Links - 6th January 2023 (2 - History Extra Quoting)

The history of beauty: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘Eurocentric beauty standards really do dominate, and they essentially become global beauty standards. But whilst the dominant standard of beauty, female beauty in Western media may change slightly, the ideal of beauty that is usually held up is some sort of white cis thin woman. And that embodies that the prevailing fashion for beauty. Now, the key thing about beauty standards is they are meant to be unobtainable, so they always do have to shift... because the ideal beauty standard is consistently unobtainable, it can lead to all sorts of other effects like depression, body dissatisfaction, low self esteem and eating disorders...
I was thinking about the most dangerous product for beauty, I was thinking about Victorian hair tonics that actually use petroleum. So those examples of things like the wonderfully named Madame Fox’s Life for the Hair. So this is made from an extract of Bailey's and petroleum. This is essentially a dry shampoo… 1897, where a lady called Fanny Samuelsson she died after her hair caught alight during a petrol treatment at an upmarket salon in London. Now, there was an inquest behind this, and it was determined that the petrol in the product was so unstable, that the friction that was caused by rubbing her hair with a towel had led to spontaneous combustion.’"
If you pretend that beauty standards are eurocentric often enough despite their pre-dating contact with Europeans, many people will believe the lie
Blaming beauty standards for unhappiness is easier than blaming neuroticism and anxiety over status competition

Benjamin Franklin: portrait of a revolutionary | HistoryExtra - "‘What's interesting about our work is all the things they thought they knew that or that they learned that they didn't know. And that's exciting, you know, soldiers in Vietnam telling us our Vietnam series told them things. World War Two veterans before they passed away, saying, thank you, I was in the Pacific Theater, I had no idea what was going on. I went, I moved from one little spot of land in this biggest of all oceans to another little spot of land. Thank you for putting it together. And same with those in the European theater.’"
Too bad for the people who valorise personal experience

America’s Cold War culture boom | HistoryExtra - "‘This was an era where people really valued culture, as you say, they believed it mattered. What do you think that the consequence of that was?’
‘It made for very exciting debates. Because I mean, just to give you an example, one of the things that the American government and the governments of the liberal democracies, including the UK, and France wanted to do in the Cold War was to promote the idea that expression was free, in liberal democracies, that the state doesn't tell you what to write or what to paint, or what kind of movies to make, as opposed to in the Soviet Union, where there was an official aesthetic, socialist realism. And everybody knew that if you didn't adhere to that aesthetic, your work would be censored or banned. So the liberal democracies want to say to the world look, we don't tell painters what to paint. Okay, so we don't tell painters what to paint. Suppose a painter decides to make a painting by just throwing paint on a canvas on the floor. Is that a painting? Is that art? Suppose a composer composes a piece of music, which is consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, is that music? So there's a lot at stake because we have to show that freedom conduces to good art, not just crazy stuff. So it's fascinating to watch the rationales that are given to explain why the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock are painting and why the silent piece by John Cage's music, and that's fascinating to write about’"

Munich: the real history behind the new film | HistoryExtra - "‘It struck me when I was watching this film that anybody sat at home watching it, essentially is watching with the benefit of hindsight. We know what was to come. What are the challenges of creating a historical story like that and maintaining tension, for example, when we all know how it's going to end up?’
‘Well, you know, there is a school of thought that drama is better if you do know the ending, so that the Titanic exercises constant fascination with people, we know what's going to happen. I wrote a novel about Pompeii. I mean, you know, one knows what's going to happen. And oddly enough, waiting for it to happen. And wondering who's going to survive is quite an effective drama, in fact. The ancient Greeks, it's Greek drama, a Greek tragedy, where you know, what's going to happen and the chorus keep telling you this is going to end disastrously so there's no problem with that, I think...
In the summer of 1938, Stalin had killed many, many millions of people, far more than than Hitler had. And was seen, certainly by the conservative establishment in Britain, as some far more menacing figure. And, you know, it was inconceivable to people that there would be something like the Holocaust, I mean, there there would be, that there would be Jewish people thrown out of jobs, treated as second class citizens, encouraged to emigrate, all of that was seen and abhorred by the rest of the world. But the concept that they actually might try to murder every single man, woman and child was beyond conception and imagining in 1938... it was less than 20 years since the end of the First World War, where 900,000 British men had been killed. And there was simply no appetite for fighting it again, and anything that could be done to try and stop it happening. If that meant that the Germans, 2 million ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia should, should go to Germany. Fine, let's do it. Another word for appeasement is really peace process. How do we find the sources of the conflict and somehow try and disarm?’"

Shining new light on medieval Europe | HistoryExtra - "This story of the Dark Ages that there was this 1000 year period after the alleged fall of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance has really been locked in the story of medieval European history, since the 14th century, since since Petrarch, since the originators of the Renaissance started to tell a story about themselves as having rescued knowledge and having shed light. And it's done a lot of harm. And we can talk a little about the harm in terms of, harm in terms of how we think about ourselves, harms in terms of how we tell the story of humanity, the story of Europe, harm in terms of how it's plugged into a lot of violence and a lot of dangerous things. But also, it's just wrong. We as professional historians, and really, as everyone we know who studies the Middle Ages, we just don't recognize the the picture of the Middle Ages that is so locked in, in modern consciousness, of this darkness of savageness, of simplicity, of isolation, we just see a much more vibrant, complex human messy world. And we wanted to tell that story and tell it in the way that could reach the most people possible."
This had little substantiation (basically the argument was that outside of Western Europe it wasn't Dark). Let alone evidence for "harm" in thinking of a collapse of the documentary record as the Dark Ages

Queen Victoria’s spy network | HistoryExtra - "‘Today the monarchy is supposed to be neutral. Was, was the same supposed to apply for Victoria?’
‘Absolutely not. So clearly, Queen Victoria is pursuing several quite political campaigns. As Rory says, It's partly about her Russophobia. But her other big political campaign is against leftists and anarchists and subversives. So in the 19th century, Britain has this fantastic tradition of providing political asylum, or providing refuge for all sorts of figures. Nationalists, like Mazzini, leftists like Karl Marx, London was kind of a menagerie of some of Europe's most colorful political figures. Queen Victoria hated this. All her relatives are writing to her from Europe saying, why are you hosting all these terrible people? And so there's a constant battle between her and people like Palmerston, people who are radically liberal, they want to support these revolutionaries. Victoria doesn't like it... She says, these, these evil Republicans must be exterminated. She doesn't, she doesn't mince her words at all. And that is clearly very, very different context historically and constitutionally from the world in which Queen Elizabeth reigns now, and it started to change after Queen Victoria. Edward the Seventh was a bit disappointed he didn't quite have his mother's influence. And gradually, it becomes more what we know today. But under Victoria, no, she was very happy and willing to meddle and manipulate, to interfere’
‘It's remarkably modern, in the sense that for 50 years through her reign, Victoria’s fighting this political battle over issues of asylum, issues of human rights, issues of political liberty, all the way through, through her reign. She's trying to promote European style secret policing. She wants, she wants revolutionaries in Britain to be put under close surveillance. And she also wants their rights to be changed, so every 10 years, a new piece of legislation is introduced into Parliament to try and throw these people out. Even in her last decade in 1894, she's bringing in something called the Aliens Act. But once again, every 10 years it's defeated. The British Parliament will not roll back on their liberal inclusive agenda of welcoming these revolutionaries from Europe.’...
'All the best secrets are in the royal archive at Windsor. And this is a place that material is continually flowing into but it's like a black hole. Things are sucked in, but they never go out. But one of the duties of the British embassies around the world is to report on stories about the monarchy, send them into London send them to Buckingham Palace. One of the hotspots for this was the British Embassy in France because the French press absolutely love the British, the British monarchy. And they're always doing crazy stories about how Princess Anne had the whole Everton football team in in her bedroom. How the Queen Mother had died, had been replaced by a body double. All this stuff was being sent in by by junior diplomats in in British diplomats in France through the 70s and the 80s. And they never got any response. At one point they said oh, do you really want this stuff? Should, shouldn't we stop and immediately Buckingham Palace said no, we love this stuff. Send us more stories. This is what we read over the breakfast table'"

A murder mystery in 19th-century Dublin | HistoryExtra - "They actually ticketed, admit, admission. So they were reported to be hordes of people crowding the streets on both sides of the building, before each day of the trial, and they had policemen on the doors, making sure that people had tickets to get in. And I think it was inside, those days, of course, they chose to just pack them in as as much as they could... in 1857, it was not permissible for a wife to give evidence in court against her husband. There's one exception actually, if if the husband had been abusing her in any way... that ruling was not revoked until 1897"

The Age of Sail: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Admiralty didn't really officially allow women on board. But quite often, you'd have the wives of maybe your warrant officers or your gunners, your surgeons, etc, or other officers joined the ship, but they had to learn to share the cabins or the hammocks, etc. They had to share their food rations. They didn't get their own food rations, so that had to be split between them. But yeah, quite often, you would have women on board. There's a great story. I can't remember the ship. But essentially, she was due to be giving birth and she'd been in labor for something like 12 hours. So basically, the surgeon went and asked if they could fire a broadside in order that it would kind of shock her body pushing out this baby and she did. She ended up having a baby off the back of this broadside being fired. But yeah, so and there's a there's a great paper that was written recently that actually covers the the wife of one of the gunners. Looking after the midshipmen, kind of being a bit of a mother figure to the younger, younger kids. Well, kids on board. You'd have your powder monkeys, for example, who are very, very tiny children. They, the the powder monkeys were used to kind of run the gunpowder up from the magazine where the gunner was up to the gun crews, so tiny little nimble children with with buckets of gunpowder taking it up to for firing...
There's been some really interesting work carried out recently by a chap called Jeremiah Dancy, who's actually, he sat and went through all of the muster books of all of these ships, which must have taken, well, in fact, it did take years, and actually found out that the number of people that were pressed rather than volunteered is a lot less than we think. So more people volunteered than than we think. But essentially, you'd have these press gangs, as everyone knows them, going around these kinds of shipping, nautical towns, port towns, and finding people to crew, the navy. I mean, obviously, you're going from peacetime where you don't really need anyone to suddenly a period of war where you may need, what upwards of 20,000 men. And so you'd have these press gangs set up in towns, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Chatham, etc. But really, there's kind of this myth, I guess, where people think of the press gangs, going into pubs and going, you're coming with me, you look able bodied. Taking people away from their houses, etc. And well it did happen, and you'd have your landsmen who had never really been to sea before, but essentially you didn't you didn't particularly want them, you needed people who'd been to sea, who knew their way around the ship and understood how to to deal with the sails or heave on lines or fire guns if they could. So really, it was kind of those merchant navy men that you you would want. But you also had to be very aware that you didn't want to leave the merchant fleet with nobody… the King's Shilling is kind of this token you're given as a sign of impressment. And there's a supposedly a pub in Portsmouth where the landlady used to drop the shilling into the beer, meaning that when they drank it, they you know, the King’s Shilling is there and right, off to see with you. And it's a, it's a myth. It's a nice myth, but I don't think that's, I don't think you'd have been able to get away with it. To the extent that people think they did, but supposedly she recruited, like hundreds of people, for the Navy...
There is a lot of superstition and myth, at sea, even to this day, things like not being able to take bananas on board. I'm not quite sure where that one came from’"

The Gothic: from Dracula to The Shining | HistoryExtra - "‘It's the golden age of ghost stories, definitely the golden age of the emergence of these really modern myths, like the vampire. Vampires as this kind of effete aristocrat, appears in 1819. Clearly modeled on Lord Byron. And then he kind of recurs again with Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897...
I always have to confess, as a, you know, an earnest professor of literature, that the only reason I am a professor of literature is because of Stephen King's The Shining, which I read a, you know, a very kind of impressionable age. And also the film, which came out in 1979 was was a huge kind of impression on me, not because it's particularly gory or violent, just because of its, its sort of sense of menace’"

The Ottoman “Age of Discovery” | History Extra - "We also have to think about Ottoman rulers as being Renaissance princes. And the best example of this is Mehmet the Second, Mehmet the Conqueror, the one who conquers the Byzantine city of Constantinople, in 1453. In every regard, he is a Renaissance Prince, both in his his artistic tastes, and his literary tastes, and his cultivation of himself as in being someone in the, being modeled on an ancient ruler. He he has his historians compare him to Alexander. So so he's very conscious of what other European Renaissance princes are doing. He has some of the same portrait artists paint him, he has the same medallion makers, strike medallions for him. So the idea that Muslims would never have portraits or medallions made is quite silly… if we think about the knowledge that he gathers around him, the philosophers he gathers around him, he's very much a Renaissance Prince, as is his grandson, Suleiman... What the death knell was choosing the wrong side in the First World War… They also engaged in, they turned against many of the Ottoman values that had kept the Empire and the dynasty around for so long. When they committed genocide against the Armenian population. This was turning against the tolerance that had sustained the empire for nearly 600 years."

What can churches tell us?  | HistoryExtra - "We spend quite a lot of time in Norfolk. And I read an obituary of a man who'd restored a very ancient church really off his own bat, at a place called St. Mary's in Houghton on the Hill, which is quite near Swaffham, but it's literally in the middle of nowhere. So in the summer, I went with my daughter, who's a theology student at the moment... we went to look at this church, and I mean it's a wonderful church. And he's restored it very beautifully. But what he's done inside, which is absolutely fascinating. This is a ninth 10th 11th century church. And he, he chipped away at the walls to get back to the original wall paintings. And he'd found such wonderful things that English Heritage and all sorts of people got involved. And the one that really catches your eye is on one side, is the Garden of Eden theme. And so you've got the, on one side, you've got the tree with the snake and Adam is sitting underneath it, and standing alongside it is God reaching out and embracing Eve and lifting her up. So my daughter, the reason having having made her go to Catholic schools, wants nothing to do with the Catholic Church, is cos she's a feminist. And then you look at this and you think, Oh, look, in the 10th century, people had a problem with that Daughters of Eve kind of line that women are all temptresses. And what did they do? On the wall of their church in the 10th century, they had God embracing Eve and casting out Adam. So you, it speaks to contemporary dilemmas in that sense, or contemporary arguments. We're not, you're not just kind of getting back into some dark, dusty, irrelevant bits of things. It connects both to the debates that we have at the moment. And they also connect, connect you as a person to those people"

Stranger danger? Xenophobia’s unexpected history | HistoryExtra - "‘There is a new term isn't there coined in the wake of the Second World War by Raphael Lemkin genocide. Could you describe how that comes about?’
‘Yes. So, you know, there's a, there are terms that are being coined to try to understand new phenomenon. And my argument about xenophobia is that it is in response to the second wave of globalization, that the notion that the stranger is an enemy is a catastrophe. If in fact, the world is globalizing, it means we're always going to be at war. Similarly, the term, the number of terms start to take 180 degree pivot backwards, right. So that anti-semite is at first a positive term, it becomes a very negative term. Racism is a positive term, it means you're proud of your race, until it becomes le racisme and it becomes bigotry against racism. Xenophobia, takes that same turn, starts out it's about them. Now it's about us. And Lemkin builds on that. He wants a term that will fill a gap because at that point, there was no term for or there was no law against, power, powers that discriminated against even murdered communities within their nation state. It wasn't a crime that international courts could deal with because it was internal... Fanon… was a black psychiatrist, and he went to Algeria. And he came to this recognition, he said, you know, the French hate the Jews who hate the Arabs who hate the blacks. And I thought, and you could just keep going. So part of the notion of thinking about xenophobia is to challenge us, who's your stranger, who's the other anxiety that you have? Now, I would suggest that that is very different from the driven internal need for a hated other, which I say is the kind of pure xenophobia, that is the stuff that's driven by projection’"
How did this go into psychoanalysis?!

How the Greeks changed the world | HistoryExtra - "Greek is one of only three languages still in regular daily use in the world today, that has a continuous record of use in speech and writing, that goes back for more than 3000 years...
You can speculatively run all the way back to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, and Odysseus on his ship, struggling to find his way back from Troy to his island home of Ithaca. Greeks, Greek shipowners apparently own the largest share of world cargo shipping of any single identifiable, gross national group in the world. It's something like 17% of world cargo shipping is Greek own. And I did this statistical check that is approximately 100 times the proportion of the Greek population as a proportion of the world's population. The Greeks are really made their mark in shifting goods by sea around the world. They were doing it 3000 years ago. They're still preeminent are doing it."

Sex work: a brief history | HistoryExtra - "‘Sex work is often called the oldest profession in the world, is that fair?’
‘Oh, is that fair. It’s one of the oldest. But the thing that you've got to remember is there's plenty of cultures and people that existed without money and without professions. So if you don't have money you don’t have professions, ergo, nobody needs to sell sex for for money, although I'm sure it's always been a really useful commodity. There were anthropologists in 1950s, actually, that did research on all tribal communities and tribal people. And they found that there was very, very little evidence of anyone selling sex because again, they didn't use money. But the figure of the medicine man and the midwife, were pretty much universal. So it would probably be more accurate to say that midwifery is the oldest profession. But you could definitely say that sex work is as old as money itself. And it's a very useful commodity.’...
‘What kind of stigma have sex workers faced in historical contexts?’
‘Much the same that they face today and continue to face. When you take a society that has quite repressive and misogynist attitudes around sex and around gender and around money, the figure of the sector worker is always going to be stigmatized in those terms. If you've got a culture that stigmatizes sex as dirty or naughty or shameful, the sex worker is the symbol of all of that. And it is the stigma that's the most damaging thing. It’s the stigma that causes the most damage. Because it's the stigma that forces people into silence. It's the stigma that stops people today, accessing help, getting support, being open and honest about what they're doing. And when you create shame, that's where you create a lot of danger...
No attempt to abolish it in the history of human experience has been successful. In fact, it hasn't kept anyone safer. It's not helped anybody that's being abused or trafficked. It just makes it harder for people because that's what happens is when you apply more criminal sanctions and more repression to an already marginalized group of people, but the sanctions that have been meted out are pretty tough.’...
‘Have there been any societies where selling sex hasn't been stigmatized or hasn't been subject to restraint and policing?’
‘I haven't found one if there is, which is rather depressing. Although what I will say is our own time is actually quite exciting... In Edo, Japan, a woman was supposed to have three loyalties in her life: one to her father, one to her husband, and one to the sons that she would bear. That was your job. Is, you were, as a wife, you were domestic, you supposed to stay there, you have the babies, you are quiet, you are demure, you are all of those things. Wwhereas your husband, as long as he's supporting you can go and enjoy multiple mistresses. And even though the mistresses exist in a state of sexual slavery, arguably, they had more freedom than the wives. And that's the tension throughout the history of sex work, that it's really difficult to square these things. But ultimately, these were really brutal, patriarchal, capitalist societies.’...
‘Renaissance Italy, that sex work was put forward as a way of saving the population in quote marks from homosexuality’...
‘If men don't have access to sex, they'll do much worse. And they mean homosexuality, they also mean like violent assaults and sexual assault or cheating, or indulging in affairs or having, worst of all, having sex with other men's wives... I still see echoes of that narrative, you know, like whenever there's some incel has done something terrible, as always, inevitably, someone on social media that says, Well can’t they have sex with prostitutes, always. And it's that same attitude that the figure of the, that sex worker has to act as some kind of buffer for horrendous behavior. So we still use that kind of idea of like, well, if they don't have sex with sex workers, they're gonna go and beat up women...
One of my favorite courtesans throughout history was the Greek courtesan Phryne, who was so famous and so good at what she did that we're still talking about today. She, she made so much money, that when Alexander the Great destroyed the walls of Thebes, she offered to rebuild it herself. She had enough money, I will just rebuild the walls of Thebes, but only on the condition that they put up a plaque that said, destroyed by Alexander the Great, rebuilt by  Phryne the whore’"
Weird how in feminist Sweden and the sex-mad US, sex work still has stigma
Strange. I thought capitalism was invented in Europe in the 18th century
The same people who say that poverty leads to crime get upset when you point out that lack of sex causes some men to commit crimes. Maybe they think to explain is to justify - which makes sense considering how they talk about poverty and crime, and blaming society for crime

How Shakespeare inspired terrorists | HistoryExtra - "'The main language in the US probably wouldn't be English without Shakespeare being imported with with the early settlers... In Iran, in Egypt, in these key cultural hubs, it's not until the 19th and 20th centuries, that there really is an influx of translation. And in large part, it's because a resistance to Shakespeare is internal resistance to the British. So they translate sciences, for example, but they don't translate literature. And they tried to preserve their own language and culture by avoiding texts like Shakespeare's. In Algeria, for example, Shakespeare's translated not because he's English, but because he's not French...
‘In Afghanistan in 2005, Corinne Jaber visits Kabul to organise the performance of the first Shakespearean play in the city since the Soviets had invaded decades before. And women take part in this production. How are they treated by the Taliban?’
‘Women hadn't been allowed to work for six years when this performance took place, let alone act. And practically all of the cast of this Love's Labor's Lost had serious issues as a result. When it comes to the women, one’s thrown out of the family home and another gets death threats. Another one is stabbed in the neck, by it, by a family member, actually. But there's one that's particularly pointed, which is *something* who, who punched to the ground on her way home one night, and then her husband who's constantly receiving these calls, telling him to stop his wife from from acting, was eventually gunned down outside their house and killed and his body was mutilated.’...
‘You said something I found really interesting, which is Shakespearean comedy is most problematic to terrorists, but the tragedies provide the inspiration. Can you tell us a bit more about that?’
‘Yeah, it's it's a finding of the book, so to speak. I mean, it's not something I expected. But it seemed to me that the constant example, so Love's Labour's Lost in Afghanistan, there was a bombing at a Twelfth Night in Doha. There's a problem with A Midsummer Night's Dream in Iran. They're all comedies. And I thought for a moment, why is that the case? It seems to me that terrorists generally don't read the plays. And if they do, or if they, if they interact with them, they want to understand them. And actually, the thing that's harder to understand is a bit more of a threat. So, so tragedies have the more universal values we've been talking about and human traits. The comedies are essentially tragic comedy, Shakespeare is very fluid with genre. So he doesn't really just write comedy or just write tragedy, they're very this to some extent, tragic comedies, they still deal with big issues of life, but in a slightly more hidden way, whether that's hidden through the, the the humor or through the puns, or through the happy resolution, they still discuss some of these big issues. And I think that that mystique, so to speak, can be quite unsettling for for those who don't like Shakespeare, whereas the tragedies seem to present these prototypes of assassination, and usurpation and, and that can provide a more direct inspiration to somebody who wants to carry out an assassination or wants to, to usurp the power that they feel is being unjust.’"
Unfortunately he does not justify the claim about the US

The Irish famine: everything you wanted to know  | HistoryExtra - "'It was triggered by a blight on the potato crop. At that stage, about 40% of the Irish people depended on potatoes, that was all they ate, it was their subsistence crop. So when blight came, it was quite serious. But the potato crop had failed a number of times before. What made this particular failure, special, unique and so deadly, was that this blight kept coming back, and it came back for seven consecutive years. And so even though Ireland had suffered from famines before, and indeed, after 1852, the longevity of this major, particularly deadly, when we talk about the famine, we generally date it from 1845, when the potato crop first failed, although excess mortality, the high levels of mortality did not really begin until the end of 1846. And we generally say the famine ended in 1852, when the Blight pretty well disappeared from Ireland...
Potatoes were very well suited to conditions in Ireland. They grew prolifically, even in the poorest of soil, and the Irish moderate climate was very well suited to their growth. So the poor people increasingly grew potatoes. And it was a good choice. It was very sensible, because potatoes, especially if combined with milk, and that was the basic diet, potatoes and buttermilk, is a highly nutritious diet. And what we think, is that before the Great Famine, the great hunger, Irish people were probably the tallest people in Europe, which is not how we think about people about to undergo a famine...
What made the Irish situation unique and so vulnerable? Was that in no other country in Europe, was such a high dependence on potatoes. And that's why when the disease appeared in Ireland, people were very worried because of the high dependence of the poor people on this one crop… In 1845, about 40% of the crop was wiped out, because it came relatively late in the season. And people could cope. You, as I said, people had suffered intermitted food shortages before. And so people did what they usually did. If they had a pig, they'd slaughter it, they'd sell it, they pawn their fishing tackle, they pawn their wedding rings, feeling that the following year would be good, as was the tradition. Again, what made this famine, this tragedy so awful, was that in the following year in 1846, the blight returned, but it was much more deadly, far more virulent. And in 1846, almost all of the potato crop was wiped out...
We don't know exactly how many people died. So, as historians, we tend to round it up. And we say at least one people, 1 million people died, 2 million people emigrated. So the space of six to 10 years, Ireland lost 25% of her population, which by any standards is shocking. And that probably makes the Irish famine, one of the most lethal famines in modern history, in terms of overall population loss. What we, what we also know, and this makes the Ireland almost unique, is that the population never recovered. So in 1841, we think the population was about eight and a half million and growing. By 1851, it was about six and a half million. By 1901, it was about four and the half million. And today, the population of Ireland is about 7 million. It's actually starting to grow. But even as we speak, today, the population of Ireland is smaller than it was in 1845. And again, that is shocking for a modern democracy’"

The Great Depression: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The stock market crash is better understood as a symptom of a lot of structural economic dislocations than as the cause of the Great Depression, despite the fact that many narrative histories introduced the Great Depression with the stock market crash. But the consensus amongst most people who study this closely is that the stock market crash did not have much of a causative effect on creating the event we know as the Great Depression... The best estimate we have is that only about 2.5%, I repeat that, 2.5% of American households owned stock as of 1929. So the effects on the banking system and the credit system turned out over time to be quite severe. But the immediate effects were almost zero in the average American household... the United States stock market did not regain its 1929 pre crash levels, until 1954...
The summary word, the one word that sums up the essence of the New Deal’s changes is the word security. And in fact, that word appears in the title of what is, to this day, probably the single most famous and consequential piece of legislation that came out of the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935’...
‘If we use the usual metric, which is unemployment, that's the sort of the best rough and ready way to think about the beginning of the depression, the scale of the Depression, and then the end of it. And it ends in the United States only in 1941, which happens also to be the year which the United States entered World War Two. And those facts are not unrelated. That it was the massive, massive American federal government spending on war materiel and mobilization for the war that finally puts paid through the Depression. So as as late as the end of 1940, early 1941, the unemployment rate was still around 15, 16 17%. By 1942, it's about 3%. By 1943, it's invisible… World War Two put an end to the depression in a very dramatic fashion. And it did so by demonstrating the power of deficit spending, of government borrowing in order to stimulate the economy. The biggest New Deal deficit was about $6 billion in fiscal year 1936. The federal deficits in 1943, and 1944 were in the range of 70 and $80 billion. That deficit spending on a scale that was just literally unimaginable in the 1930s. Even people like Franklin Roosevelt could not imagine that it would be politically possible or economically feasible, to do deficit spending on that scale’"
So much for libertarians complaining that the New Deal was the problem and delayed the recovery and the government should just have gotten out of the way

Girl with Elephant Dick / Contraceptive Instructions Dress / Paying for bills

3 more blocked by ifunny:

Girl posing with Elephant Penis (in her Tinder)
Addendum: I stumbled across a version of this picture where her name and age as stated on her Tinder profile are uncovered: "Leah, 20. 23 miles away"

"j'ai fait une robe avec une seule notice de pilule contraceptive"

"Gas bill? Can you come later, I'm busy paying for the electricity!"

Links - 6th January 2023 (1 - Covid-19)

Why smart people believe coronavirus myths
From Apr 2020. Ironic, given that some of these "myths" have turned out to be true

Doctors sounding the alarm - Mysterious rise in excess deaths... - "many of the excess deaths are not covid related... demographer Anders Sønstebø at the Norwegian statistics bureau warns that the life expectancy might actually decrease this year, which would be a first since 1997... A new peer reviewed study by Cedars Sinai shows that there has been an unprecedented increase in fatal heart attacks in the U.S during the pandemic years, with young age groups being the worst affected.  Between 1st April 2020 and 31st March 2021, in the first year of the pandemic, there was a 14% increase in heart attack deaths compared with the year before.  However, in the second year of the pandemic, there was a shocking 29.9% increase in fatal heart attacks among young adults aged 25-44.  So we know that heart attacks have risen significantly, but why? And why is there such a big increase among young people, an age group in which heart attacks are not very common. Well, according to Cedars Sinai there are several explanations...  One is that it has something to do with the covid disease itself. Covid appears to in some cases cause heart and cardiovascular problems, something a leading cardiologist in Norway also told me to be the case (but he also said something else caused heart problems too...).  I also personally know people in my family who have had cardiovascular related problems after having had covid, so I would definitely think this would explain some of the increase. And this would make sense. Something that many people have suspected for a long time now is that covid came from a lab. Of course, you were not allowed to say this. But now all of a sudden you are allowed to say it, as a new U.S senate report says that the lab-leak theory is the most likely origin of covid... I booked an appointment with on of the absolute leading cardiologists in Norway. I won't reveal his name, but I can tell you that he is one of the best in the country.  So I headed to the clinic for a heart check, with echocardiogram, EKG and a workout stress test. The full works.  One of the first things he asked me at the appointment was if I had taken the "you know what", as he told me that both it, and covid could cause these issues. Keep in mind that this is one of the best heart doctors in Norway that told me this, this is not something that I am saying... Back to the report from Cedars Sinai, another explanation they give is that the increase in heart problems could have to be with "psychological and social challenges associated with the pandemic". In other words, they are talking about lockdowns and stay at home orders and job losses.  Weird how this is barely talked about in the news, what is the actual cost of the lockdowns? How many people got heart problems due to stress because of being locked in their houses for months, never getting to socialize or exercise?  And another thing to keep in mind. If it is true that covid can cause heart problems, is there something else, something man-made that was designed to mimick covid that could cause the same issues, something that almost everyone has gotten...?... Remember when we were told we had to lockdown and stay at home to save grandma? If only it saved one life it was worth it. But now thousands and thousands more than normal are dying across Europe every week and nobody seems to care anymore, at least not the media. This is being largely ignored. People are dying, their lives are worth just as much as grandma two years ago."

Why are excess deaths higher now than during Covid? | The Spectator - "It isn’t Covid: just 27 per cent of excess deaths in England for the most recent week have Covid as the underlying cause. Instead, problems that built up over lockdowns are being keenly felt now. A report from the British Heart Foundation, published this week, found that over 30,000 people in England have died ‘needlessly’ of heart disease since the start of the pandemic. That’s 230 deaths every week that wouldn’t have happened had we not locked down.  This is in part due to treatment delays during lockdowns... One in five of those heart patients say their health has gotten worse since the pandemic. And, as the below graph shows, over 7,000 patients have now been waiting over a year for a heart procedure. Heart and circulatory conditions account for nearly a quarter of the life expectancy gap between the rich and poorest. So any rise in excess heart deaths is likely to make things much worse. The BHF report pointed to failures in the ambulance service too...   Those on the heart disease treatment and test waiting lists are only a fraction of the potential excess deaths. They’re just the ones who at least have a diagnosis. More data reveals a huge drop in the percentage of 40-74 year olds (those most at risk) receiving health checks during the pandemic. NHS England modelling cited by the BHF suggested the drop in people having their blood pressure checked because of lockdowns could lead to an extra 11,190 heart attacks and 17,702 strokes in the next three years. Despite increased pressure from academics, clinicians and now charities the government still displays little interest in what could be considered one of our greatest ever health crises. An investigation was promised by the then Health Secretary earlier this year but we’re onto our third government since then. An official in the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities wasn’t even aware it was something they monitored (they do) when asked earlier this week.  The communications void on the issue is becoming a problem. Senior clinicians are starting to worry that the lack of attention from the government and the health service is fuelling conspiracy theories... Those concerned about possible long-term effects of the vaccine are not the only ones intrigued by excess deaths. Some followers of the data have contacted me to suggest that perhaps there aren’t any excess deaths at all. There’s a worry among some that the crude averages used by the ONS do not account for an ageing population, and other demographic changes that occur over time. But the most senior figures in statistical academia refute this"

Something weird is happening with the birth rates. - "among young mothers, the unvaccinated are extremely over represented in the number of births, and if the vaccinated had as many children as the unvaccinated in these age groups, it would more than make up for the 9% decrease in birth rates we have seen in the UK over the last year. But as we go up in age groups, this difference is drastically reduced, having almost as many vaccinated as unvaccinated mothers.  Now, one explanation for this could be that among the young women who tend to be more conservative and thus likely to have more children, generally tend to be more skeptical of the vaccine compared with more left leaning young women who tend to embrace the vaccine, but they also tend to have less children. This could be part of the explanation why young mothers are underrepresented when it comes to being vaccinated."
Yet, the fertility rate in Singapore with super high covid vaccine coverage went up in 2021 and apparently will go up even more for 2022

One coronavirus vaccine may protect against other coronaviruses - "Plasma from humans who had been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 produced antibodies that were cross-reactive (potentially providing protection) against SARS-CoV-1 and the common cold coronavirus (OC43), the study found. The study also found mice immunized with a SARS-CoV-1 vaccine developed in 2004 generated immune responses that protected them from intranasal exposure by SARS-CoV-2. Lastly, the study found prior coronavirus infections can protect against subsequent infections with other coronaviruses."
Cross-immunity is not a myth

FactCheck: A claim that Covid -19 vaccines don’t stop transmission of the virus is misleading - "Zeck claimed on Twitter that Covid-19 vaccines “don’t even stop transmission” of the virus.  His initial Tweet on 23 November read: “I’m honestly asking anyone who’s willing to answer: what’s the ethical, scientific and logic [sic] justification to force the entire world to receive a product made by habitually criminal companies who aren’t liable for injury or death, when the product doesn’t even stop transmission?"
From Feb 2022. But people are still trying to gaslight us into thinking that no one ever claimed they would stop transmission

Meme - *White girl drinking at water fountain*
*Black girl drinking at water fountain*
*White girl drinking at water fountain: "vaccinated"*
*Black girl drinking at water fountain: "unvaccinated"*

RNC Research on Twitter - "Stacey Abrams says she wanted small businesses locked down and schools closed for longer: “He prematurely opened the state”"
Guy Benson on Twitter - "This is not an older clip. She just said it."

Can Fear Be Good Medicine? - Freakonomics - "The “It’s Never Just H.I.V.” campaign was meant to communicate that contracting the virus also puts people at risk for a lot of other health problems.      
FAIRCHLID: So, it’s anal cancer, it’s dementia, it’s osteoporosis. And they would show images of gay men — these young gay men of color — looking confused and ashamed, not quite being willing to look at the camera. And it sparked this huge backlash amongst groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and other long-standing activists, arguing that you’re not just conveying to these men what’s in their self-interest. You are building on, and you are enhancing, and you are legitimizing stigma amongst this group...
It’s generally not considered acceptable to make people afraid by lying to them; or as with H.I.V. and AIDS, to create stigma...
FAIRCHILD: The evidence on fear-based campaigns has demonstrated pretty conclusively that, in fact they do work to change behavior. That they don’t typically backfire. That the more fear you use, the bigger the effect that you have."
Of course, in covid messaging, stigma is good - because liberals imagine that those who don't follow the recommendations are just those they hate

Study: COVID booster may increase risk of reinfection - "A COVID-19 booster, specifically a third vaccine dose, may lower protection against getting infected with the omicron variant again for some people — and there’s a reason why, new findings suggest.  In contrast, two vaccine doses, followed by an initial omicron infection, may protect more against a second omicron infection than an extra jab, according to a preprint study published Nov. 1 to medRxiv, a server run by Yale, BMJ and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. This is due to a specific reaction within the immune system, researchers concluded.  Here’s what the findings mean.  “If you got infected with Omicron at any time, a third vaccine dose actually doubles your risk of reinfection compared to 2 doses only,” Dr. Daniele Focosi, who specializes in hematology and works at Pisa University Hospital in Italy, wrote on Twitter in response to the findings. “Amazing immune imprinting at work.”...   A prior study that examined immune imprinting and updating COVID-19 vaccines hypothesized “repeatedly updating” the shots “might not be fully effective” due to the limitations that immune imprinting can present...   “There is no question that the booster dose reduced infection incidence right after its administration…Nonetheless, findings indicate that short-term effects of boosters may differ from their long-term effects”"
Clearly, we need to mandate a second booster to "protect" other people

Humza Yousaf’s Covid fake news - "The Scottish health secretary, Humza Yousaf, has been spreading scare stories about children going to hospital after catching Covid-19...   Of course, as has been clear since the start of the pandemic, when children get infected with Covid they tend to have milder symptoms or none at all. Very few have been hospitalised or have died.  Backing this up, leading paediatrician Steve Turner said there was no evidence of an increase in the hospitalisation rate among children. Yousaf’s figures included children who were hospitalised for things other than Covid, but who then tested positive. Yousaf eventually apologised, saying he didn’t mean to cause ‘undue alarm’. But his claims are consistent with his party’s attempts to inflate fears around Covid. In fact, SNP deputy leader John Swinney seemed to back Yousaf, suggesting that new ‘variants’ could become ‘acutely challenging’ for children, though he provided no evidence of this.  This shameless scaremongering has to stop."
From 2021. Obviously shows how governments need to crack down on "misinformation"

Getting second Covid-19 infection not more dangerous, say S’pore experts rebutting US study - "An American study suggesting that people who are infected with Covid-19 for a second time are at higher risk of organ failure and death is questionable, with inherent limitations and overstated conclusions... The reinfection and first-time-infected groups were very different. From the study data, those in the reinfected group were “three times more likely to be immunocompromised and nine times more likely to be in long-term care”... the patients in the VA study tend to be older male patients, with more who smoke or have serious medical problems, so the results may not apply to the general population."

Biden's Support for COVID Protests Hinges on What Country They're In - "The White House has been quick to support the rights of Chinese demonstrators taking to the streets in opposition to the country's "Zero COVID" policy and the seemingly endless lockdowns needed to enforce it. Recent revelations show that closer to home, the administration actively encouraged a civil liberties-violating crackdown on Canadian protests against vaccine mandates...   Certainly, the statement is a lot more criticism than the White House ever offered of the Canadian government's harsh crackdown on truck drivers protesting a requirement that they be vaccinated in order to reenter their country.  Quite the opposite. The Biden administration urged the Canadian government to use whatever means it had to reopen border crossings barricaded by the so-called "Freedom convoy" and get a handle on the protests.  That's according to revelations of an ongoing Canadian inquiry into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's unprecedented invocation of Canada's Emergencies Act. Trudeau's use of the act in February 2022 allowed his government to freeze the bank accounts of protest participants (even if they hadn't been charged, convicted, or even suspected of committing a crime), demand financial information of protestors be turned over to police, and ban even peaceful, non-disruptive public demonstrations.  It was an unquestionably authoritarian move that received criticism from across the political spectrum. Conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Trudeau of declaring a dictatorship. The progressive Canadian Civil Liberties Association called the prime minister's actions "unnecessary, unjustifiable and unconstitutional." Reason's J.D. Tuccille said Trudeau had a "bad case of China-envy."... The truckers' blockade of U.S.-Canada border crossings stopped billions of dollars of goods from entering the U.S. That threatened more shortages and price hikes, areas that have been continual political headwinds for Biden.  China's "Zero COVID" policy has much the same effect. Its end would be of economic benefit to America, and of political benefit to Biden. That would be reason enough for the White House to look more favorably on the Chinese demonstrations than the Canadian ones.   The Canadian protests against the country's vaccine mandate also came right as the Biden administration was defending its own vaccine mandate for employees of larger businesses from legal challenges.  It would have been awkward indeed for the White House to domestically defend its own, far more sweeping vaccine while urging Canada's government to accommodate the demands of truckers to drop its industry-specific vaccine requirement. Instead, it heartily endorsed some incredibly repressive measures to end anti-mandate protests"
The covid hystericists who claim public health can justify any restriction on civil liberties are in an awkward position

China protests: Trudeau expresses support for protesters - "His comments come just after weeks of testimony over Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act to clear out-of-hand protests in Canada last winter, which ranged from discontent over vaccine requirements to rage fuelled by conspiracy theories"
Luckily they're not truckers

PeterSweden on Twitter - "If you are not allowed to question the science, then it is not science. It is a cult."

Meme - MartinC2Janssen @zauberb...: "Dr. Aaron Kheriaty
"The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility. The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.""
I remember when people were claiming scientism was a straw man

Flu and pneumonia deaths now 10 times higher than Covid
From June 2021

PANDEMICS, LOCKDOWN AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: A REGION-SPECIFIC PERSPECTIVE ON COVID-19 - "This study examines the impacts of COVID-19 induced factors and country specific health-care infrastructure and co-morbid factors on economic growth between January 1, 2021, to May 31, 2021 for 19 South and South-east Asian (SSEA) economies. Our findings indicate that COVID-19 related mortality negates growth, while vaccination and testing have no significant impact on growth during this period. We further quantify the effects by instrumenting government policy measures and vaccination drives in terms of testing, tracking and mortality. Our findings show a negative effect of lockdowns on growth, while vaccination has a positive impact on growth and controls fatality rate considerably."
So much for the early research claiming that lockdowns didn't depress the economy, or claims that lockdowns improve the economy by controlling covid. In the very short term, people can stay home but eventually they need to return to normal life

Strep A surge linked to lockdown, health officials admit for first time - "The surge in Strep A cases killing schoolchildren is linked to lockdown, health officials have admitted for the first time.   It comes as the tally of primary-school-aged children to die from the bacterial infection climbed to seven following the death of a child at Morelands Primary in Waterlooville, Hampshire.   Other cases in under-10s have been found in Surrey, High Wycombe, Wales and Ealing...   A 12-year-old child in Lewisham, London, has also died of the disease, taking the total known tally of children to have died from Strep A in recent weeks to eight.  An alert was issued by the UKHSA on Friday as data showed the rate of severe Strep A cases called invasive Group A Strep (iGAS) is up four-fold compared to pre-pandemic levels...   Scientists argued over the weekend over whether a so-called immunity debt – where there are more people without immunity to various diseases – brought about by Covid lockdowns and social distancing was to blame.   But on Monday, Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical advisor at UKHSA, confirmed for the first time on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that lockdown did play a role."
Time for more lockdown!

Fact Checking the BBC Fact Checkers - "Rachel Schraer is a senior reporter for the BBC, covering health and misinformation. During the pandemic she was in charge of the health team, highlighting misinformation about vitamin D and ivermectin. She was then appointed as the first specialist health and disinformation reporter on the BBC’s fact-checking team... She’s correct that the trials did not look at whether the vaccines stopped transmission but is wrong when she says they looked at whether they reduced people’s chances of catching Covid.  What the trials actually looked at was whether vaccines reduced people’s chances of getting symptomatic infection... a trial showing that the vaccine “seemed to” prevent infection sounds like more anti-science and certainly not the definitive conclusion people were told about. The one they used to segregate society, remove people’s livelihoods and bring in Covid passports... If public health messaging was so clear why were there public health messages saying to get vaccinated to protect others? Why were care home staff sacked because they were supposedly a risk to their patients?... In December 2020, in Nature magazine, it said “[no trial] has demonstrated that it prevents infection altogether, or reduces the spread of the virus in a population. This leaves open the chance that those who are vaccinated could remain susceptible to asymptomatic infection - and could transmit that infection to others who remain vulnerable. In the worst-case scenario, you have people walking around feeling fine, but shedding virus everywhere,” says virologist Stephen Griffin at the University of Leeds, UK.”... It’s not the vaccines, it’s the variants, just don’t say the sacred vaccines didn’t work. It seems, we have come to a new phase in the pandemic…backtracking. The latest catchphrase is “I was correct at the time but the facts changed”.  Facts don’t change. The fact is, the vaccines never prevented infection or transmission. Facts from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) showed you were more likely to get infected if you were vaccinated (and that was pre Omicron when they hastily stopped publishing the data)... The UKHSA data was clear for months that infection rates were higher in vaccinated people but still they got sacked. The only reason vaccine passports were dropped is that enough people were kicking up a fuss and the NHS was about to lose a massive amount of staff. That and revelations that politicians had been partying during lockdown.  Furthermore, the Dutch MEP wasn’t addressing the UK. All around the world people were discriminated against, lost their jobs, couldn’t travel and couldn’t see their family. In many countries, mandates are still in place.  Was the idea your vaccine protects others based on a lie? 100% it definitely was. If it didn’t prevent infection and transmission, how could it protect others? *lots of examples of public health messaging lying about protecting others*... BBC fact checking at it’s finest. They should be renamed to the BBC backtracking department or better still the BBC gaslighting department."

GRANT: Stop blaming people for the behaviour of a virus | Toronto Sun - "Some is hypocritical: Blaming communities of essential workers for not staying at home when it is precisely because they go to work in factories, deliver online orders and maintain infrastructure that well-heeled critics are able to stay at home. And then, some is deplorable: Blaming children for the deaths of their grandparents, as tweeted by the Peel Region paramedics union (The post is mercifully now deleted).  The blame narrative assumes that people aren’t following the rules or that the rules aren’t good enough. Both are wrong. People are being remarkably compliant with all orders from public health, almost all are wearing masks as instructed and drastically reducing social interactions.  Data show there is 80-90% compliance across the board for all the rules. This is remarkable compliance and asking for more is asking for subjects other than humans.  The rules also can’t get much stricter without impacting basic needs such as food and water. It is already impacting our social, mental and societal health, as I will explain below.  Viruses that are successful, in an evolutionary sense, survive because they propagate themselves through things that humans cannot refrain from doing... We have been locking down for over a year. Some places, including the hardest-hit Peel in Region, have been locked down without reprieve since October, with no hint of control. This isn’t because the policies haven’t been strict enough or that people haven’t been following them. It’s because SARS-CoV-2 is a remarkably well-adapted virus.  To the criticism that officials should do more – locking people in their homes or further limiting business or movement – the answer is that we have pushed people to their limits already.  The greatest punishment historically was banishment: We are a social species and without human contact, we suffer. A human alone is unnatural. The last year of forced isolation has left many of our friends and neighbours in pain. Distress that expresses itself in self-harm, increased substance abuse, overdose deaths and physical violence in homes... To borrow the most iconic phrase from the early HIV/AIDS epidemic: It’s a virus, not a moral issue.  SARS-CoV-2 isn’t spreading because of our moral failure, COVID is spreading because it has evolved to do so, inexorably. To think we can control 4 billion years of evolution is the height of hubris.  Buying into the delusion that somehow we can “win” this game, if only we try hard enough, will bring nothing but pain."
From 2021

NY Department Of Health Prioritizes People Of Color For Oral COVID-19 Therapies - "the New York Department of Health published an announcement to health care providers and health care facilities regarding two COVID-19 oral antiviral therapies: Paxlovid, created by Pfizer, and molnupiravir, from Merck, and apparently discriminated against whites."
From Dec 2021 - they were still doing this even then

Tenants Told to Get Double Vaccinated or Get Out - "An example of this occurred last week in Queensland, Australia...   The notice read: “December 17th COVID Rules – 80% Double Vaxxed. No entry to the building for anyone not double vaccinated. [This] includes residents, guests, staff, and trades people.”... if segregation is enforced by overzealous owners, acting on the arbitrary words of bureaucrats plastered all over social media, could tenants be facing a “get vaxxed or get locked out!” discrimination, or unfair eviction?"
From 2021

Pfizer boss refuses to testify to EU Parliament COVID panel — again - "Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla has once again declined to testify before the European Parliament’s special COVID committee.  That’s strike two... Bourla previously pulled out of an appointment to testify before the committee in October, at which he was expected to face tough questions on how secretive vaccine deals were struck. That decision followed an audit report into the EU's vaccine procurement strategy that raised new questions about contact between the pharma CEO and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that preceded a multibillion-euro vaccine contract... the company’s president of international developed markets, Janine Small, faced repeated questions from the committee on Bourla's absence, one of which was even taped to some MEPs' laptops. She also took questions on vaccine contract negotiations and the jabs themselves, including one from Dutch MEP Robert Roos (ECR group) about whether the vaccine was tested for its ability to prevent transmission before entering the market."

Why can't we talk about it? - "It’s stunning how the entire world is only being told one side of the narrative by the mainstream media. While we can’t change that, what we can do is to make everyone aware that nobody on the pro-vaccine side will engage in an open, public civil discussion or debate on the relevant issues. I intend to do just that through non-stop advertising all over the world... my attempt to have a discussion about COVID policies with Michael Laws on The Platform was denied. The message I received read as follows, “He isn’t interested in having his views tested by yours.”  So effectively, I’ve been “de-platformed” by The Platform which bills itself as “New Zealand's only independent media site giving you unbiased coverage, commentary, and opinion and the chance to have your say.” Wow... Everyone on our side of the narrative is denied an opportunity for an open, public discussion about any issues regarding the COVID response including mandates, masking, vaccines, early treatment, lockdowns, VAERS reporting rates that are off the charts, safety signals deliberately being ignored, trust in public health officials such as ACIP committee chair Grace Lee who doesn’t want to see the Israeli safety data, etc... I predict that no one in the world will accept our offer to have a discussion/debate on the key issues.  Their lack of interest in a fair public discussion is very hard to justify. For them, this is the easiest way to show the world that the “misinformation spreaders” are wrong which will reduce vaccine hesitancy and, according to them, save lives. They always tell us they want to reduce vaccine hesitancy: this is their golden opportunity. Why wouldn’t they seize it?...
One way or another, this will ultimately lead to a massive loss of trust in:
Congress (and other federal legislative bodies all over the world)
State and local lawmakers
The medical community worldwide, both in academia and in medical practice
Medical organizations (AMA, IDSA, CMA, etc)
Government agencies including the FDA, CDC, NIH
Medical regulators including state licensing boards and certification boards
The mainstream media
Local public health officials

COVID alarmists are now the ones spreading misinformation - "As a physician who has watched the pandemic unfold on chest X-rays and CT scans, I’ve seen the many waves of COVID wreak havoc on my patients. I have tried my best to speak over the cacophony of misinformation on social media to paint a realistic picture of what’s been happening in our hospitals, in the hopes of encouraging vaccination and accurate risk assessment. But sadly, I’ve come to the realization that not even the unyielding reality of ebbing COVID cases will quiet the voices of committed alarmists on social media. Research from the World Health Organization shows a 90 per cent reduction in global mortality from COVID since February. In clinical practice at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, I have noticed a massive drop in the number of COVID-related pneumonias. This experience is shared by radiologists across North America and reflects the high seropositivity to SARS-CoV-2 and our high levels of vaccination resulting in strong hybrid immunity, which protects against COVID pneumonias. In Ontario, hospital admissions have been dropping since mid-October. Nowadays, cases in those under 60 rarely result in hospitalization and deaths occur almost exclusively in frail elderly patients. The COVID of today simply isn’t the COVID of 2020... It’s estimated that 70-80 per cent of Canadians under 20 and 60-70 per cent of those between 20 and 59 years of age have some infection-acquired immunity.  While immunization is always preferable to infection-acquired immunity, research shows that the hybrid immunity from infection and vaccination confers robust protection lasting six months or longer. Research from South Africa shows the dominant BA.4 and BA.5 variants of Omicron are less virulent than previous variants. But for many pundits, the messaging hasn’t changed. We have entered a new, unfortunate, phase of persistent alarmism. In a competitive market with tight deadlines and an insatiable demand for news, producers often scour Twitter to find opinion leaders to act as expert voices. Unfortunately, opinions are common, but expertise is less so. Many of these so-called experts are hobbyists with no background in public health, epidemiology, immunology, virology or infectious diseases. They operate in the vacuum of online echo chambers, far removed from actual clinical care. Sadly, some of their misinformation has leaked from social media into the newscasts of major networks.   One of the more persistent unsubstantiated theories making the rounds is that the COVID virus has somehow attacked and injured our immune systems, thereby causing the current rise in RSV cases among children.  This has been roundly rejected by the infectious disease community. Infectious disease specialist Dr. Allison McGeer, in an interview with TVO, for example, explained that the spike is due to reduced rates of previous exposure in a large cohort of children who are now getting exposed all at once. Another more outlandish claim is that Omicron causes brain tissue loss in children. This is based on a single study showing atrophy in adults over the age of 51 who were infected by the Alpha strain of COVID. Extrapolating the results to children infected with the much-less-virulent Omicron strain is dubious at best. Making declarative statements absent empirical evidence is simply irresponsible. With 70-80 per cent of children already infected, brain atrophy and cognitive impairment would be hard to overlook if it was indeed occurring as claimed... As alarmists push for more restrictions based on fringe theories, the gap between what they’re saying and what people are experiencing widens. With this, we see an erosion of public confidence. Facing increasing vaccine hesitancy and organized efforts to undermine public health, we simply cannot afford to squander trust."

Links - 5th January 2023 (2 - Meghan & Harry)

Prince Harry’s war on the media - "Harry is no Greta Garbo, the 1930s film star who wanted to be completely left alone. Harry wants to have his celebrity cake and eat it. It’s not total privacy he wants, but control over his privacy. He wants to sell bits of his personal life in return for millions of dollars from Netflix, Spotify and Apple. And he also wants to keep other aspects off-limits, perhaps to commodify and sell access to at a future date. But the calculated selling of his private life is more than just an issue of monetisation. Prince Harry is trying to ensure that the press cannot just say what it wants about his private life and profit from it. Harry and Meghan are trying to ensure that if the press wants to hold them, as powerful people, to account, it will only be able to do so on their terms.   Because make no mistake, Harry and Meghan are powerful. On their Sussex Royal website, they write that they, ‘like every member of society, value privacy as individuals and as a family’. They are correct that the right to privacy is an important freedom for all of us to have, whether prince or pauper. Yet people’s private lives are not of equal public interest. The Sussexes’ wealth, media access and social position puts them at the top of society. It means their lives ought to be subject to more scrutiny than those not in positions of privilege and power. But Harry and Meghan want to control this accountability. They want the press to scrutinise them on their own terms. As their website states, they welcome ‘being held to account if appropriate’ (my italics)... Given the Sussexes’ attempts to demonise the press, it is hardly a surprise that Harry recently described the US First Amendment as ‘bonkers’. He clearly sees freedom of speech and freedom of the press as a threat to his power and privilege."

SARAH VINE: Prince Harry is playing a foolish game - "Quite what part of being given a fully refurbished cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle, together with armies of staff and just about every privilege imaginable, can be described as ‘neglect’ is something perhaps ordinary commoners such as myself simply cannot grasp. As for being bullied into silence, one cannot help, at this stage, but think ‘If only’.  I suppose we will just have to take his word for it. But Harry is playing a foolish game. Because the trouble with all this public soul-searching is that, after a while, the novelty begins to wear thin.  Each revelation has less impact than the last, and instead of offering a rare glimpse behind the curtain, Harry is now in danger of over-exposing himself. If he doesn’t get a grip soon, there will reach a point where his pronouncements will become so commonplace no one will care, or take any notice. His brother, Prince William, meanwhile, is pursuing a very different strategy.  Already over the past months we have seen the intellectual and emotional abyss that now exists between the brothers, as Harry becomes ever more angry and vengeful, externalising his pain and broadcasting his rage to the world.  William, by contrast, seems to find strength and solace in his family, preferring to focus his energies on the positive rather than turning his misery into a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder. While he has in the past indicated his sadness at losing his mother, he has not let it become the defining narrative of his life, thanks in large part to the support of the Duchess of Cambridge, with whom he clearly has a very happy and successful relationship. Whatever private agonies he may feel, he has kept them just that, private, choosing to maintain a dignified silence wherever possible. Which is why, when he read out a statement on Thursday in response to Lord Dyson’s investigation into the methods used by BBC reporter Martin Bashir to obtain the 1995 Panorama interview with Princess Diana, it blew anything his brother had to say out of the water.  The very fact that he rarely speaks out on highly personal matters already made us sit up and listen. But in the measured restraint of his delivery, in the quiet deliberation of his words, he was everything that Harry is not.  The economy of emotion and absence of melodrama (no ominous soundtrack here, unlike in the Oprah interview; no stage lighting or theatrics) made what he had to say so much more powerful.  Rather than rage, we saw sorrow. Rather than psychobabble, we saw real emotion. And rather than a child lashing out, we saw a grown man confronting the realities of a situation and dealing with them as grown men do: with courage and dignity. And yet at no point did he appear cold or uncaring... The fact that William can so clearly see the broader picture is what sets him apart from his brother, who appears to see the world through the filter of his own, fairly narrow, experience.  These are the qualities of a prince, with the wisdom and understanding needed to lead an institution like the Royal Family: perspective, authority and grace.  This week in William we saw a future king, a man with a clear and precise moral compass, who has learned to marshal his emotions and understands how to make an impact without making a spectacle of himself or his family."

Charles gave Harry and Meghan ‘substantial sum’ despite financial cut off claim - "The Prince of Wales helped the Duke and Duchess of Sussex with a “substantial sum” of money after they quit as working royals, despite Harry claiming his family “literally cut me off financially”.  Accounts show Charles continued to fund the Sussexes until the summer of 2020, with a senior Clarence House spokesperson saying he allocated them the generous amount of money.  However, the duke told Oprah Winfrey he stopped getting financial support from his family in the first quarter of that year."... A spokesperson for the Sussexes insisted there was no difference in timeline, and that Harry was actually referring to the first quarter of the fiscal reporting period in the UK, which runs from April to July."
Apparently April is summer

‘Prince Harry effect’ adds to huge rise in students reporting mental health problems
When you glorify victimhood, you get more of it

Prince Harry 'regretful and embarrassed' over Oprah chat: Biographer - "A Royal biographer claims that Prince Harry is probably “regretful and embarrassed” for betraying his family in the explosive Oprah Winfrey interviewer. His wife, Meghan Markle, however, is “in her element,” claims Duncan Larcombe, author of Prince Harry: The Inside Story... Larcombe said he foresees a time when Harry rues the day the couple spilled the royal tea.  “He’s now facing the consequences. I believe he’ll regret that interview — and maybe his decision to leave the Royal Family”"

ROYAL REPORT: Prince Harry's 'happy life' a bitter illusion - "“I think what we see and hear from these interviews is a man who is desperately trying to convince himself that he has found happiness, and he has been through it all and reached the other side — that he’s finally free. I don’t think that’s the case. He and Meghan aren’t happy or free. I don’t think his move to LA has solved anything.” Meanwhile, a shocking new poll reveals that the majority of Brits want Harry and Meghan either stripped of their royal titles or should stop using them.  The poll from YouGov was conducted on May 17 after last week’s podcast in which Harry attacked his father’s and grandparents’ parenting styles and seemed baffled by free speech. A little over 60% said they should lose their Duke and Duchess of Sussex titles... there was some good news for the Royals — but maybe not for publicity loving Harry and Meghan.  Insiders say Princess Beatrice’s pregnancy announcement was a “total dig” at the California couple.  Beatrice announced she was expecting her first child with husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi early Wednesday — on Harry and Meghan’s third wedding anniversary.  They had revealed they were expecting son Archie at Beatrice’s sister Princess Eugenie’s wedding on Oct. 12, 2018.  “It was a total dig at Harry and Meghan. They stole Eugenie’s thunder on her big day, after all, and it appears that has not been forgotten""

Prince Harry should take a leaf out of Edward VIII’s book - "The news that Prince Harry is writing “an intimate and heart-felt memoir” is yet another stinging blow for the Royal family... With woeful lack of irony, Harry says that he is “writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”. A man whom, if he was not born a prince, would not have reportedly been paid an estimated advance of $20 million...   Harry and his edgy ghost would do well to take note of the memoir of Harry’s great great uncle, the Duke of Windsor, which he wrote at the end of the Forties. Published in September 1951, A King’s Story, The Memoirs of The Duke of Windsor, dedicated “To Wallis”, caused consternation behind palace walls. The Royal family were appalled that Edward VIII would sell his secrets for money – he earned £300,000 (roughly £3.5m today) for his bestseller. Courtiers resented the title because it was Edward’s brother, Bertie, who was on the throne thanks to his abdication. However, unlike Harry, who self-exiled from the Royal family 15 months ago, choosing love and family over monarchical duty, the Duke of Windsor waited 15 years before publishing his account of abdicating to marry Wallis Simpson. By this time, he had given up long-held hope of his wife ever being acknowledged by his family or being accorded the HRH title that he was desperate for her to receive. If the Royal family had welcomed the Windsors back into the fold, it is doubtful that the Duke would ever have consented to this blameless tome... Unlike Prince Harry’s moaning, for a man as impassioned and aggrieved as Edward was, no animosity is tangible in his prose...   In contrast with Harry's alleged book deal, the memoir was the last word that the Duke ever wrote on his life or the abdication. He died 21 years later. He did not detail his bitterness over his life in exile, nor his pain towards his unyielding family. Judging by his recent form, such restraint seems unlikely with the memoir that Harry will produce. If only the Duke of Sussex would take note. Once the royal drawbridges have gone up behind you, in literary terms, less is always more."

Prince Harry says Archie’s first words were ‘Grandma Diana’ - "the Duke of Sussex revealed how Archie’s first words after “mama” and “papa” were a reference to Harry’s late mother... The revelation comes just a few months after the Duke of Sussex told chat show host James Corden that Archie’s first word was "crocodile".  He told Corden: "My son is now over a year and a half, he is hysterical, he’s got the most amazing personality, he’s already putting two, three words together, he’s already singing songs. ‘His first word was ‘crocodile’. Three syllables!""
The credulous squad will believe this, of course

Meghan Markle 'led normal life out with pals' despite moaning she didn't leave house as royal, Diana's biographer claims - "Andrew Morton, who famously wrote Princess Diana's blockbuster biography in 1992, said friends saw Meghan going out and about as a royal.  She would go to the shops and eat out at restaurants with her pals, he claims... "friends of mine said they've seen Meghan walking from Whole Foods supermarket on Kensington High Street with bags of foods back to Kensington Palace. "It didn't seem too much like a prison. Other friends have seen her out and about with friends at restaurants, so she seems, to me, to have led a normal life."...   Royal expert Andrew Morton also pointed out that Meghan flew to New York on a private jet when celebrating her baby shower when pregnant with Archie in February 2019."

Meghan Markle relative explains why they 'won't ever talk' - "One of Meghan Markle’s family members doesn’t anticipate a warm reunion with the Duchess of Sussex, saying they likely “won’t ever talk again.”  Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the relative claimed in a new interview that Markle, 39, developed the belief that she is above her estranged family after becoming a royal in 2018.  “We’re clearly in different social classes, and we won’t ever talk again”"

God Save the Kween - "Essentially they have rehabilitated, in woke form, the laws of lèse-majesté. It is a curious irony of modern Britain that it isn’t Her Actual Majesty who is furiously protected from insult. It’s Her Woke Majesty, the chattering classes’ favourite duchess, the leading lady in the new aristocracy of ‘social justice’. Stand up when ‘God Save the Queen’ comes on and the Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the woke brigade will snigger loudly. But say a single sore word about the sainted Meghan and the very same people will be up on their feet, tears in their eyes, shouting: ‘GOD SAVE THE KWEEN!’... In truth, deference didn’t disappear – it morphed. It shifted from deference to the upper classes towards deference to expertise. From deference to God and the Bible towards deference to the cult of climate change. From deference to ‘one’s betters’ towards deference to the professional managerial elites who seek to police our emotions and govern our lives in a way that would have made the ‘betters’ of old say: ‘Is that a bit much?’ And who is it that engages in this new deference? Who is it that genuflects to ‘experts’, obeys the commandments and rituals of the climate-change religion, and curtseys to the kween? It isn’t me or you. It isn’t most ordinary people. It’s the woke set. It’s these phoney rebels. It’s the overeducated new elites. They defer more crawlingly than any cap-doffer of old did. Indeed, the reason they’re so angry these days is that the rest of us are refusing to defer. Football fans see the taking of the knee – a brazen act of deference to the politics of identity – and they say ‘BOOO’. Voters were instructed to defer to the wisdom of the EU and its wise unelected bureaucrats and we said ‘Nope’. ‘Change your whole life to offset climate change’, the eco-religionists demand, and we turn away to carry on booking our cheap flights to Malaga. Ours is an era of a new elitist form of deference, and a corresponding revolt against deference. I know who I’m with – the booing, sceptical, free-thinking crowd, rather than the creeps saying: ‘Worship our kween, ye plebs.’"

Meghan Markle’s Obsession with Princess Diana – Wealth Magazine - "Meghan had a copy of Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton on her bookshelf... [Ninaki] Priddy added, “I’m not shocked at all [by Meghan’s engagement to Harry]. “It’s like she has been planning this all her life.”... “She gets exactly what she wants and Harry has fallen for her play…but my advice to him is to tread cautiously.”... Another Markle family friend, Sonia Ardakani, recalls Meghan as being “obsessed” with watching video reruns of Diana’s fairy tale wedding as a child, never knowing in her wildest dreams just how close to home the video would be.  Meghan Markle ‘idolized Diana as a child,’ yet she told Oprah in their 2021 interview that she knew little of the Royal family...   According to people who knew Meghan when she was young, she was inspired by Diana’s style and compassion in her humanitarian work as a young girl. Meghan reportedly felt Princess Diana’s death in a “keenly personal way” and cried watching her funeral. In his book ‘Meghan: A Hollywood Princess’, renowned royal biographer Andrew Morton said that, according to family friends, Meghan was “intrigued” by Diana and saw her as a role model. She started collecting clothes and toys for less privileged children with her friend Suzy Ardakani (Sonia Ardakani’s daughter), a move that was inspired by Diana.   Meghan Markle has blatantly based her image on Prince Harry’s late mother, Princess Diana as depicted in the images below… And it’s borderline creepy. Meghan Markle has proven herself to be a very disturbed individual, from disowning her father who treated her like a princess all her life, to threatening suicide while pregnant with Archie, to her life-long obsession with royalty and Princess Diana, and her perpetual deceit and hypocrisy that has played out in the media.  So, Meghan Markle always yearned for a royal life due to her ‘obsession’ with Diana. Her BFF said Meghan was a ‘superfan’ of the royal family and studied photos of Princess Diana. Meghan even managed to arrange her blind date with Prince Harry on Princess Diana’s 55th birthday anniversary, July 1, 2016. Poor, bamboozled Harry believes that ‘This beautiful woman just sort of tripped and fell into my life.’   Harry and Meghan are two of the most ultra-privileged people in this world of almost 8 billion people, and yet they are making a living out of being two whiny, pathetic spoiled brats complaining about how awful their families are and how bad their lives have been. Meghan has turned Harry from Prince Charming to Prince Harming, trashing his family just as she has trashed hers."

DAN WOOTTON reveals growing royal fury at Harry's tell-all book - "What has angered courtiers most is that Harry and Meghan know, whatever they say in the book, Prince Charles and Prince William, as heirs to the throne, will find it almost impossible to fight back. Insiders close to the Prince of Wales have confirmed he did not know about Harry's book, even though he has been working on it for the past year... A royal insider says: 'This is the end of any close relationship with the Duke of Cambridge. There's nothing more that can be said on that front. William believes his behaviour is shameful and tasteless.  'Harry's been going around to people saying he can't remember his childhood and his mother that much. Now he's going to write a book about it. How does that stack up?... The book's publication in 2022 has also worried courtiers because it risks overshadowing a trio of significant royal milestones.  The source explains: 'First and foremost, it's the Queen's Platinum Jubilee. That's what matters most.  'But it's also Prince William's 40th birthday and the 25th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana.  'With that mix, it should have been a really positive year for the Royal Family.  'But Harry clearly doesn't care. He's acting like a child. We need to remember he's a nearly 37-year-old man, not a 21-year-old. He's on the cusp of middle age.'... Harry isn't at all concerned about the pushback from London. In fact, he seems to revel in it these days.  Announcing the news yesterday, he said in a statement: 'I'm writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become. I've worn many hats over the years, both literally and figuratively, and my hope is that in telling my story – the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learnt – I can help show that no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think... even though there's general outrage within the Royal Family at Harry's move to become a bestselling author on the back of the institution, some admit he has finally proven beyond any doubt that he can be financially self-sufficient and sees no path back."

PIERS MORGAN: Prince Harry's tell-all memoirs are a betrayal too far for the Queen and the royals - "The Queen Mother had a strict maxim for royal conduct: 'Never complain, never explain, and rarely be heard speaking in public.'  It worked very well for her, ensuring that when she died aged 101, it was as a deeply beloved figure in Britain and around the world.  Her daughter Queen Elizabeth has followed a similar maxim, and it's worked very well for her too as she's become the most respected and longest-serving monarchs in history without ever giving a single interview. But the Queen's grandson Prince Harry sadly didn't get the discretion memo.  Or if he did, he rejected it in favour of the new strategy: 'Always complain, always explain, and never stop yapping, whining, preaching and trashing your family.' Now, just when we assumed that the man who insisted he had to leave Britain to protect his privacy had exhausted every lucrative avenue of invading his own privacy, he's written his memoirs...  it's not actually that surprising.  Why would someone whose only currency now is airing dirty laundry about his family to any media entity that will pay him enough, NOT write a book flinging yet more mud at them?  To be blunt: Harry's a sell-out, and this is just another example of him selling out.  It's sad, pathetic, and totally unnecessary, and it will obviously cause yet more pain to his grandmother who is still mourning the loss of her husband Philip.  But Harry doesn't care about that.  Like his wife Meghan, he doesn't care about anyone but himself... First, obviously, it's not the first time he's wanged on about his experiences, losses and life lessons. It's literally all Harry ever does, ad nauseum, to anyone that will write him a big enough cheque. He's been on the 'Woe-Is-Me' tour for many years now.  Second, given the disingenuous unsubstantiated nonsense that he and Meghan came out with during their 90-minute Oprah whineathon, I think the one thing we can safely assume from this book is that it won't be 'honest'. It will be Harry's 'truth' which like Meghan's 'truth' tends to bear little relation to the actual truth.  Third, what exactly is so 'inspiring, courageous and uplifting' about a guy who ditches his country, duty and family for a woman who's disowned her own family? The couple love to tell us all how compassionate they are, yet they show zero compassion to the people closest to them in the world.  Harry's own statement was even more laughable.  'I'm writing this not as the prince I was born,' he declared, but as the man I have become.'  Really?  In that case, why did the statement come from 'Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex?'  And he's not even writing it – he's got a Pulitzer Prize winning ghost-writer to do it, presumably to make him sound more intelligent... There's only one hat that hapless Harry wears these days and it's the one with 'HYPOCRITE' on it.  He wants all the hugely beneficial trappings of being a royal Prince without having to do any of the hard duty graft the rest of his family put in to earn the title. He wants to cash in on the royal status to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, whilst simultaneously bleating on about how much he hates being a royal.  He wants to lecture us all on stuff like climate change whilst using his celebrity mates' private jets like taxis.  And when he says, 'no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think', who is he trying to kid?... Harry's memoirs, for which he's being paid a reported $20 million – he says it's all going to charity, but let's keep a close eye on that claim - will be yet another chance for him to torch his family, and the institution they serve.  And every time he does this, and allows his wife to do it, he chips further away at the magic that sustains the royals in public life.  They've become a pair of petty, spiteful, bitter little grifters intent on causing as much damage as they can... I've said this before, and I now say it again: the Queen should strip Harry and Meghan of all their titles with immediate effect.  Compel them to do this malevolent, manipulative cr*p in their names, not as royals"

Prince Harry Feared Meghan Markle Would ‘Dump’ Him Over Racist Media Coverage - "After a relatively quiet few weeks, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle return to their customary column inch-hogging pole position this weekend. The Times of London reports that Harry feared Meghan would end their relationship if he didn’t make a strong public statement condemning what he felt was the media’s racist treatment of her at the beginning of their relationship, so he ordered his office to do just that... the couple have been approached to present an Oscar, the pick of which was up to them. The original idea was for them to present Best Actress, but then that was nixed because one of the nominees is Kristen Stewart for role as Princess Diana in the bizarro but fun to watch Spencer. So, the new idea is they’ll present the gong for Best Film.  The controversy, such as it is, is that if they do turn up at the Oscars next Sunday (on March 27), some people will be angry that they are choosing Hollywood glam over family responsibilities, Harry having already made clear he won’t be at his grandfather Prince Philip’s memorial service on Tuesday March 29, apparently due to security concerns.  Harry has, however, said he will be attending the opening of the Invictus Games on April 16 in the Netherlands, just of weeks after the memorial service. That move was said to possibly cause a raising of tension in the royal family, as well as being a “slap in the face” for the queen"

Prince Charles will not let grandson Archie be a prince: report - "Prince Charles, who is likely to be the next British king, is determined to limit the number of key royals in an effort to appease his future subjects — who he believes don’t want to pay for a bloated monarchy"
Trimming down the monarchy is good - unless it clashes with the "anti racist" agenda

Meghan Markle's presidential run appears inevitable | The Spectator - "Meghan Markle has starred in a Netflix show and married into the Royal Family, but has she got her eyes on even loftier ambitions? Since quitting the UK and moving to the United States, the Duchess of Sussex has involved herself in various soft-political campaigns. She's asked Congress to legislate paid family leave. She has also placed herself in the company of the Obamas and the Bidens. Is this all serving as a prelude to a presidential bid for the Democratic nomination?   If so, Joe Biden's sister appears to have given the game away. While Meghan has kept schtum about her political aspirations, Valerie Biden Owens has suggested president Markle might not be such a far-fetched prospect...  Is Owens just freelancing here? That seems unlikely: Biden's sister is a seasoned political operator who played a key role in her brother's successful 2020 presidential campaign. She also worked with him on his Senate campaigns and his 2008 presidential bid, which saw him bow out and grant his support to Obama in exchange for the vice-presidency. Everything that she says or does publicly, especially to a journalist during a sit-down broadcast interview, is likely to have been carefully considered. It isn't an exaggeration to say that this interview might be seen as a formal overture to Meghan from the Democratic party establishment. The message is simple: ‘Do you want to lend us your celebrity if we’re defeated by the Republicans at the next election?’...  how would Meghan handle the negative publicity that would inevitably follow any bid she makes for the top job in American politics? If she runs for public office, the media will feel licensed to pursue avenues that have previously been considered off limits, such as her first husband Trevor Engelson, who has kept a remarkably low profile since their divorce in 2013. The controversy and news stories that will inevitably emerge could make the tales involving previous presidential candidates look mild by comparison."

Meghan Markle reportedly planning to run for US president - "Meghan Markle is reportedly already networking with senior Democrats to help her ambitions to become the first female US president.  The Duchess of Sussex previously told friends about her political ambitions — and now hopes her blockbuster Oprah Winfrey interview will strengthen support in the US...   Another biographer previously insisted that the duchess does not have the “skin of a rhino to run for office,” with her sensitivity to criticism only further highlighted during her sit-down with Oprah.  “I would state categorically that she has no chance of ever running for president. She would be eaten alive,” Andrew Morton, author of “Meghan: A Hollywood Princess,” told Vanity Fair"
She and her shills can just blame her putative failure on racism and sexism

Meghan Markle Troll Makes Over $3k a Month Trashing Her on YouTube
Still nothing compared to how much Meghan and Harry make trashing his family

‘Pretending To Be A Duchess Won’t Buy Her Any Favors’: Netflix Cancels Meghan Markle Series Purportedly Based On Her Own Life - "Netflix, which reported last week it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, announced over the weekend that it was canceling development of a series created by British duchess Meghan Markle —  and some reports said the show would have been based on her own life... 'Meghan is realising that pretending to be a “Duchess” won’t buy her any favours in the cutthroat world of telly. Netflix has axed her first series Pearl - based on her own life - before it ever aired. Most likely because it was going to be worthy tosh. Back to the drawing board.'"
Liberals will say they are stupid for cutting content people want to watch

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle have ‘no celeb friends’, claims royal expert - "Royal write Daniela Elser’s comments come after Harry and Meghan were snubbed by David and Victoria Beckham at their son Brooklyn Beckham’s weekend wedding with Nicola Pelts. Prince William and Kate Middleton were, however, invited.  While many say that it is the ‘social snub of the year’, Elser believes it is not the first time that Prince Harry and Meghan have been left off important lists since their move to the US.  Writing for News.com.au, Elser said: “This latest Sussex-free event comes after rumours circulated earlier this year that we would see Harry and/or Meghan on the Oscars stage presenting an award, a glittering moment which obviously did not come to pass.”  She went on to further point out: “Nor were the Montecito-based royal expats on the red carpet for the Met Gala in New York or on Martha’s Vineyard for President Barack Obama’s 60th birthday last year.”"

Thomas Markle will give evidence against Meghan to support Samantha | Toronto Sun - "The 40-year-old royal is being sued for defamation by her half-sister, 57-year-old Samantha Markle, who has claimed the former ‘Suits’ actress made “false and malicious statements” about her in her bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey last year, and now the women’s father has admitted he backs his eldest daughter and would be willing to give evidence on her behalf... Samantha filed her lawsuit earlier this month and accused Meghan of spreading lies in order to promote the idea she’s overcome a difficult family situation, and highlighted the fact the former ‘Suits’ star told Oprah she was an “only child”, despite sharing the same father as Samantha and her brother, Thomas Markle Jr..  The writer also disputed Meghan’s claim in the interview that she’d last seen her half-sister “at least 18, 19 years ago and before that, 10 years before that”, and that Samantha only changed her own surname back to Markle when the former actress began generating headlines for her relationship with Harry.  Samantha claimed Meghan has fabricated stories of growing up in “virtual poverty” because her dad paid for her to attend dance and acting classes, and “elite and expensive private schools”. And despite the duchess’ claims to Oprah and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres that she worked hard to put herself through university, Samantha insisted their father covered the costs of Meghan’s tuition and living expenses at Northwestern University. Samantha accused Meghan of lying about her and her childhood as part of a calculated effort so they “could not interfere with or contradict the false narrative and fairytale life story concocted by” the duchess.  Samantha has claimed her estranged relative’s comments have damaged sales of her autobiography, ‘The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister’, prevented her from getting work, and caused emotional and mental distress."

Meghan Markle and Harry want to sell £11m mansion they 'aren't over the moon about' - "The Duke and Duchess of Sussex want to move just 18 months after buying their £11million California mansion – because they are not “over the moon” about the property."

'We didn't have a plan': Contrary to claims, Sussexes were making money deals in 2019 - "the couple spent more than a year before “Megxit” in talks with a now defunct U.S. streaming platform to make a series of 10-minute videos.   The story behind their conversations with Quibi, once hailed as the next YouTube and backed by pounds 1.3 billion of investment from the likes of Disney, NBC and Goldman Sachs, lays bare some of the apparent tensions between the Sussexes and their staff as they tried to walk the tightrope between royal duty and commercial opportunity... when they were still full-time working royals, palace aides are understood to have long harboured concerns that the couple would be accused of cashing in on their royal status because of the meetings with Quibi — or tarnished by association if it failed to take off. One source said: “Chinese walls were put up and certain amounts of information weren’t shared, which just made it difficult to protect the couple from accusations of attempting to monetise their role. It was hard for royal aides to be supportive of projects like Quibi because they knew how it might look, but the couple kept dismissing these concerns. They didn’t seem to see the pitfalls of any potential conflict of interests.” Amid talk of conflict behind the gates of Kensington Palace, with a bullying complaint submitted against the couple in October 2018, it seems that one bone of contention for royal aides was Harry and Meghan’s “secretive” conversations with her trio of US advisers."

Ridiculous Zuccs: Burning down Ladybugs

In "A Group Where We All Give *ONLY* Very Bad Advice 2.0", in response to "My bedroom is infested with gross bugs that need to go but everytime I have my husband release them outside, more appear and he won't let me *burn* the place down. Photo of the invaders Pls help",

"I'm terrified of lady bugs and I think you should *burn* the place down anyway, possibly with him inside so he can be with his new best friends."

Presumably this was interpreted as a death threat.