90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

German states with a high vaccination rate have the highest excess mortality

The physicist Dr. Ute Bergner, on November 17, delivered a speech in front of the Thuringian state parliament in which she presented an alarming study she had commissioned.

Bergner, who formerly belonged to the FDP parliamentary group in the Thuringian state parliament, has meanwhile switched to the Citizens for Thuringia party. She had commissioned two statisticians to investigate whether there was a connection between the vaccination rate and excess mortality in the 16 German federal states.

Prof. Dr. Rolf Steyer and Dr. Gregor Kappler analyzed the period from week 36 to week 40 and the results are truly disconcerting. The summary of the analysis states that excess mortality can be found in all 16 states.

The number of Covid deaths reported by the RKI in the period under review consistently only represents a relatively small part of excess mortality and above all cannot explain the critical issue – the higher the vaccination rate, the higher the excess mortality.

The most obvious explanation however is that being fully vaccinated increases the likelihood of death.

Of course, other explanations are possible but not very likely:

･ The higher the proportion of old people, the higher the vaccination rate and excess mortality. Therefore, the vaccination rate and excess mortality also correlate. (This explanation is not very plausible, however, as the proportion of old people would have to have changed significantly between 2016-2020 on the one hand and 2021 on the other.)

･ Higher vaccination rates are achieved through increased stress and anxiety in the country concerned, and the latter lead to higher numbers of deaths.

“Further explanations are by no means excluded. Some of them may be backed up with numbers and should be investigated further. We are very grateful for suggestions of this kind,” Bergner said.

Thuringia (4 percent) and Saxony (2 percent), the two states with the lowest vaccination rates, also have the lowest excess mortality. The front runner is Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with a vaccination rate of 66 percent and an excess mortality rate of 16 percent. All the vaccinated states showed a double-digit increase.
Results require ‘urgent clarification’

The correlation coefficient is +0.31. In the eyes of the two data scientists this is “astonishingly high”. Especially since the believers in the vaccine are claiming the opposite but provide no proof for their notion of “protection”. One should at the least expect a different relationship: the more vaccinations, the lower the mortality. After all, the intention was to protect people.

“The excess mortality increases with the increase in the vaccination rate. This requires urgent clarification,” demanded the two statisticians. Furthermore, in view of “the pending political measures aimed at containing the virus […] this figure is worrying and requires explanation if further political measures are to be taken with the aim of...

Fighting “Information Disorder”: Aspen’s Orwellian Commission on Controlling Speech in America

The Aspen Institute has issued the results of its much heralded 16-person Commission on Information Disorder on how to protect the public from misinformation. The commission on disinformation and “building trust” was partially headed by Katie Couric who is still struggling with her own admission that she edited an interview to remove controversial statements by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Aspen recommendations however are a full-throated endorsement of systems of censorship.

The findings and recommendations are found in an 80-page report on how to combat “disinformation” and “misinformation,” which are remarkably ill-defined but treated as a matter of “we know when we see it.” From the outset, however, the Commission dismissed the long-standing free speech principle that the solution to bad speech is better speech, not censorship. The problem is that many today object to allowing those with opposing views to continue to speak or others continue to listen to them. The Commission quickly tosses the free speech norm to the side:

“The biggest lie of all, which this crisis thrives on, and which the beneficiaries of mis- and disinformation feed on, is that the crisis itself is uncontainable. One of the corollaries of that mythology is that, in order to fight bad information, all we need is more (and better distributed) good information. In reality, merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course.”

In addition to Couric, the Commission was headed by Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Robinson was also a notable choice since he has been one of the most outspoken advocates of censorship. While some of us have been denouncing the expanding system of censorship by companies like Facebook, Robinson was threatening boycotts if the companies do not “rein in” those considered racists or spreaders of misinformation.

The Commission also includes Prince Harry who has referred to free speech protections under the First Amendment as “bonkers.”

Much of the report seems more aspirational in recommendations like “endorsing efforts that focus on exposing how historical and current imbalances of power, access and equity are manufactured and propagated with mis- and disinformation — and on promoting community-led solutions to forging social bonds.”

The Commission also appears to endorse the movement against “objectivity” and “both sideism” in the media: “Commissioners also discussed the need to adjust journalistic norms to avoid false equivalencies between lies and empirical fact in the pursuit of ‘both sides’ and ‘objectivity,’ particularly in areas of public health, civil rights, or election outcomes.”

Former New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones was one of the journalists who pushed the New York Times to denounce its own publication and promise to curtail columns in the future. In so doing, she railed against those who engage in what she called “even-handedness, both sideism” journalism. Likewise, Stanford Communications Professor Emeritus Ted Glasser has publicly called for an end of objectivity in journalism as too constraining for reporters in seeking “social justice.” In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

However, the most chilling aspect of the report is the obvious invitation for greater forms of censorship. It calls for the government to become involved in combatting misinformation, the scourge of free speech and an invitation for state controls over speech. Ironically, there is no need for such direct government involvement when social media companies are acting as the equivalent of a state media in the censorship of...

Biden’s Education Department Wants to Roll Back Effort to Catalog Teacher Sex Crimes

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona

Critics say the move is an attempt to appease teachers' unions

The Department of Education wants to roll back a Trump-era effort to collect data on teacher-on-student sex crimes.

The department's Office for Civil Rights will not ask school districts questions regarding teacher-on-student sexual assault allegations as part of its 2021-2022 Civil Rights Data Collection, proposed Thursday. The change is designed to "reduce burden and duplication of data," an Education Department spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. But critics say eliminating the question is the Biden administration's attempt to appease teachers' unions.

"This is the ultimate act of bowing to the teachers' unions," Kimberly Richey, who served as acting assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights in the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. "Through this proposal, the Biden administration is actively helping schools cover up these incidents, which we were intentionally shining a light on."

The Education Department will still ask districts to report documented cases of rape and sexual assault. But it will not ask school officials to report allegations that resulted in the resignation or retirement of the accused. Former secretary of education Betsy DeVos added those optional questions to the 2020-2021 data collection, which was delayed one year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The department also won't ask districts to report pending cases or cases in which a school staffer was reassigned to another district school prior to the conclusion of an investigation.

Public schools' mishandling of sexual assault cases has become a political liability for Democrats across the country. Allegations that school officials in one Northern Virginia school district covered up a double sexual assault case roiled parents just weeks before the gubernatorial election. Teacher-union-backed Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin by 2 points in the commonwealth, where President Joe Biden handily won by a 10-point margin.

Office for Civil Rights data collected during the Trump administration found that sexual assault and rape cases surged in public schools over the past decade. DeVos added those optional questions to the 2020-2021 data collection after the 2017-2018 survey found that nearly 15,000 allegations of rape, attempted rape, and sexual assault were reported during that school year, according to an October 2020 brief on the statistics.

That data set did not distinguish between teacher-on-student and student-on-student crimes. Reporting alleged sex crimes in addition to documented cases provides a fuller picture of sexual violence in schools, as the accused may retire, resign, or seek employment elsewhere before a district can...

A strict lockdown has been imposed in the Binjari and Rockhole areas in Australia's Northern Territory after nine new Corona cases were registered. The military has been called in to bring in positive cases and their close contacts to a quarantine center.

DARWIN. Prime Minister Michael Gunner said on Sunday that a 78-year-old woman was being treated at the Royal Darwin Hospital and that the remaining eight cases and 38 close contacts have been transferred to the Howard Springs quarantine center.

The Australian Prime Minister has sent 28 Australian Defense Force soldiers and a number of army trucks to the region. People are only allowed to leave their home “for medical treatment, in case of emergency or as required by law”.

Gunner said the lockdown will likely remain in place for several weeks. He added that the vaccination rate in Binjari was low and called on people to get vaccinated against Corona. Unvaccinated travelers have been banned from entering the Northern Territory since Monday.

Curiously, his draconian measures will allow Australians to “move forward with the freedoms that should be theirs”. Gunner warned critics: “If you give a green light, give comfort to, support anybody who argues against the vaccine, you are an anti-vaxxer. Your personal vaccination status is utterly irrelevant.”

The first case is a man in his 40s who had tested negative twice last week while at the Centre for National Resilience, but has since tested positive. He had received one dose of the vaccine.