Claim: On the 13th November 2024 The Onion bought Infowars at a bankruptcy auction. Reuters: True Reuters say: NEW YORK, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Like a headline lifted from the Onion, …
On the 13th November 2024 The Onion bought Infowars at a bankruptcy auction.
Reuters: True
Reuters say:
NEW YORK, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Like a headline lifted from the Onion, the parody news website is buying conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars in a bankruptcy auction.
“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” the Onion CEO Ben Collins said in a statement.
We say: False
Justification:
The sale did not go through, despite Alex Jones and his crew being evicted from the company premises and the businesses operation ceased, the Infowars business was returned to Alex Jones. He reentered the building Friday 15th restarted the radio/satellite broadcasts, supplement sales, news website and online streaming.
‘We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,‘ … ‘No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction,’ said US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez.
The Judge blocked the sale of Infowars to The Onion, and gave ownership back to Jones.
Alex Jones broadcast a show on Friday stating that The Onion had not bought Infowars, and that the Auction was not an Auction, and instead was replaced with a private sale. He said in that private sale the purchaser had not put up any money, but instead pledged the potential of Alex’s future earnings towards the cost of the purchase.
This private sale violated the Judge’s orders and was conducted without his knowledge or approval.
Reuters have not changed their article or published a follow-up.
Claim: “Some voting machines in Kentucky are NOT ALLOWING voters to select President Trump,” the X post said. “Instead, when they tap ‘Trump,’ Kamala Harris ends up being selected.” Politifact: False …
“Some voting machines in Kentucky are NOT ALLOWING voters to select President Trump,” the X post said. “Instead, when they tap ‘Trump,’ Kamala Harris ends up being selected.”
Politifact: False
Politifact say
No, this video doesn’t show Kentucky voting machines blocking votes for Trump
Social media users claimed a video shows “voting machines in Kentucky are not allowing voters to select” Trump for president.
Kentucky election officials said they investigated the situation and found the incident to be isolated. The problem occurred because the voter inadvertently touched the wrong part of the voting machine’s screen.
Officials said the voter who had the problem was able to cast her ballot as she’d wished.
Viral video purportedly showing a US citizen’s vote for Donald Trump being switched to Kamala Harris is being shared in false context. Viral video shows user error, say officials.
Sometimes i’m drawn to these fact checks and I want to stay away but the utter bullshit in them makes me react. I mean how gullible do they think people are? Do Fact checkers really think they have enough sway over the public such that their stupid denials will change the truth of matters?
After bashing other sites for showing the video, they then write
But Kentucky election officials emphasized that this incident was isolated and it does not show fraud or widespread election interference.
So they start here with an admission that a problem was identified with a voting machine and it was a one off. Then they seek to minimise the problem.
Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, a Republican, posted on Facebook at 1:43 p.m. on Oct. 31 that he was alerted to an incident that day in which one of the ballot marking machines malfunctioned. He wrote that the machine had been taken out of service and the county contacted the state attorney general’s office.
Next we get this comment from an authority stating that there was a malfunction and that the machine had been taken off line.
Doing what these outlets do best, they then deny the problem and admit it
“We checked it and couldn’t make it recreate the incident reported,” Brown wrote. “We had no complaints prior to or after the complaint. We have left the machine in full view and are awaiting further directions.”
At 5:13 p.m., Brown gave an update on the situation, after the attorney general’s office had visited the vote center to inspect the device.
“In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post. “This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not.”
So an admission following a denial that the problem existed, then a minimising statement seeking to reassure the reader this is not important. However the explanation that follows the admission seeks to blame the user..
Brown also shared a video of a county official testing the same voting machine used in the viral video. The official tried tapping the small check box, as the person in the viral video had, but it didn’t work. When the official tapped the center of the candidate’s name field, the box turned green to show it was selected.
“These ballot marking devices are set for a voter to touch inside the whole box with the name of the candidates. In the video posted you can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues,” Brown wrote. “There were no claims of any issues with the device prior, and none since it went back into service.”
This quote follows later in the article and is utter nonsense and what really got me going. It says that the official tried tapping the check box and it didn’t work. The article then goes on to to quote the official mansplaining how the devices are meant to work and to further minimise the issue.
Trouble is, this is garbage. I will admit the user interface is terrible on these screens, but it is done this way to imitate a paper ballot, and on a paper ballot the check box is exactly where a vote would be marked by pencil/pen. This can be seen in an alternative ballots from other voting stations:
Politifact then go on to quote James Young, a former Kentucky election administrator
“If you look closely, the voter is attempting to press the small check box located within the text box. Consistently, the voter gently presses their finger on the thin border, which at times can cause an adjacent text box to highlight instead of their intended choice,” Young wrote. “Had the voter pressed the center of the text box, this would not have occurred.”
This is just straight up brain washing, and to say otherwise is to tell a very obvious lie. It is intuitive and not at all unreasonable for a voter to touch the check box as a way of submitting their vote. This is how a paper ballot would be marked and it is implicitly the same thing they are looking at on a screen. It has been designed this way on purpose, as bad as it is, and had the user interface been designed properly (but maybe not allowed by law) it would have had a nice big obvious button that would have been the thing to touch to vote, e.g.
So let’s now address the machine itself. We can see that there is no selection of the candidate when the check box being touched in the video, and ultimately a touch is later detected but in the wrong place.
Curiously the specification website shows a much better user interface not used in the video in question!
Anyway I have worked on systems like these and know that the effect seen in the video can be due to a badly calibrated touch screen digitiser. This is the part that sits in front of the lcd screen and separately detects the finger press. In my experience the calibration of these digitisers is easy to lose, and they need manually calibrating involving touching corners of the screen to show the limits of the display underneath. If this is not done then the digitiser can think the screen starts and ends in a different place.
So it may be that the touch screen was poorly calibrated and this caused the checkbox of the first candidate to be unusable, but below this the larger area of this screen could have been selectable. This could also explain why the candidate below was highlighted when the one above was clearly selected. The screen and the digitiser were not in alignment.
In terms of the fact check, it is obvious that the user was not in error, both in their expectation of where to touch the screen, and in where they actually touched the screen. It was clearly the voting machine which failed.
What remains then, is the question of the nature of the problem witnessed and the scale of the problem.
Clearly there is a lot of minimisation of the issue, by both Politifact, and the election officials, and presumably also by the technicians and the manufacturer too. If all the machines in this election are the same ones by the same company then a flaw in the digitiser, requiring recalibration of the machine could be widespread. However if there is a process in place to say calibrate regularly this should mitigate a hardware glitch like this (it was stated that this machine was returned to service without further error). It was wrong in my opinion to minimise the situation without explaining it to the reader.
Lastly then, could this “bad hardware” on one machine be seen as a political move intended to favour the candidates lower down the screen and penalise the top-most candidates with the check boxes that cannot be selected. I would have to say that this is possible if someone were so inclined to rig the voting machine, based on what I can see above. It’s a difficult one to prove and could easily be excused as calibration going off “again”.
To address the girth of a potential fraud, I would suggest that a bad actor would have to have this setup of the order of the candidates across the whole country, and for each of the machines to be the same ones. Otherwise a widespread fraud using this technique would be unlikely. Wedded to this is the ability for voters to nullify and redo their vote when the machine goes wrong, so apart from the cases where a voter doesn’t notice the error and doesn’t check their printout. Again, not impossible but what are the chances?
Conclusion
So to address Politifact’s question; Does this video show Kentucky voting machines blocking votes for Trump? The only answer can be Yes, whether intentional or unintentional.
It is evidential that a vote for Trump was not possible and instead without selecting the button for Harris, a vote for that candidate was inadvertently chosen by the voting machine, and it would have gone on to print out a ballot with that selection made incorrectly.
I would suggest that this is a fault of the hardware and/or software on this voting machine, it is a bad user interface and the user is correctly trying to do the right thing but the machine won’t let them.
On the subject of political fraud, I would say this is improbable but not impossible.
To call this report as anything other than truthful is untruthful on the part of the fact checker and the election officials. There is much minimisation of the issue in this Politifact article and while I can understand why they should want to do this, it is not right to do it in this case. All of this model of voting machine likely has the same problem!
Claim: President Joe Biden wore a hard hat backwards during a photo op with union construction workers in Superior, Wisconsin. Snopes: False Snopes say: it does look, at first glance, like …
President Joe Biden wore a hard hat backwards during a photo op with union construction workers in Superior, Wisconsin.
Snopes: False
Snopes say:
it does look, at first glance, like Biden was wearing that hard hat backwards. But after comparing it to other photos and videos of the same event, we were forced to reach the opposite conclusion: The hat on Biden’s head was facing forward, bill to the front, not backward.
Link to the article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/biden-wear-hardhat-backwards/
Oh my dear god. Of course it is on backwards, the nape strap is on his forehead! Snopes try to conflate the direction of the bill/peak with the hats direction, when the internal structure (the suspension system) of the hat is intrinsically sitting backwards on his head when it should not.
This hat is not being worn correctly on his head and would offer no protection at all as it would easily fall off if knocked. Not to mention it must have felt awful on his head and probably left a bruise to boot.
Evidence
When thinking about hats peaks/bills, they do not dictate hat direction and will be different depending on the needs of the role that a hat is being worn for.
For example, is this firefighter’s hat backwards due to the peak being at the back?
No, it is there as protection for the neck.
There are many guides on the internet for how to wear a hard hat, and an example is below showing how the nape strap goes in the nape of your neck, at the back of your head!
This image is from bigrentz.com (an online construction equipment rental marketplace) and is part of a guide in how to wear a hard hat.
Linked here: https://www.bigrentz.com/blog/how-to-wear-a-hard-hat#:~:text=The headband of the hat, your hard hat less effective.
As in this diagram Joe Biden has a hard hat with a nape strap as above, that is supposed to be tightened at the back of your head.
bigrentz write:
The most important part of wearing a hard hat is ensuring its proper fit.
The ratchet located on the back of the nape strap allows for an adjustable fit that you can tighten or loosen each time you wear the hat
Conclusion
Does this even need a conclusion? It is clear that Snopes will literally say anything to appease their paymasters.
Anyone want to razz that fact check for being politically motivated in the face of the observable evidence?
Claim A Photo taken of ex President Donald Trump was circulated in mid January 2024 (Possibly from at Clinton, Iowa, on Jan. 6) has been validated as authentic by fact checkers. …
A Photo taken of ex President Donald Trump was circulated in mid January 2024 (Possibly from at Clinton, Iowa, on Jan. 6) has been validated as authentic by fact checkers.
Snopes: True
Snopes say:
A close-up photo of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s face covered with what appears to be sweat and heavy orange makeup, or self-tanner lotion, is authentic.
Snopes contacted Maury via Messenger to ask if the picture had been altered prior to being submitted for licensing. He responded, “The picture is authentic. I took it on assignment for AFP.”
A Link to the original article: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-sweat-orange-photo/
Our rating: False
Justification
This is almost unbelievable in 2024. The fact checkers have lost it. Observing things from the UK makes me feel sick as to how America is falling.
The image of Donald has clearly been edited post capture to make him look ridiculous, with the aim being to score political points. The image is purported to have come from the AFP so I can only assume that this is true, and that someone there altered the image.
The basics:
The image has been taken of ex President Donald Trump, presumably at a political rally. That much is correct.
Yes, Donald probably uses product on his face but it is not bright orange
The image has been altered around his face, with this region being cut out, possibly the eyes were left alone.
The cut out part has been adjusted in photoshop (poorly) to increase the image saturation
The altered part has then been stuck back over the original image leaving it obviously manipulated.
Evidence
Is this a “genuine” photo?
The genuine nature here refers to the fact that it is a photo of Donald. It is not a photo of someone else who has had Donald’s head pasted onto it. However the photo is not “genuine” in the sense that it appears as it was recorded by a camera, and there are notable changes to the original image that make it a manipulated image.
Look at this part of the image, of the side of Donald’s head –
This harsh line that you can see separating his hair from the guy behind, and reaching down around his ear. This is clear evidence of a pasted portion of the image which has been crudely cut out prior to manipulation. The bad “cut” around his ear show that part of the captured background has been altered beyond his head along with the intended changes.
On the left side of his head again from top to the bottom of his ear, you can see a very harsh line separating him from the background that is not present around any other person’s head in the image. Granted there is always a focus line when the subject of an image is in sharp focus, but this is beyond photography alone.
Around Donald’s collar the same harsh line can be seen again and his neck does not blend into the collar as it should.
Lastly, it is less clear here, but it is possible that Donald’s eyes may have been left alone and cut out and only the skin around them was adjusted.
As an example of the technique used, here is my attempt at doing the same thing as above to the UK’s Boris Johnson:
He looks rather hot under the collar, no?
And the original below:
Conclusion
Despite the assertion by fact checkers that the photo is “genuine” it clearly is not and has been tampered with after the image was captured. People are so lazy now at faking evidence and then lying about it. I really can’t imagine how anyone can take the media at face value anymore or believe fact checkers who back up obviously fake official narratives.
The wisdom of the anonymous crowd on the internet is correct in this case and the fact checkers are wrong.
Claim In a recent speech on the 14th July 2023 Vice President Kamala Harris said the following to a large audience who then applauded it: “Think about the impact on something …
In a recent speech on the 14th July 2023 Vice President Kamala Harris said the following to a large audience who then applauded it:
“Think about the impact on something like public health. When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.”
Lead Stories: False
Lead Stories say:
No, that’s not true: While she did say the words “reduce population,” a While House official confirmed to Lead Stories that the intended word was “pollution,” and a correction made in the White House transcript reflects that.
It appears to be an unintended mistake. A White House official told Lead Stories over the phone on July 17, 2023:
I can confirm that the vice president intended to say pollution.
It is evidently true that Kamala Harris spoke the quoted words, they were spoken without awareness that a mistake had been made and there was no remorse shown for saying such a grievous thing, not even a flinch or any body language cue to give away that these words were not intended.
The sentence flowed correctly and made perfect sense, what she said is correct as by reducing the number of people it would make the environment better, but is of course a hideous thing to say and no correction was offered by Kamala afterwards.
This video shows the exact sentence in question:
Here it is in close up:
and here is a longer version giving more context:
Could this have been scripted?
If it was scripted then Kamala would have exhibited the calm and composed delivery we see in the recording. However these words are unlikely to have made it onto a teleprompter, unless it was a prank!
If it was not scripted then, these words may also have been rehearsed by Kamala before delivering the speech, and again this would offer the cool presentation that we have witnessed. But what would drive her to say this knowing that it would be televised to the world?
Was it a mistake then?
Lead Stories and the US White House both claim that these words were misspoken and accidental, but is this likely?
The White house released a correction to the speech on the 16th July 2023 as follows:
Lead Stories also got a quote from an unnamed White House correspondent saying that the words were not intentional, and that she had intended to say pollution instead of population.
They also state that the official transcript had been corrected to say pollution, but this is no longer an official transcript faithfully reporting what was said, at least in my view!
Is it realistic that the word population an easy slip of the tongue from the word pollution?
If as it is claimed, there was a slip of the tongue and population became pollution with no obvious sign that a mistake had been made, is it likely that one can slip from one word to the other?
Well a more obvious misspeak would be to something like “solution” or “ablution” “volution” or maybe “revolution”. For the misspoken word to be population it must have been on her mind at the time, like with the Huw Edwards slip on BBC news the other week which was shared widely on TikTok:
So with this kind of slip up being the most likely scenario, why would Kamala have population reduction on the mind?
Well one only need be on the internet for 5 minutes these days and some story involving population reduction will come round, whether the source is being reported as the WEF, or Bill Gates, Yuval Harari, or some other prominent “leader”, the topic is on everyone’s lips and is perhaps why it was on her mind.
However to not realise what had been said, and to be applauded for it immediately afterwards is very strange indeed. A quiet silence from the audience would have been appropriate but instead they clapped away and cheered like these were the words they wanted to hear!
Perhaps if the audience had reacted differently then Kamala would have realised that she had said something horrid to the wrong crowd?
Conclusion
So it can be evidentially shown that Kamala Harris said the reported words, and that the White house has confirmed it. The words were beyond inappropriate and one wonders what meeting she had been in, or what phone call she had had before giving the speech?
This was not in anyway a normal slip up and for authorities and fact checkers to try to cover it up as unintended is wrong. No one can claim to know what was intended except for Kamala and we have heard nothing from her, no written speech has been presented as evidence so we are left to believe that Kamala was speaking from the heart.
Also it is morally corrupt to change a transcript of the speech; effectively retcon’ing the words as if they were never spoken.
I would suggest that people’s opinions of the Vice President of the USA have not been positively effected by this vile spectacle.
Claim There is no evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines saved a single life. Full Fact – False Full Fact say: Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 …
There is no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines saved lives, only estimates and modelling suggesting so. The safe and effective vaccines appear from personal observation not to be. Can I prove this? No, but the reverse case is also not provable and is certainly not fact, with testimony and statistical numbers going the wrong way around the world in 2023. As an unvaccinated individual I can attest to the unnecessary mandating of Covid-19 vaccines, because I am still alive and this result is an embarrassment to the establishment.
Let’s start at at the conclusion of the Full Fact fact check:
Research by the UKHSA and Cambridge University suggests that the Covid-19 vaccines saved more than 100,000 lives in England alone.
Breaking this down, we can see that it is research, rather than empirical evidence that is being used to prove the other position as negative.
Secondly Cambridge University “suggests” that the vaccine saved lives, that is also not empirical evidence. Yet Full Fact use this “hearsay” put out by the UK government to “prove” their case. I say their case is no better than the facebook posts.
Full fact go on to write:
Although it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world where a specific person wasn’t vaccinated, it is possible to show that the vaccines provided a high level of protection against death from Covid-19—because the risk was so much lower in vaccinated people.
Breaking this statement down, we can see that Full Fact acknowledge it is hard to know what would have happened in an alternative world. They are of course correct at the level of the world, but we do know by country what the Covid-19 vaccination rates were and how many deaths they had.
They jump around in this statement with regard to the topic of the point being made too. An alternative world is one thing, with billions of people on it. However their argument switches to one, just one, individual straight after. I could be that one alternative individual they talk about! Is that enough proof?
Certainly every individual case at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to be used as propaganda to scare the masses, and the establishment went that route repeatedly, extrapolating from a single case to us all!
Coronavirus: first UK death confirmed as cases surge to 116
The last part of the Full Fact statement above uses the term “risk” as a justification for the vaccines being effective. Now i’ve been trained in risk analysis and have risk assessed many situations without any of those risks coming to be, due to the contingency measures I put in place. I know risk is a vague estimate itself, and is again not empirical evidence, rather it is a subjective view of a risk assessor and depends on whether that risk assessor is any good.
For the record, the definition of risk from the Cambridge Dictionary is:
risk
nounUK /rɪsk/ US /rɪsk/
the possibility of something bad happening
This statement ends with the risk being so much lower in vaccinated people. Where is the evidence for this? “so much lower” is just opinion and perhaps a political one at that.
The article then moves on to state:
Overall, the vaccines have therefore saved vastly more lives than they have cost.
I don’t think that Full Fact can make this statement based on their assessment of what appears to be guesswork. The figures have been presented by the UK government, and represent an appeal to authority. An authority who are known to have lied about the cabinet’s own conduct during the pandemic and fines were given to a number of them for breaking their own lockdown rules.
So the government are hardly in a position of taking the moral high ground, nor are they an infallible authority to cite.
We are also not at the end of the debacle yet, so to weigh up the two positions now seems foolish. There may be many more that die post 2023 because of the pandemic actions taken in prior years. Oh look, I can speculate too!
What follows is a look at what else is presented in the fact check above and a critique of it.
The fact check provides two links to the same government document but to different chapters. This is the COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report – week 5 and can be found here:
This is from 22 February 2022 and these documents ran for many months past this one, and are still being created in 2023, so I don’t know why the latest/last report was not referenced, but anyway the first link is to page 12 for “Effectiveness against mortality”
This link indicates that a VE value for Vaccine Effectiveness is being cited and this is given by the UK government as 95%, two weeks after a third dose of the Covid-19 Vaccine (brand not stated)
VE is a calculated value and is itself an estimate, so again it is not empirical evidence and there are multiple ways of calculating it. Using the WHO document “Evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness” which is found here:
It can be seen in section 9.3.6 Final analyses of VE of this document that final “VE” referred to by the UK government is calculated from ratios and modelling is also used to provide a calculated estimate, and not a measured value.
The second link is to page 55 of the government document and covers “Summary of impact on hospitalisations, infections and mortality”. It is being used to prove that a number of deaths were prevented by vaccination.
“Cambridge Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit suggests that roughly 127,500 deaths were prevented by the Covid vaccination “
However as you can read above, this again is a suggestion and in the document it states:
“Estimates suggest that 127,500 deaths and 24,144,000 infections have been prevented”
So again we are in the world of guesswork, and no empirical evidence has been presented, only probabilities seem to be on the table. Thus this may be prestigious guesswork, but guesswork none the less.
The document suggests that the numbers of deaths in a world where no vaccinations were given cannot be calculated due to the the divergence of the two realities, and the distance one has moved from the other. This is of course vary convenient for the government, isn’t it.
What evidence is there that other populations faired better than highly vaccinated countries?
So staying on familiar territory, the BBC put out an article comparing countries of the world when it came to deaths vs vaccinations:
Now this is just speculation based on the BBC’s numbers, but I don’t think this is any worse than what Full Fact do, so:
The UK with a population of 67,886,011 as of 2020 had to the date of the article, 177,890 deaths from coronavirus (don’t get me started on how this was measured, that is for another article) and they had 149,397,250 individuals who received some number of Covid vaccinations.
Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa with 206,139,589 individuals, had 3,144 deaths from coronavirus and had 50,619,238 people with some number of coronavirus vaccinations.
So we have a UK death rate of 266.2 vs a Nigeria death rate of 1.6. Now I know these are estimated numbers and the two countries and peoples are very different, but the numbers are scarily different, more different than should be expected for a “human” response to Covid-19 and to the Covid-19 vaccination. There is a correlation that can be made between the numbers of people vaccinated and the number of deaths post vaccination roll out. I’ll leave you to make your own mind up and to go and compare other countries yourself.
What evidence is there that people were harmed by the safe and effective vaccines!
If the vaccine had been effective, then it would have worked with the first shot, it has been accepted by the CEO of Pfizer that it was not as effective as promised. You can compare the effectiveness from these two articles, one from february 2021:
“Pfizer vaccine ‘highly effective’ in reducing coronavirus transmission, study suggests”
and this viral video statement by the Director of Pfizer, from January 2022:
“Two doses of the vaccine offers very limited protection, if any,”
It can be seen by the very fact that multiple doses plus boosters have been administered to people and they still are not protected from catching, spreading, or getting ill from coronavirus, that the vaccines do not work as they were advertised.
So with the effectiveness covered, what about safety?
If the vaccine was safe, I believe that post vaccination the excess deaths from causes other than coronavirus would not be at the levels they have been over the last couple of years in the UK. The overall numbers should be coming down, and they are not. 5 year trends show that this explosion of excess deaths only started after vaccinations were rolled out for Covid-19.
These deaths are of the “unexpected” and “died suddenly” kind that only started appearing after the administration of multiple doses of the Coronavirus vaccines. Again this is only correlation, and you can make your own mind up as to causation.
Lastly I wanted to mention the veiled accusation in the Full Fact article that the use of the the term shot is not correctly referring to the Covid-19 vaccination. This is used to sow doubt in the mind of the reader that people on facebook are talking about something else. Well let’s look at the history of facebook. People were quickly silenced and then banned for using the correct terms, this was seen by facebook as mis/disinformation. So people got creative and started using alternative terms which they hoped others would understand to be the same thing, e.g. shot, jab, stabby, clot shot, gene therapy, etc. The media too seemed to distance themselves from the term vaccination and used similar terms, so to suggest that these words, used to avoid censorship, mean something else is subterfuge.
For example the Daily Mail reported:
Two prominent Oxford University researchers — renowned in the field of evidence-based medicine — branded one of the systems used to collate adverse side effects from the jabs as being a ‘mess’.
The truth of any matter can be found from the available evidence. It can be understood and learned from, and it can be passed on to others. However it will likely never be confirmed or agreed by the vast majority of people who have alternative truths they wish to believe and share.
One must learn to know the signs of truth without it being told, in fact one will likely be forcefully told the opposite case is true so be careful!
Claim At a media briefing for Geneva-based journalists, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus in his opening remarks on 20 December 2021 said: “Some countries are using to give boosters to kill children” …
At a media briefing for Geneva-based journalists, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus in his opening remarks on 20 December 2021 said:
“Some countries are using to give boosters to kill children”
USA Today News – False
USA Today News say:
we rate FALSE the claim that a video shows the WHO director general saying vaccine boosters were used to kill children. Users misinterpreted Ghebreyesus’ stutter, in which he initially mispronounced the first consonant of the word children before quickly correcting himself.
Tedros “got stuck on the first syllable” of children,” the spokesperson said. “It came out sounding like ‘cil/kil.’ He then correctly pronounced the same syllable immediately after, with it coming out audibly as ‘cil-children.’”
While the scene highlighted online is authentic, users have misconstrued his message. A WHO spokesperson told Reuters the sentence was the result of a slip of the tongue.
It is demonstrably true that this is what was spoken, and this can be heard in the recording of his brief and in its captions. It cannot be denied that the video camera recorded these words and the quote in the claim is accurate, period.
The official video is here, but it has been trimmed and his remarks cut short so that the offending word is not heard in this version:
A embedded version which contains the statement and that continues after the official video is pasted below.
Now to get into the nuances of what was said, there needs to be several things looked at; was it a stutter, was there any body language to suggest a mistake had been made, was it a language translation problem, is there any recognition that he made an awful error and attempted to apologise for it.
Was it a stutter?
According to the NIDCD (National Institute On Deafness and other Communication Disorders, a stutter is:
Stuttering is a speech disorder characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks. An individual who stutters exactly knows what he or she would like to say but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech. These speech disruptions may be accompanied by struggle behaviors, such as rapid eye blinks or tremors of the lips.
Can any of this be seen/heard in the above video where Tedros talks about the Omircon variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus spreading, I think not.
The word “kill” is pronounced clearly and there is a sizable gap between it and the next spoken word “children”. This is not characteristic of a stutter where the speaker tries to correct themselves through repetition of the badly spoken word, or knows what they want to say but are unable to get it out. Rather the flow is normal and proceeds without a stutter, stammer or blocker.
In listening to the rest of the brief, and even though English is not his first language, there is only one sign of a stutter in other parts of his recorded speech, this is when he is not able to say the word “participants” (7:52mins) but this conforms to what would be expected when someone has the inability to read from a script and is not a classic stutter of the type “p-p-p-p-p pizza”. Later when he says “kill children” it is not written down either and is part of the natural flow of an off the top of the head speech.
He does struggle to pronounce some words such as “diseases” and “budget” in one case he repeats what seems to be the same pronunciation of the word “prices” as clearly he thought he was saying it wrong, however this also is not a stutter as it is written down in front of him.
This viral mistake appears to be an unfortunate and subconscious slip of the tongue, it is not a stutter of the likes of ‘cil-children.’ as has been reported.
Was there any body language to suggest a monumental mistake had been made?
When the ridiculously offensive statement is made Tedros is not reading from a written script, and he is speaking freely. When he says “kill children” there is no obvious sign in his face or in his body language that he has made a mistake, and a tragic one at that.
The flow of his speech is steady and intentional and he moves on to further statements without any sign that a mistake has been made. It is as if the words were intended and meant, and there is nothing that suggests he realises a mistake has been made.
The word “kill” appears to be a valid part of his sentence as much as the word “boosters” was.
Was it a language translation problem?
So Tedros is from Ethiopia, and according to wikipedia he is from Asmara. The predominant language spoken there appears to be Tigrinya and the word for “children” in Tigrinya is “ቖልዑ”.
ቖልዑ is pronounced as “Colyu” in English according to www.tigrinyatranslate.com so it doesn’t seem like it would be a mix up in two languages where he is using his native pronunciation of the word, rather than the English word.
There is some other word order mistakes in his speech, but this is not the same sort of error that one makes, and instead it is an ordering of words problem.
The transcript in the video also shows the subtitle for “kill children” and someone else has also interpreted his words this way. Whether that is another person or an AI transcription service is unclear.
Is there any recognition that he made an awful error and attempted to apologise for it?
So this mistake would be a bad one to make and if it had been conscious it surely would have garnered an apology to his audience. This statement clearly has offended a great many people after the fact, so in theory would have done so with the live audience at the time.
Had it been a conscious error i’m sure he would have corrected himself and said something like “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say kill children” However there is nothing forthcoming in the recording, suggesting that this was indeed an unconscious statement as there is no obvious recognition that what he said was incorrect and embarrassing.
So we are left with the suggestion that this was a straight from memory-to-mouth statement, and little thinking about what was being said was going on at the time. This is reinforced by the lack of any correction following the offensive part.
I will not speculate as to why he would be comfortable saying what he did, or why his audience would not immediately interject to check understanding.
So what was it about, and why does the media cover for him?
What was he trying to say? it is possible that the following sentence was intended:
“So, if it’s going to be used, it’s better to focus on those groups who have the risk of severe disease and death, rather than, as we see, some countries are using boosters to vaccinate children, which is not right.”
This statement makes sense and is logical, however how the word vaccinate and kill could be switched is not at all clear. It is also not apparent how he could make that statement and carry on as is nothing wrong had been said.
The mistake clearly plays on people’s fears that the vaccine is not what it has been sold as, and is therefore a very hot potato which has been dropped.
Now why would the media and fact checkers cover for him? I think simply because it is embarrassing to him, to the WHO, and to the media itself. So there is this in built self correction mechanism which kicks in to hide the statement in the official video and in the official transcript of the briefing which can be found here:
So the media has an automatic “ass covering” instinct, rather than to apologise and explain. Sadly it is this behaviour which leads people down rabbit holes and to dark conclusions, so they must accept some responsibility for bad reporting and of covering up a mistake, if they are to have any credibility in the future.
Claim A recent article from news punch on the 17th August 2022 reported that the WEF had announced the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to control the internet. …
A recent article from news punch on the 17th August 2022 reported that the WEF had announced the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of “information warriors” to control the internet.
Lead Stories Fact Check – False
Lead Stories say:
Did the World Economic Forum (WEF) announce the recruitment of “information warriors” to control the narrative on social media? No, that’s not true: The WEF has recruited no such people.
Melissa Fleming, who leads global communications for the UN, […] says “So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders’ in those spaces where misinformation travels.”
Note her use of the phrase “information volunteers,” not “information warriors.”
So despite the weird timing of this source podcast popping up for media scrutiny nearly 2 years after it was published on Nov 26, 2020, the facts of this story are correct and Lead Stories is playing with semantics rather than reporting faithfully.
The WEF website published a podcast featuring Melissa Flemming along with the article called:
“There’s no vaccine for the infodemic – so how can we combat the virus of misinformation?”
It can be found here with the podcast embedded in it through soundcloud. This conclusively proves that the WEF did announce the recruitment activity.
Melissa’s words have been changed by News Punch from Information volunteers to Information Warriors by the writers using a technique common to many world media outlets, that of changing a slightly obscure term into one that is more widely used and understood, by putting it in quotes to denote that it is not the original term.
Here is an example from the BBC news site today where they put quotes around the term ‘hunger stones’:
The stones referenced in the article are not officially named hunger stones but this is a colloquialism that people understand. In the same way people know what an information warrior is, but who knows what an information volunteer is? Could it be someone that stands on a street corner offering direction information to passers by? Maybe it is someone who has committed a crime and was ordered by a judge to spend 200 hours in the community volunteering information about themselves and why they committed a crime?
News Punch also say that these recruited people will control the narrative on social media. While this is not directly stated by the WEF article, again we understand that when it is written “ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first responders’ in those spaces where misinformation travels” this is an equivalent statement, and is again a common technique used by the media in general.
So Did the World Economic Forum (WEF) announce the recruitment of “information warriors” to control the narrative on social media?
Yes, they did. It was an article the WEF published on their website. There is a small error in the News Punch article that it was the WEF who recruited the people, however we know that the WEF and the UN recently signed a Strategic Partnership Framework in June 2019 because the WEF also published that as an article.
So is it a real stretch to think the two organisations work together on the topic of “the consultation, exchange of information and coordination required for effective collaboration”? which is a direct quote from the UN/WEF framework document.
The only odd thing about this WEF article is why is it being brought up now as an issue, two years later? What the significance of August 2022 is in relation to information warriors is not yet known, but watch this space!
Claim In a video interview by Policy Exchange on the 5th November 2021 Bill Gates tells Jeremy Hunt that Covid vaccines are not very good at stopping transmission of the virus …
In a video interview by Policy Exchange on the 5th November 2021 Bill Gates tells Jeremy Hunt that Covid vaccines are not very good at stopping transmission of the virus and we need a new way of doing the vaccines.
Reuters Rating – False
Reuters say:
Missing context. Bill Gates’ words have been taken out of context. He did not say COVID-19 vaccines are not working very well
Reuters write that a snippet of an interview with Bill Gates has been taken out of context by social media users. But if one watches the whole interview the realisation dawns that the context is correct in this claim circulating the internet.
The whole interview can be found here and the pertinent question from Jeremy is archived below:
The context is clear in that the vaccines have failed to stop transmission and this was one of their key selling points, and therefore the justification for Vaccine passports and mandates is logically also flawed.
Since the introduction of the vaccines for Covid, transmission has been central to the call for mandates, for we are sold on the idea that if you are vaccinated then you can get a vaccine passport to travel and go out and you are not a danger to others and are not going to be spreading the virus to anyone who is vulnerable. We are also repeatedly told that the country faces lockdown if people do not get their latest round of Covid vaccinations, for if you are not vaccinated then you are dirty and unclean.
On 3rd February 2021 UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had this to say about the Astrazeneca Vaccine:
“research also shows that the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine seems likely to reduce transmission to others.”
And of course we are told that the pandemic will come to an end if we are all vaccinated, as this presumably kills it off through failure to transmit between individuals. Here is Matt Hancock on the subject from 30th December 2020:
Sky News on 23rd November 2020 said the following on the topic of transmission:
“Up to now there has been this question of whether vaccines reduce disease or reduce infection rates, and this vaccine does seem to be stopping the virus spreading.”
The other aspect of the sales pitch has been if you do not get a vaccination then you will lose your career. This is not done out of concern for an individual’s health and in case they might die on the job. Rather it is about the unvaccinated spreading the disease to others (who are already vaccinated).
The UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid said recently on the 9th November 2021:
“So whether it’s in our care homes or hospitals, or any other health or care setting. The first duty of everyone working in health and social care is to avoid preventable harm to the people that they care for. And not only that, they have a responsibility to do all they can to keep each other safe.”
“I have concluded that all those working in the NHS and social care will have to be vaccinated. We must avoid preventable harm and protect patients in the NHS, protect colleagues in the NHS, and of course protect the NHS itself.”
These words and actions only make sense if the vaccine prevents transmission, and thus the central claim above.
The final nail in Bill’s coffin is that his last words on the vaccine are :
“We need a new way of doing the vaccines”
Reuters then are guilty of misunderstanding what was said themselves and risk spreading misinformation to people on the internet. Their article was deceptive in telling people to think the way they themselves do, and to not look at the evidence on their own.
As a recent comparison from across the pond, Joe Biden on the 7th October 2021 said:
“At a health care facility you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from Covid and cannot spread it to you”
Claim During the Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on 11/11/21 Joe Biden was giving a speech and offered birthday wishes to Donald Lincoln – the father of the Secretary …
During the Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on 11/11/21 Joe Biden was giving a speech and offered birthday wishes to Donald Lincoln – the father of the Secretary of state. As part of his wishes he gave an anecdote about Satchel Paige and referred to him as the great negro.
Snopes Rating – False
Snopes say:
While he did indeed utter the words “I’ve adopted the attitude of the great Negro,” and said them in that order, the context surrounding that sentence fragment does not support the claim or implication that Biden “called” or “referred to” Satchel Paige as “the great Negro.”
“Joe Biden Did Not Refer to Satchel Paige as Negro in Speech.” Mediaite, 11 Nov. 2021, https://www.mediaite.com/online/no-joe-biden-did-not-refer-to-satchel-paige-as-a-negro-during-veterans-day-speech/. Accessed 11 Nov. 2021.
Our Rating – True
Justification
Here is a link to the live recording of that speech at the time of the offending comments, and this is attached below also:
Joe clearly says the words reported and they are clearly about the Baseball player Satchel Paige.
Snopes say that the context is important and his words have been misinterpreted so let’s take a look at that. Theses words can be twisted around in terms of the context.
If Joe said instead “i’ve adpoted the attitude of the” :
great pitcher in the negro leagues
a great pitcher in the pros
a great pitcher in major league baseball after Jackie Robinson
All of these contextual switches still mean he is referring to Satchel Paige. To say otherwise is incorrect and Snopes are covering for him.
If Joe had offered an apology and corrected himself, like he often does, then something like the above could make sense, but he did not offer an apology for what he said and did not correct himself in front of the audience.
Snopes are interpreting the speech themselves in a manner that is incorrect and are telling you the reader, to do the same. This is deceptive and dishonest of Snopes.
What remains is trying to understand what Joe was on about with this anecdote. The best I can understand is that he’s saying to the birthday boy that he’s adopted an attitude that age doesn’t matter and says “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?” Meaning that age doesn’t matter.
However in this anecdote the ability to throw a ball does matter, and in Joe’s speech the ability to say what you mean is central to this issue, and to his ongoing Presidency. How can one trust the word of someone who doesn’t say what they mean?
