing for stronger “online safety” laws.
The punishments for companies that fail to censor enough under the Online Safety Bill include having their sites blocked and being hit with multi-billion dollar fines worth up to 10% of their annual turnover. Tech company executives can also be jailed if they fail to cooperate with Ofcom’s information requests.
Despite introducing strong punishments for tech companies that don’t remove enough harmful content, the Online Safety Bill has yet to reveal the categories of legal the harmful content that tech companies will have to target under this bill.
Earlier this week, Dorries said large platforms will be required to remove legal but harmful content “if it is already banned in their own terms and conditions.”
Yet today’s UK government press release for the Online Safety Bill says that the categories of legal but harmful content will be “set by the government and approved by Parliament.” The press release also lists “exposure to self-harm, harassment and eating disorders” as examples of harmful content that online platforms will be required to remove.
The introduction of the Online Safety Bill to Parliament is the first stage of its legislative journey.
Numerous UK rights groups have blasted the Online Safety Bill and warned that it will restrict free speech.
“The Online Safety Bill is set to rip up the rule book as far as traditional British free speech standards are concerned,” Mark Johnson, Legal and Policy Officer at civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, said. “This is a censor’s charter that will give state backing to big tech censorship on a scale that we have never seen before.”
Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, warned that the bill will have a “chilling effect on free speech.”
“We are particularly concerned that the government has said it will force social media platforms to remove ‘legal but harmful’ content, including ‘harassment,’” Young added. “That will enable political activists and interest groups claiming to speak on behalf of disadvantaged groups to silence their opponents by branding any views they disagree with as ‘harassment.’”
Matthew Lesh, Head of Public Policy at the think tank Institute of Economic Affairs said: “The UK threatening tech executives with jail time is eerily similar to how Russia and other authoritarian countries are currently behaving. It is an attack on free speech and entrepreneurialism.”
Before the bill was presented to Parliament, the UK’s main opposition party, the Labour Party, suggested that it would offer little obstruction to the Online Safety Bill and complained that it hadn’t been introduced fast enough.
Last October, Labour Leader Keir Starmer lamented that it has been “three years since the government promised an Online Safety Bill. Starmer also claimed that “the damage caused by harmful content online is worse than ever” and promised to support the bill if its second reading was brought forward to the end of 2021.
More recently, Labour Member of Parliament (MP) and Shadow Culture Secretary Lucy Powell said that Labour supports “the principles of the bill that is finally being published” and claimed that “delay up to this point has come with significant cost.”’https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-online-safety-bill-censorship-parliament/
‘Dr. Francis Collins, former NIH Director and current “science advisor” to Joe Biden, has long proclaimed himself and Dr. Anthony Fauci as “not political figures.” But newly leaked audio, obtained by The Daily Wire’s Meg Basham, tells a far different story.
The audio was taken on October 26th, 2021 at an event hosted by Christianity Today in conjunction with the Institute of Politics (a leftwing organization founded by David Axelrod). Russell Moore, a favorite among socially left-leaning “evangelicals” like David French and Beth Moore, conducted the interview portion that included Collins.
What followed was the mocking of Christians, the dismissal of individual rights, and false assertions about the legalities involved with vaccine mandates. But rest assured, none of this was political per Collins’ self-description.
“The US government does have the authority to mandate vaccinations if there is an outbreak that is threatening people, because it’s not just about you, it’s about the people you’re going to infect,” Collins claimed, even though science journals were already reporting by that point that vaccinated people were just as likely to spread the then-dominant Delta variant as those who were unvaccinated.
Collins went on to ask rhetorically, “Do [mandates] convince people who otherwise wouldn’t get them?” He answered himself, “Oh yeah, especially if it means losing your job.”
Perhaps Collins should opine less on legal issues because that turned out to be objectively false. As most are aware, the Supreme Court ended up striking down the Biden administration’s federal vaccine mandate. Collins tried to cite Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, a 1905 case that involved state-level mandates, in the interview, again showing his lack of knowledge of the topic. The lack of empathy shown to those losing their jobs over a mandate that was scientifically pointless (everyone spreads COVID) is also striking.
‘Fast food chain Pizza Hut has produced a training program for teachers that claims to “promote awareness, respect, and empathy for different lived experiencing,” arguing that “everyone has as racial identity.”
In one pamphlet produced by the program, toddlers express racist views, arguing that “Children as young as three-years-old begin to show evidence of societal messages affecting how they feel about themselves or their group identity — this is the beginning of internalized superiority or internalized oppression.”
The program, developed by Pizza Hut and First Book, is a “series of resources designed to support educators in helping their students engage in effective, courageous conversations about race and social justice,” and boasts that it is “informed by leading anti-bias, antiracist (ABAR) experts.”
The guide aims to teach educators that “racism exists within and beyond schools and communities of learning,” arguing that “the myth of racial hierarchy remains a dominant part of America’s culture.”
“Acts of violence against black communities are often identified on social media by the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter,” the program suggests.
As detailed by Daily Wire, a pamphlet titled “Empowering Educators: A Guidebook on Race and Racism” claims that “The Empowering Educators Guidebook provides support for educators seeking to increase their personal awareness of race and racism, as well as direction on how to ground learning environments through inclusive curriculum and diverse, affirming literature.”
The Daily Wire reports:
The pamphlet refers to America’s history of systemic racism as it talks about the death of George Floyd: “Floyd’s murder, along with other acts of violence against Black men and women leading up to and after his death, spurred global protests as America continues to reckon with its history of police brutality and systemic racism.”
It continues by arguing, “Many antiracist experts note that racism in America is not perpetuated by ‘bad’ people. Rather, racism is maintained by laws, policies, and normalized practices that are upheld consciously and unconsciously by those who knowingly or unknowingly benefit from them,” adding, “Although many people don’t engage in individual acts of racism, they still benefit from racist policies, practices, and social norms.”
It champions the “reality” of intersectionality, writing, “A person who is Black and female, for example, experiences discrimination and disadvantage differently than a person who is White and female. This concept of intersectionality was coined in 1989 by Dr. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. She describes how a person’s social identities such as race, class, and gender coincide to create overlapping systems of disadvantage. When developing your awareness, it is important to acknowledge this reality for students, families, and colleagues.”‘https://www.rebelnews.com/pizza_hut_urges_teachers_to_watch_out_for_racist_toddlers?utm_campaign=rb_03_08_2022&utm_medium=email&utm_source=therebel
‘The Dhillon Law Group, Inc. (@dhillonlaw) has filed suit against Mater Academy on behalf of Nicolas Ortiz, a 14-year-old student, for targeting and discriminating against him for his Christian beliefs.
Ortiz, a practicing Christian, regularly brings his bible to school to read during his free time. For this activity, the complaint alleges that Ortiz has regularly been ostracized and targeted for his beliefs by fellow students, staff, and school administrators.
The complaint also alleges that school offices broke Florida law by repeatedly ignoring Ortiz’s parents requests for inquiries into their son’s bullying.
The complaint shows examples of this harassment including students planning to physically assault him, a science teacher humiliating him for his faith in front of his peers in a classroom setting, and his peers creating false and defamatory statements claiming that he was planning a school shooting to disparage him.
“Mr. Ortiz is experiencing something that no American should ever have to experience, said Dhillon Law Group managing partner, Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban). “It’s bad enough that the school has done nothing to stop the bullying from his peers, but have gone as far as joining in on targeting Mr. Ortiz for simply practicing his faith. This is blatant violation of his first amendment rights is another example of how extreme so many in our education system have become, and why Dhillon Law Group is coming to Mr. Ortiz’s defense.”
Ortiz was given the maximum allowed punishment of a 10-day suspension for the fabricated allegations that he threatened a school shooting.
“Imagine being falsely accused of threatening to shoot up a school. Law enforcement concluded that he was being pranked by fellow students, but that did not stop numerous parents from spreading the false accusation online,” said Dhillon Law Group partner, Matthew Sarelson (@MSarelson). “The students who spread the false accusations against Mr. Ortiz were never disciplined in any way. Only Mr. Ortiz was suspended, without due process and for no valid reason.”
whatyareckon 