Please contribute to Kathie Breault’s legal defense fund. GiveSendGo
In April, 2023, Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) Kathie Breault was indicted in the Eastern States District Federal Court for “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” for giving vaccination cards to people who did not receive Covid-19 vaccinations. Her defense is that the vaccinations were ineffective and harmful, and to administer them would violate the Hippocratic oath of health professionals (First do no harm). Her legal battle against a dishonest and vindictive federal government will require lawyer’s fees that exceed her ability to pay — a reminder that “the process is the punishment.”
Kathie has also been accused of “professional misconduct” by the New York State Licensing Board for prescribing Ivermectin via telehealth visits in July 2021. Many other medical practitioners across the United States have been similarly persecuted and some have lost their licenses to practice. Kathie has been under investigation by New York’s Office of Professional Discipline since March 2022. No decision has been reached as of May 2023.
Please contribute to Kathie Breault’s legal defense fund. GiveSendGo
In 1968, two Stanford professors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, wrote a book at the suggestion of the executive director of the Sierra Club, a prominent environmentalist organization. Titled *The Population Bomb*, the book warned that increasing birth rates—helped by the abundance of energy—would become a species-level crisis. Too many people would mean too little food, water, and land. Chaos would erupt. Doom would follow.
All of this would happen in the coming decades. The book’s ideas were not new. They were a modern repackaging of the economics of Thomas Malthus, who warned that an increase in economic growth would inevitably lead to a higher population than natural resources could sustain.
What both Malthus and the Ehrlichs failed to foresee was the degree to which human ingenuity would lead to innovations that would meet growing human needs. The result is that even though the population is larger than ever, the world’s food production per capita has never been higher than in modern times.
But tragically, fallacious Malthusian ideas have had a real-life impact on government policy. For example, lingering concerns about the population bomb led to horrific population control programs in countries around the world. Most know about China’s one-child policy. Less known is that the Peruvian government used US foreign-aid money to sterilize indigenous women involuntarily. Other population control policies were implemented around the world
The failure of these predictions has not disgraced the Malthusian worldview, however. In fact, its advocates continue to be treated as respected leaders in their fields. In 2023, Paul Ehrlich appeared on 60 Minutes to offer new warnings of extinction, despite a fifty-plus-year track record of being wrong.
The unfortunate reality is that predictions of environmental doom are useful for those that desire power. The greater the threat, the more power is needed. As history has shown, the government grows in times of crisis and rarely ever shrinks once the emergency has passed.
Even as concerns about global cooling have transformed into worries about global warming, the underlying need for power remains: the government needs to regulate, tax, and enjoy generally greater control over the organization of society.
This does not mean, of course, that all warnings about pollution and other negative externalities are not justified. What it does mean is that politicizing science is extremely dangerous. Whether it’s climate change, foreign policy, or covid-19, the unfortunate reality is that those that argue for aggressive state intervention are often rewarded with increased government funding. We pay for it with taxes, higher prices, and a loss of liberty.
The incentives of institutional research matter. In today’s world, they are too often guided by politics, not science.
The most destructive natural disasters are never 100 percent natural. Human choices, land use, and government policies play a big role in how harmful hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flash floods, and wildfires are to the affected communities.
And after catastrophes like the wildfire that destroyed much of the historic Hawaiian city of Lahaina last week, it’s worth taking stock of how much of the disaster was the result not of natural or accidental factors, but of policies and institutions that can be changed.
Though details are still emerging, it’s becoming clear that government failure did much to make this disaster worse—and possibly even started it. While the so-called experts are blaming climate change—and in the process demanding that government grab even more power and authority ostensibly to someday give us better weather—the destructiveness of this fire was the product of an all-powerful and all-incompetent régime.
The specific origins of the fire are still being investigated, but there is much we already know. The city of Lahaina sits on the west coast of Maui, Hawaii’s second-largest island. It is surrounded by grassland, much of which the state owns.
Nearly a decade ago the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, a research nonprofit, warned the Hawaiian government that the area around Lahaina was extremely fire-prone due to frequent downslope winds, steep terrain, and dry grass. Little was done to address these risks. A subsequent report in 2020 added that an invasive species of exceptionally flammable grass was prevalent in the surrounding fields and that passing hurricanes created strong winds known to fuel wildfires on the islands.
Early last week, Hurricane Dora crossed the ocean south of Hawaii. By early Tuesday morning, August 8, winds as fast as sixty miles per hour were blowing down the slopes of the West Maui Mountains into Lahaina. Around sunrise, a large fault was detected in the power grid, indicating a downed power line. Twenty minutes later, the first reports of fire came in from the area around Lahainaluna Road, uphill and upwind from the city.
The area where flames were first spotted is full of electrical infrastructure, mostly operated by Hawaiian Electric, the state’s monopoly electricity supplier. This included a substation and a multitude of power lines. Most of the land in the area is owned by the State of Hawaii except for a parcel belonging to the estate of one of Hawaii’s last princesses. This parcel housed a solar farm supplying electricity to the Hawaiian Electric substation. Early last year, NPR published a glowing article about the solar project, praising it the direct result of government regulation crafted to help transition Hawaii to 100 percent renewable power by 2045.
But on the morning of August 8, as winds hammered the old wooden utility poles, this highly electrified area in the dry grasses above Lahaina was quickly becoming dangerous. Yet no formal procedure was in place to shut off sections of the grid in the face of severe fire risks. As a result, twenty-nine fully energized poles fell across West Maui that day.
But even with downed poles in the way, the first firefighters on the scene met with some early success. Around 9 a.m., the county fire department declared the fire “100 percent contained.” But the message to residents included an ominous request. The county’s water pumps were powered by electricity, much of which was frantically being turned off to deactivate the downed lines. Officials asked the public to conserve water to preserve water pressure.
But by midafternoon, a flare-up brought the fire back to life on the Lahaina Bypass, a major road that heads straight into town. The flames moved swiftly into Lahaina at 4:46 p.m., one minute after the county government finally sent out an alert to warn the city’s population, largely without power, about the flare-up that had occurred over an hour before.
To make matters worse, county officials failed to activate emergency sirens, leaving residents unaware of the danger bearing down on them. And as firefighters heroically rushed toward the flames to try and save their community, they found that there was little to no water pressure in the fire hydrants, which quickly ran dry.
With a single backed-up highway leading out of the city, many residents of Lahaina had nowhere to go. Some scrambled into the ocean to escape the smoke and flames. But in the end, many couldn’t get out. At least ninety-nine people have been confirmed dead at this writing, making this the deadliest American wildfire in over a century. In addition, 2,207 buildings were destroyed, with property damages expected to reach $5.5 billion.
To review, a power company shielded from competition by the state placed electrical infrastructure among highly flammable state-owned grass fields above the historic city of Lahaina, which the government was twice warned were highly susceptible to fire. And once a fire broke out, a combination of defective water infrastructure, terrible communication by government officials, and only one escape route doomed the people of Lahaina to the worst wildfire experienced in this country in over a hundred years.
This was government failure through and through. In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises explains that on the market, the ultimate source of profits is foresight—the ability to anticipate future conditions. And economic loss occurs when market actors fail to anticipate the future. This possibility of riches if one succeeds, and the guarantee of painful failures if one doesn’t, forces producers and service providers on the market to constantly weigh risks and opportunities.
Government immunizes itself from the profit and loss system, and therefore from much of the need to weigh risk. Sure, some county officials may resign because of this. And the share price of Hawaiian Electric may dip. But the people of Maui will be forced to keep compensating the very organizations that have failed them. And there’s nothing natural about that disaster.
That statement, as well as others against the mainstream climate change narrative of impending doom, led to the cancellation of a speech that was to be given by Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The censorship has been covered in media worldwide and, besides giving the IMF a huge black eye, is leading many to wonder what has gone wrong with climate science that such a prominent expert would be canceled merely for disagreeing with a scientific hypothesis. Let’s dig into this important news story.
Dr. Clauser is an experimental and theoretical physicist and was the joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. He is now on the board of directors at the CO2 Coalition based in Arlington, Va. Dr. William Happer, chair of the board at the CO2 Coalition, said that “His [Dr. Clauser’s] studies of the science of climate provide strong evidence that there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world.”
Dr. Clauser was scheduled to speak to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office last week under the title: “Let’s talk — How much can we trust IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] climate predictions?” Because the answer Dr. Clauser was obviously going to give was “not much” and because of his other public statements criticizing the models relied upon by the IPCC, someone inside the IMF must have hit the roof. The CO2 coalition reported:
According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”
In 2021, Dr. Clauser criticized granting of the Nobel Prize for the development of computer models that predicted global warming. These climate models have been shown to be inaccurate and do not take into account the significant feedback of clouds in the climate system.
Dr. Clauser’s own climate model adds the effect of clouds, which is crucial for understanding the Earth’s climate. After all, cumulus clouds cover one-third to two-thirds of the Earth’s surface and reflect about 90% of sunlight, providing a significant cooling effect. In fact, the role of carbon dioxide is negligible in comparison. Dr. Clauser said, “The IPCC’s detailed analysis of clouds (AR5) and their effect on climate totally misunderstands the effects of clouds, and totally ignores this dominating energy transport process.”
Additionally, increased carbon dioxide will benefit the world, not destroy it. After all, it is plant food, leading to flourishing forests and crops, so too flourishing for the people and animals who live off the land. Carbon dioxide concentrations are now at some of the lowest levels they have been in at least the past 600 million years, certainly nowhere near the crisis warned about by President Joe Biden.
Dr. Clauser stated that the climate change narrative is “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.” This is, of course, an entirely accurate description of the state of the world today. Incompetencies in government and a host of other problems facing the world are erroneously blamed on climate change. By focusing on human-caused climate change, we take our focus away from solving real-world problems, such as helping those in poverty attain cheap and reliable energy and a decent standard of living.
In his speech at Quantum Korea 2023 in Seoul, South Korea on June 26, 2023, Dr. Clauser said that “If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas.” The scientific method, the tried-and-true means of scientific inquiry, is based on experimentation and proving hypotheses wrong. By asking questions and proceeding to test a hypothesis through rigorous experiments, a scientist can gain a better understanding of the world. “Good science is always based on good experiments,” Dr. Clauser tells us.
To question, not to state dogma and assume facts, is what true science is all about. We must carefully observe nature and be wary when people use scientific information for opportunistic purposes, often distorting facts to achieve their own ends. “Even the scientific community can sometimes become deluded by pseudoscience,” Dr. Clauser reminds us.
And indeed, it is often scientists themselves, such as those who work with the IPCC, who are most staunchly set in their beliefs. Dr. Clauser tells us that “The IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” We have seen this time and time again in the climate change debate, where facts are distorted, data is cherry-picked, and claims are often based on faulty computer models rather than experimentation and unbiased observation.
Moreover, silencing opposition and actively opposing those who question theories is unscientific and dangerous. We have increasingly seen that those who do not support the mainstream narrative are not only silenced but shunned and threatened. This is not an environment that encourages healthy debate, so we are prevented from striving toward the truth and subsequently making policies based on the truth.
In the climate change debate, this is especially dangerous, for if we are not causing a crisis due to our increased carbon dioxide emissions, then enacting policies that would upturn our society and way of living, putting countless people into poverty, would all be for no benefit.
“The world is awash with someone else’s perception of truth, as an alternative to real truth,” Dr. Clauser added in his speech in Korea. This is often significantly different from the real truth, but when the media and government promote it, it becomes accepted as the real truth. People will claim false truths to push their own ends, which runs counter to the spirit of scientific inquiry. Scientists should be held to the standard of honest inquiry, free from political and social pressures to obtain desired results.
Scientists such as Dr. Clauser who express different views from the mainstream should be celebrated, not silenced, for science only advances when experts are free to think outside the box. Condemnation for non-conventional thinking leads to tyranny, and it is tyranny we must fight in order to live a truly flourishing life. In the meantime, we should remind our leaders that honest, skeptical inquiry is the root of all real science. Canceling experts like Dr. John Clauser is the real crisis, not climate change.
(Mary-Jean Harris contributed to this article. She lives in Ottawa, Canada.)
“Future totalitarian regimes no longer require electrified barbed wire fences. All they need is a phone, a QR code, a digital ID, and then they can do with you whatever they want, and that is scary.” More in this short video.
End gender identity politics indoctrination. It’s starting in Canada against Trudeau. Canadian Muslims to march there against the transgender ideology being pushed on their kids.
The attached pdf is the AMICUS CURIAE in a case brought to the U.S. Supreme Court by the court’s WRIT OF CERTIORARI. It contains several chapters covering different aspects on the topic, as presented to the court by several experts and references, gathered by Amicus Paul R. McHugh, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, in support of the petitioner in the case, a case which the U.S. Supreme Court chose to consider.
This AMICUS CURIAE is well worth the time to read and consider, if nothing else than to balance the almost non-stop narrative flowing from almost all mainstream media outlets and governments.
The following biographical description is quoted from page 1.
“Amicus Curiae Paul R. McHugh, M.D. is the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. From 1975 until 2011, Dr. McHugh was the Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at Johns Hopkins. At the same time, he was psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital with overall responsibility for the proper care and treatment of patients with, among other issues, sexual disorders.”
“Dr. McHugh appears as amicus not to discuss statutory construction but to critically evaluate, on the basis of his clinical and scientific expertise, Respondents’ and the Court of Appeals’ conflation of sex and gender identity. He also seeks to discuss the frequently heard claims about gender identity, which sometimes masquerade as science but are really ideological pronouncements not supported by scientific evidence. In addition to showing that sex, from a medical standpoint, does not include gender identity, Dr. McHugh’s expertise is helpful in challenging the supposed scientific imperative for gender affirmation.”
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