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jprobst@ozemail.com.au

Own Goals All the Way

Food for thought: How solid is the science behind vaccines?

This article is as much about freedom as it is about science. We have all seen what happens when the former is compromised based on the latter, even when that science is completely corrupted, in other words: when science becomes a weapon for governments and authorities. 

The WHO and governments are complaining louder than ever before about those annoying, misinformation spreading, tin-foil hat wearing anti-vaxxers.

Millions of dollars are being spent on research to work out those whacky brains of the vaccine hesitant and how they could be fixed, nudged to become dutiful citizens.

The Grattan Institute has just published a report urging for a policy reset to ‘close the vaccination gap’. Apparently, vaccination rates have dropped not just in relation to the covid shots.

Ironically, it is the biggest vaccination operation in history, made possible through the fastest, unquestionably most sciency science ever that has probably led to more people than ever becoming aware that maybe, just maybe, not everything is as it seems in the world of vaccine science.

Indeed, it isn’t. 

But about the falling covid ‘vaccination’ rates – is it really that surprising? After all, the promises made by the manufacturers were exposed as untrue, and stories about vaccine injuries are no longer as suppressed as they once were. Most people will eventually work out they’ve been duped, especially those who only got the shots because they were coerced to take them. They might not say it out loud, but not showing up is a way of communicating distrust too. 

Personally, I’ve always been somewhat sceptical about vaccines, but admittedly I was largely as ignorant as most when it came to understanding this field of science, or should we write, ‘science’? 

I’ve had my share of injections in my younger years, as have my children, without ever really understanding how effective or safe or necessary they were. My research consisted of reading the government-issued pamphlets, and in the end, I suppose one tends to trust the men and women in white lab coats, who, presumably, know best. 

In the throes of the panic-ridden covid days, when these new so-called vaccines were whipped seemingly out of nowhere, and my bullshit indicator already on high alert, I trusted my instincts, reinforced by experts who were criticising these new substances on perfectly reasonable grounds: They were not tested enough for anyone to know what their effects were truly going to be. And there was, as was plain to me from the outset, no dangerous pandemic going on anyway, and so there was no need for a vaccine in the first place. 

I refused the covid shots. In the end, I was lucky: I didn’t lose my job, though I feared I too might have to make that impossible and unfair choice. My refusal didn’t have any consequences beyond me having to delay travelling and being a social outcast for a few months. Mind you, that was bad enough, and I will not forget that. I won’t go into details, but I look around now, and I am glad I didn’t roll up my sleeve. 

Recently, I read Turtles All the Way Down – Vaccine Science and Myth, written by a group of anonymous authors, and edited by Zoey O’Toole and Mary Holland, both associated with Children’s Health Defense. I became aware of the book during one of the sessions of the German Corona Investigative Committee.

Everyone who has an opinion on vaccination or who has questions about vaccination should read this book. It was written before the covid shots came on the market, but it confirmed everything I observed during the covid era.

At 500 pages it’s not a quick read, and this doesn’t include the many hundreds of references which are available only online, presumably to save some trees. It’s also not a book you should read before bedtime.

As long-winded as it can be, this book is written in plain language, and very well-structured, and, as far as I can judge, very thoroughly researched. The authors manage to explain scientific issues and concepts clearly. They state their viewpoint, but also present the arguments made by the ‘other side’, only to refute them quite convincingly. 

The book is mainly concerned with vaccine safety, but necessarily also discusses efficacy. Each chapter ends with a summary, as well as questions the reader might want to ask his or her doctor.

The opening chapters explain how deficient vaccine clinical trials are: studies are purposely biased, scientific principles are disregarded in many other ways, but very often, proper science is simply not done at all. By the way, if you’d like some more reading after digesting this tome, you might be interested in Judy Wilyman’s 2015 PhD thesis, A critical analysis of the Australian government’s rationale for its vaccination policy, which I read in the early covid days when the writing was already on the wall.

The built-in deficiencies of the reporting systems are addressed, vaccination guidelines are dissected, before the authors discuss in great detail the founding myths of vaccine science: how diseases have disappeared, what’s up with herd immunity, the unsound basis for mandatory vaccination, and what’s wrong with just about every major vaccine on the menu of most countries. An entire chapter is dedicated to the mysteries of polio. 

If you’re pressed for time, you might just want to read the final chapter, which essentially summarises the ten previous chapters – but you wouldn’t want to miss out on all the gory details which might convince you that this particular branch of science should be generally prefaced by the word ‘junk’.

No matter how often researchers come to the same conclusion that governments can fix vaccine hesitancy by targeted indoctrination, I think it unlikely they will succeed in winning back trust from an increasingly sceptical public any time soon. The embarrassing own goals shot during covid will be talked about for decades.

Trip to the Blue Mountains

I recently walked the Dardanelles Pass loop in the Blue Mountains, enjoying the spectacular scenery on a chilly and windy day.

Importing your own scanned text into LingQ

I love using LingQ for my language learning, and to make the most of it, I wanted to import one of my favourite French books that I have only in hardcopy. Whilst the LingQ process for importing text is as easy as could be, preparing the text involved a bit of trial and error, so I thought I would share what I do.

The book is La délicatesse by David Foenkinos, which is full of vocabulary I’d like to internalise. By the way, I love the movie with Audrey Tautou too.

Step 1: Scanning

I found it best to create individual scans of each double page, or to scan to a multi-page PDF, but it’s important not to scan with OCR (optical character recognition) turned on, so that you just have a plain PDF without any text in the background of the image. On the scanner I used the option is called a “non-editable PDF” – a slight misnomer, but anyway. If you produce a scan with OCR you may later have trouble overriding the default underlying text output – unless of course you can change the scanner’s OCR language to French, but with my office equipment that wasn’t possible.

Step 2: OCR process

I use a program called Nitro, but Adobe Acrobat would probably be similar. After importing the PDF, I go to Review > OCR > Options > Advanced, and select French as the recognition language. Then click OK, and the text recognition process only takes a few seconds.

Step 3: Create text document

Still in Nitro, I go Convert > To Word > Convert. A Word doc with the text opens up. In my experience there are some anomalies in the placement of some blocks of text, so I continue…

Step 4: Cleaning the text

I copy and paste the text in the correct order into a Notepad document. The purpose of this is to strip out any weirdness that comes from the Word doc.

Step 5: Assembling the text

I then copy and paste the text from Notepad into a WordPad document, which is easier to work with than Notepad. In WordPad I get rid of any OCR errors, for example hyphens that have magically turned into bullet points, or unnecessary spaces, etc.

It could be easier to edit in Word though. If you want to get rid of double or even triple spaces between words, you can do an easy copy/replace.

Save the file as a LingQ-compatible DOCX file if you import the whole book in once go.

Step 6: Importing the text

You can then use the Import ebook function in LingQ to easily create a lesson with the text you scanned.

Or you can create a new course and then add each chapter as a lesson.

9/11 revisited – an inconvenient news story?

Now here is something truly newsworthy: On 26 November, over two weeks ago, it was announced that at long last the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has agreed to convene a special grand jury to consider important 9/11 evidence – evidence which has been dismissed, ignored and denied for years.

But since the press release was issued by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and distributed by the not insignificant PR Newswire, only a handful of minor news outlets have picked up this story. Not even the New York Times thinks this announcement is worth mentioning. Nothing in the Australian media either. Zilch. Rien. Nada. Nichts. The obvious question is: why not? After all, the events of 9/11 served as a justification for a long series of war crimes committed by the US, aided and abetted by many countries, including Australia. So would not a truly free and independent media be keen to report on this latest development that could mark the beginning of the exposure of the potentially biggest and most brazen cover-up there ever was? What a headline story that would be! Maybe our media are afraid to be accused of spreading fake news or following a conspiracy theory, or they are worried about looking foolish for swallowing the official cock and bull story. But I think it’s more likely that a lot of people must be very keen to let sleeping dogs lie for as long as possible, and sadly the mainstream media seem either complicit or simply lack courage.

A very general Google search (from 11 Dec) says it all:

Compare and contrast with an equivalent search on an in my view ultimately pointless story:

Not so WOW – seriously, Woolworths?

The other day I went shopping at Woolworths in Glenwood and I noticed a bench made from recycled plastic bags. How commendable indeed. A bench as shown on the excellent ABC TV series War on Waste, which by the way should be compulsory viewing in every school class around the country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But then there is this in the very same shop, an entire aisle of fruit wrapped in plastic:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously? I for one refuse to buy wrapped fruit like this.

Get your act together Woolworths, and walk the talk!