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Megaphone

Best of the Web: Reuters: Sweden had 10% lower 2020 death spike than much of Europe

Johan Ahlander
Reuters
Wed, 24 Mar 2021 23:30 UTC
Sweden
© TT News Agency/Janerik Henriksson via REUTERSFILE PHOTO: People enjoy the sun at an outdoor restaurant, despite the continuing spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Stockholm, Sweden March 26, 2020.
Sweden, which has shunned the strict lockdowns that have choked much of the global economy, emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries, an analysis of official data sources showed.

Infectious disease experts cautioned that the results could not be interpreted as evidence that lockdowns were unnecessary but acknowledged they may indicate Sweden's overall stance on fighting the pandemic had merits worth studying.


Comment: When supposed experts fail to see the obvious facts of a situation, it's clear that ideology is the driving force, not science.


In the past week, Germany and France have extended lockdowns amid rising coronavirus cases and high death tolls, moves that economists say will further delay economic recovery.


Comment: With the above data at hand, it begs the question just why countries continue to enforce lockdowns that clearly don't work? And worse, because it's becoming hard to deny that they actually correlate with a higher death rate whilst also destroying the economy, which will lead to an even higher mortality rate in the long term: UK's lockdown extension will have "severe" economic impact


Comment: Sweden is not the only example, there are numerous other countries that either didn't lockdown or did so only briefly and who have emerged from the coronavirus scare, by all metrics, in much, much better shape. Meanwhile the vast majority of Western nations continue to reimpose lockdowns, because apparently a year of lockdowns has failed to achieve what they claimed would only be '3 weeks to flatten the curve':

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Attention

Best of the Web: Doctors sound warning that child suicide is becoming an 'international epidemic' amid restricted pandemic life

Brad Polumbo
Foundation for Economic Education
Tue, 16 Mar 2021 15:55 UTC
child depression lockdown mask
The damage we're inflicting on children is too devastating to be waved away in the name of public health — it's quickly becoming an emergency in its own right.

Billions of people across the globe continue to live under COVID-19 lockdowns or heavily-restricted life. And for almost all of us, life amid the pandemic in 2020 was an isolating and difficult year. Yet doctors are warning that children in particular are experiencing grave mental health consequences as a result of the lockdowns — leading to an "international epidemic" of child suicide.

The Associated Press interviewed Dr. David Greenhorn on the subject, who works in the emergency department at England's Bradford Royal Infirmary. The number of mental health crises he has seen, such as suicide attempts, has gone from a couple per week pre-pandemic to now several per day.

Comment: Even if the majority of youngsters and teens manage to come through the madness, they will be marked for life by an evil inflicted on them in the name of keeping them "safe".

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Cloud Precipitation

Best of the Web: Historic flooding in New South Wales, Australia: Tens of thousands evacuated as state experiences 'once-in-a-century' extreme weather event

Doyle Rice
USA Today
Mon, 22 Mar 2021 16:46 UTC
flooding new south wales
© Dean Lewins/EPAThe New Windsor Bridge submerged by flood waters from the Nepean River at Windsor in the north west of Sydney. The state of New South Wales has been hit by its worst flooding in a century
"Phenomenal" rainfall over the past week has led to some of the worst flooding in decades in Australia's state of New South Wales, officials said Monday, and some rivers are topping record levels.

Thousands of people have been forced from their homes and hundreds more had to be rescued from the rising floodwaters that have isolated dozens of towns in Australia's most populous state.

Around 18,000 people had been evacuated from flooding in New South Wales (NSW) by Monday and emergency services feared up to 54,000 people could be displaced with heavy rain forecast to continue until Wednesday.


Comment: As of March 24th, that's up to 40,000 people evac'd.


"This is nothing like we've seen since the 1960s," said state Premier Gladys Berejiklian at a news conference, CNN reported. In parts of the state that have been hit harder, this is a once-a-century event; in other regions such as the Hawkesbury area, it's a "one-in-50-years" event, she said.


Comment: Here's an earlier report we carried on this, from Australia's 9 News:

Flash floods, towns evacuated and dams on the brink of spilling over as wild weather slams New South Wales, Australia

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Biohazard

Best of the Web: UK children targeted for Covid-19 vaccine in August, Johnson govt 'considering' making vaccinations mandatory for healthcare workers

Ben Riley-Smith
Telegraph
Wed, 24 Mar 2021 10:15 UTC

Comment: If they 'cross the Rubicon' and make vaccinations mandatory, they will be the first UK govt to do so since the 1800s smallpox vaccine laws (which led to widespread rebellion when those jabs caused deadly outbreaks of smallpox)...


johnson hancock
Begging for a revolution, they are
Children will start getting the Covid vaccine as early as August under provisional government plans to push for maximum immunity from the virus, The Telegraph can reveal.

Two sources involved in preparations said that was the soonest point at which Britons under the age of 18 would be given the jabs - months earlier than expected.

Safety data on the critical child vaccine study being run by Oxford University - on which ministers are waiting before making their final decisions - is expected shortly, with its conclusions due in June or July.


Comment: There's a lack of safety data because the UK population, particularly its most vulnerable, are acting as test subjects, and, in preparation for August, vaccine experiments on children are in the works: UK children to be test subjects of latest AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trials


Comment: A year of lockdowns has already seriously compromised immunity in the population, and it's likely that sacrificing children's usually robust health for the sake of this mass vaccination scheme could have dire consequences: By the way, the French govt is toying with doing likewise; legally mandating vaccinations for all healthcare workers.

And the Russian govt has taken the opposite stance.

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Key

Best of the Web: Did CIA pressure Yemen to release al-Qaeda leader from prison?

Alexander Rubinstein
MintPress News
Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00 UTC
Tenet Awlaki
© bucketeer/amazonaws.comFormer CIA director George Tenet • Anwar Al-Awlaki
Explosive new recordings released by the Houthi government of Yemen pile more earth atop mountains of existing evidence of the U.S. government's support for the very same terrorists it has claimed to be waging war against for nearly two decades.

The Moral Guidance Department, a branch of the Yemeni Armed Forces of the revolutionary Houthi government of Yemen published last week a number of secret documents and phone calls from the former regime of longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Two phone calls between former president Saleh and the former director of the CIA George Tenet were released. A Yemeni government official has confirmed to me that the calls took place in 2001.

In the calls, the former CIA director can be heard pressuring Saleh to release a detained individual involved in the bombing attacks on USS Cole in October of 2000, which left 17 dead and 37 injured. In the call, Tenet is asked by Saleh's translator about the name of the individual in question.

"I don't want to give his name over the phone," Tenet tells him.

Saleh notes that the FBI team tasked with the USS Cole investigation had already arrived in Sana'a, and asks Tenet if the FBI personnel could meet with him to discuss the matter. Tenet refuses, saying
"this is my person, this is my problem, this is my issue... The man must be released. I've talked to everybody in my government; I told them that I was going to make this call."
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Microscope 1

Best of the Web: COVID prevention - an effective alternative to vaccines

Joel S. Hirschhorn
World News Daily
Sun, 21 Mar 2021 15:51 UTC
Joel S. Hirschhorn
© WMU Cooley Law School/YouTubeJoel S. Hirschhorn
The massive global effort to promote COVID vaccines plays on fears of getting the disease, despite the fact that they are experimental. Meaning that they have not gone through the rigorous, time-consuming and expensive randomized clinical trials that so many experts say is the gold standard for evaluating drugs.

This absence was used by the government to condemn and block the use of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Vaccine testing and regulatory approval have been rushed. Missing from nearly all information reaching the public are some key facts.

Comment:

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Yellow Vest

Best of the Web: Lockdown protests erupt across Europe and Canada, police greet crowds in riot gear


RT
Sun, 14 Mar 2021 14:56 UTC
Dutch protest
© Jeroen Jumelet / ANP via AFP
Amsterdam police deployed two water cannons and officers in riot gear to prevent an unpermitted protest against Covid-19 restrictions, ultimately making the crowd leave the area.

The anti-lockdown rally gathered on Saturday in Amsterdam's Museumplein, a green open space named for the three national museums located in the area. The protest took place without a permit from the municipality, so the police declared Museumplein a security risk area, threatening a possible crackdown on those gathering there. This didn't stop a large crowd of activists from coming and mingling with ordinary people, who frequently hang out at the museum neighborhood on weekends.

Some of the protesters were dressed in medical garb or military uniforms, though more exotic outfits were also seen.

Comment: Below is just a selection of some of the protests that occurred this weekend:

England



Serbia


Denmark



Canada

Italy


France


Belgium


Ireland



With lockdowns being reimplemented throughout Europe in a suspiciously coordinated fashion, yet again, we can expect that the discontent and the numbers will only continue to grow; that would also explain why a number of countries have been concocting bills that give the security forces, tasked with cracking down on these crowds and other dissidents, ever more draconian powers:

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Hotdog

Best of the Web: Netherlands election result: Mark Rutte retains premiership as Dutch apparently vote overwhelmingly in favor of Covid-19 restriction measures

Mike Corder
Associated Press
Thu, 18 Mar 2021 07:26 UTC

Comment: This astonishing result comes on the heels of major mass rioting against the curfew imposed on the Dutch electorate in late January 'because Covid'. Something doesn't add up here...


mark rutte klaus schwab
The process of forming a new Dutch governing coalition began Thursday, a day after Prime Minister Mark Rutte's conservative party powered to a fourth consecutive victory in a vote held during a nationwide lockdown and dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The feat put Rutte in position to lead coalition talks, most likely with another big winner — the centrist, pro-European D66 party led by former diplomat Sigrid Kaag, who danced on a table Wednesday night when an exit poll showed her party capturing one of its biggest-ever victories.

However those two parties will likely need at least two more partners to form a majority coalition. According to the national news agency ANP, based on 88% of votes counted, Rutte's party, known by its Dutch acronym VVD, won 35 of the 150 seats in the lower house of parliament while D66 garnered 24.

Rutte wants to move quickly to hammer out a coronavirus recovery plan before getting into a government blueprint for the new coalition's four-year term.

"We must have plans in place to unlock the country," Rutte told his lawmakers in a virtual meeting Thursday.

Comment: So there we have it. The first general election result in western Europe since The Rona was unleashed, and the VAST MAJORITY of the population believes in it and supports their government telling them what to think and do...

Or do they?

Are election and referendum results in the 'Western democratic system' reliable indicators of what populations think and feel about their governments?

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Eye 1

Best of the Web: 'The unblinking eye': Boris Johnson confirms British citizens are 24/7 targets of government military & intelligence cyber ops

Kit Klarenberg
RT
Thu, 18 Mar 2021 17:25 UTC
UK cyber
© Getty Images / gorodenkoff
Boris Johnson has unveiled some eyebrow-raising upgrades to Britain's defence and foreign policies, which include propaganda campaigns aimed at its own people to 'deliver cognitive impacts' - i.e. making them think 'correctly'.


Comment: The lockdown fearmongering propaganda has been noted even by psychologists: Psychologists accuse UK government of using 'unethical' fear tactics on people to enforce lockdown


The UK government's long-awaited 'Integrated Review' has finally been released. Officially billed as "a comprehensive articulation" of London's "national security and international policy," it intends to "[shape] the open international order of the future."

An audacious ambition indeed, and the Review's pledges are certainly bold - among other things, Whitehall is now committed to increasing the total number of nuclear warheads at its disposal to 260, reversing a 2010 decision to reduce the stockpile to 180. The volte face is attributed to an allegedly "evolving security environment," seemingly a veiled reference to China's growing economic and military might.

Comment: See also:

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Eye 2

Best of the Web: 'Leaders' of lockdown: The long and wasted year

John Waters
johnwaters.substack.com
Wed, 17 Mar 2021 06:47 UTC
Trudeau
Last night I heard you talking in your sleep

Saying things you shouldn't say.

Oh baby, you just might have to go to jail someday.

— Bob Dylan, The Long and Wasted Years
I have invented a parlour game called Go, Chieftain!, which, though tricky to play, has a contemporary political edge. The difficulty arises from the fact that it requires the actual presence of the Prime Minister of Canada, the President of France and the Taoiseach of Ireland to be present in the same room, whereupon the player is blindfolded and let loose among them. You can also play the game with female leaders, like Nicola Sturgeon, Jacinda Ardern, or even a mixed doubles version if you feel so inclined.

The idea is that there is absolutely no political or human distinction to be made between these people. In my version, designed with Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau and Leo Varadkar in mind, the first leader with whom the player makes physical contact might be despatched to Dublin, the second to Ottawa, and the third to Paris (this is alphabetical order version, though I have several other formats), without undue aftershocks. Obviously, no below-the-waist touching is permitted. The house then bets that, regardless of the outcome, since the three leaders are ideologically, morally, culturally and spiritually indistinguishable, there will be no change in anything. Since I invented the game, rather inconveniently, there has been a change at the 'top' in Ireland, with Micheál Martin replacing Varadkar, but happily this makes no difference either.
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