I want to start this week's blog with a question: Could you give up your phone? Regardless of make, model, year or capability, could you live life without your phone? It's a simple yes/no answer, but I fear many of us would struggle to abandon the little black screen lurking in our hand or pocket. This leads me to wonder if we are all actually addicted to our smartphones.
I was brought up in London in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I still remember my grandmother's Bakelite telephone, proudly displayed on our hall table. I wish I knew what happened to it; I hear they go for quite a high sum these days. Indeed we were lucky to have a landline back then. You would dial 100 and speak to the operator, who would connect you to the number you needed to call. The operators were very polite, although sometimes a little brusque in manner. You would hear the familiar noise of ‘the pips’ as you were being connected. The marvels of speaking to other people miles away was still considered nothing short of miraculous.
Back in ‘the day’, a telephone was, I thought, a device to verbally communicate with someone at a distance. Its only purpose back then was to facilitate verbal communication, it couldn’t take your blood pressure, tell you how many steps you had taken in a day or diagnose you with cancer—and it certainly couldn’t pay for a takeaway!
In 2023, the era of mobile phones has almost eliminated the need for a traditional voice only landline, and the convenience of a mobile telephone has evolved into nothing more than a spy in your pocket, a pocket doctor, a pocket life planner and a pocket postal service. Is your phone your friend or foe? Does it help or hinder you? Can you trust the information it is giving you? Phones have mouthpieces, but they have ‘ears’ too. Do you know who is listening to you or watching your every search, reading messages and emails? And what of the consequences? In 2023, a simple message to a friend could potentially lead to a police arrest. When does ‘convenience’ outweigh your own personal safety, security and privacy?
One Health, One Vision, One World and ‘One App’—a super app which will monitor, control and survey your every move. One app that will store all your health records, banking records, purchases, social and financial credit scores, plus many more intimate details about your life, unless you say NO. Your phone is gobbling up as much information on you as it can, and as fast as it can. Far from helping you, it is a thief, stealing from each and every one of us. Your phone, far from being your friend, is actually your foe. A spy in your pocket, surveillance 24/7.
Thank you to one of our viewers who informed me that despite never having a smartphone, never sharing any contact details with the NHS and opting out of everything possible, the NHS somehow knew his contact details (despite never having shared them): even a mothballed e-mail address was detected and used. Our viewer described feeling hounded and stalked by the NHS.
My question is in two parts:
- How did the NHS obtain this data?
- Where did the NHS get this data from? Could the source be mobile phone providers or internet providers?
It is a question for which, as yet, I have not discovered the answer. When did you last read and fully understand the terms and conditions and the privacy policy of your provider?
How dependent are you on your phone? Would you ever bin it? If you don't agree with the government narrative, you may have to. Perhaps now is the time to wean ourselves off our phone usage gradually, by reducing our screen time and dependency. The question remains, who is watching you and who is monitoring your phone?
Smartphone app ‘can locate active terrorists' in half a second
Imagine an app that can locate a terrorist just “by listening to a single gunshot”. What a shocking headline. This article in the Sun was published in 2019. Bearing in mind the times we are living in now, it seems an appropriate time to revisit it. By wearing a high-tech military headset, a soldier can pick out a terrorist in under a second, just by measuring shock waves triggered by incoming gunfire to calculate the position of a ‘shooter’, using artificial intelligence. The information is relayed using Bluetooth or USB to a soldier’s smartphone.
It appears our military are no strangers to smart phone apps and have been using them for some years. I find the name of the one of the applications extremely distasteful; ATAK. Is this a game-changer for the British military?
Sniffing out cancer
Last week on UK Column News, we reported a trip that King Charles (then, Prince Charles) made to Jerusalem in 2020. On that visit, he was presented with the ‘Sniff Phone’, a new innovation from Technion that can sniff a disease from exhaled breath. The language used to describe the technology (‘artificial’, ‘intelligent’, ‘nanoarray’ and ‘inexpensive’) might make you feel slightly uncomfortable. Would you trust your phone to diagnose you with a medical condition? Personally, I wouldn’t.
Phones will become ‘drunk’ detectors?
Would you trust your phone to tell you how much alcohol have you drunk? Using your voice, your smartphone will be able to detect whether you are drunk and how drunk you are. The use of recordings of your voice, before and after a drink, will determine your fate. Sensors implanted into smartphones will be the secret policeman in your pocket. Can we really trust our phones to be able to distinguish between alcohol consumption and effects of drugs (prescribed or otherwise) or illness that affects speech, such as stroke? Do we need our phones to tell us if we need ‘help’ managing our alcohol consumption?
Smartphones and Migraine: From arm to brain
A friend of mine suffers from severe migraines, but he isn't too keen on the thought of hooking up to a ‘neuromodulation’ (REN) device that may reduce the symptoms of a migraine. Strapping a medical device to your arm underneath your clothes will tell your smartphone if you are having a migraine, and with just a swipe of an icon, your ‘treatment’ to reduce symptoms will be delivered by the device. Nerivio delivers a 45-minute treatment, every other day if required, and stimulates nerves in the upper arm through remote REN.
Smartphone addictions affecting our youngsters
Even before the ‘pandemic’, most youngsters appeared glued to their mobile phones. Far from enabling mobility, the device appears to immobilise the majority of them, who appear more interested in communicating with other individuals online than engaging and communicating with others face-to-face.
In 2019, the BBC reported youngsters feeling panicky if they were denied access to their mobile phones. Since the ‘pandemic’, more and more youngsters were forced, through no fault of their own, into relying on their phones even more during lockdown. In Spain, a mum and teacher, Francina Solé, is campaigning to prevent children from being allowed to own smartphones until they are 16 years old.
Ofcom data were published in a report in 2022 entitled Children and Parents. The report shows that 44% of children had phones by the age of nine, which then rose to 91% by the time the children were eleven years old. In the village of Greystones in County Wicklow, Ireland, parents are campaigning for a smartphone ban for younger children. With an increasing number of youngsters suffering with mental illness, and with many describing feelings of loneliness, the issue of smartphone addiction in our youngsters is becoming increasingly worrying. As doctors and ‘wellbeing’ experts direct our youngsters to ‘mental health tech’ and ‘wellbeing’ apps on their phones, isn’t that just exacerbating and worsening an already serious problem?
Stories in Brief
Iceland declares state of emergency over volcanic eruption threat
As of the time of writing, this is an ongoing potential disaster. A swarm of seismic activity is rocking Iceland and a state of emergency has been declared. Powerful earthquakes affecting the Reykjanes peninsula in the south-west of the country have threatened the village of Grindavík, and the people living there have been advised to leave as the threat escalates with warnings of an imminent eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano. Thoughts and prayers go out to all affected.
Xenobots
Xenobots are not new news, but not many people I speak to have heard of them, so I just wanted to remind our audience of their existence. Xenobots are robots that can self-replicate. Put simply, they are living robots made out of frog embryos. Can you see where this is heading? It appears that those in Frankenstein’s laboratory are not only trying to modify humans into robots, they are also modifying animals and reptiles into robots.
Does anyone remember the television series in the 1980’s, ‘V’? Far from reptilian ‘visitors’ from invading earth, perhaps we are creating them on earth? Due to their ability to self-replicate, who is going to control their replication rate, and how long before there are more of them than us? Will there be ‘xenobot birth control’?
Purple butterflies and grieving families
Have you heard of the ‘purple butterfly initiative’ or the Skye High Foundation? A purple butterfly cot card is placed on a cot or incubator in memory of a lost sibling in a multiple birth. It was founded by Millie Smith and Lewis Cann, who sadly lost one of their twins soon after birth and were distressed when their loss appeared to go forgotten. The purple butterfly is a reminder to others of the distressing journey the family have been on and the grief they are suffering.
There is much to be learned from research on twins. Our regular audience may remember that UK Column has featured Professor Tim Spector, the founder of Twins UK, which has the richest collection of twin data in the world.
Whatever the original intentions of the founders, I am not comfortable in highlighting surviving sibling or siblings, or in any way bringing them to the attention of professionals who may want more from them, than just their name, in the name of research.
Fast-tracking drug clinical trials announced for UK
Dame June Raine, CEO of the MHRA, has been rather busy. It appears she and the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, have been cosying up together to cook up plans with which to ‘streamline the research process’ in order to speed up drug clinical trials. You didn’t think it was in ‘our best interests’, did you? The UK population is, once again, seemingly being used as lab rats, courtesy of the NHS, in order to enable the UK to become a global superpower in Life Sciences—the brainchild of Sir John Bell, the UK’s Life Science ‘champion’.
There will be a new fast track process aimed to:
Dramatically reduce the time required for life saving drug trials to commence.
What does ‘shrinking’ approval times for trials mean? And who deems what is defined as ‘low risk’?
During the September MHRA Board meeting, Dr Mark Bailey, Head of National Institute Biological Standards, proudly announced that the backlog of over 2,000 clinical trial applications had now been cleared. This raises the question of why any further acceleration was required, and what impact that will have on patient safety. Regular readers may be familiar with the 100 Day Mission, written by Melinda Gates and Sir Patrick Vallance, where experimental drugs will be designed, created and approved within a hundred days of an emergency being declared.
Record demand for Accident and Emergency care
Why? That is my first question. We are still in autumn and the winter flu season hasn’t even arrived, yet British hospitals’ A&E departments are already overwhelmed and ambulance services are busier than ever. October was the busiest month of the year according to new data, with over 547,586 emergency admissions, the highest number since January 2020. Has anyone thought to investigate how many of those admissions were related to a Covid–19 vaccination or booster? I thought not.
The UKHSA is getting in a flap
It appears the UK Health and Security Agency has its feathers ruffled as it stockpiles flu vaccines in anticipation of avian flu. As there is a no human ‘bird flu’ jab, a decision has been made to stock up on generic flu jabs ‘just in case’. Despite there being no evidence that H1N1 can transmit between birds and humans, the UKHSA will proceed with carrying out ‘procurement exercises’ in order to get the nearest match. Will you be volunteering your arm for the next round of fear-mongering?
Sudden deaths and incapacitations amongst pilots
Thanks to Colin, a kind viewer who e-mailed me this worrying report from The White Rose. Their report includes incidents where pilots have collapsed at the controls of an aircraft, boarding gates or in hotel rooms on layovers. Some of the events that have taken place in the air have required emergency landings and diversions. Some have required the pilot to be removed from the controls and given emergency treatment in the cabin. However, the very mention of vaccination as a potential cause appears to be met with resistance.
MHRA’s conflicts of interest
The door of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) revolves so quickly, I can hardly keep up with it. As someone who has attended most of the MHRA online board meetings, I never fail to be surprised at the blatant conflicts of interest of MHRA board members with both the biotech industry and pharmaceutical industry.
We have reported on it often. Hedley Rees, world expert in pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution, and also a friend of UK Column, has recently completed a deep dive on the MHRA’s revolving door on his Substack blog. It makes for extremely concerning reading. Where do the MHRA’s board members’ loyalties lie: with the patients or the pharmaceutical companies? After all, the pharmaceutical companies need us to be sick in order for them to thrive; there’s no money to be made from healthy people. Without sick people, the pharmaceutical companies and the MHRA would have no need to exist.
The Telegraph and AstraZeneca vaccine injuries
A headline of the Telegraph on 9 November 2023 reads:
AZ to be sued over defective vaccine
A landmark legal action will suggest claims over the vaccines efficacy were ‘vastly overstated’. Jamie Scott, a father of two who is no longer able to work, is taking the case after suffering a ‘significant permanent brain injury’ after receiving the jab in 2021. A second claim is being made by a widower and two young children after their mother and wife received the AZ jab. The article continues within the main body of the paper, and goes on in depth to criticise the MHRA. It also includes a quote from Sir John Bell, the then chief advisor for the Government on Life Sciences and an advisor to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, as saying:
It is an asteroid like risk from the AstraZeneca vaccine. There is a risk of getting hit by an asteroid but it isn’t very big.
Sir John must be getting giddy in the constant revolving door of ever-growing conflicts of interests. Perhaps he would like to try telling his asteroid analogy to the thousands of vaccine injured individuals?
Reports on social media are emerging to suggest that the Telegraph received a threatening phone call from a senior member of staff at the MHRA, telling them that they would be banned from press briefings and press notices if they did not soften the news. Why? I have taken the liberty of e-mailing Dame June Raine, CEO of the MHRA, with a Freedom of Information request to ask whether this is true, and if so, who made that call and why. Watch this space.
Covid strains that could ruin Christmas
Over the last four years, I have noticed the ‘scientists’ telling us that what happens in the southern hemisphere will eventually find its way to the northern hemisphere. With all eyes on Australia, it appears that Christmas travel plans may be scuppered due to a rise in cases of Covid. An eighth ‘wave’ of Covid fear-mongering could put Christmas on hold. Australia is not alone: apparently, other countries affected by an uptick in cases are the UK, South Africa, Thailand, Japan, Switzerland and South Korea.
Ukraine set to legalise cannabis
Ukraine’s parliament is about to pass a bill to legalise medical cannabis. According to Ukrainian Health Ministry and World Health Organisation estimates, there are thought to be up to seven million people in the country who are traumatised, injured and in pain who may benefit from cannabis medication, including soldiers. The bill will prohibit the use of recreational cannabis.
Marijuana increases risk of heart failure and stroke
From one story to another: same topic, different message. So who is putting out misinformation? Ukraine or the National Institutes of Health of the USA?
It would appear that in the USA, as the number of older adults using marijuana has doubled to over 2 million individuals, the risks have risen too. One study reports that those who use marijuana daily are at 34% higher risk of heart failure and are 20% more likely to suffer a major heart attack or stroke. Should doctors ask older people whether they use cannabis recreationally before they offer them treatment? If they answer yes, are they refused treatment? This appears to be the start of ‘conditional’ healthcare based upon your lifestyle choice.
Storm Debi
Storm Debi has officially been named and is heading for the Republic of Ireland and parts of the UK. With strong winds and heavy rain expected, warnings have been issued. According to the Met Office, it will develop quickly. South West Water, I am watching.
And finally
Let’s finish with some good news.
For all of you who have stuck to your guns and refused to use self-service checkouts, it appears your protests have been noted. The north-west of England supermarket chain, Booths, described as ‘the northern Waitrose’, has decided to axe self-service checkouts in 26 of its 28 branches. Booths says that customers received a better customer service with colleagues serving them. It just goes to show nothing can replace the human touch. Bravo, Booths. A message to Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Aldi, Lidl et al.: let’s see you following their example, please.
Have you got a plan? Is your car fuel tank topped up? Do you have extra supplies of water, food and any medicines you may need? Do you have some cash stashed away in case the power goes down and we don’t have the ability to pay by card? It’s always good to be prepared. Even though we are living in difficult times, try to remember to give yourself a break from the headlines and grab some happy times with family and friends.
Until next week,
God bless,
Debi.
Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man. Luke 21:36 KJV
