Spring seems to have sprung in Sydney just in time for the Restoring the Presumption of Innocence Conference this coming Saturday, 31 August. Only a few tickets are left to see this exciting program – don’t miss out!
ASF’s annual conference will be held at RMIT in Melbourne from 15 to 17 November, with details on exact timings and speakers coming in over the next few weeks. As we did last year at our inaugural annual conference, we plan to include content across a range of disciplines and cover a variety of concerns that plague Australia, to bring together practitioners, thinkers, educators and community leaders from across the country, and to focus strongly on developing workable alternatives for a better, happier future. I hope to see you there!
Another exciting in-person ASF engagement opportunity is now being planned for the second or third week of December, inspired by my recent visit to Chateau Hodbomont in Belgium – the main geographical home of the new higher-education initiative, Nova Academia – to participate, together with my family, in week-long “boot camp” taster sessions for prospective students. Some of the students who attended these boot camps are now about to commence a 3-month program at the castle, led by Nova Academia’s academic director and my long-time coauthor Paul Frijters and his wife Erika Turkstra. We are now planning to replicate the “boot camp” experience for interested students in Australia, a few weeks before the January 2025 start of the next 3-month program at Chateau Hodbomont. Venues are actively being considered and compared (please be in touch if you know of a suitable location – it doesn’t have to be a castle!), with the goal of keeping the price point reasonable and just breaking even. We are hoping to announce a venue and exact pricing within the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you or a young person you know may be interested in taking part in such an opportunity, please help us to gauge demand by emailing admissions@novacad.org to signal your interest and be among the first to be informed as plans develop.
Another upcoming in-person event, being organised in Melbourne on Wednesday 18 September by like-minded organisation The Brisbane Dialogues, is a public discussion on the fraught issue of energy policy. I’m sure it will be a fascinating evening.
Moving to items of note in the independent media, Rebekah Barnett recently published on her substack a withering take-down of Victoria’s debt-fuelled covid-era spending (criticised recently even in the mainstream media) in which Jay Bhattacharya and I are both extensively quoted, and a review of Jereth Kok’s case demonstrating – regardless of how you view what Jereth wrote on his social media accounts – how AHPRA’s de facto role is now not merely medical regulator but speech regulator. Meanwhile on Raphael Lataster’s substack we are treated to a sane look at messaging and accountability in the post-truth covid era.
In other Australian news, former NSW premier Dominic Perrotet has become the first Australian politician to say that it was wrong for governments to issue Covid-19 vaccine mandates, while a bill prohibiting discrimination based on a person’s Covid-19 vaccination status did not receive enough support in the Senate to proceed.
In the academic world, the authors of mainstream papers are discovering waning effectiveness of the covid injections, and correlations are being published between the shots and excess death counts in Australia. Peter McCullough and colleagues have put out this paper reviewing the covid shot program overall and a new paper specifically on the risks of cardiac complications after the covid shots, while this preprint showing certain cardiac events only occurred in covid-vaccinated (vs covid-unvaccinated) people was valiantly if somewhat comically defended by the mainstream press as NOT having found what some outlets as said it found, namely that these cardiac events happened only in covid-vaccinated (vs covid-infected) people (think about that one for a moment!). Colleagues at UNSW have produced this paper slamming Australia’s covid-19 vaccine injury scheme, and the paper was even picked up in our mainstream press. Sanjeev Sabhlok has called for a medical conference at which professional medical voices could unite around the the objective of abolishing the practice of quarantine, drawing on our joint paper (with other coauthors) about the failed history of quarantine as a medical intervention (see more details here).
More has happened of interest to Team Sanity on the international stage this past month than one can shake a stick at, including:
In the US,
- plaintiffs (including Jay Bhattacharya and the State of Missouri) losing their Supreme Court bid to retain de facto free speech for Americans in the face of censorship via collusion between the Executive Branch of the federal government and mainstream media (collusion directly admitted to Congress just days ago by Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg);
- the State of Vermont’s Supreme Court finding in favour of the state’s power to utilise federal legislation as a weapon to dispossess people of their medical freedom;
- Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic US Presidential ticket, being voted into that position not directly by members of the Democratic Party, but rather by their delegates to the Democratic National Convention;
- Robert F Kennedy Jr withdrawing from the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump, and promptly receiving criticism from his siblings in response; and hearteningly,
- a string of recent lower-court rulings supporting, in various ways and to various extents, medical freedom.
In France,
Finally, an upcoming film about vaccines and another one about racial narratives in the US may be of interest, as well as some humour inspired by the recent shenanigans in the US presidential race.
Please pass the word about ASF’s mission and activities and consider joining us as an affiliate member, if you aren’t one already. We have so much work still to do to make the future a better place for ourselves and our children, and everyone’s energy and talents are needed.
I look forward to seeing you in person at an upcoming ASF event!
