Headsup: Disney's Hulu - mafia tool?! First warning already sent to the Knox series production team about the hoaxes and mafia connections. The Daily Beast's badly duped Grace Harrington calls it "the true story of Knox’s wrongful conviction of the murder of her roommate". Harrington should google "rocco sollecito" for why Italians hesitate to talk freely.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Deadliest Ever “Spanish Flu” With 50-100 Million Dead Was More Accurately “American Flu”

Posted by Peter Quennell

Global leaders should be working together on what matters, not being divided by political nonsense. 

China has an obvious response to the distracting US effort to get other countries to label this the “China Virus” or “Wuhan Virus”.

Patient Zero in the world’s deadliest-ever pandemic is believed to have been a cook at an American troop training camp in Kansas.

The virus is believed to have been carried by American troops to Europe. The US suppressed information, Spain didn’t, and so the world came to think Spain was the origin.

Here is an excellent short history with photographs by Jim Harris, an Ohio State history professor.

Recent estimates suggest that this flu claimed as many as 50 million lives around the world between 1918 and 1919, killing more people in a single year than the entire “Black Death” of the 14th century…

When the first cases of the influenza pandemic broke out in 1918 during the final year of World War I, the origins of this deadly pandemic were unknown…

The Spanish “origin” relates to reports in the press of cases of influenza in the summer of 1918, where as many as eight million Spaniards succumbed to the disease. Even the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, caught influenza in 1918.

[Today’s] standard narrative maintains that the first cases broke out in a military camp in Kansas where few noticed the signs of the pandemic to come amid the ongoing war.

On March 4, 1918 company cook Albert Gitchell, possibly patient zero, reported sick with a fever of 104º Fahrenheit at Camp Funston, part of Fort Riley, where 54,000 men were gathered for basic training. Within days, 522 soldiers reported sick and by the end of the month 1,100 soldiers were admitted to hospital with influenza….

[The pandemic] followed the movement of soldiers around the globe. The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), which deployed out of Kansas to France, were likely carrying the flu with them in the spring of 1918 as the Allies rushed deployments to halt the German Ludendorff Offensive.

And the deliberate suppression of factual information carried a huge price.

Britain, France, Germany and other European governments kept it secret. They didn’t want to hand the other side a potential advantage.

Spain, on the other hand, was a neutral country in the war. When the disease hit there, the government and newspapers reported it accurately. Even the king got sick.

So months later, when a bigger, deadlier wave swept across the globe, it seemed like it had started in Spain, even though it hadn’t. Simply because the Spanish told the truth, the virus was dubbed the “Spanish flu.”...

When the second wave of Spanish flu hit globally, “there was outright censorship” in Europe, Barry said. “In the United States, they didn’t quite do that, but there was intense pressure not to say anything negative.”

News about the war was carefully controlled by the Committee on Public Information, an independent federal agency… The CPI released thousands of positive stories about the war effort, and newspapers often republished them verbatim.

So when the Spanish flu spread across the United States in the fall of 1918, both the government and the media continued the same rosy strategy “to keep morale up.”

The official denial opened the way to the much more deadly second wave.

Monday, March 23, 2020

The Unexpected Way In Which It Increasingly Appears Many, Many Lives Are Being Saved

Posted by Our Main Posters

Saturday, March 21, 2020

Most-Watched Virus YouTube Explains The Many Rickety Systems That Have Let Us Down

Posted by Peter Quennell

This excellent interview (from Seattle) mentioning Italy is averaging 3 million views a day.

The expert is Michael Osterholm, Director of The Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy at the University of Minnesota.

He has been warning for decades that the capacity to manage a global pandemic just isn’t there.

The UN System above all else should be the go-to place for global capacity-building. But with neo-isolationism, it is too frequently a political football, and it is severely underfunded and understaffed.

Neo-isolationism is a dead-end street, and for now we are paying the price.

Sunday, March 08, 2020

Coronavirus: Experts Increasingly Zero In On Perhaps THE Crucial Cause, Selenium Deficiency

Posted by Peter Quennell

1. The Body’s Virus Defenses

The body’s first lines of defenses against viruses are the antioxidants and antivirals vitamin C, CoQ10, vitamin E, and alpha-lipoic acid.

When all of those prove inadequate, the 80,000 pound gorilla is glutathione.

When at sufficient levels in the body, glutathione is highly efficient at grabbing viruses and marching them right out of the body.

Normally, we can all manufacture glutathione, especially if we can help the body along with

(1) the vegetables high in sulfur (onions, garlic, asparagus, broccoli) and

(2) the supplements NAC, quercetin, vitamin E, apha-lipoic acid, CoQ10, and B-vitamins.

2. Crucial Role Of Selenium

Unlike those other substances, selenium does not just “help” to produce glutathione.

It is a make-or-break component. It MUST be present. This is a quirk of all mammals and maybe of all living creatures.

Read this excellent survey for the full reason why.

Worldwide, selenium has never been in high supply. There are very few mines. And there is not enough in the world to treat all agricultural lands.

Selenium density in the soils and foods has become worse in recent years because of two eco-measures we thought would exclusively help us:

(1) the cutting back on coal use; selenium used to be propagated along with cool soot.

(2) the spread of organic foods; foods not grown with selenium-enhanced fertilizers.

Thera are geological maps available on the internet showing the global and local distribution of selenium.

Central China, southern Korea, north-east Italy and the US northwest have little or no selenium in their soils.

And all four of those places are coronavirus hotspots.

3. Ways Of Boosting Glutathione

This YouTube above is helpful. It is simple, cheap, and pretty safe to optimise your glutathione by boosting your selenium in these ways:

(1) via one or two brazil nuts daily - typically brazil nuts contain the highest selenium content of any foodstuff, and/or

(2) via selenium capsules, widely available in healthfood stores with a recommended daily 100 mcg dose, and/or

(3) via the taking of 5-10 capsules daily of N-Acetyl-Cysteine (NAC) containing also selenium, along with significant vitamin C and a little vitamin E (this seems the best route).

Okay. Do start to feed that 80,000 pound gorilla. He or she seems to be your best bet.


Below: Why China really may see infections dwindling

Saturday, February 29, 2020

Very Efficient Italian Containment Of CoronaVirus - Foolishly Gets Isolated Anyway

Posted by Peter Quennell

1. Status Of Italian Responses As Of Saturday

With impressive rapidity, Italy’s epidemic-management machinery swung into action several weeks ago.

Only the Republic of Korea response so far has matched Italy’s in its speed, efficiency, professionalism, and level of funding. 

Diagnostic test kits were widely made available almost immediately, the tests are free, infected cases have been isolated in special wards, mass tracking initiated, and detailed maps of known cases updated in real time online.

All public information is being provided by scientists.

The epidemiology maps show that the coronavirus hotspot is in the north-east of Italy.

That is actually farther from Rome than it is from France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and Croatia.

Threatened countries everywhere should be busy learning from Italy’s first steps.

2. While US Bungles And Sparks Global Panic

By comparison, take a look at this as one of the US’s first reactions.

The Trump administration is eyeing steep cuts to global health funds in its 2021 budget proposal, slashing more than $3 billion in overall programs, including half of its annual funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), which is leading the fight against the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

American scientists have been pushed into the background and muzzled.

The self-serving politicians now in charge are wasting precious time fighting an emerging picture of massive bungling and of the deliberate destruction of epidemic-management capacity since 2016.

Strident warnings about Italy and other countries substitute for effective management. They are instilling zero confidence anywhere, as the global stockmarkets have just shown with a vengeance.

Rattled America tourists are flooding back, and some American colleges are insisting their exchange students head home.

Hard to believe but “home” includes some areas in the US far-west (including Seattle) which might soon be shown to have MORE cases than Italy, once the bungled testing in the US actually gets under way.

In a fine report from Italy in the Daily Beast Barbie Nadeau describes the US-provoked overreaction.

Even while European Union health ministers braved the “threat” and came to Rome this week to announce solidarity and plead that there is no need to close the borders to stem the spread, several countries and lots of companies are doing it anyway.

Late Friday, the Trump administration raised the safety threat level to the ominous “level 3,” which will almost certainly set off a global panic attack about this country….

Dr. Adrian Hyzler, chief medical officer of Healix International, says it is far too late to restrict travel to and from Italy and other places. The virus is now in nearly 60 countries, and he says trying to single out a few with higher numbers of infections is counterproductive.

“You cannot stop air travel without huge repercussions,” he told The Daily Beast. “To restrict travel now would be to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted! And anyway, how on earth would you do it on the continent? It’s practically impossible.”

Hyzler notes that the World Health Organization put out a statement saying travel restrictions should be “consistent and proportionate to local risk assessment” which means cancelling travel to a city like Rome, where just three people were infected, including two Chinese tourists and a researcher who flew in from China who have since recovered completely, doesn’t make sense.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Please Check Out Our Expanded New-Format Wiki Of This Extraordinarily Well-Documented Case

Posted by azoza

The famous Quadriga sculpture atop the Rome Supreme Court

1. What’s New Here

Italian justice sure goes the extra mile in documenting its cases.

Today our own collection for the murder case of Meredith Kercher features roughly 3,000 PDFs, 17,000 images, 150 audio files and 130 video files.

All these files now have a new second home at this address. Please note the “dot net”.

These are most of the existant files relevant to the murder case. They are necessarily a subset of the entire source documents on file in several locations in Italy. But we continue to seek to provide as complete a record of case documents as possible.

Above all, this is an extremely objective, reliable and trustworthy collection. Not a single document has been doctored and to our knowledge not a single document mistranslated.

This new “MMK.net” site was created in part as a more navigable version of the original file library (which is still available with some outdated analysis at the original Meredith Kercher Wiki website).

And also it was created in part for the much expanded file library, which is more complete and refined than the old one, with a very large image file section.

And also it was created in part as a precautionary backup in the event that the original site may no longer be available.

The new “MMK.net” will now serve as our primary file library website for the murder case, so that for example anyone interested in researching the murder case can easily get to the original documents, including many put into English, and view the facts of the case for themselves.

Eventually we hope to provide a guidebook documenting in detail some of the important key documents of the case.

Some source material that we did not scan or digitize are things like press pass requests, invoices for court expenses and various court administrative documents that were ancillary to the court proceedings.

There was some source material, like recordings on micro-tape, which will likely remain un-digitized. And, there some files, such as the autopsy video or phone intercept recordings, that will never be posted, out of respect for privacy.

2. Five Main Ways Of Navigating

Links to the files are organized in a number of different ways:

1) The “Master List Of Files” Webpage has links to all the files on a single page.

With the “find” function of your web browser, you can search for specific filenames.

2) The “Files By Chronology” Webpage lists the files chronologically, based on their date of creation.

So police and prosecutor notices issued on November 3rd, 2007, can be found on the webpage titled “November 3rd, 2007”. The chronological ordering is very interesting as it provides a daily, monthly and then yearly view of the police investigations, prosecutor and lawyer notices, court proceedings, etc.

3) The “Files By Subject Matter” Webpage organizes the files by the subject they deal with.

This grouping has links to a selection of the library files, since some of the files do not pertain to the subjects listed. Instead, this grouping is helpful to people just learning about the case. As an example, someone may want to find all the files relevant to DNA analysis, or all the files related to a particular lawyer, or all the files related to a particular court proceeding, or all the files related to a type of evidence.

4) The “Files By Type Of Content” Webpage organizes the files primarily by their document type or by their content type.

Most of the links are to pages featuring the PDF documents, but some of the links go to webpages featuring images. This organization is more “inclusive” than the subject matter organization. As an example, the “testimony” link goes to a webpage listing ALL the courtroom testimony available in the library, both in PDF documents and in audio files.

5) The “Files By Type Of Format” Webpage organizes the files by their type of data: PDF, images, audio or video files.

3. Other Available Ways Of Navigating

In addition to the five available “sorts” above of the file library documents, there are a few ancillary options.

Three webpages of images galleries feature (1) Meredith, (2) Perugia, and (3) select photos of the small mountain of source documentation that was consulted.

Various “Case Overview” links provide some general information about the case as help to newcomers.

The “Case Timeline” Webpage features a table of the events of the murder case, from the discovery of the murder to the final Italian Cassazione ruling.

The “Key Documents” Webpage provides links to documents that will be analyzed further in an upcoming guidebook on the documentation.

The “Evidence list” Webpage featuring a detailed listing of case evidence. It is still a work in progress.

We hope to eventually have authorization again to access the prosecutor case archives, and also the police archives, to find a few documents and files we know are still missing. We hope to have this in the next year or so.

We wish you fruitful researching.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

Highly Misleading But Revealing “Knox Week” On Enabler Kary Antholis’s “Crime Story” Site

Posted by Julan

1. On The Hoax Bandwagon

It is now twelve-plus years after Meredith’s murder.

And yet Amanda Knox still uses every opportunity to put herself on-stage, exclaiming how badly she was mistreated, misunderstood and vilified…

Condescending to the media, Italy’s justice system, anyone who doesn’t support her. And she still manages to snare naive enablers.

Kary Antholis had an illustrious 25-year career with HBO the premium cable-TV movie channel. One could expect him of all people to look before he leaped into any venture.

For example, Kary might have taken a minute to track down the damning and unrefuted posts about Knox and her huge mafia-backed hoax on this Smoking Guns page.

And yet instead Kary has emerged as yet another unwise Knox enabler. This week-long event is now featured on his new Crime Story website.

Amanda Knox Week: We dedicate this week at Crime Story to Amanda Knox, the legacy of her story, and the work that she has pursued as a voice for compassionate and restorative justice with her partner, Christopher…

See in particular these two postings on Kary’s site of an unwittingly revealing two-part Amanda Knox interview.

Day 4 Part 1/2: Interview with AK and husband #1

Day 5 Part 2/2: Interview with AK and husband #2

Those interviews were seemingly done in December. They are a bit difficult to read because of the disjointed grammar. Maybe better to listen.

2. Window Into Knox Psychology

The interviews actually give great insight into Amanda’s psyche… truly showing an esoteric mindset and blatant narcissism.

Both Amanda and husband claim to be atheists and moral nihilists (there is no right nor wrong).

They have a complete lack of logic and critical thinking.

Nihilism, most simply, means believing in nothing. The word is derived from Latin, nihil, which means ‘nothing.’

Knox says her “moral compass of kindness and empathy” was instilled at an early age by her mother and that she practises the Golden Rule.

One has to wonder if Patrick who she framed and whose business she wrecked would still be in prison if Rudy had not been caught?

Friday, December 27, 2019

Commemorating Meredith: Not Only Qualities Lost, Forty Years Of Achievements Too

Posted by Our Main Posters

All YouTube versions exceed 25m views; the most-watched operatic duet

Friday, December 20, 2019

Crack Italian Law Enforcement Gain Ground On New Kind Of Mafia

Posted by Peter Quennell

1. The Context

One could argue that Italy is both blessed and cursed by its geographical location.

Blessed, because it has a wonderful and extraordinarily long coastline, which allowed for the Roman Empire, allows for many amazing towns and villages, allows for a lot of fresh seafood, and allows for a lot of tourism from the Vitamin-D-deprived countries to the north of it. 

Cursed, because the south of Italy, which a couple of thousand years ago sat right on main trade routes and became enormously rich, fell into deep poverty as both the trade routes and the climate changed. Hence the origin of the mafias.

And cursed again, because it is so close to the desperate populations of north Africa, which makes Italy by the far the main point of entry for migrants to Europe trying to escape tribal frictions and their own descent into deep poverty.

2. The Development

In the past 20 years Italy has had major anti-mafia successes. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra is largely history, and the Calabrian Ndrangheta and Neapolitan Comorrah have been leaned on to the extent that their only expansions have been away from Italy.

And so crime-rates remain lower in Italy than in many European countries, and much lower than in the United States.

The video and this article depict the first big sweep against the recently-arrived Nigerian mafia.

This is typically Italy’s way against organized crime. Seem to be paying no attention (this was the mode in Perugia against the Ndrangheta). But then all of a sudden - pow - busloads of perps are on their way to courts and prison. 

Stay tuned. Such first mass arrests usually lead to other mass arrests. Although not here yet, for sure there will be a tipping point.

Monday, December 02, 2019

Here’s How We Might Actually Help The Hard-Pressed Media - And Development Generally

Posted by Peter Quennell

One of the largest newspaper printing presses; to what purpose?

1. The News-You-Can-Use Concept

We’re almost fully loaded for our widespread exposure of this huge legal hoax.

And there’s a possible constructive alternative to merely rubbing the media’s noses in it, though that, frankly, is pretty enticing as so many messed up so much.

A couple of decades ago, some smart TV and movie producers noticed that having some “news you can use” built into every airing would attract noticeably more eyeballs. As an example, we should be able to learn something interesting or useful from every CSI episode.

2. Nature Of The Problem

American news media right now fall short terribly in this news-you-can-use dimension. Their “breaking news” almost always tends to be bad news, depressing and disempowering, and all too soon a turn-off.

The overall effect of “breaking news” is to jack up nation-wide paranoia and helplessness. Hence the heated confrontations almost everywhere, which can get luridly misreported like the “Knox case”, and we all move on to our next “breaking news” fix.

Plus the superhero-as-savior angle is vastly over-played these days, both in the media and in entertainment. No top-down president, top-down manager, or rogue soldier or cop, is of much relevance to present problems, which need harmonious skilled diverse teams to resolve them. 

So viewership and readership and revenues dwindle, and we encounter all these desperate struggling media websites. And very few of our myriad problems actually get fixed or stay fixed.

3. Nature Of The Solution

TJMK has long tried to include some news you can use if you want to in the inter-country comparisons of policing, legal and penal systems, as in the previous post just below this.

For the most part Italian policing, legal and penal systems are something other countries could really learn from, rather than reject as the Knox campaign incites people to do.

And here is the much wider value of this angle, if it has any.

Virtually no Americans or Europeans have ever been a part of a development project or process (unlike residents of developing countries, who have often experienced several) and could really use those tools they don’t yet know about to get ahead.

In development terms, American news - and European news, especially on Brexit - is almost entirely useless, and worse, it comes with a high cost, because it is so distracting and prone to over-heating hard-pressed segments of the population.

Japan’s remarkable development exploded from the 1960s. It was mirrored in due course by Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and then by China, India, and Indonesia. That is more than 50 percent of the world’s population - all growing faster in real terms than Europe or the US are now.

And how did they do this? By first Japan and then all the others “borrowing” and using American systems (with the help of some Americans who moved to Japan) and then taking them further, often much further.

At Toyota, for example, a production system can be tweaked 2,000 times - and then junked and replaced by a new generation system.

Meanwhile, way too many Americans - and Europeans - are barely conscious of systems like those that define their lives and careers… well, except maybe for those on their Apple phone.

For this reason primarily it is actually much slower and harder and more unusual to get development processes (AKA system invention and upgrade processes) moving in the US or in the EC countries than it is in India or Africa!

4. The Main-Media Opportunity

There’s such an enormous “news you can use” opportunity here for the main media.

The NY Times has maybe 100 stories a day where, if one is on this wavelength, one can spot the system angles - a system or some systems broken, waiting for some sharp team to leap in there and fix them. Even in the arts and the sports pages.

The Boeing 737 MAX story is exactly this type of story - Boeing aircraft systems and production and quality control systems were badly developed or broken, Federal government watchdog systems were politically pushed away to arms length - and so nearly 400 people died.

But one has to work really hard from say the NY Times reporting to figure out all the system shortfalls and how to make up for them so all future aircraft are a lot more safe.

The NY Times and BBC and so on could so easily build into many or most of their stories this additional system enhancement angle.  Start to tell us ALL of the news. News-we-can-use is value-adding and empowering and integrating.

And development lessons can really be hammered home by engaging in international systems comparisons. Comparing US and UK versus Italian justice systems is just one place to start.

A lot better than this instance where the premier justice school in the US extensively lied about Italy’s justice - and duped an audience from around the world.