As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of ‘The Times’ and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames….

…Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.

As Orwell wrote in his monumental work, 1984, this is the goal to which all governments move until they reach full totalitarianism. Re-writing the past is a continuous task for the Ministry of Truth and their legions of slaves—the eternally suppressed Outer Party members.

Sound familiar? Of course, it’s going on now in our supposedly free and democratic societies.

Today, the Press, the media, the chattering classes, call that execrable mob what you will, blatantly re-write reality whenever they feel like it. The New York Slimes is a world leader in mendacity in journalism, CNN a world leader in lying about Trump.

Orwell campaigned ceaselessly for honesty in reporting and writing, especially when it annoyed the Establishment. In his A Review of Mein Kampf, published in England in 1940 when England was at war with Germany, he discusses the very real and powerful appeal of Hitler’s ideas and personality at a time when England was facing possible defeat by the Third Reich. A while ago, our illustrious blog “BarrelStrength” carried a discussion of Orwell’s review by yours truly.


Well, lo and behold, I stumbled on an extremely interesting video on YouTube [see here]. Searching the Web, you can find many links to Orwell’s review.  Most show Orwell’s review containing the following quote….


But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches …. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.

Note the ellipsis. It denotes something missing. All the links to this essay show the same thing…EXCEPT for the original copy stored by Project Gutenburg [here]. Note what has been erased…

 

You see, Orwell did not fabricate fictitious feelings and emotions about the personality of Hitler. In our diseased times, everyone remotely active in the political sphere has to shriek their personal hatred at the top of their lungs, lest they be accused of fascist sympathies. Indeed, who would dare not to?

Hitler plays the role of Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, the quasi-mystical figure whom everyone must hate, who never seems to be defeated, who lives eternally as a permanent threat to the rule of the Party.

Apparently, Orwell’s lack of the required hatred was enough to have some of his essay consigned to the memory hole.

Rebel Yell

These days, when the Fake News Media drones on endlessly about some foreign leader being “the Last Dictator” or something, you know there is a hidden motive. Take Belarus, for instance.

Belarus, formerly White Russia in the Soviet Union, is led by Aleksandr Lukashenko and has been since its independence. No doubt he is less susceptible to “democratic” persuasion than he should be, but he seems to be more in tune with reality than some in the West.

In the never ending saga of Covid-19, Belarus seems to have adopted the same policies as did Sweden, namely, not locking up its citizens and destroying its economy, but attempting to live and behave reasonably.

Apparently, Belarus was offered nearly $1 billion by the World Bank at the beginning of the corona-mania, but only on condition that it adopt the lockdown policies of Italy and Spain and other countries.

According to Belta (the Belarusian news agency),

According to the president, the World Bank has showed interest in Belarus’ coronavirus response practices. “It is ready to fund us ten times more than it offered initially as a token of commendation for our efficient fight against this virus. The World Bank has even asked the Healthcare Ministry to share the experience. Meanwhile, the IMF continues to demand from us quarantine measures, isolation, a curfew. This is nonsense. We will not dance to anyone’s tune,” said the president.

And what of Belarus’ record in coronadoom? According to the Johns Hopkins website, Belarus (population 9.5 million) has recorded 553 deaths from Covid-19 as of July 30th. With no lockdown. With no economy shutdown.

Compare that with Italy, say, with a population about 60 million and over 35 000 deaths and a crippling lockdown, which has a per capita rate ten times higher than Belarus.

No wonder the globalist money bags hate Lukashenko; he won’t knuckle under to their extortion racket.

Rebel Yell

Some updates from Old Blighty on the state of coronadoom…

 

From the Daily Mail (UK) 

As my legions of adoring fans will note, this is a much-delayed missive on the state of our collective insanity. This will be the last specific plague-year number. Why?

….Because this epidemic is OVER. All that remains is the paranoia and political hysteria that is paralyzing entire countries. Politicians will be loath to give up their “emergency powers”—they enjoy them too much. Of course, there are large swathes of the population that relish wallowing in disaster porn, but most of us are sick of it. Our societies have dealt with much worse diseases and not shrivelled up into whining cry-babies. Here are a couple of snap shots from Britain, where again the paranoia is being stirred up for “second waves’, “third waves” and “n-th waves” just so governments can boss everyone around in their private lives.

Oh, and never mind the millions who have lost their jobs, businesses, and livelihoods—they are just the collateral damage when you are “saving lives”. On that topic, ask the residents of long-term care homes in Governor Cuomo’s Death State, New York, how they feel about that. Or, for that matter, in Canada.

 

As Guido Fawkes (UK Blogger) notes…

New polling from Kekst CNC has revealed that on average the British public believe a whopping 7% of the UK population has died from Coronavirus, a number 100 times higher than the recorded-death reality. Brits also believe that 22% of the country has had coronavirus, when the real surveyed number is four times less – between 5 and 6%. Brits are also the most fearful of a second wave of infections of any country polled, with more than three-quarters (76%) expecting one in the next year or so…

 

Sheesh.

Rebel Yell

A very necessary and rigorous take-down of the appalling leadership of the once-great Cambridge University by Douglas Murray [here] is necessary reading for all.

 

It relates the story of an ignorant mediocrity proclaiming ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’ and her subsequent promotion by the University commissars.  But even better is the commentary by a Mark Corby (thank you, sir) which I reproduce below:

 

Well done indeed Mr Murray, a splendid piece. Using almost surgical precision, you have skewered that pretentious Gopal to the wall, like a malignant butterfly.
Even allowing for an infinitesimal amount of Oxford bias, you have clearly exposed the University of Cambridge for the pestilential cesspool of academic achievement it has been since time immemorial. One only has to think of the wretched traitors spawned there in the 1930’s, Blunt, Cairncross, Philby & Co.
Nurtured and suckled by the heady atmosphere of sodomy, treachery and deceit, so prevalent at the time, particularly in the infamous Apostles ‘Society‘, no single institution has done so much damage to England.
Gopal, an over promoted, entitled cretin, seething with rage, and continually spewing vitriol like some demented Gorgon, is but the latest in the horrors that Cambridge has visited on this once “ green and pleasant land”.

 

‘Nuf said.

 

Rebel Yell

 

 

Good Blog—Real science;   science20.com

Rebel Yell

 

What’s it all about, Alfie?

 

Rebel Yell

 

June 3, 2020

This is no longer a daily rant as the plague situation seems to be reasonably well understood and not much changes.

In Ontario, the emergency situation has been extended again to June 30th. Well, you lucky folks who are out of a job and business people whose businesses are folding, too bad. Perhaps Theresa Tam (Chief Public Health Officer for Canuckistan) and others of her ilk would like to donate some of their fat salaries to help you. Fat chance, I hear you say.

Again, in the media, there is no talk of the costs to people’s lives and livelihoods—the vast majority of the population of 14 million in Ontario.
My confidence in Premier Ford, even though his government’s actions so far have been quite reasonable, is softening.


This pandemic mind set is going from absurd to insane.

At the beginning of this thing, the reactions of Western governments seemed reasonable, given the lies of the communist Chinese government and their toadies in the World Health Organization (of which Dr Tam is an apparatchik). Perhaps death rates of the order of 3–4% were real. Hence the lockdown mindset. But even in the places that took the heaviest hits, New York City and such, the emergency hospitals and the US Navy hospital ships were never even used. The much-feared wave that would overwhelm the hospital system simply did not happen—neither in the US nor the UK.

There was, and is, a vast difference of opinion among the medical experts about the extent of the disease and the effectiveness of the lockdowns in suppressing it. Doctors and scientists from Oxford, Stanford, and many other places do not agree that shutting down the economy is the best thing, or even if it is helping. Watch this video with Dr Sunetra Gupta [see above video]  of Oxford University give a very different assessment from the state-approved narrative…

It is interesting that she says that lockdowns have little effect as the pathogen has, essentially, swept through the population and we are now on the downward slope of the curve. Further, confirmed cases don’t tell us anything of any use as the case numbers are entirely dependent on testing, which affects only a tiny part of the population. The only relatively reliable estimates can be obtained from death data—the number of confirmed deaths.

As a rider to that, looking at the data from Our World in Data, one can see exactly these data from many different countries. Since countries have very different populations, a comparison of countries with the total confirmed deaths per one million of the population seems a credible metric.

So let’s take a look at the data (seven-day rolling average) for the following situation:

Several countries at the same relative socio-economic level;
Total number of confirmed deaths per million of the population since the beginning of the pandemic to June 3rd;
Lockdown or no lockdown. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-million

United Kingdom     579.93 [lockdown]
France                       443.37 [lockdown]
Italy                           554.57 [lockdown]
Spain                         597.59 [lockdown]
Germany                   102.06 [lockdown]
Sweden                     442.41 [no lockdown]

Sweden with no lockdown has almost exactly the same total death rate per capita as France with a massive lockdown! And Sweden is significantly better off than Italy, Spain and the UK.

On the science front, some very interesting developments regarding hydroxychloroquine–a drug that could possibly treat, or manage, the symptoms of covid-19.

Since President Trump mentioned it, the Fake News Media immediately claimed that it must be useless, even dangerous, simply because they hate Trump. They glommed on to that despite the fact that several clinical researchers around the world have claimed success with it.

Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), reports:

 
A study published on 22 May in The Lancet used hospital records procured by a little-known data analytics company called Surgisphere to conclude that coronavirus patients taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine were more likely to show an irregular heart rhythm—a known side effect thought to be rare—and were more likely to die in the hospital.

But,

Today, The Lancet issued an Expression of Concern (EOC) saying “important scientific questions have been raised about data” in the paper and noting that “an independent audit of the provenance and validity of the data has been commissioned by the authors not affiliated with Surgisphere and is ongoing, with results expected very shortly.”

Really? That’s interesting. Looks like the Fake News industry bit off more than they could chew. After some digging into the background of this company Surgisphere, Science reports:

Surgisphere’s sparse online presence—the website doesn’t list any of its partner hospitals by name or identify its scientific advisory board, for example—have prompted intense skepticism. Physician and entrepreneur James Todaro of the investment fund Blocktown Capital wondered in a blog post why Surgisphere’s enormous database doesn’t appear to have been used in peer-reviewed research studies until May. Another post, from data scientist Peter Ellis of the management consulting firm Nous Group, questioned how LinkedIn could list only five Surgisphere employees—all but Desai apparently lacking a scientific or medical background—if the company really provides software to hundreds of hospitals to coordinate the collection of sensitive data from electronic health records. (This morning, the number of employees on LinkedIn had dropped to three.)

So why was this highly dubious company touted as providing reliable data on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine? And why didn’t the “investigative journalists” doing any investigating? Agenda, silly! It fit the agenda.

It was left to the AAAS writers to do the homework, expose another fraud, and bring The Lancet to order. It’s also true that The Lancet has a far-left editor in tune with all the correct fads and dogmas–but that’s another story for later.

Rebel Yell

 

A little change of course from the usual plague hysteria. Now we have race hysteria. As usual, the Fake News media are fanning the flames of stupidity and actually supporting these violent thugs rampaging through the cities of America.

 

I direct you to an excellent post by the ever-spot-on physicist, Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame.

 

The photo above is of an irate business owner saying that the people will end this rioting [here] if the gutless mayor and governor won’t.  Of course, they’re Democrats, the fomenters of mayhem in society. They are starting violent insurrection—that is sedition and should be treated as such.

 

Trump will crush them.

 

Rebel Yell

May 25, 2020

What’s this? Trump right again!? More liberal heads explode. Back in March, the well-known subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party, the World Health Organization, was touting a 3.4% fatality rate for the coronavirus. At the time, President Trump was ridiculed by the usual suspects for doubting this, saying that it would probably turn out to be less than 1%. [here]

As more has become known about this virus and its effects, particularly the large numbers who suffer no ill effects, the CDC has revised its estimates of the fatality rate to….0.26%, barely different from a nasty flu.
But, now here’s what the CDC is saying about the fatality rate the coronavirus:

• 0-49 years old: .05%
• 50-64 years old: .2%
• 65+ years old: 1.3%
• Overall ages: .4%
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.

Yoram Lass, the former director of Israel’s Health ministry, was interviewed by Spiked! Online . When asked why he called the general response to coronavirus world-wide, he replied:

It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria.
It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

And Dr Max Pemberton, writing in the UK Daily Mail:

We will never have a guaranteed zero risk of infection — it’s crazy to think that’s a possibility. And what about all the other risks we happily take every day? For example, there were 1,870 road deaths last year, but that hasn’t stopped most people driving.
It’s time to get the country back on its feet, while maintaining social distancing and regular hand-washing — and protecting the most vulnerable.
It’s natural to be afraid, but we cannot let fear control us. We will most likely be living with this virus for a long time, so for all our sakes, let’s get back to some common sense normality.

And for a superb summary of the current zeitgeist from the Burning Platform:

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.” – Samuel Adams

 

After observing the reaction of the America people, over the last two months, to a virus that will not kill 99.97% of them, I wondered how could a country created upon the blood and courage of patriot farmers and leaders who knew they would hang if their revolution failed, have degenerated into an infantilized nation of obedient slaves to un-Constitutionalized authoritarianism. It saddens me that a country borne by revolutionary means against an overbearing authoritarian monarchy has turned into a nation of bed-wetters curled up in their basements sucking their thumbs, begging government overlords to protect them from a virus.

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising after decades of government public school indoctrination where U.S. History facts have been usurped by feelings, diversity and gender agendas pushed by less than mediocre teachers. Government controlled education hasn’t taught children to think critically or question authority, but to obey rules and allow emotions to drive their actions. When multiple generations have been programmed to feel, rather than think, using panic and fear to make them do as they are told isn’t a difficult task. This pandemic reaction is a testament to their decades long propaganda and misinformation campaign. Rather than developing herd immunity the country developed a herd mentality.

A-men, brother.

Rebel Yell

Data here:  https://wmbriggs.com/public/worldometer13may.csv

May 22, 2020

Yesterday, I alluded to a British politician and Cabinet member, Dr Therese Coffey (PhD Chemistry, UC London), the only real scientist in the higher echelons of the government in the UK, who mentioned that maybe BoJo was getting some “duff advice” from some of the semi-secretive “advisory” committees.

Naturally, the Fake News media unloaded on her. As the task of the media is to spread panic and lies, real objective advice will be ignored and actively suppressed.

Jump to this side of the pond, especially to Professor William Briggs (Statistician to the Stars) for a few comments on lockdowns. Now that we are getting a much better handle on how to deal with things, we need some rigorous analysis of the thinking (or lack of) concerning lockdowns.

The picture above compares countries with and without lockdowns and death rates per million people.

Not looking good for the lockdown crew. And from UK data ….



During none of the previous outbreaks was the entire economy of the country destroyed with all its concomitant deaths (which never seem to be considered by the hysterical media)?

Talking of hysteria, it’s not only the media. Many people in positions of authority, and who should know better, are peddling hysteria. Consider this:

…Consider this scaremonger from the AIDS days:
Back in 1983, one scientist and doctor was sole author of a paper in the prestigious medical journal JAMA which stated that AIDS might be transmissible through “routine close contact, as within a family household.” That turned out not to be true, of course, but in the meantime the media had widely propagated the myth, naturally setting off a wave of hysteria.
Nevertheless, within months the author was promoted to chief of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, a position he still holds.
Who was that person? His name was… Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But let me finish with some sane words from the American Council on Science and Health[here] (Alex Berezow PhD Microbiology):

In the coming months and years, those with political agendas will use COVID-19 to criticize the politicians they love to hate. But remember that the novel coronavirus caught us all off guard. The biomedical community was always worried about influenza, not coronavirus, which is why most of us (myself included) were dead wrong about the danger posed by SARS-CoV-2. Anyone who says otherwise, namely that they “knew” this pandemic was coming, is engaging in revisionist history.

Rebel Yell