Propaganda COVIDiocy: Care To Guess Who ELSE Had Been Reporting Pfizer COVID Vaccine Killing People? The Russians, Of Course

One of the often-repeated refrains from antivaxxers is Pfizer COVID vaccine (Cominarty) had killed thousands, though the same claims were also levied against all the other Western COVID vaccines such as the AstroZeneca vaccine and J&J vaccine as well. 

Care to guess who's the loudest "news outlet" (besides Fox News, and I don't mean Tucker Carlson?) that claimed so? 

The Russian RT News, of course, with clickbait titles such as "Health authorities on alert after nurse DIES follow vaccination with Pfizer's Covid-19 shot in Portugal"

RT news as screencap'ed by FirstDraft News
https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/rt-fringe-undermine-covid-vaccinations/

Of course, nobody cares about the rebuttal from the Portuguese Government stating that there is no link between her death and the vaccine. 

Keep in mind that RT is a Russian propaganda website spreading plenty of fake news along real news. It has amplified fake news such as harm of 5G, including "5G caused COVID". 

The disinformation is so bad that Germany has officially banned RT German only a few days ago. 

So if you are repeating antivax propaganda, consider your sources carefully. You may be helping the Russians spreading fake news. And I mean fake as in "not real", not Trumpian fake news, which is any news he didn't like. 

Today I Learned: The 5G Conspiracy Theory Was Started by Russian Trolls

Looking back at 2020, there was a flood of crazy conspiracy theories linking COVID to 5G, and some of them stated that...

• COVID was not spread from person to person. Instead, 5G radiation caused the body to create the COVID virus
• 5G radiation weakened the body's immune system thus allow COVID to infect
• COVID virus was spread via 5G radiation (?!)

You can blame a bunch of clueless celebrities, such as Keri Hilson (who needs to stick to singing) falsely spreading claims that 5G caused COVID, by making casual observations that China rolled out 5G then BAM! COVID.  She and various celebrities forgot an important lesson in science: correlation is NOT causation 

The debunking is TRIVIAL... Iran, which has no 5G, is also a major cluster of COVID. How do you explain that? Hmmm? 

But did you ever wonder, who STARTED this nonsense anyway? Let's do a little tracing. 

Hilson spread a video by Dr. Cowan who's also against 5G. What nobody checked was Cowan was under probation by California medical board. The video was a talk by Cowan at an anti-vax conference headlined by none other than disgraced ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield. When it was shared by anti-vax RFK jr, it's enough to make the rest of the conspiracy theorists like David Icke jump in with their own copycat take on the disinfo. 

And before you think this is harmless, ALMOST 80 5G towers in UK were attacked in 2020, and several phone carrier employees hospitalized due to attacks in the UK. Canada also had reports of several phone towers damaged. Sad part is none of them were actually 5G towers.  Tennessee believes several state-owned towers were damaged by COVID conspiracy theorists. And the damage may be far more widespread than suspected. 

Cowan is hardly the first to make wild claims. The first doctor to make such a claim was a Dutch doctor by the name of Kris Van Kerckhoven, a general practitioner, in January 2020. His interview was published in a local paper that claimed 5G is dangerous, without proof. He then suggested there may be a link between 5G and COVID, which had just appeared in Wuhan, Again, without any proof. But it was enough to get the conspiracy theorists rolling. 

When there isn't that much known about COVID during February and March of 2020, various conspiracy theorists started flooding the net with "the truth about COVID" and it got past the sanity filters of the search engines, and started to, pardon the pun, gone viral. 

But who was the first to claim 5G causes illnesses? 

Turns out, it was a Russian troll news outfit called "RT News". And it started as early as January 2019, a whole YEAR before COVID really affected the world. 

As tracked by Wired and NYTimes, RT had repeatedly posted videos containing baseless rants about 5G, including statements such as "it might kill you" "health risks" and even claims that children exposed to 5G incurred brain damage, about 10+ times in 2019 alone. Yet there seems to be no particular reason for it other than to delay the global rollout of 5G so Russia can catch up. 

So there you have it: anti-vax idiots trolled by Russians. 

In other words, double idiots. 

Why Is Decent Internet So Hard to Find in San Francisco? Part 1 of ???

I live in one of the densest cities in the US... San Francisco. 49 square miles with 80000+ residents, yet getting a good reliable Internet connection is far more difficult than it should be. 

At this point, I am with AT&T DSL, because it's the standard phone provider, and DSL was counted as an add-on service. I sorta forgot to look at the overall picture, and turns out I was paying $170 a month for 2 phone lines and 1 18 Mbps down / 1.5 Mbps up ADSL line. Including tax. 

Which is ridiculous. That sort of connection won't even get me onto many "work from home" jobs which demands are much better connection. At times, I was getting even LESS than that. My actual usable speed is more like 14 Mbps down / 0.9 Mbps up, as tested by Speedtest. 

Screenshot of my Speedtest results from Nov 2020 to Feb 2021

So I clicked over to AT&T's website, and click on "upgrade my service". Turns out, they only offer ONE level of service to me... the Internet 18 ADSL plan. And I am already on it. And with phone and taxes, it costs me $170 a MONTH. 

My phone's LTE service (through Verizon) was much faster. Averages 80 Mbps down and 10-15 Mbps up. And Verizon is supposedly rolling out "5G Home Internet" in San Francisco. So I went to Verizon's website. Except they aren't. NEITHER 4G/LTE nor 5G Home Internet service is available at my address, and I've had my Verizon account for YEARS. Over a decade, actually. 

So I was thinking... can I use my LTE to supplement my DSL? Turns out, you *can* with Speedify. Connect / tether your phone to your PC, run Speedify, and Speedify will combine BOTH connections into one solid connection for your streaming or uploads or whatever you need. I have one of Verizon's unlimited plans for my cell. Problem solved, right? Wrong, unfortunately. Turns out, unlimited is for phone usage only. Tethering has a 15 GB limit a month, after which it slows down to 0.6 Mbps instead of 15 Mbps.  I blew through the 15GB data cap in TWO DAYS (just for uploading some gameplay videos). So that clearly won't work. I actually paid for a 3-year service (it's only like $3 a month) and I had to cancel. Fortunately, Speedify has a 30-day money-back guarantee. And I HIGHLY recommend the service if you can find a use case for it. 

So back to the search...  I was thinking... if I can't get Home Internet from Verizon, can I get it from one of their competitors? Given AT&T doesn't offer that, it had to be T-Mobile. Turns out, T-Mob has the SAME PROBLEM. No 4G/LTE Home service available at my address in downtown San Francisco, which is definitely in their service zone... for mobile, but not home internet. 

So what's a man who wants the internet to do? Check ALL competitors, of course. This brings me to... Comcast. Let's just say, I've heard horror stories about Comcast, lock you in with modem "rental" that you can easily buy one off eBay or whatever, have to call them every year to demand the promotional rate... But cable Internet does offer a lot better throughput without getting on fiber, which is very limited availability. 

So I get online and chat with Comcast sales rep. He said he will send an engineer out to do a "site survey" to verify availability and get back to me. 48 hours later, I got a call... Turns out, my block is NOT on Comcast's network, but good news... They will wire up my block in the next 60 to 90 days. Guess enough people on my block demanded it to put it on the schedule. But that doesn't help me at all then, does it? And the guy has the gall to ask me if I want to continue the install. I told him no (probably in an exasperated tone.)

I look around for other vendors, but there really aren't many other choices. 

I called Sonic Internet and they will set me up with dual-line bonded DSL which supposedly will do 60 Mbps down and 10-15 Mbps up. Not quite LTE speed but it's uncapped and unlimited. AND it comes with a phone line... for $130 a month (or less). So basically, it's 4x the bandwidth (or more) than AT&T's service, for $30-40 a month LESS than what I pay AT&T now. 

Sign me up, please. 

Then I cancel AT&T. 

I may revisit the situation in 12 months.  I can go without the phone line (nobody calls on the landline, it's not even connected) so Verizon 5G Home Internet will end up costing less and give me MORE bandwidth... if it ever rolls out.