News

Discernable guest Clare Pain is a medical journalist who wrote educational material for doctors throughout the pandemic and after noticing strange and sudden changes in her industry she started to investigate matters.

In particular, she wanted to know whether valid consent was received for Covid-19 injections in Australia and her workplace declined the idea, she commissioned her own survey of 27,000 Australians. The quantitative results are presented in our longform interview with Clare but she also received a large amount of qualitative data.

Here are the free-form responses she received from Australians describing why they received injection(s).

The reasons range broadly over 25 minutes and are presented in categories. They should be read in conjunction with the Australian Immunisation Handbook and Article 6 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights.

The statements on screen are raw and uncensored and do not necessarily represent the views of Discernable or Clare Pain. The full interview with Clare Pain: https://discernable.io/why-did-australians-choose-to-get-vaccinated-against-covid-19-did-they-really-choose/

Some observations:

• From those who felt coerced or forced, there seems to be a lot of anger expressed toward governments but not much toward other Australians who willingly wanted one of the Pfizer/AstraZeneca/Moderna/Novavax products.
• From those who willingly wanted one of the Pfizer/AstraZeneca/Moderna/Novavax products, there seems to be a lot of anger expressed toward other Australians who were less willing.
• There is a surprisingly high amount of misinformation such as believing Australian laws automatically gave mask exemptions for the vaccinated, or that you could travel further than 5kms from home in Melbourne if vaccinated.
• There is a sizeable number of people who altruistically made the effort to protect their community, family or other group.
• There is an overwhelming pattern of being forced by authority figures: employers, judges, medical professionals denying treatment etc.
• Much of the pressure seems to be second order effects of government mandates ie social, work or bureaucratic threat be denied some part of normal life even in spheres where discretion was available (privately enforced mandates).
• The classical reason for vaccinating (to protect yourself through acquired immunity against a disease) constituted a minor percentage of the responses.

This is the creamiest custard/ice cream you will ever taste. Recipes like this are commercially unviable so impossible to find unless you make it yourself. Follow along and experience Matt’s rich custard (and ice cream!).

Ingredients
600ml cream (thickened cream from Woolworths is perfect)
150ml water
6 egg yolks
1/2 cup xylitol (or 1/2 cup sugar)
1/4 teaspoon guar gum (only if proceeding to ice cream)
Large pinch of salt
1 tablespoon of butter
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (alcohol base)
1 vanilla bean (optional)

Equipment
Silicon spatula
Sieve/strainer
Pot
Glad wrap
Digital temperature probe
Ice cream maker (only if proceeding to ice cream)

Method
1. Mix guar gum evenly through xylitol/sugar (guar gum only required for ice cream).
2. Combine cream, water, salt, xylitol mix and vanilla, in a pot.
3. While gently stirring, heat pot to fully dissolve ingredients (about 60C is fine)
4. Allow pot to cool below ~50C while preparing egg yolks in a mixer bowl.
5. Gently whisk egg yolks while dribbling cream mix in. Dribble slowly at first to prevent heat-shocking the eggs, gradually speeding up pouring in the remaining liquid.
6. Pour liquid mix into a pot through a sieve to remove any lumps of egg and guar gum.
7. Add butter and scraped vanilla bean seeds to custard and heat to an absolute maximum of 83C, making sure to slow down heat and stir well as you approach 80-83C.
If any part of the mixture gets to 85+ it will set and make a lumpy custard!

8. Once 83C is reached, cool custard quickly to get it out of the danger zone (75C+)

Hot custard is now ready to eat, or proceed to the next step.

9. FOR COLD CUSTARD: pour into a bowl and cover with glad wrap, pressing the glad wrap down to touch the surface of the custard, which will prevent condensation and skins forming. Cool for hours in a refigerator.

10. FOR ICE CREAM: pour cold custard (refrigerate overnight) into your ice cream maker and follow the instructions. The colder the custard to begin with, the better the ice cream.

11. Remove ice cream from maker which will be at soft serve consistency. Freeze overnight for a hard, supermarket style ice cream.

TROUBLESHOOTING
Ice cream too hard/soft after freezing overnight? Adjust cream/water ratio. Higher fat = softer final result. More water = firmer ice cream.

Still can’t get ice cream soft enough? Cheat by adding a dash of vodka before churning in ice cream maker.

Icicles in your ice cream? You didn’t freeze the custard fast enough. Make sure the mix is cold as possible before churning.

Grainy ice cream? Your temperatures are wrong. Either you went too hot in the final cook separating some of the fats and creating a grainy texture. OR you didn’t dissolve all the ingredients properly in the first cook – heat higher and longer.

It seems you must either ‘stand with Avi’ or ‘stand with PRGuy17’ (choose a side) but there are a number of us who may not personally like the way either of them choose to go about their work but believe they both play a very important role in our public discourse.

The way Victoria Police treated Avi is wrong and we should celebrate this apology. I hope they back up their apology with action moving forward.

Like many, I’m not a fan of Rebel News but why does that even matter? They do important work that most (including myself) do not have the courage (or let’s be honest – temerity) to do. If you don’t like it, then do a better job. If you think they’ve made a mistake, then gather some facts and call it out.

As we watch journalists in a dying legacy media pander to powerful corporate and government interests, it increasingly falls to independent media to fill the role traditional journalists have abandoned. Peter Hitchens described it to me thusly: ‘The appropriate relationship between journalists and governments should be of that between a dog and a lamp post.’

So if you’re looking for a completely unbiased journalist or media outlet, you will die of exhaustion. But quality of journalism is, in the end, decided by the people. It’s not for Victoria Police or a government to decide who is and who isn’t a journalist.

Institutions should be answering questions from anyone who dares to ask them – whether those questions are asked respectfully or otherwise.

I note that the pandemic years has given rise to a number of new voices (there are many with small followings under 5,000 subscribers) and some are not happy about it. Yes there’s misinformation. Yes there’s bias. But the cultural reflex to smear and censor dissenting voices leads to a dangerous end.

I say increase the number of voices! On all sides, on every side, on no sides. More, not less, speech combined with an increasingly savvy audience, is preferable to the censorious, mushroom approach we currently live under (mushrooms are kept in the dark and fed excrement).

It’s messy, sure, and it takes courage to walk through the noise but we are better off with a cacophony than with a submissive euphony.

Welcome to Studio 3.0! Discernable is now in its third iteration of its studios, and they were built and equipped by the generosity of almost 100 supporters.

The average equipment purchase or labour/materials contribution was ~$250 with a few very large supporters but 75% were below $200. These truly are ‘the people’s studios’!

June 2022 was a tumultuous month for western culture. ‘Pride Month’ delighted some, enraged others, but in my estimation revealed a sickness in our minds and souls: the agrandisement of the ‘self’. In an effort to counter the shame experienced by the LGBT community society reached for the opposite force and mistakenly grabbed on to ‘pride’ (which is certainly not the opposite of shame).

Confusing self-esteem and self-worth the terrible sickness of pride, we raised flags, emojis and profile pictures to celebrate a cancer in the modern world. Pride is an unhealthy preoccupation with self and manifests in both the haughty and the self-pitying. The true opposite force – humility – is much more difficult to define but it has been said that ‘humility is not thinking less of yourself…it is thinking of yourself less’.

Hot on the heels of Pride Month was the US Supreme Court leak and subsequent overturning of Roe v Wade, unwinding the judicial activism of 1973 and returning abortion rights to the democratically elected legislature of the states instead of unaccountable justices. 50 years of case law, policy and culture was violently thrown out the window and some states immediately legislated restrictions or bans on abortion, whilst other states increased access and lowered the bar of entry to abortion services. Corporations piled on to declare their financial support of any employee needing to travel interstate for an abortion.

Protests erupted with cries of ‘MY choice’ and you know what? Maybe it is ‘their choice’ but even if that were true, are we all so blind as to miss what is happening to our society? Every viral new technology, every marketing campaign in business, every new convenience, every new law, every preacher in a modern church…EVERYTHING is targeted at satisfying the self. Improving the self. Protecting the self. Rewarding the self.

Myself, Myself, Myself. Me, me, me. I, I, I.

To even mention that old virtue – denial of self – seems antiquated and unwelcome in our world of ever fragmenting identities, broken family units, and empowered individuality. As mental illnesses explode in our modern world we offer ever more myopic and prideful ‘solutions’ to a population already sick from an overdose of pride.

Perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate this self-harm we inflict, and chart a new course to a healthy society of interdependence, not independence. To be dependent on one another requires great humility and the laying down of prideful mantras like ‘I am _____; affirm me!’ and ‘I have the right to do _____; respect me!’.

Let’s resist the propaganda of self and swim against the current. After all, ‘He who turns back soonest is most progressive’.

2 years ago when I first took notice of Victoria’s Premier (Daniel Andrews) I spent quite a lot of time defending his motives.

When I interviewed the retired Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police and he called Daniel inept and corrupt, I struggled to keep a straight face.

Corruption is not something this Australian millennial associated with Australia. That only happens ‘overseas in 3rd world countries’. Right?

Coming up on 2 years now of interviewing as broadly as I can (whoever will accept my invitations) and I am saddened to report that corruption is just as widespread in Australia, but it looks different. Conflicts of interest abound in Australian politics and big business, and often outright regulatory capture of government departments.

From health, to education, to justice, the western world has a problem with ‘white collar’ corruption where somehow being dodgy is less smelly because…you know, at least we’re not taking bags of cash (or are we #SussexSt?) but rest assured, opportunists are drawn to the trough of big business or big government. We certainly do have corruption.

It probably doesn’t get clearer than the story of #SlugGate but there are many, on all sides of politics.

And it’s encouraging to see the likes of 3AW’s Neil Mitchell finally calling a spade a spade when it comes to the heartless Daniel Andrews because we will not likely get a better historical case study than the decline of the State of Victoria over the last 20 years.

It’s a story of good but misguided intentions, a particularly caring population primed to be taken advantage of, and what investigators assure me in private: outright criminality by Daniel Andrews over decades.

Daniel is not a dictator. Dictators go off the deep end but often in a misguided pursuit of the welfare of their subjects. Daniel just doesn’t care about us the way we thought. He’s heartless. He’s cold. He’s opportunistic. He’s fake.

Why do you think he tries so, so hard to emphasise that he ‘cares’ about all Victorians? It’s because we know – from his actions – that no caring Premier would take the public for a ride like he does, or drive the health department into the dirt whilst hiding all health advice, shutting down inquiries and blaming everyone (including Victorians) but himself for any failure that comes to light.

I am aware that such malfeasance in office is not unique to the Labor Party, and I do not have much good to say about the Liberals (or most independents) at this time.

But I can say that I’ve ‘lost my virginity’ when it comes to corruption awareness in this country, and there’s no going back. I have Daniel Andrews to thank for making it so plain…the heartless Premier who taught us what a captured state looks like.

Captured bureaucracy. Captured police force. Captured education department. Captured and crumbling health department. A captured judiciary. Captured politicians – many of whom are too scared to speak against their leader. A captured people, endlessly bashed by propaganda designed to make Daniel look good, and the people bad.

That’s probably the most outrageous part – it feels like Daniel’s war is not against his political opponents. His war is with the people of Victoria. Every announcement he makes pits Victorians against Victorians, cheering one group and demonising the other.

Or his war of propaganda – not designed to make the Liberals look bad – but designed to make us forget certain truths, and believe other half-truths. A propaganda war on ourselves.

Why is he so angry with us? Did we not deliver him repeated electoral wins and positive opinion polls for handling the pandemic?

I grew up in an abusive household, and dallied with abusive religions. I know what this is. But occasionally, like a good victim, I forget and start wondering whether I’m simply misinformed. Maybe Daniel is telling the truth about #SlugGate, the Red Shirt Rorts, hotel quarantine deaths, branch stacking, the health advice, the VIC firefighter’s union…

Maybe the rumours of his alcoholism, of his driving the car that ran over the cyclist, of his bullying and glass jaw are completely unfounded. But to enter into his world and believe its physics requires too great an effort to maintain.

The meme offers a simpler explanation: ‘the secret ingredient is crime’.

We wish him all the best for the upcoming state election in November 2022.

The People’s Project brings you LIVE coverage of the Australian Federal Election 2022 with a studio panel:

• Emily (Voice for Victoria)
• Richard Riordan MP (Victorian Liberal Party)
• Krystle Mitchell (former VicPol)
• Ken Phillips (Self Employed Australia)

The first hour was plagued with audio issues but we hustled and switched systems so the following 5.5 hours are great!

Join us as our panel explores the results and crosses live all around the country to:

• Professor Gigi Foster
• Senator Malcolm Roberts
• Jim Penman
• Stepmates (creators of Pauline Hanson’s cartoons)
• Damian Coory
• Bill Lang
• Senator Gerard Rennick
• Glen Druery (The Preference Whisperer)
• Alexandra Marshall
• Anka Sahin
• Daniel Lewkovitz
• Caroline di Russo

LibDems candidates Damian Coory flew down to Melbourne to check out our new studios and tell us what is on his mind.

We talked about all the hot topics: climate change, abortion, vaccine adverse events, and Youtube stars Dr Vinay Prasad, ZDoggMD and Dr John Campbell.

DAMIAN COORY
https://www.ldp.org.au/bio_damian_coory