Episode 2 In the Beginning

Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations

Dr Brian M Fagan (2003)

Film Review

Primates are an order of mammals divided into Anthropoids (apes, humans and monkeys) and Prosimians (lemura and other pre-monkeys).

The suborder hominidae differentiated from chimpanzees 7-5 million years ago. The date can be determined fairly precisely from a genetic mutation found in all hominidae in blood albumin. The most prominent hominidae species was Autralopithicus. It’s believed hominidae evolved as Africa became drier and jungle regions were increasingly transformed into grasslands (savanna). As savanna dwellers, hominidae were exposed to numerous predators and had to stand upright to survive (it helped them run faster). It was also much harder to find food on the savanna, and early hominids became much more dependent on meat than their chimpanzee relatives.

Fossil finds:

• 1924 – Taung South Africa Australopithecus africanus skeleton dating 3-7 million years ago
• 2002 – Toumai Chad hominid skull 6-7 millions years ago (debatable whether ape or hominid)
• 1992 Ethiopia – Ethiopia Ardipithecus ramidis, earliest hominid skeleton discovered (dating from 4 to .5 million years ago) walked upright.
• 1978 Kenya – Australopithecus afarenis 3.8 million years ago 3.5-4 feet tall. Nicknamed Lucy.
• 1978 Kenya – Mary Leaky discovered Australopithecus footprints dating 2.5 million years ago show evidence of slow rolling gait (unlike modern humans).

Human brain size increased along with social intelligence as hominids gradually figured figured out how to find and catch meat.

Three million year ago Australopithecus aferenis split into two different lines, with one becoming true humans who made tools.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/15061946/15061950

UC-123 airplanes spraying herbicides in central South Vietnam, 1966. (Source)

By Uriel Araujo

The recent end of a prolonged drought in Iran is triggering controversy across West Asia: Iranian and Iraqi authorities claim that the unusually heavy rainfall following Iranian strikes against certain American facilities in the Gulf indicate that Tehran in fact disrupted a covert weather-modification program – allegedly operated by the US and Israel.

Iraqi MP Al-Kaikhani in turn has claimed that Washington and Tel Aviv had been “stealing clouds”, causing droughts regionally.

Some analysts have dismissed the claims as “conspiracy”. The broader issue however deserves serious consideration: the question is not whether Iran has proven the existence of a US-Israeli weather weapon (so far it has not). It is whether such weather modification can be weaponized, whether great and regional powers have explored these possibilities in the past, and whether modern geoengineering technologies could eventually become instruments of geopolitical competition.

Military weather modification is no science fiction: the clearest documented case remains Operation Popeye during the Vietnam War (1967-1972) involving “cloud-seeding” missions to trigger landslides and disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines.

It remained highly classified until exposed in the early 1970s. Operation Popeye then directly inspired the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention (ENMOD), which prohibits the hostile military use of environmental modification techniques with widespread effects. It would make little sense to negotiate and ratify an international treaty banning a capability that policymakers regarded as impossible back in the seventies.

Almost 50 years later, weather modification initiatives continue to exist in various forms. China operates one of the world’s largest cloud-seeding programs, employing aircraft, and drones to influence precipitation for agricultural and drought-relief purposes. Iran itself has experimented with cloud-seeding operations in recent years and reportedly expanded these efforts in late 2025.

More ambitious geoengineering concepts, including solar radiation management and marine cloud brightening, remain largely experimental – allegedly. Yet they are openly discussed by governments, think tanks, and scientific institutions. No wonder concerns about their potential military applications are growing.

An important warning comes from Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan, head of the Outer Space Security Cluster at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. In a recent piece, Al-Rodhan argues that geoengineering technologies possess an undeniable dual-use character: systems intended to mitigate climate change could also become instruments of coercion, strategic leverage, or geopolitical rivalry.

The point is that whether or not large-scale weather warfare is currently feasible (and to what extent), the perception that states possess such capabilities can itself destabilize international relations. For one thing, efforts to alter rainfall patterns in one region could be interpreted as hostile actions elsewhere. Climate intervention may very well become another arena of great-power competition alongside cyberspace, outer space, and artificial intelligence.

Back to Iranian and Iraqi allegations, one of the counterpoints made is that such has been banned under international law, as mentioned. Alas, the claim that weather warfare is illegal does not prove it is not happening. History, by the way, offers numerous examples of governments engaging in activities that violated international norms, treaties, or human rights standards.

The US experience alone provides several examples: targeted killings through drone strikes in a number of countries have generated longstanding legal controversies in recent years. More famously, the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War caused devastating consequences.

Similarly, Israel faces serious scrutiny from UN experts, Amnesty International, and others regarding conduct in Gaza, including genocide allegations.

The point here is that states sometimes do violate international law: the illegality of weather warfare thus cannot be used as evidence that weather warfare is impossible!

Also, consider the following:

CIA infamous MKUltra experiments evolving mind control and “brainwashing” were once ridiculed as paranoid fantasies before official investigations confirmed them.

The NSA’s mass surveillance programs were likewise dismissed by many until the Snowden revelations.

The COVID-19 laboratory-leak hypothesis was widely rejected as “paranoia” before becoming the serious subject of official investigation as it is today.

Notably, Pentagon investigations now acknowledge the existence of “unexplained aerial phenomena” after decades of ridicule surrounding the topic.

The same pattern occurs regarding military technology:

Stealth aircraft such as the F-117 were often ridiculed as UFO lore or impossible due to aerodynamics (“it won’t fly”).

CIA-operated U-2 spy planes in Area 51 generated UFO rumors, and when the first allegations surfaced many experts believed the altitudes were impossible for manned aircraft – in fact various “UFO” or “UAP” sightings may in fact be phenomena connected to classified tech.

Before 1945, the idea of a single bomb destroying an entire city seemed fantastical to most observers – and yet the atomic bomb was developed in total secrecy during WWII (Manhattan Project).

The point is that what appears impossible to the public today may become routine tomorrow after years of black-budget research and compartmentalized development.

It is true that none of this proves that Iran destroyed an American or Israeli  weather weapon. Droughts and rainfall patterns have many causes, and climate systems are notoriously complex.

Yet the timing of recent events in Iran inevitably raises eyebrows. Combined with growing global interest in geoengineering, all the documented historical precedents, ongoing cloud-seeding programs, and the strategic incentives, the allegations deserve investigation rather than mockery.

Professor Al-Rodhan’s warning should therefore be taken seriously. Weather warfare, conducted in the Vietnam era, remains a potential future domain of competition, addressed by international law.

It is true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is also true that history has repeatedly shown that extraordinary secrecy can produce capabilities that surprise the world when revealed. In an age of hybrid warfare, gray-zone competition, and increasingly sophisticated climate technologies, speculation about covert weather-modification activities is not absurd at all.

Whether Iran’s suspicions ultimately prove justified (regarding drought in the Gulf) remains unknown. In any case, the suspicions themselves indicate the atmosphere is becoming yet another geopolitical battleground.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/iran-ended-drought-destroying-us-israel-weather-weapon/5928864

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Breitbart

Republican Reps. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) and Abe Hamadeh (R-AZ) have introduced a resolution calling for the phased elimination of the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel and its replacement with a partnership focused on trade, joint technology development, and strategic cooperation — a proposal endorsed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The nonbinding resolution, introduced Wednesday, urges the United States and Israel to negotiate a memorandum of understanding before the current ten-year agreement expires in 2028. Under the proposal, direct military assistance would be gradually phased out and replaced by a framework centered on joint defense cooperation, co-development, co-production, and mutual investment.

The effort comes with Netanyahu’s backing.

Following a May 27 meeting in Jerusalem with Stutzman and Hamadeh, Netanyahu sent a June 1 letter expressing support for the initiative and embracing its broader vision of transitioning the U.S.-Israel relationship from one based on aid to one based on partnership.

[…]

Via https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/06/04/gop-resolution-introduced-phaseout-u-s-military-aid-israel/

RRT

Thousands of Albanians took to the streets of the capital, Tirana on Thursday for the fourth consecutive day of protests against a controversial luxury resort project linked to Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump.

By Maryanne Demasi
June 4, 2026 

This week, I reported that Pfizer’s mRNA flu shot offered almost no clinical benefit in adults aged 18–64 — and that the harms were more significant than the headlines suggested.

But that was not the full story.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) did not publish any data from the older adults in the same trial — the very population most at risk from influenza and the main reason these vaccines exist.

Instead, the over-65 results were quietly uploaded to ClinicalTrials.gov, where they sat buried on a government website, out of sight and far from the scrutiny that comes with publication in a leading medical journal.

When MIT professor Retsef Levi discovered the missing cohort while reviewing the trial documents, he was stunned — not only by what the data showed, but by what it means when a flagship journal selectively reports findings that may directly shape public health decisions.

What he told me calls into question not just this study, but the integrity of the system that allowed it to happen.

Burying Data

Levi said the missing data in the NEJM article was “puzzling,” adding that “it seems like the reason for omitting the older participants was because the results were not favourable for the studied mRNA vaccine.”

The trial enrolled about 27,000 participants aged 65 and older. Their data make it clear: Pfizer’s mRNA flu shot did not outperform the traditional flu shot in the elderly.

On top of that, Pfizer’s shot caused slightly higher rates of mild-to-moderate local and systemic reactions — injection-site pain, fatigue — consistent with the well-known reactogenicity profile of mRNA products.

Levi said omitting data from this group was “unacceptable, especially since the over-65s are among the high-risk populations that influenza vaccines aim to protect.”

He did not soften his criticism of NEJM’s role.

“It’s either gross negligence in the review process, or worse, scientific misconduct,” said Levi, questioning how the public can trust a journal “if its review process either misses or hides major results in the trial.”

Rather than presenting the full dataset in the journal, Pfizer uploaded the unfavourable results on ClinicalTrials.gov, where they remained effectively invisible to clinicians and the public.

Levi said there was no question this was an egregious oversight.

“I do not see how NEJM can argue that the published article is transparent, when results are selectively reported, and moreover, negative results are not reported.”

The failure to publish the older cohort’s results has now placed NEJM — and its Editor-in-Chief, Dr Eric Rubin — under intense scrutiny.

Levi said, “I think that what we see here is a clear failure of the NEJM’s review process and integrity, and the ultimate responsibility rests with the Editor in Chief…Dr Rubin should be expected to provide a clear explanation as to how this has happened.”

The Eric Rubin Problem

Dr Eric Rubin presided over the decision to publish a Pfizer trial stripped of its most important age group, allowing a reputed journal to become complicit in the same selective reporting practices that have long undermined scientific publishing.

Rubin also sits on the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) — the same committee that may one day review Pfizer’s biological licence application for this very product.

His track record during the pandemic has been fraught.

In a 2021 VRBPAC meeting on Covid-19 vaccines for children, Rubin dismissed concerns about unknown safety gaps, saying, “We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it. And that’s just the way it goes.”

NEJM under his leadership also published the pivotal AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trial — a paper that omitted adverse event data.

One of those missing cases involved participant Brianne Dressen, whose severe neurological complications were removed from the trial records. Dressen personally contacted Rubin asking him to correct the record and update the trial data.

But Rubin refused.

Asked whether someone in Rubin’s position can objectively assess a product when his own journal has published selective data about it, Levi said, “The personal integrity of members in government advisory committees is a critical factor to consider.”

Levi declined to comment on whether Rubin should remain on the committee, saying only that “this type of incident harms public trust in science and more broadly, public health recommendations.”

What Should Happen Next?

Publication ethics are clear.

COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) states that retraction is warranted when there is “scientific misconduct or honest error that significantly affects the reliability of the findings.”

Selective reporting of pre-specified primary or secondary outcomes — particularly when it conceals clinically relevant harms — fits that definition precisely. At a minimum, NEJM must issue a formal correction with the full dataset.

Levi would not be drawn on whether the study should be retracted, but he was unequivocal about the principle: “Proper scientific conduct requires scientists and academic journals to be transparent and truthful.”

This case is neither.

The Real Issue Now

What happened here is a textbook case of regulatory capture.

A manufacturer runs a trial. A major journal publishes only the flattering part. The negative data are buried on a federal website. And the journal’s editor-in-chief sits on the FDA committee that may soon decide whether the product should be licensed.

This is precisely the kind of institutional rot that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has vowed to root out.

The question now is whether he will call for Rubin’s resignation from VRBPAC — a test of how far he is willing to go in confronting industry influence and demanding full transparency in medical journals.

Because unless this system is forced into the open, selective reporting will continue to be standard practice in even the most prestigious journals. And the public will keep receiving a polished marketing story instead of the full scientific truth.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/major-journal-under-fire-for-omitting-pfizers-failed-flu-data-in-seniors/

Rebekah Barnett

If a scientific paper offers a counter-narrative conclusion, should it be deleted from the record?

Science publisher Elsevier says yes, if the topic is vaccines, because allowing doctors and parents to read it would pose a risk to public health.

This raises the question: Is censorship of science really the best way to ensure public health and safety?

The paper under scrutiny is a peer-reviewed analysis of three decades of vaccine adverse event reporting data which found that 75 percent of sudden infant deaths occurred within seven days of a vaccination, a statistically significant finding.

Author Neil Z. Miller reviewed the medical literature linking SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) to vaccines and proposed several pathogenic mechanisms, concluding that, “While the findings in this paper are not proof of an association between infant vaccines and infant deaths, they are highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”

The main finding from the paper, titled ‘Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature,’ is represented in the below image, which was widely shared on social media since its publication in the journal Toxicology Reports, in June 2021.

Nearly five years later, the paper has been removed, a highly unusual step reserved only for papers that may present legal risks to the publisher, Elsevier, or that could pose a serious health risk. Usually, serious concerns are dealt with either through the publication of a correction, an expression of concern or, in the most egregious cases, a retraction. Removal differs in that it essentially deletes the paper from the scientific record.1

According to a 9 April notice, the removal was triggered by reader complaints over “potential research errors and methodological flaws,” leading an investigation by the journal. The main sticking point was the use of data from VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System), a passive reporting system to which anyone can make a report, to infer a correlation between vaccination and SIDS.

The notice states that Miller’s response during the investigation “did not satisfactorily address” concerns raised. “In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal.”

In a further comment to Retraction Watch, an Elsevier spokesperson confirmed that the paper was removed because “the recommendations and conclusions presented in the paper may pose potential risks to public health and could potentially be applied in clinical practice resulting in harm to patients.”

This is striking given that paper explicitly states that “this paper does not prove an association between infant vaccines and sudden infant deaths.”

Miller qualified that because the article “reveals unusual patterns and safety signals highly suggestive of a causal relationship,” “additional investigation is warranted,” as well as “finding ways to increase vaccine safety, reduce inaccurate or inconsistent cause-of-death certification practices, and support families in their quest to make genuinely informed healthcare decisions.”

It is hard to see how any of these recommendations could do anything other than improve public health and clinical practice.

In an email, Miller told me that he “strongly opposed the removal of my paper,” calling the decision “unjustified.”

The problem with VAERS data

VAERS is the US national passive vaccine surveillance system, the purpose of which is to “detect possible signals of adverse events associated with vaccines,” according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Anyone can submit a report to VAERS — patients, caregivers, doctors, pharmacists, even lawyers. On the other hand, if a patient experiences a post-vaccine side effect and a report is not voluntarily submitted to VAERS, it is a proverbial tree falling in the forest with no witness.

Thus, VAERS captures reports of adverse events that occurred after vaccination, but it does not capture all adverse events and it cannot establish that the vaccine caused the event.2

The CDC states that correlation alone does not constitute a signal, and regarding SIDS specifically, that clustering deaths close to infant vaccinations is likely coincidental because, “At this age, infants are at greatest risk for certain medical events, including high fevers, seizures, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).”

The fact is that public health agencies and their defenders want to highlight the limitations of VAERS when it benefits them, but gloss over them when it doesn’t:

Authorities and their sanctioned researchers are allowed to “investigate” correlations between VAERS reports and vaccines and produce findings that the vaccines had nothing to do with anything, but independent researchers are not to use the data at all.

As noted by Retraction Watch, Miller’s article is just one of a number of vaccine-critical studies featuring VAERS data that has come under scrutiny in recent years. These include one retracted by Cureus which called for a moratorium on mRNA Covid vaccines, and another retracted by Toxicology Reports which questioned, “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?”

A third under investigation by publisher Taylor & Francis, was incorrectly described by Retraction Watch as “claiming to find DNA contamination in COVID-19 vaccines that was based on VAERS data.” In fact, the DNA contamination finding was based on lab work, however VAERS data provides specific lot information along with reports of medical incidents after vaccination, allowing the scientists to correlate batches with high DNA contamination reads with potential real-world impacts as reported to VAERS.

Cynics might speculate that it benefits the vaccine industry and public health agencies promoting vaccine uptake to keep VAERS exactly as is, limitations and all.

A 2007-2010 investigation into VAERS conducted by Harvard for the US Government which found that fewer than one percent of post-vaccine adverse events were reported to VAERS recommended that “proactive, spontaneous, automated adverse event reporting” linked with electronic health records and other information systems could improve the speed and accuracy of identifying the risks of pharmaceutical drugs.

Conspicuously, the researchers claimed that the CDC was “no longer responsive” to their “multiple requests” to continue the investigation, and a planned randomised trial comparing an improved surveillance system to the existing VAERS never happened.

No one in the US Government has since shown serious interest in improving VAERS until US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. identified implementing recommendations from the Harvard investigation as a priority.

VAERS and SIDS

While VAERS data cannot prove a causal relationship between vaccination and SIDS deaths, Miller argues that temporal associations should be considered alongside potential biological explanations for any correlations that are apparent.

“The reason infants are at greatest risk for medical events at this age is precisely because they receive multiple vaccinations — that have never been tested in combination — at a time when their immune, neurological, and respiratory systems are still immature,” he told me (emphasis Miller’s).

Miller said that he acknowledged the potential of reporting bias — where parents and doctors may be more likely to report SIDS deaths closer to vaccination than weeks later — in the limitations section of his paper.

But that potential reporting bias should be taken alongside the biological plausibility of an “an incubation period,” whereby vaccinations can, according to various experts referenced in the paper, trigger a cascade of physiological responses that peak within 24-48 hours after vaccination.

Miller said that the smaller proportion of infant deaths reported on Day 1 and Day 3 post-vaccination compared to the peak on Day 2 was statistically significant and “strongly suggests that reporting bias cannot fully explain the clustering of infant deaths and SIDS cases in the early post-vaccination period.” If parents were simply reporting deaths near vaccination opportunistically, you would expect Day 1 to have the most reports, not Day 2.

Moreover, Miller references seven studies and two confidential reports which display similar distribution of sudden infant death reports following vaccination, highlighting that this finding is not unique to his analysis of VAERS data. These studies comprise of passive data collection and case reports across multiple countries in relation to a range of different vaccines.

The GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) confidential post-marketing surveillance data relating to the Infanrix hexa vaccine, from 2011 and 2015, is the most damning. Miller attests that the manufacturer’s own internal reports showed that 97 percent and 98 percent, respectively, of sudden infant deaths occurred in the first 10 days post-vaccination.

According to a critique published in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (Puliyel & Sathyamala, 2018) and cited by Miller, GSK in a sleight of hand calculated the comparative ‘expected’ rate of SIDS deaths according to doses distributed, not administered, thus likely inflating the expected rate of deaths. Also, no active surveillance was conducted, and deaths acknowledged in an earlier report were eliminated from a later one. GSK concluded that SIDS deaths did not exceed the expected rate and that its vaccine was safe: regulators accepted this at face value.3

On the subject of expected background rates, Miller acknowledges that population-level SIDS rates would be a useful comparative metric, but notes that with immunisation coverage above 90 percent in the US, a meaningful unvaccinated baseline is challenging to quantify.

Miller also acknowledges that while some studies have found a correlation between vaccination and SIDS, other studies have not. One wonders if any papers in the latter category have been subject to campaigns for their deletion from the scientific record.

Timing suggests social media popularity was a factor in removal

According to Miller, whose LinkedIn page says he is a psychology graduate who has been researching and publishing on vaccine safety for some forty years, the complaints he was asked to respond to were brought from a single person soon after publication.

However, Miller was not notified of the complaints until December 2025. During that year, high-profile vaccine-skeptics Dr Peter McCullough and Dr Pierre Kory shared posts about Miller’s paper on their Substacks and discussed its findings on social media. The image at the top of this post showing the clustering of SIDS deaths within days of vaccination in particular was shared widely on social media sites.

In February 2026, Miller was informed by the publisher, Elsevier, that despite his thorough responses to concerns raised, Editor-in-Chief Professor Lawrence Lash had decided that the findings of the article “constitute potentially unsafe research for medical practice,” warranting a removal rather than a correction.

Is the Editor seriously suggesting that medical practitioners are too stupid to understand what VAERS is, and how the data should be weighed alongside other scientific data and in the broader context of the scientific discourse around vaccines and SIDS?

Lash, the Founding Editor of the journal, is a highly-cited Professor of Pharmacology at Wayne State University. It is unlikely that he genuinely believes his peers are so dumb.

More likely, this was a political retraction. Prior to its removal, Miller’s paper had been cited only 12 times in the scientific literature, according to Semantic Scholar. Its primary impact was clearly in the public sphere, not the scientific.

If this is the case — and we have seen journals remove valid peer-reviewed articles before due to social media virality, as I have previously reported — then this is yet another instance of politics dictating the bounds of scientific discourse.

[…]

It’s worth noting that the Editor-in-Chief of the journal at the time of the article’s peer-review and publication was not Professor Lash, but the extraordinarily highly-cited Greek Professor of Toxicology Aristidis Tsatsakis, senior author on the aforementioned and now retracted article, “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?”

Professor Tsatsakis said in an email that he believed his paper had been “retracted unjustifiably” due to “the policy [of] that period.” He noted that he has published several books with Elsevier which is a “huge publisher” and that “people representing Elsevier at various times can do mistakes.” He characterised Professor Lash as reputable scientist who acted as a “kind of yes Sir” Editor-in-Chief under these circumstances.

[…]

Via https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/study-linking-vaccines-to-sids-deleted