Russell Brand and the Mysterious Professor Sachs - Part 2, Electric Portaloo.

Part Two - Electric Portaloo - where we observe Russell's selective cherry-picking of news, a scientific method based on opinion and not facts, and meet the mysterious Professor Sachs!

Previously, on Rebutting Russell Brand. We explored how Russell pretended there was censorship around the topic of COVID origins simply because he didn't feel like his "narrative" was receiving the attention it deserved, we explored how racist tropes were trotted out to justify the shortcomings of the US government's initial COVID response at the expense of building cooperation and consensus between nations, and we discovered how Russell is willing to sacrifice the well-being of normal working people in order to live in comfort and luxury! 

So join us as we now return to the next thrilling installment of... Rebutting Russell Brand !

If you see a big bowl of fruit and you ignore all of the other fruit and pick only cherries, what would you call that???!!!

Hello, you awakening fruit bowls! Bursting with the fecund bounty of nature’s blessings! Maybe, one day, we can look forward to a time when there is nothing but cherries in the fruit bowl, a time when we have eliminated all the other fruits and can progress with our plans for a spiritually homogeneous world where the baser urges of the populace are dampened by strict adherence to religious doctrine. A religio-fascist state, if you will, or the Great Awakening as Russell likes to call it.

But, in the absence of divinely mandated uniformity. We must deal with a complex and ever-changing world that Russell, at least partially, likes to cope with by selectively choosing the parts of news articles that he talks about while ignoring those that don’t align with his worldview (or “narrative”). Cherry picking! One of Russell’s favorite past-times. A form of censorship where he hopes to hoodwink his audience by boosting favorable information while purposely suppressing the news he disagrees with. So much for free speech!

This is a continuation of a discussion around Russell's YouTube video of 19th September, where he discusses an article published in the Telegraph reporting on the findings of a committee set up by the Lancet medical journal under commission from the  World Health Organization to identify lessons from the COVID pandemic. Part one is available here.

Before Russell even tries reading the article, however, he’s keen to play a montage of headlines and front pages questioning the effectiveness of both COVID lockdowns and COVID medications (no sources provided in the video notes, by the way) before going on to state that the “complexity” of both the war in Ukraine and the Queen’s death are somehow being downplayed in order to keep you dumb. But luckily for you, Russell is here to help you with your dumbing down!

And easing you into your dumbitude is Russell’s reading of the Telegraph article, where he is delighted to tell you about the prospect that COVID could have come from a US lab. Yes, you heard right, a lab in the US, not the one in Wuhan China where the disease was first detected.

Credit to Russell, he does at least acknowledge that the article says the lab leak hypothesis is ”plausible” which is not the same as likely. However, this status of “plausibility” with no allowance for likelihood puts both lab leak and natural spill-over at equal footing. Actually, lab-leak would appear to have the upper hand, when you consider the tabloid sensationalism of this story which places the lab-leak hypothesis front and center.

Russell also makes a good deal of assertions in the article that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been less than forthcoming with their research. He does this with one of his silly voice bits. Oh goody. He’s putting on a preposterously over-the-top “American” accent while pretending to be the NIH withholding information because they want to throw you a surprise party, or something. Sometimes, when you watch Russell’s videos, you forget that he was once a professional comedian. Thankfully he does these silly voice bits to remind you precisely why he isn't a professional comedian anymore. 

God this goes on for a while. It is an absolute cringefest. It’s embarrassing to watch. I hope no one can see me watching this. If I were to get an email tomorrow saying that my laptop webcam had been hacked and that the hackers were threatening to send the video of me watching Russell Brand doing his silly voice bit to everyone on my contacts list, I would pay the ransom in an instant!

The silly voice bit does finish - eventually - and you’ll be glad to know that Russell manages to get a dig in at Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Chief Medical Advisor to both Presidents Trump and Biden. Russell thinks that Dr. Fauci ought to release the  NIH research into coronaviruses before he retires. 

Ah, Dr. Fauci, the evil puppet master pulling all the COVID strings! One of the most depressing aspects of Russell Brand's current iteration is his willingness to jump on pretty much any right-wing conspiracy bandwagon. Dr. Fauci has become a lightning rod for right-wing ire ever since the right perceived him as being an annoyance to Donald Trump during the first year of the COVID pandemic. Let’s bear in mind that Fauci is a civil servant and is only a public figure by dint of his work in the field of public health - he’s not a politician, and his career appears to be one of public service in support of the health and the well being of his fellow man and woman. Right-wing propagandists and conspiracy theorists have been tying themselves in knots in order to try and cast Fauci as a self-serving villain, and despite three years under the spotlight - in the blazing center of the crucible of rightwing media scrutiny - they have been unable to cook up a genuine scandal to end his career. Much like The Dude, Dr. Fauci has prevailed.

There was a time when Russell would have been able to identify Dr. Fauci as a well-meaning public servant. Even if he disagreed with him, I do not believe that Russell of old would not have engaged in such base vilification. But now that Dr. Fauci stands in the way of Russell’s twisted COVID narrative, he must be cast as a villain. This is just laziness and it is mean-spirited on Russell's part.

But take heart! There is at least one elderly academic that our Russell is enamored with. And that is the chairman of the committee responsible for producing the WHO report in question, a professor of economics, and the alleged progenitor of the US lab-leak theory -  the Mysterious Professor Jeffery Sachs. Russell supplements his reading of the Telegraph article by playing video of Professor Sachs at a conference in Madrid discussing the work of the Lancet/WHO committee. In the video, Sachs states that he's “pretty convinced” that COVID came out of a “US lab of biotechnology and not nature”.  He goes on to tell us that he personally oversaw this part of the work, which he had worked on “intensively” for two years, although he does feel the need to point out that "we don't know for sure" that this was a "biotech blunder". I'll discuss Jeffery's hypothesis in more detail in Part 3 of this extended blog post.

Russell is captivated! And Russell doesn't let Jeffery's lack of certainty in his own cockamamie theory hold him back! When the good professor goes on to bemoan the lack of investigation into a US-based lab-leak source for COVID, Russell is keen to provide sinister motives - could the investigation lead to "embarrassment"? Could it lead to the breaking down of the "dominant narrative"? For his part, professor Sachs says that people don't want to "look under the rug" - I guess that's why the Prof boasts in the Telegraph article that he shut down an investigation into a possible natural origin for COVID? Won't be looking under THAT rug if the good professor has anything to do with it. Russell also agrees that this is a rug that shouldn't be looked under less it exonerates big pharma - or something.

According to Russell, Professor Sachs has no financial incentive which ties him to the “mainstream narrative”. I guess to Professor Sachs is an outsider, working for the not-at-all-mainstream World Health Organization, a branch of the not-at-all-mainstream United Nations,  in partnership with the prestigious, and not-at-all-mainstream, medical journal The Lancet. Even as others are supposedly motivated by increased state regulation, big tech, big pharma, and massive wealth transfer, Jeffery remains pure of heart and light of purse. So, asks Russell, what is old Jeffery Sachs’ motive? We can only guess! And maybe I’ll do some guessing later, in Part Three of this blog post. Suffice it to say just now that Russell sees Prof Sachs as an unassailable paragon of virtue.

Maybe it’s Russell’s infatuation that blinds him and causes him to skip over the parts of the Telegraph article that detail criticisms of the good prof? Under the sub-headline “Shameful Moment”, a scolding reference to the inclusion of the US lab-leak theory in the report, the article references efforts by researchers to remove Sachs from his position as chairman, especially after he guested on well-known anti-vax crusader RFK Jr's podcast. Other criticisms lament that the report: “flagrantly” ignored evidence on the origins of COVID; was a disappointing contribution to disinformation; and contained baseless “wild speculation” that US labs were involved.

Russell does acknowledge that one of the report authors had pushed to remove references to US labs as they were a “distraction”, but only to disagree with the researcher's professional assessment, apparently for no other reason than it would contradict Brand's preferred narrative that COVID originated from a Big Biotech / Big Pharma lab-leak.

Also worthy of ignoring is the statement in the article that “the origins of Sars-Cov-2 [were] only a small element of the report”, and the further conclusions that:

• Vaccine programs were ”hampered by [government] science policy and implementation failures” (But Russell, I thought you said governments were in the pocket of Big Pharma to push out vaccines?)
• “Most countries still lack ‘meaningful’ pandemic preparedness plans”. (But what about all the "globalist" plans Russell said were going to use permanent lockdowns as a means of controlling the masses?)
• More needs to be done to "combat vaccine hesitancy globally” (Do you think celebrities undermining vaccines on social media could contribute to vaccine hesitancy?)
• several influential political leaders showed "striking...irresponsibility". (Russell is usually so keen to talk about the shortcomings of our political leaders.)
• Previous experience of the SARS epidemic in 2003 left the areas encompassing East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand better prepared for COVID, giving rise to their outstanding "very low average mortality rate[s]". (Better prepared, how? Wear masks in public? Implement and comply with lockdown measures? Take collective responsibility for simple public health measures in support of the wellness of fellow citizens at the expense of minor personnel discomfort?)
• In "stark" contrast, the approach in both North and South America, had high mortality rates that reflect "the failures of this region to take concrete measures to suppress the epidemic, and high vulnerability to deaths”. (Can’t be anything to do with all the ivermectin, medical misinformation, lockdown protests, and mask avoidance that Brand and his palls have spent the last three years hyping and spreading over social media contributing to the deaths of over a million people?)
• And in Europe, countries were "repeatedly pushed into stringent lockdown" because they were too quick to ease up on control measures, which allowed new waves of disease to hit. (Seems like Prof Sachs and his crew might be quite keen to have seen initial lockdowns extended. I wonder why Russell didn't mention this?) 

Emerging from his thorough and unflinching reading of the Telegraph article, and his equally thorough perusal of the underlying sources (only joking),  Russell professes to see the emergence of two sciences - Science and "Science". The former - Science - is the "analysis of evidence,... presentation of theories and... hard facts that emerge from that process", the other "Science", is "a kind of Dogma, a kind of Doctrine, a kind of tool of powerful people in order to create stories, and ultimately bureaucratic measures, that support outcomes that they are in pursuit of".

Guess which Science Russell identifies with? The Science of evidence and facts? Or the "Science" of dogma for powerful people supporting their preferred outcomes?

So, with that in mind, let's recap what we've just learned from Russell...

1. Russell wants us to believe that COVID came from a US lab leak.
2. The US lab leak theory originates with the mysterious Professor Jeffery Sachs, who is an economist and not a scientist .
3. Despite his apparent confidence in his US lab-leak theory, Professor Sachs wants to be "absolutely clear" that he is "not sure" about it.
4. Multiple colleagues on the WHO committee chaired by the Professor wanted him removed due to his bat-shit craziness.
5. Others (actual scientists) have accused Prof Sachs of “flagrantly” ignoring evidence in developing his theory...
6. And contributing to disinformation by publishing it...
7. And engaging in baseless wild speculation.
8. The good professor is such a stalwart analysis of evidence and presentation of theories that he bragged of arbitrarily shutting down investigations into subjects that might have contradicted his preferred theories.
9. Russell completely ignores any scientific fact that does not "support outcomes that [he] is in pursuit of"

To present two concepts of science, implying that you are on the side of the scientific method while, in fact, you are blatantly promoting scientific quackery and consciously suppressing scientific fact in order to promote a personal agenda requires either a total lack of self-awareness or a special kind of dumb.

But to do so knowingly? Given that COVID has now killed more than 6.5 million and sickened over 630 million people globally? That requires a level of callousness that approximates evil.

And so that’s it for this second part of my blog on this video. If you do want to read my further musings on the nature of this WHO report, Professor Jeffery Sachs, and what he is actually trying to imply about the US role in any lab leak, then I recommend you don’t touch that dial and stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of this blog post in Part Three - Lie Hard, with a Vengeance!

But what do you think? Is Russell the kind of powerful person who would follow dogma and distort science in order to create stories that support the outcomes that he is in pursuit of? Or is he merely a wealthy elite who will take a doctrinal approach to misrepresent science in order to promote his preferred narrative? Does Russell ignore facts that he doesn't like in order to mislead his audience? Or does he simply avoid truths that he finds objectionable to deceive his followers? Can we say with any kind of certainty that Russell is a force for evil in this world? Or is he merely wicked and immoral?

However bad you think Russell is, please let us know in the comments! (or don't). But however vile you do think Russell is, please remember to "like, subscribe, and review!" - clinga-ding-ding-ding!