Israel demands disbanding of UN committee investigating attacks on Gaza
MEMO | August 1, 2022
Israel demanded on Sunday the disbanding of the UN committee investigating crimes committed during the occupation state’s military offensive against Gaza in May last year. It is alleged that remarks made by one member of the committee were “anti-Semitic”.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid made the demand in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in which he referred to the statements by Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, in a media interview.
“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by, whether it is the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” Kothari said on a Mondoweiss podcast on 25 July. “A lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us.”
Israel boycotted the investigation and prevented the commission’s investigators from entering the apartheid state. It claimed that the commission’s partial findings in June were “the latest in a series of biased reports.”
In his letter to Guterres, Lapid claimed that, “The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be waged with words alone, it requires action. This is the time for action; it is time to disband the Commission. This Commission does not just endorse antisemitism — it fuels it.”
The UN spokesman did not respond immediately to requests for comment, but Mondoweiss published a message from the committee’s chair, Navi Pillay, in which she said that Kothari’s comments were intentionally taken out of context.
The US and other Western countries, including Germany, Britain and Austria, denounced — very predictably — Kothari’s comments as “anti-Semitic”.
The US representative to the UN Human Rights Council, Ambassador Michele Taylor, tweeted, “We are outraged by recent anti-Semitic, anti-Israel comments made by a member of the Israel COI. These unacceptable remarks sadly exacerbate our deep concerns about the open-ended nature & overly broad scope of the COI and the HRC’s disproportionate & biased treatment of Israel.”
Although the commission was set up to investigate the Israeli attack on Gaza, which lasted 11 days in May last year, its mandate includes human rights violations before and after that, in addition to investigating the root causes of the tension.
At least 250 Palestinians as well as 13 people in Israel were killed during the Israeli aggression, which saw severe Israeli attacks and raids that exacerbated the destruction caused by the 2014 military offensive. Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip fired several thousand rockets in response to Israel’s ongoing brutal military occupation and siege.
Is Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan the ‘Pearl Harbour Moment’ Jake Sullivan Called for?
By Cynthia Chung | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 30, 2022
In October 2019, Jake Sullivan, who became U.S. National Security Advisor in 2021, stated in an interview that the U.S. needed a clear threat to rally the world and play the role of saviour of mankind and that China could be that organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. In the 2019 interview, he acknowledges that the problem was that people were not going to believe that China is a global threat, that their view of China is too positive and that the United States would need a “Pearl Harbour moment,” a real focusing event to change their minds, something he calmly stated that “would scare the hell out of the American people.”
According to Sullivan, from the same man who called for Libyan and Syrian military interventionism, American exceptionalism needed “rescuing” and “reclaiming,” not of course with actual qualitative actions that would earn one’s position as a model of true democratic governance with American citizens and the world, but rather through ever aggressive PR and media shame-based social conditioning, labeling whoever points out the clear hypocrisy of these statements as “threats to national security.” Actors like Sullivan have shown that they are willing to do anything to achieve that “Pearl Harbour moment,” even if acts of terrorism on their own people are required in order to paint their “enemy” as a monster in the eyes of their citizens.
This is by no means a new strategy. Operation Gladio is a perfect example of how NATO conducted a decades-long secret war against its own European citizens and elected governments under the guise of “communist terrorism.”
In 1962, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed Operation Northwoods, which was a proposed false-flag operation against American citizens, which called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets and subsequently blame the Cuban government in order to justify a war against Cuba. The plan was drafted by General Lemnitzer specifically and has a striking similarity with NATO’s Operation Gladio.
The logic of Northwoods was the stripe of Gladio. The general staff inclined towards prefabricated violence because they believed benefits gained by the state count more than injustice against individuals. The only important criterion is reaching the objective and the objective was right-wing government.
Operation Northwoods memorandum March 13, 1962.
There was not a single item in the Northwoods manual that did not amount to a blatant act of treason, yet the U.S. military establishment dispatched “Top Secret – Justification for U.S. military Intervention in Cuba” straight to the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for onward transmission to President Kennedy.
Needless to say, President Kennedy rejected the proposal and a few months later General Lemnitzer’s term was not renewed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served from October 1st 1960 to September 30th 1962.
However, NATO lost no time, and in November 1962 Lemnitzer was appointed commander of U.S. European Command and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, the latter to which he served from January 1st, 1963 to July 1st, 1969.
Lemnitzer’s was a perfect fit to oversee the cross-continental Gladio operations in Europe. Lemnitzer was a prime motivating force in setting up the Special Forces Group in 1952 at Fort Bragg, where commandos were trained in the arts of guerilla insurgency in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Before long, the men who proudly wore distinctive green berets were cooperating discreetly with the armed forces of a string of European countries and participating in direct military operations, some of them extremely sensitive and of highly dubious legality.
The New American Century
Jake Sullivan’s statement that we need a “Pearl Harbour moment” is nothing new.
In September 2000 a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century” was published by none other than The Project for the New American Century. In the report it is written (pg. 51):
“… the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Interestingly, within this same report, published by The Project for the New American Century, it is written (pg. 60):
“Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and ‘combat’ likely will take place in a new dimensions: in space, ‘cyber-space,’ and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Richard Perle, called the “Prince of Darkness,” by his adversaries and the “Pentagon’s Brains” by his admirers was an acolyte of Albert Wohlstetter, you could say the “brains” behind the RAND Corporation (for more on this refer here). Paul Wolfowitz was another of Wohlstetter’s acolytes. The followers of Wohlstetter were so numerous, whom Perle said Donald Rumsfeld was among (1), that they called themselves “the St. Andrews prep” boys. (2)
Perle stated (3) the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert [Wohlstetter]’s vision of future wars. That it was won so quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.”
In fact, this call for the need of a “Pearl Harbour moment” originally came from the Wohlstetters themselves.
A New Pearl Harbour Moment
In the mid-1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter, Albert’s wife and RAND peer, produced her seminal analysis of Pearl Harbour, recognised by the Pentagon as a definitive work of twentieth-century American military history. The study began as an internal RAND document based on unclassified documents drawn from the congressional record.
Warner Schilling noted in his perceptive review of Roberta’s work on Pearl Harbour that “The main concept that Mrs. Wohlstetter brings to bear on these events [is that]… the pictures of the world that government officials build from intelligence… are not so much a matter of the ‘facts’ their sources make available as they are a function of the ‘theories’ about politics already in their minds which guide both their recognition and their interpretation of said ‘facts’.”
The primary practical lesson of Roberta’s Pearl Harbour was that the United States should invest in rapid and aggressive means for responding to surprise attacks (for more on this story refer here).
On January 12, 2003, Los Angeles Times published an article titled “Agenda Unmasked,” where they write:
“In the hours immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, long before anyone was certain who was responsible for them, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly asked that plans be drawn up for an American assault on Iraq…
At first consideration, Rumsfeld’s early targeting of Iraq seems odd. Too little was known, too much uncertain. But the Defense secretary’s desire to attack Iraq was neither impulsive nor reactive. In fact, ever since the first American war against Iraq in 1991, Rumsfeld and others who planned and executed that war have wanted to go back and finish what they started. They said so in reports written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the last years of the George H.W. Bush administration, and they continued the push when they were out of power during the Clinton years. In the spring of 1997, their efforts coalesced when Rumsfeld, Cheney and others joined together to form the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, and began concerted lobbying for regime change in Iraq.
In an open letter to President Clinton dated Jan. 26, 1998, the group called for “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,” and in a letter dated May 29, 1998, to then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.)… Signatories to one or both letters included Rumsfeld; William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine and chairman of the PNAC; Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator whom President Bush last year named director of Middle Eastern policy for the National Security Council; Paul D. Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon; John R. Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control; Richard N. Perle, now chairman of the Defense Science Board; Richard Armitage, now Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department; and Zalmay Khalilzad [another Wohlstetter acolyte(4)], former Unocal Corp. consultant and now special envoy to Afghanistan.
… They expected that the radical changes in U.S. military policy they favored would have to come slowly in the absence of, as the PNAC report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” put it, a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” On Sept. 11, 2001, they got their Pearl Harbor.”
As the Los Angeles Times article also observes, without 9/11 as their Pearl Harbor, their entire campaign against terror in the Middle East could never have been justified.
In fact, since the disastrous PR campaign of the Vietnam War, most Americans had become horrified at the prospect of entering any more foreign wars on the clearly false and hypocritical terms of bringers of “peace” and “freedom.”
9/11 changed all that.
Thus, when Jake Sullivan observes that there is not enough anti-China sentiment to bolster an image of the United States as a “saviour of mankind” against China and that America is in need of a “Pearl Harbour moment” I would be very wary.
The circus around Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in the coming days, and evident glee that is coming forth from many of these neocons frothing at the mouth over this prospect is a clear sign that something incredibly reckless and stupid is about to happen.
Pelosi’s airplane might indeed be shot down on her completely irrelevant and unnecessary trip to Taiwan, and if it is, don’t be surprised if it was the Americans themselves who are behind it, who have shown they are willing to do anything for that “Pearl Harbour moment.”
‘Ukraine scattering mines in Kharkov Region’
A photo purportedly showing a PFM-1 anti=personnel mine in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Samizdat – July 31, 2022
The military-civilian administration in the Kharkov Region has accused Ukrainian forces of using cluster munitions to disperse anti-personnel mines in the village of Tokarevka.
The munitions, which are banned by a 1997 agreement, have also been deployed in Donetsk, officials say.
The administration announced having discovered the mines on Sunday and in a Telegram post showed a picture of a green butterfly-shaped device nestled in a patch of weeds. The object, apparently a Soviet-era PFM-1, was almost invisible among the foliage.
Such munitions are typically scattered in large quantities, either by aircraft or artillery. Designed to maim rather than kill, they are capable of blowing off or disfiguring a victim’s foot. The PFM-1 is banned under the 1997 Ottawa Convention, to which Ukraine is party.
The Kharkov administration accused the “Kiev regime” of planting the explosives.
The same mines have been showered across the city of Donetsk, in the Donetsk People’s Republic, throughout the past week. Donetsk Mayor Alexey Kulemzin said on Sunday that two people had sustained injuries from the landmines, including a first responder who lost a foot.
Photos and video footage from the city showed residents placing cardboard boxes over the mines and marking the surrounding areas with warning signs. Kulemzin said on Sunday that more than 600 such mines had been disposed of in the preceding two days.
Russia would help Serbia if conflict were to break out – senator
Samizdat | August 1, 2022
If Serbia-Kosovo tensions spiral into an outright conflict, Moscow is ready to assist Belgrade without playing a direct role, a Russian senator has said. The two sides clashed on Sunday, with demonstrators building barricades and unknown gunmen reportedly firing on Kosovo police.
“It is very dangerous, it is the center of Europe, and everything can end in a very sad way, because NATO forces are stationed there (in Kosovo),” Russian Federation Council member Vladimir Dzhabarov said in an interview with RIA Novosti news agency on Monday.
According to the lawmaker, the situation “may end in an armed conflict, and as soon as NATO countries get in there, of course, there is a danger that other countries that are allies of Serbia will be drawn in.”
His remarks were in response to a feud between Serbia and its breakaway province, officially called the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija in the Serbian constitution, which received recognition by several Western powers in 2008.
The government in Kosovo planned to ban the use of Serbian-issued license plates and ID papers starting from August 1, and to prohibit entry for anyone using Serbian-issued plates or documents, while also refusing to print temporary papers for travelers.
Belgrade officials have called it an attack on Kosovo’s Serb minority, and President Aleksandar Vucic accused Pristina of violating the rights of local Serbs, who “will not suffer any more atrocities.” While offering a chance for peace, he warned on Sunday that his government would not sit idly by if Serbs were targeted.
Kosovo has denied a crackdown on Serbs and accused Belgrade officials of undermining “the rule of law” on their territory. Prime Minister Albin Kurti has accused local Serbs of opening fire on police, and claimed his government is facing “Serbian national-chauvinism” and “misinformation” from Belgrade.
Tensions flared on Sunday on the Kosovo-Serbia border. Serbs in the north of the breakaway province set up roadblocks and rang alarm bells, as heavily armed special police under Pristina’s authority took control of two administrative crossings with Serbia.
After a discussion with Washington, Kosovo officials decided to postpone the implementation of the controversial law for 30 days on the condition that Serbia remove barricades from the de facto border.
What The Future Holds For Our Climate Leaders
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 28, 2022
If my posting has been a little light for the last month or so, it’s because I’ve been working on a big Report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the subject of energy storage as a means to back up electricity generation from wind and solar facilities. The Report is basically finished, and now going through an editing process. It will probably be published some time in September.
In doing the research for the Report, I have had occasion to look carefully into the plans of many countries and U.S. states that claim to be the “leaders” in climate virtue, specifically on the subject of how they intend to reach the goal of Net Zero carbon emissions from generation of electricity. These climate “leaders” include, in Europe, Germany and the UK, and in the U.S., California and New York. One would think that for any jurisdiction pursuing Net Zero ambitions, and seeking to abolish use of fossil fuels, it would be completely imperative that some energy storage solution absolutely must be found to provide back-up for the electricity system when the wind and sun are not producing. But what my research has shown is that every one of these jurisdictions seeking to be the leader toward Net Zero has given astoundingly insufficient consideration to the energy storage problem.
I previously have covered some of the more incredible deficiencies in the Net Zero planning of these places, for example in “Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?” on May 16, and “And The Winner Is, Germany!” on June 29.
The single most astounding universal failure of all jurisdictions pursuing Net Zero is the failure to pursue any sort of working prototype or demonstration project of a Net Zero electricity system before committing the entire jurisdiction to the project on the basis of a blank check to be paid by the taxpayers and ratepayers. Who has ever heard of such a thing? in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison wanted to start building central station power plants to supply electricity for his new devices like incandescent lightbulbs, he began by building a prototype facility in London under the Holborn Viaduct, and followed that with a larger demonstration plant on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan that only supplied electricity to customers within a few square blocks. Only after those had been demonstrated as successful did a larger build-out begin. Similarly, the provision of nuclear power began with small government-funded prototypes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, followed by larger demonstration projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Only in the late 1960s, twenty years into the effort and after feasibility and cost had been demonstrated, were the first large-scale commercial nuclear reactors built. No competent person would take any other approach.
But somehow our politicians have now become so filled with hubris that they think they can just order up a functioning wind/solar electricity system and assume that backup energy storage devices will magically get invented and it will all work fine and not be financially ruinous, all by some arbitrarily-ordered date in the 2030s.
Today, all the mentioned jurisdictions and many more have embarked on ambitious Net Zero plans, and yet there does not exist anywhere in the world a functioning prototype or demonstration project that has actually achieved Net Zero in electricity generation, or anything even close. Indeed, it’s worse than that. There is a fairly substantial project that set out to achieve Net Zero (although they weren’t using the term at the time, which was 2014), and has fallen remarkably short. That project is on the island of El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. El Hierro installed a collection of wind turbines and a pumped storage/hydro reservoir as back-up to great fanfare, but it struggles to achieve 50% of the electricity from the wind/storage system over the course of a year. The rest comes from a diesel generator. The system operator puts out monthly statistics (with substantial lag), typically with excited verbiage about “tons of carbon emissions saved,” without ever admitting that the system has totally failed in its original goal of getting rid of the fossil fuel piece. Instead they now have three redundant systems for providing the electricity — wind turbines, hydro reservoir and turbines, and the diesel generator — all of which must be paid for, and all to provide the same electricity that the diesel generator was fully capable of providing on its own. The cost has been calculated at about 80 euro cents per KWh, roughly 7 to 8 times average U.S. consumer rates; but the cost is largely hidden from El Hierro ratepayers by subsidies from the EU and government of Spain.
My research also covered in depth the question of how much energy storage would be needed for various jurisdictions to fully back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system without any use of fossil fuels. Credible calculations previously discussed here have included the calculation of Roger Andrews, done in 2018, that either California or Germany would require at least about 25,000 GWh of energy storage to back up a fully wind/solar generation system for a year without use of fossil fuels; and a calculation by Ken Gregory done on very similar methodology in late 2021 showing that the full U.S. (lower 48 states) would require about 250,000 GWh of storage for the same purpose. These are truly huge numbers.
Facing such requirements to reach Net Zero and banish fossil fuels from the electricity system, the plans of these jurisdictions for acquisition of storage are quite shocking. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie reported on April 11, 2022 that Germany had announced plans to acquire all of 8.91 GWh of energy storage by 2031 — a ridiculously puny amount if Germany is actually serious about Net Zero. Utility Dive reported on April 12, 2022 that New York had plans to acquire all of 6 GW of storage (likely corresponding to about 24 GWh, since the batteries are to be of the lithium-ion type that generally have capacity for four hours of discharge at full capacity). This figure is only slightly less puny than Germany’s. Another piece from Utility Dive on April 6, 2022 reported that California’s regulators had ordered utilities to acquire what would be the equivalent of about 42 GWh of storage as part of the Net Zero plans of that jurisdiction. All of these storage acquisition plans are in the range of about 0.1% to 0.2% of the storage that would actually be needed to achieve the Net Zero goal.
So what will the future of energy usage actually look like in these places as fossil fuels get phased out and wind and solar take over, with woefully insufficient energy storage to cover the intermittencies? To get an idea, let’s take another look at the Report for California put out by consultancy Energy Innovations on May 9, with the title “Achieving an Equitable and Reliable 85 Percent Clean Electricity System by 2030 in California.” Note that this in not actually Net Zero, but only 85% of same. Here are a few tidbits. First, their graphic on the nature of the transition:
We’re going to have a “paradigm shift” in “RA,” which seems to mean “Resource Adequacy.” Check out that list on the right under “clean reliability resources” — “Energy availability depends on weather.” Are you starting to get the picture now?
Read through the report until you get into pages in the mid-30s, where the subject becomes what they euphemistically call “demand response.” It’s a lot of bafflegab to make it seem oh so pleasant. Excerpt:
Demand-side measures can substitute for supply-side resources and therefore contribute to resource diversity; their increased availability hedges against the risk of deploying new clean supply-side resources too slowly (including generators and storage). For example, the technical report finds that deploying Load Shift could reduce load by 1,500 MW in the early evening hours solar output falls, hedging against battery deployment challenges such as supply chain. . . . Demand-side measures also provide complementary reliability, resiliency, and public safety benefits to supply-side solutions or imports, as they lie closest to the affected load. While centralized generators provide the bulk of our power under most system conditions, they can be rendered less effective or useless under certain disaster conditions.
This is bureaucratese meaning “we’ll turn off your electricity at random times when we feel like it.” Get ready for this, California, Germany, et al. I guess New York is on the same path too, but I have my secret escape plans ready.
Biden’s Back-to-Back COVID Diagnoses Undermine Administration’s Narrative on His Health: NYT
© AFP 2022 / MANDEL NGAN
Samizdat – 31.07.2022
Joe Biden tested positive for COVID-19 a second time on Saturday, just days after his announcement Wednesday that he had been given the all-clear following last week’s diagnosis.
The president’s COVID rebound case, while mild, will undermine the White House’s narrative on his health and “complicate his effort to turn his illness into a positive story,” The New York Times believes.
In its story on the president’s re-diagnosis, the liberal newspaper pointed out that the 79-year-old president, whom detractors have been attacking mercilessly over possible signs of dementia and a series of slips, falls, and flubs, has shown eagerness to display his physical prowess, “especially as he forecasts plans to run for a second term in 2024.”
Biden, the NYT recalled, showed himself working at the White House throughout his first quarantine after testing positive on July 21, and then sought to present Wednesday’s COVID all-clear as a “triumphal return to work in person.”
“Instead of the narrative of beating the virus, however, the president’s rebound case reinforces the unpleasant reality that the pandemic refuses to go away. Although the death toll has fallen dramatically, Covid-19 remains a fact of life for Americans, some of whom [mostly the vaccinated] have been infected multiple times,” the paper noted.
It added that the re-diagnosis would push back the president’s plans to travel the country to push his agenda and campaign in support of Democratic allies, who face a walloping at the upcoming November midterm elections, according to recent polling.
The NYT also questioned what impact Biden’s re-diagnosis might have on Pfizer – the pharma giant and advertising revenue moneybag that manufactures Paxlovid – the oral drug taken by Biden after his first COVID-19 diagnosis which has come under growing scrutiny for so-called “rebound” cases.
“Paxlovid rebound has become a source of debate within the scientific community and among Covid patients,” the newspaper carefully explained, admitting and that the real number of rebound cases is “likely significantly higher” than the low single digits referred to by Pfizer in its studies.
“Either way, experts stressed that Paxlovid has been notably successful in preventing more severe Covid-19 illnesses and hospitalizations,” the paper stressed, referencing the commonly used talking point in US media referring to both COVID treatments and vaccines. Previously, when studies revealed that the FDA-approved Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson jabs were subject to a “breakthrough infection” rate of 25 percent or more, particularly against Omicron variants, the pharmaceutical companies, government, and media shifted the goal posts, pointing instead to their [claimed] “protection against severe illness, hospitalization and death.”
In a video address following his re-diagnosis Saturday, President Biden, who had been double-vaxxed and double-boosted before getting COVID the first time, emphasized that he was “feeling fine,” that “everything is good,” and that he would be “working from home for the next couple days” with Commander, his German Shepherd.
Parliamentary Pizzazz
Fireworks in French Parliament as the government’s proposed legislation to extend vaccine passports and other covid restrictions was rejected by the Assembly
Resisting the Intellectual Illiteratti | July 31, 2022
The government’s Covid bill was brought to the lower house on Monday July 11th and the stormy debates started right away, lasting into late Tuesday night, amidst interrupted sessions and even a motion of censure against the government (which, sadly, fell short of the necessary votes to be successful).
The Macron government’s main aim with the Covid bill was/is to extend the use of so-called health passes for all travelers coming into and out of France, creating a sort of “border pass.” What’s interesting is that on that Monday evening, I think it was, a motion was introduced by an opposition party to cut out the entire article dealing with this provision. The article in question, Article 2, would require anyone coming into or leaving France, regardless of nationality, to show either a negative PCR test, proof of recovery or proof of injection at the border. It would also make it possible to require children (between 12 and 18, I think) to use a health/border pass for travel as well.
Unfortunately, this bold move to scrap article 2 right out of the gate fell short of the necessary votes (by only 14 votes), and the debates raged on. It was a blow to all of us, especially those of us present at the protest next to the Assemblée on the 11th, because we were all hoping that the new lot of parliamentarians would do the right thing immediately.
But then, to everyone’s surprise, just a day later the newly elected députés ended up doing just that, when Article 2 was taken out of the bill by a majority of parliamentarians in the opposition who were able to set aside their differences on this crucial issue. In subsequent votes, another article was removed, and the bill ended up passing with only the first article intact. But it is now a watered down version of what the government wanted.
As things presently stand, the state of emergency and the dictatorial powers it has conferred on the executive for the last 2.5 years will come to an end on the 31st of July 2022. In addition, health passes (rebranded as border passes) cannot be brought back for travel at the border or for any other reason. For anyone.
So not only will lockdowns, curfews and business/school closures be off the table (at least not without the parliament passing a new law), but the government won’t be allowed to issue mask mandates or set capacity limits on businesses. Those are the very positive outcomes of the vote.
On the downside, medically meaningless and invasive testing and contact tracing will continue, with the intolerable and absurd obligations and restrictions they entail becoming more and more normalized. So even if the positive developments are not to be scoffed at, the nightmare is far from over and the battle is in no way won.
The bill is now before the Senate — whose composition, unlike the lower house, has not changed — where the majority right-wing Les Républicains, who lent their support to just about every totalitarian measure that has come before them since 2020, could easily vote the 2nd article back into the bill. The text is currently being studied by a Constitutional Law Committee (about which little has been reported) and tomorrow, Wednesday July 20th, it will be debated in the Senate, with the session open to the public, so broadcast.
It has been reported on a government website that amendments have been introduced by Senators, perhaps providing for some limited return of mask mandates or the health/border pass, but what these are exactly won’t be known until tomorrow, when the debates are held.
The Macron government was up in arms over the lower house’s amputation of the second article from its precious bill and has vowed to use all legal means and pressures to get the evil parts put back in by the sénateurs. Whatever the outcome in the senate, the bill will be the subject of further discussion and another vote in the lower house, which has the final say in the legislative process. A possible wild card that the government could still use would be to claim an unacceptable deadlock between the two houses and call for the creation of a joint parliamentary committee to find some compromise.
Even if this were to happen, the lower house will still have the final word in the legislative process. However, the wheeling and dealing that takes place in such drawn-out situations tends to favor the government.
Our hope is that the momentum created from the small victory over article 2 will gather force and prove to be unstoppable. Perhaps the efforts of the heroic groups of scientists, researchers, and doctors (and the alternative media that have given them a platform) who have spoken out over the past year and challenged the official narrative have made a difference. Even the most obtuse of the parliamentarians will know by now that the injections don’t prevent transmission or infection, or that a positive PCR test is not a “case,” at least not in the way that word was used up until long-established principles of public health and basic scientific facts were subverted in 2020.
The one thing I can’t quite understand in connection with this covid bill is how the government is still getting away with maintaining the suspension of the several thousand nurses and doctors who refused to take the experimental injection last September as part of their new Orwellian conditions of employment.
Of the 15,000 who have been prevented from earning a living in the healthcare professions for the last 10 months, it is believed that perhaps up to 5,000 have pivoted to other jobs or sectors, and may never return to healthcare. But it seems that the majority of those whom the government suspended do not want to do anything else and desperately would like to return to work to help sick and injured people get better.
During a time of chronic shortages in the healthcare system in France, and in light of the aforementioned reality that the injections don’t protect patients from infection from hospital staff, one would think the government would cede ground on this critical issue and allow the sorely needed personnel to go back to work. But not only is the Macron government continuing to refuse to allow thousands of experienced doctors, nurses and orderlies back to work, it continues to get away with saying that the so-called vaccinations are necessary to protect patients.
It is maintaining this delirious position not only amidst increasingly vociferous and vehement calls by the opposition parties in the lower house to reinstate the thousands of healthcare workers but also in light of the fact, now well documented and part of the public record, that the Macron gouvernement has reduced public hospital capacity by something like 18 thousand beds over the past 5 years and that perhaps 5 thousand of these were closed during the worst months of the pandemic. At the same time the government and the MSM are working hard to ramp up fear again, warning of a coming 7th or 8th wave (I’ve lost track), once again in complete contradiction to publicly available epidemiological data. The cognitive dissonance is unprecedented.
What I’m not clear about is how Macron, through his Prime Minister and Health Minister, will be able to keep healthcare workers suspended from their jobs after the state of emergency ends on the 31st of July. I would have thought the Parliament could find some way to legislate the healthcare workers back to their jobs either before or after this date.
If an absolute majority of lawmakers from several very different parties who are usually at each other’s throats (socialists, far-leftists, right and far-right) can agree that health/border passes must not be brought back, the same people can surely agree that over 10,000 healthcare workers vital to the health of the nation should have their right to earn a living restored to them, along with their right be free from medical coercion.
Although many have spoken out publicly against this continued outrage, what is missing, in my view, is for some high-profile dissident or attorney to publicly make the argument (for which it seems there is no shortage of evidence) that the Macron government has committed, in some form, reckless endangerment to human life by reducing hospital capacity and suspending thousands of health care workers during a so-called public health emergency. How wonderful would it be if someone just floated the idea.
Yet even during the most polite and thoughtful discussions between government officials and dissident academics, or during the more bold and humorous exchanges between critical media hosts and their guests, I have never heard it respectfully submitted — with all the careful wording and gentle tones that could be used to soften the accusation — that the closing of hospital beds and the suspension of healthcare workers, both by the thousands, in the middle of a pandemic must be considered a criminal act and should therefore be prosecuted as such. There must be some mathematical modeler on our side up to the challenge of estimating how many lives may have been lost due to these irrational and reckless actions taken by the government.
It’s maddening to see that after all the headway made in bringing certain basic facts to public attention (in this case, facts having to do with the uselessness of the injections for healthcare workers), the livelihoods of thousands of doctors and nurses essential to the health of the nation remain in the hands of Macron’s Prime Minister, who has once again said, peremptorily, that letting them return to work “is not on the agenda.” Such arbitrary, arrogant power would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It continues to be extremely worrying.
Prior posts from this author:
Kosovo planning to attack Serbs – Belgrade
Samizdat – July 31, 2022
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has issued a plea for peace in Kosovo amid rising tensions with Pristina. However, he also vowed to fight to the death if ethnic Serbs in the self-proclaimed republic are targeted for another pogrom.
“The atmosphere has been heated up, and the Serbs will not suffer any more atrocities,” Vucic said in Belgrade on Sunday. “My plea to everyone is to try to keep the peace at almost any cost. I am asking the Albanians to come to their senses, the Serbs not to fall for provocations, but I am also asking the representatives of powerful and large countries, which have recognized the so-called independence of Kosovo, to pay a little attention to international law and reality on the ground and not to allow their wards to cause conflict.”
Vucic’s comments came as Pristina prepared to implement a controversial law requiring ethnic Serbs living in the disputed territory to replace their Serbian-issued vehicle registrations with Kosovo plates, starting on Monday. Kosovo also may require the replacement of other types of Serbian-issued documents, such as identification cards, and it will make a renewed attempt to ban entry or issue temporary papers to travelers with Serbian-issued documents or license plates.
Church bells rang in alarm across the northern part of the province on Sunday, amid reports that armed ethnic Albanians were gathering for another pogrom of the remaining Serbs – as had happened in 2004.
The Serbian president claimed last month that the registration policy was part of an effort to force remaining Serbs out of Kosovo. He referred to the move as “a new Storm,” in reference to the Croatian military operation in 1995 that forced most Serbs to flee Croatia.
Serbian Foreign Minister Nikola Selakovic told reporters on Saturday that “the Albanian side in Kosovo and Metohija is literally preparing to raise hell for Serbs.”
Kosovo’s prime minister Albin Kurti, an ethnic Albanian, has denied that the transition to non-Serbian documents is anything more than applying “law and justice” equally to all citizens.
“Trust your government,” he said in a videotaped message in Serbian.
Vucic has claimed that “provocations” against Serbs living in Kosovo have increased since Kurti, a nationalist who champions the idea of Albanian unification, became prime minister last year. The number of such incidents, including attacks by ethnic Albanians on Serbian cemeteries and Orthodox churches, has jumped 50%, he told reporters on Sunday.
“We do not want conflicts and we do not want war,” Vucic said in his speech. “We will pray for peace and seek peace, but let me tell you right away: There will be no surrender, and Serbia will win. If they dare to start persecuting, harassing and killing Serbs, Serbia will win.”
Vucic also speculated that Pristina is trying to take advantage of the Ukraine crisis by provoking a conflict in which Kurti would be portrayed sympathetically as Kosovo’s version of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, with the Serbs cast in the role of Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after a 78-day air war against what was then Yugoslavia. The province declared independence in 2008, with Western support. While the US and most of its allies have recognized it, Serbia, Russia, China and the UN in general have not.
Why are US road accidents sky-rocketing?
Free West Media | July 31, 2022
There has been a massive increase in traffic accidents in the United States since last year. Based on its observations, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) predicted some time ago that there would be a statistical increase in traffic deaths in at least 44 (out of 50) US states by 2021.
In fact, the number of fatalities in multi-vehicle accidents in cities and on urban roads in the United States increased by 16 percent from 2020. For people over the age of 65, the number of traffic deaths increased by 14 percent. The number of fatal pedestrian accidents increased by 13 percent. Even the number of fatalities on motorcycles increased by nine percent, and the number of fatalities on cyclists increased by five percent.
The states with the highest number of traffic-related fatalities are California, Texas, Florida and Washington DC.
NHTSA’s numbers represent the worst accident statistics since 2005 and the largest one-year percentage increase in the history of the Fatality Analysis Reporting System.
In absolute numbers: 43,000 Americans died on US roads in 2021 – the highest level in 16 years. The number of car accidents increased by ten percent in 2021 compared to 2020 and is still increasing. For 2022, the forecast is that 50,000 Americans will die in car accidents.
The NHTSA appears disinterested to find out why the rising number of accidents has reached a 16-year high coinciding with the “pandemic”. In contrast, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) blamed speeding, alcohol, drugs and distracted driving for the massive increase in road fatalities.
Some 270 million Americans have been vaccinated against Covid-19 with mRNA vaccines in the last two years. Already, behind closed doors, calls are being made for more autopsies to be carried out on the alleged “accident” victims. In any case, the increase in numbers correlates strikingly with the increasing numbers of collapsing athletes, public figures and, more recently, tourists worldwide.
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The Tragic Consequences of believing Anti-Science
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
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