Ivan Aivazovsky Moonlight Reflecting On Water c1850
Sad little man
NHS infectious diseases consultant
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484509777631887367
Croatia Macron
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484426702344359937
No, really, people like Malone and Rogan are actually anti-vaccine, they just claim they’re against mandates: “They’re using terms that they know are not going to get censored.”
What a stupid hit piece. Is that all you got?
• Organized On Facebook, A Who’s Who Of Anti-Vaccine Activists Head To DC (NBC)
Thousands of protesters are expected to descend on Washington this weekend for a rally against Covid-19 vaccine mandates, a sign that the anti-vaccination movement that gained traction on social media during the pandemic is spilling even further into politics and real life. The rally has been largely organized on Facebook and some extremist internet forums, and organizers have raised at least $200,000 on a crowdfunding site. Some nearby hotels in Virginia are sold out ahead of the event, according to the event’s organizers, who are arranging last-minute travel plans for latecomers. The “Defeat the Mandates DC” Facebook group, in which much of the organizing has taken place, now has more than 11,000 members, gaining almost 3,000 in just the last week.
Organizers of the rally, Defeat The Mandates: An American Homecoming, say they are expecting tens of thousands of attendees who will begin their protest at the Washington Monument at 10:30 a.m. ET Sunday. The event adds momentum to activists who continue to find ways to spread false and misleading claims about the Covid vaccines, now often focusing on mandates as an entry point. Among the scheduled speakers is Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist who has recently emerged as a new leader of the anti-vaccination movement after appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in December. Malone, who is president of the Pandemic Health Alliance, the organization soliciting donations for the rally, has pushed anti-Covid vaccine talking points, including tweeting a retracted study falsely claiming Covid vaccines caused a substantial number of deaths. He has instead repeatedly advocated for the use of ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that the Food and Drug Administration does not consider an effective treatment against Covid.
On Rogan’s podcast, which is estimated to reach tens of millions of people and was the top podcast on Spotify in 2021, Malone insisted that Sunday’s event is an anti-mandate rally, and not an anti-vaccine rally. Rogan said he will not be attending the rally. Anti-vaccine groups on Telegram have also pushed local “Defeat the Mandates” rallies planned for Sunday in several cities, including Denver and Sacramento, California. Some of the events have been amplified on Telegram by members of extremist groups like the Proud Boys, with one account adding that the event in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, would feature a “mask burning.” Kolina Koltai, a postdoctoral fellow who researches the anti-vaccine movement at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, said the D.C. event was bringing together some of the most high-profile anti-vaccine activists. “It’s a who’s who of grifters and people who made a profit off the pandemic,” she said.
[..] The permit for the rally was filed by the Children’s Health Defense Fund. Organizers expect 20,000 people, according to the permit, which also requires attendees to wear masks in crowded outdoor areas. Koltai said that while most, if not all, of the speakers at Sunday’s rally oppose vaccines, referring to the rally as being against mandates is a way to drum up wider support and also evade bans from Facebook and Twitter, which frequently take down anti-vaccine misinformation. “As policies have changed on Facebook, we’ve seen anti-vaccine groups rebrand to ‘pro-medical freedom’ or ‘pro-choice,’” she said. “They’re using terms that they know are not going to get censored.”
We’ve seen from umpteen sources that the vaccines don’t work vs Omicron, but Walensky now says “if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date”. That should confuse a few people…
• CDC Plans To ‘Pivot The Language’ On Vaccination, Walensky Says (Fox)
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a Friday briefing that the agency is working to “pivot” its language regarding what it means to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Responding to a question about why the CDC is not changing the definition of the phrase to include a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, the health leader told reporters that it is working to “pivot the language to make sure that everybody is as up to date with their COVID-19 vaccines as they personally could be, should be, based on when they got their last vaccine.” “So, importantly, right now, we’re pivoting our language. We really want to make sure people are up to date.
That means if you recently got your second dose, you’re not eligible for a booster, you’re up to date. If you are eligible for a booster and you haven’t gotten it, you’re not up to date and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date,” she added. Previously, Walensky and others had stated that the definition of being fully vaccinated would not change from those who have received their primary series of their COVID-19 vaccine. “So, individuals are considered fully vaccinated against COVID-19 if they’ve received their primary series. That definition is not changing,” she said during a Jan. 5 White House COVID-19 Response Team briefing. “But consistent with how public health has historically viewed or even talked about how we recommend vaccines, we are now recommending that individuals stay up to date with additional doses that they are eligible for.”
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN on Friday that the CDC had not updated the language because their recommendations are about “how well you are protected rather than a definition.”
Completely ignoring VAERS. Which should be the first thing they check every morning. Walensky turns it all upside down. While we know a lot (most?) of what is registered as Covid deaths are not really, she now claims vaccinated people dying in a car crash should not be in VAERS. Sly.
• Fauci, Walensky Dodge When Asked About Number Of Vaccine Deaths (WND)
How many people have died as a result of COVID-19 vaccines? Nobody can say for sure – because correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation – but it’s clearly a question in the public interest. A “national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines,” called the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, or VAERS, was established for that important purpose. It’s co-managed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. So, when CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and top White House coronavirus adviser and National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate committee hearing Tuesday on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, a senator posed the question.
But amid the most ambitious vaccination effort in the history of the world, Walensky and Fauci didn’t have an answer. They curiously both began with emphasizing that people can’t rely on VAERS for any indication, because, they said, people who get hit by a car shortly after being vaccinated get recorded as vaccine deaths. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala, noted that the number of COVID-19 vaccine deaths is “in the thousands.” As of Dec. 31, VAERS recorded 21,382 vaccine-related deaths and 113,303 hospitalizations among a total of 1,016,999 adverse event reports. “Is this true?” the senator asked Walensky. “Are we having that many people die after taking one of these vaccines.”
She responded by saying that VAERS is a “mandatory system of any adverse event that happens after being vaccinated.” “So, if you get hit by a car, tragically, after getting vaccinated, that gets reported in the vaccine adverse reporting VAERS system,” Walensky said. “So the vaccines are incredibly safe,” she continued. “They protect us against omicron, they protect us against delta, they protect us against COVID. They don’t protect us against every other form of mortality out there.” Tuberville asked again. “Do we keep numbers of people that die … following taking this vaccine? Do we have any idea?” “Absolutely, yes,” Walensky said. “I couldn’t give you the absolute number off the top of my head, but I can absolutely get back in touch with you with those data.”
Tuberville turned to Biden’s top health adviser. “Do you know, Dr. Fauci? Do you have any clue on that?” “I don’t have a number, but I think part of the confusion is that when you get vaccinated and get hit by a car … that’s the thing that get’s confusing, that everything that happens after the vaccination — even if you die of something completely obviously unrelated, it’s considered a death,” he said. Walensky added, “And every one of those is adjudicated.” Many physicians and scientists believe the true VAERS figures are much higher. Physicians who sued the FDA for documents related to clinical trials for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine estimate the true numbers are five times higher. A recent study led by a researcher at Columbia University estimated the actual figures are higher by a factor of 20. If the underreporting factor is correct, it would mean that there are nearly 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services points out that a VAERS report is not documentation that a link has been established between a vaccine and an adverse event. However, HHS also notes that VAERS is a “passive” system of reporting, and it “receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events.” Many health care workers have disclosed they are instructed by their superiors not to report to VAERS any harm caused by COVID vaccines.
“These are the real bioweapons, not a virus, which, by their own terms, poses a negligible threat to most people.”
• Hiding the Bodies (Diana West)
The lethality of the covid “vaccine” is the last thing media and political and money elites want us “useless eaters” to understand. The mantra they have pressed on us is “safe and effective,” which I think of as the new “Sieg Heil.” We’re supposed to repeat after them, while sucking on the same old puff-blah, “Fauci, Walensky testify while omicron prompts many possible changes” (Associated Press); or the same old melodrama, “Criticized by Senators, U.S. Health Officials Defend Omicron Response” (NYT); or, worst of all, the “battle” of Fauci vs. Paul, those fake gladiators in the arena fighting over nothing. (I’ll get back to that.)
Among others, CNBC pushed the latter (“Fauci says Sen. Rand Paul’s false accusations ‘kindles the crazies’ and have incited death threats”), as did Fox, only the other way around (“Rand Paul rips Fauci following latest hearing fireworks: He doesn’t want debate because he ‘is science’). Whatever Fauci and Rand Paul lob at each other in these recurring “showdowns,” their dispute over virus research in Wuhan has nothing, zip, nada, to do with the agony of our nation. We are not dying over the origins of a virus which may not exist, or even over the virus itself (plus “variants”) with its 99+ percent survival rate, and whose average age of death approximates the average age of death. We are dying from the tyrannical “cure”: each and every act of oppression imposed on us by our very own governments and institutions, all in the name of a fake plague called “covid.”
From “flattening the curve (15 days), to “lockdowns” forever, to “social distancing” and other totalitarian measures including incessant “testing” (with a fake test), we find ourselves not on the road to something they mockingly call “public health,” but rather to a state of perpetual fear, vaxx apartheid, “green passes,” concentration camps (happening), digital currency (to come), a vaxx-caused die-off and overall sickening of the world’s peoples, and, I am increasingly persuaded, the goal of ending the human species itself in gene-engineered and nano-wired “transhumanism.”
There is a simple switch to shut down the dystopian juggernaut. If we were to stop “testing” healthy people by the million (or if healthy people were to refuse to be tested by the million) the Xi to Gates Foundation to WEF to WHO to CDC to Johns Hopkins “dashboards” would stop generating the false-positive-“cases” that drive the closures, the stoppages, the firings, the breakdowns, the hysteria, rage and more testing. Without the fake statistical drivers that fuel this “pandemic,” this “pandemic” stops. So, theoretically, does demand for, or submission to the covid shot of Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, Astra Zeneca, Comiraty, all of them. These are the real bioweapons, not a virus, which, by their own terms, poses a negligible threat to most people.
Mathew Crawford digs deeper. I can’t really cover this in a few words. Click the link and go to his site.
• The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 1 (Crawford)
As omicron took over the caseload, the case fatality rate (CFR), which is the proportion of COVID-19 cases that are fatal (cases, not infections), took a nosedive. Per case, COVID-19 is almost 90% less deadly than prior to the omicronification of the pandemic. In fact, we may pass 90% by the time I’m done typing, which has already confused my sense of changing tense in this paragraph… We should still keep an eye out for overall health impact, including the frequency and severity of long haul symptoms. But the extremely good news is that the COVID-19 case count—not that it was ever measured correctly—has officially decoupled from the hospitalization and death counts. That’s okay—sometimes, during changes in functional outcomes, we care more about precision in measurement than accuracy.
And by “officially” I don’t mean that the WHO said so (though they might have…I haven’t bothered to check because why would I?), but rather “look at the charts!” In fact, there are almost no deaths at all associated with the omicron variant! Of course, there will be some. There is no such thing as a respiratory infection that doesn’t kill some of the frail elderly. But unless there is some facet of the omicron outbreak that we don’t yet understand, this is all extremely good news. In fact, it’s such good news that we should probably declare the pandemic over with and stop talking about vaccine mandates and passports altogether.
See above.
• The Omicron Hypothesis, Part 2 (Crawford)
A quick summary of primary open hypotheses explored:
Hypothesis 1: Omicron has been circulating widely for at least several months.
Hypothesis 2: Omicron was genetically engineered—most likely by somebody in the same working group who engineered an mRNA vaccine to stop SARS-CoV-2.
Now, before we really get started again, some places (including those I mentioned in Part 1) where there is now a pandemic of the vaccinated.
United Kingdom: Vaccinated twice as likely to have omicron than unvaccinated
Leaked Dept. of Health memo warns efficacy falls to zero against omicron.
The Imperial College of London finds an increasing affinity among the vaccinated for omicron relative to delta that increases with the number of doses taken.New South Wales, Australia
Denmark data shows negative vaccine efficacy
Oh, Canada!
Ontario: 95% of omicron cases in the vaccinated
Joel Smalley caught Alberta cooking the books to keep the vaccines from looking bad against omicron.Dec 13, 2021: The CDC says that 79% of early identified omicron infections are in vaccinated individuals.
The vaccine manufacturers worry that their products do not protect against omicron
This article will disappear again sometime today.
• Will These People Be Charged With Genocide? (Mercola)
According to The Desert Review, a slew of high-power figures in the COVID-19 pandemic and the push to mandate experimental COVID jabs have been accused of several crimes, including crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression in the U.K.: “In a stunning 46-page legal filing2 to the International Criminal Court on December 6 [2021], an intrepid attorney and seven applicants accused Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Melinda Gates, William Gates III, and twelve others of numerous violations of the Nuremberg Code. These included various crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Rome Statutes, Articles 6, 7, 8, 15, 21, and 53.”
The Dirty 16 In all, the 16 defendants named in the legal filing are:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID
Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance
Bill Gates
Melinda Gates
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca
Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson
Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO
Boris Johnson, U.K. prime minister
Christopher Whitty, U.K. chief medical adviser
Matthew Hancock, former U.K. secretary of state for Health and Social Care
Medicines and Healthcare, current U.K. secretary of state for Health and Social Care
June Raine, U.K. chief executive of Medicines and Healthcare products
Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation
Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic ForumThe victims, on behalf of whom the complaint was filed, are “the peoples of the United Kingdom.” One of the seven applicants is Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former vice president and chief scientist of allergy and respiratory research at Pfizer. At the end of 2020, he expressed deep concerns about the COVID jabs becoming mandatory, as he could find no medical rationale for their use. In 2021, as we all know, mandates were rolled out around the world. In April 2021, Yeadon went public with concerns that the shots were part of a depopulation agenda. “I believe [COVID-19 booster shots] are going to be used to damage your health and possibly kill you. I can see no sensible interpretation other than a serious attempt at mass depopulation,” he said in a “Planet Lockdown” interview published in late April 2021.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal located in The Hague, Netherlands. Its activities are governed by an international treaty called the Rome Statute, which has been ratified by more than 120 countries, including the U.S. The ICC is a permanent, independent court that investigates crimes that concern the international community, such as claims of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. In theory, member states are supposed to cooperate with the court, but that doesn’t always happen.
Doctors trying to kill a patient. Why?
• Wife Stands Off With Hospital to Keep Her Husband Alive, and Wins (ET)
Sentiments expressed in random phone calls for Anne Quiner as her husband Scott lay in a hospital bed breathing through a ventilator ranged from “I hope your husband dies a vegetable” followed by a litter of profanity, to “he should have taken the vaccine; I hope he dies,” before hanging up. While not the traditional Hallmark expressions for one to get well soon, Quiner said it was a feeling shared among some of the doctors at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, where Scott had been hospitalized for COVID-19 complications in November. In one recorded phone call with Dr. Linda Soucie in which Quiner was fighting to keep Scott on the ventilator, Soucie told Quiner, “Unfortunately, if we could turn back time and he had gotten the vaccine, then he wouldn’t be here,” just after Soucie had told Quiner,
“After three years, I think we’ve gotten pretty good at determining who’s going to make it and who’s not, and unfortunately Scott’s in that range of the group that is not going to make it.” In a recorded conference call, doctors told Quiner that they would be taking Scott off the ventilator on Jan. 13 because he would not recover due to what they said were his “destroyed lungs from COVID pneumonia,” and that their attempts at decreasing sedation only caused him pain. Quiner told The Epoch Times that her petitions for alternative treatments, as well as to keep Scott on the ventilator, had been met with contempt. With doctors determined to take Scott off the ventilator, Quiner sought legal counsel. Marjorie Holsten, Quiner’s attorney, told The Epoch Times that she filed a motion for a temporary restraining order that prevented the hospital from taking Scott off the ventilator.
Mercy Hospital then hired its own law firm that objected to the temporary restraining order on the basis that Holsten and Quiner’s position isn’t “supported by medical science.” Because of this, the hospital requested that the court issue an order authorizing the hospital to take Scott off the ventilator. The judge sided with Holsten, issuing the order based on the standard that irreparable harm would result if not issued, which Holsten said was easy to establish because if Scott had been taken off, he would have died. On Jan. 15, Scott was transferred out of Mercy Hospital and taken to an undisclosed hospital in Texas, where Holsten said the doctors have reported Scott to be malnourished, having lost 30 pounds underweight, and dehydrated. Both Holsten and Quiner said doctors in Texas were “horrified” by Scott’s condition when he arrived.
“One doctor said he didn’t know how Scott made it out of that hospital alive,” Quiner said. “He looked at his chart and said, ‘I can’t believe the heavy, sedating drugs they put him on.’” The hospital was following a rigid late-treatment COVID protocol that has “very likely killed many people,” Holsten said.
She is insane. Just not certified yet. Cancelled her own wedding too.
• Jacinda Ardern Will Force Household Covid Contacts To Isolate For 24 Days (DM)
New Zealand will make household contacts of Covid cases isolate for 24 days under harsh new rules brought in to combat an impending Omicron outbreak. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has brought in the strict measures as the country battles to stay Covid Zero despite the threat of the highly contagious mutant strain. But critics say the lengthy quarantine period is ‘unworkable’ and will lead people to avoid getting tested. Anyone infected with Covid is now required to isolate for 14 days, up from 10 days under the new interim rules. Household contacts must then stay in quarantine for a further 10 days, stretching the time alone out to three and a half weeks.
The extension to isolation comes as New Zealand recorded 84 new Covid cases on Saturday, with 43 in the community and another 41 caught at the border. It includes an Auckland airport worker who tested positive for the omicron strain, sparking fears case numbers could soar up to 1500 a day or more if the mutant strain spreads across the nation. The NZ Ministry of Health said the changes were made after new scientific data published in Japan revealed the highly infectious strain has a longer incubation period than previous variants with sufferers also shedding the virus for longer. But Ardern’s critics warn the extreme policy is ‘unworkable’ and could lead to more Covid cases with greater number refusing to be tested in order to avoid the lengthy quarantine period.
‘The effect is that if you test positive, members of your household may have to isolate for 24 days,’ Act political party leader David Seymour told NZ’s Stuff. ‘People who cannot afford that will have a strong incentive not to get tested, defeating the purpose of the policy. ‘If the advice is taken seriously, it will cripple the health workforce and supply chains more generally.’
Haka
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484890057232187393
“Certain words that are key did not flow, so that began to raise a red flag.”
• Mask Mandates Causing Over 350% Surge In Childhood Speech Delays (NP)
Mask mandates implemented by the government amidst the COVID-19 appear to be causing speech delays in young children. The regulations, which are still in effect in Democrat-led cities including Washington D.C. and New York City, have had adverse effects on the development of speaking abilities in children and babies. “This has been a very challenging year,” emphasized Jaclyn Theek, a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach, Florida. The clinic experienced a 364 percent increase in patients who were babies and toddlers amidst the pandemic. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, only 5 percent of the clinic’s patients were in the age group, while today it stands at 20 percent.
“There’s no research out there yet saying that this could be causing speech and language delays. But, most definitely, I’m sure it’s a factor,” Theek said. “It’s very important that kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth.” Similarly, many parents interviewed by WPBF 25 News felt the irregular speech patterns were “COVID-delayed.” A parent interviewed by the outlet attributed the delays to “social isolation and everyone wearing masks”: Gregg Santos brings his son, Diego, to speech therapy twice a week. “He would just ramble, baby ramble,” Santos said. “Certain words that are key did not flow, so that began to raise a red flag.” Santos said his son was born perfectly healthy at the start of a pandemic.
“We’d go out and walk around the neighborhood, and there would be no one there…everyone just stayed in,” Santos said. Santos said he believes social isolation and everyone wearing masks lead to Diego’s speech delays. “It bothers me,” Santos said. “It bothers me a lot.” “It definitely makes a difference when the world you are growing up in, you can’t interact with people and their face. That’s super important to babies,” cautioned another parent.
Jonathan Cook on being disappeared.
• Is It Already Too Late To Say Goodbye? (Cook)
My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory. No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice. Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers. But this isn’t really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn’t just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.
Journalists like me are part of an experiment – in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us. The corporate media needs corporate advertising to survive – or the owners’ deep pockets. They don’t need you, except as a captive audience. You’re both their prisoner and their product. But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles’ heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.
If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning us, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control. And equally, for those like me who are already established and have significant numbers of readers, these tech giants can whittle them away one by one. Ostensibly, I have many tens of thousands of followers, but for several years now I have been reaching fewer and fewer of you. I am starved of connection. The danger, already only too obvious, is that my readership, and funding model, will slowly start to shrivel and die. Joe Rogan, Russell Brand and a handful of titans of the new media age are so big they can probably weather it out. But the rest of us will not be so lucky.
Acting out Orwell’s warnings.
• University Slaps A Trigger Warning On George Orwell’s 1984 (DM)
As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship. Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’. The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book. Published in 1949, Orwell’s dystopian story – set in a totalitarian state which persecutes individual thinking – gave the world phrases such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Newspeak’ and ‘thought police’.
[It] makes powerful points about what can happen to a society that doesn’t cherish academic freedoms or its own history. Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’. In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘There’s a certain irony that students are now being issued trigger warnings before reading Nineteen Eighty-Four. Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it. ‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’
@dimitrigalanis: “The current propaganda meme in Washington is that #Russia is going to “invade #Ukraine” and absorb it. It will not: Ukraine is a decaying, impoverished, de-industrialised, divided, corrupt and decaying mess; Moscow does not want to take responsibility for the package.”
• The Hidden Origin Of The Escalating Ukraine-Russia Conflict (CD)
Western and Russian leaders and their media express deeply conflicting views concerning the escalating conflict in Ukraine and its origins. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials have repeatedly blasted the Kremlin for instigating the crisis along Ukraine’s border in an attempt to carve out a sphere of influence. They argue that after the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych was ousted by peaceful protesters in 2014—dozens of whom were massacred by government snipers—Russia annexed Crimea and launched a hybrid war with Ukraine in the Donbas with the help of Russian proxies. Moreover, Western officials maintain that Ukraine is a sovereign state which has a right to join NATO. In contrast, Russian leaders insist that the Ukrainian government was overthrown in a fascist putsch, which led to Crimea voluntary joining Russia and to a civil war without Russian military involvement in the Donbas. They say that Ukraine has been under de facto NATO rule since 2014 and regard unrecognized separatist republics in the Donbas as independent.
Various evidence presented in studies I have authored, which has been echoed by many other Western scholars who research these issues, show that both of these narratives are inaccurate. Indeed, the question of which side carried out the “snipers’ massacre” is central to understanding one of the “bloodiest and most controversial hours of European conflict since the end of the Cold War,” and the main tipping point in the escalating conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. According to testimonies by over 100 wounded protesters, several dozen prosecution witnesses, and forensic ballistic and medical examinations by government experts, the massacre of the absolute majority of protesters and police at the Maidan (central square) in Kyiv on February 20, 2014 was perpetrated principally by members of the Maidan opposition, specifically its far-right elements. This event precipitated the violent removal of the corrupt and oligarchic but democratically elected government in Ukraine, touching off a conflict which has since killed more than 13,000 people. Western governments were at least aware of, or de facto backed, the overthrow.
The best we have. Gone.
• German Navy Chief Resigns After Saying “Putin Deserves Respect” (ZH)
[..] the “Russia is about to invade Ukraine” plotline just suffered a major blow after the chief of Germany’s navy, vice-admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach , said on Friday that Crimea “will never come back”, and that what Putin “really wants is respect…and it is easy to give him the respect he really demands – and probably deserves.” And sure enough, just one day later, on Saturday evening, he resigned from his post for having the temerity to speak out against conventional wisdom. “I have asked Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht to relieve me from my duties with immediate effect,” Schoenbach said in a statement cited by the Reuters news agency. “The minister has accepted my request,” he added.
Speaking at an event organized by the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses on Friday, the vice-admiral redpilled the shocked audience when he dismissed as “nonsense” the notion that Russia was “interested in having a small and tiny strip of Ukraine soil and integrating it into their country.” “Does Russia really want a small and tiny strip of Ukraine soil to integrate into their country? No, this is nonsense. Putin is probably putting pressure because can do it and he splits EU opinion.” Schönbach went on to claim that what President Putin really wanted was the West to “respect” Russia, adding “giving some respect is low cost, even no cost. If I was asked, it is easy to give him the respect he really demands and probably also deserves.” Addressing the issue of Crimea, the German Navy commander opined that the “peninsula is gone” and “will never come back — this is a fact.”
On Ukraine’s possible admission into NATO, Schönbach said, “Ukraine of course cannot meet the requirements because it’s occupied in the Donbas region by the Russian Army or by what they call as militias.” In this context, he also said the Crimea peninsula, which was annexed by Russia, is “gone” and is “not coming back”. Then in an even greater transgression of conventional pro-China etiquette, the German had the temerity to point out the elephant in the room when he slammed China which is “not that nice country we probably thought” and added that that “Russia is an old country, Russia is an important country. Even we India, Germany, need Russia. We need Russia against China…” This, he said, is “easy” and “keeps Russia away from China” because China needs resources of Russia and they [Russia] are willing to give them because the sanctions sometimes do go the “wrong way”.
Most corrupt country on the planet?
• Germany ‘Encouraging Putin’ By Refusing To Supply Weapons: Ukraine (Y!)
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Saturday condemned Germany for its refusal to supply weapons to Kyiv, urging Berlin to stop “undermining unity” and “encouraging Vladimir Putin” amid fears of a Russian invasion. In a separate development, Germany’s naval chief Kay-Achim Schoenbach announced his resignation late Saturday, after Ukraine summoned the German ambassador to Ukraine, to protest remarks the vice-admiral had made on the crisis. Kyiv’s foreign ministry stressed “the categorical unacceptability” of Schoenbach’s comments, who had said the idea that Russia wanted to invade Ukraine was “nonsense”, and that Putin probably deserved respect.
With tens of thousands of Russian troops gathered on the Ukrainian border, fears are mounting that a major conflict could break out in Europe. Ukraine’s calls to Western allies to bolster its defence capabilities have seen the United States, Britain and Baltic states agree to send to Kyiv weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Kuleba said on Twitter that Germany’s statements “about the impossibility of supplying defence weapons to Ukraine” did not match “the current security situation”. Ukraine’s minister stressed that “today the unity of the West in relation to Russia is more important than ever. “The German partners must stop undermining unity with such words and actions and encouraging (Russian President) Vladimir Putin to launch a new attack on Ukraine,” Kuleba said.
Bilbao
Énorme manifestation à Bilbao au pays basque espagnol contre le pass sanitaire. #Manifs22janvier pic.twitter.com/PotTxNTRCo
— Anonyme Citoyen (@AnonymeCitoyen) January 22, 2022
Bern
https://twitter.com/i/status/1484882444792827907
London
LONDON CALLING – No vaccine mandates, no vaccine passports.
We hear you world! It’s time to set your people free!#London #COVID19 #VaccineMandate pic.twitter.com/ZMexV1qi1l
— Bernie's Tweets (@BernieSpofforth) January 22, 2022
Stockholm
Large protest against vaccine passports in central Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. pic.twitter.com/9kH5mE1Ueb
— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2019) January 22, 2022
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