One week to trial! Next Tuesday morning in Courtroom 518 of the District of Columbia Superior Court, we begin jury selection in the matter of warm-monger Michael E Mann vs Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn. I'm entitled to be tried by "a jury of one's peers", so I'll be seeking an all-Canadian jury: Ted Cruz... Jennifer Granholm... Jim Carrey...
Ahead of that, do join me tomorrow, Wednesday, for our Clubland Q&A, when I'll be taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet. The fun starts at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm GMT.
If you seek a sane alternative to Mann's climate-change hockey stick, there's always our handsome limited-edition trial souvenir: the SteynOnline Liberty Stick. Every stick is made in the USA and shows both Magna Carta and the US Constitution. They're exclusively available here - and I sign and number each one.
They can also serve as souvenirs for my suit against the UK media censor Ofcom, for their rulings against my coverage of the Covid vaccines. That comes up at the High Court of England and Wales in March.
~My opponents on either side of the Atlantic are, in effect, standing on an appeal to authority. Mann's position re climate change is that, once the National Academy of Credentialed Wankers has pronounced, one cannot disagree. Likewise, says Ofcom, with British officialdom, especially themselves. The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority - and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:
US scientists held secret talks with Covid 'Batwoman' amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly
You don't say! When would that have been? Oh:
...just before pandemic
Well, there's a surprise!
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.
You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it's where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can't do in suburban Virginia.
So how's that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that "Unknown Cause" was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. "Unknown Cause" is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.
Does "Unknown Cause" have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who'd like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?
Apparently not. Gee, it's almost as if taking too great an interest in "Unknown Cause" can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).
And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard's Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:
2020 15,890
2021 14,466
2022 19,716
So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach "the height of the pandemic". Here's another striking feature - again, direct from Statistics Canada:
During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.
So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at "the height of the pandemic".
Like I said: odd.
Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that's three times the size of last year's drop.
Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I've pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that's the opposite of what's meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.
Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of 'em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It's a lot to keep track of.
Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of ...whatever. And nobody cares to find out.
We now have an addition to the side-effects column. From a new paper out of Hong Kong:
The impact of COVID-19 vaccines including their effectiveness and adverse effects in patients with diabetes are not well known yet. Here, we showed that 61.1% patients with type 2 diabetes, but not healthy controls, exhibited aggravated insulin resistance towards the booster shots of the COVID-19 vaccine.
And more:
About 66.7% of diabetic subjects had increased risks of cardiovascular complications.
As Igor Chudov points out, it's the spike protein that's doing this. The paper's conclusion:
In this study, we showed that boosters of COVID-19 vaccines weaken insulin sensitivity in pre- diabetic and diabetic patients, providing a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and insulin resistance... [They] increase diabetic complications risks in diabetic patients.
A tenth of the planet is diabetic, so that seems likely to go well.
Happily, "edgy" "controversial" "shock jock" Howard Stern is still complying with the experts. How's that working out four years in?
"It's impossible that I got COVID," said Stern. Stern said he hasn't been anywhere, he went to his mother's and wore his masks the entire time. He also said he saw his assistant and his driver without a mask and they both tested negative.
Stern said he also gave COVID-19 to his wife, Beth Stern.
"I must thank the scientist who developed the COVID vaccine," Stern says as he told the story of how bad his COVID has been.
Things are likely to get worse now that we're moving into the official start of Covid Season - or, as it used to be known, Iowa Caucus Day.
~Related to all the above, the Ofcom decisions against me seem ever more outrageous with each passing news-cycle. So I've been enormously touched by how many readers wish to support my free-speech lawsuits in both hemispheres - over the Big Climate warmatollahs in Washington (the trial starts on January 16th) and against the UK state censor Ofcom in London (coming shortly thereafter in March). Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate;
c) ordering a copy of my latest book, the aforementioned The Prisoner of Windsor (you won't regret it - ask Kathy Gyngell);
d) splashing out on the aforementioned limited-edition SteynOnline Liberty Stick; or
e) lavishing upon your beloved a once-in-a-lifetime Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds goes to a grand cause, and with the latter three a significant chunk - and, in all of them, you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Finally, let me thank all the newcomers to our ranks in recent days, from Berlin to Barbados, from Gwynedd to Hervey Bay, from Norman, Oklahoma to Daphne, Alabama. We hope to welcome many more of you in the years ahead. For more information on The Mark Steyn Club, see here.
