Dear ASF community,
Welcome to the Antipodean spring! We are looking forward to seeing you at our fourth annual Progress through Science and Freedom conference, running from 20 through 22 November in Perth. Earlybird tickets are still available for about another week, so be sure to secure yours if you haven’t already. Check out our fantastic program of speakers and themes and get tickets here.
Our online ASF Members’ Forum on 13 October will feature Dr Robyn Cosford. If you’re not a member of ASF already, you can join here and receive links to all our online Monthly Members’ Forums, plus get discounted ticket pricing and early notification of ASF events across Australia. ASF members also have the opportunity to contribute to ASF initiatives and become part of our community, which includes our expanding list of contributing authors. This month’s ASF blogs include, amongst other great pieces, some incisive analysis about the recently released PISA results in education whose equal you will struggle to find anywhere in the mainstream or even in the conventional academic press.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most jaw-dropping news this month was published in that ex-bastion of science, the British Medical Journal, in whose “BMJ Investigations” outlet investigative journalist David Willman reports that US government authorities used a flawed system to track adverse events from the covid shots, and no one bothered to sniff-test and debug the system, leading to innumerable deaths and injuries while the government continued to proclaim publicly over and over that no safety signal had been detected. In a painful irony, the underlying reason for the emergence of the flaw in practice was the historically high (and hence, presumably, unanticipated by those who built the system) incidence of adverse events from the two leading flavours of these products – those produced by Pfizer and Moderna. System designers, take note!
On our shores, Sall Grover’s case will not be heard by the High Court of Australia, confirming the Full Federal Court’s decision made in favour of Roxane Tickle, a transgender woman to whom Sall denied access to her female-only app Giggle for Girls. One of our contributing authors, Petra Bueskens, covered this bizarre case on a previous ASF blog. Meanwhile, a collection of well-known Australian resistance fighters gathered on 10 September in Sydney to call, once again, for a Royal Commission into decisionmaking during the covid era, in an event covered here by independent journalist Alison Bevege.
In Canada, the Allison Inquiry (named after its initiator, Dean Allison MP) has elicited some amazing testimony about the misdeeds of the covid era, including discussion from a former Canadian Broadcasting Co producer about the influence of government upon the CBC’s editorial process. In a major coup, the inquiry was even covered in the mainstream Toronto Sun. In the US, while conventional medical societies have finally recognised they have a problem with freefalling public trust (especially in vaccines) and are joining forces in an attempt to restore it, Americans for Health Freedom – including many prominent MAHA movement leaders – have written a pointed letter to Senator Robert F Kennedy Jr that so far seems to have been roundly ignored. Meanwhile, Brownstone Institute has released recordings of all speeches made at its recent Polyface Retreat – and its YouTube channel has heaps of other content worth checking out.
While news seems mixed this month, public sentiment in the West – as our leaders inch us ever closer to war and major economic distress – is still inching gradually toward more awareness and a reducing tolerance for incompetence, disrespect or corruption by those in authority.
Join us in Perth in November for deep discussions about how you can direct your voice and energy, with others in Australia, to rebuild the strong, healthy, and joyful society that we would all like to live in.m
Gigi Foster
