Month: October 2021

I watched part of a recent press conference of Ron DeSantis introducing Florida’s new surgeon general. “No more noble lies,” he said, speaking of Covid. Apparently, in Florida at least, people can handle the unvarnished truth.

And what about ignoble lies, I thought, when thinking of Australian health authorities.

On 28 October in Victoria twenty-five people were reported to have died of Covid. How many were vaxxed, a reporter asked. We have that information but are not giving it out, came the reply. So far as I know, the intrepid reporter did not follow up. Nothing much is ever followed up anymore unless it’s to do with baseless conjecture about the historical sex life of a conservative politician or a catholic priest.

It’s quite important to know whether vaccinations are preventing deaths.

An ABC report dated 15 October revealed that 36 of the 49 aged-care residents who had died of the Delta strain in NSW were fully vaccinated. Seems interesting. But it’s all going on under the radar.

Andrew Bolt who revealed himself on air to be a “vaccine believer” – the first time I have come across this kind of descriptor since Julia Gillard revealed that she was a climate-change believer –admirably expressed curiosity about the reticence of those paid by the public purse to tell the public what they knew. Of course, there are such things as state secrets, but the circumstances of deaths from Covid hardly fall into that category.

I suspect foul play. Dissemblance-cum-deceit is afoot. It seems likely, does it not, that it would have been trumpeted from the rooftops; if all, or the overwhelming majority, of the twenty-five people who died had been unvaccinated. Public health gurus would have danced on their graves. Those rascally unvaxxed deserve everything they get; bar them from hospitals etc.  

With no-one remotely resembling DeSantis in our political class, anywhere in Australia, we can look forward to an unremitting diet of dissemblance and deceit, whether on Covid or climate change or on anything else of note. The Australian people can’t handle the truth. Government and main opposition parties are at one when it comes to that; and they can rely on the tame media.  

Archbishop Vigano Denounces The Coronavirus Vaccine: ‘There Is A Duty To Refuse It’, (who is Abp Vigano?), said the following.

“The Note on the morality of using some anti-Covid-19 vaccines was issued last year in the absence of complete data on both the nature of the gene serum and its components,” Vigano writes in his letter to the bishops and others, in which Vigano exposes the faulty “safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” argues that “the experimental drugs are not vaccines in the proper sense,” and raises alarms about “side effects on pregnant mothers and nursing children.”

“In this case, the health authorities have decided to carry out experimentation on the entire world population, as an exception to the usual practice of the scientific community, international standards, and the laws of individual nations. This means that the entire population finds itself in the condition of being susceptible to suffering the adverse effects of the vaccine, at their own risk, when normally experimentation is done on a voluntary basis and carried out on a limited number of subjects, who are paid to undergo it,” Vigano writes. “…I think it is evident that there are medical treatments without adverse side-effects, even though they have been systematically boycotted by the Health Institutions – WHO, CDC, EMA – and by mainstream media.”

“Having established that the drugs sold as vaccines do not give any significant benefit and on the contrary may cause a very high percentage of deaths or grave pathologies even in subjects for whom Covid does not represent a threat, I do not think that we can conclude that there is any proportionality between the potential damages and the potential benefits. This means therefore that there is a grave moral obligation to refuse inoculation as a possible and proximate cause of permanent damages or death. In the absence of benefits, there is therefore no need to expose oneself to the risks of its administration, but on the contrary there is a duty to refuse it categorically,” Vigano writes.

There’s much more at the link. There is this as well: Abp. Viganò warns US bishops about COVID jab: The Great Reset wants ‘billions of chronically ill people’. This is the subhead for the article.

The silence of so many cardinals and bishops, along with the inconceivable promotion of the vaccination campaign by the Holy See, represents a form of unprecedented complicity that cannot continue any longer.

Not your standard-issue conspiracy theorist.

Seventy-nine years ago on the 2nd of November, 1942, the village and aerodrome of Kokoda in the Owen Stanley mountains of Papua, was re-entered by Australian soldiers.

What follows is not a campaign narrative – there are plenty of those already in existence – but a small collection of related and lesser-known facts. All have been sourced from primary documents, and references for specific pieces of information can be provided on request.

The first substantial information of Japanese interest in a land route to Port Moresby after their attempt to occupy the latter was temporarily thwarted in the Battle of the Coral Sea, came from signals intercepts. On the 18th of May, Continue reading “Guest Post: Muddy – A Village Somewhere, Kokoda”

Net Zero By 2050? Don’t Plan on It

Politicians promise an unrealistic transformation that would deny poor countries a chance to grow.

As leaders prepare to gather in Glasgow for the United Nations climate-change conference, you may think the world has agreed to reduce and eventually eliminate its dependency on fossil fuels, stepping up its reliance on renewable energy. Even Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who won an election opposing costly climate policies, now proudly embraces net-zero emissions by 2050.

But the timeline for the transformation is entirely unrealistic. The politicians who make promises about how energy will be delivered within three decades can be fairly certain that they will be merely footnotes in history. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claims that all cars sold in Britain will be electric by 2030. But he doesn’t acknowledge that on current trend there won’t be enough electricity to power all of these cars.

Climate enthusiasts admit that achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 presents some difficulties. But they quickly shift to talking up the exciting technological challenge, because, according to Australia’s iron-ore billionaire Andrew Forrest, “there are tens of billions of dollars around the world looking to invest in renewables” and eventually in industries such as hydrogen. Activists also suggest that dissent is an affront to international opinion.

Yet as the West strives to cut emissions, the developing world doesn’t, particularly India and China, the two most populated countries on the planet. Global energy consumption is expected to increase 50% by 2050, a rise fueled mostly by developing countries that want energy not to spite the planet or to offend international opinion, but to raise living standards as best they can.

For decades the developed world has implored these countries to trade with the West and not simply rely on handouts from richer countries. In many cases, these rising countries can trade thanks to manufacturing processes and energy sources no longer considered acceptable in polite Western society, namely coal.

The West would do well to remember that it became prosperous through industrialization, a process that relied heavily on fossil fuels. When Britain led the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it did so entirely on the basis of coal, which powered its factories and later its railways.

Other countries did the same. Now the West uses its supposed moral and economic superiority to lecture other countries on the need to curb their behavior, even if it means retarding their own economic progress and making themselves more dependent on richer countries. This is a form of colonialism, which makes the left’s attraction to it all the more bizarre.

Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, aren’t up to the job of powering the world’s economies. There isn’t enough wind in much of the world to get the turbines turning. Fossil fuels may well be damaging to the health of the planet, but the retreat around the world from nuclear power was shortsighted, especially in countries that lack viable alternatives.

Europe is weathering an energy crisis because of the caprice and spite of Vladimir Putin, who is manipulating the price of the gas Russia provides to Germany and other parts of Europe. This has pushed prices up to a point where not only domestic customers but industrial ones find energy costs reaching prohibitive levels. In Britain, ceramics manufacturers have told a hapless government that they may have to shut down because they can’t afford Mr. Putin’s prices.

In Australia, Mr. Morrison feels compelled to announce net zero so he doesn’t let down Canberra’s Aukus partners, the U.K. and the U.S., which enthusiastically support unilateral decarbonization. Yet by weakening the economies of the West, net zero is a boost to a rising China.

Instead of rhetoric designed to make environmentalists feel smug, Western governments need proper contingency plans for their own energy supplies. Politicians should avoid relying too heavily on renewables, even if that means using coal to power generators or a renaissance of nuclear power to keep the world’s lights on. And the developing world deserves the same chance the developed one had.

One day, with technological breakthroughs, it will be possible to power the world without fossil fuels. But that day isn’t coming soon, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.

Mr. Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and a presenter at the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Pfizer’s request to roll out COVID-19 vaccines for Americans as young as 5 years old cleared a key regulatory hurdle Tuesday, after a panel of the Food and Drug Administration’s outside vaccine advisers voted by a majority to back Pfizer’s request. 

OK, this passed the panel, 17 for, 0 against and 1 abstention. One of the panel members (in a video bouncing around Twitter) can clearly be heard saying:

We’re never going to learn about how safe a vaccine is, unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”

Techno Fog

I’ll ignore (for the time being) that (allegedly) the discussions acknowledged they have no idea about the long-term risks for kids – because I can’t confirm it with a video. We’ll see what emerges in due course.

Were there any misgivings about this nearly unanimous decision? Why Yes, there was.

Continue reading “Mater’s Musings #36: This is how it starts”