China has hitherto done its utmost to remain completely away from the NATO-Russian proxy war that’s being waged between them in Ukraine, yet a fast-moving spree of developments over the past few days compellingly suggests that it’s recalibrating its approach to the New Cold War’s top conflict. The present analysis will begin by highlighting those aforesaid events before explaining the larger context in which they’re occurring, which should show the reader that something big is going on behind the scenes.
Diplomatic Developments In This Direction
Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Wang Yi met with Russian PresidentPutin in the Kremlin last week after visiting several countries and participating in the Munich Security Conference. Their talks were significant since the Russian leader rarely meets with anyone who isn’t his counterpart, and he wouldn’t have made an exception to his informal rule simply to discuss the details of President Xi’s upcoming springtime visit.
Less than 24 hours afterwards on Saturday, it was announced that Belarusian President Lukashenko will be traveling to China from 28 February-2 March, following which French President Macron said that he plans to go there too sometime in early April. This fast-moving spree of developments proves that China is serious about negotiating at least a ceasefire to the Ukrainian Conflict, to which end President Xi will likely share his views on this with his two aforementioned counterparts during their visits.
Speculation About Chinese Arms Shipments To Russia
At the same time, however, American officials began warning that China is supposedly seriously considering the dispatch of lethal aid to Russia. Secretary of State Blinken was the first to make this claim after meeting with Director Wang in Europe. Biden and CIA chief Burns then said the same on Friday, the one-year anniversary of Russia’s special operation, though the first said he doesn’t anticipate it happening while the second didn’t dismiss that scenario.
It’s difficult to discern the veracity of those accusations, but America is adamant about convincing everyone that this is a real possibility, which is why it’s considering publicly sharing related intelligence according to the WSJ in a report that they published on Thursday. While it’s unclear whether the information that they might release would be purely facts, artificially manufactured falsehoods, or a combination thereof, an intriguing development on Saturday sheds some light into Chinese thinking.
The Scandal Surrounding The G20 Finance Ministers’ Joint Statement
China sided with Russia in rejecting the third and fourth paragraphs of the G20 Finance Ministers’ joint statement after their meeting in Bangaluru. These two parts of that document – which referenced anti-Russian UNGA Resolutions, the difference of opinion over the Ukrainian Conflict within this group, and upholding the principles of the UN Charter – were taken from the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration that they previously agreed to in mid-November.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova said in a statement that she condemned the efforts of the US, EU, and the rest of the G7 in attempting to destabilize the G20’s work by including those two paragraphs in that joint statement, which is why only a summary and outcome document was released. Moscow’s stance on opposing the spirit of the same text that it earlier agreed to just a quarter-year ago suggests that it did the latter because it couldn’t count on anyone else to support its refusal at the time.
The “New Détente” & Its Unexpected Derailment
In order to not appear “isolated” and prompt speculation about the future of its strategic partnership with China, Russia went along with India’s compromise solution that the White House Press Secretary later praised Prime Minister Modi for pioneering. Beijing couldn’t be relied upon back then for jointly resisting that deliberately ambiguous (but well-intended from Delhi’s perspective) wording since President Xi used that event as the opportunity to initiating a “New Détente” with the West.
Readers can learn more about everything that China and the US did in pursuit of exploring a series of mutual compromises aimed at establishing a “new normal” in their ties from then up until the eve of the balloon incident in early February by reviewing the preceding hyperlink embedded above. It’s beyond the scope of the present piece to explain that concept at length but simply enough in this context to reference it so that folks understand why Russia didn’t object to the last G20 document’s wording.
The unexpected derailing of the “New Détente” brought about by the aforementioned balloon incident, which readers can learn more about in detail here and here, appears in hindsight to have decisively shifted China’s “deep state” dynamics in the direction of more confidently challenging the US. Regardless of whoever one believes was responsible for that black swan event, it abruptly worsened bilateral ties and suddenly placed them on the trajectory of seemingly inevitable intense competition.
Stoltenberg’s Statement Of Relevance To China’s Changing Calculations
While work on China’s peace plan far predated the balloon incident, the latter appears to have inspired Beijing to do its utmost in ensuring that this document lays the basis for a tangible process instead of remaining a public relations stunt like it otherwise might have been if the “New Détente” was still viable. Two statements in between that incident and the unveiling of its peace plan from NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg and Zelensky added a sense of urgency to China’s efforts in this respect.
Regarding the first, he belatedly admitted that his bloc is in a so-called “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia, which suggested that the US-led West’s GoldenBillion might seriously consider dispatching even more arms to Kiev at the expense of their own minimum national security needs. They can’t sustain the pace, scale, and scope of their armed support to that proxy army without doing so, but NATO might take this risk in order to avert the scenario of Russia soon dealing a decisive defeat to Kiev.
If NATO dispatches more modern arms to its proxies at the expense of its members’ own minimum national security needs, then it could shift the military-strategic dynamics away from Russia’s favor where they’ve recently been for the past few months. The scenario of Russia’s ultimate defeat and subsequent “Balkanization” like former President Medvedev warned would happen in that case couldn’t be ruled out then, thus spiking the chances of a dramatic escalation (including nuclear) to avert that.
For its part, China wants to avert the scenario of either side becoming desperate enough that they dramatically escalate the conflict in order to stave off the scenario of their crushing defeat, hence why it’s very serious about promoting its peace plan at this precise moment in time. If it’s unsuccessful in doing so, then Beijing might actually dispatch lethal aid to Russia in order to restore the balance of power between it and NATO, which would raise the odds of a stalemate instead.
Zelensky’s Statement Of Relevance To China’s Changing Calculations
This possibility directly leads to what Zelensky said around a week after Stoltenberg’s belated acknowledgement of the true military-strategic dynamics of this proxy war that the Golden Billion had tried to cover up until that point. The Ukrainian leader declared that “if China allies itself with Russia, there will be a world war”, which coincided with Blinken introducing this scenario into the global information ecosystem.
Large parts of Zelensky’s country, both that which his side still controls as well as what it lost to Russia but still claims, have already been destroyed by this conflict. He knows very well that the rest of it would suffer a similar fate in the event that this proxy war rages on, which he likely expects to happen if Russia isn’t decisively defeated by NATO’s potential influx of modern arms that might soon be dispatched out of desperation at the expense of its members’ own minimum national security needs.
From his perspective, the only way that Russia wouldn’t lose in this scenario is if China starts dispatching lethal aid to its strategic partner irrespective of whether it’s equivalent in pace, quality, scale, and/or scope to what NATO could soon give Kiev. Nevertheless, after the unexpected derailing of the Sino-American “New Détente” due to the balloon incident black swan, Zelensky might have assessed this as more likely than ever since Russia’s possible loss could directly lead to China’s maximum “containment”.
His ominous prediction might have been interpreted by the People’s Republic as signaling a desire to seriously explore a peaceful solution for averting this scenario that would likely result in his country’s further destruction, however, which could have emboldened Beijing to double down on its peace plan. Behind-the-scenes diplomacy between them in the run-up to China’s unveiling of its 12-step proposal might have in hindsight been responsible for Zelensky’s interest in it and in meeting with President Xi.
After all, the Ukrainian leader’s reaction was completely unexpected for most observers, which instead predicted that he’d dismiss China’s peace plan outright just like Biden did. Seeing as how Belarus previously hosted last spring’s talks that were sabotaged by the UK at the US’ behest, it makes greater sense why Lukashenko announced a day after Zelensky’s interest in this proposal that he’ll be visiting Beijing next week to discuss the “international situation” according to his country’s official media.
The Possible Convergence Of French/European & Chinese Interests
Macron’s interest in China’s peace plan directly stems from Zelensky’s, without whose potential participation nothing of tangible substance can be accomplished, but also from his country’s national interests too. If the People’s Republic dispatches lethal aid to Russia and thus averts the scenario of its strategic partner’s defeat in the event that NATO first sends a lot of modern arms at the expense of its members’ minimum national security needs as was earlier explained, then the EU could seriously suffer.
A protracted conflict risks further retarding its already very slow economic recovery and could potentially even plunge it into a full-blown recession, which might possibly entail far-reaching socio-political consequences, especially from the existing elite. This strategic assessment also helps explain the WSJ’s recent report about the French-German-British NATO-like security pact that they’re considering extending to Kiev to encourage it to resume peace talks likely to avert that aforesaid scenario.
That said, the timing of his planned trip sometime in early April reveals a lot about how China and the EU view the evolution of the military-strategic dynamics in this conflict. NATO-backed Kiev and Russia are both reportedly planning large-scale offensives, which are each expected to commence sometime in the next in the weeks preceding Macron’s visit to Beijing. By then, all parties will have a clearer idea of whether the military-strategic dynamics have shifted or if the stalemate appears likely to remain.
From there, France can either lead the EU’s efforts to encourage Zelensky to seriously entertain China’s peace plan or eschew doing so, whether unilaterally, due to US pressure, or because Beijing decided to dispatch lethal aid to Russia in the event that the military-strategic dynamics decisively shifted against it. In the best-case scenario that Macron decides to support President Xi’s proposals, then the latter might then soon embark on a trip to Moscow and Kiev to meet with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts.
Bullet Point Review
A lot of insight has thus far been shared in the present analysis, which might understandably be overwhelming for most readers, hence the need to summarize everything to enhance comprehension. What’ll thus follow are two bullet point lists, with the first chronologically ordering the many events that were touched upon in this analysis, while the second will detail the gradual recalibration of China’s approach to the NATO-Russian proxy war. A six-paragraph wrap-up will then conclude the analysis.
———-
* 15-16 November: President Xi initiates his envisaged “New Détente” by meeting with his American and other Western counterparts at the G20 Summit in Bali to discuss repairing their troubled ties.
* 2-4 February: The balloon incident, which actually began in late January, becomes public and abruptly derails the “New Détente” after Blinken indefinitely postpones his planned trip to Beijing in response.
* 13 February: NATO chief Stoltenberg belatedly acknowledges that his bloc is engaged in a so-called “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia.
* 14-22 February: Director Wang travels to Europe and Russia to promote China’s forthcoming 12-point peace plan for ending the Ukrainian Conflict.
* 19 February: Blinken introduces the scenario of China dispatching lethal aid to Russia into the global information ecosystem.
* 20 February: Zelensky ominously builds upon Blinken’s narrative by predicting that China arming Russia could trigger World War III.
* 22 February: Director Wang meets with President Putin at the Kremlin, which represents one of the extremely rare instances where the Russian leader hosted someone who wasn’t his counterpart.
* 23 February: The WSJ keeps Blinken’s narrative alive by reporting that the US might publicly share related intelligence alleging proving that China is seriously considering sending lethal aid to Russia.
* 24 February: China unveils its peace plan; Russia praises it; Zelensky signals interest; the WSJ reports on leading EU states’ NATO-like pact proposal with Kiev; and Biden & Burn speculate on Chinese arms.
* 25 February: Lukashenko announce that he’ll travel to Beijing next week; Macron says that he’ll follow in early April; and China joins Russia in rejecting part of the G20 Finance Ministers’ joint statement.
———-
Now here’s how the abovementioned sequence of events shifted China’s strategic calculus:
* True Neutrality: The latest phase of the New Cold War that began after Russia was provoked into launching its special operation saw China initially take a truly neutral stance towards it.
* Uncertainty: The unexpected derailing of the “New Détente” after the balloon incident prompted uncertainty about Sino-US ties, thus leading China to wait for signals from the US before proceeding.
* Peacemaker: Anti-Chinese hardliners’ rising influence convinced Beijing that the “New Détente” is dead while the NATO chief’s “race of logistics” quip convinced it to seek peace in Ukraine pronto.
* Anti-NATO Ally?: If its peace efforts fail, China might evolve into Russia’s anti-NATO ally by arming the latter to avert its defeat and preempt it from escalating (including via nuclear means) in that event.
———-
Concluding Thoughts
China assesses that NATO might dispatch more modern arms to Kiev at the expense of its members’ minimum national security needs out of desperation to prevent its proxy’s defeat after the conflict’s military-strategic dynamics shifted towards Russia’s favor over the past months. That could decisively flip the aforesaid dynamics in NATO’s favor, thus risking the scenario of Russia’s defeat, its “Balkanization”, China’s further “containment”, and Moscow’s possible escalations to preempt this.
The unexpected derailing of the “New Détente” after the balloon incident, which led to anti-Chinese hardliners exerting more influence over the US’ policy formulations, convinced China that it’ll never succeed in negotiating a series of mutual compromises aimed at establishing a “new normal”. Realizing that NATO’s possibly successful “containment” of Russia will inevitably lead to that bloc and its collection of “Balkanized” proxy states focusing on China in that scenario, Beijing decided to act first.
Director Wang promoted his country’s 12-point peace plan during his latest European trip, including in a rare private meeting with President Putin, while other Chinese diplomats operated behind the scenes to brief Zelensky about it and ensure that he doesn’t publicly dismiss it outright after its unveiling. The Ukrainian leader’s unexpected interest in this proposal directly led to Macron announcing his upcoming trip to Beijing in early spring, which follows Lukashenko’s next week.
The time between these two visits will almost certainly see Russia and NATO-backed Kiev’s reportedly planned large-scale offensives commencing, which will in turn provide greater clarity about the state of military-strategic affairs between them, particularly whether they decisively shifted or not. A continued stalemate or decisive Russian advance could convince Zelensky to seriously consider a ceasefire, after which President Xi might soon thereafter visit Moscow and Kiev to help negotiate this right away.
If the military-strategic dynamics decisively shift in NATO’s favor due to the bloc dispatching more modern arms to Kiev at the expense of its members’ minimum national security needs like Stoltenberg implied might happen, then peace would be ruled out and Russia’s defeat would become possible. In that scenario, China might arm Moscow despite the maximum sanctions this could prompt the West to impose against it in order to avert the worse scenarios of nuclear escalation or Russia’s “Balkanization”.
China truly doesn’t want to become a party to the Russian-NATO proxy war, but it’ll practically have no choice if its strategic partner faces the credible scenario of defeat since the People’s Republic would have to preemptively ensure its national security needs related to averting Russia’s “Balkanization”. It’s impossible to predict how else the Golden Billion might react in that scenario apart from imposing maximum sanctions against China, but it would definitely lead to clearer divisions in the New Cold War.
We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.
Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.
Original title: “Serbia may soon be forced to sanction Russia – Vucic”. The smaller countries that have independent ideas, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, are vassals to their allies.
Vucic’s main message: “The fighting to date will feel like “almost nothing, compared to what’s coming..” And then watch Gonzalo’s tweet. The US has sent Samantha Power to Budapest to trip Orban. A literal power game.
The moment is approaching when Serbia will have no choice but to give in to Western demands to sanction its ally Russia, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has said. In an interview with Prva broadcaster on Friday, Vucic said he expects “a major escalation” in the conflict in Ukraine over the next six months. The fighting to date will feel like “almost nothing, compared to what’s coming,” he warned. This situation “will affect our country as the pressure on Belgrade, in terms of its relations with Russia, will become two or three times tougher – despite already being very strong now,” the president said. Sanctioning Moscow over its military operation in Ukraine and recognizing the independence of the breakaway province of Kosovo have been singled out by Brussels as key conditions for Belgrade’s bid to join the EU.
Vucic, who has been rejecting both demands for months, now says the moment may eventually come when Belgrade would have to join the EU’s curbs on Moscow. “Let us push like this as long as we can, I will know when the moment is right, and I will not hide anything from people. That moment [when Serbia sanctions Russia] has been approaching for a long time, I am afraid that it’s not even months away,” he said. The Serbian president revealed that he used to believe that the West, which is backing the Kiev government with weapons, funds and intelligence, was getting the upper hand in Ukraine. However, “at this moment, it’s no longer entirely clear who is winning in Ukraine,” he added.
Moscow’s chances of succeeding have been boosted by the fact that there is now “unity” among the Russian people regarding the conflict, especially after the announcement by Berlin and some other countries last month that German-made Leopard tanks would be supplied to Kiev, he said. According to Vucic, it’ll be “difficult” for Serbia no matter who prevails in Ukraine. “The West doesn’t want a country allied with Russia in the middle of Europe. On the other hand, Russia doesn’t want to lose everything it has in the Balkans,” he said. That’s why Belgrade remains among the few international players who speak about the need for a diplomatic solution to the crisis, but “no one is allowed to mention peace anymore,” he stated.
REGIME CHANGE COMING IN HUNGARY
She’s setting up the mechanisms to overthrow Viktor Orban—“Pro-democracy Non-Government Organizations” which are actually CIA contractors to recruit agents provocateurs.
Soon there’ll be riots in Budapest. You watch—they always do the same thing. https://t.co/qAWwTAS2dP
“..the notion that Serbia should “break completely with Russia,” and “throw out Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy” is equally absurd. “That can’t be Serbia, we have to take care of the soul of our people..”
Serbia will not jump on the Russia-bashing bandwagon and cancel the country’s culture, President Aleksandar Vucic has told media. He explained that preserving the Russian classics in the public domain is as important as guarding national financial interests. In an interview with Serbia’s Prva news channel broadcast on Friday, Vucic acknowledged that his country largely depends on the West in terms of investment. For this reason, the president noted, those who call on Belgrade to cut these ties “don’t know how the country works.” Vucic went on to argue that the notion that Serbia should “break completely with Russia,” and “throw out [novelist] Dostoyevsky, [composer] Tchaikovsky and [writer] Tolstoy” is equally absurd. “That can’t be Serbia, we have to take care of the soul of our people,” the president clarified.
Last month, during a press conference in the Russian embassy in Belgrade, President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy on international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvydkoy, announced that Belgrade and Moscow were discussing holding a year of cultural exchange in 2024. Several renowned Russian musicians will visit Serbia already this year. On top of that, a meeting of Russian and Serbian academia is also in the pipeline, Shvydkoy revealed.Following the start of Russia’s military operation against Ukraine in late February 2022, a number of European cultural venues have canceled the staging of artworks which have Russian origins and have also barred some Russian performers who have refused to denounce Moscow’s actions.
Certain politicians in the EU have also spoken in favor of such bans. As recently as early January, Lithuanian culture minister Simonas Kairys spoke in favor of a “mental quarantine” on Russian culture, claiming the latter is being used by Moscow as a “weapon.” Earlier, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra in Wales erased music by Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky from a concert program, while Britain’s Royal Opera House called off a tour by the Bolshoi Ballet. Netflix, in turn, put on hold the production of ‘Anna K,’ an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel ‘Anna Karenina’. Commenting on these tendencies, Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn parallels between Western efforts to cancel Russian culture to the Nazi practice of book burning.
“..an inconvenient narrative arises, the government and lemmings in the media slander it as false and dangerous, and, months later, the dispute in question turns out to be true..”
Wednesday morning, Seymour Hersh published “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” The Nord Stream 1 and 2 Pipelines exploded in September 2022. The Nord Stream 1 has delivered natural gas from Russia to Europe for over a decade, and Russia was developing the Nord Stream 2 at the time. Outlets like The New York Times called the explosions “a mystery.” The sabotage presented a major energy crisis for the United States’ European allies. Europe imports nearly 40% of its gas from Russia, and the Nord Stream 1 was responsible for delivering approximately one third of that supply. Now, Hersh reports that “the United States executed a covert sea operation” with Navy divers to sabotage Russia’s pipelines with explosives. For a less obsequious press corps, this should have been an easy story to crack.
In the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, President Biden announced his intention to act against the pipelines in the event of war. “If Russia invades… there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” he told reporters. “We will bring an end to it.” “How will you do that exactly?” a reporter asked. “I promise you we will be able to do it,” President Biden said with a slight smile. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland was equally as explicit. “I want to be very clear to you today,” she told reporters in January 2022. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed “Anglo-Saxons” in the West for “terror attacks” on the pipelines. “Those who profit from it have done it,” Putin told the press.
President Biden chastised Putin’s accusation for “pumping out disinformation and lies.” “Just don’t listen to what Putin’s saying,” Biden added. “What he’s saying we know is not true.” White House National Security spokeswoman Adrienne Watson backed up Biden’s claim, referring to Putin’s accusation as “Russia’s disinformation.” Russia’s U.N. ambassador also implied that the United States had been involved in the sabotage. Richard Mills, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., responded by calling the claims “conspiracy theories and disinformation.” Despite the Commander and Chief’s explicit announcement that he would take action against the Nord Stream pipeline, a credulous press corps has dutifully parotted government talking points that accusations of western involvement in the sabotage are “baseless” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “conspiracy theories.”
This all follows a similar pattern to the informational warfare of the Covid era: an inconvenient narrative arises, the government and lemmings in the media slander it as false and dangerous, and, months later, the dispute in question turns out to be true (or at least highly plausible). Arguments over natural immunity, vaccine efficacy, masks, the lab leak hypothesis, school shutdowns, lockdowns, and the scientific basis of social distancing are just a few examples that followed this cycle of reporting. This was the same pattern as The New York Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. Now, at hearings to investigate corruption that implicated Big Tech, intelligence officials, and the federal government, Raskin and his cohorts return to their familiar censorship ploys. For censors, augmentation of power, not truth, remains the chief objective. To achieve this goal, they conflate dissent with domestic terrorism.
Let’s just go through the list of beneficiaries I first compiled two years ago.
1. The tech companies that became so enraptured with the digital world—and we can include online retailers in this—that they forgot all the people who cannot and do not want to live entirely outside the physical world. To be sure, many of these high flying companies are now coming back to earth thanks to higher interest rates. Even Zoom may be falling on hard times. To which I say: Schadenfreude.
2. The pharmaceutical companies with hundreds of billions of investment in labs and distribution circles that wanted to ply their wares in the midst of emergencies, in addition to the PCR testing industry, not to mention mask and ventilator makers and so many other grifting companies in this space. They not only gain from tremendous subsidies and indemnification from damages; they even got governments to conscript their customer base.
3. Public health intellectuals, who for at least a decade and a half had fallen for the romance of computer modeling, were itching to try out a new method for disease mitigation. They must have gotten quite a kick out of watching the experiment tried out in real time. Speaking of: we haven’t heard from these people in a very long time. They seem conveniently very quiet. Notice how the prophets of doom who were all over the news three years ago, with their magic ability to see the future with precision, have completely vanished?
4. The mega-billionaire Bill Gates found himself vexed by computer viruses that were wrecking his Windows operating system and thereby developed a passion for blocking viruses in general, while failing to understand the difference between biology and computer hardware. He seems to have done very well for himself, not only with his investments but now with his new book telling us how he will single-handedly change the path of the global climate.
5. Government officials certainly had a field day trying out new uses of power. My goodness, they even got their mitts on social media, scripting who gets to speak and who cannot. The national security state hasn’t had this much fun since the Cold War. It was, in short, the most successful ramp up of government power the world over in modern times or maybe ever. Disease panic proved more advantageous to them than ever war and economic depression.
6. Media companies, who live on clicks and know with certainty that public panic is the best way to guarantee consumer attention, did especially well, given that millions were locked at home with nothing else to do. Talk about a captive audience!
7. The Chinese government, which was supremely annoyed at the Trump administration’s trade policies, successfully trolled the West into believing that China nixed the virus through totalitarian controls. It can now brag to have scripted the pandemic response for the whole world, and is now goading the World Health Organization into doing ever more of it.
8. Rabid opponents of the Trump administration, who had failed to wreck it through accusations of Russian collusion and then impeachment over a phone call to Ukraine, finally turned to creating tremendous social, economic, and political chaos by massively overblowing the severity of a widespread viral pathogen, which itself became a metaphor for the political infection they believed afflicted the country. This was the final undoing of the administration, much to the celebration of his political opponents.
9. School teachers’ unions that have been wanting to strike for years in order to extract pay and benefits from the taxpayer, worried that doing so would turn their public against them; for them, lockdowns were the perfect excuse to find another way. They abandoned their jobs and got paid anyway. Then they tried to make the racket last as long as possible.
10. A ruling-class population that has lost touch with people who cannot live on their computers, had become increasingly detached from the flow of life as it exists in the physical world, utterly failed to empathize with the suffering of others under lockdown. But they rather warmed up to the mess they had created because it meant they could make the big bucks while never changing out of their PJs.
When it comes to the Global South, what the Hersh report imprints is Rogue Superpower, in giant blood red letters, as state sponsor of terrorism. Everyone with a brain already knew the Empire did it. Now Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report not only details how Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked, but also names names: from the toxic Straussian neoliberal-con trio Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland all the way to the Teleprompter Reader-in-Chief. Arguably the most incandescent nugget in Hersh’s narrative is to point ultimate responsibility directly at the White House. The CIA, for its part, gets away with it. The whole report may be read as the framing of a scapegoat. A very fragile, shoddy scapegoat – what with those classified documents in the garage, the endless stares into the void, the cornucopia of incomprehensible mumbling, and of course the whole, ghastly, years-long family corruption carousel in and around Ukraine, still to be completely unveiled.
Hersh’s report happened to pop up immediately after the deadly earthquakes in Turkey/Syria. This is an investigative journalism earthquake in itself, straddling over fault lines and revealing countless open air fissures, nuggets of truth gasping for air amidst the rubble. But is that all there is? Does the narrative hold from start to finish? Yes and no. First of all, why now? This is a leak – essentially from one Deep State insider, Hersh’s key source. This 21st century “Deep Throat” remix may be appalled at the toxicity of the system, but at the same time he knows that whatever he says, there will be no consequences. Cowardly Berlin – ignoring the nuts and bolts of the scheme all along – will not even squeak. After all the Green gang has been ecstatic, because the terror attack has thoroughly advanced their medieval de-industrialization agenda.
In parallel, as an extra bonus, all the other European vassals receive further confirmation this is the fate that awaits them if they don’t follow His Master’s Voice. Hersh’s narrative frames the Norwegians as the essential accessory to terror. Hardly surprising: NATO’s Jens “Peace is War” Stoltenberg has been a CIA asset for perhaps half a century. And Oslo of course had its own motives to be part of the deal; to collect loads of extra cash selling whatever spare energy it had for desperate European customers. A little narrative problem is that Norway, unlike the U.S. Navy, still does not have any operational P-8 Poseidon. What was clear at the time is that an American P-8 was commuting back and forth – with mid-air refueling – from the U.S. to Bornholm island.
A positive screamer is that Hersh – rather, his key source – had the MI6 completely vanish from the narrative. SVR, Russian intel, had focused like a laser on MI6 at the time, as well as the Poles. What still cements the narrative is that the combo behind “Biden” provided the planning, the intel and coordinated the logistics, while the final act – in this case a sonar buoy detonating the C4 explosives – may have been perpetrated by the Norwegian vassals. The problem is the buoy may have been dropped by an American P-8. And there’s no explanation of why one of the sections of Nord Stream 2 escaped intact.
Russia is ready to engage with Ukraine, but there should not be any preconditions for talks that should be based on the existing reality, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin said in an interview with Zvezda television. “Yes, according to the classics, any hostilities end up in talks, and, naturally, as we have said before, we will be ready for such talks, but only if those are talks with no preconditions, talks that would be based on the existing reality,” the senior Russian diplomat said, according to a fragment of the interview posted on the TV channel’s website. However, it is not Kiev, but Washington and Brussels who make the decision on talks with Moscow, Vershinin said.
“First of all, there have been [talks] before – you remember Minsk and you remember Istanbul. And you remember that those were broken off by Ukraine, but you are well aware that decisions are being made not in Kiev, decisions are being made in other capitals, primarily in Washington and Brussels. So, inquiries should be sent there,” he added. Commenting on whether such talks could be held under the current US president, Joe Biden, Vershinin said, “This does not depend on us, we have made our position clear, and if only Mr. Biden were cautious and wise enough, I mean him and his entourage,” he added.
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the latest findings about explosions at the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, published by US journalist Seymour Hersh, deserve to be discussed at an emergency NATO summit. “There have been a plenty of facts: pipeline explosions, [clear] motives and indirect evidence obtained by journalists. So when will an emergency NATO summit gather to analyze the situation?” she asked rhetorically. On February 8, Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article where he said, citing a source, that explosives were planted under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines by US Navy divers under the guise of the Baltops exercise in June. The story stated that US president Joe Biden personally authorized the operation.
US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said earlier that the US denies they were involved in the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines and believes its explanations on the matter are credible. He called the theory laid out by Hersh complete and utter nonsense. On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage that occurred the day before on three strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore gas pipelines. On September 26, Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on the pipeline routes. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office launched a criminal case based on charges of international terrorism.
Mao Ning
10 Feb China's Mao Ning: "The Nord Stream gas pipelines are vital transnational infrastructure. The explosions had a serious impact on global energy markets and the environment. If Hersh is telling the truth…US owes the world a responsible explanation." https://t.co/t0AUETRxDlpic.twitter.com/2MfdXB36ef
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who admitted that her words about Europe being at war with Russia had been a mistake, against making irreparable mistakes concerning Ukraine, Zakharova wrote on her Telegram channel on Saturday. Earlier on Saturday, Baerbock admitted that she had made a mistake claiming in late January that the European Union “is fighting a war with Russia.” “The one who doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t live,” Baerbock quoted this saying in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel newspaper, explaining her words. According to Zakharova, it was a pivotal statement of Baerbock.
“Once you realize your mistake sincerely, you will understand this. You have to. However, if you are hypocritical again, you are making an irreparable mistake this time,” Zakharova wrote. The Russian diplomat called on the German foreign minister “if you believe that everyone has the right to make mistakes because it is part of human life, stop engaging in escalating the crisis that leads to killings of people with Western weapons.” Zakharova recalled that Germany had been supporting the Ukrainian regime, which was killing people in Donbass, for eight years, and that Russia had launched its special military operation to stop the bloodshed and curb the threats of its escalating into another world war. “And then NATO criminals started pouring fuel on the fire, turning it all into a massive carnage,” she added.
The Western nations’ deceit regarding the Minsk agreements on Ukrainian reconciliation needs to be formally sealed and qualified within the legal framework, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s official spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said. “The fact that those countries, those politicians deceived the international community, and the people of Ukraine were the first to suffer from their deceit, deserves to be formally sealed within the framework of the law,” she told the Right to Know TV show on Russia’s TVTs television. “Instead of talk, there must be a [legal] qualification, and it must be made by law experts.”
“The thing is that they deceived the UN Security Council,” she said.According to Zakharova, from the very outset, Germany, France and Ukraine implied something totally opposite to what they had openly pledged to their people, to Europe and the world in general. “They <…> gave the Kiev regime time to rearm. This means that they planned to deceive the international community from the very start. The intentions that they declared were totally different from what they had in mind,” she added. The diplomat described this as a real sham and a global-scale fraud. “There was a [malicious] intent that dealt a blow to global security,” she added.
International Monetary Fund staff will meet with Ukrainian officials in Warsaw next week, a source familiar with the plans said on Friday, as Ukraine presses for a multi-billion dollar borrowing program to cover its funding needs given Russia’s war. The Interfax Ukraine news agency earlier this month quoted Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko as saying that Ukraine hopes to start negotiations with the IMF during the second quarter of 2023. The IMF had no immediate comment on the staff mission, which comes two months after the IMF’s board approved a four-month monitoring program for Ukraine that is aimed at maintaining economic stability following Russia’s invasion, and at helping promote donor financing.
At the time, the IMF said “program monitoring with board support”, or PMB, “should help pave the way toward a possible full-fledged IMF-supported program.” The scope of that program is a source of ongoing debate, given existing IMF constraints on lending to a country at war. Ukrainian government officials have said the country will need $38 billion this year to cover the budget deficit and another $17 billion for urgent energy repairs and reconstruction of critical infrastructure. Experts say the country’s needs could be far higher, given the extent of damage caused by Russian attacks in recent months.
Former Democratic US Representative Tulsi Gabbard has continued her long-running feud with Hillary Clinton following the ex-Secretary of State’s recent visit to India. She told Fox News that the trip served little purpose, and shows that former presidential candidate is a “dangerous character” who is “envious” of Joe Biden. Clinton arrived in India on February 5, visiting salt pan workers in Gujarat where she announced a $50-million initiative intended to empower women and communities to fight against climate change. However, Gabbard – who left the Democrat Party last year – has since said that Clinton’s visit to drum up support for alternative clean energy shows that she still covets diplomatic authority and is “envious” of Joe Biden’s presidency.
“Her desire to be commander-in-chief that she’s had for a very long time has nothing to do with ensuring the safety and security of the American people,” Gabbard said on FOX News’ ‘Jesse Watters Primetime’ show Thursday. “It has everything to do with the fact that if there’s a war to be fought, she wants to be the one with her finger on that proverbial trigger.” She added that she believes Biden to be “channelling her warmongering ways.” Clinton has previously referred to Gabbard as a “Russian asset,” which prompted the former Hawaii Democrat to launch a defamation lawsuit. Gabbard also stated that Clinton’s visit to India did nothing to address India’s more pressing issues, such as tensions with its neighbor Pakistan, and that its only benefit was to increase her own public profile.
“This is what makes her such a dangerous character,” Gabbard said. “She feels that she’s not accountable to anyone because she’s not suffering those consequences.” While in India, Clinton said that the country was ideally positioned to implement clean energy methods, which, she claimed, would increase economic growth. She referenced solar power facilities at a salt pan farm she’d visited in Surendranagar as evidence of this. Clinton also used the visit to praise self-employed Indian women who have chosen to work in roles such as street vendors, farmers and laborers.
“The Democratic Party [is] the bedfellow of international communism.” Those words from Sen. Joe McCarthy captured the gist of the Red Scare and the use of blacklists and personal attacks to silence critics. The Democrats this week appear to have taken up the same cudgel in labeling opponents and critics Russian sympathizers and fellow travelers in opposing government involvement in a massive censorship system. The Red Scare is back and it is going blue. I testified this week in Congress on the Twitter Files and how they suggest what I have called “censorship by surrogate” or proxy. The files show dozens of FBI and government employees actively seeking the censorship of citizens and others for their viewpoints.
In my testimony, I warned that this was reminiscent of the McCarthy period where the FBI played a role in the establishment of blacklists for socialist, communists, and others. I encouraged Congress not to repeat its failures from the 1950s by turning a blind eye to such abuse. This view was amplified by former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who became persona non grata for her anti-war sentiments in Congress. She was later labeled a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton, who has refused to support that scurrilous claim of a former member. For years, the Democrats pushed a Russian collusion theory that collapsed. It was later disclosed that the Clinton campaign hid and then lied about funding the infamous Steele Dossier. Nevertheless, people like Carter Page were falsely accused of being Russian agents and critics labeled as Russian apologists.
Ironically, the FBI was warned that the dossier appeared to be the result of Russian disinformation and relied on a presumed Russian agent. If anything, my warning of McCarthy-like attacks and measures seemed to be taken more as a suggestion than an admonition by some. Yet soon after the end of the hearing, MSNBC contributor and former Sen. Claire McCaskill appeared on MSNBC to denounce the member witnesses (Sen. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Ron Johnson, and former Rep. Gabbard) as “Putin apologists” and Putin lovers. She exclaimed, “I mean, look at this, I mean, all three of those politicians are Putin apologists. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard loves Putin.” (For the record, she also attacked me as not being “a real lawyer.”)
[..] In the 1950s, it was easy for politicians to avoid discussing underlying views by just labeling their opponents as fellow travelers. We are watching the same use of personal attacks today as a way to evade the troubling disclosures in the Twitter Files. While some like McCaskill yell “Russians!” others use more modern labels, such as “conspiracy theorists.” That notably includes the FBI itself. When criticized for the role FBI agents played in secretly targeting citizens for censorship, the FBI called critics “conspiracy theorists . . . feeding the American public misinformation.”
Trump turned down numerous invitations to Epstein’s hedonistic private island and his Palm Beach home. There is no evidence Trump did anything improper. Norma Foerderer, Trump’s longtime personal assistant, told me that Trump thought Epstein was “creepy.” “The one time I visited his Palm Beach home, the swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls,” Trump told a member of his Club, Mar-a-Lago. “‘How nice,’ I thought, ‘he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.’” According to his personal security guard, Trump left Epstein’s home within 15 minutes of arrival, feeling uncomfortable with the strange ratio of men to much younger women. Many of the Epstein-based smears against Trump that are now recycled by Ron DeSantis’ organized flying monkeys on the internet, originated with the Clinton campaign.
Epstein provided millions in seed funding for the Clinton Global Initiative, was a heavy donor to the Clinton Foundation. Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s island on at least 17 occasions, as well as being identified by FAA records as having been on Epstein’s plane on at least 26 occasions. The Clinton Foundation provided one-hundred percent of the funding for TerraMar, a nonprofit controlled by Epstein pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, which was utilized to hire young female interns to allegedly work on environmental projects while actually constituting a grooming pool. Unlike the Clintons, Trump cut Epstein off after he heard about an inappropriate advance by Epstein toward a young woman who worked at the Spa at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump told security that Epstein was barred from the property. The Clintons continued to socialize and fundraise with Jeffrey Epstein after his state conviction.
The Clinton Foundation actually took a donation from Epstein after he had a probable cause affidavit filed on him by Palm Beach Police in May of 2006. Trump cut Epstein off well before state charges were brought against the sex-trafficker. The Clintons were desperate to distract from their own relationship with Epstein by trying to throw shade on Trump. Now, the “influencers” propping up Ron DeSantis are recycling the same trash. Recent weeks have seen this vicious assault on President Donald Trump; distorting the facts about his “connection” to Jeffrey Epstein, which, as I have stated above, is an obscene distortion of the facts. The repetitive drumbeat of their talking points are obviously prepared by Governor DeSantis’ Ukrainian handler bleed through in the posting of her internet-based corp of flying monkeys. The uniform language blows the op. It was a smear in 2016 and it’s a smear today.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has privately asked members of his cabinet to work out ways of rebuilding connections with the EU that had been severed after Brexit in 2020, government sources have told Bloomberg. Plans are currently being put together at 10 Downing Street to boost ties between London and Brussels in such areas as defense, migration and the economy, including trade, energy and international standards, the agency reported on Saturday. According to British ministers, diplomats and officials, who all spoke on condition of anonymity, the rapprochement is being prepared in order to compensate for the fallout of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, in which London positions itself among the prime backers of the Kiev authorities.
In the coming days, Sunak’s government is hoping to announce a solution to the longstanding dispute with the EU over post-Brexit trading arrangements for Northern Ireland. London’s plan is to capitalize on this development and make it the basis for further improving ties with the 27-member bloc. Bloomberg pointed out that by moving in this direction, the PM is risking causing anger among the anti-EU lawmakers from his ruling Conservative Party. Another challenge for Sunak would be overcoming the skepticism of European leaders, who got tired of top British politicians using the bloc as a “punch bag for their domestic audience” since the Brexit vote in 2016, it added. One of the sources assured Bloomberg that the alleged turn towards Europe didn’t mean that Brexit was a mistake but was merely a reflection of the changing geopolitical situation.
According to another official, Sunak’s subordinates were able to persuade the Prime Minister, who has been in office since late October, that in the current reality of “a more dangerous world, rising authoritarianism and protectionism,” closer cooperation with allies was absolutely essential for the UK. Achieving this would require Britain to give up on its “madman strategy” of resisting the EU, in favor of a stable relationship with the bloc as critical friends, he said. By standing together, London and Brussels would be able to withstand economic turbulence and threats posed by Russia and China more effectively, the source explained.
The paper suggests you can take the number of vaccine doses delivered, divide by 1,000 to get an estimate of the number of people killed by the COVID vaccine. The tweet directly from the author sums it up:
The paper finds that the vDFR (vaccine-dose fatality rate) is exponential with respect to age.
The paper points out that “it is not unreasonable to assume an all-population global value of vDFR = 0.1 %”. For the US, 670M doses have been given, so the estimate is 670,000 people have been killed by the COVID vaccines in the US. I have said for a long time that the URF in VAERS is 41, and there are 16,300 excess US deaths in VAERS (subtracting 250 background deaths per year which gets reported into VAERS) which comes to 668K.668K is very close to 670K, isn’t it? What an amazing “coincidence”!The paper gives a simple way to estimate the number of people a country has killed by deploying the COVID vaccines: 0.001*# of doses. In short, you can just take the number of vaccine doses in millions and just change “millions” to “thousands” to estimate the number of people killed by the vaccine.
Using data from Israel and Australia, the paper estimates 13 million deaths worldwide from the COVID vaccines: The COVID-19 vaccines did not only not save lives but they are highly toxic. On the global scale, given the 3.7 million fatalities in India alone, having vDFR = 1 % (Rancourt, 2022), and given the age-stratified vDFR results presented in this work, it is not unreasonable to assume an all-population global value of vDFR = 0.1 %. Based on the global number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered to date (13.25 billion 24 doses, up to 24 January 2023, Our World in Data), this would correspond to 13 million deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines worldwide. By comparison, the official World Health Organization (WHO) number of COVID-19 deaths to date is 6.8 million (6,817,478 deaths, reported to WHO, as 3 February 2023), which are not detected as COVID-19 assignable deaths in ACM studies.
NASA only uses 15 digits of π for calculating interplanetary travel. At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that'd fall off by less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom https://t.co/iXpDgL03r5pic.twitter.com/HybLJHW2X1
Triangular impossible object, devised in the 1950s by Lionel Penrose and his son, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Sir Roger Penrose
https://twitter.com/i/status/1624400863732047873
Participants in the Ukraine-EU summit, held in Kiev on February 3, will be frustrated, as the goals of Russia’s special military operation will be achieved, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement on Saturday. “Western attempts are futile. As the Russian leadership has reiterated, the goals and objectives of the special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine will be achieved in full. All the participants in the February 3 gathering in Kiev will be bitterly disappointed. They will have to be accountable also to their own population, at the expense of which the bloody geopolitical game ‘to the last Ukrainian’ waged by the West is being funded,” the diplomat said.
According to Zakharova, the recent event was yet further proof that “for the sake of weakening Russia and serving the hegemonic aspirations of the United States and NATO,” the European Union proceeds with its unconditional support of the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. “By promising a EU prospect in violation of its own standard requirements for EU candidates and by declaring ‘common values’ shared with it, the European Union is condoning the all-out persecution of dissent, the trampling of freedom of speech and expression, the flagrant violation of linguistic and confessional rights in Ukraine,” the diplomat said. “Nevertheless, in the summit’s joint statement they cynically ‘reiterated’ the commitment to full respect for ‘the rights of persons belonging to minorities’. This totally overrides those principles on which the EU was once built,” she stressed.
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman pointed out that no less hypocritical were the EU representatives’ calls for peace when they pledged readiness to invest in military action to be continued “for as long as it takes”. “Twelve billion euros has already been allocated at the expense of European taxpayers. The beefed-up funding for the conflict, more shipments of weapons and equipment, more training camps, and more training programs for the Ukrainian armed forces – all of these will result in more casualties in the conflict, including among civilians,” Zakharova continued. According to the diplomat, under these circumstances, the attempts to launch the process of creating any quasi-structures to hold accountable for the Ukraine crisis are “absurd and immoral”.
“As they say, who are the judges? [Are they] those who cheated in the Minsk agreements, covered up the Kiev regime’s war crimes against civilians in Donbass since 2014, pumped weapons and money to Ukrainian criminals, and those who are trying to misappropriate Russian state assets and the money of our citizens?” she asked rhetorically. Zakharova stated that it was proved once again that the leadership of the European Union and its member countries had invested all political, financial and military means into deploying the front to Ukraine against the establishment of a multipolar world order, which was firmly advocated by Russia and the majority of the world community.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has claimed a “consensus” was reached with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky that Kiev will not use Western weapons, including German Leopard tanks, to stage attacks on Russian territory. The West, however, still considers Crimea and four other new Russian regions to be part of Ukraine. In an interview with the Bild am Sonntag newspaper published on Saturday night, chancellor Scholz once again pinned all the blame for the conflict on Moscow, arguing that Russia’s “unprovoked aggression” justified the collective West’s intervention with military aid to protect the “European peace order.” “Together with our allies, we are giving battle tanks to Ukraine so that they can defend themselves,” Scholz argued. He added that Berlin “carefully weighed every arms shipment, closely coordinating… first and foremost with America.”
Scholz pledged 14 Leopard 2A6 tanks to Ukraine from the Bundeswehr’s own stocks last month, after the US promised to send some of its own M1 Abrams tanks sometime later this year. In the interview, the German leader dismissed any concerns about his country’s weaponry once again being used against Russian soldiers as “abstruse historical comparisons.” At a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of victory at the Battle of Stalingrad on Thursday, Russian President Putin said it was “unbelievable, but true – we are once again threatened with German Leopard tanks, with crosses on their hull. And once again seeking to battle Russia in Ukraine with the help of Hitler’s followers, the Banderites.” “Those seeking to defeat Russia on the battlefield apparently do not realize that a modern war with Russia would be entirely different for them,” he added, promising a response that goes beyond armored vehicles.
“No, Putin didn’t threaten me or Germany,” Scholz said about their phone conversations with the Russian leader, when the interviewer brought up recent claims by Britain’s ex-Prime Minister. The Kremlin said Boris Johnson had either deliberately lied about a “missile threat” or simply didn’t understand what Putin was talking about. Further justifying Western arms shipments to Ukraine, Scholz said there was a “consensus” that these weapons will only be used on “Ukrainian territory,” when asked if there was any kind of “agreement” on that with President Vladimir Zelensky. He did not elaborate on which territory he considered to be Ukrainian. The US also allegedly provided its military aid to Ukraine on condition that it is not used to strike targets in Russia.
However, American officials have said this restriction does not apply to Crimea and the other new Russian territories, and repeatedly stated that Kiev was free to pick its own targets. Crimea and the city of Sevastopol joined Russia in 2014, while the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, did the same last year. Kiev dismissed referendums in which people living in those territories voted for the move as a “sham.” On Wednesday, President Putin tasked the military with “eliminating any possibility” of Ukrainian strikes against Russia. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov clarified that includes the territories that Ukraine still considers to be its own, saying that Moscow will “push back” the Ukrainian troops to a range at which they will not be a threat, and that “the longer range the weapons supplied to the Kiev regime have, the further the troops will need to be moved.”
“..Germany has a strong manufacturing ethos, benefitting from access to Russian resources, markets for its products, and through Russia renewed access and cooperation with China..”
There were several claims as to who the Father of a United Europe was, but the version which triumphed was authorised by the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), which was set up in 1948 by senior American intelligence figures from the CIA. Germany is still kowtowing to US intelligence seventy-five years later. But as the recent episode over Leopard tanks has shown, there is some resistance to this status quo. We also know that other Germans at high levels have been unhappy with the ECB’s monetary regime. Jens Weidmann, who resigned as President of the Bundesbank in October 2021, is not the only critic of monetary policy, though the Bundesbank now appears to have been purged of critics of the ECB.
Therefore, there are two issues holding back Germany. It has been forced to abandon its sound money principals, and to cut itself off from its natural markets in Asia. But a resumption of NATO backed hostilities will throw Germany’s suppression by the US political and military establishments into sharp relief. Chancellor Scholtz will know that Russia is highly unlikely to be easily defeated. If anything, this forthcoming NATO venture is the western alliance’s final desperate throw of the dice. And despite NATO, Scholtz must keep his options open. If against all alliance propaganda NATO fails to win in Ukraine, Russia consolidates its position, and Putin remains as a strong Russian leader, Germany must be prepared for a political accommodation with Russia.
It is not only a question of geographical proximity, but Germany has a strong manufacturing ethos, benefitting from access to Russian resources, markets for its products, and through Russia renewed access and cooperation with China. Clearly, Germany’s commercial ethos has more in common with the industrial revolution being planned by the Asian axis and their emerging plans for sound money than it has with most of her EU partners. If only Germany was free of US political control, in time she could establish a new Hanseatic League, a trade corridor from Eastern Europe encompassing the Baltics and Netherlands. It is considerations of this sort that must make the US establishment determined to not release its grip over Germany and the wider EU.
“If Russia does not end this war and get out of Ukraine, it will be isolated on a small island with a bunch of sub countries and the rest of us 141 countries will go forward and build a prosperous future, while Russia suffers a complete economic and technological isolation…” -Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of NATO war against Russia, in a March 2022 interview with TASS. Nuland has failed miserably. Instead, Russia’s economy is growing, and the inability to isolate Russia is arguably a larger loss than the one NATO is suffering in Ukraine. Last week The New York Times finally got around to admitting the isolation efforts have failed: “Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington nonprofit, recently issued a similar analysis, estimating that the value of Russian imports from the rest of the world had exceeded prewar levels by September.”
It marks quite the change in script. Consider this sampling of headlines from the past year: “Russia’s isolation from global markets is withering its economy and will wreck its status as an energy superpower, experts say” – Business Insider. “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will knock 30 years of progress off the Russian economy” – CNBC. “Another Nail In The Coffin Of The Russian Economy” – Forbes. “War against Ukraine has left Russia isolated and struggling — with more tumult ahead” – NPR. “A New Iron Curtain Is Falling: The isolation of the Russian economy is striking in its speed and scope” New York Times.
It’s been clear that this has never been the case. US allies Japan and South Korea remain unwilling to cut off energy ties to Russia. Chinese and Russian economic integration has grown, as have ties between Moscow and the Persian Gulf states. The US has been particularly frustrated by two countries that have been key to Russia’s economic resiliency: Türkiye and India. Washington has been unable to get Ankara and New Delhi to join the sanctions party, and it’s not for a lack of trying. What the Times’ piece leaves unsaid is that most of these countries have faced unprecedented pressure from the US but have instead ignored the declining power.
The US neocons continue to double down, however, lashing out in increasingly desperate attempts to achieve the Russian isolation they want. How much will they isolate the US in the process? They’ve long enjoyed creating chaos elsewhere while benefiting from the safety of two oceans. Will that geography play a part in their lasting gift to Americans: the cementing of the US into a backwater nation, effectively quarantined from the economic engine in Asia due to its untrustworthy and aggressive behavior?
Kiev’s forces will not hold back when it comes to hitting locations inside Russia, according to Fyodor Venislavsky, a member of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee. Speaking to Germany’s Bild tabloid on Saturday, he also described Moscow as a “legitimate military target.” Anyone who believes that Kiev should commit to not using the arms supplied by its Western backers in attacks on Russian territory are living in a “parallel world,” claimed Venislavsky, who is also Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s representative in the Constitutional Court.
Venislavsky insisted that any munitions depots as well as other military facilities on the territory of Russia are “legitimate military targets,” adding that the same goes for Moscow. The Russian capital is the country’s most populous city, with around 13 million people, according to official data. Moscow hosts the General Staff headquarters as well as Russia’s National Defense Management Center, which are both in the city center. Venislavsky stressed that he has no issue with Ukraine potentially attacking any command center in the Russian capital.
The MP did not say whether Kiev already has specific plans regarding targets, adding that it was for the Ukrainian military leadership to decide whether to strike locations inside Russia, including Moscow. Venislavsky’s remarks come a day after the Pentagon announced it was supplying Kiev with ground-launched small diameter bombs (GLSDB) – munitions consisting of a rocket motor and an airplane bomb, with a range of up to 150km (93 miles). It is unclear if Kiev has obtained any weapons capable of striking Moscow, since the capital lies some 500km (310 miles) away from Russia’s nearest border with Ukraine. Washington previously stated that it would not prevent Kiev from using the new weapons to strike targets deep within Russia.
Washington’s decision to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles and allow Kiev to use them at will can only lead to further escalation, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warned on Saturday. He said the US appears not to want the Ukraine conflict to end. Strikes against the Crimean peninsula will not force Moscow to sit down at the negotiating table, the former president said. “The result would be exactly the contrary. There would be no talks in such a case. There would only be retaliatory strikes,” he warned in an interview with Russian journalist Nadana Fridrikhson. Medvedev insisted that if Washington wanted peace in Ukraine, it could simply urge Kiev to engage in talks with Moscow, but that US President Joe Biden’s administration and “hawks” in Congress are “simply not interested in it.”
Russia could “retaliate in any way possible” should Ukrainian forces strike targets in Crimea or deep inside Russian territory, the former president warned. “We do not set any limits depending on the nature of threats, and are ready to use all types of weapons,” he insisted, adding that Russia would only be guided by its own doctrines, including the nuclear one. “I can assure you a response would be swift, hard and convincing.” Medvedev also accused European leaders, who have been supporting Kiev through means including weapon shipments, of acting at the behest of Washington and to the detriment of their own people. The cost of sanctions, military aid to Ukraine, trade wars, and embargoes are borne by ordinary EU citizens, he added.
Medvedev’s remarks came a day after the Pentagon announced it was supplying Kiev with ground-launched small diameter bombs (GLSDB) – munitions consisting of a rocket motor and an airplane bomb, with a range of up to 150 kilometers. According to US Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, Washington will not prevent Ukraine from using these munitions to strike targets deep within Russia. Moscow has repeatedly warned that providing heavy weapons to Ukraine could see the US and its allies directly involved in the conflict, and spiral into a military standoff between Russia and NATO.
“..The vast majority of the planet wants liberation from the U.S./Western warmongering system that underpins capitalist exploitation that only enriches a global elite..”
The war in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine and Russia with the U.S. and NATO acting as seemingly benevolent supporters of Ukraine, as the Western media portray. The United States and its NATO allies are deeply involved in the conflict. The military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 – after 20 years of futile occupation – was a calculated “reorganization of firepower” against Russia, says Pepe Escobar. Ukraine is merely a proxy and ultimately cannon fodder for American imperial planners. This war is part of a bigger geopolitical confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, China and other nations that are pushing for the emergence of a multipolar world. That is a multipolar world no longer under the hegemony of U.S.-dominated Western capitalism. Pepe Escobar assesses the bigger picture and outlines how the U.S. imperial state is in “panic mode” to shore up the collapsing American-controlled global capitalist system, and in particular the privileged position of the U.S. dollar.
Going to war with Russia presently and in the longer term against China is part of the desperate dynamic to prolong the dominant position of Washington that was established after the Second World War. That postwar imperial order – euphemistically called the “rules-based order” – is increasingly falling into disrepute from unbridled imperialist wars and abuse of financial controls. The vast majority of the planet wants liberation from the U.S./Western warmongering system that underpins capitalist exploitation that only enriches a global elite. The war in Ukraine is but the manifestation of the breakdown in U.S. global power and the desperation to preserve the systematic inequality that defines capitalism. This year is fraught with extreme danger, says Pepe Escobar. But if the psychotic U.S. deep-state planners can be contained by Russia and China without an all-out catastrophic war erupting then there is a chance of a more hopeful, peaceful and just world order emerging.
“The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated that work on the pipelines would be in breach of the Norwegian sanction regulations – and by extension the EU sanction regulations..”
Norway’s Equinor on Wednesday revealed that it was the government in Oslo and EU sanctions that blocked it from responding to a request for assistance in dealing with the damage to Nord Stream pipelines. The Baltic Sea pipelines delivering Russian natural gas to Germany were damaged by sabotage in September, which Moscow blamed on the West. “The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated that work on the pipelines would be in breach of the Norwegian sanction regulations – and by extension the EU sanction regulations,” Equinor said a statement emailed to Reuters. Equinor is the Norwegian oil company that administers the Pipeline Repair and Subsea Intervention (PRSI) Pool, established by Oslo to deal with leaks and ruptures. The Swiss-based operators for Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 are among the 72 members of PRSI, and sent requests for assistance in October, shortly after both pipelines were damaged by undersea explosions.
Because PRSI “adheres to current legislation related to sanctions,” it “notified NS1 and NS2 (operators) that we were not able to do work as requested,” Equinor said in the statement. Nord Stream 2 AG told Reuters that it had filed a request for support to inspect the damage, “as a full member of the PRSI Pool,” but was turned down. Its sister company, which operates the original Nord Stream, said in early October that the survey vessel it attempted to charter was waiting for permission from the Norwegian government. The original Nord Stream was inaugurated in 2011, and supplied Russian natural gas to Germany and the rest of the EU while bypassing Ukraine and Poland. The second pipeline, which would have doubled the volume of gas deliveries, was finished in 2021 but Berlin refused to certify it for operations even before the conflict in Ukraine escalated. The US had sought to block the second pipeline’s construction with sanctions and vowed it would prevent it from becoming operational.
On September 26, 2022 both strings of NS1 and one string of NS2 were damaged in a series of powerful undersea explosions. As NS1 was pressurized at the time, a large quantity of gas was released into the Baltic Sea. Washington insinuated that Moscow was behind the blasts, while Russia pointed the finger at the West for the “act of terrorism.” Sweden, Denmark and Germany launched an investigation into the explosion, but refused to share the results with Russia. Anonymous EU officials have since leaked to the US media that there was “no evidence” to suggest Moscow was behind the sabotage. Russia’s energy company Gazprom was allowed access to the site only once, in late October. While the German gas company Uniper has estimated it would take 6-12 months to repair the pipelines, it is unclear whether Berlin even wants to do so.
For years, many politicians and pundits have dismissed free-speech concerns by noting that the First Amendment only applies to the government. So long as corporations do the censoring, they contend, it is not a free-speech problem. This obviously is wrong on several fronts. The First Amendment is not the exclusive measure of free speech. Corporate censorship of political commentaries or news stories are denials of free speech that harm our democratic system. Second, this is a First Amendment violation. The Twitter files have substantiated long-standing concerns over “censorship by surrogate” or proxy. As with other amendments like the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches or seizures, the government cannot use private agents to do indirectly what it cannot do directly. Just as a police officer cannot direct a security guard to break into an apartment and conduct a search, the FBI cannot use Twitter to censor Americans.
To be fair, there were occasions when Twitter reportedly balked at government demands for raw political censorship — in one case, a demand by Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Cal.) led a frustrated Twitter censor to object that “We don’t do this.” Nevertheless, Twitter’s management certainly now seems to admit that the company worked as an agent of the FBI and carried out most demands for social media suspensions, removals or blocks of individuals. At the same time, the FBI pushed for closer collaboration on content removal. We do not know the full extent of this operation or its impact, but Congress should want to know if the FBI and other agencies created a system of censorship-by-surrogate. The only reason we now have Twitter’s previously secret communications is because an eccentric billionaire bought the company.
The broader effort with other companies could well constitute the largest censorship program ever run by the government — a system designed to escape both public and judicial scrutiny. It also shows how it is no longer necessary to have a “Ministry of Information” to maintain a state media: You can have an effective state media by consent rather than by coercion or control. The FBI’s response to disclosure of these long-secret communications is particularly chilling. When some critics denounced it as raw censorship, the FBI accused them of being “conspiracy theorists … feeding the American public misinformation.” So, criticism of the FBI’s work to censor citizens resulted in an official statement denouncing those citizens. None of these denials or attacks succeed, however. The public understands the threat and strongly supports an investigation into the FBI’s role in censoring social media. Despite the push for censorship by some politicians and pundits, most Americans still want free-speech protections. It is in our DNA.
For months, media has been relishing the investor lawsuit against Elon Musk, who became persona non grata when he moved to restore free speech protections on Twitter. Coverage spoke of Musk losing billions in the lawsuit while others speculated that Musk might be “setting himself up to lose Tesla.” Not yet. Not only are stock prices up for Tesla, but Musk just won a unanimous verdict in the investor trial. The reaction to the trial has been a shrug from critics as they continue to try to hammer Musk into submission. It does not appear to be working. A jury found Elon Musk not liable for losses of investors due to a series of tweets saying he had “secured” funding to take the electric car maker private. They deliberated for less than two hours. Musk personally testified at the trial and noted that he was relying on a handshake agreement in 2018 with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
The verdict is a buzz kill for the alliance of media, political, and business interests against Musk. Critics of his effort to restore free speech protections on Twitter have pressured advertisers while celebrities have publicly renounced their own Teslas. The very thought of allowing opposing views on issues from Covid to climate change to elections appears intolerable for many in politics and the media. The public itself, however, has consistently supported the effort to restore the protections and Twitter has experienced a sharp increase in users. That success, however, has only led figures like Hillary Clinton to call on foreign governments to censor fellow citizens. This unhinged campaign against Musk is being led by the same anti-free speech figures that long supported censorship. That is precisely why Musk may be the only person who could have fought this fight. While these figures and companies have a long history of forcing others into compliance, Musk has proven the immovable object in the face of this seemingly irresistible force.
Nobody launches a “balloon” of that sort of size and mass without a means of “de-orbiting” it should it veer out of its expected flight envelope or on command. I don’t care if China intended it to enter our airspace or not (although I will assume they did); they most certainly had the ability to prevent it from doing so by sending it a command to come down before it did so. They didn’t do that, on purpose. Period, end of discussion, full stop. The United States has full authority under both US and International law to shoot it down and did from the point at which it entered our EEZ’s airspace. We did not have to wait and there is utterly no excuse for our failure to destroy it before it crossed over into the United States.
Nobody has the right to enter the airspace of a nation without permission. If you do it as a manned aircraft you can be forced down and, if you refuse to land, destroyed. An unmanned device, which this clearly is, can be destroyed without warning. Something of that size and lifting capacity could easily have a thermonuclear warhead on board. Detonation of such at that height would produce minimal direct damage however nothing prevents the device from rapidly descending first and then exploding at, for example, 2 miles of altitude. Oh, they’d never do that? Sorry, that’s not how it works. An unannounced and uncleared incursion by a heavy-lift air vehicle capable of carrying such a device must be presumed to have one on board with intent to use it.
There are no “do overs” if you get this wrong. Our military is derelict in permitting this craft into our airspace and our so-called “civilian leadership” is either incompetent or deliberately in league with the Chinese. Either way both must be removed and destroyed, replacing same with functional entities. The Pentagon appears to be more-concerned with what pronouns some “soldier” wants to use than whether a potential nuclear device is floating over several of our major cities and a decent part of our nuclear missile silos inventory. We are a sovereign nation and its damn time we started acting like one.
The world has just seen the largest vaccination campaign in history. At least 13 billion COVID shots have been administered—more injections, by a sweeping margin, than there are human beings on the Earth. In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope. More than three-fifths of the population elected to receive the medicine even before it got its full approval from the FDA. Yet the legacy of this achievement appears to be in doubt. Just look at where the country is right now. In Florida, the governor—a likely Republican presidential candidate—openly pursues the politics of vaccine resistance and denial . In Ohio, kids are getting measles . In New York, polio is back . A football player nearly died on national TV, and fears about vaccines fanned across the internet .
Vaccinologists, pediatricians, and public-health experts routinely warn that confidence is wavering for every kind of immunization , and worry that it may collapse in years to come. In other words, America is mired in a paradoxical and pessimistic moment. “We’ve just had a national vaccination campaign that has exceeded almost all previous efforts in a dramatic fashion,” says Noel Brewer, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina who has been studying decision making about vaccines for more than 20 years, “and people are talking about vaccination as if there’s something fundamentally wrong.” It’s more than talk. Americans are arguing, Americans are worrying, Americans are obsessing over vaccines; and that fixation has produced its own, pathological anxiety.
To fret about the state of public trust is rational: When vaccine adherence wobbles, lives are put in peril; in the midst of a pandemic, the mortal risk is even greater. More than 60 million Americans haven’t gotten a single COVID shot, and a few thousand deaths are attributed to the disease every week. But the scale of this concern—the measure of our instability—may be distorted by the heights to which we’ve climbed. Evidence that the nation has arrived at the brink of collapse does not hold up to scrutiny. No one knows where vaccination rates are really heading, and the coming crash is more an idea—a projection, even—than a certainty. The future of vaccination in America may be no worse than its recent past. In the end, it might be better.
The first alarms about a widespread vaccination crisis—the first suggestions that a leeriness of COVID shots had “ spread its tentacles into other diseases ”—were raised by clinicians. Megha Shah, a pediatrician with the Los Angeles public-health department, told me that she began to worry in the spring of 2021, while volunteering at a medical center. Two years earlier, she recalled, working there had been uneventful. She’d meet with parents—mostly from low-income Latino families—to discuss the standard vaccination schedule: Okay, here’s what we’re recommending for your child . This protects against this; that protects against that. The parents would ask a couple of questions, and she’d answer them. The child would be immunized, almost every time. But in the middle of the COVID-vaccine rollout, she found that those conversations were playing out differently. “Oh, I’m just not sure,” she said some parents told her. Or, “I need to talk this over with my partner.”
During a press conference, a team of Japanese researchers led by Professor Masanori Fukushima stated their intention to sue the Japanese government if the Health Ministry continues to refuse to acknowledge the causal link between the vaccine and deaths. “Around April last year, the pathology and forensics societies have already issued a statement that in the future, an autopsy should be done on people who have died after vaccination,” said Prof. Fukushima. “In the future, we need to urgently establish guidelines on what kind of medical treatment should be provided for victims injured by vaccines, and we need to develop diagnostic techniques.”According to Fukushima, Japan’s Health Ministry won’t acknowledge the causal link between the vaccine and deaths.
The Japanese researchers threatened the government that additional lawsuits would be filed for the COVID vaccine harm cover-up.“One more thing, pathological autopsies have already been conducted on people who died after receiving the vaccine. However, the Health Ministry is still unwilling to acknowledge the causal link between the vaccine and the deaths. If the health ministry maintains this unjustified position, we intend to file additional lawsuits in consultation with our lawyers,” said Fukushima “We demand the Health Ministry provides appropriate victim compensation based on the vaccination law. In other words, the victim is compensated based on the vaccination law that is properly stipulated by Japanese law,” he continued.
When asked by a reporter on what he would say to medical professionals who provide vaccines to patients, he responded:”I want to say one thing very clearly to the Health Ministry in addition to the medical professionals. They should distribute a Vaccination Victim’s Handbook to everyone who has been vaccinated. The Vaccination Victim’s Handbook is similar to the Atomic Bomb Victim’s Handbook, which is distributed to survivors of atomic bombs. After distributing the vaccination victims handbook to vaccinated people, medical institutions should be encouraged to properly follow up with vaccinated people. It is necessary to examine whether there is a link between the disease and the vaccine. Biopsy tests should be performed on sick people suspected a vaccine-induced illness.”
In 2015, photographer Atif Saeed captured this intense photograph of a male lion moments before it launched an attack on him. He narrowly escaped with this incredible shot of a face-to-face with a lion about to kill.
The “domino theory” was once used to great effect in order to manipulate the American public into supporting the Vietnam War, but will the same narrative work to get the west to support World War III with Russia? Former UK Defense Minister Sir Gerald Howarth seems to think so as he uses this exact claim to justify NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine.
FORMER DEFENSE MINISTER OF UK SAYS NATO FORCES MAY NEED TO FACE RUSSIA ON THE GROUND pic.twitter.com/7LJ3Nksniq
It should be noted that a large percentage of the American populace and most of Europe have no interest whatsoever in engaging with Russia and possibly its allies in all out war, but the establishment appears intent on forcing the issue anyway. The delivery of NATO tanks and the possibility of longer range missiles will no doubt trigger a wider response from Russia, which will then be used by NATO as a reason to escalate further. At the very least, Howarth does admit what many in the alternative media have been saying for some time – That Ukraine’s efforts have ground to a halt without further support from NATO troops. The deliveries of money and weapons are nothing more than a stop-gap; wars are won by men.
The former minister suggests that Ukraine is essentially too big to fail and that NATO cannot allow Russia to prevail in the region, otherwise they will be emboldened to strike other nearby nations. There is zero evidence to support this argument, but it is clear that NATO talking heads are desperate to drum up some kind of public fervor. Are western citizens willing to fight and die for Ukraine? It’s highly unlikely.
NATO has been involved in a hybrid war against Russia for quite a long time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said during a press conference after the talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry Tuesday. “Whatever our Western partners may say, however they try to justify their actions on pumping Ukraine with weapons – including the known slogans that the path to peace lies through arms shipments – everyone understands everything. We are talking about NATO being involved in a hybrid war against Russia for a rather long time, a war that is being refracted in its hot displays, in actions of the Kiev regime,” he said. Lavrov noted that Moscow is taking necessary measures in order to prevent attempts to turn Ukraine into an even sharper threat to Russia’s security.
“Of course, we watch how discussions develop in the West about further pumping of Ukraine with increasingly serious weapons, including offensive weapons. Of course, we see it all, and we not merely observer, but take necessary measures in order to prevent further attempt to turn Ukraine into an even sharper threat for our security, and to prevent the Kiev regime from prevailing in its policy of discrimination and destruction of rights of all those Ukrainian citizens and former Ukrainian citizens, who felt involved in Russian history, Russian culture and Russian traditions,” he said. Lavrov underscored that Russia is watching this process, while the armed forces take all necessary measures to prevent Western plans from coming to fruition. “And they will not [come to fruition],” Lavrov underscored.
“..the neo-cons ultimate intent: Poland, already mobilising a 200,000 man military force, would become the new proxy (and the largest army in Europe) in a wider European war against Russia.”
‘Serendipitously’ – at this moment of Davos decay – a raucous, distracting noise started up: Abrahams M1s and Leopards for Ukraine. German FM, Baerbock declares Germany and the EU family are “at war with Russia”. The noise, as usual, succeeds in obscuring any wider picture. Yes, point one, we do have mission creep: We won’t send offensive weapons, but then they did. We won’t send long-range weapons M777), but then they did. We won’t send multiple missile launch systems (HIMARS), but then they did. We won’t send tanks, but now they are. No NATO boots on the ground, but they have been there since 2014.
Point two: Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to a U.S. Defence Secretary, says that the mood in Washington has notably changed: DC gets it – the U.S. is losing the proxy war. This fact however, Macgregor says, still remains ‘under the radar’ in respect to the main-stream media. The more important point Macgregor makes is that this late ‘awakening’ to reality is not shifting the stance of the neocons hawks, one jot. They want escalation (as do one small faction in Germany – the Greens; as well as a leading faction in Poland and, as usual, the Baltic states). And Biden has surrounded himself with State Department war-hawks.
Point three: the contrarian ‘reality’ is that the ‘uniformed’ militaries of Europe also ‘get it’: that Ukraine is losing, and now are very worried by the prospect of escalation – and of war engulfing eastern Europe. The tanks have nothing to do with their calculus about the war outcome. The professionals know the Abrams or Leopards will neither change the course of the war, nor will they arrive before it is too late to alter anything. The European military cadre do not want war with Russia: They know the EU has no ‘surge’ manufacturing capacity to sustain war against Russia beyond a very small window. Popular opinion, and key strands of élite opinion in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe), are becoming hardened in opposition to the war. The concern is that the emphasis on sending exactly German tanks, with their dark symbolism of past bloody battles, is intended to bury any prospect of any future German relationship with Russia – for good.
Further, German military officers worry that a failing Ukrainian military might fall back to the Polish border – and even across it – before the tanks are delivered. The tanks then would be absorbed by the Polish military. There is a thought in these military circles that this might, in fact, be the neo-cons ultimate intent: Poland, already mobilising a 200,000 man military force, would become the new proxy (and the largest army in Europe) in a wider European war against Russia.
“..nearly every possible scenario gamed in Washington and Brussels finishes with NATO like a giant, armoured version of Wile E. Coyote plunging to the depths of the Grand Canyon..”
Every military analyst with an IQ over room temperature knows all those Leopards will be duly incinerated – or better yet, captured, and dissected by Russian military specialists. So what happens next is yet another vector of the – very successful so far – U.S.-unleashed German de-industrualization racket: the Americans will invade the German industrial military complex with their “much improved” Abrams – which may perhaps arrive in 2024, when only a rump Ukraine may still exist, or never arrive at all. So no need for the Abrams to prove themselves in actual combat – as in being captured and/or incinerated. Rumors in Washington advance that the U.S. “strategy” in Ukraine – extensively detailed by endless think tank reports – had to be adapted. It’s not about “defeating Russia” anymore, but providing Kiev with the means to “scare” Russia.
The Russian General Staff must be trembling in their boots. Meanwhile, in real life, nearly every possible scenario gamed in Washington and Brussels finishes with NATO like a giant, armoured version of Wile E. Coyote plunging to the depths of the Grand Canyon. And that happens even if the much ballyhooded “Big Arrow” Russian offensive starts in a few days or weeks, or never starts at all. Arguably the Russian General Staff has concluded a long time ago there’s no point in reducing Ukraine to rubble in a matter of hours – something they could easily accomplish. Thus the fabled mincing machine approach – offering no excuses for NATO to “escalate” (which they continue to do anyway, as Jens “War is Peace” Stoltenberg is so fond of parroting).
The trick is that NATO’s escalation overdrive, as it happens, is somewhat controlled by the Russian General Staff, which is always calculating which optimal maneuvers will consume NATO’s military hardware faster. Call it a Russian version of the popular axiom “frog in a boiling pot doesn’t realize it’s being cooked until it croaks.” Absolute desperation is now graphically extrapolating into attacks on Iran. Both Russia and China have Iran as their key ally in West Asia for the whole, complex process of Eurasia integration; strategic partnerships interlink the trio. So attacking the Ministry of Defense in Isfahan with drones – total fail – and bombing an IRGC convoy of humanitarian aid crossing from Iraq to Syria is a serious U.S.-Israel-coordinated provocation.
Essentially these are also attacks against Russia and China. Israel cannot lift its hand or foot without U.S. permission. Iranian intel may be able to establish how the Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con cabal in charge of U.S. foreign policy authorized if not ordered these attacks, which of course are directly connected to NATO’s desperation in Ukraine. When in doubt, just come back to Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski: “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps, Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by contemporary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc.” And mirroring Ukraine/Russia there’s of course Taiwan/China.
The West’s supply of weapons, including tanks, to Kiev will not bring about the solution to the Ukraine conflict, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised interview with the TRT channel on Wednesday. “I cannot say that I believe that sending tanks is a step towards resolving [the Ukraine conflict],” he said. “We expect Western countries to back our calls for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.” Referring to the buildup of arms supply to Kiev, Erdogan emphasized that “this risky step is especially profitable for arms barons.” Nevertheless, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that weapons supplies to Ukraine may create conditions for “a negotiated peaceful solution” in the future.
On January 25, the United States pledged to send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Kiev. On the same day, Germany confirmed that it would transfer 14 Leopard 2A6 tanks to Ukraine and would allow other countries to re-export these combat vehicles to Ukraine. According to German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, the Leopard 2 tanks would be sent to Ukraine “before the end of March.” Norway, Slovakia, the UK, Poland, and France have also pledged to provide Kiev with Western-made tanks. Kiev expects to receive up to 140 tanks from 12 countries as the first batch. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that tensions around the situation in Ukraine are rising due to Washington’s decisions and US pressure on other countries.
‘Nothing is forbidden in principle, provided that it will be useful, in particular, for the Ukrainian armed forces, will not lead to an escalation of the conflict and strikes on Russian territory..”
French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement that the possible delivery of military aircraft to Ukraine will not lead to an escalation is absurd, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing on Wednesday. “We’ve paid attention to the words of French President [Emmanuel] Macron, who, responding to a question about the possible supply of aircraft to Ukraine, said: ‘Nothing is forbidden in principle, provided that it will be useful, in particular, for the Ukrainian armed forces, will not lead to an escalation of the conflict and strikes on Russian territory, will not weaken the defense capability of France itself.’ Forgive me, but it’s some kind of absurdity,” Zakharova said, “Sorry, but Paris’ readiness to supply Kiev with fighter jets was confirmed by the French Defense Minister [Sebastien Lecornu] who visited Ukraine on January 28.”
“Is the French president really sure that supplying the Kiev regime with arms, heavy weapons and aircraft for combat operations will not escalate the situation? I refuse to believe that a grown man can have such logic,” the diplomat added, “Such statements only increase the already irrepressible appetite of [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky’s regime, which, by shelling hospitals and massacring civilians, has clearly demonstrated that Western military injections – how did Mr. Macron put it? – will not lead to an escalation of the conflict. Well, of course, they ‘give’ peace. Obviously these planes are going to be used to drop cookies and candy, right? I have a different feeling.”
The diplomat stressed that Russia strongly condemned “the increasingly aggressive and bellicose rhetoric of Western officials, who have not been shy about making loud statements on the Ukrainian conflict lately.” “I understand them. They feel the deadlock of their own position and the lack of arguments to explain to their own citizens what they have done, in particular to the European continent. Hence the tearing and shouting, trying to find some kind of explanation for what they are doing,” she added.
Russian energy giant Gazprom has increased its daily volume of gas transit through Ukraine to the EU by 20% for the first time in weeks, the company announced on Wednesday. Supplies jumped to 29.4 million cubic meters (mcm) on February 1, compared to 24.5 mcm pumped the previous day through the Sudzha entry point, which remains the only operating interconnector in Ukraine. “Gazprom supplies Russian gas for transit through the territory of Ukraine in the amount confirmed by the Ukrainian side through Sudzha – 29.4 mcm as of February 1,” Gazprom spokesperson Sergey Kupriyanov told reporters. Kupriyanov added that an application had been rejected for the Sokhranovka transit point, which previously served as a key gas transit route through Ukraine and handled about a third of the Russian gas flowing through the country to the EU.
Ukraine shut down transit through Sokhranovka in early May, citing “interference by the occupying forces.” Russian gas deliveries to the EU via Ukraine were slashed from last May in the aftermath of the bloc’s sweeping anti-Russia sanctions, and stood between 40 to 43 mcm per day. This year, shipments declined sharply from 35.5 mcm in early January to 24 mcm by the end of the month. Analysts attributed the lower volumes to warm winter temperatures in Europe and to high stocks of gas in underground storage facilities. Imports have somewhat rebounded after gas prices began to rise on expectations of colder weather next week. Flows are still about 27% lower than levels at the start of the winter gas season last year, according to Reuters estimates.
Meanwhile, requests for Russian gas from Ukraine to Slovakia via the Velke Kapusany border point also surged to 23.7 mcm compared to 18.6 mcm the previous day, Ukrainian transmission system data showed. Gas transit through Ukraine remains the only route for Russian supplies to the countries of Western and Central Europe after sabotage attacks in September rendered the Nord Stream pipeline inoperable. Gazprom also exports gas via the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream pipelines to Southern and South-Eastern Europe.
The article above: “Russian energy giant Gazprom has increased its daily volume of gas transit through Ukraine to the EU by 20% for the first time in weeks..”
This article: “Russia’s pipeline gas exports to Europe slumped to a new monthly record-low in January, falling by nearly 30% from December..”
Russia’s pipeline gas exports to Europe slumped to a new monthly record-low in January, falling by nearly 30% from December due to lower prices on the spot market, according to Reuters calculations. Russia’s gas giant Gazprom has seen exports to Europe decline since the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year as Russia cut off gas supplies to a number of countries in Europe. Russia cut off supply to Poland, Bulgaria, and Finland in April and May, slashed gas deliveries via Nord Stream to Germany in June, then off Nord Stream supply in early September. Russia still sends some gas via pipelines to Europe via one transit route through Ukraine, and via TurkStream.
This month, Gazprom has reduced pipeline gas transit flows to Europe via Ukraine on some days. Analysts have said that the lower pipeline flows were the result of lower demand for gas under long-term contracts, considering the milder weather in parts of Europe earlier in January and the fact that spot supply is currently cheaper. Per Reuters calculations, which are based on daily data of flows from Russia via the transit route through Ukraine and via TurkStream, pipeline gas exports from Russia to Europe dropped to around some 1.8 billion cubic meters (bcm) in January, down from 2.5 bcm in December.
Gazprom hasn’t released January export data yet, but its exports to Europe via pipelines plunged to a post-Soviet low in 2022, according to data from the Russian firm calculated by Reuters. Last year’s Russian gas exports slumped by 45% year on year to reach 100.9 bcm in 2022. Germany, Russia’s biggest customer of gas before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, doesn’t import any Russian gas via pipeline now. Norway became Germany’s single-largest natural gas supplier in 2022, overtaking Russia, as total German gas imports dropped by 12.3% compared to 2021.
A Ukrainian rocket has reportedly struck near an oil pumping station connected to the Druzhba pipeline in Russia’s Bryansk Region, the operator Transneft claimed on Wednesday. Speaking to the TASS news agency, Igor Demin, a spokesman for the company, said the shell landed on the territory of the Novozybkovo station in the late hours of January 31. He noted that the attempted attack ultimately failed to cause any casualties or hinder the work of the pipeline. According to initial reporting by the Mash news agency, the strike was carried out using a Tochka-U rocket. Workers reportedly found a 20-meter crater on the territory of the station, which lost power as a result of the attack.
Demin explained that the Novozybkovo oil pumping station, which was the apparent target, is only temporarily used at peak times on the Druzhba pipeline and was last turned on in 2022 for only a few hours. He noted that Transneft workers are currently repairing the damage caused by the attack and that the pipeline continues to operate normally. The Druzhba (Friendship) oil pipeline is one of the longest in the world and connects eastern parts of Russia to several points in Europe, including Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and Germany.
The segment that was apparently being targeted by Kiev’s forces on Tuesday is located some 39km from the Russian-Ukrainian border and leads directly into Belarus, where it branches off into two sections: one going to Germany and Poland and the other delivering oil to Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and the Czech Republic. Germany, however, has not received any oil since the start of the year after Berlin and Poland both pledged to stop all imports of Russian crude. According to Bryansk Governor Aleksander Bogomaz, Kiev’s forces also launched several artillery strikes against civilian targets across the region on Tuesday. Although no casualties have been reported, Bogomaz said the attack damaged over a dozen residential buildings, a WWII memorial, and a shop. The strikes also cut off power to several villages, he said, later adding that these issues had been promptly resolved by emergency services.
Exports of Russian oil loaded in Western-insured tankers surged in January as prices for Moscow’s flagship Urals grade stood below the cap set by the Group of Seven (G7) countries and the European Union, Reuters reported, citing tracking data. The price cap on Russian seaborne oil exports of $60 per barrel was introduced by the EU, G7 countries, and Australia on December 5. It bans Western companies from providing insurance and other services to shipments of Russian oil unless the cargo is purchased at or below the set price. The average price for Urals oil blend was at $49.50 per barrel on a free-on-board basis (FOB) on Tuesday for shipments from the port of Primorsk, and at $47.83 FOB from Novorossiisk, traders told the outlet. Western tankers are set to carry more than 9.5 million tons of crude from the Russia, hitting a multi-month high in January as soaring Asian demand pushes up prices.
This month’s loadings of crude from Russia and Kazakhstan from only two ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk are expected to reach the highest volumes since 2019, amounting to 7.4 million tons, traders’ data showed. A quarter of all Urals shipments from Russia in January were handled by EU-owned vessels mainly from Greece, twice as much as in December. Meanwhile, other Russian export blends such as Sokol and ESPO are trading well above the price cap, with Sokol being contracted at about $78 per barrel and ESPO trading at over $72 per barrel as of Tuesday. Russia has been opposed to the price cap initiative from the start. Last month, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree banning the supply of Russian oil and oil products to foreign buyers that “directly or indirectly” mention the cap in their contracts. The ban came into force on February 1, and will be valid for at least five months.
Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll decried how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” Lauren Wolfe, the fired freelance editor for the New York Times, has not only gone public to defend her pro-Biden tweet but published a piece titled “I’m a Biased Journalist and I’m Okay With That.”
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a leading voice for advocacy journalism. Indeed, Hannah-Jones has declared “all journalism is activism.” Her 1619 Project has been challenged as deeply flawed and she has a long record as a journalist of intolerance, controversial positions on rioting, and fostering conspiracy theories. Hannah-Jones would later help lead the effort at the Times to get rid of an editor and apologize for publishing a column from Sen. Tom Cotten as inaccurate and inflammatory. Polls show trust in the media at an all-time low with less than 20 percent of citizens trusting television or print media. Yet, reporters and academics continue to destroy the core principles that sustain journalism and ultimately the role of a free press in our society.
Notably, writers who have been repeatedly charged with false or misleading columns are some of the greatest advocates for dropping objectivity in journalism. Now the leaders of media companies are joining this self-destructive movement. They are not speaking of columnists or cable hosts who routinely share opinions. They are speaking of actual journalists, the people who are relied upon to report the news. Saying that “Objectivity has got to go” is, of course, liberating. You can dispense with the necessities of neutrality and balance. You can cater to your “base” like columnists and opinion writers. Sharing the opposing view is now dismissed as “bothsidesism.” Done. No need to give credence to opposing views. It is a familiar reality for those of us in higher education, which has been increasingly intolerant of opposing or dissenting views.
According to USASpending.gov, a database of spending by the US federal government, the Department of Defense (DoD) awarded tens of millions of dollars in contracts to Hunter Biden’s Metabiota labs. Metabiota is a San Francisco-based health startup known for tracking epidemics. The company is mentioned on the Hunter Biden laptop. Hunter Biden’s investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, invested $500,000 in Metabiota, and the company went on to raise several million more from investment giants like Goldman Sachs. The firm has biolabs in several countries, including Ukraine, where Hunter played an important role in the company’s activities. In their pitches to potential backers, Hunter bragged that they had done more than just get financing for the company; they had also helped it “get new customers,” including “government agencies” in the case of Metabiota, according to Daily Mail.
Government data shows Hunter Biden secured millions in government funding and grants for Metabiota after he became part owner of the firm. Metabiota was one of the 46 Ukrainian Bioweapon labs that the US government partnered with, per DC Draino. Following Hunter Biden and his company, Rosemont Seneca’s acquisition of a 50% ownership stake in the Metabiota, the government contracts and grants started flowing. Before the Rosemont Senaca agreement, Metabiota was given a $349,513 contract from the government. Following Hunter’s involvement, Metabiota was awarded a contract with the Department of Defense worth $23.9 million. Before Hunter was involved, Metabiota received a $649,882 grant from the US government. After Hunter became involved, Metabiota received several million in government grants.
According to Daily Mail, Hunter Biden connected a corrupt Ukrainian gas company called Burisma with the Metabiota for an undisclosed “scientific project.” The outlet added that Metabiota is supposedly a medical data company, but in 2014, Metabiota Vice President Mary Guttieri contacted Hunter explaining how they could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia,” an unusual ambition for a biotech corporation. “Thanks so much for taking time out of your intense schedule to meet with Kathy and I on Tuesday. We very much enjoyed our discussion. As promised, I’ve prepared the attached memo, which provides an overview of Metabiota, our engagement in Ukraine, and how we can potentially leverage our team, networks, and concepts to assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society,” the email reads.
First son Hunter Biden and his legal team sent a slew of letters to government agencies on Wednesday demanding investigations into the dissemination of materials from his laptop, while also threatening to sue Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A source familiar with the letters, obtained by CBS News, indicated to the outlet that the scandal-plagued Biden intends to take the initiative in combatting negative press and Republican-led investigations. “He is not going to sit quietly by as questionable characters continue to violate his rights and media organizations peddling in lies try to defame him,” the source said. The letter to Carlson demands that the Fox host retract statements describing a “money laundering scheme” connected to Biden allegedly paying his father “rent” money.
The letter acknowledges that other outlets have retracted such claims. Other letters went to the Delaware attorney general, the IRS, and the Department of Justice seeking investigations related to the publication of the laptop, the authenticity of which has since been verified. The letters appear to mark a direct admission from Biden’s legal team that the laptop does indeed belong to Biden and that the contents are authentic. “This failed dirty political trick directly resulted in the exposure, exploitation, and manipulation of Mr. Biden’s private and personal information,” read the letter to Delaware AG Kathy Jennings. “Mr. Mac Isaac’s intentional, reckless and unlawful conduct allowed for hundreds of gigabytes of Mr. Biden’s personal data, without any discretion, to be circulated around the Internet.
Specifically, Biden wants investigations into laptop repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, at whose store the younger Biden left the laptop, as well as various Trump aides connected to the publication of its contents. Biden alleges that many of these aides may have broken the law in obtaining and distributing the laptop’s contents. Biden also has asked the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of Marco Polo, the organization operated by former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler that published a lengthy report on the laptop’s contents. Reports emerged in December that Hunter Biden was mounting a legal and media blitz to combat conservative criticism and allegations of legal improprieties. A source at the White House expressed concerns to the Washington Post about Hunter’s plans at the time, saying “[n]o one thinks this strategy of putting Hunter Biden front and center is smart… No one, including the White House, thinks this is a smart strategy.”
Trump’s firing of Comey on May 9 was nothing like his hit TV show, The Apprentice. The boss couldn’t move on to the next episode, nor would the ousted employee quietly walk away. The firestorm that erupted in the aftermath of Comey being axed required a do-over, in part because of shifting White House explanations for his dismissal. So Trump sat down two days later for an interview with Lester Holt, the Nightly News anchor for NBC. But instead of tamping down the controversy, it fanned the Russia flames for the media. A tweet from the show on May 11 set the narrative for the Holt interview: “Trump on firing Comey: ‘I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.’” Those few words, by suggesting Comey’s firing was aimed at getting the FBI inquiry off his back, provided fresh ammunition to anti-Trumpers.
The full interview, which was available online, presented a more nuanced story, and appeared to reflect what his advisers told him: firing Comey could prolong, not end, the investigation. Trump told Holt, soon after the controversial words, that the firing “might even lengthen out the investigation” and he expected the FBI “to continue the investigation,” to do it “properly,” and “to get to the bottom.” The media focused on the “Russia thing” quote; the New York Times did five stories over the next week citing the “Russia thing” remarks but leaving out the fuller context. The Post and CNN, by comparison, included additional language in their first-day story. The White House was upset and repeatedly asked reporters to look at the full transcript, according to a former Trump aide and two reporters.
On the heels of the NBC interview came a leak of Comey’s notes of private conversations with Trump, including one at a dinner in January where Trump was said to have asked the FBI director to pledge loyalty to him. The Times piece reported that the inquiry into Trump and Russia “has since gained momentum as investigators have developed new evidence and leads.” Comey, once out of office, had his internal memos leaked to the Times, hoping that might “help prompt” the appointment of a special counsel, he testified to Congress a few weeks later. At the same hearing, he criticized the paper’s story of February 14, one of whose authors was Michael Schmidt, the reporter who received his leaked memos. On June 8, at a Senate hearing, Comey was asked whether the Times story was “almost entirely wrong.” He said yes.
A Jan. 25 report by the U.K government showed the risks of serious adverse effects from mRNA COVID-19 vaccines largely outweigh the benefits, according to John Campbell, Ph.D., who analyzed the U.K. data used for the report. U.K. health officials knew about the data in October 2022, but didn’t change their recommendations for the shots until the day they released the report and announced they will no longer recommend COVID-19 boosters for healthy people under 50. They also said they will discontinue free distribution of the primary two-shot series. In his latest video, Campbell, a retired nurse teacher in England, summarized the results of the report, which calculated how many people had to be vaccinated in different age groups and risk profiles in order to avoid a single hospitalization.
Campbell compared the results to peer-reviewed data on serious adverse events reported following mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. The report was based on an October 2022 UK Health Security Agency presentation to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI). Despite the “massive shift” in vaccine risk-benefit analysis that was already clear in the October presentation, Campbell said, “the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation carried on without modification to the autumn booster program.” “My question to the Joint Committee on Vaccination Immunisation is why?” said Campbell, who noted that the agency is 85% funded by industry.
Summary of the analysis: ‘number needed to vaccinate’ versus risk of serious adverse events The U.K. study analyzed the “number needed to vaccinate” by age group to prevent either hospitalization or “serious hospitalization,” which is when someone needs oxygen or a ventilator — though Campbell noted that it is common, in general, to oxygenate in hospitals. For example, healthcare providers would need to vaccinate 43,000 people in the 50 to 59 age group to prevent one hospitalization and more than 256,400 people in that age group to prevent a serious hospitalization. Campbell compared the numbers in the report to a peer-reviewed study published in Vaccine that re-analyzed the original phase 3 trials for Pfizer and Moderna to identify serious adverse events of special interest following the mRNA vaccines.
In the Moderna trials, the risk of serious adverse events was 15.1 per 10,000 doses. In other words, 1 in 662 vaccines administered produced a serious adverse event. In the Pfizer trials, the risk of serious adverse events was 10.1 per 10,000, which breaks down to 1 in 990 vaccines administered producing a serious adverse event. On average, there were 12.5 serious adverse events per 10,000 people vaccinated, which is 1 in 800. That means there were a total of 1,250 serious adverse events for every 1 million people vaccinated, according to the study.
“What we see with Farrar is a recipe for disaster when it comes to imposing experimental medical technology on the population during public health crises..”
The World Health Organization (WHO) last month named Dr. Jeremy Farrar its new chief scientist. Farrar will step down Feb. 25 as director of the Wellcome Trust, the largest funder of medical research in the U.K. and one of the largest in the world. Farrar and the Wellcome Trust are less well-known relative to similar global public health giants, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and that’s “to people’s detriment,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb told journalist Kim Iversen on a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show”: “If what is essentially a power grab by the World Health Organization gets put into force, then Jeremy Farrar will have essentially total authority to impose upon member states what medical responses they would have to implement in the event of another pandemic.”
Webb referred to proposals in the works to transform the WHO from an advisory organization to a global governing body whose policies would be legally binding for member states in the case of a global health emergency. While at Wellcome Trust, Farrar was the architect of several key WHO COVID-19 pandemic policy directives, including lockdowns, masking and mass vaccination. “What we see with Farrar is a recipe for disaster when it comes to imposing experimental medical technology on the population during public health crises. This is a guy who was very much invested in this stuff,” Webb said. It’s something out of ‘Brave New World’ Iversen asked about links between the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
While there is no direct link, Webb said, “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a lot of these other organizations, including the Wellcome Trust, are very much pushing an agenda that I would argue is sort of the fusion of Big Pharma and Big Tech.” “Essentially Big Pharma is looking for new markets and new products and Big Tech can help them accomplish that,” she said. Over the last several decades, Big Pharma and “billionaire philanthropists” have come to dominate the WHO, Webb told Iversen. They are the ones, “in my opinion, executing this power grab more than the WHO itself,” she said. There are also key ties between Big Tech and national security agencies, Webb said. Farrar has connections to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, Webb said.
A substantial portion of the documents on Julian Assange were destroyed by the Swedish Prosecution Authority, which investigated him for rape in a criminal investigation opened and closed three times between August 2010 and November 2019. The materials destroyed were correspondence between the Swedish Prosecution Authority (SPA) and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) which was providing the SPA with support on the case, since Assange was under investigation in Sweden but had been in London since 2010. The correspondence between the SPA and CPS is absolutely crucial to understand and reconstruct what really happened in the Swedish rape investigation. That investigation was ultimately dropped once and for all without Assange ever being charged, but for almost a decade has deprived him of the empathy of public opinion.
Especially the empathy of that segment of the public more sensitive to the WikiLeaks revelations on war crimes and torture, often the segment also more mindful of women’s rights. The highly anomalous handling of the Swedish case by prosecutor Marianne Ny resulted in justice for no one, contributed to the devastation of Assange’s health, cost British taxpayers at least 13.2 million pounds to keep the Ecuadorian embassy under siege by Scotland Yard from 2012 to 2015, and resulted in the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention decision that Sweden and the United Kingdom had arbitrarily detained Assange since 2010, in the case of Sweden the first time the UN Group had ever made such a decision in the country’s history. In September 2019, the then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture who had investigated the case, Nils Melzer, listed fifty perceived due process violations, including “Proactive manipulation of evidence”, in an official letter to the Swedish government.
[..] The fact that documents were destroyed by the Swedish Prosecution Authority has just surfaced thanks to our lengthy FOIA litigation, and comes almost six years after that very same FOIA litigation unearthed that key documents were destroyed by the Crown Prosecution Service. It is now clear that both of the authorities handling the Swedish case, the SPA and the CPS, destroyed a large part of their email exchanges. Why? What did those documents contain and on whose instructions were those materials destroyed? Now more than ever some sort of explanation is urgently needed, considering that the United States is currently acting through the Crown Prosecution Service itself in the extradition proceeding against Julian Assange.
Since 2015, we have been engaged in trench warfare in Sweden, Britain, the United States and Australia to access the full documentation on the case under FOIA, represented by seven lawyers. This investigative work has allowed us to find the answer to one of the key questions around the Swedish case: why did Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, who reopened the rape case in September 2010 after Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Eva Finné, had immediately dismissed it (because, in her judgement, the suspect’s conduct “disclosed no crime at all”) refuse to question Assange in London for six years?
I suggest we have three “pairings” of people. In Russia, there’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. In the US, we have Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre. In the EU, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell. Of course, there’s also President Biden and Putin; the EU has no president, it only has von der Leyen. Likewise, you at times see Russian and American Defense misters, but the EU doesn’t have one of those either. It sort of makes do with Borrell.
For the three pairings, the job titles are different, but these are the people you see talking most when Ukraine is the topic. Certainly Lavrov, but also Zakharova, are diplomats. Blinken and Borrell like to call themselves that, but they are obviously not. The job of a true diplomat is to always leave channels open to talk with everyone, and never condemn or speak ill of, anyone -in public. It’s bad manners. But Blinken is a neocon who’s been cheering on various US invasions for 30 years, and that disqualifies him from diplomacy. As for Jean-Pierre, let’s not even discuss her. We don’t want to insult Zakharova by even trying to make a comparison.
Von der Leyen and Borrell have the disadvantage that their power is not genuine. They have never been elected to their posts, other than by a small group of insiders that are easily controlled. Moreover, the EU has no army, it depends 100% on the US, so independent decisions are out of the question. The EU is talking again about its own army, and even about building its own fighter jet, but each would cost at least 10 years, and thus be useless in the current situation.
Perhaps that’s why Von der Leyen and Borrell talk more, and more aggressively, than the others. But with that talk, along with the sanctions they have made the bloc’s policy, they have brought a lot of misery to the people in their member countries. Of course, they claim this is inevitable, and it’s all Russia’s fault, but that is merely a claim. Just like the idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was totally unprovoked. That practically no country outside the “collective west” think it’s true says a lot.
And the next colossal and fully unnecessary blunder appears to come next week, when the European parliament is poised to declare Russia a “Terrorist State”. What they hope to achieve by that, who knows? Bragging rights? Diplomats don’t do those. Even the US refuses to go there, because “none of these efforts at keeping some kind of potential negotiations open would be possible if the US slapped a ‘terrorist state’ label on Russia.” The ‘terrorist state’ label comes straight from Zelensky, and the EU appears set to still follow him closely. While the US is creating some distance from him. The talk in Turkey last week between the US and Russian intelligence chiefs should not be overlooked. And yes, that’s right, the EU doesn’t have an intelligence chief.
When Zelensky and Poland tried to lure the US into a NATO war against Russia in reaction to the “missile over Poland”, the US for the first time said a firm “NO”. A turning point? It’s the US making clear they will not enter the war. Because as Lidia Misnik wrote: ‘The US Won’t Sacrifice Chicago For Warsaw’What’s more, as Batiushka said, “In Kiev, Warsaw, the Baltics and in London, they should remember what the Americans did to [Saddam] Hussein and Bin Laden. They are quite capable of doing the same again, pulling the plug on them all.”
The best thing to do for the EU would be to get rid of both Borrell and von der Leyen, and adopt a less antagonistic and more diplomatic position vs Russia, but that may be hard to achieve, given the power structure in Brussels. Still, there must be a few French and German real diplomats left. But, ironically (?!), the US may not agree. They may want for the EU to continue it’s self-destructive path for a while, at the same time that the US washes its hands clean(er). European pain is American gain in many ways. Just look at EU purchases of weapons and LNG. Once Europe freezes over, this will not be a viable attitude, but for now…until Christmas…
The EU’s policies towards Moscow promoted by foreign policy chief Josep Borrell only deepen the divisions in the bloc, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday. Earlier this week, the top EU diplomat proposed six points to serve as guidelines for diplomacy towards Russia amid the Ukraine conflict. Commenting on Borrell’s plans, Zakharova said that while it is “too soon” to speak about what it may entail, Moscow “does not harbor any illusions” about the bloc’s political thinking. “Unfortunately, the ideas which are being sold to EU members by… Borrell do not contain even a hint of the EU’s strategic vision [regarding Russia].”
“They only work to deepen the … divisions in Europe,” the spokeswoman stated, adding that the EU has not proposed any measures to solve the numerous problems in bilateral relations. Revealing his six-point plan, Borrell described the stand-off with Russia as a “geopolitical battle,” and insisted that the EU should, among other things, isolate Russia internationally, hold it accountable for its alleged misdeeds, while cooperating with the bloc’s partners and supporting civil rights groups. While trying to root out any alternative points of view, the EU has fully embraced the idea of isolating Russia, Zakharova said, adding that “this is hopeless and will only impose costs on EU countries and their citizens, who are forced to pay out of their own pockets for the strategic blunders of their politicians.”
“It’s emblematic that most global capitals are not ready to follow … Brussels, which, in its medieval logic, is bringing the world back to the age of schism, high walls, and besieged fortresses,” she said. Her comments come as EU countries face protests over high energy prices and surging costs of living, which have been worsened by the sanctions on Russia. In late October, thousands of Czech citizens rallied in Prague to decry the rampant inflation, while calling on the government to begin direct talks with Moscow over gas imports.
EU member state Hungary has repeatedly spoken out against the sanctions. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto claimed that they “have failed” and have only backfired on the EU and damaged the economy. Following the start of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine in late February, relations between the EU and Russia deteriorated rapidly as Western countries imposed unprecedented sanctions on Moscow. In June, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov claimed that EU-Russian ties had frayed to the point that it would be difficult to damage them any further.
You can just about watch the EU under the present “leadership” commit hara kiri in real time.
The European Parliament has prepared a resolution recognizing Russia as a “terrorist state” – to be subject of a vote held during a session in Strasbourg next week, according to a spokesperson’s briefing at a Friday news conference. The largely symbolic resolution was drafted by the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) and cites Russia’s “intimidation and destruction of Ukrainians as a nation,” according a draft previously seen by Euronews. The political blocs Renew Europe and the European Conservatives and Reformists are also said to be backing a formal declaration which could come as early as next Wednesday.
While not legally binding, the resolution can be used for the EU to slap further sanctions on Moscow, and can create momentum for other countries like the UK to adopt the ‘terror state’ label for Russia. However, the UK has so far resisted these calls from some individual British politicians and officials. So far, the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been the first to legally recognize Russia as a terrorist state. The Biden administration has also thus far resisted some isolated Congressional calls to do so, as the Kremlin has warned such a measure would destroy all ties and communications. It would make negotiated settlement in Ukraine almost an impossibility.
So far it’s especially been the Pentagon which has sought to keep an open line of communications. The CIA director William Burns was also in Turkey this week meeting with this Russian intelligence counterpart. But none of these efforts at keeping some kind of potential negotiations open would be possible if the US slapped a ‘terrorist state’ label on Russia. The US is also chiefly interested in pursuing prisoner swaps, with citizens like Brittney Griner now serving long prison sentences.
There are things shifting and moving, especially on the US side. It’s very much the question if that will happen fast enough for the people of Europe, who will be cold, and Ukraine, who will be cold and in the dark..
We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.
Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.
16-year old Jouke whom the police tried to kill. Gov’t now says it was a error of judgment, and the cop is at home sick feeling very bad. But look where the bullet hole is. As Jouke says here, they could have shot at the tires, huge targets, and you stand still within seconds.
"I was saved by an angel." These are the words of Jouke, the underage boy which the Mark Rutte's police shot in a demonstration by Dutch farmers in Heerenveen. pic.twitter.com/XThDhAAX1d
“Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”
– Lu Xun (Chinese writer) 1921.
Sanctions imposed on Russian and Belarusian fertilizer producers are akin to weapons of mass destruction in the scale of the damage they will likely cause over the next few years, the founder of chemical giant EuroChem has claimed. “The EU sanctions mean suffering, famine and migration flows for many hundreds of millions of people,” Andrey Melnichenko said in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche on Thursday. “Sanctions targeting food and energy are economic weapons of mass destruction. They hit innocent people the worst. I have no doubt that billions of people will feel its effects,” he warned. Suffering people will want to hold those responsible accountable, and the EU won’t be able to shift its culpability, the businessman added.
It was not Russia or the US, but EU members like Lithuania and Estonia, and also European leaders Germany, France and Italy, which chose to disrupt the operation of his chemical empire with sanctions, he explained. EuroChem, a leading fertilizer producer, is headquartered in Switzerland, where Melnichenko also lives with his family. The EU and Switzerland targeted the company and its owner with sanctions aimed at hurting the Russian economy in retaliation for Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine. Melnichenko argued he personally was unjustly punished for being a rich Russian, dismissing claims that he had any influence on the Russian government. He warned of the catastrophic consequences that the “carpet-bombing” of the Russian economy will cause over a few years.
He assessed that EuroChem products helped feed almost 274 million people. With its fertilizers not produced and sold due to sanctions, the effect would be far worse than what is happening now over the cut in grain exports from Ukraine, he said. “The G7 countries, with their one billion citizens, see themselves as the world’s moral leaders. But they have overridden the interests of the other seven billion people,” he said. Russia and its ally Belarus, another target for Western sanctions, account for 17% of global fertilizer supply, the tycoon said. Exports from those two countries dropped by 30- 40% amid the stand-off with the West, and it’s the most vulnerable people, who are paying the price, he warned. “We don’t know whether people in the third world are already dying, or if they are ‘just’ starving and migrating away,” he said. With social tensions skyrocketing over hunger and fuel shortages, there will be a surge of violence, he predicted. “Perhaps jihad will raise its black flag again. These are not wild theories, but facts.”
“.. the Russians sent in their junior varsity and systematically wiped up the floor with Ukraine’s 250,000-man, NATO-trained (ha!) army of neo-Nazis..”
It looks like someone has called room service in a certain Swiss Fortress of Solitude and ordered der Schwabenklaus’s ass to be handed to him on a platter with a side of sauerkraut. The assisted suicide of Western Civ, Euro division, has been interrupted by peasant uprisings, first in the Netherlands, now spreading to Germany, Italy, and Poland. The farmers are on the march. They are coming for you, Klaus, and your World Economic Forum’s legion of implanted government goblins. The governments of virtually all the nations of Western Civ have become enemies of their people. It’s been obvious in the USA for quite some time, but our preposterous attempt to turn Ukraine into a forward NATO missile base next door to Russia finally revealed the villainous rot in Euroland, too.
Cut yourselves off, Germany, from Russian oil and natural gas? Whose bright idea was that? (Hint: Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who else? He supposedly runs that joint, doesn’t he?) Plan B, you Deutsches Volk now realize, is to burn your furniture to stay warm at Christmas. America’s gambit to goad Russia into a Ukrainian quagmire turned into such a mighty fail that the US news media doesn’t even report on the doings there anymore. Which are: the Russians sent in their junior varsity and systematically wiped up the floor with Ukraine’s 250,000-man, NATO-trained (ha!) army of neo-Nazis. That is not an empty pejorative, by the way. They really are explicitly true believers in old Adolf’s mid-20th century program of exterminating the Russ people next door. Mr. Putin wasn’t kidding around when he highlighted that feature of his operation.
So, now the heart of Euroland looks forward to a new era without energy and without modern industry, meaning what? Well, without modern life (maybe without life, period). Der Schwabenklaus outlined that pretty clearly, too, with the by-now shopworn slogan that “You vill own nussing and you vill be heppy.” It was such an absurd maxim that many who pretend to think took it as a sort of joke. And, let’s face it, Klaus really does appear to be a comic figure — the weirdo tunic he sometimes wears, the Hollywood B-movie accent. But not so many are laughing now as the lights go out from Galway Bay to the Gulf of Riga.
Western nations have failed in their attempts to destabilize the Russian economy with sanctions, President Vladimir Putin said at a government meeting on economic issues on Friday. “As a result of the actions of the Central Bank, as a result of the measures that were taken in a timely manner by the government … a lot was done. And the so-called blitzkrieg that our ill-wishers attempted in relation to Russia, the economic blitzkrieg, of course, has failed,” he said. The president, nevertheless, acknowledged that the restrictions have hurt the country’s economy and “many risks still remain.” Putin has urged that in response to the current challenges associated with Western sanctions, Russian energy companies should work for the long-term perspective.
Gasification of the country’s regions and diversification of exports should be the key tasks for the government, he stressed. According to the Russian leader, the government is already considering options for developing railway, sea and pipeline infrastructure for the supply of Russian oil and oil products to friendly countries, as well as gas transportation infrastructure to increase gas supplies to Asia and the domestic market. Talking about the general economic situation, he pointed out that the world markets “are still in disarray due to the West’s calls to abandon Russian energy resources.” Putin recalled that the price of Brent oil surged to $130 per barrel amid fears of a possible shortage, but in recent days prices have fallen by $20-$30 due to projections of a global economic slowdown.
The Russian president reminded his audience that he had repeatedly warned European leaders about the current situation on the global energy market, but no one listened. “They treated our warnings so dismissively. This is exactly the situation that we have warned about, this is happening today,” he noted. Putin also indicated that if Western countries continue their sanctions policy it could lead to catastrophic consequences for the global energy market. Anti-Russia sanctions cause much more damage to those who introduce them, he said. At the same time, the situation on the Russian energy market is stable despite the sanctions regime, the president explained. According to him, oil and gas condensate production in June reached 10.7 million barrels per day, which is 500,000 barrels more than in the previous month. Overall, Russia’s oil output jumped 3.5% since the start of the year. Gas production for the period from January to May decreased slightly, by merely 2%, the president added.
Putin threats?!
Ukraine war: Accept our terms or brace for the worst, Putin tells Kyiv euronews pic.twitter.com/iu1L06hdch
Men have always sought to dominate and forcefully order the lives of others. This is part of human nature. It dates back to before the days of Noah. Early empires sought power and wealth, by conquest. Monarchies and feudalism dominated the Middle Ages in Europe, South Asia, and East Asia. Then, in a consolidation of monarchist power, colonialism was rampant from the 1550s to the 1950s. Only a few large and economically strong colonies broke away from their parent countries, before 1900. As colonialism began to wane, collectivism started to re-shape the world, mostly after 1916. Ponder the far-reaching effects of these brutal collectivists: the Soviet Union (1917-1991), Nazi Germany (1933-1945), Cambodia (1967-1978), Cuba (1959 to present), and Communist China (1943 to present).
In all, these and other dictatorial regimes killed more than 133 million people in the 20th Century, imprisoned hundreds of millions, and placed billions of people under the yoke of contrived collective economic systems, confiscating their wealth and land. Most of this killing and suffering was at the hands of communists or socialists with grand utopian visions of the future (with special status just for themselves) or a “new world order”. To their way of thinking, this justified taking the lives and property of their countrymen, and often also those in other countries, through invasions.The latest in a long string of socialist despots is coming to the fore. This time it is with the new excuses of “protecting the environment” and preventing or reversing “climate change”. Many of them use the blanket term “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) to encapsulate their plans.
In effect, they want to control every aspect of human life, all around the world, to fulfill their supranational socialistic goals. These are globalists. As a key enabling tool, they want to implement a global electronic currency, with every transaction tracked. In toto, they have is a bigger plan of action than that of the multi-national Marxist-Leninist communist conspiracy of the 20th century. Most of the 20th Century communists wanted to keep nation-states intact. But the 21st Century globalists want a true world government, with all state and national governments subsumed for “the greater good.” The level of collectivism and redistribution of wealth that they covet is much larger than their Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist predecessors ever attempted. These new “green” socialist schemers want The Whole Enchilada: a reset to global government, with themselves at the top.
As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat. That is part of the reason why Nato issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia. Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by Nato on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, Nato advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.
According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China. In response, Beijing accused Nato of “maliciously attacking and smearing” it, and warned that the alliance was “provoking confrontation”. Not unreasonably, Beijing believes Nato has strayed well out of its sphere of supposed “defensive” interest: the North Atlantic. Nato was founded in the wake of the Second World War expressly as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The ensuing Cold War was primarily a territorial and ideological battle for the future of Europe, with the ever-present mutual threat of nuclear annihilation.
So how, Beijing might justifiably wonder, does China – on the other side of the globe – fit into Nato’s historic “defensive” mission? How are Chinese troops or missiles now threatening Europe or the US in ways they weren’t before? How are Americans or Europeans suddenly under threat of military conquest from China? The current Nato logic reads something like this: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February is proof that the Kremlin has ambitions to recreate its former Soviet empire in Europe. China is growing its military power and has similar imperial designs towards the rival, breakaway state of Taiwan, as well as western Pacific islands. And because Beijing and Moscow are strengthening their strategic ties in the face of western opposition, Nato has to presume that their shared goal is to bring western civilisation crashing down.
Or as last week’s Nato mission statement proclaimed: “The deepening strategic partnership between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests.” But if anyone is subverting the “rules-based international order”, a standard the West regularly invokes but never defines, it looks to be Nato itself – or the US, as the hand that wields the Nato hammer. That is certainly the way it looks to Beijing. In its response, China argued: “Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, [Nato] has not yet abandoned its thinking and practice of creating ‘enemies’ … It is Nato that is creating problems around the world.”
The top diplomats from the United States and China voiced guarded hope Saturday of preventing tensions from spiralling out of control as they held rare talks on the Indonesian island of Bali. Neither side expected major breakthroughs between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, but the two powers have moderated their tone and stepped up interaction at a time when the West is focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “In a relationship as complex and consequential as the one between the United States and China, there is a lot to talk about,” Blinken said as he opened discussions at a resort hotel in Bali, where the pair attended a Group of 20 gathering the day before.
“We very much look forward to a productive and constructive conversation,” Blinken said. Wang said that President Xi Jinping believed in cooperation as well as “mutual respect” between the world’s two largest economic powers and that there needed to be “normal exchanges” between them. “We do need to work together to ensure that this relationship will continue to move forward along the right track,” Wang said in front of US and Chinese flags before a day of talks that will include a working lunch. Daniel Kritenbrink, the top US diplomat for East Asia, earlier said that Blinken will seek “guardrails” in the US rivalry with China and do “everything possible to ensure that we prevent any miscalculation that could lead inadvertently to conflict”.
It is Blinken and Wang’s first in-person meeting since October. They are expected to prepare for virtual talks in the coming weeks between Xi and President Joe Biden. After a long chill during the pandemic between the two countries, since last month their defence, finance and national security chiefs as well as their top military commanders have all spoken. China’s state-run Global Times, known for its criticism of the United States, wrote that the growing diplomacy “underscored the two sides’ consensus on avoiding escalating confrontation”.
The European Union has accelerated the export of Ukrainian grain, almost doubling the volume of shipments in June, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell reported in his Twitter on Friday. According to him, 5.8 million tons of grain have been transported by the EU from Ukraine via so-called “solidarity lanes” since April. Borrell also wrote that “1.2 billion people are severely exposed to the combination of rising food and energy prices and tightening financial conditions.” He once again accused Moscow of “blocking millions of tons of grain in Ukrainian storage facilities, using food as a weapon of war.” Western nations have repeatedly blamed Russia for blocking Ukrainian ports, making it impossible to ship the country’s grain.
Moscow has responded that it would guarantee safe passage for grain shipments if Kiev clears its ports of mines. Last month, President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is not impeding exports, and criticized the West for its “cynical attitude” towards the food supply of the developing nations, which have been worst affected by soaring prices. He said rising inflation in the West was “a result of their own irresponsible macroeconomic policies.” Ukraine, a major agricultural producer, has been unable to export its grain by sea due to the ongoing conflict, with an estimated 22 million to 25 million tons of grain currently stuck in the country’s ports.
One solution on the table is for the EU to import liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States. However, shipments of American LNG to the EU and UK have already increased since the political tensions between Europe and Russia began. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the US exported 74% of its LNG to Europe in the first four months of 2022, which is up from 34% the previous year. But this was apparently not enough to keep European energy prices stable. This raises a fundamental issue, which is whether the European Union can actually afford to maintain its sanctions on Russia.
Members’ economic models are simply not compatible with the reality that their sanctions are creating, and this is already hurting people’s wellbeing and leading to social and political unrest. The European Union’s foreign policy is supposed to follow the doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” but what is happening is neither strategic nor an act of autonomy. No doubt the situation in Ukraine is horrifying and has led Europeans to question the existing security architecture of the region, but, if the latest strategic concept of NATO is any suggestion, the shots are being called from Washington.
Famed international relations scholar John Mearsheimer recently lamented in a speech that, “History will judge the United States and its allies with abundant harshness for its foolish policy on Ukraine.” In fact, the prevailing allied policy on Ukraine is doing everything to ensure that the conflict becomes protracted – which has the dual threat of destroying Ukraine and hurting Europe’s future economic prospects. That’s because the longer the conflict continues, or if it continues indefinitely, it means the bifurcation between Russia and the West will be permanent. And it logically follows that this will impact the economic model of European countries, particularly of Germany. If that is the eventuality we are headed for, then the EU’s fate becomes a question.
Already, people in the Czech capital of Prague are beginning to joke that in a few years Europe will be nothing more than a summer holiday spot for the Americans and Chinese. But are there really enough jobs in the tourism industry for all of us here? And can we all withstand the winter off-season? Jokes aside, I believe that Germany’s trade deficit is significant. In a few days, the trend could be more pronounced if other industrial European countries report similar deficits. At the very least, this should sound the alarm on exactly what the European Union’s long-term plans are vis-á-vis Russia and whether or not European industry can feasibly survive with sanctions on Russian energy. My bet is that it can’t. And this goes to show just how destructive blindly following Washington’s foreign policy is, time and time again, for Europe.
Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: “The fact that the Russian Foreign Minister spent most of his time during the talks not in the room, but outside it, highlights the fact that the Russian government is not a single millimetre closer to having talks.” Can you even make any sense out of what she said? Outside what room? Utter nonsense. The German public should be aware of the fact that their Foreign Minister Annalena is lying to them. Lavrov was among the audience the moment the G20 meeting started and about two hours later he began to hold bilateral talks with his colleagues who attended this forum in a room next door. This is what other ministers did as well, since in-person forums are held exactly for the purpose of holding meetings and having contacts.
Otherwise, everyone would have gone online or sent out their speeches. Or, maybe Baerbock thinks that the foreign ministers of Indonesia, Argentina, Brazil and other countries also were in the wrong room? On the other hand, Germans are already beginning to realise who is in power in their country. More than half of the German citizens (58 percent) believe that German Foreign Minister Baerbock should have personally met and held talks with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the G20 ministerial which is taking place on the Indonesian island of Bali. On Friday, Der Spiegel published a survey by Civey pollster to that effect.
Now, the truth about Baerbock. She said this because the G7’s plan to boycott Russia at the G20 failed. Nobody supported the Western regimes. That is why they are fuming now. Lavrov made his schedule in advance, including in it the G20 meeting and a dinner on behalf of the hosts, as well as numerous bilateral contacts and communication with international media. The materials, photos and videos are available on the Foreign Ministry’s website and on social media. And neither Annalena nor anyone else can change reality with their lies.
The U.S. Army on Friday said that roughly 40,000 National Guardsmen and 22,000 Reservists who have refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will be barred from their duties, effectively cutting their pay and benefits. “Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement to Military.com. The announcement comes one week after the deadline for the Army National Guard passed that required soldiers to get the shots in their arms.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in November said that members of the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard who refused to get vaccinated would be barred from participating in trainings and their pay would be blocked. Austin also warned that the continued refusal to get vaccinated could result in “separation” or expulsion from the service. The move reportedly comes as servicemen prepare for annual summer trainings that help them hone their military skills and ensure they are ready should they need to be deployed. Though servicemen who remain dubious on the merits of the vaccine will feel the repercussions of disobeying a directive, Army officials said they will continue to work with soldiers to keep them in the service — whether through informing them on the benefits of the vaccine or in rare cases making sure they qualify for exemption status.
“We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career,” Director of the Army Guard, Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, said in a statement to Military.com. “We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed.” Roughly 13 percent of the Army National Guard and 12 percent of Army Reservists remain unvaccinated — a margin that could prove crippling to the ranks as the service struggles with low recruitment.
In December 2020, the Trudeau government unveiled their new climate plan, with a focus on reducing nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer by 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. “Fertilizers play a major role in the agriculture sector’s success and have contributed to record harvests in the last decade. They have helped drive increases in Canadian crop yields, grain sales, and exports,” a news release from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada reads. “However, nitrous oxide emissions, particularly those associated with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use have also grown significantly. That is why the Government of Canada has set the national fertilizer emissions reduction target, which is part of the commitment to reduce total GHG emissions in Canada by 40-45% by 2030….”
This is a tacit admission that any attempt to lower admissions by reducing nitrogen fertilizer will consequently lower crop yields over the next decade, hurting the Agriculture sector and, more importantly, hurting farmers. And indeed, according to a report from Fertilizer Canada: “Total Emission Reduction puts a cap on the total emissions allowable from fertilizer at 30% below 2020 levels. As the yield of Canadian crops is directly linked to proper fertilizer application this creates a ceiling on Canadian agricultural productivity well below 2020 levels…. It is estimated that a 30% absolute emission reduction for an a farmer with 1000 acres of canola and 1000 acres of wheat, stands to have their profit reduced by approximately $38,000 – $40,500/ annually. In 2020, Western Canadian farmers planted approximately 20.8 million acres of canola. Using these values, cumulatively farm revenues from canola could be reduced by $396M – $441M on an annual basis. Wheat famers could experience a reduction of $400M.”
Moreover, Fertilizer Canada doesn’t believe that forcibly decreasing fertilizer use will even lower greenhouse gases but could lead to carbon leakage in other jurisdictions. Nonetheless, Trudeau’s government is moving forward, with farmer’s groups speaking to Farmers Forum now wondering if he’s intentionally trying to cause a food shortage — which Trudeau previously told Canadians to prepare for. “We’ve seen from the global pandemic to the war in Ukraine significant disruptions of supply chains around the world, which is resulting in higher prices for consumers and democracies like ours, and resulting in significant shortages and projected shortages of food and energy in places around the world,” Trudeau said. “This is going to be a difficult time,” he continued, “because of the war, because of the recovery from the pandemic. And Canadians will do what we always do: we’ll be there for each other.”
For the first time in over 40 years, the U.S. economy is dealing with widespread shortages. Parts are unavailable for manufacturers when they need them. Airlines abruptly cancel flights. Railroads and trucks are cutting shipments. Food shelves in some areas are depleted with some areas reporting a lack of meat supplies, milk, or other essential food items. Shortages and empty shelves are characteristic of economies where governments control and allocate resources. They are not characteristic of America’s free-market economy. The only other times America has faced shortages were during World Wars or during the 1970s. Government-imposed price controls were directly responsible for shortages in the early 1970s. When businesses were unable to raise prices to sell their goods at a profit, they stopped producing, which created the shortages.
Once the price controls were removed, the shortages ended. Also in the 1970s, government price controls on oil and gas led to severe shortages on both. By the end of the decade, there were long lines of cars waiting at gas stations and purchases were rationed to ten gallons of gas. As soon as President Reagan removed price controls, the shortages of oil and gasoline ended and prices declined. Free-market economies seldom experience shortages. This isn’t because everything is always plentiful. Bad weather can destroy crops. Disease can kill herds creating a shortfall in meat. Labor disputes or international shocks also disrupt markets. While shortfalls in some items are inevitable, a free-market economy adjusts and corrects for such events.
In free-market economies, shortages are rare because the market is remarkably efficient at raising prices of items that are in short supply. Sharply higher prices for scarce items, limit their use to the most efficient uses of the items and encourages the use of substitute items. Doing so enables the economy to adjust to potential shortages and shocks in the most efficient way possible. In the current situation, the wide range of shortages highlights a serious problem. As with prior shortages, this one is due to government policies. While the federal government has not placed direct price controls on the economy, it has distorted markets in a number of indirect ways.
“Should Americans be concerned that a presidential son was texting and exchanging wire transfers with alleged prostitutes using a Russian email address?”
As his father was ramping up his 2020 presidential run, Hunter Biden was busy texting a woman with a Russian email address about finding a way to evade bank suspicions so they could complete a wire transfer. “Email with .ru flags wires,” Hunter Biden texted the woman named Eva in early January 2019, according to evidence two members of Congress have sent the Justice Department. “Too much red flag for bank,” Hunter Biden texted another time when wire coordinates for the payment to the woman were sent. “That its [sic] what got my accounts frozen and reviewed by bank. Send me Julia and I will give her the cash.” The text messages — first reported in the news media and now recounted in an official letter from Congress to DOJ — raise a tantalizing question: Should Americans be concerned that a presidential son was texting and exchanging wire transfers with alleged prostitutes using a Russian email address?
Sens. Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, two Republicans who have spent more time than any investigating the Biden family’s overseas business dealings, believe the answer is a resounding “Yes.” “These findings of potentially criminal behavior must be thoroughly investigated by law enforcement entities according to the highest ethical standards,” the senators wrote this week to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Chris Wray and U.S. Attorney for Delaware David Weiss in a letter pleading for action. The letter provided a pointed reminder that Hunter Biden was aware banks had suspicions he was engaged in wrongdoing, flagging his accounts for reviews, and was in his own words trying to evade those suspicions.
Johnson and Grassley have disclosed that dozens of financial transactions involving the president’s son and his business deals were flagged to the U.S. Treasury Department by banks that filed Suspicious Activity Reports. Just the News has confirmed that one former executive of a bank has filed a whistleblower complaint to the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commissioner suggesting there is far more to the Hunter Biden story than what is public. And documents obtained by Just the News show Hunter Biden was warned repeatedly starting in 2016 that he had failed to pay taxes on money he had earned from one of his more controversial business clients, the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. It a picture now well documented in the public but frequently blacked out by a Democrat-led Congress and news media unwilling to ask the hard questions, Grassley and Johnson argue in their letter.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”
Elon Musk moved Friday afternoon to terminate his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter — the latest twist in a whirlwind process in which the billionaire Tesla CEO became the company’s biggest shareholder, turned down a board seat, agreed to buy the social media platform and then started raising doubts about going through with the deal. The next chapter in the saga is almost certain to be a court battle. A lawyer representing Musk claimed in a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer that he is ending the deal because Twitter (TWTR) is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the original agreement, which was signed in April, according to a regulatory filing Friday evening.
Musk has for weeks expressed concerns, without any apparent evidence, that there are a greater number of bots and spam accounts on the platform than Twitter has said publicly. Analysts have speculated that the concerns may be an attempt to create a pretext to get out of a deal he may now see as overpriced, after Twitter shares and the broader tech market have declined in recent weeks. Tesla (TSLA) stock, which Musk was planning to rely on in part to finance the deal, has also declined sharply since he agreed to the deal. “The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” Twitter board chair Bret Taylor said in a tweet Friday, echoing earlier statements by the company that it planned to follow through with the deal. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
[..] Still, Musk’s lawyer alleged in the Friday letter that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligations” to provide Musk with sufficient data, and said Twitter “appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied” when agreeing to the deal. “For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,'” the Friday letter reads. “This information is fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance and is necessary to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement.”
It continues: “Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information.”
Persistence of message ribonucleic acid fortified with synthetic 3' and 5' nucleoside analogue caps in the body for months resulting in excess and prolonged production of Spike protein is the explanation for cumulative toxicity and death after doubles, triples, and quadruples. pic.twitter.com/q0jVydjLUh
— Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) April 16, 2022
Russia executes what it has been saying for a long time.
Mariupol, the last stronghold of Ukrainian troops in the south-east of the country, is very close to falling. Russian troops have given Ukrainian soldiers in the area, a chilling ultimatum to “surrender or die”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has admitted the situation in Mariupol remains “extremely severe” but has not acknowledged that the city could fall. He warned Moscow that peace talks would be scrapped if the city’s remaining defenders were killed. Despite Russia’s assurances that its offensive would focus on the east of the country, the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser, which Russia attributes to various non-combat causes, has led to new attacks on targets in the capital, and in western Ukraine.
“The elimination of our troops, of our men, in Mariupol will put an end to any negotiations.- Zelensky”. In Kharkiv, continued Russian shelling is leaving the city in ruins. More and more people are trying to escape to the west, perhaps with the ultimate aim of leaving the country. Ukrainian authorities say that Fridays attack by russian forces has killed several and wounded over 50 people.
Good Friday in Rome
Good Friday procession in Rome, Italy The Cross is being carried by two representatives of the Russian & Ukrainian diaspora – much to the criticism of Ukrainian ambassador to the Vatican, Andriy Yurash. Orthodox Easter this year is on 24 April, following the Julian calendar pic.twitter.com/2frPL6XplQ
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed Saturday it had cleared Ukrainian forces from all urban areas of the besieged city of Mariupol, Russian news agency RIA reports. Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson Igor Konashenkov said in a statement the only remaining Ukrainian troops were a few fighters blockaded in the Azovstal steel works plant, RIA reports. The Guardian quoted Konashenkov as saying in the statement that the few remaining fighters’ “only chance to save their lives” is to surrender. Konashenkov claimed more than 4,000 Ukrainian troops had died in Mariupol, and nearly 1,500 had surrendered. Forbes could not independently verify Konashenkov’s figures, and Ukrainian officials did not immediately respond to the Russian Defense Ministry’s claims.
Troops from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade fighting in Mariupol reportedly broke through Russian lines earlier this week to join up with soldiers from the Azov Regiment who have been fighting from the Azovstal plant, a sprawling compound where the defenders have been able to find cover to weather Russian assaults. Mariupol, a port city of about 400,000 near the Sea of Azov, has faced heavy bombardment by Russian forces in a siege that has lasted for weeks. Capturing the city has been a key priority for Russia, as it would consolidate a land bridge between mainland Russia and the annexed Crimean peninsula. The city has struggled to evacuate civilians and receive basic supplies due to damage to critical infrastructure by Russian forces. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko told the Associated Press more than 10,000 residents have died and that he predicts the true death toll could double.
Russian forces renewed missile strikes on Kyiv and intensified shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in an apparent strategy to hobble Ukraine’s defenses in preparation for what is expected to be a full-scale Russian assault in the east. These attacks and others scattered across the country were an explosive reminder to Ukrainians and their Western supporters that the whole country remains under threat. With the port city of Mariupol under siege, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there.” He said Ukraine needs more heavy weapons from the West immediately to have any chance of saving the city.
Each day brings new discoveries of civilian victims of an invasion that has shattered European security. In the towns and villages just outside Kyiv, authorities have reported finding the bodies of more than 900 civilians, most shot dead, since Russian troops retreated two weeks ago. After the humiliating loss of the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia’s military command vowed to step up missile strikes on the capital. The Russians said they hit an armored vehicle plant on Saturday, a day after targeting a missile plant. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko advised residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return. “We’re not ruling out further strikes on the capital,” he said. “If you have the opportunity to stay a little bit longer in the cities where it’s safer, do it.”
The mayor said Saturday’s strike killed one person and wounded several. It was not immediately clear from the ground what was hit in the strike on Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district. The sprawling area on the southeastern edge of the capital contains a mixture of Soviet-style apartment blocks, newer shopping centers and big-box retail outlets, industrial areas and railyards. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said an armored vehicle plant was targeted. He didn’t specify where the factory was located, but there is one in the Darnytskyi district.
In what appears Moscow’s “answer” to the US and NATO countries continuing to supply major weapons systems to Ukrainian forces, state agency TASS is claiming that Russian forces have brought down a Ukrainian military transport plane that was transporting Western arms. It would mark a massive battlefield development if confirmed, potentially escalating conflict more directly with the West, now that Russia is actively targeting Western arms shipments. The alleged shoot down occurred outside Odessa via anti-air systems, says TASS, while citing Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov. Though remaining unconfirmed, China state media has also picked up the report, citing the defense ministry statement, which reads:
“Near Odesa Russian anti-aircraft defense forces have shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane, which was delivering a large shipment of arms supplied to Ukraine by Western counties,” Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said Saturday. However, there’s nothing in the way of independent or outside sources confirming it, and Ukraine’s military has not issued any statements, nor are they likely to admit that their military aircraft were transporting Western weapons shipments, even if accurate. Days ago, the Kremlin repeated its threat to attack any inbound shipments of weaponry or supplies coming from Ukraine’s Western backers. The military also said it would hit “decision-making centers” – and on Saturday long-range missiles reportedly struck weapons depots in Kiev. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and US State Department have continued positively boasting that more weapons are en route, in a continuing escalation…
Question: Are there any additional details about Germany’s military biological activities in Ukraine?
Maria Zakharova: For you to better understand the situation, I will cite the following facts. Since 2013, under the auspices of the German Federal Foreign Office, the German Government has been implementing the German Biosecurity Programme (GBP) which includes partnership projects with government agencies and research organisations in focus countries, which Ukraine became part of in 2014, the year of Maidan. German specialists from the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces (Munich), Friedrich Loeffler Institute (Greifswald-Riems Island), Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (Hamburg) and the Robert Koch Institute (Berlin), which specialise in research of deadly biological agents, are engaged in practical activities. According to the German Federal Foreign Office, the third phase of the GBP will be implemented in 2020-2022. We can infer from the publicly available materials that the GBP’s stated technical goals include, among others, the gathering of epidemic intelligence in third countries, including with the use of big data technology, and developing the infrastructure of partner countries for handling dangerous biological agents.
The Institute of Experimental and Clinical Veterinary Medicine in Kharkov has been the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces’ main Ukrainian counterparty since 2016, which we know from its own data. The two institutes cooperate under the Ukrainian-German project titled “Initiative on Biological Safety and Biological Defence in the Management of the Zoonotic Risks at the Outer Borders of the European Union.” The fact that its official goal is to “improve the biological defence and security situation” in Ukraine, “particularly in the east of the country” gives rise to the rhetorical question of which border the German military biologists consider an outer border for the purposes of their professional interests. Is it the Russian-Ukrainian border?
The Institute of Microbiology claims in its materials that the project is related to the “potential threat of biological terrorism” in Ukraine amid the unending hostilities in eastern regions of that country. It is crystal clear that this is a way to send a subtle message about the DPR and LPR s possible involvement in hatching plans for the use of internationally prohibited biological weapons. In so doing, the German military have been deliberately intimidating their Ukrainian counterparts for a long time and have, in fact, been psychologically pitting them against the Donbass republics. Ukrainian biological safety experts invariably participate in the medical biodefence conferences that are regularly held by the Institute of Microbiology of the German Armed Forces.
German journalist
https://twitter.com/i/status/1514986138234023947
Earlier this week, President Biden appeared to veer off script in the middle of his ‘blame Putin, not our idiotic policies, for your collapsing cost of living’ speech, when he dropped the ‘g’ word… “Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide half a world away.” As the world waited for another rapid walk-back by White House staffers of another Biden gaffe, the 79-year-old doubled-down… “Yes, I called it genocide. Because it has become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of being able to be Ukrainian.” The comments sparked reactions from around the diplomatic world. French President Emmanuel Macron was the most outspoken, refusing to back Biden’s claim that Russia is committing “genocide” in Ukraine.
The French leader instead warned that an escalation of rhetoric wouldn’t bring peace. On the same day Biden accused Russia of genocide, Newsweek published an article quoting a senior official from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency who said the civilian casualties in Ukraine are typical of modern warfare and “hardly” amount to genocide. The DIA official: said “I am not for a second excusing Russia’s war crimes, nor forgetting that Russia invaded the country.” “But the number of actual deaths is hardly genocide. If Russia had that objective or was intentionally killing civilians, we’d see a lot more than less than .01 percent in places like Bucha,” the official emphasized.
Well, I would not criticize Zelensky. He’s acting with great courage, great integrity. You can understand and sympathize with his position from where he sits. However, the Pentagon has a wiser stand. Yes, we could enter the war. We could provide Zelensky with jet planes and advanced weapons. Pretty soon Putin would be radically escalating the attack on Ukraine, would wipe it out which he has the capacity to do. He would be attacking the supply chains that are providing advanced weapons. And we’d be in a war, which would be a nuclear war, which would wipe us all out.
So I’m not criticizing Zelensky; he’s an honorable person and has shown great courage. You can sympathize with his positions. But you can also pay attention to the reality of the world. And that’s what it implies. I’ll go back to what I said before: there are basically two options. One option is to pursue the policy we are now following, to quote Ambassador Freeman again, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. And yes, we can pursue that policy with the possibility of nuclear war. Or we can face the reality that the only alternative is a diplomatic settlement, which will be ugly—it will give Putin and his narrow circle an escape hatch. It will say, Here’s how you can get out without destroying Ukraine and going on to destroy the world.
We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine, and recognizing that, like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, “I don’t like hurricanes,” or “I don’t recognize hurricanes.” That doesn’t do any good. And the fact of the matter is, every rational analyst knows that Crimea is, for now, off the table. That’s the alternative to the destruction of Ukraine and nuclear war. You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.
The Israeli government has been trying to keep as low a profile as possible over the war in Ukraine, but Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, seems determined to drag Israel on to centre stage. Zelensky made a direct appeal to the Israeli parliament last month, ostensibly asking for weapons, especially the Iron Dome interception system Israel uses to stop short-range rockets fired out of Gaza by Palestinians trying to draw attention to Israel’s 15-year siege of the enclave. But rather than being flattered by the attention, many Israeli politicians objected to Zelensky’s speech. In it, he compared Russia’s treatment of Ukraine to the Nazis’ “Final Solution” for European Jews. Zelensky, who is Jewish, hoped the parallel would strike home.
To most Israeli ears, it sounded offensive. So far Israel has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons or join the West in waging economic warfare on Russia. It does not help that major Israeli political parties and religious communities have strong geographical and emotional ties to Russia. Or that Moscow is a major actor in the Middle East, not least in neighbouring Syria. Israel coordinates closely with Russia over regular air strikes in Syria – themselves in violation of international law. Israel has been trying its best to tread a difficult diplomatic path over Ukraine. On the one hand, Israel is a regional client state of the United States, under Washington’s protection, and wishes to keep its patron happy. And on the other, Israel’s military interests are to maintain good relations with Moscow.
Furthermore, Israeli leaders are worried about reinforcing the consensus that what the Russian army is doing in Ukraine amounts to war crimes, thereby creating a very public precedent that could be turned against Israel over its own abuses in the occupied territories. Adopting an early role as mediator, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett even urged Zelensky to accept a Russian ceasefire proposal. Nonetheless, Zelensky is intent on tipping the scales in Ukraine’s favour with Israel. He understands that his country’s plight has captured the western media and western public sympathy. He has every incentive to weaponise that sentiment to press-gang Israel into more openly supporting Ukraine. In his speech to the parliament, he appropriated a quote from a former Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who claimed that “our enemies want us to cease to exist”. Russia planned to do the same to Ukraine, Zelensky warned.
“We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way..”
A senior Biden administration official recently admitted that prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States made no effort to address one of Vladimir Putin’s most often stated top security concerns — the possibility of Ukraine’s membership into NATO. When asked on a podcast published on Wednesday by War on the Rocks — a U.S. foreign and defense policy analysis website — whether NATO expansion into Ukraine “was not on the table in terms of negotiations” before the invasion, Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken replied that “it wasn’t.” Chollet’s remarks confirm suspicions by many critics who believe the Biden administration wasn’t doing enough — including offering to deny or delay Ukraine’s NATO membership — to prevent Russia from launching a war against Ukraine.
“We made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way, I mean arms control type things of that nature,” Chollet said, adding that the administration didn’t think that “the future of Ukraine” was one of those issues and that its potential NATO membership was a “non-issue.” “This was not about NATO,” said Chollet, who contradicted himself moments later, saying, “In perpetrating this totally unjustified and unprovoked war, [Putin’s] goal was to try to divide the U.S. from Europe and weaken NATO.” Of course Putin himself stated publicly many times before the invasion that indeed, Ukraine’s potential NATO membership was a key security concern for Russia.
Weeks before Russia launched its war against Ukraine, Putin claimed that Russia’s concerns about NATO enlargement were being ignored. “We need to resolve this question now … [and] we hope very much our concern will be heard by our partners and taken seriously,” he later said. War on the Rocks’ Ryan Evans told Chollet that he takes Putin’s claims about NATO “seriously,” adding, “I’m a little struck by the refusal to even talk about the issue of NATO expansion.” “We talked about NATO in saying that NATO is a defensive alliance. NATO is not a threat to Russia,” Chollet said. Before the Russian invasion, Quincy Institute senior research fellow on Russia and Europe Anatol Lieven wrote that as part of a broader package to stave off war, the United States should propose “the declaration of a moratorium on Ukrainian membership of NATO for a period of 20 years, allowing time for negotiations on a new security architecture for Europe as a whole, including Russia.”
This is an amusing headline…. “California regulators unveiled a plan to ban the sale of new gas cars by 2035 on Thursday, the state’s latest effort to combat greenhouse gas emissions. The plan from the California Air Resources Board calls for 35% of new car sales in the state to be battery or hydrogen-powered by 2026, according to CNBC. The board will vote on the proposal in August.” I’m looking forward to this insanity. I hope Vegas has figured out how to do without most of the roughly 25% of the people who come there from Southern California since most of them come by car. The trip is, on the shortest path, 270 miles — which is materially beyond the “safe” distance you can go in an EV on one charge assuming no traffic that slows you down while, of course, you’re baking in the 100+ degree sun and have the A/C running.
While LA -> San Diego is doable (~120 miles) San Diego out to Vegas is definitely not at 332 miles; you will run out of power if you try it in other than excellent weather – with no traffic. Good luck on that “no traffic” thing. In-state travel? Ha! Never mind interstate personal travel. Oh, and have I noted yet (checking notes; nope) that California lacks the electrical grid and generating capacity to deliver the power to charge said vehicles? Sure, with a few percent of the total they are pulling it off. But – and this is important – their cost per kilowatt-hour is ~80% higher than the cost in place like Tennessee or Florida and will go higher still with the new demand. Never mind that at so-called “public” charging stations (e.g. Superchargers, etc.) the rate is typically two to four times – or more – that of your residential rate.
So much for “saving money” too; no you won’t! Oh, and what are those people who live in apartments or other higher-density places without garage space, which means no power connection going to do? I presume the answer isn’t to leave unguarded but metered connections out in the open as doing so is basically-certain to invite wholesale theft by others with….. electric cars. Unlike a gas vehicle which requires actual vandalism to steal the fuel (never mind the risk of blowing yourself up doing it) stealing power from an open receptacle is simply a matter of plugging into it. Yeah that’ll work out well too, especially in California. Go ahead and do it – this is going to be fun to watch.
A string of severe hepatitis cases in children has doctors across both sides of the pond spooked. Dozens of children in the UK and Europe, as well as some in the U.S., have come down with symptoms of hepatitis not currently explained by known causes. Theories for the outbreak include the resurgence of an existing but usually quieter germ, complications of covid-19, or even the arrival of a novel or mutated virus. Hepatitis is most often caused by a group of five unrelated viruses (hepatitis A through E), but it’s actually a formal term for any kind of liver inflammation. Various infectious diseases, heavy alcohol use, toxins, and even certain medications can all cause hepatitis. Symptoms range from fever and fatigue to jaundice (yellowed skin and eyes), nausea, abdominal pain, and dark urine. In severe cases, it can lead to liver failure and death.
Since January this year, UK doctors have reported a concerning rise of severe, sometimes life-threatening hepatitis cases in children—above the normal baseline rate of incidence. At least 74 cases documented in the country seem to fit the bill, with children not testing positive for any of the known hepatitis viruses. In a case report by doctors from Scotland published Thursday, the authors noted that three children became so sick that they were evaluated for a possible liver transplant. At least six children in the UK have received a liver transplant, according to a recent summary by the World Health Organization.
This week, health officials in Spain reported three of their own cases, including one child who also needed a transplant. And in the U.S., health officials in Alabama have reported at least nine hepatitis cases in children dating back to October 2021 that similarly elude a simple explanation. A public health alert issued by the Alabama Department of Public Health to doctors in February alluded to one possible case in another state but provided no further details.
“..the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”
Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company. The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site. Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic.
Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, Libs of Tik Tok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves. The company seemingly has written off free speech too. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal was asked how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to “protect free speech as a core value” and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is “not to be bound by the First Amendment” and will regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”
Not surprisingly, selling censorship is not a big hit with most consumers, particularly from a communications or social media company. The actions of Twitter’s management have led to roller-coastering share values. While Twitter once reached a high of about $73 a share, it is currently around $45. (Musk was offering $54.20 a share, representing a 54 percent premium over the share price the day before he invested in the company.)
“The gas price in Europe has more than doubled since February 23: from 88 euros per megawatt hour to a record peak of 212 euros on Friday afternoon. Compared to a year ago (less than 17 euros), that is about a twelvefold increase.”
In the long-ago summer of 2010, I found myself in the beautiful harbour of Sevastopol, surveying the rival fleets of Russia and Ukraine as they rode at anchor in the lovely Crimean sunshine. One great fortress was adorned with banners proclaiming ‘Glory to the Ukrainian Navy!’ Another frowning bastion across the water bore the words ‘Glory to the Russian Navy!’ In the streets of that elegant city, with its porticoes and statues and monuments to repeated wars, sailors from the two fleets mingled on the pavements. The Russians looked like Russians, with their huge hats and Edwardian uniforms. The Ukrainians looked more like the US Navy on shore leave in San Diego. It was almost funny to see. I hoped at that time that it would work out well. For the Ukrainians had begun to be silly. In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language.
Russians who had lived there happily for decades were pressured to take Ukrainian citizenship and adopt Ukrainian versions of their Christian names. The schools were promoting a national hero, Stepan Bandera, who Russians strongly disliked and regarded as a terrorist. And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge. Quite a few people told me they felt put upon by these policies. Why couldn’t they just be left alone? Until that point, Ukraine had been a reasonably harmonious country in its 20-odd years of existence. After that visit I saw big trouble coming, both in the Crimea and in the Don Basin, where I also travelled that year. Far out among the abandoned slagheaps of the dying coalfields, I found the decaying semi-deserted town of Gorlovka, now in the midst of an unofficial war-zone, where it has been since 2014.
This town had been officially renamed Horlivka by Ukraine in its high-handed way, though hardly anybody I met there called it that. Gorlovka in those days still hosted the rather pleasant Cafe Barnsley, the last echo of the Soviet days when Gorlovka had been twinned with Barnsley in a gesture of Communist solidarity with Arthur Scargill’s miners. I remember, that boiling hot, almost silent afternoon, enjoying a Russian beer there, while listening to music from a Russian station on the radio. I wrote rather vaguely at the time that the people of Crimea and Donbas were hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future. I thought that if Ukraine wanted to be a rigid ethnic nationalist state, then some sort of peaceful deal with its Russian minority was going to be needed. Little did I know what passions I had touched on.
[..] I would like to end with two quotations. The first is from the American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman who said: ‘I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.’ The other is from the ‘Benedictus’ in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which asks God ‘to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace’, which I fervently pray, for I am not sure that anything else will now do any good.
The reason we know Ukrainian officials are trying to goad the US into war is because that’s exactly what they say they’re doing. There is no ambiguity here — at this very moment, a furious multi-front lobbying blitz is underway to solicit full-fledged US military intervention in Ukraine, and therefore open warfare against Russia. To put it bluntly, a foreign country’s representatives are doing all they possibly can to instigate the closest thing anyone on Earth has ever experienced to World War III. At the forefront of this campaign is the president, Zelensky, who’s been transformed overnight into an international folk hero. His nonstop lobbying offensive included a soaring address Friday to what some media outlets ludicrously described as an “anti-war rally” in Frankfurt, Germany.
Such a description is ludicrous because the headline takeaway from the rally was Zelensky passionately condemning the alleged cowardice of NATO countries — for, as yet, refusing to launch a war against Russia. “All the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you, because of your weakness,” he inveighed. In his pro-war advocacy, Zelensky uses the same clever euphemism that has now entered heavy circulation: “No Fly Zone.” At this point, everyone with a bare-minimum understanding of what a US-administered “No Fly Zone” would entail has readily acknowledged that it means direct war with Russia — and by extension a radically increased risk of nuclear annihilation. Still, this is what Zelensky is calling for any chance he gets, in his true-to-form showbiz style.
(For those unaware, his professional endeavors prior to assuming the presidency included a stint as “the Ryan Seacrest of Ukraine,” as VICE once put it, not to mention his role playing the character of “President” on a comedy TV show.) During an interview with CNN last week, masterfully choreographed from his underground bunker, Zelensky was asked what he would tell Joe Biden ahead of the State of the Union speech. His answer: impose the No Fly Zone immediately. To dispel any concerns about the dangers of his demand, Zelensky added that it “does not mean dragging NATO into this war.” Well, phew! That’s a relief. “Frankly, you know, everyone is drawn into the war now,” he explained. Unfortunately, if you actually examine the logic that’s operative here, your relief should quickly turn to dread. Zelensky is saying that NATO (or in other words, the US) has already been dragged into the war.
World War III has already commenced, is what he’s saying. In which case, a “No Fly Zone” wouldn’t really be an escalation per se — it would just be a retaliatory strike in a war that’s already ongoing, whether we like it or not. That’s the argument. In an op-ed generously facilitated by the New York Times last week, Zelensky’s chief of staff — also writing from the storied underground bunker, we’re told — laid out the logic even more clearly. He implored: We are calling on the West to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. We recognize that this would be a serious escalation in the war and that it could bring NATO into direct conflict with Russia. But we firmly believe that Russia won’t stop at just Ukraine, which would potentially drag NATO into this conflict anyway. A no-fly zone would at least give Mr. Putin some pause.
Yesterday Putin had a most interesting conversations with members of what look like members of an flight attendant union. We hope to bring the the whole thing subtitled in English later today, but here is the key sentence made by Putin during that conversation: “If the leadership of Ukraine continues to do what they are doing, it will call into question the future of Ukrainian statehood, and that will be entirely their responsibility”. I think that it is important to understand the context in which Putin made this statement. As a reminder
• The Ukronazi armed forces are down to less than 25% of its original size.
• Almost all the remaining forces are in some type or another of cauldrons.
• Russia has full air supremacy
• The Ukronazi fleet does not exist anymore
• In spite of all the propaganda, no help from abroad will affect the outcome of this war
• It appears that Russia will surround Odessa and eventually take control of the entire Ukrainian Black Sea coast
In other words, what seems to be shaping up is that Russia will soon have control over the entire Ukraine except for the western provinces (west of Vinnitsa and Zhitomir). In other words, the war is over, at least militarily. There will be a meeting between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators tomorrow, and it shall be interesting to see if something, anything, will come out of it. The west is clearly determined to heroically fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. Russia wants to stop this operation as soon as possible, but only after her double goals of 1) disarmament and 2) denazification are achieved. Right now the big question is Kiev. It’s a big city with plenty of civilians and probably 30-50 thousand combatants of all different kinds (VSU, SBU, Volkssturm, deathsquads, looters, etc.). The logical solution would be to offer the combatants (and the civilians) corridors to exit the city, but the West can’t have that.
Now if the Ukies won’t vacate Kiev, then some rather serious fighting will take place inside the city and clearing the city from the Nazis will demand the involvement of a major Russian force. It appears that these forces are now in their staging areas all around the city (except for the south). Think about it this way: the frontline (line of contact) is now very long and the Ukies don’t have enough forces to even try to hold any frontline in such a context. However, remember the number of Russian forces deployed along the Ukrainian border – about 100’000+ or so soldiers? It appears that there are currently not enough Russia forces to fully exploit the Russian advances over the past ten days. Alternatively, we could say that the Russian force is big enough, but that now it has to sharply increase its use of firepower to further develop its operations.
A minor squall on Twitter this past week may have largely gone unnoticed amid the larger hurricane about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But it’s worth taking a close look at it, because it illustrates something significant about U.S. foreign policy since World War II, and how propaganda works everywhere. It started when Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — the equivalent to the U.S. State Department — did something unusual: It tweeted out an endorsement of a 2014 article in Foreign Affairs — the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, probably the most influential American think tank on U.S. foreign policy. The piece was by John Mearsheimer, a professor in the political science department at the University of Chicago and a prominent member of the “realist” school of foreign policy thought. You can understand why the Russian government liked it, because it was called “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.”
This led to a response from Anne Applebaum, a neoconservative journalist who’s currently a staff writer at The Atlantic. “Now wondering if the Russians didn’t actually get their narrative from Mearshimer et al.,” she wrote. “Moscow needed to say West was responsible for Russian invasions (Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine), and not their own greed and imperialism. American academics provided the narrative.” The “et al” part is important here. In U.S. political lore NATO was created in 1949 as a defensive military alliance against the Soviet Union and its allies. The reality was somewhat different. But for realists in general, not just Mearsheimer, the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War meant that an expansion of NATO could lead to dangerous conflict with Russia.
Fifty American foreign policy leaders, largely realists, wrote to President Bill Clinton in 1997 that pushing NATO’s borders eastward would be “a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability … In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma …”
The current situation in Ukraine has once again invigorated the lying Western media and sent them into an anti-Russian frenzy. For the last two years the media has been enthusiastically pushing the genocidal Covid narrative on behalf of the Globalist faction. Whatever doubtful credibility they had prior to Covid they have destroyed with their relentless lies. With an astonishing lack of self-awareness they are now pushing the anti-Russian narrative like the unprincipled mindless hacks that they are. Ignoring both facts and context they are relentlessly promoting war propaganda to justify this hostility to their own beleaguered populations. The unfortunate reality is that despite unprecedented distrust in the media that propaganda works. Anti-Russian sentiment is rising throughout the West.
We have witnessed the same phenomena with the rabid anti-China narrative emanating from Western governments and their client stenographers in the media. The message is clear, unless you are a pliant puppet of the Anglo-American empire, then obviously you are evil and must be destroyed. The truth of course is deeper, the real war the Globalists are fighting is against the citizenry of every country on earth. As the Covid atrocity is being rapidly exposed the repression of the people is the only option open to the New World Order Davos cabal. As has always been the case, a war abroad is the best excuse to impose tyranny at home. The Western Neo-liberal governments of America, Canada, Australia and most of Europe cannot afford to be removed from power. The full anger of the people will be unleashed full power against those who imposed the Genocidal Covid lie upon them.
Trudeau, Macron et al will be held to account (one way or another) for their pivotal roles in this atrocity. They cannot allow that to happen, they have too much to lose. The tragic and unnecessary conflict in the Ukraine can be viewed as the “Great Reset War”. Although targeted towards Russia for media purposes, its real objective is the further subjugation of the peoples of their own countries. The Western Neo-liberal agenda is failing on every front, economically, socially and morally. The Cabal has destroyed the once prosperous and free societies that they governed. The dystopian future that they have planned for the world is now plain for all to see. It has been on display in Canada and Australia, New Zealand and throughout Europe. It is a prospect that should alarm everybody.
“The Great Reset” is the Cabal’s way of ensuring that the same Globalists who plunged the world into chaos are still in charge after the coming inevitable collapse. The Green agenda and the 4th industrial revolution are about de-industrialising the world and destroying successful industrial competitors such as Russia and China. Not surprisingly, neither Russia or China, along with India and Iran are going along with this insidious plan. They are not alone, many countries from Africa, South America and Asia are also gravitating more towards the Russian/Chinese orbit. All have good reasons to be distrustful and angry at the Empire. The Cabal is weak and failing, it has created powerful enemies who are formidable obstacles to the New World Order and the Great reset. Expect this to embolden other countries to resist the Empire’s plans.
Greece was for a long time perceived as being closer to Russia than other nations, both at home and abroad. That is why Zakharova addresses the current situation.
“We noticed the unprecedented campaign launched in Greece to defame Russia’s policy. Senior officials in Athens allow themselves to make crude accusations against our country and its leadership, they are literally competing with their like-minded people. They hypocritically speak of an “unprovoked attack” against Ukraine, for the first time since World War II, a “mass invasion” and so on. It should be recalled that with the efforts, first of all, of the US and its satellites, wars and conflicts have shaken the world for the last decades – the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the operations in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan. No one has taken responsibility for the enormous sacrifices and suffering of the peoples of these countries. Today, the crimes of the Kiev regime, which came to power as a result of the bloody coup of 2014, remain in the shadow of the new wave of anti-Russian criticism.
The fact that Crimea and Sevastopol paid for their free reunification with Russia with total blockade and Western sanctions is silenced. In the besieged Donbas, as a result of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian clearing operations, more than 14,000 civilians have been killed in the past eight years, and the Russians have been offered to leave Ukraine. The meaning of the daily shootings can be explained, among others, by the Greek expatriates who live in the territories of the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic. The European Union has chosen to silently watch the extermination of the Donbass civilian population, becoming an accomplice in the long-standing genocide of the people of southeastern Ukraine. Now Europe, including Greece, is fully integrated into the ranks of the Kiev regime’s advocates, while the anti-Russia hysteria cultivated by the authorities has reached a boiling point.
On this basis, profoundly wrong, criminal decisions are made, including the shipment of weapons to Ukraine. Eventually, weapons will be turned against civilians, including Greeks, by Ukrainian nationalist battalions that use them as human shields and who have already fallen victim to this inhumane tactic. In the name of collective Western plans – to do harm to Russia at all costs – common sense has been sacrificed. Bilateral ties are being deliberately damaged, and Russian-Greek relations, unfortunately, are no exception. Athens actively supports the EU sanctions regime. They accuse us of so-called “energy blackmail”, proclaiming the goal of rapid independence from Russian gas, the uninterrupted supply of which for decades has been a stabilizing factor for the national energy sector. With the collective directive of Brussels, the Greek sky closed for the Russian airlines.
The order was given for the suspension of any cooperation in the field of culture, for the interruption of the Common Dedicated Years. There are calls for a complete cessation of any cooperation. Essentially, for the sake of vague and dubious goals, the Greek leadership was to nullify our own common historical heritage, which only yesterday it characterized as its natural advantage in cooperating with Russia. “Time will put everything in its place, will show who was right and who – the critical one – showed a lack of insight, made the wrong choice. We believe that the eternal ties that unite the peoples of Russia and Greece will withstand these trials as well.“
At least 16,000 foreign nationals have volunteered to join an “international legion” created to resist Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed, after Kiev lifted visa requirements for anyone willing to fight. “Every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country, please come over,” Zelensky pleaded at a recent press conference, adding “We will give you weapons.” Though the president offered no details on the international fighting force, including the origin of the volunteers, the request comes as Kiev appears to grow more desperate for help in pushing back Russian troops – having already declared martial law and a “general mobilization” of its populace. Those policies include conscription for men aged 18-60 and the commandeering of civilian vehicles and structures, while Ukrainian convicts with military experience are being released from prison to back up the war effort.
Despite the lack of specifics from officials, however, media reports suggest that foreigners from a long list of nations are lining up to enlist. Around 400 Swedes have signed up for the legion, according to the country’s TT News Agency, which cited the group’s coordinator Philip Brannval. The first flight departed Thursday for Poland – thought to be a logistics hub for arms and aid deliveries – and from there the volunteers will enter Ukraine by land, Brannval said. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, meanwhile, announced on Thursday that the government would not punish those seeking to join up with Ukrainian forces, as the country typically prohibits citizens from serving in foreign armies. Up to 300 Czechs have reportedly vowed to ship out. Prague, unlike non-aligned Stockholm, is among NATO’s 30 member states.
The Czech government is also now moving to criminalize speech supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Russian invasion. Czech police report that they are already investigating hundreds of people for alleged support for Moscow, with criminal proceedings in nine cases. A small handful of American, Canadian and German special forces veterans are also set to join the fight, according to interviews by BuzzFeed News. The outlet noted the group – numbering just 10 people in total – is “NATO-trained and experienced in close combat and counterterrorism.” A pair of retired American infantry officers will also fly over to provide “leadership” for the squad, while several other US and Canadian citizens also told Reuters they intend to answer Zelensky’s call.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told reporters over the weekend that Ottawa would leave the decision to fight up to individual citizens. The US State Department, however, continues to urge Americans to avoid travel to Ukraine amid the hostilities.
Westbound natural gas flows through the Yamal-Europe pipeline stopped on Friday while Gazprom’s bids for additional transit capacity via Ukraine stand at high levels, data from pipeline operators shows. Flows to Germany via the Mallnow metering point stood at about 101,119 kilowatt hours per hour (kWh/h) earlier on Friday morning and were about 13.5 million kilowatt hours per hour overnight. Russian energy company Gazprom on Thursday resumed westbound natural gas supplies via the Yamal-Europe pipeline to Germany from Poland and booked 7.8 million kilowatt-hours per hour of gas transit capacity via the pipeline for Friday morning until Saturday morning.
The pipeline between Poland and Germany usually accounts for about 15% of Russia’s westbound supply of gas to Europe and Turkey. Since December, however, it has been operating in reverse and driving European gas prices higher. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia would continue to supply gas to world markets, though the United States and its European allies have been strengthening sanctions against Moscow after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Since the invention of synthetic ammonia-based fertilizers roughly a century ago, yields on crops have rocketed higher, meaning far more output from every acre that is planted. During that same time, the global population went from 1.7 billion to 7.7 billion people, yet agriculture kept pace, feeding a more crowded and prosperous world, largely because of advances in fertilizers. Dependable and affordable foodstuffs became almost a given, especially for America, a land blessed with “amber waves of grain.” Now, much of that progress is put at risk. A Midwestern farmer explains the economics of the situation. Ben Riensche farms 16,000 acres in Iowa and warns Americans: “You think they squawk about having gas go from three to four dollars a gallon? Wait until the grocery bill is $1,000 a month.”
There are two main causes for this massive input price appreciation. The first is the overall explosion in inflation caused by the misbegotten policies of the Biden administration, including his eco-radical war on energy, a critical component of fertilizer production. But the second, new issue is Russia. The US has declared an unprecedent economic war against Russia because of its invasion of Ukraine. While the offense against Ukraine’s sovereignty is inexcusable, Washington’s insistence on hugely escalating the economic war with Russia incites enormous risks, including for our food. Cutting off Russia equates to havoc for farming, right into planting season. Bloomberg’s fertilizer analyst Alexis Maxwell describes Russia’s importance: “No other nation has the same breadth of readily exportable fertilizer supply.” Not surprisingly, the price of fertilizer storms higher. This chart depicts the St. Louis Fed’s Fertilizer Index which combines synthetic ammonia, nitric acid, and urea.
The condition of China’s winter wheat crop could be the “worst in history”, the agriculture minister said on Saturday, raising concerns about grain supplies in the world’s biggest wheat consumer. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the country’s annual parliament meeting, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Tang Renjian said that rare heavy rainfall last year delayed the planting of about one-third of the normal wheat acreage. read more A survey of the winter wheat crop taken before the start of winter found that the amount of first- and second-grade crop was down by more than 20 percentage points, Tang said. “Not long ago we went to the grassroots to do a survey and many farming experts and technicians told us that crop conditions this year could be the worst in history,” he said. “This year’s grain production indeed faces huge difficulties.”
The minister’s comments underscore concerns about China’s grain supply at the same time as the war between Russia and Ukraine, which together account for about 29% of global wheat exports, has disrupted supplies causing wheat prices to surge to 14-year highs. However, Tang is confident China can ensure a bumper harvest of summer grain thanks to strong policy and technical support and the improving crop condition for the grain. Fuelled by the Ukraine crisis, wheat prices in China soared to a record this week on existing domestic supply worries. Tang’s comments also come as Beijing has refocused on food security, a long-standing priority for the central leadership that has become increasingly prominent in policy since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020.
China’s state planner said in its own report at the parliament meeting that grain supply remains tight, despite consecutive good harvests in recent years. To address the issue, the National Development and Reform Commission’s (NDRC) report said China will ensure that grain acreage for the year stays above 117.33 million hectares (289.93 million acres). China will also increase the production of soybeans and other oilseed crops, the NDRC said, reiterating top policy priorities in the farm sector. The country will also build up momentum to increase corn output, it said. China’s corn imports surged to a record last year, amid soaring domestic prices and low inventories. China will guarantee the supply-demand balance of grain, edible oil, cotton, sugar and fertilisers through the effective use of reserves and imports, the NDRC said.
Here is a summary of the argument that these injections induce an autoimmune response against the cells which fuse with the lipid nanoparticles (LNP) that carry the mRNA transcript encoding the Spike protein.
Spike-protein encoding genes are wrapped in lipid nanoparticles (LNP)
LNPs are injected into a human
LNPs enter the bloodstream
Bloodstream spreads LNPs throughout the body
Cells fuse with LNP & make the Spike protein – the antigen
Cells then present the antigen via MHC I í! Train killer T-cells
Killer T-cells circulate around the body and destroy any cell that is presenting the Spike protein antigen
This is the critical final step:
• Before your cells fused with LNPs, they were healthy
• After vaccination, killer T-cells now perceive those healthy cells as infected – requiring destruction
This is the definition of an autoimmune response – the host immune system turns on its own healthy cells. Unfortunately for us, this is just one of the consequences of these injections… [..] the aforementioned injections contain an RNA sequence which encodes the SARS-CoV-2 chimeric Spike protein. This RNA sequence is modified, and encased by lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) – fancy talk for nanometer-sized bubbles of lipids. One of the most significant obstacles in gene-therapy is a delivery system. You cannot just rub genes on a person’s skin, or give them a pill to swallow, and hope the genes makes it inside the target cells without degradation.
Lipid-based delivery systems have proven to be an effective mechanism in delivering chemicals, proteins, and gene-sequences to cells & tissue. LNPs serve two functions:
• Protect the payload while it reaches the target tissue
• Seamless fusion of LNPs with cell walls (also lipid bi-layers) to deliver the payload
However, the challenges do not end there. These LNPs have their own weaknesses which ultimately affects their degradation by the host cells. Thus, several other modifications have been developed over the years to compensate for this, including adding charges to the LNP (positive or cationic) and PEGylation (attaching a modified Polyethylene Glycol).
The relationship between RNA, cationic Lipids, and neutral lipids – Ge et al, 2021
Pay careful attention to the above image. As this gene-containing particle enters the cell (cytoplasm), the cationic (positively-charged) lipids allow it to form a lipid bi-layer that stabilizes the payload from the destructive forces inside the cell. The manufacturers will tell you that this is merely to protect the RNA, so it can get to the ribosomes and be transcribed into proteins. But, the cell is far more dynamic and complex. It will not just do what we want it to do.
“If you think about it, the underlying thesis is, ‘well, the CDC didn’t say that, so therefore you’re spreading medical misinformation.’ But now we learn who’s really been spreading medical misinformation is the CDC.“
Dr. Robert Malone, a noted mRNA vaccine researcher, and Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most-published medical doctors in the world, gave a joint statement to The New American on Friday where they accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of perpetrating “criminal” fraud. “In my opinion, withholding scientific data constitutes fraud,” Dr. Malone argued. “This is scientific fraud. In my opinion, if I was to publish a study in which I had a large body of epidemiologic data, and I decided to only public publish part of it because I wanted to advance some agenda, I would be guilty of scientific fraud. The paper would be withdrawn. I would be kicked out of my academic institution. I would be guilty of scientific fraud. That’s what this is.”
“And the CDC has, I’ve watched it over the years, become more and more and more a political arm and not serving its its function,” he continued. “This is the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They are the archive of information which physicians have relied on for decades through the MMWR publication. They are the ones that are responsible for providing us the frontline data about what’s going on and where it’s happening and they have stopped performing that function.” “They no longer release that detailed information through MMWR,” Dr. Malone went on. “They have become purely a political organization and arm of the executive branch. And what they have done is in my opinion, obscene. And it is part of what’s underlied the attacks that Peter and I have sustained from the press. If you think about it, the underlying thesis is, ‘well, the CDC didn’t say that, so therefore you’re spreading medical misinformation.’ But now we learn who’s really been spreading medical misinformation is the CDC.”
[..] “There are going to be legal consequences, and I believe they have a choice,” Dr. Malone said. “These government employees that have been participating in hiding this data, they can either be defendants or they can be witnesses. It is time for them to step up and speak out. And if they want do a whistleblower action, speak to Senator Ron Johnson, his office is in business looking for this.” “And when the midterms are done and he’s reelected and the Republicans take the Senate, he’s going to be in charge of the Senate subcommittee on investigations,” Malone added. “And I can tell you that he is ready to go.”
,_oil_on_canvas,_114.6_x_128.9_cm,_Philadelphia_Museum_of_Art.jpg)
