Washington Post claims RUSSIA behind SolarWinds hack, citing same ‘sources’ as it did for Russiagate
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 14, 2020
Having accused Russia of a ‘secret war’ on the US, the Washington Post is apparently trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, citing anonymous sources to blame the alleged hack of US cyber infrastructure on the Kremlin.
“Russian government hackers breached the Treasury and Commerce departments, along with other US government agencies,” the Post declared on Monday. It’s a serious accusation that one would think demands a serious weight of evidence. The Post offers only anonymous “people familiar with the matter,” however, and demands we take their word for it.
The alleged hack in question is what the US authorities described as an “active exploitation” of the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by corporations as well as US government agencies such as the State Department, NASA, the Department of Justice, the Pentagon, the Executive Office and even the spying agency NSA. The breach supposedly happened between March and June.
One of the first to report the hack was FireEye, a cyber-security outfit that last week said its own hacking tools had been stolen. While FireEye didn’t name names, it was the Washington Post that blamed Russia for the theft. The paper’s editorial board then cited the hack of FireEye as one of the arguments for the existence of a “secret war” by Russia against the US.
The others ranged from fake news like the “bounties” for killing US troops in Afghanistan, to esoteric conspiracy theories like the Russian “hacking” of the DNC and attacking US diplomats in Cuba with “microwave weapons.”
The Post was one of the driving forces behind ‘Russiagate’, the conspiracy pushed by Democrats claiming that President Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to “hack” the 2016 election and serving as the basis for “resisting” his administration ever since.
Its reporters can’t help bringing that up, either, treating as a statement of fact the utterly unproven assertion that Russia hacked the DNC emails in 2016 and leaked them “to the online anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in an operation that disrupted the Democrats’ National Convention in the midst of the presidential campaign.”
To further bolster its ‘nonpartisan’ bona fides, the Post sought comment from Michael Daniel, White House cybersecurity coordinator during the Obama administration and now president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, “an information-sharing group for cybersecurity companies.” Huh, no wonder all these cyber outfits always spout the same talking points!
At the very end of the story, the reporters also quote a tweet from Dmitri Alperovitch, identified only as “cybersecurity expert and founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.” Yet Alperovitch would be far more familiar to the public as a fellow of NATO’s Atlantic Council and a former head of CrowdStrike, the security contractor hired by the DNC that’s the sole source of claims “Russia” hacked them.
Admittedly, CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry told Congress under oath that they never had more than circumstantial evidence the data was actually “exfiltrated” – i.e. that the hack happened – but that tiny detail from a secret testimony was only made public in May. Russiagate is an assumed fact now and Dmitry has moved to bigger and better things. As Hillary Clinton herself once put it: What difference, at this point, does it make?
Meanwhile, other mainstream media outlets were perfectly happy to report Russia was behind the “hack,” citing other “media reports” as sources and conflating them with US officials confirming only the existence of the breach.
One notable example was NPR, previously known for declaring that “Hunter Biden isn’t a story but a distraction.”
Getting back to the Post, however, you can see how the paper that’s basically been spreading disinformation about ‘Russian hackers’ for years is at it again. Never mind that no evidence is offered beyond anonymous sources and the usual suspects, or that the charges are serving a partisan political agenda – and that of their own editorial board.
Then again, why wouldn’t they? What’s stopping them exactly, journalist ethics? Their ‘Russiagate’ activism has only resulted in awards and rewards – and a return to political power. And in Washington, power is everything.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Stealth Green New Deal language being slipped into take-it-or-leave-it House spending package
AEA Urges Senate and House Leaders to Reject “Sense of Congress” Nonsense
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | December 14, 2020
WASHINGTON DC – The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the country’s premier pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, and free-market energy organization, sounded the alarm today on a proposed Sense of Congress resolution that if adopted, could cause a major disruption of America’s energy system.
AEA has obtained a page from a discussion draft dated December 13 at 5:28 PM that appears to include a provision from the Green New Deal-like energy legislation, H.R. 4447, making it a “Sense of Congress” to call for 100% of power demand to come from “clean, renewable, or zero-emission” energy sources. Information around these terms, or how they would be implemented, appears to be left intentionally vague.
Putting Congress on record supporting 100% renewables is a major statement of policy and it should not be tacked onto a massive spending bill with no discussion or debate warns AEA. To make matters worse, this provision appears to give the Secretary of Energy a blank check authorization from Congress to impose 100% renewables.
Thomas Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, issued the following statement:
“While most Americans are eagerly looking for news about access to a COVID-19 vaccine, or juggling their expenses and schedules this holiday season, some unnamed Members of Congress are making a last-minute attempt to to sneak bad energy policy into a take-it-or-leave it spending bill before checking out for the year. It’s shameful and should be rejected outright.
“Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate are negotiating behind closed doors to jam a a stealth Green New Deal provision into a massive year-end bill to fund the entire federal government. Language uncovered in a “discussion draft” would give the Secretary of Energy the authority to effectively change the Department of Energy into the Department of Climate Policy.
A major policy shift and resulting disruption of America’s energy system should never occur as the result of a backroom deal to secure a legacy legislative item for an outgoing chairperson. It should be fully transparent, debatable, and subject to amendment. It’s no wonder that Americans are losing faith in their government institutions.”
Following Normalization with Israel, US Removes Sudan from State Sponsor of Terror List
Palestine Chronicle | December 14, 2020
The United States on Monday formally removed Sudan’s state sponsor of terrorism designation, 27 years after putting the country on its blacklist, the US embassy in Khartoum announced.
“The congressional notification period of 45 days has lapsed and the Secretary of State has signed a notification stating rescission of Sudan’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation is effective as of today (December 14), to be published in the Federal Register,” the US embassy said on Facebook.
President Donald Trump announced in October that he was delisting Sudan, a step desperately sought by the nation’s new civilian-backed government as the designation severely impeded foreign investment.
The Trump administration promised to remove Khartoum from the terror list and restore its sovereign immunities – meaning it would no longer be exposed to lawsuits in US courts – if it agreed to normalize ties with Israel.
As part of a deal, Sudan also agreed to pay $335 million to compensate survivors and victims’ families from the twin 1998 attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, carried out when dictator Omar al-Bashir was welcoming Al-Qaeda, and a 2000 attack on the USS Cole off Yemen’s coast.
Trump sent his notice to Congress on October 26 and, under US law, a country exits the terror list after 45 days unless Congress objects, which it has not.
Science Crushes Rolling Stone’s Claimed Link Between COVID and Climate
By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | December 11, 2020
Rolling Stone this week added its voice to a number of media outlets, like Phys.org and Business Insider, falsely asserting a connection between climate change and COVID-19. In reality, if a modestly warming Earth has any impact on viruses and pandemics, it is to make them less likely and less severe.
In the article, “How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era,” the author writes, “[a] warming world is expanding the range of deadly diseases and risking an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks.” The article is long on assertions, touching anecdotes, and personal stories but short on facts and scientific evidence.
Transmissible diseases like the flu and the coronavirus are far more prevalent and deadly during the late-fall, winter, and early spring, when the weather is cold and damp, rather than in the summer months when it is warm and dry. That is the primary reason that flu season runs from fall through early spring, and then peters out. Similarly, colds are called colds because they are less common in the summer, as well.
Historically, we know that the Black Plague arose and ran rampant in Europe and elsewhere during the Little Ice Age.
Chapter 7 of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change’s report of Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts details the results of dozens of peer-reviewed studies and reports showing premature deaths from illness and disease are far more prevalent during colder seasons and colder climate eras rather than during warmer seasons and warmer climate eras.
In 2010, BBC health correspondent Clare Murphy analyzed mortality statistics from the UK’s Office of National Statistics from 1950 through 2007 and found, “For every degree the temperature drops below 18C [64 degrees Fahrenheit], deaths in the UK go up by nearly 1.5 percent.”
U.S. Interior Department analyst Indur Goklany studied official U.S. mortality statistics and found similar results. According to official U.S. mortality statistics, an average of 7,200 Americans die each day during the months of December, January, February, and March, compared to 6,400 each day during the rest of the year.
In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”
More recently, in a study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths—a huge sample size from which to draw sound conclusions. The researchers found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than hot weather. No, that is not a typo – 1,700% more people die from cold temperatures than warm or hot temperatures.
And Rolling Stone’s assertion that climate change will cause vector-borne diseases to spread to new regions is refuted by the vast body of scientific literature detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels.
Studies from throughout the world repeatedly find any link between global warming and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases, are either grossly overstated or outright false.
For example, a 2010 study in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature compared historical and contemporary maps of the range and incidence of malaria and found endemic/stable malaria is likely to have covered 58% of the world’s land surface around 1900 but only 30% by 2007. They report, ‘even more marked has been the decrease in prevalence within this greatly reduced range, with endemicity falling by one or more classes in over two-thirds of the current range of stable transmission.’ They write, ‘widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent.’
Also, in a 2008 article in the Malaria Journal, Pasteur Institute of Paris professor Paul Reiter wrote:
“Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ‘new’ malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission, [continuing] future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on ‘global warming’ as a dominant parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is scary enough without pop-media outlets like Rolling Stone hyping unwarranted fears of a link to climate change. Rolling Stone should stick to what it does best, covering music and pop culture. When it comes to science, Rolling Stone is about as knowledgeable and authoritative as Madonna.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | December 11, 2020
Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).
Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.
They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”
Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.
Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.
Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.
In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.
To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.
Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.
UN’s call for ‘climate emergency’ is an invitation to misery in developing countries
By Vijay Jayaraj – Global Warming Policy Forum – 14/12/20
A declaration of climate emergency (as per UN’s emission reduction requirements) will dent the developmental goals and increase energy prices. Besides, it will also result in the tax payers funded transition to a less reliable energy system, a recipe for a potential economic collapse.
A precursor to the 2021 COP26 meeting in the UK
Speaking at the Climate Ambition Summit to mark the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, UN chief Antonio Guterres implored, “Today, I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.”
He further clarified that,
We need meaningful cuts now to reduce global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. This must be fully reflected in the revised and strengthened Nationally Determined Contributions that the Paris signatories are obliged to submit well before COP26 next year in Glasgow.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed 11.6 billion pounds of UK’s overseas aid to support green technology. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan pledged not to build any new coal plants in the country.
Support for the UN leader’s call also came from the Chinese President Xi Jinping. He said China will cut down carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65% by 2030, in comparison to 2005. Given its status as the leading coal consumer and empowerer of fossil fuel technology in other developing countries, it remains to be seen how President Xi will reconcile his 65% commitment with Beijing’s fossil ambitions and energy intensive industries.
Speaking at the same event (virtually), the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India will reduce emission intensity by 21% in comparison to the 2005 levels. Earlier this year, Modi had indicated that the country is aiming to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% to 35% and increase the use of natural gas, without setting a deadline for the same.
Even as per its ambitious scenario to reduce emissions, India will not be able to achieve a 45 percent reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 2010 levels without compromising on its aggressive energy policy that has enabled the country to achieve an energy surplus in recent years.
Studies on the relationship between GDP and energy growth indicate that “It is very difficult to reconcile reductions in carbon dioxide emissions with continued economic growth, especially in poor and medium rich countries,” as most of the world’s primary energy comes from fossil fuels.
A call for 45 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emission will be suicidal for the energy sectors in the developing world, most of which depend on coal, oil, and Natural gas. 84% of the world’s primary energy comes from Fossil fuels (2019) and just 11% coming from Renewables. Though the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption may appear to be reducing by a small margin each year, the absolute value of consumption keeps increasing each year.
Despite the rapid addition of renewable technology globally, the year-on-year change in primary energy consumption value for both renewable and fossil sources were almost the same in 2019, i.e., an increase consumption of around 960 TWh for both the sources. The actual fossil fuel consumption has technically increased and will continue to increase in future, as developing economies are wary of falling back into the dark ages of energy poverty.
Riding on the renewable energy myth
Developing nation’s precaution with green transition has a reason. Gueterres claimed that “Renewable energy is getting less expensive with every passing day.” But the claim is disputed, at least as per the current state of renewable technology, their backup mechanisms, and the evidence from the existing green grids.
Data from renewable energy dominated states like California and from countries like Germany and UK, show that excessive investment and dependency on renewable energy has actually resulted in increased electricity prices.
Renewable energy like wind and solar, which in many instances is installed with subsidies from taxpayer’s money, ends up charging the taxpayer more for their electricity use, thus technically costing the taxpayer not once but twice.
A ‘green’ Covid recovery will imperil developing countries
Gueterres insisted that, “the recovery from COVID-19 presents an opportunity to set our economies and societies on a green path in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
He is not alone in suggesting a marriage of COVID-19 recovery stimulus and green energy transition. The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset program suggests the same, with global leaders like Justin Trudeau already endorsing it.
Developing countries are unlikely to join this call for green transition, despite Xi’s tall pledges. India, for example, is likely to become the most populous country in the world by 2030 and it will have to risk millions of poor people falling back into the extreme poverty category if it were to amend its commitments to Paris agreement as per Gueterres’ suggestions.
With COVID-19 lockdowns adversely impacting the country’s economy (a negative growth in GDP and a long road to arrive at pre-COVID-19 levels), it is unlikely that the country’s leadership will commit to any significant CO2 reduction targets before the COP26 meetings in the UK.
India’s Economic Survey 2018-2019 categorically stated, “While there has been a tremendous increase in renewable energy capacity, fossil fuels, especially coal, would continue to remain an important source of energy.” The survey added, “Further, considering the intermittency of renewable power supply, unless sufficient technological breakthrough in energy storage happens in the near future, it is unlikely that thermal power can be easily replaced as the main source of energy for a growing economy such as India.”
This is likely the reason why Prime Minister Modi refused set a deadline for India’s proposed 30-35% reduction in emissions. India had recently doubled its mining exploration activity by implementing about 400 new projects. The mining sector is considered important to the country’s ambition to become a USD 5 Trillion economy. According to India’s Central Electricity Authority, 50% of India’s electricity generation in 2030 will continue to come from coal.
Does climate alarm justify extreme calls for energy transition?
Despite the heightened focus on emission reduction commitments, the elephant in the room has been the science used for justifying these emission reductions in first place.
During his speech, Gueterres asked “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Well he may be right! This is indeed a “dramatic” emergency, not a scientific one!
If we were to assess the key indicators that determine quality of life, it is evident that many of those metrics have improved drastically since the industrial revolution, despite the contrasting storyline portrayed in the mainstream media.
Life expectancy (age to which a new born baby is expected to survive), access to clean drinking water, access to affordable and reliable electricity, access to nutritious food at affordable prices, agricultural crop productivity per acre and farmer incomes are some of the key metrics that show us that the world has improved a lot, especially in the past 3 decades. We are not in a climate emergency!
The only reasoning provided for a future climate catastrophe is the temperature projections from computer climate models, collectively known as CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project). The UN uses the most recent versions of CMIP (5 & 6) to frame climate policy decisions and the mainstream media and academic institutions regard these models as the gold standard in climate forecasting.
The models are designed to forecast future temperatures, based on greenhouse gas emission scenarios. This is how the UN predicts future temperatures and the reason why Gueterres has called for an emission reduction. But the models are hypersensitive to emissions and thus have been faulty since inception.
Recent research has shown “that climate models overstate atmospheric warming”. The warming projected by these models have been found to be 4 to 5 times faster than the actual temperature observations on ground. Even if the developing nations refuse to commit to UN’s carbon neutrality initiative, there won’t be a significant impact on the climate.
So, the call by Gueterres is not only pseudo-scientific in its climate assumptions but also dependent on unreliable and unaffordable green energy. The call for emission reduction will be economically damaging and to a severe extent in the developing countries.
Moreover, it completely excludes the possibility of economies becoming stronger in the future, potentially making them more resilient, thus developed enough to adapt to climatic challenges. The prescribed reduction mechanisms and the war on fossil fuels could actually stifle their ability to mitigate and adapt to future temperature changes.
It will be interesting to see how Xi, Modi and others in developing world put their commitments into practice, and how it will impact the current energy forecasts which project an increasing reliance on fossil fuel in their respective economies.
Jack Dorsey, the CIA and Twitter Censorship in the Age of Covid-19
By Vanessa Beeley |
Unlimited Hangout| December 10, 2020
Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, has embedded himself in some of the most powerful global influencer complexes. His techno-mining of African potential and the increasing use of Twitter as a surveillance tool for the corporatocracy have generated the opportunity for Dorsey to play an increasingly pivotal role in the roll-out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
In Part 1 of this series on the emergence of the “celebrity humanitarianism” complex of the 21st century and its role in the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, I covered the evolution of Hollywood actor Sean Penn from anti-Iraq-war activist to establishment narrative endorser and advocate for the predator class factions dominated by the Clinton family cabal and globalism.
Penn was one of the three men together on a beach holiday that was featured in a Daily Mail article in November 2020. Another of the three global influencers strolling on the beach with Penn was “technology entrepreneur” and the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey’s meteoric rise to fame as a leading innovator in the world of data technology began to falter in 2016/17 when 247 Wall Street listed Dorsey among the twenty worst CEOs in America. In this article, I will investigate Dorsey’s involvement in the narrative management of Covid-19 and his potential contribution to the roll out of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset that has been accelerated by the Coronavirus “pandemic” exercise.
Like Penn, Dorsey is a supporter of the Democratic Party. Dorsey broke ranks with the billionaire bloc to donate $ 5600 to Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign after the June 2019 Democratic debates. Dorsey cites Gabbard’s anti-war stance as the reason for his support. Dorsey also contributed to the campaigns of Andrew Yang and Jay Inslee. Dorsey commends Yang for his “focus on artificial intelligence and automation” (emphasis added). Dorsey has also endorsed the philanthrocapitalist “climate change” portfolio – in a tweet Dorsey says that Gabbard and Yang’s “voices are important to surface in debates”, adding:
“Along with systemically addressing climate change and economic injustice, these are the key issues of global consequence I want to see considered and discussed more.”
Dorsey as well as the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, were subpoenaed to a US Senate hearing in November 2020, where their platforms were accused of anti-conservative bias after their effective suppression of the Hunter Biden China scandal. Of the two social media platforms, Twitter was deemed to be the most aggressive in its censorship of the New York Post article.
US conservatives were outraged that a story critical of Joe Biden, with potential to turn the election in favour of Donald Trump, was being buried by platforms as influential as Twitter and Facebook. Dorsey’s rationale for this unprecedented censorship had been that Twitter policies prohibit “directly distributing content obtained through hacking that contains private information”. Dorsey later back-pedalled but by then, the story had effectively been “disappeared” and damage to the Biden campaign had been successfully limited.
Dorsey’s apparent absorption into the transnational billionaire complex controlling the global response to the Covid-19 “pandemic” and orchestrating the Fourth Industrial Revolution, will be explored throughout this article.
From Square to Covid-19 – Dorsey transfers $ 1 billion to “disarm the pandemic”
In addition to Twitter, Dorsey is also the CEO of Square, a digital payments platform. In April 2020, Dorsey transferred an alleged 28% of his wealth from Square to his Start Small LLC (SS) to fund Covid-19 relief globally. The $1 billion donation represents the most significant “philanthropic” donation made by the tech-billionaire during his entire career.
One month after the launch of SS, Dorsey announced on Twitter the disbursement of $87.8 million to a number of initiatives apparently responding to fall-out from Covid-19 response measures. The disbursements included $600,000 to help develop “high impact digital learning tools to support special needs students and English language learners who are most affected by the crisis and will experience the most learning loss during school closures”.
The reality is that none of these measures would be necessary if scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, medical staff and experts opposing the disproportionate response to a virus [seemingly] less deadly than seasonal flu had been taken into consideration by the institutions and governments rolling out the draconian “lockdown” of global populations in preparation for the Great Reset. Dorsey’s and Twitter’s role in ensuring the censorship and de-platforming of dissenting voices is also examined in this article.
Let us not forget that “a report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus ‘pandemic’, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $ 82 billion in just 23 days” as picked up by journalist, Cory Morningstar, who is also cited below.
In May 2020, Dorsey donated $10 million to Sean Penn’s CORE response which supported CORE’s national expansion of Covid-19 drive-through test sites “into Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans and the Navajo Nation”. The origins of the CORE initiative are examined in detail in Part 1 of this series. Dorsey is also credited with persuading Penn to join Twitter in May 2020.
As Dorsey stated in his April 2020 tweet:
“After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and [Universal Basic Income] or UBI.”
Dorsey’s involvement in the promotion of UBI demonstrates his endorsement of measures which are designed to shore up economic privilege for members of the global billionaire cartels while asset-stripping and disenfranchising the working classes and what remains of an already decimated middle class in the West.
Cory Morningstar, one of the foremost voices speaking out about the unprecedented power grab being facilitated by the Covid-19 narratives, gave me this statement with regards to the covert threat of UBI:
Covid-19 is the catalyst for the Great Reset, in which universal basic income plays a securing role. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the strategic solution to protect the ruling classes from Molotov cocktails and global civil unrest by those being methodically dispossessed of their occupations, dignity and self-preservation – the working class, much middle class, peasantry, artisans, and those that comprise the informal economy that presides in the Global South. Disclosures on coming “disbanding of existing safety-net programs” are not included in the foundation-funded marketing campaigns.
When UBI begins to be rolled out globally, one can expect public healthcare to slowly disappear, replaced by privatized services (largely Telehealth). Further, UBI payments will be linked to benefits via blockchain – ensuring full spectrum compliance and servitude of whole societies. Billionaires are supporting/financing UBI marketing campaigns for good reason: it is preferable to pay a pittance to the citizenry than to risk losing the social license that allows for the continued decimation of the Earth, coupled with the continued exploitation of those most oppressed and vulnerable.
The real motive behind Jack Dorsey’s interest in Africa
Dorsey’s focus on UBI and girl’s health and education is mirrored, coincidentally, by the interests of the Clinton Foundation in Africa. Dorsey had been planning to relocate to Africa for six months in 2020, plans that were apparently derailed by the Coronavirus crisis although a more likely obstacle was investor concern that his pivot to Square and the opportunities presented for digital payment remodeling in Africa’s cash-based society would lead to his neglect of Twitter.
In 2015, Bill and Chelsea Clinton led an entourage of powerful elite sponsors of the Clinton Foundation to Africa for Bill Clinton’s 12th visit to the resource-plundered continent. Dorsey joined the Clintons, Microsoft (via Bill Gates), Facebook and Google in a bid to ensnare the developing market sector into their accelerator programmes and debt enslavement campaigns. Visa, Mastercard and Salesforce are also establishing venture investments in African start-ups.
According to “Witney Schneidman, a Brookings fellow with the Africa Growth Initiative and former deputy secretary of state Clinton administration”, Dorsey was in the right place at the right time. In November 2019, Dorsey tweeted that Africa “will define the future (especially the bitcoin one)” The African continent comprises 54 countries with a combined population of 1.3 billion people with the highest population growth rate in the world. The world’s largest population of people without banks, trading in cash. Ripe for exploitation by the world’s robber barons and financial-tech-carpet-baggers.
In November 2020, Dorsey was the closing keynote speaker for the Africa Fintech Summit sponsored by Dedalus Global and Ibex Frontier. Dorsey is described as a “futurist”, a “visionary”, and one of the “biggest influencers in tech ecosystems worldwide”. “With an unbanked population of 66% and a credit card penetration rate that averages 1.5%, the applications for crypto in sub-Saharan Africa can only help solidify Dorsey’s interest in the continent” (Africa News )
Dorsey is investing in the reinvention of colonialism as smart growth, the new-age digital colonialism. The Facebook’s internet footprint in Africa and its Orwellian ambitions for that continent are covered in detail in this article by investigative journalist, Cory Morningstar. Morningstar has showed in her recent and past work how the billionaire class seeks to facilitate the absorption of the Global South into a paternalistic, inherently racist, Global North power structure that will suck the lifeblood out of these nations via “philanthropic” channels that have been constructed to mine data, resources, livelihoods and cultural infrastructure until it is an overpopulated, micro-managed colony with no access to development unless it is plugged into the predator class mothership.
“As Africa meets the 4IR Fourth Industrial Revolution], its youth will be one of its most important assets” – August 2020, World Economic Forum: How can Africa succeed in the Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Dorsey, the Clintons and the technological “disruption” of Haiti
Dorsey’s history of rubbing shoulders with the Clinton clan goes way back. Just as Sean Penn was heavily involved with the Clinton’s rapacious policies in Haiti, Dorsey was a keynote speaker at the Haiti Tech Summit in 2018, an event that is also described as the “Davos of the Caribbean”. The summit was organised by the Global Startup Ecosystem which, according to their website, “hosts the world’s first and largest digital accelerator- supporting 1000 companies from 90 countries every year”. Target regions are Africa, America, Asia, Europe, Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East.
Taken from their website, in 2017, GSE launched a 13 year initiative to accelerate emerging market ecosystems every year until 2030 in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The “iconic” Haiti Tech Summit was the pilot launch. The company was projecting 54 tech summits in 2020, to be held virtually and “across all major hubs globally”. Alongside Dorsey at the 2018 Haiti Tech summit were representatives from other Silicon Valley giants — Google, Facebook and YouTube. The end of summit message from the summit’s founder and GSE’s co-founder, Christine Souffrant Ntim, informed the audience that Haiti “was ready for disruption”. This is an unfortunate choice of words considering the decades of “disruption” that have been inflicted upon the semi-colonised island by a series of US administrations, dominated by the Clintons’ exploitation policies targeting Haiti.
Screenshot from Haitian Times video report on the Tech Summit 2018.
This is nothing less than implementation of UN Agenda 2030, an agenda that aims to privatise and seize control of land, resources, energy, education and to digitalise the world we live in, to bring us all into city-based data colonies that can be easily controlled and manipulated for the benefit of the vulture class – the billionaire elites who perceive this world to be their exclusive bread basket and the “little people” as the “useless” expendables.
GSE’s website lists Dorsey as a member of their speaker network that includes Ben Horowitz and Sophia, the world’s celebrity robot. Horowitz is co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in technology start-ups, and their better-known investments include GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. GSE partners include LinkedIn, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Forbes. GSE’s mission is to “prepare individuals and organisations for the digital age” according to Einstein Ntim, managing partner at GSE – a goal completely in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Covid-19-facilitated Great Reset.
Dorsey and the Transition Integrity Project – Berggruen Institute
Dorsey’s involvement with the Berggruen Institute (BI) is an indication of his collaboration with some of the most powerful neoconservative influencers in US politics. BI is another transformational future-shaping conglomerate “promoting long term answers to the biggest challenges of the 21st Century”. Nicolas Berggruen is the co-founder and chairman of BI. Berggruen has been pivotal in the restructuring and reinventing of “democracy” for the new digital age. Berggruen used the institute as a launch pad for a number of government reform projects. These include the 21st Century Council which brought together former heads of state – with Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroder, Helle Thorning Schmidt and Nicolas Sarkozybeing just a few of names on the list. Dorsey was a member of the 21st Century Council and is one of Berggruen’s “people”.
Berggruen established the “Think Long Committee for California” in 2010. The committee included such neoconservative and “progressive” luminaries as Condoleeza Rice and Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) and its purpose was to effectively create a new set of rules for governance, using Agenda 21 Sustainable Development grants to impose regional governance.
Soros/Berggruen/von der Leyen
In 2012, Berggruen’s Council for the Future of Europe met in Berlin to discuss Europe Beyond the Crisis. Speeches were given by former UK Labour Party leader and criminal globalist, Tony Blair, billionaire influencer and transnational interventionist, George Soros and George Papandreou, former PM of Greece and last in a long line of corrupt imperialist sycophants. Dorsey has effectively embedded himself into one of the most influential and predatory of the neocon cartels. Dorsey is a minor in the billionaire circle but a major in identifying the foremost power hubs.
Berggruen is also behind the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), recently covered by investigative journalist, Whitney Webb, for Unlimited Hangout who described the TIP as:
“A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios.”
Another sinister Berggruen programme is the “Transformations of the Human” which has all the hallmarks of a transhumanism agenda. The concept involves the placing of philosophers and artists in key research sites “to foster dialogue with technologists”. The “aim of the program is to render AI and Biotech visible as unusually potent experimental sites for reformulating our vocabulary for thinking about ourselves” which could be interpreted as reprogramming humanity. The findings will be fed back into the “production of both AI and biotech and to thereby contribute to both human and non-human flourishing” or perhaps to merge the two?
As investigative journalist, James Corbett, warns “are we ready to give up our humanity” to succumb to the “ethical use of technology to extend human capabilities?”. The redesigning or genetic modification of the human condition is not science fiction, it is the bedrock of the ideology of those who rule this world behind the facade of government.
As Julian Huxley, an influential English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist wrote, in the last century:
“… unless [civilised societies] invent and enforce adequate measures for regulating human reproduction, for controlling the quantity of population, and at least preventing the deterioration of quality of racial stock, they are doomed to decay …”
Huxley invented the term “transhumanism” just before he became President of the British Eugenics Society, 1959-62. Huxley was also the first Director General of UNESCO.
Author, Dean Koontz, described the age of Transhumanism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution very succinctly:
“We live in hubristic age, when politicians imagine themselves to be messiahs and when many in the sciences frankly discuss their dreams of creating a “post-human” civilization of genetically engineered supermen, ignorant of the fact that like minds have often come before them and have left no legacy but death, destruction, and despair.”
Dorsey’s close ties to those whose purpose is to reinstate a Silicon Valley-backed Democrat as US President and to oust President Trump who, to some degree, slowed down the global military interventionism of the neocon camp in Washington as well as Twitter’s record of protectionism of the Biden election campaign are perhaps what, currently, make Dorsey an accepted member of the overclass.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Pacilio, senior communications manager at Twitter, who deleted Trump tweets claiming (correctly) children are almost immune from Covid-19, was formerly the press secretary for Kamala Harris, Biden’s pick for vice president. Twitter’s proclaimed neutrality is rendered nonsensical by all the above and by their collaboration across the board with global influencers whose futurist agenda is reliant upon the acceptance of official Covid-19 narratives.
Dorsey’s anti-conservative Twitter censorship policy is also supported by online petition giant, Avaaz, who were instrumental in the fomenting of conflict in Syria from the outset in 2011 and well versed in the art of selling hate for Empire.
Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey – investing in civil unrest?
Dorsey and Covid-19 impresario, Bill Gates, are alleged indirect funders of the BAIL Project (BP). The project was established to bail out protestors who participated in the George Floyd demonstrations and riots. BAIL is reported to have connections to Antifa, an organisation associated with stoking civil unrest and being “primary instigators of violence at public rallies” according to declassified Department of Homeland Security and FBI studies from 2016, the first year of Trump’s presidency. While many of the reports linking Dorsey to BAIL and BAIL to Antifa can be described as “conservative”, Dorsey’s Start Small initiative has donated to Black Lives Matter, suspected to be another of the billionaire co-opted organisations designed to harness and control black power globally.
The Audacious Project (housed at TED) was seed-funded $ 250 million by Gates, Skoll and Dalio Foundations. The BAIL Project was one of the five recipients of $ 50 million funding from the Audacious Project and is partnered by TED directly according to their own website. The Audacious Project, “a new model to inspire change”, is yet another node in the philanthrocapitalist complex wreaking havoc globally under the pretext of building a better future for all. In reality, such groups are building a system that will make the world’s wealthiest class even wealthier and will give ever increasing control over the global resource inventory.
When the connection is made to the Transition Integrity Project and Gates and Dorsey’s suspected involvement in BAIL and potentially Antifa, it makes sense that these narrative builders of the Covid-19 paradigm would be behind the scenes of the planned civil unrest in the US.
Further evidence of Twitter’s role as a surveillance tool for US intelligence agencies and influencers on Covid-19 response came when The Intercept exposed the AI start-up Dataminr and that company’s involvement in the monitoring of the Floyd protests and provision of that data to police and security forces nationwide. While both Twitter and Dataminr deny any engagement in domestic surveillance, these accusations followed on from the 2016 controversies that aligned Twitter with the CIA as investors in, or partners of Dataminr. The Twitter-Dataminr collaboration permitted Dataminr to scan every public tweet as soon as it was published, giving them advance warning of any incoming protests or dissident action.
Despite the denial of surveillance activity by both Twitter and Dataminr, “monitoring activities and forwarding information to the police is clearly surveillance” explained Andrew Ferguson, author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement.”
In 2016, Twitter allegedly asked that Dataminr stop providing intelligence agencies with Twitter tools and content but as TechCrunch reported:
“… Dataminr isn’t ending its relationship with the government altogether: Dataminir still counts In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA, as an investor. Dataminr has taken investment from Twitter, too, highlighting some of the conflicts that remain as tech companies fight for more transparency and autonomy from government control.”
Dataminr’s Yale leadership is believed to still have a $ 255,000 contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The protestations of Twitter and apparent withdrawal from US intelligence blood-hounding by Dataminr appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors designed to put the public off the scent.
However, perhaps even more relevant to the Twitter censorship of Covid-19 dissident media, scientists and medical experts, and famously, David Icke, all of whom were challenging establishment “science”, is perhaps also related to its partnership with Dataminr. In late 2016, Twitter told TechCrunch that Dataminr “uses public Tweets to sell breaking news alerts to […] government agencies such as the World Health Organisation” although the “not for surveillance” caveat was thrown in.
The billionaire complex apprentices, managing narratives for their mentors
Penn and Dorsey are not in the upper echelons of the ruling elite circles. They are the keen instruments of power, eager to please and to do the bidding of those in positions of power they perhaps aspire to one day. The wealthiest people in the world are providing funding for the Covid-19 response, with good reason. It is the portal to the world vision they have been working towards for decades, perhaps even centuries.
At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 2020, historian and philosopher, Yuval Harari, gave talks on the future of humanity. Harari talks about the “useless class”, he describes the data colonies that will be formed under some projected “dictator.” In the world, Harari envision, if a dissident’s mind can be read by a centralised AI data hub, he can be arrested for non-compliance with the dictatorship.
Of course, the global dictatorship is already here with the Covid-19 measures, the obligatory masking, martial law, the Army deployed to roll out testing and vaccines, mandatory vaccines (you will not be able to function in society without one), the incarceration of the elderly, the destitution and isolation of children in schools and distance learning, digitalised education systems. The future according to this totalitarian, neo-feudalist system is bleak for humanity unless we collectively wake up.
Penn and Dorsey are just two of a collection of useful pathways to the Great Reset. They are the fear-stokers and narrative managers, ensuring that people fear death, fear their own powerlessness against a “virus” that stalks them even in their own home.
As journalist, Peter Koenig, described earlier this year:
“The virus is just a clever idea to use an invisible enemy for instilling fear, worldwide, by this minuscule, insanely rich and psychotically power-hungry elite to put the entire world population to its knees. FEAR that obliterates the human immune system and may bring about a range of illnesses far worse than covid-19, including cancer, coronary diseases, diabetes – and much more.”
It is time to recognise that death is an inevitable part of our existence as human beings, that visions of immortality offered by those who will distort and twist humanity out of shape to create a dystopian future for all but the very privileged few, are nothing but the erosion of all that is human. Being human is what will enable us to fight back. When we remember what we cherish as human beings, a smile, a hug, the comfort of touch and the warmth of human interaction perhaps we will start fighting before we lose what makes us who we are to the vision of those who see us as ultimately expendable.
Europe’s Anti-Russia Sanctions a Stupendous Act of Self-Harm and Loathing
Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
New data out this week indicates that the European Union has suffered aggregate economic losses amounting to over €120 billion due to its policy of imposing sanctions against Russia. That’s according to figures released by the Dusseldorf Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Yet European leaders at an EU summit this week again called for the extension of sanctions on Russia, which will roll on into the middle of next year and probably beyond that date. This lockstep action by the bloc is only leading to more tensions with Russia and taking a political direction to nowhere except more conflict. Those EU sanctions were first imposed in July 2014 over dubious allegations of Russia’s malign involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Moscow has rightfully reciprocated with counter-sanctions on European exports of agriculture and other goods.
The German Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates that the entire stand-off has hit EU economies with losses of €21 billion every year. The biggest loser is Germany’s economy which forfeits nearly €5.5 billion a year in bilateral trade with Russia.
Accumulated over six years since 2014 the EU’s sanctions policy against Russia has resulted in a staggering total loss of over €120 billion. And counting.
To put that figure into some perspective, it would be comparable to the combined annual military budgets of Europe’s three biggest economies: Germany, Britain and France.
Or to put it another way, this week the European leaders agreed on a landmark stimulus package worth €1.8 trillion for the 27-member bloc to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. The economic loss to the EU from sanctions on Russia is of the order of 10 per cent of that record stimulus effort.
It is therefore mind-shuddering why the European Union persists in inflicting such untold damage to its own economy through its policy towards Russia.
The EU claims that sanctions are being extended because of the lack of progress in peace negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. Brussels is seeking to blame Moscow for that ongoing frozen conflict, oblivious to the fact that Russia is not a party to the conflict. It is a member of the so-called Normandy Format overseeing the Minsk Peace Accord signed in 2015. Germany and France are also members of the Normandy group. The group has not met since one year ago. So, why is Russia being singled out as the sole responsible for lack of progress in settling the Ukraine conflict?
Secondly, the Ukraine crisis was instigated by a coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The coup was orchestrated by the United States and European allies, which ushered in an ultranationalist regime in Kiev with disturbing links to Neo-Nazi factions. Hostility towards Russian-speaking communities in the Ukraine then led to the Crimean referendum in March 2014 appealing for reunification with Russia. It is simply preposterous and cynical for the European Union to blame Russia for subsequent turmoil when the EU is itself directly complicit in fomenting the crisis.
In any case, rigidly applying sanctions is counterproductive to a diplomatic solution. Mutual dialogue is precluded by a policy of recrimination and scapegoating.
The EU sanctions policy is self-defeating and suffused with contradictions. It imposes measures against Russia with seeming insouciance about the huge damage being done to EU businesses, workers and farmers, and it does this without any clear justification. Yet this week EU leaders led by Germany refused to impose sectoral sanctions against Turkey in spite of repeated calls by EU members Greece and Cyprus for such measures as a means of defending their territorial integrity from Turkey’s aggressive gas exploration in the East Mediterranean. So here we have EU members protesting against threats to their sovereignty from Turkey; yet the EU leaders show little resolve to defend the bloc’s external southern borders by taking a tough sanctions line towards Ankara.
There is evidently a strange double-think when one compares the EU’s gung-ho attitude towards Russia over a matter in Ukraine which is not even part of the EU and a matter that is highly contested in terms of the allegations being made against Russia.
How to explain such an irrational, anti-Russia policy by the European Union?
One has to conclude that the EU is slavishly following a policy determined by the United States. The US has imposed its own bilateral sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine, as well as many other equally dubious claims, such as alleged electoral interference. The Europeans are thus deferring to Washington’s foreign policy of hostility towards Moscow, even though the economic losses felt by the Americans are negligible compared with those of Europe due to the latter’s geographic proximity and traditionally much greater trading relations with its continental neighbor.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted this week that the European Union’s policy is “centered on the United States”. Lavrov lamented that the EU under current leadership shows no sign of acting independently from Washington. In effect, the European bloc is a vassal under American tutelage.
Ironically, the antagonism towards Russia from the West is due to Russia’s demonstrative independence.
Says Lavrov in a separate interview: “The West’s awareness that Russia is an independent power has had a cumulative effect. Russia will always prioritize its national interests. It is always ready to harmonize them candidly and equitably with the national interests of any other countries based on international law, but it will never be under someone’s thumb.”
The Russian top diplomat added: “The desire to score propaganda points has dominated the West’s foreign policy for a long time, while overlooking the essence of the problems that need a solution in the interests of the peoples of the respective regions.”
A psychiatrist might opine that European self-harming, irrational antagonism towards Russia – while constantly appeasing an American bully – is a form of self-loathing. The EU’s political class resent Russia because the latter is a constant reminder of the independence and integrity that they are so abjectly deficient in.
Bottom falls out of Western narrative as Sunday Times claims Navalny was poisoned twice
By Paul Robinson | RT | December 14, 2020
Long known as the “house journal” of British spooks, it now appears the Sunday Times has given up any pretence of critical journalism and is unquestionably publishing what intelligence officials want to place in the public domain.
A prominent liberal Russian journalist once commented that Western writings on Russia were so bad that they were liable to turn even the biggest Putin hater into a supporter. For while there are many very legitimate criticisms that can be made of the country, Western reporting is so exaggerated that it discredits almost everything that comes out of its mouth – even when it’s actually correct.
One prime example is an article published this weekend in Britain’s most prestigious Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Times, on the subject of the poisoning of opposition activist Alexey Navalny.
Navalny was taken ill on a flight in Siberia on August 20, and medically evacuated to Germany two days later. The Russian authorities are sticking to the initial diagnosis of doctors in Omsk, who said that Navalny was suffering from a metabolic disorder. The Germans, however, claim that he was poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok. Since it is said that Novichok can only be produced in state-run facilities, the implication is that the Russian state was responsible for the poisoning.
The circumstances of Navalny’s illness are indeed suspicious. Furthermore, previous cases, such as the poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal in the UK, make it seem plausible that somebody in authority might have wanted to attack the Moscow protest leader in a similar way. That said, suspicions aren’t proof, and the German government has failed to provide any. The lack of transparency is immensely regrettable, and makes it possible for sceptics to argue that the Germans are lying.
This weekend’s article in the Sunday Times is probably meant to undermine the doubters. In reality, it’s likely to have the opposite result. For its claims are so outrageous that many thinking people will react with laughter, and then perhaps start questioning the poisoning story as a whole.
According to the Sunday Times, Navalny wasn’t poisoned by a nerve agent smeared on his water bottle, as has previously been asserted, but rather was attacked by means of his underpants. Moreover, he wasn’t poisoned once, but twice, and despite Novichok’s reputation for extreme deadliness, both attempts failed.
When examined, though, these claims don’t amount to much. The Sunday Times story is nearly 4,000 words long, but 95 percent of it is irrelevant filler, including the comical assertion that the murder of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916 proves “Russia’s penchant for poisoning” (because, of course, nobody other than Russians ever poisoned anyone). The allegations regarding the attack on Navalny take up a mere 100 words of the 4,000-word total. As well as being brief, they are to say the least unproven. The Sunday Times says:
“Vladimir Uglev, a retired Russian chemist who developed nerve agents, believes Navalny’s poisoners would have been instructed to place novichok on the elastic waistband of his pants, where it would come into contact with his skin. … A German laboratory later found traces of a nerve agent on the surface of one of the water bottles. Uglev, the retired chemist, believes that this is because Navalny touched it having got novichok on his fingers after putting on his underpants.”
In other words, the underpants story is just what a single Russian scientist, unconnected to the case, happens to think. Nothing more. Does Uglev provide any evidence to prove his assertion? No. He just “believes” it. Yet, this is sufficient for the Sunday Times to treat the story as essentially true, leading off its article with the claim that, “Navalny was exposed to a nerve agent – not, as initially believed, when he drank a cup of tea in the departure lounge but when he got dressed that morning.” This is not exactly good reporting.
If the underwear story smells a little off, so too does the claim that Russian secret agents tried to murder Navalny not once, but twice. As evidence, the Sunday Times says that, “German security sources have told their associates in the UK that the attackers struck again as Navalny lay in an induced coma before being put on a medical flight to Germany. ‘This was with a view to him being dead by the time he arrived in Berlin,’ one source said.”
To put it another way, an anonymous person (probably a member of the British intelligence or security services) told a journalist that some other anonymous person believes that this is so. In other words, it’s not just hearsay, but anonymous hearsay. One can believe it if one wishes. But there’s no particular reason why one should.
After all, it requires one to imagine that the Russian secret services are so incompetent that they should fail to murder somebody on their own soil, not just once but twice. And further, that they should fail while using what is meant to be one of the deadliest poisons known to man. Maybe that’s what happened. But nobody who is already sceptical about the claim that the Russian state poisoned Navalny with Novichok is going to accept it. Instead, it’s likely to reinforce their scepticism. Add in the underwear, and they’ll probably feel that the bottom has fallen out of the Germans’ story.
And that’s a problem. Western commentators regularly complain that, when faced with evidence of misbehaviour, the Russian state and its supporters respond by inventing conspiracy theories in order to sow doubt about what is real and what is not. But such a tactic can only succeed if people have already lost faith in their original sources of information. In other words, the fundamental problem is not the conspiracy theories themselves, but rather the loss of faith caused by the exaggerations and falsities of so much of what passes as reporting.
The poisoned underwear is a case in point. It stretches the elastic of the imagination so far as to be utterly incredible. In this way, this latest allegation plays right into Moscow’s hands. Alexey Navalny may well have been the victim of a vicious attack. But there will be many who, having stuffed their noses into the Sunday Times, will decide that it doesn’t pass the sniff test, and that the whole Navalny story is a giant load of pants.
Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog
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From the Archives
Jack Ruby: Israel’s Smoking Gun
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 13, 2021
By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on September 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case.
Of course, it is perfectly normal that Chief Justice Earl Warren, when Ruby told him on June 7, 1964, “I have been used for a purpose,” failed to ask him who had used him and for what purpose.[1] But what about independent investigators? Are only readers of the Forward (“News That Matters To American Jews”) worthy of being informed that “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Killer ‘Jack Ruby’ Came From Strong Jewish Background,” and that he told his rabbi Hillel Silverman that he “did it for the Jewish people”? … continue
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