Cassandra Voices

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  • Guglielmo Marconi’s Irish Connections

    The life of Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, has been celebrated on two primary occasions in Ireland. First, in 1997 at the centenary of his first wireless transmissions, and also in 2007 at the centenary of his first commercial TransAtlantic wireless transmissions between Ireland and Canada.

    Both anniversaries were celebrated in Clifden, Connemara, where, in a rural site at Derrigimlagh, Marconi had built his most powerful radio station fit for the purpose.

    For the 2007 celebrations, I produced a twenty minute documentary on the life and achievements of Marconi. This was presented at the Italian Institute of Culture in the presence of a select audience, which included Marconi’s daughter Princess Elettra, and her son Gugliemo.

    The documentary entitled “Marcon’s Legacy in Ireland” is a comprehensive, somewhat emotional profile of Marconi that engages with him as a man and father, as well as his profound scientific achievements.

    Tracing the path of his life from birth in 1874 to death in 1937, it shows how, as a young boy, he showed a passion for constructing rudimentary gadgets that drew on the filed of electromagnetism, for which he and developed a deep fascination.

    This culminated in him developing the capacity to transmit wireless messages to his brother in the perimeter of his garden in Villa Griffone, his family home near Bologna.

    That was only the beginning of a distinguished career as an inventor which led to the invention of radio, as we know it today.

    Marconi’s many links with Ireland are highlighted in the documentary, including a connection with the RTÉ grounds where Montrose House stands, which was inhabited for some time by Marconi’s mother, Annie Jameson who was a member of the famous family of distillers.

    Indeed, his first wife Beatrice O’Brien, was the daughter of Lord Inchiquin of Dromoland Castle, Co Clare; although he eventually, amicably divorced her to marry an Italian countess Cristina Bezzi Scali.

    His surviving daughter Princess Elettra, was the guest of honour at the presentation of the documentary at the Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin in 2007.

    She said: “I love Ireland and I know Ireland was very important to my father, I’m very grateful because Annie Jameson was the only one who believed in my father when he was very young.”

    In 1909, Marconi shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun for their “contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy” (radio communications).

    Feature Image: Marconi demonstrating apparatus he used in his first long-distance radio transmissions in the 1890s. The transmitter is at right, the receiver with paper tape recorder at left.

  • Covid-19 Absurdities

    Foremost among Utopian absurdities, we had the false promise of ZeroCovid. This continues to inflict untold damage on millions of lives and livelihoods that have been lost along the mystical path to salvation.

    Although the ZeroCovid leaders identified themselves with logic and rationality, the fanciful idea of every country excluding an influenza-like virus appears to have been a hangover from Judeo-Christian eschatology, which purports to save human beings from themselves.

    Other Utopian modern ideologies including Communism, Nazism and even neoconservatism, adopt a similar schema, wherein a vanguard elite guides the flock to safety.

    The nonsense started before the ZeroCovid concept grew legs, as China, the source of our slave-produced consumer goods, provided carefully choreographed footage demonstrating how instantaneous death ensued after infection with the deadly pox. All dutifully conveyed by compromised media.

    That China also runs concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslim minority, and harvests organs for transplantation from healthy executed prisoners was ignored. The West adopted a lockdown policy that represented the onset of another, dystopian Cultural Revolution.

    The WHO advised the West that lockdowns were essential. This advice arrived despite the 2019 WHO pandemic preparedness document containing no such recommendation. China then supplied genetic sequences they happened to have lying around to dodgy German academics to create the PCR test, which is a research tool not a diagnostic test.

    Weren’t we so lucky that the Wuhan Institute of virology is located near the alleged ground zero? It just so happened to be doing gain of function research on bat corona viruses in conjunction with the Americans.

    Herd Immunity

    Initially there were sensible discussions – including from the U.K.’s chief scientific officer Patrick Vallance – around herd immunity, the limited lethality of corona viruses in general, and the potentially disastrous effects of shutting down entire societies.

    Sweden, then a bastion of social democracy, held on to its rational faculties. Sadly, the government of no other major Western democracy seriously weighed up the effects on society of its public health policy. In an atmosphere of acute hysteria some governments acted against the advice of their health authorities.

    Resistance to drastic measures broke down once the Italians began singing to the world from their balconies, and army trucks were filmed removing dozens of bodies from hospital morgues. Strange how film crews always seem to know when to turn up to capture such footage.

    In what was the final twist of the thumb screw, our old friend Professor Reliable Data from Imperial College pulled scary figures from a dark orifice and waved it in the face of sceptics. Bear in mind, the same guy had predicted in 2005 that up to one hundred and fifty million people could die from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

    Despite the reasoned arguments of Nobel laureate Professor Michael Levitt, which few were able to read or hear, the British and others opted for the doom-laden scenario.

    T-Shock

    Meanwhile, on our own benighted little island of Ireland, beloved of Big Pharma and Big Tech, T-Shock Varadkar took to the podium to address the nation in our solemn hour, as the spectre of a common cold virus loomed on the horizon. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s World War II speech, he told the nation ‘this is the calm before the storm…’ before opining that there could be up to 85,000 deaths.

    Severe limits were placed on our freedom to roam freely and meet one another, as if we faced the impending Blitzkreig. He asked us to perform the unlikely feat of ‘coming together as a nation by staying apart.’

    Ironically, the wellbeing of the nation had become the central focus for a right-wing government, as individual needs and desires were cast aside, apparently for the common good. A country that had racked up vast personal and household debt worshipping at the altar of Mammon was expected to do a U-turn and become altruistic. But beneath the surface snouts were in the trough.

    For the first time in the history of infectious diseases the entire global population, healthy and infirm, would now be forced to quarantine, as apparently we could be asymptomatically-ill, or healthy-sick.

    Staying apart from each other meant no visits to elderly relatives, because grandchildren might kill their grannies. Children might even infect one another with a disease less likely to kill than being struck by a fork of lightning.

    Naturally outdoor sports and music events would have to be prohibited too. After all, they wouldn’t want people to be discussing the bullshit over a few pints. And finally, most small and medium sized businesses were to be closed down, regardless of the long-term effects.

    Well not all small businesses. Off licences, fast food outlets and supermarkets would still be open. These however are usually staffed by low skilled, low-wage earners. Young and expendable in other words.

    The propertied middle class would stay at home, protected from the menace of infection behind computer screens, home deliveries and A-rated houses. These were the civil servants, tech workers, teachers, and professional classes.

    This ‘Zoomocracy’ would ‘stay safe’, while boosting the profits of Messrs Bezos, Gates, Dorsey, Zuckerberg et al. Somehow the top ten wealthiest men in the world managed to double their wealth in the midst of the biggest international crisis since World War II. It would make you wonder who was really in control.

    Garda Checks

    We were treated to the daily sight of embarrassed members of the Gardai stopping ordinary citizens on their way to shops enquiring as to the purpose of their journeys.

    Other brave fellows formed road blocks at entry points to beaches or mountain trails. A particularly bizarre incident took place one Sunday near the tiny Cavan village of Mullahoran, when the only four roads leading to the Catholic church were blocked by garda cars preventing parishioners accessing their place of worship.

    The terror was augmented by the obscene nightly roll call of death and pestilence, which had the desired effect on the majority. Those who didn’t succumb to the fear were subjected to ridicule, or simply starved of the oxygen of publicity. Dissenters were forced to resign from their jobs.

    Throughout, we were repeatedly assured as to its deadliness, yet the median age of death was eighty-two years of age. The true figures for the numbers who died of (not with!) this virus will never be known.

    Paradoxically, despite the elevated risk of those over eighty years of age dying from COVID-19, their family doctors were advised that they didn’t need to see their patients.

    There were simply no treatments available. This despite Professor Didier Raoult from Marseille, Professor Paul Marek from Virginia and Professor Peter McCullough from Texas successfully repurposing drugs. The advice for the Irish patient was to take two paracetamol and at the first tinge of blue call an ambulance. Primum non nocere, my arse.

    https://twitter.com/BillyRalph/status/1458052402372923392

    Psychological Torture

    Fear, like any stimulus exhausts itself, so using the support and advice from various purveyors of psychological tortures, such as Susan Michie, governments introduced curveballs to confuse the population even further. We couldn’t have people waking up and smelling the bullshit when they reflected on how many in their social circles had actually died of this deadly virus, relative to an average influenza season.

    ‘The New Normal’ was a term coined by very shady unelected people and repeated ad nauseum by some equally shady elected individuals.

    Once measures designed to ‘open up’ society were introduced we were treated to the infamous €9-45 minute meal and a pint. No meal, no pint. Then we had the restricted purchasing within supermarkets – crisps and condoms, but no socks or Nerf guns.

    Then came the masks, for almost every setting, including eventually, primary schools. Lone occupants of cars and swimmers at the Forty Foot and even people out picking blackberries in the remotest parts of Ireland weren’t excused.

    All of this imported from totalitarian China! And woe betide anyone not wearing their badge of allegiance. These untermensch were jostled by shopping centre security guards, refused access to medical care and even arrested, regardless of their age. And in the final entry in this sorry list, jailed.

    Having endured the relentless propaganda, lockdowns, masks, social isolation, endless hours of Netflix, nourished on the finest delicacies from Dominoes and McDonalds, the vast majority of the country’s wage slaves were simply dying to become commuters and patrons of the country’s pubs, cafes and restaurants once again.

    Safety First…

    So, when the experimental mRNA gene therapy, also known as the Covid vaccine, became available the population had been primed. Primed by the most successful advertising campaign in history, a global conformity Edward Bernays and his admirer Joseph Goebbels could have only dreamed of achieving.

    That ‘vaccine’ is the gift that keeps on giving – to its manufacturers. If Bill Gates’s wish comes true all seven billion humans on the planet will receive it.

    It is so safe that one manufacturer persuaded a court that its supporting data should be hidden away from prying eyes for seventy-five years. Nonetheless, the post-mortem in the peer reviewed literature is revealing serious adverse reactions.

    We heard from many sources including our own resident expert Professor Luke O’Neill that the vaccine was a game changer, while potential conflicts of interest were never disclosed or discussed during the extended time he spent on air.

    Other worthies such as dear old Joe Biden advised that you would not catch the virus, it would stop the transmission of the virus, and even stop hospitalisations and deaths.

    Fast forward a few months and you can catch the virus, you can transmit it, you can end up in hospital and die despite two, three or even four shots of this miracle medicine.

    Worst of all, we now can’t have an open scientific debate because the truth might get in the way of the vast profit potential for the manufacturers how inept our so-called experts really are, and how venal politicians in so-called democracies became as they made light of civil liberties.

    Medical Profession

    Today in Ireland, most of the medical profession are reluctant to acknowledge the damage inflicted on societies by their gullible and myopic approach of shutting down society, and they most certainly do not want to kill the golden goose, especially in general practice.

    No heed is taken of the CDC-VAERS data, Eudravigilance, WHO’s own reporting, the Yellow Card system in the UK, the up to 40% rise in life insurance pay outs in some European countries; resistance to exposing drug trial data to public scrutiny.

    A company that previously paid out the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine is now making billions in profits.

    No heed is taken of the meteoric rise in the careers of so-called celebrity scientists and doctors whose integrity and ethics were dispensed with at the first whiff of the profits on show.

    Contrast this with some real academics and scientists whose careers have been badly damaged by retaining their integrity; for example Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, Professor Martin Kuldorff of Harvard, Professor Jay Bhattacharya and Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, and Professor Peter McCullough of Texas A&M.

    This latter group called for the availability of early treatments, focused protection of the vulnerable, but for society to function as normal to limit unintended damage. They also advocated for judicious not widespread use of an experimental product, avoiding children and pregnant women in particular, and most importantly preserving scientific debate.

    Instead, we got lockdowns and restrictions on civil liberties, no early treatments, and a coercive vaccination campaign straight form the CCP playbook.

    Feature Image is a still from RTE’s Claire Byrne Live of Professor Luke O’Neil trying ‘Zorbing’.

  • Three Parables / Short Tales

    ABOUT A GIRL AND HER DATE OF BIRTH

    Once upon a time, there lived a girl who was so used to being accompanied by her date of birth, that she couldn’t imagine herself separated from it. For seven years following her first birthday, the girl and her date of birth were always seen holding hands, and people who knew the girl well were surprised when on her eighth birthday, they saw the girl walking alone, although strictly speaking, she was not alone, as her date of birth ran just a little behind her. Everyone got so used to seeing the girl’s date of birth running just a little behind her, that when the girl turned 15, they were surprised yet again to see her date of birth lagging behind, not just two steps away as it did during the last seven years but almost fifteen steps away from the girl. The number of steps between the girl and her date of birth grew with each birthday, and when the girl turned twenty-five, her date of birth was lagging twenty-two or twenty-five steps away, no one knew for sure how many, as there was no way to measure the number of steps. When the girl, by now no longer a girl but a woman of course, was celebrating her thirty-fifth birthday, her date of birth was so far behind her that it was no more than a small dark silhouette on the horizon, running, running, trying to catch up with the girl, that is, the woman, and of course, its efforts were in vain, as there was no way for the date of birth to catch up. Ten years later, when the woman was celebrating her thirty-ninth birthday in the new millennium, her date of birth tumbled back into the 20th century where it belonged and, no matter how hard the woman tried to pull it back into the 21st century so the two of them would stay together, she could not see her date of birth in the darkness of the past millennium. From then on, the separation grew harder for both of them, the woman and the woman’s date of birth. When the woman turned fifty, she walked to the Edge of the World, which was nothing but a precipice that divided the third millennium from the past, and she called out to her date of birth, hoping to hear its voice, even if she could no longer see it, but her date of birth did not respond. The woman spent the next ten years weaving an unusually strong rope, and when the rope was finally long enough as well as strong enough, the woman once again came to the so-called Edge of the World. She dropped her rope into the darkness and waited. Finally, someone tugged on the rope at the other end, ever so slightly, and although the tug was ever so weak, the woman knew it was her date of birth tugging, for who else would care to catch the other end of her rope? The woman spent the next twenty years standing at the Edge of the World, trying to pull her date of birth out of the abyss of the past century, but as every passing year her date of birth fell deeper and deeper into the past, the woman’s task looked quite hopeless, even to the woman herself, who just couldn’t quit and she stood there year after year and pulled and pulled, until her hands were so sore that she couldn’t hold the rope anymore, and when she gave up and died at the age of eighty-three, she was finally reunited with her date of birth.

    ABOUT THE APACHE AND A POET

    A long time ago, when the Spanish first encountered the Apache, whom they called Querechos, the Apache managed to capture five Spaniards, and they did to four of them what they always did to their enemies, and when they were about to do the same to the fifth man, their medicine man warned the Apache chief that the man they were about to execute was what the Spaniards called “poet”, which was similar to what a “medicine man” was to the Apache. It was decided that the life of the “poet” would be spared if he composed a “poem” every day, so the Apache medicine man could use it as a spell in his healing ceremony, and of course the Spaniard complied, under fear of death, and produced a poem per day, for many days, and after six months of this, the chief of the Apache pardoned him and changed the sentence from death by lancing and scalping to suicide. Thus, as soon as the poet ran out of poems, he would have to kill himself. Under this sentence, the poet went on and on writing poems every day, until he outlived all the Apache who had been present at his sentencing, and even though no one any longer remembered the sentence of suicide, he continued composing a short poem daily, because he knew that he would kill himself if he stopped composing poems. Come to think of it, this isn’t very different from the way some of us write poems today, is it?

    ABOUT INDIFFERENCE TO FAME

    One poet was very concerned about his future immortality, therefore he did everything possible to ensure that his works would remain for centuries. We will not waste time recounting unnecessary details of the steps he took to achieve his goal. We can only say that when that which will happen to all of us, happened to him, his soul instantly forgot about its existence in his body and began to fly around the world. In its seemingly aimless flying around the world, his soul sometimes flew over the city in which the poet had lived, but it recognized none of the streets or houses, including the poet’s own house. The poet’s soul flew into a book fair where his books were being sold and advertised, but after circling first over his books beautifully laid out on counters, then over the magnificently illuminated advertisements of his books, it flew out the window, as if the image of its former self on book covers had nothing to do with it. Just as accidentally, it flew into the house where the poet’s wife and children were still living, and without recognizing them, flew out the open door. The soul, freed from the body, was deeply indifferent to the man’s dreams of the immortality of his name, which it had long forgotten.

    Feature Image Daniele Idini

  • COVID-19: Torches of Freedom

    ‘Harold Evans used to say that an investigation only really began to count once the readers – and even the journalists – were bored with it’
    Alan Rusbridger: who broke the news?

    In New York city on Easter Sunday 1929, in a premeditated move, a group of women brought the annual parade to a halt and proceeded to light up cigarettes. In a choreographed response, the tobacco industry, guided by the legendary Edward Bernays, re-branded cigarettes ‘Torches of Freedom’.

    This manipulated scandal had the desired effect of connecting smoking cigarettes with female empowerment. Within a few years, a woman’s ‘right’ to smoke had largely been conceded. Effectively doubling its market, the tobacco industry laughed all the way to the bank.

    Such an apparently spontaneous public spectacle is arguably the gold standard in advertising, wherein an avant-garde movement is associated with a product or service – all while the consumer is blissfully unaware. Importantly, radical or even rebellious social groups often inform mainstream taste, as with the popularity of so-called ‘ghetto styles’.

    This article explores how the pharmaceutical industry, in league with technology corporations and so-called stakeholder capitalism – which entails giving corporations more power over society and democratic institutions less – successfully associated global support for universal vaccine uptake against COVID-19 with a ‘left-wing’ political outlook, infused with youthful idealism.

    In particular, global Black Lives Matter demonstrations appear to have been harnessed – without the consent of organisers – to popularise the use of face masks, which became the enduring global symbol of the pandemic. The fretful atmosphere these inculcated offered a chilling reminder that COVID-19 was constantly in our midst.

    This arrived despite an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, 2020 dismissing calls for widespread masking as ‘a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic’. That same month the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine referred to 14 trials on the use of masks vs. no masks, saying these ‘showed no effect in either healthcare workers or in community settings’. Thereafter, even experts who questioned their efficacy were censored on social media.

    Masks were supposed to play an equivalent role to the assumed purpose of vaccines: protecting others. They were made – and in some cases remain – compulsory in many settings in numerous states, foreshadowing similar laws enforcing vaccine compliance. In essence, the vaccine would set us free from an obligation to wear masks.

    Summer, 2020

    By the summer of 2020, with case numbers plummeting, many were wondering whether COVID-19 had become an endemic, seasonal respiratory infection. We learnt that France’s first known case was in December, 2019. Later, it was discovered to have been circulating in Italy from September, 2019 and in Spain from as far back as March, 2019, apparently without overwhelming medical systems.

    But a whole industry had been waiting for a pandemic to occur, with the incentive of producing a vaccine for global use and, seemingly, an architecture of surveillance that had been publicly discussed from the outset. In contrast to the Swine Flu debacle, this opportunity would not be lost.

    Moreover, it was being reported that PCR testing was inflating case counts (and thus mortality statistics) through false positive results. Publicity stunts that generated a wave of global hysteria were by then appearing increasingly absurd. Meanwhile, extraordinary predictions for mortality, suggesting we were contending with a challenge equivalent to the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1919 were proving seriously wide of the mark.

    Spanish Influenza caused approximately 75 million deaths, whereas COVID-19 may have been responsible for a global death toll of 6 million, the vast majority of whom were beyond average life expectancy, at a time when the global population was about five times that of 1919.

    Indeed, the early spike in deaths from (or with) COVID-19 in some countries can be attributed to hospitals transferring sick older patients into care homes, where outbreaks followed and only basic medical care was available.

    The ‘Scientific’ Advice Changes…

    After a period of social isolation brought about by unprecedented stay-at-home orders and lockdowns, there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in the wake of large and often disorderly Black Lives Matters demonstrations triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25.

    In response, some outlets claimed protestors’ use of face masks had prevented outbreaks. However, most of those in evidence were cotton fabric, which health agencies now acknowledge to be next to useless. Furthermore, masks had been worn as a defence against tear gas, or in order to preserve anonymity prior to COVID-19, as the feature image for this article from 2014 demonstrates.

    Whatever the purpose, an impression was created of ‘caring’ mask-clad protestors demanding racial justice around the world. Subsequently, Joe Biden’s own lawyers helped Whole Food workers mount a legal challenge to allow them to wear Black Lives Matters-branded facemasks while on the job. More revolutionary aspirations – including to disband the police – were conveniently ignored by lockdown-enthusiasts who craved enforcement.

    Circumstantial evidence suggests that demonstrations were seized on by an alliance of vested interests that exert control over a swathe of media, new and old.

    The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appears pivotal. The Foundation is the second-largest contributor to the WHO budget, and put over $10 billion into universities in 2020 as well as at least $250 million into journalism in the first half of 2020 alone.

    Unprompted by the publication of any scientific study, the WHO changed its advice on wearing masks on June 5, 2020 shortly after the Black Lives Matters demonstrations. Most national health agencies – long subject to regulatory capture – followed suit, although a few countries declined to alter long-standing advice.

    In the U.S., NIAID director Dr Anthony Fauci claimed he had previously told a white lie to the effect that wearing a mask offered no protection in order to prevent a run on stocks. But emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal he was giving the same advice in private — against mask use.

    Manipulation of mortality statistics can also be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. This set out strict new rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths that differed fundamentally from registration for other causes.

    The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’

    The achievement of universal vaccine uptake – no matter how limited its usefulness – offered dizzying possibilities to the super-rich intent on engineering a new world order, which was openly being referred to as the Great Reset.

    Political Identification

    There was also a direct political purpose for stoking fears around COVID-19, which goes some way towards explaining the involvement of actors beyond the pharmaceutical sector. Application of ‘the science’ against COVID-19 would undermine right-wing Populist movements around the world, which had been to the fore in challenging globalisation – alongside chauvinistically asserting national and religious identities.

    The political quiescence of the radical left in a period of authoritarian lockdowns led by rapacious global corporations arrived following the defeats of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K., and a concomitant decline in investigative journalism. Fresh from seriously undermining Corbyn with bogus charges of antisemitism, the once-progressive Guardian became a leading conduit for fearmongering coverage of COVID-19. It now provides fawning interviews with Bill Gates, whose Foundation subsidises the newspaper.

    Nonetheless, in the era of the internet political allegiances retain a tribal dimension that can be exploited. Thus, at the outset of the pandemic when lockdowns were first mooted many identifying as left-wing assumed that in ‘following the science’ and/or ‘listening to the experts’ they would be preventing the medical system from collapsing.

    But as the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris put it: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’

    In fact, from the outset there were huge divisions, and arguments, in the scientific community over the efficacy of lockdowns, masks and vaccine passports. But these debates were largely concealed from public view through online censorship of authoritative academic sources.

    2020 was also the year of the U.S. Presidential election during which the Democrats used the pandemic as a weapon against incumbent Populist President Donald Trump, who actively antagonised those identifying as left-wing.

    In order to defeat Trump, the Democrat establishment seems to have entered a Faustian Pact with Big Tech, ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and Big Pharma.

    One still hears partisan support for vaccines against COVID-19 being expressed by those identifying as left-wing. Most seem oblivious to the world’s ten richest men doubling their fortunes during the period, while the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fell; besides the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies.

    It is axiomatic that young people are drawn to idealistic ‘left-wing’ ideas – any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head. This was also the cohort that would be most difficult to persuade to take a vaccine.

    Therefore, apart from allaying individual health concerns, taking a COVID-19 vaccine was sold as an exercise in civic virtue. Hold outs were decried as selfish and put other people’s lives at risk, even unAmerican, while ‘anti-vaxxers’ were portrayed by a prominent (however hypocritical) left-wing ideologue Fintan O’Toole as a motley crew of ‘egoists, paranoiacs and fascists.’

    Generally ignored in this coverage is in that in the U.S. vaccination rates lagged among people of colour, and that leaders of the Black Lives Matters movement were steadfastly opposed to vaccine passports.

    ‘We Realised We Could’

    In a revealing interview with The Times Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, whose unpeer-reviewed paper in March, 2020 proved pivotal – ‘due to the professor’s WHO ties’ – to the introduction of lockdowns in the U.K. and elsewhere, revealed amazement at the influence he wielded. After the British government followed Chinese policy in introducing a lockdown he observed: ‘It’s a communist, one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

    “Getting away” with imposing lockdowns – that appear to be causing ongoing excess deaths – was predicated on the assumption that a vaccine, or vaccines, against COVID-19 would be invented within eighteen months or longer.

    A subsidised vaccine against COVID-19 would be all the more lucrative if it was not simply a one-off treatment, and as long as states were offering a captive market, through coercion if necessary.

    It also represented a unique opportunity to trial new technologies. Unsurprising, the industry, and their supporters, were highly resistant to any suggestion of a safe, off-patent treatment being used instead.

    Since the nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical industry has been implicated in a host of scandals, including the recent opioid epidemic. Oliver Wendell Holmes, dean of Harvard Medical School concluded in 1860 that ‘if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the seas, it would be all the better for mankind – and the worse for the fishes.’

    Moreover, in a history charting advances in longevity, The Changing Body (2012), Floud et al argue that ‘it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of scientific medicine when one considers that much of the decline in the mortality associated with infectious diseases predated the introduction of effective medical measures to deal with it.’

    Of course medications such as antibiotics continue to save many lives, but as David Healy put it ‘we are living off scientific capital accumulated in an earlier age.’

    Peter C. Gøtzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre has argued that the industry’s conduct today closely resembles organized crime syndicates. He wrote perceptively: ‘Drugs always cause harm. If they didn’t, they would be inert and therefore unable to give any benefit.’

    A recently published work entitled The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research (2020) by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry argues:

    Pharmaceutical spin doctors are the contemporary counterparts of the sophists of fifth century Greece. The essence of sophistry is to shape public opinion by skilful mastery of persuasive speaking without regard for any considerations of truth. Pharmaceutical marketing is a form of sophistry, whereby the serious attempt to discover efficacy or safety in medicine is subjugated to the goal of promotion. Medical rhetoric has usurped medical science – an embarrassment in an age allegedly devoted to evidence-based medicine (p.126).

    Qualitatively Different

    Attitudes to the COVID-19 vaccines were also scaffolded on tried and tested paediatric vaccines against common infectious diseases such as measles. Parents are encouraged to vaccinate their kids not just for their own sake, but for the sake of all children.

    The COVID-19 vaccines were, however, from the outset qualitatively different to most traditional vaccines, which generally produce a herd immunity that diminishes childhood morbidity – and even mortality – from infectious diseases, notwithstanding at times spurious claims of adverse reactions.

    All COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ produced so far are qualitatively different to most – with rare exceptions – traditional vaccines that are designed to prevent an infection from occurring.

    At the very least, one would have expected the trials to determine whether a COVID-19 vaccine would seriously diminish illness; yet as British Medical Journal associate editor Peter Doshi observed in October, 2020: ‘The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.’

    He continued:

    None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

    Moreover, the companies were busy covering their tracks, meaning efficacy, and long-term safety data, would be difficult to determine. In January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’

    This came after Pfizer pleaded an ‘ethical responsibility’ to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. Yet Doshi and Light argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’

    The information in the public domain was easily manipulated by servile media. In April, 2021 a Lancet article by Ollario et al referred to the ‘elephant (not) in the room’, wherein vaccine efficacy was being reported overwhelmingly in terms of a relative risk reduction. This gives percentages of around 95% efficacy, whereas the absolute risk reduction of developing a serious illness was in the region of just 1%.

    Importantly, relative risk reduction only considers ‘participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.’

    Peter Doshi has since publicly argued these ‘products which everyone calls MRNA vaccines are qualitatively different from standard vaccines.’

    Whistleblower

    In November, 2021, Paul D. Thacker in the British Medical Journal brought to light a whistleblower’s account of poor practices at a contract research company carrying out Pfizer’s trials. Brook Jackson raised questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight which, once again, gained little or no traction in mainstream ‘progressive’ media.

    The real scandal is that often coercive attempts to persuade the entire adult – and in many cases child – population was not based on a cost-benefit analysis.

    Recently, a peer reviewed article in Vaccine – the premier journal for vaccine research – found the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with a 16% higher risk of serious adverse events.

    The study was limited to an analysis of trial data the companies had submitted to the FDA and did not evaluate the vaccines’ overall harm-benefit. The authors argue that

    The excess risk of serious adverse events found in our study points to the need for formal harm-benefit analyses, particularly those that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes. These analyses will require public release of participant level datasets.

    A young, healthy person faces a vanishing risk of hospitalisation from COVID-19.

    However, throughout the pandemic industry-aligned ‘fact checking’ initiatives served to undermine scientific integrity. The tactic of so-called fact checkers is to highlight absurd claims from random sources that serve to undermine informed criticism of the lockdown-mask-vaccine policy.

    Apart from its political ramification, the vaccine was, and is, a cash cow. It is instructive that the AstraZeneca vaccine, which in an apparent appeal to left wing sentiment was to be sold ‘at cost’, never received U.S. authorisation, and the manufacturers have since announced that it will be sold for a profit.

    The failure to interrogate vested interests reflects a serious decline in contemporary journalism, especially from publications previously associated with progressive viewpoints, many of which now depend on philanthro-capitalist handouts. We have reached an absurd juncture where a centibillionaire such as Bill Gates is attacked for being ‘left-wing’.

    Sell to Anyone

    The COVID-19 pandemic realised former Merck CEO’s Henry Gadsden dream of making drugs for healthy people, which Merck would be able to ‘sell to anyone’, as he candidly revealed to Fortune magazine in the 1970s.

    This could not have been achieved without the active collaboration of technology corporations and stakeholder capitalism in an era of surveillance capitalism. The censorship and disinformation used to bring the world to a halt in 2020, and beyond, represents a unique attack on democracy and worked to the benefit of a global financial elite.

    As Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry anticipated ‘the ideal of an open, democratic society is threatened by an oligarchy of corporations’ (p.23).

    However, at least much of the evidence that was used to permit coercion is slowly being decoded by investigative journalists such as Paul D. Thacker and research scientists of the calibre of Peter Doshi. We can remain optimistic that the truth will eventually out, at least on the margins, despite continued social media censorship.

    Nonetheless, the willing dissemination of disinformation in once-reputable publications has been increasingly normalised. Thus, the first and enduring casualty of the war in Ukraine has been the truth.

    On September 10, 2022 the Guardian reported that ‘the much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive was a disinformation campaign to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine’s special forces have said.’ Strikingly, the authors do not refer to the Guardian previously publicising that disinformation.

    COVID-19 generated a conveyor belt of disinformation that has cast doubt over the reliability of contemporary journalism, and revealed how medico-scientific discourse can be captured by vested interests. It is vital for the future of humanity, as we confront environmental challenges, warfare and crushing poverty that scientific rigour, coupled with values that can be traced to Aristotle, are reasserted.

    Feature Image: Black Lives Matter demonstration in Oakland, California, December 2014.

  • About Queen Elizabeth in a Soviet Childhood

    Did I mention that I remember seeing Queen Elizabeth II not as a very old or medium-old or middle-aged woman, the way everyone alive now remembers her, but as a youngish-looking woman in her forties? Okay, my seeing her didn’t take place in real life, but still… for a child living in the Soviet Union, it was a bit unusual. Here’s how it happened.

    My father had a huge stamp collection in Moscow. In the sixties he corresponded with stamp collectors—philatelists—from all over the world, and when I say “the sixties,” it’s important to keep in mind that those were the Soviet sixties, and if you know what the Soviet sixties were like, and what Soviet censorship was like, you might imagine what it felt like to correspond with people from Australia, New Zealand, France, FRG/ФРГ (the usual Russian acronym for West Germany), Belgium, and so on, simply to exchange some stamps for a stamp collection. My father’s stamps were kept in special albums—kliassery in Russian.

    I learned names of foreign countries from them: a stamp from Sweden, a stamp from Hungary, a stamp from Denmark, and always the British stamp, with a portrait of dainty Queen Elizabeth, still a youngish-looking woman in her forties, with a little crown on her head, like a silvery bird on a dark nest.

    It was thanks to my father’s stamp collection that we were able to leave the Soviet Union. I won’t go into all the details of what it was like, in the early seventies, to apply to the OVIR (Office of Visas and Registration) for permission to emigrate, and I won’t compare the process to Russian roulette, although it would have been the right comparison.

    One day we were lucky and got our permission. Now my parents had to buy four plane tickets to Vienna, and they didn’t have enough money. My father sold his whole stamp collection to a well-known philatelist in Moscow, and with that money, he was able to buy us four plane tickets to Vienna.

    So here’s how I saw Queen Elizabeth II. If you missed the part about the queen… Psst-psst, it was in the middle.

  • Smartphone usage is impacting society, but how?

    Whether we’re regularly reading sports news or contributing to a comical WhatsApp group, many of us have become heavily reliant on our smartphone devices. In fact, smartphones have impacted the world’s population greatly and have added a sense of convenience that wasn’t there before, be it for shopping online or ordering in some food using a popular app like Uber Eats.

    The sheer amount of functionalities a modern-day mobile phone possesses is remarkable when you really think about it. Gone are the days when texting and playing Snake were regarded as innovative opportunities, instead being replaced by internet-based products that can perform an incredible amount of tasks. People find love using apps, they’re booking holidays on a smartphone device, tucking into pirate-themed casino games, posting images on Instagram, and even conducting banking enquiries through an official banking app. While these miniature computers in our pockets highlight how far technology-based innovation has come, they do contribute towards some concerning negative societal effects, though.

    After all, given the fact that devices made by the likes of Apple have become more sophisticated year on year, as a society, we’re ultimately being exposed to something new and untested. Nobody knows the impact constant smartphone usage will have on youngsters as they progress into adulthood, for example. For now, though, despite smartphones providing a range of benefits, there are many negative effects of phones on day-to-day life. Let’s assess a number of concerning developments around smartphone usage below.

    The social aspect

    While instant messaging apps and online dating products enable people to converse in a more casual manner, there is no doubting that we’re yet to see the full effects of them when it comes to establishing relationships in real life, particularly when assessing the youth of today. From being judged constantly on social media to disturbing sleep patterns that can then hinder progress in daily life, society has become glued to their smartphones screens. The art of conversation has been lost somewhat, with the rise of the introvert becoming inevitable as social skills diminish throughout society as a whole. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people in this category, but there is no denying that smartphones have resulted in a lack of conversation between people. Who knows how this could impact our future.

     

    Negative impact on parenting  

    According to research, parents are not fully present when they’re on their smartphones devices. As such, there are concerns that many modern children are growing up with a whole host of emotional issues, perhaps through being starved of attention and feeling emotionally neglected. With limited research around what has become a modern-day parenting issue, there are growing concerns surrounding the impact of smartphones on parenting. Smartphone addiction is a genuine issue, no matter the age group.

    Smartphones are ruining relationships

    Smartphones are having an impact on romantic relationships, too. With some people paying more attention to their social media feed than a loved one, Dr. Suzana E. Flores, a clinical psychologist, says: “This sends a message that their phone is more important than their partner. When a partner feels dismissed or unappreciated, they will eventually choose someone else who values their company.”

    Self-worth based on social media likes

    Another concerning trend has seen an increasing amount of the global population seeking approval from their social media audience. In 2022, sharing a viral post online is an accomplishment for many, with “likes” being the main aim of the game. This has led to more people comparing themselves with other social media users and basing their self-worth through the traction their posts get on popular on popular platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

  • enuff

    live long enuff yoolsee enuff war –
    yool think this is not what life is for –
    yool feel all the feels feasibly feelable –
    yoolbee both heart sleeve-able and heart konseelable…
    live long enuff yoolhear enuff bang –
    yool vibe off protest songs yoor parents sang –
    yoolyawn at the yarns elected folk spin –
    yoolbee both heart open and heartbroken…
    live long enuff yoolsee enuff war –
    yool think this is not the days of yore –
    yool roar all the roars possibly roarable –
    konflikts not adorable – kuntreeze are not hoardable…
    live long enuff yoolhear enuff bomb drop –
    yoolwish yookood command call all bomb stop –
    yoolwince once more wearily – weep waspish tears –
    we all be humanity – same loves – same fears…

  • Poetry: Kevin Higgins

    Memorial to Myself

    I have been away toasting tables lined
    with the pricier variety of imbecile;
    humouring old buzzards in Aran sweaters
    and cranky caps
    until their sweaters collapsed
    threadbare off their bastard backs.
    I have cut ribbons for guys
    floating balloons across the town square
    and calling it dance.
    I have eaten with people of enormous importance
    and forgotten most of their names.

    I did not shrivel like the rest of them.
    Though they thought they had me
    I was not bought and sold at the market stall
    where you can get (third hand)
    Fianna Fail senators cheaper
    than Mayo flags two weeks after
    an All Ireland defeat.

    I am again what I was before
    and secretly always was
    though I sometimes had to hide it.
    I did not kill the dream I dreamt with those others
    not all of whom made it this far.
    Tonight I consult their ghosts.

    Feature Image: Higgins and Ivana Bacik campaigning during the 2011 presidential race.

  • Musician of the Month: Niamh McKinney

    For a lot of my life I felt a fervent need to be doing something creative but I didn’t know what. Eventually I started to feel the unsated creative urge turn to intense frustration within me; a physical tension through my body, like important growth held back or suspended indefinitely. I pictured bunched vines in my arms, straining to be freed and climb. I knew I needed a creative outlet, but I didn’t know what it should be. I quashed these intense feelings, over and over, trying to reason them out of existence.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNcw0ZkADKY

    A music-lover since I was tiny (as a small child I heard a lot of traditional Irish music; as a teen I loved The Cranberries, Alanis Morrissette, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Metallica, Sinead O’Connor, Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, a little Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers to name a few… then Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, Jefferson Airplane in my late teens/early twenties), I actually went through a long period in my early twenties of denying myself the pleasure of listening to my favourite songwriters.

    It had actually become painful for me: Listening to my favourite songs was never enough – I felt I should be writing songs. It was a nagging, constant voice chanting in my ear. However, for years I stifled that urge, I told myself people who don’t play an instrument can’t write songs. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to have a creative outlet, it wasn’t as though anyone else needed it to happen from me: there are plenty of songwriters out there! But it was a need, not merely a desire.

    A ferocious hunger was building in me and I felt utterly helpless in the face of it. I convinced myself I was unable to write a song. Isn’t it strange how boxed-in our ideas can be? How stifled and thwarted we can become because of them. I gave up on listening to music, it was too painful, and I was busy in life anyway, so there were a million distractions…

    https://soundcloud.com/niamhmckinney/the-price-new-mix?si=4cdfd3f26bef4171803e71ea2e647cf8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

    One day, however, my husband (a singer and guitarist) and I decided to record “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for a laugh on his Mac: He would put down the guitar and main vocal and I’d add harmonies. After we recorded the song – amazed by the possibilities that recording with the Mac offered – I asked my husband to show me how to layer tracks and then he left me alone for a while to play around with it.

    I grabbed a notebook of poetry (I’ve written since I was a small child) and started singing words into the mic. Entire songs came out of me, already fully formed. I was astounded and elated: I put my voice to the air as though freeing a bird long-trapped and the lines of words came out as songs, as though they’d been stored inside me just waiting to be sung. No thought or effort was needed. The question as to whether they were “good” or not didn’t actually occur to me at all. The creative frustration I had been feeling for years was finally being released.

    I was euphoric. I hardly left the bedroom for three days. I wrote at least twelve songs within those three days, each one a fully-formed melody and full set of lyrics: verses, choruses, bridges – everything flowing out effortlessly.

    I felt like I was wholly myself – truly – for the first time in my life. I didn’t need anything else to come from it. Having the songs written was enough. My soul had the avenue of expression it had been hankering for – making me absolutely desperate – for years. A month after my first bout of songwriting, the third song I wrote – “Down Near the Sea” – won a thousand euros in the Allingham Festival Songwriting competition. It was a very welcome validation.

     

    Despite the fact that my husband is a musician, it took a couple of years before he began writing accompaniments for my songs, all of which I wrote and recorded a capella – often recording them as I wrote them – with layered harmonies. He brought the songs to completion. He is highly intuitive and stays utterly true to the meanings and feelings of the songs. He also has an unbelievable ability to surprise me and craft unexpected accompaniments for certain of my songs. It is endlessly satisfying, having this creative relationship as well as our marriage now.

    The two of us derive enormous pleasure from it. He has said he loves being pushed creatively by certain of my songs to challenge himself and get the accompaniment to where he wants it.  I know next to nothing about music – keys, chords, etc – so the work of creating accompaniment is down to Steve. However, I sometimes write a line of melody for the guitar to play here and there, or request a certain sound or feel here, a certain atmosphere there, and we have developed an intuitive creative rapport between us.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney.

    I write alone and in dribs and drabs: a little ribbon of melody floating to me while I unpack the dishwasher; a snippet of a lyric coming to me while I’m out running. When I feel I have the song finished or near it, I sing it for Steve and he begins to write an accompaniment for it.

    Songwriting is a gift: A gift to a soul that endlessly craves to express itself, to express the way it experiences itself, and to channel pain and sorrow – as well as joy – in a way that no other art form allows.  I am blessed to be married to a gifted musician who creates the accompaniments, the structures for my songs to be held in and elevated upon.

    There is something ethereal and mysterious about how a melody visits you, or descends to you, and entices your voice to sing it. So deliciously mysterious; the compulsion to join voice to melody, lyric to line, in order to allow the soul a kind of freedom it can access in no other way. I have been singing since I was a baby.

    Melody comes to me at odd moments, or mundane moments. I might be thinking about something else entirely and suddenly notice I am humming a tune I quite enjoy and I’ll record it into my phone. A particular lyric will ‘ask’ for a particular series of notes; the notes come and lend themselves to the words, and suddenly the marriage of words to melody have completed the expression of the feeling; they encapsulate that extremely personal experience or reflection. When it happens I experience a unique high. I consider myself lucky, to have stumbled upon relief, release: A gift.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney Bandcamp

  • The Best Neoliberal Country in Europe

    Ireland is the bloated sow that kills its young. The best little neoliberal country in Europe. From the blood of patriots, alas, a city of tents has bloomed around us.

    Strange flowers bloom in our city, folding into doorways at night, spreading through the city and out to the suburbs.

    Airy, I suppose, and if you want to look at the stars, you can sleep al fresco in a fashionable street corner on Grafton Street; snug under a sheet of newspaper

    Such a fabulous city. The edge to it now. Feral gangs roaming the streets, the glitter of knives after dark, the wretched stench, the rivers of urine. And such sights to behold. A man defecating on the pavement, a girl in her underwear, crazed on drugs, running around O’Connel Street.

    Enjoy your trip home from the city, if you have a home. You might not have it for long. A tent awaits you, like some fabulous moth flapping its wings in a cold wind, just for you.

    Good thing we got rid of the scourge of England. Our own in charge now: posh, privately educated politicians, owners of multiple properties, unctuously wringing their hands about the crises of homelessness; so hard to maintain all those properties, so very hard.

    Are we a failed state then? An outlier in Europe when you examine homelessness, the cost of living, the health service?

    Yes.

    A nasty little neoliberal country run as a business model. A human being is reduced to an economic unit to be preyed on, exploited, profited from.

    Capitalist pathologies have morphed into neoliberalism. With checks, balances, and democratic norms, it’s cyclical nature could have been sustained, but at its best it exploits and appeals to the very worst in our human nature, creating a society of individuals motivated by little other than self-interest and self-advancement, jostling for status, position, power or wealth, enslaving humans by the ego, itself an absurd societal construct .

    Everything has shifted to the right, including basic moral parameters. Democracies are failing, the right and the left are configuring.

    Here sadism and cruelty have crept out from under the nun’s mantle and into public discourse. Homeless children, like cockroaches, eat their dinner off the pavement.

    But the economy is thriving, and there’s full employment…

    The slogan “Keep the recovery going” … was as out of touch with reality as any despot surrounded by yes men. It’s a good thing a disenchanted constituency here will be soaked up by Sinn Fein.

    But profits blossom, as does the sale of luxury goods. Now we have the rich, the poor, and the working poor, who are little better than slaves.

    Vulgar extensions protrude out of gentrified neighbourhoods, gangs in the shadows waiting to smash through them.

    History teaches us again and again that the poor man will come to the rich man’s gate, and the barbarians are on the move. Civic virtues mean nothing, the good life or the practice of virtue is sneered at.

    The idea of civic-minded citizens leading a virtuous life is not a religious concept, but about creating a society based on shared collective values. There are ways to organise a society for the greatest common good that don’t require a widespread understanding of rocket science, or a Communist regime. It simply involves valuing wider social responsibilities, and relationships over the narrow morality of self-interest and self-advancement.

    Empires come and go, and simple spiritual lessons go unheeded. Monotheistic religions are a disaster, and the religious disposition may well be a pathology, but there are great riches in all spiritual traditions, blithely ignored.

    Who, once he had truly seen a flower, not just looked at it, would want temporal power or to run an empire, or would trample on someone else?  A fool perhaps. Only a fool who cannot see it.

    Survival was never about the survival of the fittest. Darwin was referring to the survival of the fittest to adapt. Atomised humans have no sense of being part of a collective species, no shared sense of a  future, or of the future of the planet that sustains them.

    And when the nuclear cloud has settled, the earthworm will perhaps continue churning joyfully through the charred ruins of the Earth. Perhaps even a flower might poke it’s head above the rubble when the human grub has gone.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini