UNI QLD LAW PROF : Covid Hysteria Based on Lies, Propaganda and Ignorance

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a
false-front for the urge to rule it.”
– H.L. Mencken

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken

Superb piece from Prof. James Allan.

(5 min read)

Via The Australian

Covid hysteria based on lies, propaganda and ignorance

By James Allan

12:00AM OCTOBER 2, 2021

All the Covid hysteria around most of the democratic world, and especially in Britain, New York state, Canada and here in Australia, is driven by two main things. 

The first is that many people haven’t got a clue about what the relative risks are. Ask them what they think their chances of dying would be should they catch Covid and most get this massively wrong – a good few get the odds wrong by two orders of magnitude (answering 30 per cent when at most it’s about 0.3 per cent). And we’re talking about one’s chances of dying before being vaccinated.

Government propaganda – because there is no other way to describe it – has deliberately tried to scare people senseless and hence to distort their relative-risk assessments. That has been a clear and unmistakeable goal, including of all the daily press conferences with the breathless recitation of cases by politicians without an ounce of concern for freedom-­related issues, and by public-health types.

And for once, government seems to have got something right because its Covid scaremongering has been very successful.

The second problem has been all the models relied upon by the supine political class. It started with the Neil Ferguson modelling coming out of Imperial College in London and spread out from there.

No one in the press corps seems to care that Professor Ferguson has had an unbroken track record of massively wrong predictions with his models, prophesying things that came nowhere near reality. In 2002, his models predicted 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease). In the event there were 177 deaths.

In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million could be killed from bird flu. By 2009, 282 people had died of it. Ferguson was also heavily involved in the modelling around Britain’s foot-and-mouth disease that led to a mass culling of 11 million sheep and cattle in 2001. That time his models predicted up to 150,000 humans would die. You guessed it. There were actually fewer than 200 deaths. And before Boris Johnson’s “Freedom Day” a couple months ago, when the British PM finally summoned up a backbone and ignored the public-health class of fearmongers, Ferguson and a small army of supposed experts (more than 1200 scientists and doctors, including the editor-in-chief of The Lancet) signed a letter predicting carnage if Boris went ahead. All their “this is a murderous, irresponsible opening up” predictions proved woefully wrong.

Ferguson, interviewed later about being off by such a huge margin, replied along the lines that it doesn’t bother him being wrong, as long as he is wrong in the right direction. Let that sink in for a moment. For him, and seemingly the vast preponderance of the modelling caste, the right direction is the one that massively overstates future bad outcomes.

A woman looks at a mural of a health worker with wings holding a globe on International Nurses Day in May. Picture: AFP

A woman looks at a mural of a health worker with wings holding a globe on International Nurses Day in May. Picture: AFP

You can keep your jobs no matter how badly off your predictions are, as long as you’re wrong in the overstated direction. Under-predict by even one death, though, and the fear is some pusillanimous politician will give you the axe.

That same attitude seems to be true of virtually all the modelling, including here in Australia. So many models have implausible assumptions built in, such as that no citizens left to their own devices would change any behaviour without the despotic, mailed fist of government ordering them to do so. You will try in vain to find a ­single model that ended up understating the bad outcomes it ­predicted.

So now turn to Sweden, with a population of just under 10 and half million. It never locked down at all. No small businesses were forced to close and so bankrupted (and no big businesses were thereby incredibly enriched and allowed to have bumper profits under the sort of crony capitalism that lockdowns deliver). Schools never closed. People were trusted to make smart calls. Oh wait, Sweden may have put a limit of 500 people at big events for a while. That was it.

According to the most recent data I can find, Sweden has had about 1.14 million Covid cases and 14,753 Covid deaths (a sizeable chunk of those happening early on in aged care, for which the overseeing epidemiologist, Professor Anders Tegnell, quickly admitted the country’s handling mistakes). Since May of this year Sweden has had one of the lowest rates of Covid in Europe. Its deaths per million across the whole pandemic are now low enough that the press no longer talks about Sweden. The lockdownistas do not want the country to do well.

Meanwhile, a number of British doctors are now predicting that deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves will end up outnumbering the saved Covid deaths by 10 or 20 to 1. And this in a world where the median age of Covid deaths is higher than the country’s average life expectancy for men and for women.

A woman walks through a field of white flags symbolising the lives lost to Covid-19 in the US. Picture: AFP
A woman walks through a field of white flags symbolising the lives lost to Covid-19 in the US. Picture: AFP

It’s a world where (according to the latest Stanford study) the survival rate for the unvaccinated for these age ranges is: 0-19 (99.9973 per cent); 20-29 (99.986 per cent); 30-39 (99.969 per cent); 40-49 (99.918 per cent); and the survival rate doesn’t drop below 99.7 per cent until you get to the over-70s.

In a world with that sort of risk of dying from Covid, if you are under 70 why would you care in the slightest if someone else chooses not to get vaccinated? You started with those great odds and improved them by getting vaccinated yourself. Give anyone under 75 a choice of whether to get Covid or cancer, heart disease or diabetes, and you’re an idiot if you don’t pick Covid.

The whole vaccine-passport mandate position (full disclosure, to have some hope of one day seeing my kids who live overseas I’m double-jabbed) is premised on people having no clue at all of their relative risks. Then add in a dollop of “take the worst imaginable outcome modelling”. Throw in a media and press corps that is either stupid or longs for the reincarnation of Pravda. Stir. And you have Australia, readers.

We’re not the world’s best handlers of Covid. From early on it was plain we were on a trajectory to be the world’s worst. And with every year that passes, that will become ever more obvious.

James Allan is Garrick professor of law at the University of Queensland.

Covid hysteria based on lies, propaganda and ignorance | The Australian

Covid-19 Related :


FROM Terrorism to Climatism to Pandemism

Garrison - Problem Reaction Tyranny

GARRISON | Problem, Reaction, Tyranny


The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
 (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
 by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.”
H.L. Mencken

WE need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.

– Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

***

RON CLUTZ, of the excellent site Science Matters, examines the historical use of fear employed by our ruling-class-elite as a tool to maintain control and solicit power.

CLUTZ finds that the modern use of fear has been weaponised under a far more sinister premise than in more ‘noble’ times gone by. Whereas in the past, power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people, today’s “societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain.”

Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears.

A salient read that dutifully explains the planned chaotic times we currently inhabit…

*

From Terrorism to Climatism to Pandemism

In 2004 BBC aired a 3-part documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. The episodes start with this narration (in italics with my bolds):

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority.

Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.

And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits.

At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age.

And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

*

I was impressed at the time by the writing, imagery and presentation of the premise: Our societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain. A lot has happened in the last 16 years, including the demise of Osama Bin Laden, disruption of Al-Queda, the rise and fall of ISIS. With terrorism increasingly on the back burner, politicians turned to climate fears, emphasized at the 2009 Copenhagen COP, ramped up to the Paris Accord in 2015, and further amped to SR1.5 in 2019 to claim a “climate emergency”, leading to schoolchildren protesting rather than learning, and violence from groups like the “valve turners” and Extinction Rebellion.

The Power of Nightmares explained the symbiosis between radical revolutionaries and elected officials. Public fear of damage and destruction cedes power and authority to governing politicians.They invited Greta to speak at Davos for the very same reason:  she empowers them. At first the menace was Islamist Terrorists, who did achieve much killing and suffering in places they were able to occupy, or in attacks such as the Twin Towers. Then the media turned to extreme weather events, extinctions, sea level rise, arctic amplification, acid oceans, and fear of everything from Acne to Zika virus. The latter was a prelude to our current obsession with the coronavirus.

In all cases, the fear has been seized upon for outlays of public monies in massive spending, unheard of in normal times. And from the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, and FISA courts, on to environmental regulations and obstacles, and now to lockdowns and distancing orders, civil liberties are quashed to gain safety from an invisible enemy.

Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears. Most recently, the fear mongers are promoting racism as a reason to undo law and order in favor of passion and violence. They are literally playing with fire threatening the roots of civil society in their pursuit of power.

From Terrorism to Climatism to Pandemism | Science Matters

(Climatism links added)

•••

SEE also :

RELATED :

•••

THE Climatism Tip Jar – Support The Fight Against Dangerous, Costly and Unscientific Climate Alarm

(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.

Thanks to all those who have donated. Your support and faith in Climatism is highly motivating and greatly appreciated!

Citizen journalists can’t rely on mastheads, rather private donations and honest content. 

Click link for more info…

Many thanks, Jamie.

(NB// The PayPal account linked to “Climatism” is “Five-O-Vintage”)Donate with PayPal

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•••


COVID19 : Totalitarianism Doesn’t Shock Us Anymore

53211-literature-1984

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell, 1984


“If you want a picture of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
George Orwell, 1984

***

NEVER in American history have politicians been more powerful than they are now. Tucker Carlson reveals how many of our elected representatives have become “drunk with power”, feeding on draconian CV19 lockdown measures while completely ignoring the Bill of Rights.

AN important 10’31” video …

FWD by Green Jihad :

The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t just resulted in panic, but also new found power grabs by politicians and an acceptance by many to cede their liberties to political authority. This isn’t just about unchecked power, but also what happens when humans are viewed as the primary cause of a catastrophe in which leaders tend not to even abide by rules they impose on others. For example, the police officers featured in the below video aren’t wearing face masks, few politicians wear themdespite the risks and the practice being required in some states, and former president Obama was recently caught golfing in Virginia despite the state’s lockdown order.

 

via : Totalitarianism Doesn’t Shock Us Anymore | Green Jihad

•••

SEE also :

FOR the latest AU government information on COVID19 :

NEED to speak to someone?

•••

THE Climatism Tip Jar – Support The Fight Against Dangerous, Costly and Unscientific Climate Alarm

(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.

Thanks to all those who have donated. Your support and faith in Climatism is highly motivating and greatly appreciated!

Citizen journalists can’t rely on mastheads, rather private donations and honest content. 

Click link for more info…

Many thanks, Jamie.

(NB// The PayPal account linked to “Climatism” is “Five-O-Vintage”)Donate with PayPal

Screen Shot 2020-02-12 at 5.35.38 am

•••


SHAMEFUL Day For Australian Universities – Andrew Bolt

SCIENTIFIC Marxism. The totalitarians at JCU destroying the meaning, value and relevance of ‘science’ in the name of global warming groupthink and government grants.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Stewgreen

image

https://twitter.com/theboltreport/status/998508795385933824

Andrew Bolt has an excellent piece on the Peter Ridd sacking, well worth a watch.

As well as the specific issue here, he highlights that this is part of a much wider trend in Australian universities, recalling the sacking of Bob Carter for daring to question global warming dogma.

He could also have mentioned Murry Salby.

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Polar Bears & the Sleazy New York Times

Superbly written Donna.

ERICA Goode’s unhinged attack on Dr. Crockford in the NY Times is further evidence of the totalitarian and authoritarian underpinnings that have corrupted the field of climate ‘science’. – Question the preferred wisdom of the day at your own peril! – Obey, or be persecuted and have your reputation trashed! This isn’t science, this is religion. “Belief” and “Denial” are the words of zealots, not scientists.

WHAT would it take for activists Goode and Co. to be happy? A Polar Bear population back to 1960’s extinction levels? Sadly, I believe the answer is yes! How dare their scared ‘cow’ and mascot of climate catastrophe have grown in population from some 5,000 in the 1960’s to 25,000-30,000 at present, despite rising CO2 and diminished sea-ice extent?

INCREASING polar bear numbers, directly threaten the power of activists and their lucrative climate change scare. We can’t have that now can we Erica?

Big Picture News, Informed Analysis

SPOTLIGHT: Journalistic professionalism evaporates in front of our eyes.

BIG PICTURE: When historians document the demise of the mainstream media, an article published this week by the New York Times will make an excellent case study. Titled “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back,” it’s written by Erica Goode who isn’t just any journalist. She’s a former Environment Editor of the Times. In 2009, she “founded and led a cluster of reporters dedicated to environmental reporting.” Currently, she’s a visiting professor at Syracuse University.

Out here in the real world, a debate exists about polar bears. Will they be adversely affected by climate change or will they continue to adapt as they have historically?

Since the future hasn’t yet arrived, it’s impossible to know whose opinions will turn out to be correct. But rather than presenting a range of perspectives…

View original post 865 more words


James Cook University @jcu censures a climate skeptic – help him fight back

MASSIVE response from defenders of free speech already through the ‘Gofundme’ page.

PLEASE try to donate even as little as $5 (a takeaway coffee).

FUNDING Professor Peter Ridd’s legal fund helps protect freedom of speech and sends a very important message to supposedly “free-thinking” institutions that suppression of thought, ideas and opinion MUST NOT and cannot be stifled because these ideas disagree with the preferred wisdom of the day or a chosen ideology. This is totalitarianism that directly undermines freedom and democracy.

DONATE today to help Prof Ridd fight @JCU and stick it to the tyrannical climate industrial complex.

https://www.gofundme.com/peter-ridd-legal-action-fund

Watts Up With That?

UPDATE: I made this a “top post” that will remain at the top of WUWT until we reach the goal. New content will appear below.

Last week we covered this ugly saga of how a colleague of the late Dr. Bob Carter has been singled out for criticism and ruin by his university: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/29/the-power-of-grant-money-on-display-at-james-cook-university/

Now we have this announcement from Dr. Jennifer Marohasy, reposted below.

I ask three things of our readers.

  1. Retweet and repost this story wherever you can, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.
  2. To show support, buy a copy of the book in which he says the Great Barrier Reef alarmism is just that.
  3. If possible, donate to his campaign to fight back against the university- link below.

Peter Ridd Asks for your Help – Now

Peter Ridd and Jennifer Marohasy speaking about the need for quality assurance in science last November in Sydney.

PROFESSOR Peter Ridd is a…

View original post 799 more words


Carl Sagan Explains Why Barack Obama Tries To Silence Skeptics

Real Science

“The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

http://www.philosophicalsociety.com/archives/skepticism.htm

h/t to Andy Oz

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EPA : Purpose Of Science And Technology Is To “Meet Obama’s Needs”

Climatism comment : The rise of the ‘scientific technological elite’. Extremely concerning.

Real Science

“science and technology improvements will allow us to take action moving forward that meets the needs of this president as he has charged EPA” …. McCarthy said.

EPA Administrator to Scientists: ‘Speak the Truth’ on Climate Change to Meet Obama’s ‘Needs’ | CNS News

ScreenHunter_513 Jan. 31 09.44

Twitter / JunkScience: Science’s new mission: EPA …

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