Dr Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• By May 2020, it had become apparent that the standard practice of putting COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilation with ventilators was a death sentence
• Between 50% and 86% of COVID patients placed on life support ended up dying
• By May 2020, doctors had also found that high-flow nasal cannulas and proning led to better outcomes than ventilators
• The World Health Organization promoted the use of ventilators as a way to purportedly curtail the spread of virus-laden aerosols, thereby protecting other patients and hospital staff. In other words, suspected COVID patients were sacrificed to “protect” others
• The matter becomes even more perverse when you consider the fact that many “COVID cases” were patients who merely tested positive using faulty PCR testing. Hospitals also received massive incentives to diagnose patients with COVID and put them on a vent

[…]

Via https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2023/02/01/how-covid-patients-died-for-profit.aspx/

By Perry Gottesfeld
Undark

The effects of lead on human health are well-documented — we now know that even low-level lead exposures can diminish children’s learning and impact behavior.

Given the negative publicity about the lead paint in our homes poisoning children and lead pipes contaminating our water, most people might assume that the lead industry is suffering a slow death.

But even as our understanding of low-level lead exposure hazards has grown, global lead production actually increased by 75% between 2001 and 2017.

In the U.S., according to the most recent federal data, lead usage grew 26% over this same period, largely due to a rise in ammunition production and lead battery manufacturing.

Despite advances in lithium-ion and other competing battery chemistries, lead battery production is expected to continue to grow to meet demands for transportation and so-called “clean” energy storage.

In fact, almost every electric vehicle comes equipped with an even larger lead battery than used in an equivalent size conventional vehicle.

In the face of more stringent regulation in the U.S., the industry has shifted production to countries with weaker standards and few resources for enforcement.

At the same time, the world’s largest lead battery company, Clarios, recently established a foundation that launched a major public relations effort to gloss over the industry’s own responsibility.

It’s time we push back to protect public health.

The effects of lead on people’s health are well-documented. Historically, physicians generally believed that children had to ingest paint chips to become severely poisoned, but we now know that even low-level lead exposures can diminish children’s learning and impact behavior.

Those effects not only cause individual harm, but they can also ripple throughout the economy. According to a 2010 report from the Pew Center on the States, the resulting loss of earnings totals more than $190 billion in the U.S. alone.

Less well-known is that lead accounts for more deaths among adults than any other chemical exposure, as it increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.

In 2021, a viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Heart Association declared that the burden of proof had been unequivocally met that lead is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease based on the “clinical, toxicological, and experimental evidence.”

And a study published in The Lancet Public Health in 2018 estimated that each year in the U.S., more than 400,000 deaths can be attributed to environmental lead exposure.

That’s nearly three times the number of people who die annually from excessive alcohol use.

These health effects are increasingly impacting low- and middle-income countries as lead production and recycling get exported to places with weaker regulations.

Studies from Mexico, China, Peru and other countries have demonstrated a higher concentration of children with elevated blood lead levels in communities closer to such facilities.

The lead industry has a long history of actively promoting the use of lead for water pipes, paint and other applications. Today, the International Lead Association, an industry trade group representing lead producers, continues to promote the “safe and responsible use of lead,” which it claims is “critical to achieving a sustainable and low-carbon future.”

At the same time, the industry has raised doubt on scientific studies showing the impacts of low-level lead exposures and is actively working to forestall regulations.

In 2006, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was updating the ambient air lead standard for the first time in nearly 30 years, the lead battery industry association even attempted to have lead removed as one of six criteria air pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act.

In 2022, industry associations pushed back on U.S. and European efforts to update environmental and occupational lead regulations.

The last primary lead smelter in the U.S. shut down in 2013, but domestic mined ore is now exported to other countries for processing where these smelters are known to be significant sources of contamination.

Used lead batteries are also often exported for recycling, to take advantage of weaker environmental controls abroad. For example, Mexico saw a 23% increase in used lead batteries imported from the U.S. from 2017 to 2021; Mexico’s air standard for lead is 10 times greater than that of the U.S.

In 2021, Clarios, formerly known as Johnson Controls, shut down a lead battery recycling plant it had opened less than a decade earlier in favor of exporting used lead batteries to recycling facilities in Mexico.

The year prior, the company’s foundation embarked on a public relations campaign billed as “Protecting Every Child’s Potential,” or PECP, in partnership with UNICEF and the nonprofit Pure Earth. The foundation has given both organizations millions of dollars. (The PECP project includes the International Lead Association and other industry associations as technical partners.)

That same year, UNICEF and Pure Earth produced a report that placed blame on others for “unsound recycling” while downplaying the need for regulation and improved pollution controls in the largest lead battery manufacturing and recycling plants. Pure Earth published articles advancing the same narrative in scientific journals.

In this way, the lead industry has been successful at placing blame on informal sector recyclers who melt batteries down on the side of the road to sell for scrap in many low-income countries. These efforts distract regulators away from focusing on emissions from larger licensed facilities.

Lead industry associations consistently work to discredit science and raise doubt by hiring firms to reanalyze the data from key studies. They fund academics and organizations that favor industry positions. The intent of these lead industry actions is to delay regulatory action and maintain the status quo.

These tactics are not unlike what we have seen from the tobacco industry, which has fought to exempt e-cigarettes from government regulation, funded scientists to publish favorable research and attempted to influence and fund U.N. agencies.

To counter these efforts, we must recognize the continuing influence of the lead industry and insist on greater transparency. Nonprofit organizations and governments must adopt comprehensive disclosure requirements and ensure that public health recommendations and policies are free from industry financial or other influences.

UNICEF and other U.N. agencies must stop accepting funding and collaborating with the lead industry, just as some U.N. agencies have established policies against tobacco industry interference.

In recent years, global public health organizations have called for an end to collaboration with the tobacco industry and all organizations that they fund. Now it is time for environmental organizations and international aid agencies to take the same action against lead industry funding.

Environmental justice, a key focus of the Biden administration, should not stop at the U.S. border. We must stop exporting hazardous waste and our most polluting industries that shift the burden of these exposures on countries with few resources to regulate or enforce standards.

At the same time, we should encourage all countries to put in place minimum environmental and occupational standards for smelters and lead-using industries to protect public health and the environment.

The U.S. has committed billions of dollars to eliminate lead water pipes, clean up lead-contaminated soil, and abate lead paint from housing. While addressing the legacy of lead pollution, we must recognize the role of industry influence in growing the lead market and keeping regulators at bay.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/lead-health-risks-heavy-metal-production/

El Gato Malo

a lot of very strange things seem to have happened in the west around covid and covid response.

not only did we take every piece of evidence-based epidemic guideline that had stood in place for 100 years and toss it out the window, but we then immediately adopted its diametric opposite as “proven policy” and recklessly imposed it in draconian fashion as though his was somehow “the science™.”

public panic was pursued as pandemic policy and response rammed down throats as trumped up moral imperative backed by increasingly overt threats and mandates.

dissidents were vilified and silenced. disagreement was disparaged and drowned under demagoguery.

the party line was as relentless and uncriticizable as it was lacking in foundation.

it felt like we were under attack.

it was not so much public health as war and as the fog clears we can increasingly see why: because this was done by soldiers.

this trend was astonishingly endemic. a few examples:

the UK

canada

the netherlands

don’t even get me started on china or the australian reversion to prison colony.

i suspect you’d be hard pressed to find a country in the west where this was not so and where not only were militaries and military grade infowar and propaganda techniques used against an unsuspecting citizenry, but where they are not, as is so clearly the case in the US, seeking to keep doing it.

this does not instill confidence.

but how did all this happen?

the US response was largely dictated early on by deborah birx, a woman who came from a military and walter reed background and had almost no direct experience in this sort of pandemic.

she did not come to the white house through a health agency but rather under the auspices of matt pottinger, the national security advisor. it seems she was feeding his wife yen non-public info from china and he then put her forward to run white house response.

this is, on it’s face, a really weird choice and situation.

• why would the security/military apparatus step forward at such a time?
• and why, the minute that they did, did folks like fauci and redfield turn on a dime and start advocating the exact opposite of that which they had been (which had previously been in accord with longstanding practice)?
• why suddenly adopt 27 kinds of deeply restrictive pseudoscience from a fountain of fake data like birx?
• and why, all over the world, was this a military/security state issue and not a health agency one?

it sure is an interesting question.

i don’t think there has ever been a disease response like it in the developed world.

a divergence of this sort and magnitude would seem to require a potent causative agent to induce it.

so let’s put on our prognosticating hats and give it a bit of a think.

obviously, what’s about to follow is speculative. i claim no special knowledge here, just a tendency to see the shapes that underlie pixelated mosaics.

but it sure seems to like like the most parsimonious explanation here is a simple one:

governments knew this was a gain of function lab escape and not a naturally evolved virus and feared what that might mean.

this put the controls and roadmap for handling it in the hands of the military and security agencies, not the health agencies who were grabbed and dragooned into compliance to assure their loyalty (and perhaps to hide their culpability as matters of “security.”

they did not know how the pandemic would play out but even more so feared the idea that the public would panic even more if it knew this was man made and feared a “bioweapon” (something i do not believe SARS-COV-2 is or was ever intended to be) because that story rather than “vaccine program” would be the first jump from “lab escape” in the public consciousness.

“national security” was invoked, blast shutters dropped, patriot act (or similar) powers evoked, and the kinds of people who plan invasions were put in charge of public safety for fear this might wind up seeming like some sort of war.

and so it became one in all but name.

[…]

Via https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/musings-on-the-militarization-of

(Getty Images)

Considering that the Western U.S. is in the midst of the most severe drought in a millennium, allocating billions of gallons of fresh water to grass seems like an egregious misuse of resources. The drought is so dire that the Colorado River, which provides 40 million people across the Western U.S. with water, has shrunk by 20% over the past 20 years.

Lawn maintenance is also a threat to Colorado’s pollinators and public health. Americans use approximately 70 million pounds of pesticides to maintain lawns each year. Of the 30 most common lawn pesticides, more than half are probable or possible carcinogens, and many of them are linked with birth defects, neurotoxicity, kidney damage, liver damage and more.

In Colorado cities and towns, such as Colorado Springs, the glyphosate-based herbicide known as Roundup is sprayed on lawns in public parks, despite being a possible carcinogen. Lawn pesticides and fertilizers commonly run off into lakes, streams and groundwater, wreaking havoc on aquatic ecosystems and polluting drinking water. Pollinators, which are on the decline globally and in Colorado, are harmed when lawn pesticides contain neonicotinoid chemicals. Insecticides aimed at lawn pests don’t spare bees and butterflies.

Lawn equipment also contributes to the climate crisis and the Front Range’s bad air quality. According to the EPA, in just one year, gas-powered lawn and garden equipment produced more than 20 million tons of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Even more emissions are created when lawn clippings are disposed of in landfills. In the Front Range, gas-powered lawn and garden equipment contribute as much as one-fifth of the region’s ozone pollution.

Landscaping alternatives better suited to Colorado do exist. Replacing lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping — termed xeriscaping by Denver Water — can reduce water usage by 30-80%. Replacing lawns with native plants can reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers. Growing native plants also patches together habitat for dwindling pollinator populations.

Colorado is a state defined by mountainous vistas, natural landscapes and abundant wildlife. Its residents are outdoor enthusiasts and free-thinkers, demonstrably not afraid to break the mold (consider the legalization of marijuana, the decriminalization of psychedelics). Yet many of Colorado’s yards exhibit a custom justified primarily by tradition and peer pressure.

Some cities, such as Aurora and Castle Rock, have passed ordinances to limit new lawns. However, statewide and in Denver, little to no progress has been made to incentivize xeriscaping.*

Lawns are antithetical to the climate and character of Colorado. Colorado’s leaders should implement educational programs about alternative landscaping and introduce greater financial incentives for home-owners and developers to replace lawns.

As our state enters another year of drought, climate chaos and habitat loss, hopefully Colorado will kick lawns to the curb.

* The process of landscaping, or gardening, that reduces or eliminates the need for irrigation.

Lecture 21: Machines at War – Evolution of the Catapult

Understanding Greek and Roman Technology: From the Catapult to the Pantheon

Dr Stephen Ressler (2013)

Film Review

According to Ressler the catapult provides an excellent case study of 700 years of engineering development. In 393 BC Dyonysius of Syracuse created the first military think tank to design and build weapons for his campaign against Carthage (see Military Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome ). The catapult grew out of a need to overcome limitations of the bow and arrow.

In engineering terms, a bow is a beam that operates by bending. Compression energy is created on convex side of the bow, while tension energy is created on the concave side. This stored elastic energy is released as kinetic energy (propelling the arrow).

According to Ressler, there are three ways to increase this kinetic energy

1. Increasing the length of the draw.
2. Shortening the bow string to increase the bow tension
3. Making the bow stiffer, requiring more energy to bend it (released when the string is released).

In the 2nd millennium BC, steppes nomads learned how to make a stiffer, composite (enabling heavier arrows to travel further) bow by combining wood, animal horn and animal tendons.

Greek Catapults

The next improvement was the gastrophetes, created by ancient Greeks in 399 BC: It attached a wooden slider to the bow with an iron trigger mechanism. The bowsman cocked it by applying his full weight to the belly brace. Not only did it have a longer range, but it could penetrate armor.

As new versions of the gastrophetes became heavier and more difficult to cock, a windlass was added to make a primitive catapult and it was fitted on a base.The oxybetes, invented in 375 BC, was larger than the gastrophetes and could shoot both large iron tipped bolts and 50 pound rocks.

When the bow couldn’t be lengthened any further, it was replaced by two torsion springs, made of twisted bundles of animal tendon.

The ancient Greeks classified artillery pieces into two categories: arrow shooting euthytones and stone throwing palintones. A full size palintone could throw  200 pound rocks 400 years and 50 pound rocks 700 years.

euthytone

palintone

In his 275 BC De Architechtura, Vetruvius cites the scientific formula used to calculate the ideal diameter of the torsion springs:

D = 1.1 x ∛100 M

M equals the weight of the projectile (in minas) and D equals the diameter of the torsion springs (in dactyls).

Although the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have a mathematical method of calculating cube roots, Eratosphenos inventing a process of determining their value by graphing them.*

Late model Greek catapults replaced the rope torsion springs with bronze leaf springs and pneumatic sliders.

The Scorpio increased the catapult’s power with forward moving arms.

Roman Catapults

The Hatra Ballista was a Roman siege catapult powered by torsion springs consisting of rope bundles made from animal sinew. This machine was particularly innovative, with  the two wooden throwing arms rotated inward, rather than outward as with conventional catapults. The inward swing allowed for a greater angle of rotation, which increased the elastic energy stored in the springs.

During strife-ridden late empire, the Romans reverted to using the one armed onager, which was less complex and easier to build.

*See https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TheEratosthenesMachineForFindingTheCubeRootOfTwo/

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/146678/146720

Vijay Kolinjivadi

Al Jazeera

Then there is the fatal confusion between efficiency and ecology. We are being duped to believe that buying more “energy efficient” or “green” products can save the planet. Whether it is a new electric car, an “eco-friendly” condo, a paper straw instead of a plastic straw, or a solar-powered turtle-shaped mega yacht – all are branded as ecological solutions because they are supposedly more energy or materially efficient than the standard alternative.

What often hides behind these “green” labels is the large carbon footprint their production generates. Furthermore, “greened” technological solutions often just shift the environmental damage they do to another sector or a distant location.

For example, the growing electric vehicle industry may help reduce carbon emissions but it will also cause a massive jump in the demand for lithium and other minerals. Scientists are already warning about the grave environmental impact the rush for mining lithium may have, including water pollution and loss, toxic waste spills, biodiversity loss and soil contamination.

Apart from making climate change worse, these “solutions” also disproportionately harm marginalised groups and Indigenous peoples, as UN special rapporteur Tendayi Achiume has recently warned. Not only are the impacts of ecological collapse felt more severely by those who encounter racism on a daily basis, but the extraction of minerals needed for “smart” technologies and renewable energy exposes these same people to pollution, violence and displacement.

The argument that “green” solutions provide jobs also rests on weak foundations, especially if the quality of work is considered. As the ILO has pointed out, a large share of employment for the so-called “nature-based solutions” is informal, low-wage, temporary, and exposed to risks, such as unsafe working conditions, child labour and lack of social security.

‘The biggest land grab in history’

Nature conservation has also fallen prey to the “greening” deception. For years now, large conservation organisations and their corporate sponsors have been pushing the idea that large swaths of land and forests need to be fenced off so we can protect biodiversity and help mitigate the effects of climate change.

Like the carbon offset schemes, this policy is just another way to enable big polluters to continue to pollute by saying: “We are doing something for the planet.” It also enables some – particularly in the tourism and construction sectors – to benefit from the so-called “nature” tourism in which the wealthy pay big money to access fenced-off parks and “experience” pristine nature while staying at luxury real estate projects.

And just like other “greening” strategies, this type of nature conservation results in major human injustices. Indigenous peoples from around the world have suffered evictions, dispossession and even killings as they have been forced from their lands to make way for nature conservation projects.

In the Republic of the Congo, the Indigenous Baka people have been brutally oppressed by the guards of a conservation project supported by the UNDP, WWF, the EU, the US and logging and palm oil companies. A UNDP investigation found that members of the community were routinely beaten, some imprisoned, tortured or raped.

In the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, the guards of a national park funded by the US and German governments have also engaged in violent attacks on the Indigenous Batwa people living in its territory. A 2022 report by Minority Rights has produced evidence that at least 20 members of the community have been killed and at least 15 women raped during forced eviction campaigns.

There are countless horror stories like these ones; according to estimates, some 14 million people have been evicted in this manner in Africa alone. That is why the news that a new conservation scheme was approved at the UN conference on biodiversity (COP15) held in Montreal in December was met with much dismay by Indigenous people across the world.

The new Global Biodiversity Framework – also called the 30×30 target – aims to turn 30 percent of the planet into protected areas by 2030. In a letter to COP15 participants, Indigenous peoples stated that the policy “may be the biggest land grab in history and further threaten the physical and cultural survival of Indigenous people worldwide”.

[…]

Via https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/1/29/greening-ourselves-to-extinction