Illeis galbula

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

One of the most thought provoking speeches I've seen in a while.

@Miss_Snuffy on how raising a generation to see the world through oppressors and the oppressed is changing the West.

If you don't have time, bookmark it. It's worth every second.

WATCH:

[Douglas Brown @darkwaterjack]

This government is presiding over the greatest expansion of State surveillance capacity in NZ in recent memory. Done without fanfare, or even being minimised by govt Ministers. Three Bills, two before Parliament and one that is coming, are making these changes.

The first bill is the Telecommunications and Other Matters Bill. A small part of this Bill amends the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Act 2013, changing only a couple of words, but the effect of those words is enormous. As a result of those changes, the government can now insist that overseas providers of end-to-end encrypted (E2E) communications provide it with an interception capability, a ‘backdoor’, into those communications.

Basically, the government is legislating to force WhatsApp, Signal, Apple’s Messages, Facebook Messenger, and any other E2E messaging service to give it ‘backdoor’ interception access when required. If they don’t, the government will be able to literally ban their use by New Zealanders.

When this was proposed overseas, messaging services and the tech community pushed back. For some reason, that hasn't happened here. The Free Speech Union and I opposed this, but the Select Committee has not chosen to listen to us, and the changes are going through. The only problem is that if the E2E messaging services were to provide such a backdoor, there would be no end-to-end encryption. A backdoor open to a government is open to everyone with the requisite skill to exploit it. The foreign governments backed down, but NZ is not deterred by technical impossibilities; it is made of sterner stuff than that!

The second bill amends the Policing Act. It has been presented by @MarkMitchellMP, the police minister, as simply restoring to the Police some common law powers taken away by a recent Supreme Court decision. That is patently and unequivocally false. The Police Commissioner is now also saying that it gives them the operational capacity to introduce body cameras, but that is disingenuous.

The wording of the Bill gives the Police powers that allow them to make an end run around the Privacy Act, the Search and Surveillance Act, and private property owners' rights, and that far exceed any common-law powers they ever had.

Historically, Police surveillance has been legally permitted only for people suspected of crimes. To be fair, the Police often forget this, hence the recent Court case, as well as the Privacy Commissioner and the IPCA throwing a fit at the Police a couple of years ago over randomly photographing young people for ‘intelligence purposes’. Under the new Act, surveillance will be allowed for ‘an intelligence purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police, or any other lawful purpose connected with a function, or an activity, of the Police.’ In other words, the Police can conduct surveillance of the NZ public for any reason they can come up with. There is no limit.

Further, the Police will now have the authority to conduct surveillance against any private property, so long as they do it from a public space. The Police could, for example, legally set up a surveillance site in a hillside park that could easily look into private property, 24 hours a day. No warrant required; no suspicion of wrongdoing needed, even. They just need to “consider that the information will or may support the Police in performing a function, or carrying out an activity, of the Police”.

And if they can’t be bothered coming up with a reason like that, they can do it under the ‘any other lawful purpose’ justification. Like, I don’t know, checking every backyard in the city for a cannabis grow.

Except that if they are using the same camera they use on the Eagle helicopter, they can see more than your backyard; they can read what is written on the paper stuck to your fridge door.

When the Police Minister says that the law simply gives the Police back powers they already had, it is so wrong as to be laughable.

Then there is the third piece of legislation, the so-called under-16 social media ban. Which hasn’t even been introduced yet, but for which the Dept. of Internal Affairs has already been given $30 million to implement.

This legislation will require every person in New Zealand to provide proof of age to every designated social media platform before accessing social media. If you are over 16, you will be permitted to continue. In fact, assuming we adopt the Australian model, the government won’t have to designate a platform; unless a platform is excluded, it will be subject to the requirement to perform an age-check.

In other words, the government is going to impose a gate on your access to social media. This will include platforms you might not consider social media; so long as you use that platform to communicate with others or receive communication from them, they qualify. You will have to show your age and, almost certainly, your identity, before you can use it. If you choose not to provide that information to the social media platform, you will not be permitted to use it.

The government has not provided us with any reasons why this is necessary. It has not provided any research that justifies it. There is no overwhelming evidence that it is necessary. And it is clear that, although superficially popular, when the methods necessary to implement it become known, it becomes exceptionally unpopular. Yet, the Minister for State Control, @EricaStanfordMP, is keen to proceed with this as soon as possible. That is because this is not based on evidence, but on ideology.

The ideology it's based on is not just about keeping children safe, a noble concept that relies on strongly debatable and heavily contested social science. It is also about protecting them from information that politicians and activists don't like. Misinformation, disinformation, harmful information, call it what you will. Politicians can dress it up as protecting children from harm, but when it boils down to it, the UK government in recent days has come into the open with the reasons why it feels a need to take control of social media, especially for under-16s, but even for older young people. Or adults.

The recent attempted beheading of a Belfast man, which saw riots following the distribution of the video on social media, particularly on this platform, prompted the UK Labour government to immediately call for controls on this platform, plus explicit calls for control of social media algorithms in order to prevent what is called misinformation from spreading. In fact, what the UK government wanted was for genuine, truthful information to be prevented from spreading, so that bad news it didn't like would not spread, and criticism of its policies and the consequent public response to their effects would not be felt.

But this policy is doomed to failure. The Australian implementation has shown that it is easily circumvented, not only by using a VPN, but also by children themselves, who find simple workarounds.

It also creates a privacy and information-protection nightmare for the people of any country in which it is implemented. The UK is already finding this out through its existing online safety laws and is now looking at banning VPNs and other measures that might be used to circumvent the rules.

To comply with laws designed to satisfy regulators, social media platforms, or the security firms they use to ensure their customers are over the age of 16, have to store some form of data. Unfortunately, that makes them an irresistible target for hackers. Even government systems in places like Estonia and India have been targeted and breached. More recently, Discord was breached, leading to the identification of a huge amount of its users' private data.

There is also the problem of what happens with the next government or the one after that. Whilst a supposedly centre-right government may say it is only concerned about the safety of children on social media, the Department of Internal Affairs has no such pretensions. It simply wants to regulate the internet, and it will do so by any means necessary. It will spend its time patiently convincing politicians, if not this government, then the next or the one after that, to allow it to become a super-regulator, imposing its view of what is acceptable on the public of New Zealand. And you'd be surprised at what the Department of Internal Affairs considers acceptable or not. I assure you, they do not align with the views of the average New Zealander. Put bluntly, the Department of Internal Affairs is a pack of wowsers.

Which brings me back to the beginning. This is all being done under a @NZNationalParty-led coalition government. The biggest increase in state surveillance capacity in a generation is being undertaken by a supposedly centre-right government. That is because the National Party lacks senior politicians with a strong commitment to liberty. People like Erica Stanford and Mark Mitchell are politicians whose first impulse is to use the power of the State to ensure the safety of the people, as they see it. Whether the people like it or not. And they have been quite open about that.

For Ministers such as @chrisluxonmp, Stanford, and Mitchell, an increase in the government's power over the private individual is a feature, not a bug. Keeping children and the public safe is worth trampling on the freedom and privacy rights of those same people, or invading the family in order to be a Nanny State.

After all, you cannot put a price on public safety, now, can you?

https://t.co/OSDIKG7j82

[Holyhekatuiteka @2ETEKA]

🚩There are literally hundreds of Jobs popping up online advertised ONLY FOR INDIANS, e.g Trade depot in Hamilton are looking for a forklift driver -

“OSH Forklift Licence is essential”

and so is :

“Proficiency in Hindi or Punjabi is essential for effective communication with team members and clients”

NZ’s Human Rights Act 1993 and Employment Relations Act 2000 prohibit discrimination in job ads, and hiring on these grounds
• Race or colour
• Ethnicity or national origins.

Language requirement is discrimination. Treating people differently or less favourably because of these traits is unlawful. But I guess Modhi is now in charge of our discrimination laws in addition to our immigration policies.

Indians only hire Indians - everyone knows this.

National/ Labour/Act are determined to destroy us with immigration.

FFS Vote NZFirst

https://t.co/B11yRsRsIn

[Illeis galbula @deborahcolson]

@DrAseemMalhotra I don't think he is mate.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

Zionism or Islam?

Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, after centuries of exile, slaughter, and persecution, have the right to self-determination in the land of their ancestors, a land the size of New Jersey.

A land where their history, their faith, and their identity have been rooted for over 3,000 years.

Zionism is not about conquest; it is about survival. It is about reclaiming what was stolen, rebuilding what was destroyed, and ensuring that the Jewish people will never again be at the mercy of those who sought their annihilation.

Islam is the belief that Muslims must rule the world, that every government, every culture, every law must bend the knee to Sharia.

It is an ideology that rejects borders, denies coexistence, and declares that no land is ever permanently “non-Muslim.”

The entire world, in the eyes of Islam, is divided into two categories: Dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the land of war).

And the goal of Islam is to turn the entire planet into Dar al-Islam, by force if necessary.

Zionism does not demand that anyone else submit, change their laws, or adopt Judaism, it only demands the right for Jews to exist in peace in their ancestral homeland.

Islam, on the other hand, demands global subjugation, the destruction of non-Muslim governments, and the enforcement of Sharia upon all people, whether they like it or not.

And yet, the ignorant Western left attacks Zionism while defending the ideology that would strip them of every right they claim to care about.

The same people who preach feminism, LGBT rights, and freedom of speech will turn around and defend an ideology that stones women, executes homosexuals, and silences dissent with the sword.

I choose Zionism every single day.

[Taya Bass @travelingflying]

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We estimate 1.5 million European and American slaves taken between 1750 and 1815.

Jefferson and Adams went to their ambassador in London and said, why do you do this to us? The United States has never had a quarrel with the Muslim world of any kind. We weren't in the crusades. We weren't at war with Spain. Why do you do this to our people and our ships? Why do you plunder and enslave our people? The ambassador said very plainly, Mr. Abdul Rahman said, because the Quran gives us permission to do so, because you are infidels, and that's our answer. Jefferson said, well, in that case, I will send a navy which will crush your state, which he did.

Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy. It's a lie to say so. It's a masochistic lie, and it excuses those who are the real criminals, and blames us for the attacks made upon us.”

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"Sugar-free" is code for "we replaced sugar with something even worse for you."

"Fat-free" is code for "we took the fat out and packed it with sugar to make up for the taste."

"Plant-based" is code for "ultra-processed in a factory you'd faint walking through."

"Heart-healthy" is code for "contains seed oils and a logo we paid the foundation to put on the box."

"Lite" is code for "watered-down, then sweetened, then sold at the same price."

"All-natural" is code for "technically traceable to a plant at some point in the chain."

"Cage-free" is code for "the cage is now the entire windowless barn."

"Whole grain" is code for "still flour, still spikes your blood sugar, just browner."

The label is the marketing. The ingredients list is the document. Read the second one.

[Mr Na @ocarolant]

New Zealand COVID-19 Stats (as of early 2026):
Survival rate for confirmed cases: 99.85%
Case fatality rate (CFR): 0.15%
Confirmed cases: 2627114
Deaths: 3,944
Average age at death for COVID-19 attributed fatalities: 81.7 years
Total government cost for COVID-19 response measures: $70.4 billion (allocated for public health + economic supports; 20% of GDP)
https://t.co/Nm7RE2MYQ9

ACC Vaccine Injury Claims (Pfizer Comirnaty):Accepted claims: 1779 (out of 4495 lodged)
Fatal claims accepted: 6
Total payments made: $16.88 million

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Systematic Slaughter of Christians. And the Silence That Surrounds It.

They had come to mourn. The fighters from the Islamic State-linked Allied Democratic Forces had disguised themselves as civilians to move among the mourners at a wake in the village of Ntoyo, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. When they struck, they used axes, machetes and firearms. One witness saw his sister killed with an axe. Another found her parents' bodies in the morning, her father shot, her mother beaten to death with a hammer. A third described how fighters broke into her house and took her four daughters. At least 60 people died at that single attack in September 2025. "I'd never seen so many bodies," one survivor told Amnesty International researchers.

This was not an isolated atrocity. It was one episode in a sustained, doctrinal campaign of killing. The ADF's own statements and claims of responsibility make explicit reference to Christians as targets. Its leadership has formally sanctioned their killing. In February 2025, ADF fighters rounded up 70 Christians and beheaded them inside a Protestant church in Kasanga, North Kivu. In July, they killed at least 40 worshippers gathered for a night prayer vigil in Ituri province. On Maundy Thursday this year, they attacked a village in Mambasa Territory and killed dozens more. The victims are not incidental. They are chosen.

Amnesty International's new report describes these attacks as war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also identifies why they receive so little attention: international focus has fixed on the Rwanda-backed M23 movement operating in the same region, and the ADF kills in its shadow. The mechanism of invisibility is as deliberate as the violence itself. Overstretched Congolese forces, a security vacuum, and a crowded news agenda combine to ensure the dead are buried without consequence.

Eastern DRC is not an outlier. It is one theatre in a continental emergency.
The Open Doors World Watch List for 2026, audited by the International Institute for Religious Freedom, recorded 4,849 Christians killed for their faith in the year to September 2025. Of those, 3,490 died in Nigeria; more than in every other country on earth combined. In June 2025, Fulani militants attacked the Christian community of Yelwata in Benue State over four hours, killing 258 people, most of them women and children. Eyewitnesses reported the attackers shouting that they would destroy all Christians. On Palm Sunday that same year, 43 people were burned alive in Bassa. From 2011 to 2025, more than 44,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria for their faith.

In Syria, an ISIS suicide bomber struck the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Elias in Damascus in June 2025, killing 22 and wounding more than 60. Syria's constitutional declaration of March 2025 made Islamic jurisprudence the primary source of legislation. Roughly 300,000 Christians remain in the country, hundreds of thousands fewer than before the emergence of Islamic State in 2013. Many conceal their faith. Many do not attend church. In Mozambique, Islamic State's local franchise is burning Christian villages in the north. In one attack on Napala in October 2025, militants killed 20 Christians and displaced 2,000 more. A pastor described four elderly women tied up and burned to death inside a house.

Over 150,000 people have been killed by Islamist militants in Africa over the past decade. The trajectory is upward. Analysts expect the violence to intensify across the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, Somalia and eastern DRC through 2026. The victims are Black. They are Christian. They are being killed by jihadists operating under the banner of Islamic State and its affiliates. South Africa's Chief Rabbi put it with the clarity that Western editors have conspicuously avoided: "It seems as if black lives do not matter if they are murdered by Islamists in Africa."
That is not a provocation. It is an audit of our attention.

[Yossi BenYakar @YossiBenYakar]

Top British attorney Natasha Hausdorff stunned the audience by completely destroying the Palestinian narrative about the conflict. The truth the world refuses to accept:

Palestine never existed as a sovereign Arab state.
The British Mandate of Palestine was a British territory taken from the defeated Ottoman Empire after 1917. Jews lived continuously in the Holy Land for centuries — long before modern Zionism. They were the majority in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule. Jews legally bought desert land (including the area that became Tel Aviv) and turned it into thriving cities and kibbutzim. Not a single Arab was displaced by these purchases.

The Arabs rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and launched war to destroy the newborn Jewish state. They lost. During that war, Arab armies ordered local Arabs to flee so they could “push the Jews into the sea.” Many did exactly that.

Israel has never committed genocide. It has fought for survival against repeated attempts to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s regime are the real obstacles to peace in the Middle East.

The historical facts are clear. The propaganda is not.

Share this. The truth needs to be heard.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Let's talk about how long it takes the medical establishment to admit it was catastrophically wrong.

1950s: Doctors recommend smoking to pregnant women. "Calms the nerves." Magazine adverts featured obstetricians lighting up patients in waiting rooms.

Time until reversed: 25 years.

1960s: Thalidomide prescribed for morning sickness. Ten thousand children born with malformed limbs across forty-six countries. The drug was on the market for five years. The United States narrowly avoided approval thanks to one FDA reviewer, Frances Kelsey, who was harassed by the manufacturer for refusing to rubber-stamp it. She received a Presidential Medal afterwards. The men who pressured her did not lose their jobs.

Time until reversed: 5 years. 10,000 affected children.

1970s: DES prescribed to prevent miscarriage. Causes a rare vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who took it, sometimes appearing twenty years later.

Time until reversed: 30 years.

1980s: Margarine officially recommended over butter. Trans fats turn out to cause the exact heart disease they were marketed as preventing. Harvard researchers later estimated up to 250,000 excess American deaths from industrial trans fats before the FDA finally moved against them in 2018.

Time until banned: 30 years after the harm was published.

2000s: Vioxx approved for arthritis. The internal Merck documents showing cardiac risk existed before approval. They hid them.

Time until withdrawn: 5 years. 60,000 dead.

2010s: Opioids prescribed like sweets. "Less than 1% addictive when properly prescribed," cited endlessly from a 1980 letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The letter was 101 words long, observed hospitalised patients on short-term doses, and was not a study. It was cited over six hundred times to justify giving OxyContin to people with back pain for the rest of their lives.

Time until reversed: 20 years and counting. Half a million dead.

The pattern is mechanical.

The establishment recommends something. The evidence of harm emerges. The establishment ignores it. Years pass. The harm becomes undeniable. The guidance is quietly updated "based on emerging data." Nobody is held responsible. Nobody apologises. The next mistake is already in development in an adjacent department.

So when modern doctors tell you, with the full confidence of the institution behind them:

"Seed oils are heart healthy."
"Statins for everyone over fifty."
"Saturated fat causes heart disease."
"Cholesterol is the enemy."

Remember that they have been catastrophically, generationally, lethally wrong before. While charging consultation fees the entire way through.

The question worth asking isn't whether they're right this time.

The question is what their track record predicts.

History gives you a fairly clear answer.

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

My doctor put me on a statin after my heart attack at 52.

I trusted him. I took the pill. I never asked a question.

Then I found this study. 60 clinical trials. 323,950 people. Every cholesterol lowering drug ever made. Statins. PCSK9 inhibitors. Ezetimibe.

They measured how much each drug lowered LDL cholesterol. Then they measured whether people lived or died.

The line is flat.

It did not matter if they lowered LDL by 10% or by 70%. The death rate did not change. In some trials people died more.

323,950 people. Near zero benefit. Published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology. 2023.

Nobody showed me this chart. Not my cardiologist. Not my pharmacist. Not the drug rep who visited my doctors office every month.

I had to find it myself. After the heart attack.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1956. Your doctor tells you to eat margarine instead of butter. The margarine is industrially hydrogenated vegetable oil with a trans fat content that will, forty years later, be classified as one of the most harmful substances in the food supply. Your doctor does not know this. Nobody is asking.

The year is 1961. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine, bespectacled and certain. Your doctor now tells you to reduce animal fat. The evidence is a study that initially looked at twenty-two countries and was published with seven. France, which eats butter by the kilogram and has the lowest heart disease rates in Europe, is not one of them. The hypothesis is now a consensus. The consensus was built by excluding the data that disagreed.

The year is 1977. Senator McGovern releases Dietary Goals for the United States. Cut fat. Eat complex carbohydrates. The food industry hears this as bread, pasta, cereal, and an enormous commercial opportunity. Your doctor starts telling you to eat six servings of grain a day. You lose weight briefly and gain more back. Your doctor suggests you try harder.

The year is 1984. Time publishes another cover, two egg yolks and a strip of bacon arranged into a frown. Your doctor stops letting you eat eggs. The correction, that dietary cholesterol barely affects blood cholesterol for most people, will arrive in 2015.

The year is 1992. The food pyramid arrives. Six to eleven servings of bread at the base. Fats at the apex, to be used sparingly. Obesity rates, stable for thirty years, begin to climb almost immediately. Type 2 diabetes follows. Nobody connects the two because the pyramid is official, and official things cannot be questioned.

The year is 1995. SnackWell's fat-free cookies overtake the Oreo as the best-selling biscuit in America. They are sugar and refined flour. Your doctor sees no problem with them because they are fat-free.

The year is 2018. Your doctor tells you red meat causes cancer. The evidence is a hazard ratio of 1.18, which in any other field of science would be considered noise. Your doctor does not mention this. Nobody told your doctor either.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines. Protein is back. Saturated fat is being quietly rehabilitated. Refined carbs are, at last, the villain they were always going to be.

None of the doctors who told you otherwise have phoned to apologise.

None of the institutions that enforced the last position have issued a correction.

The file simply updates. The old guidance vanishes from the website. The textbooks get reprinted. The medical students are taught the new version as if the old version never existed, and the patients who spent forty years doing what they were told are expected to quietly update their diets and move on.

Your great-grandmother was right. Your grandmother was right. Your mother, who followed the guidelines, is on three medications.

The pattern is not subtle.

The pattern has never been subtle.

The only question is how many more cycles of this you are willing to sit through before you stop asking the people who got the last one wrong what to do about the next one.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Fibre is the most successful marketing campaign in the history of food.

It is, definitionally, the part of the plant that your body cannot digest. The indigestible bit. The leftover cellulose that the plant put there to not be eaten, and that you cannot break down because you do not have four stomachs.

It has been rebranded as essential. Required. The thing your gut cannot function without. You must have 30g a day or your bowels will forget what they are for.

There are populations on Earth who have eaten almost zero fibre for generations and had flawless digestion. Traditional Inuit. Traditional Maasai. The Sami reindeer herders. Every carnivore you have ever met, if you ask them.

If fibre were required for human digestion these people would have died out. They did not die out. They thrived, often with better gut health than the modern fibre-maxing office worker who is bloated by Tuesday.

The gut does not need the plant's leftovers. The gut needs real food it can actually absorb.

The indigestible bit was never the point. The digestible bit was always the point.

Eat the thing your body can use.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

People think ketosis is a weight loss trick. A short metabolic shortcut you endure for a few months to fit into the wedding outfit.

This is a bit like describing electricity as a way to slightly improve candle technology.

Start here. Ketosis is not an emergency switch. It is the factory default. It is the state your body drops into the moment you stop force-feeding it glucose, which is to say, the state your ancestors spent most of their lives in between hunts, between harvests, through every long winter and every failed foraging trip for two and a half million years. The sugar-burning state is the exception. The ketone-burning state is what you were shipped with.

Your brain runs beautifully on ketones. Not adequately. Beautifully. It is the fuel the brain prefers when given the choice, which is why a fasting human does not get progressively stupider as the glucose runs out. The thinking gets sharper. The focus narrows. This is the feature that kept us alive in every lean week for two million years.

The sugar-burning brain has a fuel tank that holds about two hours and sends panic signals when it runs low. The shake. The three o'clock fog. The sudden conviction that a biscuit will fix it. You have been living in this cycle your entire adult life and calling it normal.

The ketone-burning brain does not do this. The barrel has no bottom. Your body fat is the reserve, measured in weeks, not hours. Miss a meal and nothing happens. Miss lunch and get the best work of your day done in the afternoon you used to write off.

Underneath it, something quieter. Ketones shift the balance of GABA and glutamate in the brain, pushing it toward the calming neurotransmitter and away from the excitatory one. The constant low hum of anxiety that you assumed was just what being a modern person feels like begins to recede. The catastrophising voice that narrates your commute gets quieter.

Mitochondria, meanwhile, are having the best week of their lives. Cleaner fuel. Less oxidative damage. The engine runs cooler and lasts longer.

A mellow, sustained high. An erosion of the low-grade dread most adults accept as the cost of being alive.

They came for the weight loss. They stay for the peace.

The state you have been told is extreme is the one your body came pre-installed with. Somebody sold you the upgrade, and the upgrade was the problem.

[HighWire+ @HighWirePlus]

SNEAK PEAK - NEW POLIO DOCU-SERIES

A sneak peek of the Series Premiere of ‘Jefferey Jaxen Investigates.’ In ep 1, ‘Polio: The Founding Myth of Modern Medicine, Pt 1,’ Jefferey tells untold truths about the Polio epidemic, unearthing facts, science, and history you haven't heard before. Watch the first ten minutes here, then click https://t.co/LNShCjhpGE to sign up for HighWire+ and watch the entire series premiere!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"I switched to plant-based oils years ago. Animal fat is so unhealthy. I can't believe people still cook with it."

Lovely. Let's walk through how your cooking oil was made. Then we'll walk through how tallow was made. You can decide which one sounds like food.

Rapeseed oil. Step by step.

Step one: harvest rapeseed. Press it. The crude oil at this stage is dark, smells strongly, and is not fit for consumption. We are going to fix this.

Step two: solvent extraction. Bathe the remaining seed in hexane, a petroleum-derived solvent, to pull out the rest of the oil. Hexane is a neurotoxin. It is then evaporated off. Most of it. Residual hexane stays in the oil at levels regulators consider acceptable. Acceptable is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Step three: degumming. Add water or acid to strip out the phospholipids. The phospholipids were the most nutritionally complex part. They go in the bin.

Step four: refining. Add sodium hydroxide. Caustic soda. The thing under your sink for unblocking drains. This neutralises the free fatty acids. The resulting soap is removed and discarded.

Step five: bleaching. Run it through bleaching clay. The oil is still the wrong colour. We continue.

Step six: deodorisation. Heat it to 270 degrees Celsius under vacuum for up to two hours. This removes the smell. It also produces trans fatty acids as a byproduct. The amount varies. It is not zero.

Step seven: bottle it in clear plastic. The oil is highly polyunsaturated and will oxidise on exposure to light. The clear bottle ensures this begins immediately on the shelf. Add a picture of a sunflower.

Tallow. Step by step.

Step one: take the fat from the beef. Heat it gently. It melts. Impurities settle. Pour off the clean fat. Let it cool.

Done.

No hexane. No caustic soda. No bleaching clay. No deodorisation chamber. No trans fat byproducts.

Shelf-stable at room temperature. High smoke point. Fat-soluble vitamins intact. Used as a cooking fat in Britain since people have been cooking in Britain.

It does go solid in the jar. This is, apparently, the most unsettling thing a fat can do.

The liquid one went through six industrial processes.

The solid one went through one.

Unhealthy, though. Very unhealthy.

[Jonathan Cohler @cohler]

The Emperor Has No Clothes!
How the IPCC Built a 38-Year Empire
on a Circle of Lies

Jonathan Cohler
16th International Climate Change Conference
Hotel Washington • Washington, DC
April 8, 2026

[Jonathan Cohler @cohler]

The Emperor Has No Clothes: How the IPCC Built a 38-Year Climate Empire on a Circle of Lies
Summary of my talk at ICCC16 on April 8, 2026.
The papers underlying this analysis are available at https://t.co/TiXR6dk7Uk.

For nearly four decades, the world has been told a story. The story goes like this: the Earth is warming at an alarming rate, humans are causing it by burning fossil fuels, and unless we spend trillions of dollars to stop it, catastrophe awaits. Governments have reorganized their economies around this story. Children have grown up afraid of it. Scientists who questioned it have been ostracized.

There is just one problem. The scientific foundation of that story — every single number the IPCC uses to tell it — is physically meaningless. Not uncertain. Not debatable. Physically meaningless, in the same way that the average of everyone's phone numbers in Washington, DC is meaningless. You can calculate it. The arithmetic works out fine. But the result tells you absolutely nothing about reality.

This is not a fringe claim. It is a mathematical and physical demonstration, built on peer-reviewed papers and the foundational principles of thermodynamics. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

The First Lie: A Temperature That Does Not Exist

Everything begins with the Global Mean Surface Temperature, or GMST. This is the single number — usually expressed as an anomaly from a pre-industrial baseline — that the entire IPCC enterprise is built upon. When you hear that the Earth has warmed 1.2 degrees since the industrial revolution, you are hearing about GMST. When climate models project warming of 2 or 3 or 4 degrees by 2100, they are projecting changes in GMST. When the Paris Agreement sets a limit of 1.5 degrees, it is a limit on GMST.

So what exactly is GMST? Here is where the story starts to unravel.

Temperature, in physics, is what is called an intensive property. That means it describes the state of a specific physical system — a system that has boundaries, that is in or near thermal equilibrium, that has a single governing equation of state. You can meaningfully talk about the temperature of a cup of coffee, or a room, or the ocean at a particular depth, because each of those is a defined physical system. What you cannot do, without violating the laws of thermodynamics, is aggregate temperatures across systems that are not in thermal contact with each other and call the result a "temperature."

The Earth's surface is not a thermodynamic system. It is a patchwork of thousands of local systems — deserts and rainforests, polar ice sheets and tropical oceans, mountain peaks and valley floors — none of which are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Averaging their temperatures produces a number, yes. But that number is not a temperature in any physically meaningful sense. It has no equation of state governing it. There is no physical law that connects it to anything. It is, as physicist Christopher Essex and colleagues demonstrated rigorously in a 2007 paper, simply not a temperature.

This is not a technicality. It is the kind of category error that, in any other field of science, would end a research program immediately. Averaging intensive properties across non-equilibrium systems is like averaging the zip codes of everyone in New York City and then using the result to give someone directions. The arithmetic produces a number. The number means nothing.

The International Organization for Standardization recognized this implicitly decades ago. ISO was tasked in 2002 with defining all important terms related to climate change — and to this day, "global average temperature" does not appear in their completed definitions. The omission is not an oversight. ISO's mandate requires metrological rigor, and "global average temperature" cannot survive it.

Neither the IPCC nor any climate agency has ever produced a rigorous physical definition of GMST. They use it constantly — it appears in virtually every chapter of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report — but they have never defined what physical quantity it represents, because no such definition is possible.

The Second Lie: Models Built on Nothing

If GMST is physically meaningless, what are the IPCC's climate models actually doing?

The answer is uncomfortable. Every major climate model used by the IPCC — the ensemble known as CMIP, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project — is tuned to reproduce historical GMST trends. These models have hundreds of adjustable parameters, and those parameters are set so that the model's output matches the observed GMST record. This is called validation: you adjust the model until it fits the data, and then you declare that the model has been validated against observations.

But if GMST is not a physically meaningful quantity, then tuning a model to reproduce it is not validation. It is curve-fitting against a number that has no physical content. The model learns to reproduce a mathematical artifact, not a physical reality. And because these are coupled global circulation models — where temperature interacts with precipitation, wind, ocean currents, sea ice, and dozens of other variables — the corruption spreads everywhere. Every projection the model produces, for every variable, inherits the original meaninglessness.

The implications are staggering. Every temperature projection. Every sea level projection. Every extreme weather projection. Every carbon budget. Every remaining-emissions calculation. All of it flows from models validated against a quantity that does not physically exist.

The Third Lie: An Ocean That Was Never Measured

Recognizing that surface temperature records were contested and unreliable, the IPCC developed a second line of evidence: ocean heat content, or OHC. The argument was straightforward — if the planet is accumulating energy from the greenhouse effect, that energy must be going somewhere, and most of it should be going into the oceans. Measure the ocean's heat content over time, and you have a direct measurement of the planet's energy imbalance.

This argument sounds compelling. It rests on a program called Argo — a network of roughly 4,400 robotic floats deployed across the world's oceans, each one diving to 2,000 meters and rising back to the surface every ten days, transmitting temperature and salinity profiles along the way. Argo is a genuine scientific achievement, an engineering marvel that has produced an enormous amount of valuable oceanographic data.

But here is what Argo was actually designed to do, according to its founding documents from 1998: observe the evolving physical state of the upper ocean, track regional patterns of heat and salinity, support weather forecasting, and complement satellite altimeters. Global ocean heat content and Earth's energy imbalance are mentioned nowhere. The program was not designed for that purpose, and its design is fundamentally unsuited to it.

The problem begins with basic physics. When an Argo float ascends from 2,000 meters to the surface over six to ten hours, it collects roughly 1,000 temperature measurements along the way. But the float is drifting the entire time. By the time it surfaces and phones home via satellite, it may be fifty kilometers from where its deepest measurements were taken. Those measurements are all assigned to the surface GPS position — the only location that is actually known. The actual underwater trajectory is entirely unknown. Every single data point below the surface is assigned to the wrong location.

Then the interpolation begins. Those 12,000 real measurements per month — already spatially misassigned — are used to fill 45,000 three-dimensional grid cells covering the global ocean. The vast majority of the ocean is not measured at all; it is calculated. The polar regions, coastal zones, and marginal seas are largely excluded. About half the total ocean volume, including all water below 2,000 meters, is simply ignored. The calculations use correlation functions that blend measurements from water masses hundreds or even thousands of kilometers apart, destroying any local information the floats actually captured.

The anomalies computed from this process — the differences from a historical baseline — then run into the same fundamental physics problem as GMST. Temperature is an intensive property. You cannot meaningfully average temperature anomalies across non-equilibrium volumes of ocean any more than you can average them across the Earth's surface. The resulting number has units attached to it, and the arithmetic is consistent, but it does not represent a physical reality.

When all the genuine sources of uncertainty are properly quantified — the untracked trajectories, the interpolation errors, the deep ocean ignorance, the polar gaps, the mismatched measurement frameworks — the true uncertainty in the derived Earth Energy Imbalance figure is greater than plus or minus one watt per square meter at 95% confidence. The IPCC's AR6 reports it as 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter. The actual uncertainty is roughly five times larger than the signal being measured. The result is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

The Fourth Lie: Satellites Adjusted to Match the Fiction

The IPCC presents its ocean heat content figure and its satellite-derived energy imbalance figure as two independent lines of evidence that agree with each other. This agreement is cited as powerful confirmation that the Earth is accumulating energy at the rate claimed.

What the IPCC does not prominently advertise is how that agreement was achieved.

NASA's CERES instruments — satellites measuring the radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere — produce raw measurements with an absolute uncertainty of roughly three to five watts per square meter. The signal the IPCC claims to be measuring is 0.7 watts per square meter. The satellites, on their own, cannot resolve it.

So what was done? The CERES data were adjusted — via a least-squares optimization — to force agreement with the Argo-derived ocean heat content estimate. The IPCC's own AR6 documentation acknowledges this directly: the CERES fluxes "were adjusted, within the estimated uncertainties, to ensure that the net TOA flux was consistent with the estimated Earth's energy imbalance based on ocean heat content measurements."

In other words: they adjusted the satellites to match the floats, and then cited the match as independent confirmation. That is not science. That is circular reasoning with extra steps.

This is not unprecedented behavior in the IPCC ecosystem. Kevin Trenberth, one of the architects of the ocean heat content framework, wrote in a now-famous 2009 email obtained through the ClimateGate disclosure: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in August shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong." When the satellites disagree with the models, the satellites are wrong. When the satellites are adjusted to agree, that agreement is cited as confirmation. The game is rigged by construction.

The Fifth Lie: The CO₂ Fingerprint That Was Never There

The final pillar of the IPCC's case is carbon dioxide attribution. Yes, CO₂ has risen in the atmosphere. Yes, human industrial activity emits CO₂. But the IPCC goes further, claiming that the rise in atmospheric CO₂ is almost entirely anthropogenic — that natural processes cannot account for it, and that the isotopic composition of atmospheric CO₂ provides an unambiguous human fingerprint.

This claim rests on the Bern model, a mathematical framework describing how CO₂ moves between the atmosphere and natural reservoirs. The Bern model has a particularly alarming feature: it predicts that a substantial fraction of CO₂ emitted today will remain in the atmosphere for centuries or millennia. The IPCC's AR5 report states that fifteen to forty percent of emitted CO₂ will persist in the atmosphere for more than a thousand years. This is the foundation of carbon budgets and net-zero targets.

The Bern model has been falsified by evidence that has been sitting in plain sight for sixty years.

When atmospheric nuclear testing peaked in the early 1960s, it injected a massive pulse of radioactive carbon — bomb carbon-14 — into the atmosphere. This pulse has been tracked continuously ever since. If the Bern model were correct, that pulse should decay slowly, with a substantial permanent fraction remaining. Instead, it decays as a single exponential with an e-folding time of about seventeen years. The bomb carbon is gone. It cycled through the system and was absorbed — completely — in roughly half a century. The multi-exponential Bern model, with its permanent airborne fraction, is simply wrong. CO₂ does not persist in the atmosphere for millennia. It cycles through in years to decades.

The isotopic evidence tells the same story. The carbon isotope ratio in atmospheric CO₂ — the quantity called delta-13C — is supposed to be declining as fossil fuel CO₂, which is isotopically light, mixes into the atmosphere. The IPCC treats this decline as the smoking gun of human causation.

But a 2024 peer-reviewed study by Prof. Demetris Koutsoyiannis examined the actual isotopic data carefully and found something the consensus narrative cannot accommodate: the net isotopic input signature to the atmosphere has been essentially unchanged since the Little Ice Age. The value has remained stable — globally, across all major measurement sites, throughout the entire period of industrialization. A changing human fingerprint should show up as a changing net signature. It does not. The isotopic composition is consistent with natural biosphere dominance and an undetectable human contribution.

The reason is not mysterious. The biosphere — plants, soils, oceans — cycles roughly twenty-five times more carbon per year than human industrial emissions. Natural processes are overwhelmingly dominant. Human emissions are noise on top of a vast natural signal. And temperature, not human activity, drives the dominant part of that signal: warming causes the biosphere to exhale more CO₂, which raises atmospheric concentrations. The causality runs from temperature to CO₂, not the reverse.

5 x 0 = 0

Step back and look at the full picture.

The IPCC's case for human-caused climate catastrophe rests on five interlocking metrics: GMST, the climate models tuned to it, ocean heat content, Earth's energy imbalance derived from ocean heat, and CO₂ attribution. Each one is presented as an independent line of evidence. Together, the IPCC says, they constitute overwhelming proof.

But they are not independent. They form a circle. GMST is physically meaningless. The models are tuned to GMST and inherit its meaninglessness. Ocean heat content is computed through a process that violates measurement physics and is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Earth's energy imbalance is derived from ocean heat content and confirmed by satellites that were adjusted to match it. CO₂ attribution rests on a model falsified by nuclear bomb data and an isotopic fingerprint that does not exist in the observations.

Each element of the chain depends on the others. None stands independently. The IPCC calls this "multiple lines of evidence." But five times zero is still zero.

What This Means

None of this proves that the climate is not changing, or that human activity has no effect on the atmosphere. Climate changes continuously, and has for billions of years. What it demonstrates is that the specific metrics the IPCC uses to quantify the crisis — every number that drives the policy, every figure that justifies the spending, every projection that frightens the public — are built on a foundation that does not survive contact with basic physics.

The International Organization for Standardization could not define global average temperature because it fails metrological requirements. Four different AI systems, presented with the mathematical arguments, reached the same conclusion independently. The emperor has no clothes — and even the tools his court built to defend him can see it.

For thirty-eight years, an enormous scientific and political infrastructure has been constructed on top of these metrics. Trillions of dollars in spending have been justified by them. Careers, institutions, and international agreements depend on them. Questioning them has been treated as heresy.

But physics does not negotiate. A number that has no physical meaning does not acquire one because important people find it useful. A measurement indistinguishable from zero does not become evidence of a crisis because a satellite was adjusted to agree with it. A model falsified by sixty years of bomb carbon data does not become valid because it has been cited ten thousand times.

The work is done. The papers are published. The mathematics is there for anyone who wishes to examine it. The question now is not scientific. It is whether the institutions that built their empires on these numbers will acknowledge what the physics has always been trying to tell them.

The emperor has no clothes. He never did. And it is long past time to say so.

The presentation "The Emperor Has No Clothes" was delivered at the 16th International Climate Change Conference, Washington DC, April 8–9, 2026.

👇👇👇👇👇

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

"Stay out of the sun. It causes skin cancer."

Where were the dermatology clinics of Georgian London? Where were the Victorian SPF recommendations for fieldworkers? Where, in the entire written medical record of pre-industrial Britain, is there a single document warning the population that the sun, which they had been standing under for their entire lives, was now going to kill them?

There isn't one. Because it wasn't.

The agricultural labourer of 1850 worked fourteen-hour days in a field in July. Shirt sleeves rolled up. Face weathered to the colour of tanned leather by thirty. He did this for forty years and the thing that killed him was usually a cart, a cough, or the gin.

The Aberdeen fisherman of 1890 stood on a deck with the North Sea reflecting sunlight back at him from every angle. He did not wear SPF 50. He ate herring, butter, and oats. He died, when he died, of the sea. Not of the sun.

Every human being on your family tree for a quarter of a million years lived outside, under that sun, without a single tube of zinc oxide between them.

Then something changed.

Not the sun. The sun is the same sun. UV intensity at ground level has barely shifted across recorded history.

What changed was the fat.

In 1911, Procter and Gamble introduced Crisco. Industrial cottonseed oil, hydrogenated, sold as a shortening substitute. Before that moment, the fat in the British and American diet was butter, lard, tallow, suet, cream. Saturated. Stable.

After that moment, the fat was increasingly polyunsaturated. Soybean. Corn. Safflower. Canola. The kind of fat that oxidises on contact with heat, light, and oxygen.

Your skin is made from the fat you eat. Every cell membrane. The fat gets incorporated, and then it sits there, for months to years, waiting.

Saturated fat under UV light is stable. Nothing much happens.

Polyunsaturated fat under UV light oxidises. Lipid peroxidation. Free radicals. Inflammation. In your skin, this looks like redness, pain, peeling, and eventually the kind of cellular damage dermatologists have quite reasonably started calling dangerous.

The sun didn't become dangerous. The skin did.

Specifically, the skin of a population that replaced butter with margarine, lard with vegetable oil, and cream with coffee creamer made of soybean derivatives.

The medieval peasant stood in a July field all day because his skin was saturated fat. Your skin is soybean oil. They behave very differently under ultraviolet radiation.

Nobody wants to tell you this because the alternative is to sell you a bottle of SPF 50 and blame the sun when you burn anyway.

The sun has been there the whole time.

The butter hasn't.

Go outside.