The shot that was NOT heard ‘round the World
Ashli Babbitt, the Coronavirus Coup, and the Silence of the Scams
By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | August 14, 2021
More than seven months have passed since an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead inside the US Capitol while attempting to climb through an opening in a glass door.
Six months after her death, her killer – a police officer who apparently shot her without warning, and certainly without having made any effort to stop her short of putting a fatal bullet through her chest – has never been publicly identified, let alone charged or disciplined.
During those same seven months – during which every self-respecting liberal demanded a criminal penalty for the policeman who killed George Floyd – Ashli Babbitt, the victim of an equally questionable police killing, has been the target of an orgy of media character assassination.
When Donald Trump recently mentioned her death as “a terrible thing” (hardly a radical assessment), New York Magazine’s response seethed with victim-blaming outrage, insisting that the unarmed Babbitt, with no criminal history of any kind:
was leading the mob [inside the Capitol] violently forward toward its goal of threatening or killing officials.”
There’s no evidence that Babbitt intended to kill anyone, let alone that she actually tried to. And there’s plenty of reason to believe that her fatal shooting was illegal. But facts about Ashli Babbitt have never counted for much in liberal media.
For the press, the top priority has been to ensure that in any story told about the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones who tried to destroy American democracy, while Joe Biden’s Democratic Party heroically came to its rescue.
In this respect, New York’s slander is altogether typical. Refracted through the editors’ invective, in which (among other things) Republican politicians are, weirdly, accused as the real culprits in Babbitt’s death, the underlying message emerges as an ideological tautology: Ashli Babbitt had to die because she joined the wrong sort of protest.
No wonder New York concluded that the hapless 35-year-old was killed “for a very good reason.”
The January 6 demonstration in which she participated has been as relentlessly demonized in the press as Babbitt herself.
According to mainstream media, the men and women who marched to the Capitol to protest the machinations by which Biden ousted Trump from the White House were – take your pick – “fascists” (PBS), “white supremacists” (CNN), “terrorists” (MSNBC), or a violent “mob” bent on paralyzing the United States government (USA Today), while virtually every mainstream media outlet still insists – against all evidence – that, collectively, the demonstrators staged an armed “insurrection” that only just failed to turn the United States into a right-wing dictatorship.
And anyone who imagined that, after seven months of this, the slanders against Ashli Babbitt couldn’t get any more venomous reckoned without the inflammatory effect of mass media Trump-hatred.
When, on July 12, the former President suggested that Babbitt’s killer should at least be publicly identified, the New Republic swung into anti-Republican overdrive, claiming in a hysterical screed that the unarmed Babbitt was a monster who had hoped for “the mass execution of Democratic politicians and prominent liberals” when she went to Washington to be killed on January 6.
Merciful heavens, the woman was so freaking bloodthirsty that she actually used to watch – Tucker Carlson!
Even that wasn’t all. The same rant that accused Ashli Babbitt of harboring dreams of mass murder described the January 6 protest as “a mob of thousands who…rampaged through the halls of Congress,” when in fact only a small fraction of the protesters entered the Capitol at all, and only a handful of those have been accused of possessing “weapons” (most of which seem to have been flagpoles); with a single exception, not one of the charged “insurrectionists” even thought to bring a gun to the coup. (The lone protester facing criminal charges who did carry a pistol into the Capitol never drew it, according to police.)
But hey, fantasy breeds fantasy: for liberals like the TNR editors, where there are Trump supporters, there’s just got to be mayhem.
Lest I be accused of playing an after-the-fact role in the “insurrection” myself, let me emphasize that I do not share Ashli Babbitt’s politics, and that I do not approve of the actions of the protesters who broke into the Capitol on January 6. Nor do I regard the 2020 presidential election as having been “stolen,” at least not in the sense that many of the protesters evidently believed it was – of which more presently.
But whether Ashli Babbitt was right about Donald Trump or about the 2020 election is ultimately beside the point. The plain truth is that as far as anyone can tell she was the victim of an extrajudicial execution – an execution made even more heinous by the fact that Babbitt’s actual offenses inside the Capitol involved no violence and placed no one in jeopardy.
It is an outrage that in the United States of America a police officer can shoot a woman dead for trespassing. And it is doubly an outrage that so few ostensible civil libertarians have been willing to say so.
Scores of liberals, politicians, op-ed writers and public moralists demanded a full-scale investigation into the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor. Why couldn’t one of them utter a single word of protest about the lethally trampled civil rights of Ashli Babbitt?
The smear campaign against Babbitt is more than the product of a pernicious double standard. It also serves to distract the public from the very real issues that spurred the protest in the first place.
I repeat: I don’t credit stories about the ghost of Hugo Chavez rising from the grave to manipulate secretly-programmed voting machines on Election Day. (In fact, I suspect these “theories” have been amplified in popular media precisely because they’re relatively easy to refute.)
But the January 6 protesters did have excellent reasons to be angry about the electoral process that put an end to Trump’s term of office. And since the popular press refuses to discuss the protesters’ legitimate grievances, allow me to enumerate three of the most important ones.
1. The balloting procedures used in key jurisdictions were probably illegal.
In several closely contested states – Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania among them – state executives made unilateral changes in the election laws in order to facilitate voting by mail rather than at polling booths, citing the “killer virus” as a pretext. Yet in every such case, the applicable state constitution assigns questions of public policy – including the extent to which people can vote by mail – to the state’s legislators rather than the executive branch; these matters cannot legally be determined by gubernatorial fiat except in strictly defined “emergencies.”
Nor can it be claimed that COVID19 posed such an emergency. Even Atlantic Magazine, one of the most sedulous organs of coronavirus hysteria, conceded barely a month before the presidential election that “voting with a mask on is no more dangerous than going to a grocery store with a mask on – something millions of Americans do every week.”
That means that the balloting procedures used in several important states were fundamentally flawed – not only violating the relevant state constitutions but probably transgressing the “due process of law” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution itself. And while there’s no way to know whether these wrongly altered procedures actually changed the outcome of the election, Trump voters had every right to condemn them.
2. The election was effectively decided by mass media misinformation.
It is ironic that so much recent propaganda accuses Trump and his supporters of circulating “misinformation.” In fact, one of the most consequential misinformation campaigns of modern times was largely responsible for Trump’s defeat.
Post-election observers are in general agreement that Joe Biden – that mumbling mummy – would have stood little chance of besting Trump had it not been for the popular press’ relentless stoking of coronavirus hysteria.
Of particular impact was the claim – repeated in various forms in more venues than I can count – that Trump was “personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths,” as one typical hit piece insisted in the run-up to the election.
But was he? For all the huffing and puffing, no one has presented any real evidence to support the accusation. Yes, the man in the bad wig behaved as anyone familiar with his record might have expected: he made some foolish remarks, picked needless feuds with Democratic governors, hogged the spotlight, reversed himself without acknowledgment, and took credit for things that would have happened just as well without him.
But the fact remains that presidential action had little effect on the virus or its consequences; nearly all the important decisions – including the disastrous lockdowns and small business closures, not to mention the suspension of representative democracy and the attacks on education, public worship and the arts – were made at the state level.
In all of this, the White House was largely irrelevant. Trump’s most culpable act – in my opinion – was backing the Food and Drug Administration as it cut the corners of the testing procedures that should have been required for the COVID19 “vaccines” and granted the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse medical consequences.
But on that point, remember, Trump was supported by the “experts” and even by his political opponents. Legitimate criticism never figured in the media blitz against the former President. Instead, he was blindsided over claims so vague they couldn’t even be specified, with dire-sounding but meaningless words like “downplaying” or “mishandling” repeated so often that eventually they seemed to prove themselves. It was an impressive display of emotion-churning propaganda. It contained little or no truth.
Did the avalanche of misinformation violate any election laws? Alas, no. But that fact certainly did not deprive angry voters of their right to protest.
3. Biden’s election guaranteed the worsening of the coronavirus coup.
The protesters’ conviction that Trump actually won the election probably won’t stand the test of time. But in one important sense, they did know perfectly well what they were fighting for – and so did we.
Joe Biden has never made a secret of his fondness for attacks on freedom in the name of “health” regulation. Less than two months into his term, Biden was openly mulling an executive fiat that would require the muzzling and six-foot separation of all American workers, even those who have submitted to the “vaccines.”
He has also suggested that anyone who declines to be a guinea pig for Big Pharma is unpatriotic, and has announced a plan to have “local health leaders” hawk the scantily-tested drugs from door to door to add even more pressure to the vaccination campaign – even as the unprecedented “gene therapy” has already figured in more than 5,300 deaths nationwide.
And this is clearly just the beginning.
Each passing week sees the lockdown-lovers flaunting still more contempt for the Bill of Rights. Mandatory muzzling has been reintroduced in Los Angeles County. Geraldo Rivera, a media stalking horse for the administration, has endorsed Jim Crow restrictions for the “unvaccinated” that would bar them from grocery stores and nearly all public places.
The US Surgeon General is publicly calling for still more censorship on social media (where dozens of accounts have already been canceled for disseminating information the authorities don’t like).
The nastiest aspect of all these police-state tactics is the growing intensity of the hate speech aimed at dissenters. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden insisted (falsely) on July 16.
Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took the incitement a step farther, blaming even infections among vaccinated Americans on “outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage.” In other words: if you get sick, you can thank those dastardly freethinkers who still imagine they’re entitled to civil rights.
It’s a dangerous and divisive strategy. And anyone unsure where it leads need only look to Italy, France and Greece, where officials are already forcing health care workers to submit to vaccinations on pain of losing their livelihoods.
French President Emmanuel Macron, not even bothering to seek parliamentary approval, is mandating “vaccine passports” for anyone who wants to eat at a restaurant or to travel by train.
And these strong-arm tactics are doubtless intended to prepare us for worse still to come. Anthony Fauci himself has declared that COVID19 vaccination should be compulsory in as many places as possible – even though federal law holds otherwise, since the drugs have only been granted “emergency use” authorization – because he thinks it “horrifying” that people should decide the fate of their own bodies. (The good doctor sings a different tune on the question of legalized abortion, but since when have our ruling mandarins been consistent?)
In short, to say that a lot was at stake in the 2020 presidential election would be putting it very mildly. Liberal pundits have expressed shock at the willingness of thousands of people to converge on Washington to denounce the election results that effectively intensified the coronavirus coup. I think it would have been shocking had they not done so.
It’s not just that our government – and its tame mouthpieces in the press – is using the pretext of “health regulation” to demonize those citizens who choose to exercise their right not to be injected with an untested drug. The entire vaccine-blackmail program is premised on a lie.
The campaign necessarily assumes that the COVID19 “vaccines” prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. They do no such thing.
The manufacturers have acknowledged, and the FDA has explicitly confirmed, the absence of any evidence that the new “vaccines” prevent either infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The argument that vaccination is necessary to “protect the public” against COVID19 is simply fraudulent.
Not only does the fear-mongering about “the unvaccinated” falsely assume that the “vaccines” prevent transmission, it completely ignores the presence of genuine immunity among those who have already been exposed. As with any respiratory virus, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 triggers the development of antibodies and T-cells that serve to prevent future infections and, therefore, to block the virus’ transmissibility.
In October 2020, the prominent Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta estimated that “three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate…that the vulnerable could resume normal lives” in the United States. More than nine months have now passed since Gupta’s assessment.
Even if her estimate turns out to have been overly optimistic, there can be no doubt that enough natural immunity exists in the general population to have a profound effect on the transmissibility of COVID19, with or without the experimental drugs the government wants us to use. Any “analysis” that omits that obvious fact is patently dishonest.
And suppose, for argument’s sake, that one overlooks all this and accepts the “case” numbers peddled by the CDC. Even so, the statistical basis for all the shrieking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is riddled with too many inconsistencies to be taken seriously.
The southern states of Mississippi and Arkansas, for instance, are both at the low end of the vaccination-level range, at 33.6% and 35.2% respectively.
If the Biden-Walensky propaganda were correct, those states would be inundated in comparable outbreaks of new COVID19 infections.
In fact, after adjusting for the small difference in population size, Arkansas’ most recent 7-day average for “new cases” is nearly 2.5 times higher than Mississippi’s. Such a disparity in the official numbers clearly cannot be explained on the basis of COVID19 vaccination rates.
And things are no different at the high end of the vaccination spectrum. Maryland has “fully vaccinated” 57.6% of its population, while New York lags just slightly behind at 55.8%. Yet, after adjustment for the different population sizes of the two states, New York still has nearly 2.5 times the 7-day average number of new “cases” of COVID19 that Maryland has – as big a gap as that between Mississippi and Arkansas.
Or consider the wildly different “case” levels to be found in California, which has a “fully vaccinated” rate of 51.5%, and in Pennsylvania, where the rate is 51.1%. Again, after adjusting for population, California’s latest “new case” average is well over double that of Pennsylvania’s – even though the vaccination level in the two states is virtually identical. Anomalies like these make nonsense of any argument that the US is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
And what about the “vaccinated”? Here, too, the propaganda doesn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Recently, six “fully vaccinated” people at a single wedding – held in a “large, open-air tent” – all came down with COVID19. Of those six, two were hospitalized and one died.
In a rather desperate brush-off typical of mainstream media, Insider’s Hilary Brueck described this as a “small outbreak that underscores how effective vaccines are against even variants of the virus.”
Ah, how nimbly propagandists put about in a changing wind! A year ago, six symptomatic cases of COVID19 would have marked the ceremony where they originated as a dreaded “superspreader event” – it would have been touted as proof that anyone selfish enough to invite guests to a wedding ought to be treated as a public menace.
And if, on top of that, fully a third of those infected had been hospitalized, and over 16% of them had dropped dead – well, I will leave it to the reader to imagine the hysterical headlines that would have erupted about that. Are we really supposed to chant hosannas now that the identical evils are showing up in the wake of COVID19 “vaccinations”?
But let us return to January 6 and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the killing of Ashli Babbitt.
Apart from her violent death – the only one that occurred in the Capitol on January 6 – the incidents of that day were strikingly incommensurate with the media’s horrified depictions of the “storming” of Congress.
Yes, there were scuffles with police, but such things were hardly unprecedented in Washington. And the media’s obsessive use of the phrase “deadly riot” misrepresents the unfortunate but nonviolent deaths (other than Babbitt’s) that occurred during or immediately after the protest.
Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died the following day, and whose death – as we were assured by the New York Times on the basis of “anonymous” reports – resulted from being clubbed over the head with a fire extinguisher by one of the “insurrectionists,” actually died of natural causes (as did two of the older protesters).
The only other supposedly “violent” death, that of protester Rosanne Boyland, was determined by the D.C. medical examiner’s office last April to be the consequence of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” though that didn’t prevent the Times from offering its readers back in January a gorily detailed – and false – account of how Boyland was “trampled” and “crushed” to death by “the mob.”
(By the way, I am not aware that the ostensibly meticulous fact-checkers at the Times have ever printed a direct retraction of either of these two bogus articles. Innocent errors do sometimes merit a correction at the Paper of Record; malicious errors almost never do.)
The threat allegedly posed by the demonstrators to members of Congress seems also to have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the media’s early insistence that the “insurrection” was led by sinister “right-wing extremists,” only a handful of those who breached the Capitol had any ties to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters or Aryan Nations.
“More than four-fifths” of those charged for their actions on January 6 “come from various backgrounds, from business owners to white-collar professionals,” the BBC reported in February. The claim that the “rioters” brought zip-tie handcuffs to use on Democratic politicians turned out to be another falsification: the one protester photographed holding the “restraints” actually found them on a table inside the Capitol. The police had brought them there.
And frankly, I find it a little hard to believe the stories of lawmakers who say they feared for their lives during the “siege” when one of them, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, could generate straight-faced media reports by claiming that she preferred a “possible confrontation with the insurrectionist mob” to sharing a “secure location” with some Republicans who were – gasp – not wearing masks!
True, her insistence that masks on the Republicans would have protected her, while her own would not, is part of the magical thinking we’ve all been asked to swallow throughout the propaganda campaign.
But would anyone who genuinely thought she was running from a lynch mob refuse a safe haven just because “I wouldn’t be able to see the virus as it was coming toward me” from a few un-muzzled legislators across the room? What was evidently meant to sound like a horror story reads, to me, much more like farce.
So it turns out that anyone genuinely concerned about “deadly violence” during the January 6 protest can have only one real subject to investigate: Ashli Babbitt. And the more one investigates her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, the less justifiable the whole scenario appears.
Just how, for instance, did protesters manage to enter the Capitol in the first place?
No one in power has offered any convincing answer to that question.
Federal government buildings in Washington are normally among the most zealously guarded in the world. And everyone knew that a large political protest was planned for January 6, the day Joe Biden’s election as President was to be officially certified.
Why couldn’t Capitol police use tear gas to stop the unarmed demonstrators as soon as they breached the entrances, especially since “tear gas munitions were used by other federal police agencies against protesters in front of Lafayette Park” just a few months earlier? And assuming the local police force was somehow unable to handle the crowd, where was the vaunted National Guard?
Some of the protesters believe that they were deliberately entrapped. As one of them later told the FBI, “law enforcement purposefully did not have enough resources there so that supporters of the former president could overrun the Capitol and be subsequently labeled as ‘intruders.’” I cannot prove this theory correct – but I also cannot dismiss it as implausible.
As early as February 4, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported that a “conspiracy” involving “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” had orchestrated a “vast, cross-partisan campaign” to ensure Biden’s smooth entry into office.
This “conspiracy” was so effective that it “got states to change voting systems” and, on the day of the January 6 protest itself, saw to it that the protesters who converged on the Capitol “were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators” who might otherwise “be blamed for any mayhem.”
Surely a cabal capable of that much could also arrange for the protest to get just far enough out of hand to guarantee media images that would discredit Donald Trump with the nation’s political elites – which, of course, is exactly what happened. Or was it all just coincidence?
Along similar lines, the strange absence of the National Guard on January 6 has been widely reported – but only as an inexplicable blunder.
Yet couldn’t this, like the parallel absence of counter-demonstrations, have been deliberate?
We know that the deployment of National Guard or military personnel to the Capitol would have required the consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was General Mark Milley, a man who (according to a soon-to-be-published book) told his aides that Trump reminded him of Hitler, and whose determination to ensure that Biden was installed as President – “come hell or high water” – went so far that he “informally planned for different ways to stop Trump” after the election, including private telephone conversations with (Democratic) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, credible reports maintain (though he denies it) that General Walter Piatt, director of Army staff, specifically refused to send National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 because “it wouldn’t look good.”
An honest press – if we had one – would be taking a hard look into the possibility that the “deadly riot” was really political theater, organized not by the protesters but by the very democracy-haters the protesters came to challenge. That would make Babbitt’s killing an even uglier miscarriage of justice.
Meanwhile, the refusal of the media, the pundits, the civil rights organizations, the politicians – just about everyone in power – to give Ashli Babbitt’s death the attention it deserves is more than a wrong in itself. It is part of a larger pattern of political gaslighting by which the victors in the 2020 election, while accusing Trump & Co. of an attempted “coup,” continue to advance a coup of their own.
Today the coup marches under the name “Delta variant.” But this is only a temporary phase. Specific terrors will vary from month to month, but there will always be some reason for whittling down our remaining freedoms. This latest scare is entirely typical.
Notwithstanding the ballyhoo, there’s no real evidence that the “Delta variant” is particularly dangerous – not even the CDC has attempted to make that case – and as a general rule, subsequent variants of a respiratory virus are less severe than those they follow.
(As a matter of fact, there’s only sketchy evidence that the new “variant” is even more transmissible than the original version, despite popular media’s insistence on this as a matter of fact: the CDC cites only one study about the alleged contagiousness of the “Delta variant,” which is based entirely on manifestly unreliable public “test” data. It’s also rife with anomalies, such as the finding that the variant spreads more rapidly among Asians than among white people, while among blacks it actually appears to be less transmissible. Go figure.)
In other words, like nearly everything the “experts” have claimed about COVID19 for the last seventeen months, the “deadly Delta” story is much less about facts than it is about maintaining public hysteria.
And the motive for the fear porn is perfectly clear. The Biden administration never intended to give the public anything more than a brief honeymoon from coronavirus terror.
True, there had to be some kind of reward for voting Donald Trump out of office. But now it’s time to get back to business – “business” being the deepening confinement of the American public.
“The carefree Covid season is over,” barked CNN on July 17. And the network was quick to identify the next targets of the crackdown: conservative media, for encouraging “vaccine hesitancy,” and “Republican-led states” that “have tried to outdo each other in limiting the power of cities and counties to impose Covid restrictions in case of a new outbreak.”
It’s a short step from condemning defenders of basic liberties to uprooting the liberties themselves. So if you thought this was all about roasting a TV commentator like Tucker Carlson or a politician like Ron DeSantis, think again: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Can we still pry our country loose from the grip of the fear campaign? I hope so, believing as I do in the aspirations to which our political system is dedicated, and still more in the value of the human lives that have grown up under the influence of those ideals.
But if we want each life to matter, we have to prove that Ashli Babbitt’s life mattered too. We need to demand more from the federal Justice Department than the cynical conclusion that there was:
no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defence or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
We need to seek an explanation for the fact that “the officer,” unlike Derek Chauvin – currently behind bars for killing George Floyd – has never faced charges of any kind for gunning down an unarmed woman under circumstances that placed no one in serious danger.
We must ask why there are no crowds in the streets to support the Babbitt family’s lawsuit against the Capitol police, as there would be if she had been killed by a cop during a Black Lives Matter rally.
It must be clear by now that the coronavirus coup isn’t going away of its own accord. If we don’t demand an end to it, there will be no end.
There will only be more fear porn, more manipulated elections, more wrecked livelihoods, more attacks on freedom – and more tragedies like the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who believed that by taking her protest to the seat of government she could make a difference.
Whether she was right about that is no longer up to her. It’s up to us.
Taliban seek peaceful transfer of power in ‘next few days’: Spokesman
A US military helicopter is pictured flying above the US embassy in Kabul on August 15, 2021. (Photo by AFP) Top photo – Saigon, 1975.
Press TV – August 15, 2021
A Taliban spokesman says the group expects a “peaceful transition of power” in the next few days after the militants entered Afghanistan’s capital Kabul with little resistance amid evacuation of US diplomats from its embassy by helicopter.
“We are awaiting a peaceful transfer of power” as soon as possible, Suhail Shaheen said in an interview with BBC on Sunday, adding the Taliban expected that to happen in a matter of days.
The spokesman added that the group is in talks with the Afghan government “for a peaceful surrender” of Kabul, calling on President Ashraf Ghani and other leaders of Afghanistan “to work with us.”
He emphasized that the group would protect the rights of women, who “will be allowed to leave homes alone,” as well as freedoms for media workers and diplomats.
Shaheen said media would be allowed to criticize anyone but should not indulge in character assassination.
“We assure the [Afghan] people, particularly in the city of Kabul, that their properties, their lives are safe,” the Taliban spokesman said.
He added that the group seeks to establish an inclusive Afghan government in which all Afghans will be represented.
The spokesman said the Taliban have no intension of taking revenge on anyone, adding that all those who have served the government and military will be forgiven.
The Taliban capture Afghanistan’s key eastern city of Jalalabad
The Taliban spokesman called on Afghan civilians to stay in their country and do not leave due to fear.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Naeem, a spokesman for the Taliban’s political bureau, rejected as “mere rumor” reports that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the political chief of Taliban, has travelled to Kabul, saying he is in the Qatari capital city of Doha.
Afghan state sources denied reports about the presence of a Taliban delegation in the presidential palace.
Afghan President Ghani leaves country for Tajikistan: Interior ministry official
Later on Sunday, a senior official at Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said the country’s President Ashraf Ghani has left the capital Kabul for the neighboring Tajikistan.
Asked for comment, the president’s office said it “cannot say anything about Ashraf Ghani’s movement for security reasons.”
A top Afghan foreign ministry official said separately that Ghani had left Afghanistan, but that it was not clear which country he was heading for.
Afghanistan’s top peace negotiator, Abdullah Abdullah, also confirmed Ghani’s exit from the country, saying in a video posted on his Facebook page, “”The former Afghan president has left the nation.”
Abdullah blamed President Ghani for the current situation in the war-ravaged country.
The new revelation came as a representative of the Taliban said the group was checking on Ghani’s whereabouts.
Taliban forces ordered to enter Kabul to prevent looting after police desert posts
The Taliban spokesman released a statement on Sunday afternoon, saying that the group has ordered its forces to enter the Afghan capital Kabul to prevent looting after local police deserted their posts.
The statement by Zabihullah Mujahid came shortly after it was announced that President Ashraf Ghani had left the country.
Kabul handover will be peaceful: Afghan acting interior minister
In a related development, Afghan acting Interior Minister Abdul Sattar Mirzakwal also said on Sunday that the “power will be peacefully transferred to a transitional government.”
“It is agreed that power will be transferred in a peaceful manner to a transitional administration,” Mirzakwal said in a televised message broadcast in local media.
“People should not worry about the safety and security in Kabul. The security of the city has been guaranteed. There will be no attack on the city,” he added.
The official emphasized that the big city of Kabul and the power will be handed over to a temporary third party and called on the people not to be “victim” of Taliban propaganda.
Russia: No plan to evacuate Kabul embassy
Meanwhile, Russia announced on Sunday that it does not plan to evacuate its embassy in Kabul as Taliban fighters reached the outskirts of the Afghan capital, a Russian Foreign Ministry official, Zamir Kabulov, told Russian news agencies.
“No evacuation is planned,” Kabulov said, adding that he was “in direct contact” with Moscow’s ambassador in Kabul and that Russian embassy employees continued to work “calmly,” AFP reported.
According to the RIA Novosti agency, Kabulov also said that Russia is among countries that have received assurances from the Taliban that their embassies would be safe.
“We received these guarantees a while ago. It was not only about Russia,” RIA Novosti quoted Kabulov as saying.
“The situation in Kabul is a bit tense, but there is no war in the city,” a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Kabul was quoted by TASS news agency as saying.
The spokesman was also cited by the Interfax news agency as saying that Moscow is ready to cooperate with Afghanistan’s interim government, adding that Russia is taking part in political contacts in Afghanistan.
TASS also quoted a Taliban official as saying, “We have good relations with Russia and our policy, in general, is to ensure safe conditions for operations of the Russian and other embassies.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry, however, was quoted by RIA state news agency as saying that Moscow does not yet recognize the Taliban militants as Afghanistan’s new lawful authority.
The ministry also told RIA that Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani was unlikely to head to Russia after leaving his country.
Afghan delegation to meet Taliban in Qatar on Sunday
An Afghanistan peace negotiator said later on Sunday that a delegation representing the Afghan government, including senior official Abdullah Abdullah, will travel to Qatar the same day to meet with representatives of the Taliban.
Fawzi Koofi, a member of the Kabul negotiating team, confirmed to Reuters the delegation would meet with the Taliban in the Persian Gulf state after the militant group earlier entered Kabul.
A source familiar with the matter told Reuters the Afghan delegation and Taliban representatives would discuss a transition of power, adding that US officials would also be involved.
Pope voices ‘concern’ over Afghanistan, calls for ‘dialogue’
In a related development, Pope Francis expressed his “concern” Sunday over the conflict in Afghanistan, calling for dialogue so that the “battered population” can live in peace.
“I join in the unanimous concern for the situation in Afghanistan,” the pontiff said during the weekly Angelus at the Vatican, Reuters reported.
“I ask all of you to pray with me to the God of peace so that the clamor of weapons might cease and solutions can be found at the table of dialogue.
“Only thus can the battered population of that country – men, women, elderly and children – return to their own homes, and live in peace and security, in total mutual respect.”
Political solution in Afghanistan ‘more urgent than ever’: NATO
Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance said on Sunday that finding a political solution to Afghanistan conflict was more pressing “than ever” as the Taliban stood poised to take power on the outskirts of Kabul.
“We support Afghan efforts to find a political solution to the conflict, which is now more urgent than ever,” an official at the 30-nation alliance told AFP.
The official said “NATO is constantly assessing developments in Afghanistan,” adding, “We are helping to maintain operations at Kabul airport to keep Afghanistan connected with the world.”
“We also maintain our diplomatic presence in Kabul. The security of our personnel is paramount, and we continue to adjust as necessary,” the NATO official added.
Taliban show off US-made war spoils in Kandahar
The Taliban released footage showing captured US-made Afghan military helicopters at the key Kandahar airport in southern Afghanistan, which has until recently one of the most important US bases in the country.
The militants have been quick to show off their war spoils in the city, which is generally considered as their spiritual birthplace.
The Taliban posted footage on their social media accounts on Saturday, showing a militant walking around a US-made Black Hawk military helicopter, which is in brown-green camouflage with Afghan Air Force markings, purportedly at a Kandahar airport hangar.
He then walked out and another Black Hawk was seen in the distance on the tarmac.
The Black Hawk inside the hangar was seemingly in storage, with a black sheet covering its windshield and its left engine apparently missing.
Two Russian military helicopters are also seen as another person is heard saying “Mashallah” — an Islamic term of praise. However, it was not clear if any of the helicopters were airworthy.
The helicopters outside the hangar were missing their blades, with a sheet covering the front of one airframe.
It is heard that one of the militants is claiming there are five military helicopters at the airport and several jets.
Washington supplied much of that hardware to the Afghan military, to the tune of $88 billion since 2002.
An Afghan government official confirmed on Friday that Kandahar, the most important city in the south, was under the control of the Taliban as foreign occupying forces complete their withdrawal.
Telegraph: “Government climate tsar’s dirty secret: he still drives a diesel car”
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | August 11, 2021
British climate tsar Alok Sharma, leader of Britain’s push to ban gasoline vehicles, who regularly ignores quarantine when returning from countries on the Covid-19 red list, has promised to trade his diesel automobile for an electric vehicle at an unspecified time in the future.
What can I say – whether its President Obama’s epic maskless birthday bash, Gavin Newsom’s shameful visit to the French Laundry restaurant, Nancy Pelosi’s Hair appointment during a lockdown, the Chicago teachers union leader partying in Peurto Rico, while claiming its “too risky” to return to work, Sharma’s contempt for quarantine rules and travel restrictions everyone else in Britain has to observe, or Sharma’s love for his diesel vehicle, a kind of vehicle he is working to deny to everyone else in Britain, one thing is clear.
Our elites no longer even try to hide their disdain for living by the rules they inflict on ordinary people.
If Net Zero crashes and burns, the press will have only themselves to blame
Global Warming Policy Forum – 13/08/21
The passengers on the global warming bandwagon are worried. With the big climate conference in Glasgow at the end of the year getting ever closer, it now looks very much as if the big emitting nations are not going to sign up to a Net Zero agreement, and that the Prime Minister will be left with a humiliating failure on his hands.
It’s not just the conference that is in jeopardy. The government’s whole Net Zero agenda looks increasingly threatened, as Conservative MPs look nervously at the costs, and wonder what it might do to their chances of reelection.
If it goes all pear-shaped, the journalists and commentators who have been promoting the decarbonisation agenda for years have only themselves to blame. It has been clear to anyone who took the time to question the narrative that the aims were impractical, the figures presented were implausible, and that it was only a matter of time before there was a public backlash.
However, questioning things seems to nowadays be only a peripheral part of journalists’ job descriptions, particularly those on the climate and energy beat. Today’s Times’ leader, and James Kirkup’s recent article in the Spectator, both on the subject of net zero, are cases in point.
Both authors have clearly been briefed that the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has estimated the cost of decarbonising the economy at £1.4 trillion. Unfortunately, that is wrong. The OBR has not prepared any estimate of the cost – it simply relays the figure prepared by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). Similarly, the Treasury, currently engaged on its review of the Net Zero project, is not actually assessing the bill to be paid either; it too accepts the CCC’s figures on trust.
This is a problem, because the CCC – beset as it is with extraordinary conflicts of interest – is the last organisation you’d entrust with coming up with reliable figures. And if you had any doubt, you only need to consider the tens of thousands of pounds it has spent on lawyers in order to keep the calculations underlying its estimate secret to realise that there really is a problem.
Even simple arithmetic shows the CCC estimate is entirely implausible. Twenty million homes needing heat pumps at £12,000 a time adds up to a cost of hundreds of billions of pounds. Most of them will need major insulation works too, at a cost running to tens of thousands of pounds each. That’s half of your £1.4 trillion gone already.
More arithmetic reveals further problems. The Times claims that electric cars will be cheaper than petrol and diesel by 2025. Really? To deliver that, you’d need to deliver price reductions of £2500 per year. But in recent years, the EV cost premium has hardly come down at all, and indeed looks as if it may even start to grow, because of upward pressure on battery prices.
Still, the Times does rather better than James Kirkup, who makes some wild and entirely unsubstantiated claims about the cost of renewables. Onshore wind down 40%? Reviews of the financial accounts of onshore windfarms reveals no such decline, nor indeed any decline at all. Offshore wind down a third? Even if that were true (it isn’t), that would still leave it several times more expensive than traditional power sources, leaving consumers facing sustained electricity price rises, and ultimately being priced off the roads and left unable to afford to heat their homes.
To be fair, there is a wrinkle with offshore windfarms, in that several have signed agreements to supply the grid at very low prices. But as the International Renewable Energy Agency notes, these kinds of deals may merely be part of a long-term pricing strategy, and should not be taken as representative of the underlying costs; in other words, that we will just end up paying more later. That suggestion is borne out by the financial accounts of the UK’s offshore windfarms, which show that costs remain very high, and are at best falling only slightly.
These issues are of vital importance to the UK economy, because if costs are not coming down then the CCC’s estimate of the cost of delivering net zero is understated, possibly by several trillion pounds. It’s a pity then, that journalists opining on net zero have mostly ignored them.
Before I finish, it’s worth raising one final example of a failure to question, this time from the Spectator article. In closing his piece, James Kirkup relays some official estimates of the financial disaster that potentially besets us: the OBR, he notes, has said that national debt could rise to 289 percent (presumably of GDP) if we do nothing about climate change. But here we see again that the pronouncements of officialdom can get you into trouble, or at least if you fail to question them. That’s because the choice is not between doing nothing and trying to change the weather by installing windfarms. There is a third choice: adapt.
Consider this: the biggest cost of global warming is supposed to come about through sea level rise, and here the cost of doing nothing will undoubtedly be very high – one study said we could face a bill of 11% of GDP every year.
But as the seas, rising 2–3 mm per year, started to overtop the sea walls, would we really do nothing, and let our homes be swamped and our children drown? Or would we improve our sea defences? The cost in that case has also been estimated, and is a thousand times smaller than doing nothing. Moreover, such a bill will be readily affordable in the future because of the world’s growing wealth.
The environmentalists and the renewables industry have done well to obscure the painful truth about the decarbonisation agenda from the public. The media have managed to turn a collective blind eye. But times have changed, and the costs can no longer be hidden. If, as seems likely, Net Zero crashes and burns, and all that money is wasted, they will have nobody to blame but themselves.
Defending CO2: Astro-Climatology, Climategate And Common Sense
By Matthew Ehret | Principia Scientific | August 12, 2021
According to such modern climate experts as Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Carney, Al Gore, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Prince Charles and Klaus Schwab, carbon dioxide must be stopped at all cost. Images of submerged cities, drowning polar bears and burning deserts taking over civilization flash before our eyes repeatedly in schools, mainstream media and films.
The Paris Climate Accords demand that all nations reduce their emissions to pre-industrial levels and the upcoming COP27 Summit in the UK will certainly demand that these reductions be made legally binding and enforceable by new global governance mechanisms.
But is CO2 really the existential threat it is being made out to be?
I would like to take a few moments to entertain the hypothesis that we may be drinking some poisonous Kool-Aid in a modern-day Jonestown cult and we are just minutes away from a hearty “bottoms up”.
While some of the questions and facts you are about to read are considered heretical in certain quarters, I think that history has shown that it is only by permitting the mind to question sacred cows at the risk of being denounced as “heretical” that any creative progress can made. With this thought in mind, I will venture the risk and only ask that you accompany me for this thought experiment with an open mind.
A Preface On Climategate
Back in November 17, 2009, a major scandal erupted when the 61 Mb of emails internally circulated among the directors and researchers at East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) were made public. To this day, it has not been verified if the scandal occurred via an internal leak or a hack, but what was verified throughout the hundreds of emails between director Phil Jones and the teams of climatologists staffing the CRU, was that vast scales of fraud were occurring. Jones himself was caught red handed[1] demanding that data sets be ignored and massaged in order to justify the climate models that had all been used to sell the idea that CO2 was driving startling rates of warming.
East Anglia’s CRU is the world’s foremost center of data set centralization and climate model generation which feed directly into the UN’s Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which in turn feeds into every major NGO, school, corporation and government. The other central control point of data selection and model generation (for both climate change and covid-19 data sets) is an Oxford-based operation called “Our World In Data”, funded in large measure by the UK government and Bill Gates[2].
Climategate couldn’t have come at a worse time, as the COP15 Climate Summit was scheduled for December 2009 where the world’s first legally binding carbon reduction treaties were expected to finalize an end to sovereign nation states. The terrible publicity of climategate essentially caused the event to become a big goose egg, as Chinese and Indian delegates refused to play along, and ensured that all teeth were removed from any binding carbon caps[1].
In December 2009, former chief economic advisor to Putin, Dr. Andrei Illarionov stated that Russia had sent data to East Anglia’s CRU from 476 meteorological stations covering over 20% of the globe’s surface hosting a wide range of data from as far back as 1865 to 2005.
Dr. Illarionov explained[2] that he was dismayed to see that Phil Jones and the CRU entirely ignored the data from all but 121 stations, and from those stations they did use, they artificially cherry-picked data that gave off the false result that temperatures between 1860-1965 were 0.67 degrees colder than they truly were while temperatures from 1965-2005 were made artificially high.
After being suspended for a few months, a UK review panel absolved Jones from his transgressions and re-installed him into his old position of carbon data gatekeeper at the CRU.
Development Greens The Earth
Many people were taken aback by the findings published by a team of scientists analyzing the results of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. NASA’s website[3] described the findings (published on February 11, 2019[4]) in the following way: “The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China.”
Up until this study’s publication, scientists were not certain what role human economic activity played in this anomalous greening of the earth.
The NASA study demonstrated that this dramatic rate of greening between 2000-2017 was being driven largely by China and India’s combined efforts at eradicating poverty which involves both reforestation, desert greening efforts (see China’s Move South Water North megaproject[1]), agricultural innovation and also, general industrial growth policies. The later policies represent genuine efforts by Asian nations to wipe out poverty by investments into large scale infrastructure… a practice once used in the west before the days of “post-industrialism” induced a collective insanity of consumerism in the early 1970s.
A perplexed reader might now be heard to ask: but how can industrial growth have anything to do with greening of the planet?
One simple answer is: carbon dioxide.
CO2: An Innocent Victim Framed For Genocide
As children, we are taught that CO2 is an integral part of our ecosystem and that plants love it.
The processes of photosynthesis which evolved over long spans of time with the advent of the chlorophyll molecule eons ago requires constant infusions of carbon dioxide that are broken down along with H2O, releasing oxygen back into the biosphere. Over time, free oxygen slowly formed the earth’s ozone layer and fueled the rise of ever higher life forms that relied on this “plant waste” for life.
Today, large amounts of carbon dioxide is regularly generated by biotic and abiotic activity from living animals, decaying biomass as well as volcanos which constantly emit CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A surprisingly small portion of that naturally occurring CO2 is caused by human economic activity.
Taking the entire composition of so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ together, water vapour makes up 95 percent of the bulk, carbon dioxide makes up 3.6 percent, nitrous oxide (0.9 percent), methane (0.3 percent), and aerosols about 0.07 percent.
Of the sum total of the 3.6 percent carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, approximately 0.9 percent is caused by human activity. To restate this statistic: Human CO2 makes up less than 1 percent of the 3.6 percent of the total ‘greenhouse gases’.
During the mid-20th century, a belief began to emerge among some fringe climate scientists that the 400 parts per million (PPM) average carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the “natural and ideal amount”, such that any upset of this mathematical average would supposedly result in destruction of biodiversity.
These same mathematicians also presumed that the biosphere could be defined as closed systems such that rules of entropy were the natural organizing principles- ignoring the obvious fact that ecosystems are OPEN, connected to oceans of active cosmic radiations from other stars, galaxies, supernova and more while being mediated by nested arrays of electromagnetic fields.
As film maker Adam Curtis demonstrated in his All Watched Over By Machines of Love and Grace (2011)[1], this belief slowly moved from the fringe into mainstream thinking despite the fact that it is simply wrong.
Beyond the facts already presented above, another persuasive piece of evidence can be found in carbon dioxide generators which are commonly purchased by anyone managing a greenhouse[2]. These widely-used generators increase CO2 to amounts as high as 1,500 PPM. What is the effect of such increases? Healthier, happier, greener plants and vegetables.
Temperature And CO2: Who Leads In This Dance?
Amidst the frantic alarms sounding daily over the impending climate emergency threatening the world, we often forget to ask if anyone ever actually proved the claim that CO2 drives the climate?
To begin to answer this question, let’s start with a graph showcasing the rise of human industrial CO2 from 1751-2015 broken down into various regions of the earth. What we can see is consistent increase from the mid 19th century until 1950, when a vast spike of emission rate increases can be viewed. This increase obviously accompanies world population growth and the correlated agro-industrial output.
Next, let us look at the global mean temperature changes from 1880-present.
Here several anomalies strike the thinking mind.
For starters, absolutely no warming accompanies the period of intensive industrial growth of 1940-1977. In fact during this period, many climate scientists were ringing the alarm over an impending ice age![1]
Another anomaly: Since carbon dioxide emissions have increased continuously over the past 20 years, one would expect to see a correlated spike in warming trends. However, this expected correlation is entirely absent between the year 1998 and 2012 when warming tappers off to a near standstill sometimes called “the global warming pause” of 1998-2012[2].
This has been an embarrassment for all modellers whose scare-mongering predictions have fallen to pieces to the point that they can only pretend this pause doesn’t exist. Again, the question must be asked: why would this anomaly appear if CO2 drove temperature?
Let’s take one more anomaly from our temperature records before digging into the hard proof that CO2 does not cause temperature changes: The medieval warming period [see graph].
While certain proven fraudsters like Michael Mann[1] have attempted to erase this warming period from existence with things like the famous “hockey stick” model crafted with the help of East Anglia’s Phil Jones, the fact remains that from 1000-1350 A.D. global mean temperatures were significantly warmer than anything we are currently living through. The Vikings in Greenland had no coal plants or SUVs, and yet mean temperatures were still warmer than today by a long shot. Why?
Perhaps taking a wider look at the CO2:climate correlation might give us a better idea of what is actually happening.
Below we can see a chart taking 600,000 years of data into account. It is certainly the case that CO2 and temperature have a connection on these scales… but correlation is not causation, and as the author of How to Lie with Statistics[1] famously stated “a well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s Big Lie; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
When a 70,000 year sampling is inspected, we find the sleight of hand fully exposed by observing the peaks and troughs of temperature and CO2. If the later were truly the driving force as the Great Resetters of our day proclaim, then CO2 peaks and troughs would happen before temperature, but the evidence shows us the exact opposite. Let’s look at one more example of an 800 year CO2/temperature lag about 130,000 years ago…
Going back even further into the climate records, it has been revealed that during many of the past ice ages, carbon dioxide had risen up to 800% higher than our current levels, despite the fact that human activity played zero role[1].
A Brief Look At Space Weather
Technically, I could end right now and feel like any honest jury would conclude that CO2 has been falsely framed for murder. But I would like to introduce one more dramatic piece of evidence that gets us back on the path of a true science of climate change and ecosystems management: Astroclimatology.
The fact that the earth is but one of a multitude of spherical bodies in space speedily revolving around an incredibly active sun within the outskirts of a galaxy within a broader cluster of galaxies is often ignored by many computer modelling statisticians for a very simple reason. Anyone who has been conditioned to look at the universe through a filter of linear computer models is obsessed with control, and is incredibly uncomfortable with the unknown.
The amount of actual factors shaping the weather, ice ages, and volcanism are so complex, vast and mostly undiscovered that computer modellers would prefer to simply pretend they don’t exist… or if they do acknowledge such celestial phenomena to have any function in climate change, it is often dismissed as “negligible”.
Despite this culture of laziness and dishonesty, the question is worth asking: WHY does evidence of climate change occur across so many other planets and moons of our solar system? Ice caps on Mars melt periodically[2] and have been melting at faster rates in recent years. Why is this happening? Could the sun’s coronal mass ejections, solar wind, or electromagnetic field be affecting climate change within the solar system as one unifying process?
Often Venus with its atmosphere of 96.5 percent CO2 is used as a warning for people on the earth what sort of terrible oven we will create by producing more CO2. It is hot after all with temperatures averaging 467 degrees Celsius (872 degrees Fahrenheit). However, if CO2 were truly to blame for the heating, then why is Mars so cold with temperatures averaging minus 125 degrees Celsius (-195 degrees Fahrenheit) despite the fact that it’s atmosphere is 95 percent CO2?
Similarly, what role does cosmic radiation play in driving climate change? Based on the recent discoveries of Heinrich Svensmark and his team in Denmark, strong correlations were found linking cloud formation, climate and cosmic radiation flux over time.
Cosmic radiation flux into the earth is a continuous process mediated by the earth’s magnetic field as well as the oscillating magnetic field of the sun which shapes the entire solar system as we revolve around the galactic center of the Milky Way every 225-250 million years. Svensmark’s discovery was outlined beautifully in the 2011 documentary The Cloud Mystery.[1]
A Return To A True Science Of Climate
The point to re-emphasize is that the weather is, and always has been, a complex process shaped by galactic forces that have driven a miraculous system of life on the earth over hundreds of millions of years.
During this time amounting to approximately two revolutions around the galactic center, living matter has transformed from relatively boring (high entropy) single celled organisms, through a continuous process of increased complexity, and increased power of self-direction (low entropy). Up until now, there is no actual evidence that this process is a closed system and as such, that any fixed state of no change/heat death is controlling its behavior.
While some might deny this claim, citing the redshifts of galaxies as proof that the universe is in fact dying (or inversely had a starting point “in time” 13.6 billion years ago before there was nothing), I refer you to the work of Halton Arp[1].
This process has been characterized by non-linear discontinuities of living matter emerging where only nonliving matter previously existed, followed later by conscious life having appeared where only non-conscious life had been found and most recently self-conscious life endowed with creative reason appearing onto the scene. While this process has been punctuated by sometimes violent mass-extinction cycles, the overall direction of life has not been shaped by randomness, chance or chaos, but rather improvement, perfectibility and harmony.
When humanity appeared onto the scene, a new phenomenon began expressing itself in a form which the great Russian academician Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) described as the Noosphere (as opposed to the lithosphere and biosphere). Vernadsky understood this new geological force to be driven by human creative reason, and devoted his life to teaching the world that the law of humanity must accord with the law of nature stating:
“The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. In it, for the first time, man becomes a large-scale geological force. He can, and must, rebuild the province of his life by his work and thought, rebuild it radically in comparison with the past. Wider and wider creative possibilities open before him. It may be that the generation of our grandchildren will approach their blossoming”.[1]
In Vernadsky’s mind, neither the noosphere, nor the biosphere obeyed a law of mathematical equilibrium or statis, but was rather governed by an asymmetrical harmony and progress from lower to higher states of organization. It was only by coming to understand the principles of nature that mankind became morally and intellectually fit to improve upon nature by turning deserts green, harnessing the power of the atom or applying scientific progress to health and agriculture.
Some of his most important insights were published in his Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomena (1938), Evolution of Species and Living Matter (1928) Some Words About the Noosphere (1943), and The Transition of the Biosphere to the Noosphere (1938).[2]
Despite the lasting contributions made by Vernadsky to human knowledge, here we sit, 76 years after the end of WW2 tolerating an unscientific policy of mass decarbonization which threatens to radically undermine civilization for countless generations.
Is this change being forced upon humanity? Unlike the forces of fascism and imperialism of the past, today’s terrible self-implosion of civilization is occurring via the consent of those intended to perish under a Great Reset via the collective guilt for the crime of simply being human. It has become the norm for the majority of today’s children to think of themselves as belonging not to a beautiful species made in the image of a Creator, but rather to a parasitic race guilty for the crime of sinning against nature.
So let’s take this opportunity to re-introduce truth back into climate science, and let the social engineers drooling over a Great Reset scream and whine as nations choose a new open system paradigm of life and anti-entropy rather than a closed system world of decay and heat death.
This positive new paradigm of cooperation, scientific and technological progress, and cultural optimism is getting stronger by the day led by Russia, China and other nations joining the international New Silk Road. Most importantly, let’s finally absolve CO2 of its accused sins, and celebrate this wonderful little molecule as our friend and ally.
About ther author: Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the‘Untold History of Canada’ book series, and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .
No lockdown Belarus reports COVID mortality rates similar to neighbors that imposed draconian lockdowns
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | August 13, 2021
The country of Belarus, which imposed no legal lockdown at all throughout the entire pandemic, has released COVID mortality figures which are broadly in line with other nearby countries which imposed draconian lockdowns.
After authorities in Belarus refused to put their citizens under lockdown, the global media had a collective hissy fit, with one headline declaring, “One leader looks hell-bent on turning COVID-19 into a catastrophe for his country.”
However, while managing to avoid all the negative impacts of lockdown, the outcome of Belarus’ no lockdown policy is far from a “catastrophe.”
Newly released overall death statistics from the start of the pandemic up to March 2021 show that the death rate is similar to neighboring countries such as Latvia, Russia and Ukraine which imposed full lockdowns.
Indeed, when compared to Poland, which imposed a particularly harsh lockdown, Belarus’ mortality rate in March 2021 was significantly lower.
Belarus is similar to Sweden, which has suffered fewer than 15,000 COVID deaths despite refusing to impose a lockdown. Figures show that cases and deaths tend to fall in waves whether a lockdown is imposed or not, proving that lockdowns are totally pointless.
“Alongside places like South Dakota, Florida, Sweden and Tanzania, Belarus is an important illustration of what can be expected from COVID-19 when restrictions aren’t imposed. Like those places, we see that the outcome is basically the same as similar places where restrictions are imposed,” writes Will Jones.
“It simply isn’t the case that a whole country becomes infected if the virus is given largely free reign, as Belarus, like other no-restriction jurisdictions, shows. Even without lockdowns and vaccines the epidemic is self-limiting and comes to an end at around the same point having infected a similar number of people. Until our leaders and their advisers grasp this crucial fact about COVID-19, they will keep pursuing pointless and ineffective but deeply harmful policies.”
Don’t expect any of this to be highlighted by the mainstream media, which has parroted the provable falsehood that repeated lockdowns were to thank for ending each “wave” of COVID.
Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism ignores Palestinian rights, narrative
By Kathryn Shihadah | Israel-Palestine News | August 14, 2021
The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA) was released in March as a progressive variant of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of anti-Semitism – a definition that, despite its wide acceptance, is deeply problematic.
Progressives agree that JDA is a huge improvement over IHRA. JDA acknowledges that support for the Palestinian cause is “not on the face of it” antisemitic; it also leaves room for opposition to Zionism, criticism of Israel (including use of the word “apartheid,” or a “double standard” framing), and even the BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement.
But while it makes these allowances, the parameters the Jerusalem Declaration sets for that debate leave much to be desired. Many Palestinian individuals and organizations and others have published objections, some of which are referenced below (specifically, Mark Mohannad Ayyesh, writing for Al Jazeera news network, and Samer Abdelnour, writing for Al Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network.
Proponents of justice and racial equality would do well to remember that while anti-Semitism has its victims, Zionism in the last half century arguably has had more – in 2002 Israeli author Israel Shahak wrote: “In the last 40 years the number of non-Jews killed by Jews is by far greater than the number of the Jews killed by non-Jews.” Yet Palestinians are not invited to participate in mainstream dialogue about the state that was built on land stolen from them.
Two of the most common objections to the JDA definition of anti-Semitism have to do with “Palestinian hostility” toward Israel and Jews’ right to exist in Israel as equals (presumably equal to Palestinians).
1. Palestinian hostility toward Israel
In judging whether an action is anti-Semitic, the JDA authors rightly remind readers to be context-conscious. The Preamble to the Jerusalem Declaration states:
Context can include the intention behind an utterance, or a pattern of speech over time, or even the identity of the speaker, especially when the subject is Israel or Zionism.
So, for example, hostility to Israel could be an expression of an antisemitic animus, or it could be a reaction to a human rights violation, or it could be the emotion that a Palestinian person feels on account of their experience at the hands of the State.
At first glance, this statement may resonate with justice-seekers because it acknowledges the negative encounters that Palestinians may have had with the state – something the IHRA definition lacked. But hiding below the surface of these words is an implication that Palestinian hostility might be merely an emotional reaction to an incident of perceived misconduct.
JDA leaves no room for the possibility that Palestinians have over 70 years’ worth of legitimate grievances against Israel – grievances that Palestinians have identified as coming not from Jews, but from Zionism as an ideology and from Israel as a state.
In simple terms, JDA seems to recommend that Palestinian outrage is an emotional outburst that must be tolerated: ‘It’s not antisemitism – they’re just letting off steam.’
(As an aside, notice the preposterous suggestion that Palestinians may be having “a reaction to a human rights violation.” After generations of ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and state violence, no Palestinian has been lucky enough to endure just one human rights violation.)
2. Jews’ right to exist in Israel as equals
The Jerusalem Declaration offers examples of allegedly unacceptable, anti-Semitic language that are very similar to those in the IHRA definition, including:
- Blaming all Jews for Israel’s conduct
- Demanding that Jews publicly denounce Zionism
- Assuming that non-Israeli Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries
- Denying Israeli Jews the right to exist and flourish as Jews, “in accordance with the principle of equality”
This last item is problematic for Palestinians (and their allies) for several reasons.
To begin with, the statement does not define “equality.” In fact, “equality” in the context of apartheid and ethnic cleansing is nonsense.
The “right to exist and flourish” is not reciprocal. True equality and mutual flourishing would require the dismantling of Israeli apartheid as a starting point.
Palestinian writer Samer Abdulnour sums up his objections to the supposed antisemitic statement:
The definition discusses Jewish flourishing without any acknowledgment that since the inception of Israel until the present day, this flourishing is tied to privileges that stem from [Palestinian] dispossession and military occupation, and the denial of our collective freedom and right of return—that is, our right to exist and flourish.
Mark Muhannad Ayyash points out that the JDA document assumes as non-negotiable the idea that Jews have the right to their own Jewish state – without acknowledging that this state was founded on land inhabited by indigenous Palestinians. Ayyash asks,
So how is this “principle of equality” to be secured in a context where the Israeli state must maintain Jewish sovereignty for a Jewish majority at all costs? Are Palestinians supposed to accept that the right of Jews in the State of Israel ought to take precedence over their own sovereign rights?
From the start, Palestinians rejected the creation of the state of Israel, not because it was Jewish, but because it was on their – the Palestinians’ – land. They fought the new state precisely because it denied them – the Palestinians – the right to exist and flourish as indigenous Palestinians.
The “principle of equality” was never a factor in the creation or maintenance of the state of Israel.
Ultimately, while the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism is a step forward from the IHRA definition, it still rejects the realities of what the Jewish State has done and is still doing to the Palestinian people.
Kathryn Shihadah is an editor and staff writer for If Americans Knew.
Lima Group Loses Lima
By Yves Engler · August 11, 2021
The Canadian instigated Lima Group has been dealt a probably fatal blow that ought to elicit serious discussion about this country’s foreign policy. But, don’t expect the media or politicians to even mention it.
In a likely death knell for a coalition seeking to overthrow the Venezuelan government, Peru’s new Foreign Affairs Minister called the Lima Group the country’s “most disastrous” ever foreign policy initiative. Héctor Béjar said, “the Lima Group must be the most disastrous thing we have done in international politics in the history of Perú.”
Two days after Béjar’s statement St Lucia’s external affairs minister, Alva Baptiste, declared: “With immediate effect, we are going to get out of the Lima Group arrangement – that morally bankrupt, mongoose gang, we are going to get out of it because this group has imposed needless hardship on the children, men and women of Venezuela.”
Prior to Baptiste and Béjar’s statements, the Lima Group had lost a handful of members and its support for Juan Guaidó’s bid to declare himself president had failed. Considering its name, the Peruvian government’s aggressive turn against the Lima Group probably marks the end of it. As Kawsachun News tweeted a Peruvian congressman noting, “the Lima Group has been left without Lima.”
The Lima Group’s demise would be a major blow to Trudeau’s foreign policy. Ottawa founded it with Peru. Amidst discussions between the two countries foreign ministers in Spring 2017, Trudeau called his Peruvian counterpart, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, to “stress the need for dialogue and respect for the democratic rights of Venezuelan citizens, as enshrined in the charter of the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Democratic Charter.” But the Lima Group was established in August 2017 as a structure outside of the OAS largely because that organization’s members refused to back Washington and Ottawa’s bid to interfere in Venezuelan affairs, which they believed defied the OAS’ charter.
Canada has been maybe the most active member of the coalition. Former Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland participated in a half dozen Lima Group meetings and its second meeting was held in Toronto. That October 2017 meeting urged regional governments to take steps to “further isolate” Venezuela.
At the second Lima Group meeting in Canada, a few weeks after Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself president, Trudeau declared, “the international community must immediately unite behind the interim president.” The final declaration of the February 2019 meeting called on Venezuela’s armed forces “to demonstrate their loyalty to the interim president” and remove the elected president.
Freeland repeatedly prodded Caribbean and Central American countries to join the Lima Group and its anti-Maduro efforts. In May 2019 Trudeau called Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel to pressure him to join Ottawa’s effort to oust President Maduro. The release noted, “the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Lima Group, underscored the desire to see free and fair elections and the constitution upheld in Venezuela.”
In a sign of the importance Canadian diplomats placed on the Lima Group, the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers gave Patricia Atkinson, Head of the Venezuela Task Force at Global Affairs, its Foreign Service Officers award in June 2019. The write-up explained, “Patricia, and the superb team she assembled and led, supported the Minister’s engagement and played key roles in the substance and organization of 11 meetings of the 13 country Lima group which coordinates action on Venezuela.”
Solidarity activists have protested the Lima Group since its first meeting in Toronto. There were also protests at the second Lima Group meeting in Canada, including an impressive disruption of the final press conference. At a talk last year, NDP MP Matthew Green declared “we ought not be a part of a pseudo-imperialist group like the Lima Group” while a resolution submitted (though never discussed) to that party’s April convention called for Canada to leave the Lima Group.
Hopefully the Peruvian and St Lucia governments’ recent criticism marks the end of the Lima Group. But, we should seek to ensure it doesn’t disappear quietly. We need a discussion of how Canada became a central player in this interventionist alliance.
Featured Video
Answers to Myocarditis and Heart Conditions
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Casuistry
By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
loongtip on Eilat port faces worst crisis… loongtip on British minister dreams of kid… loongtip on Kiev awards major mining proje… loongtip on UK believes it can seize any t… loongtip on Pirates of the Caribbean loongtip on Australian festival boycotted… loongtip on Kiev seeks to ban Russian musi… seversonebcfb985d9 on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… John Edward Kendrick on Kidnapped By the Washington… aletho on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… John Edward Kendrick on Somaliland and the ‘Grea… aletho on Donald Trump, and Most America…
Aletho News- Report: Kurdish Fighters Have Been Entering Iran From Iraq and Clashing With the IRGC
- Trump’s Options in Iran Limited By Military Buildup in Latin America
- Villains of Judea: Paul Singer’s Empire of Debt & Demographic Replacement
- The Gaza ceasefire’s Phase 2 only exists in the media and at UN meetings
- We must act before Palestinian hostages are executed in the world’s worst prisons
- Why Washington will take Greenland
- Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate: There’s a ‘very significant influence operation by the US’ in Iran
- Israel–Syria security pact stumbles as Tel Aviv rejects withdrawal: Report
- The Ukraine Snare Still Beckons
- Italy and the drone that isn’t there
- If Americans Knew
- Militant Pro-Israel Group Agrees to Halt Operations in New York
- During “ceasefire,” at least 100 Gaza children killed – clearly NOT a ceasefire Day 96
- Israel Has Demolished 2,500 Buildings in Gaza Since Signing Ceasefire Deal
- Iran, Gaza and the politics of counting the dead
- How Israel’s move in Somaliland fits in its broader strategy for regional dominance
- As genocide continues in Gaza, the West Bank is pushed into a new Nakba
- Israeli settlers beat elderly, deaf Palestinian man in West Bank attack, video shows
- U.S. May Bankroll New Israeli Armored Vehicles With Billions of Dollars, Internal Files Reveal
- How Israel and the US are exploiting Iranian protests
- The New Neoconservatives
- No Tricks Zone
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
- German Media Report That Current Frigid Weather Can Be Explained By Arctic Warming!
- Berlin Blackout Shows Germany’s $5 Trillion Green Scheme Is “Left-Green Ideological Pipe Dream”
- Modeling Error In Estimating How Clouds Affect Climate Is 8700% Larger Than Alleged CO2 Forcing
- Berlin’s Terror-Blackout Enters 4th Day As Tens Of Thousands Suffer In Cold Without Heat!
- Expect Soon Another PIK Paper Claiming Warming Leads To Cold Snaps Over Europe
- New Study: Human CO2 Emissions Responsible For 1.57% Of Global Temperature Change Since 1750
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
Aletho News 