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Iran summons Swiss envoy to protest US seizure of Iranian oil cargo

Press TV – May 27, 2022

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Friday summoned the chargé d’affaires of Switzerland, which represents Washington’s interests in Tehran, to protest the US seizure of Iranian oil cargo from a Russian-operated ship in Greece’s territorial waters.

“The Swiss chargé d’affaires was summoned to convey Iran’s concern and strong protest over the continued violation of international laws and maritime conventions concerning free navigation and trade by the US administration,” the director-general of the ministry’s department for American Affairs, said in a statement on Friday.

The ministry also demanded the immediate release of the seized ship and its confiscated cargo.

The Swiss envoy, according to the statement, assured that he would convey Iran’s message to American officials.

Earlier, on Wednesday, Iran’s foreign ministry had summoned the Greek chargé d’affaires to lodge its protest over the same matter.

The ministry officials condemned Greece’s “unacceptable” surrender to “illegal” US pressures and said the “seizure of the cargo of the ship” with the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran was “an example of international piracy.”

In a Thursday report, Reuters news agency cited unnamed sources saying the US Department of Justice had confiscated 700,000 barrels of Iranian oil cargo seized last month off the southern Greek island of Evia onboard a Russian-operated ship.

A Greek source was quoted in the report as saying that the oil cargo had been transferred to another ship hired by Washington and was supposed to be sent to the US, adding that the US Department of Justice had “informed Greece that the cargo on the vessel is Iranian oil.”

Another source was cited as saying that the Iranian oil cargo was currently being transferred to the Liberia-flagged tanker Ice Energy, which is operated by Greek shipping company Dynacom.

The ship, previously operating under the Russian flag, was sailing in international waters when it was forced to anchor near Greece over technical problems.

Iranian authorities have said they will hold the Greek government responsible for the confiscation of crude.

It is the second time the US has confiscated Iranian oil outside its territorial waters on trumped-up charges brought by American courts.

In 2020, four cargoes of Iranian oil bound for Venezuela were seized by the US with the help of foreign agents. The cargoes were then sold for more than $40 million, according to reports.

The latest incident comes amid stalled talks between Iran and world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear deal four years after Washington unilaterally walked out of the agreement and reinstated crippling sanctions on Iran.

Iran has blamed the lack of decisiveness in Washington for the pause in talks to salvage the deal. US authorities said on Wednesday that chances of reviving the agreement were very bleak, pointing to their reluctance.

May 27, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Domestic terrorism bill fails in Senate

Samizdat | May 27, 2022

A Democrat proposal to create a special task force for hunting down “white supremacists” in the US military and federal law enforcement agencies failed in the Senate on Thursday, after no Republicans voted for it. The ruling party invoked the recent mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket to argue such enforcement was necessary.

An 18-year-old killed 10 people and wounded three more on May 14, in the attack the authorities say was racially motivated.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would have set up an interagency task force within the FBI and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to analyze and counter white supremacist infiltration in the military and federal law enforcement.

“The bill is so important because the mass shooting in Buffalo was an act of domestic terrorism,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said on the floor ahead of the vote. “We need to call it what it is, domestic terrorism. It was terrorism that fed off the poison of conspiracy theories like white replacement theory.”

Opposing the bill, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said it was an “insult” to claim US Marines and police were “consumed with white supremacy and neo-Nazism.”

“It would be the Democrat plan to name our police as white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I met policemen throughout Kentucky and I’ve not met one policeman motivated or consumed with any kind of racial rage,” Paul added.

The final vote in the Senate was 47-47, right along party lines. The US House of Representatives approved the bill in a 222-203 vote last week, with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) as the only Republican in favor.

Republicans have accused the Democrats of seeking to smear all critics as domestic terrorists, pointing to the party’s insistence that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol was an “insurrection.” In his inauguration speech, President Joe Biden called domestic terrorism and white supremacy the greatest threat the US faced.

Within days of Biden taking office, the Pentagon announced a “stand-down” to investigate extremism in its ranks, and appointed a controversial Democrat activist to formulate new diversity and extremism regulations.

May 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

China, Russia Veto US-Sponsored UNSC Resolution on North Korea

Samizdat | May 26, 2022

The UN Security Council failed to reach common ground on new sanctions against Pyongyang on Thursday. Washington proposed the sanctions in the wake of North Korea’s latest missile test this week, on the heels of US President Joe Biden’s Asia tour.

The vote came just a day after North Korea was accused of test-launching its largest intercontinental ballistic missile and two others. Ahead of the vote, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield called for unity in the face of “a threat to the entire international community.”

However, China and Russia vetoed new sanctions on humanitarian grounds, pointing to their futility and even “inhumanity,” as North Korea struggled to contain a massive Covid-19 outbreak.

The UNSC imposed sanctions on North Korea back in 2006, following its first nuclear test, and has tightened them over the years. Since the latest round of restrictions in 2017, Moscow and Beijing have increasingly been arguing that further pressure is a road to nowhere and unlikely to force Pyongyang to disarm unilaterally.

“We do not think additional sanctions will be helpful in responding to the current situation. It can only make the situation even worse,” China’s UN Ambassador Zhang Jun said on Thursday.

“We have repeatedly said that the introduction of new sanctions against the DPRK is a dead end,” said Russia’s representative Vasily Nebenzya. “We emphasized the fallacy, inefficiency and inhumanity of sanctions pressure on Pyongyang.”

The new resolution sought to cut North Korea’s already limited imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products by another 25 percent, impose additional maritime sanctions, and ban the country from exporting mineral fuels, oils and waxes. Washington also proposed a global asset freeze on the state corporation that supervises North Korean laborers overseas, as well as the Lazarus hacking group, accused of “cyberespionage, data theft, monetary heists” on behalf of the Pyongyang government.

Pyongyang has for years accused Washington and Seoul of “hostile policy” towards the North, and vowed to maintain a sufficient level of deterrence. Regional tensions somewhat improved during the presidency of Donald Trump, with Pyongyang temporarily halting its missile tests. However, the two much-hyped summits between the US and DPRK leaders in 2018 and 2019 reached no lasting agreement on the subject of sanctions or denuclearization.

Biden has returned to the more hostile posture of his predecessors, while North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has responded in kind, by firing off over a dozen of ballistic missiles this year alone and warning that the DPRK not only has a “firm will” to continue with its “nuclear deterrent” program but will use such weapons “preemptively,” if forced to.

New South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol similarly ran on a more hawkish platform than his predecessor Moon Jae-in.

May 27, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

US infiltrated post-Soviet states with biolabs – Russia

Samizdat | May 26, 2022

In the 1990s, post-Soviet nations were weak and inexperienced while the US had the guile and resources to find footholds in them, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT Arabic. Washington took advantage of that, establishing a webwork of biolabs that Russia believes to be conducting military research, he explained in an interview.

The collapse of the USSR left in its wake nations that were poor and in desperate need of even the most basic necessities, which left them open for the US to exploit, Lavrov said.

“Our Western partners then, so to speak, vigorously scrambled. They offered their services in every aspect and infiltrated every area of the newly-independent states. They sent advisers. And now we are experiencing what came as a result of those times,” the minister said.

In particular, the diplomat was referring to US-funded labs that many post-Soviet states host in their territory. Operating under the umbrella of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, they conduct biological research.

Washington says the network is benign and serves to detect and identify emerging pathogens that may pose a threat to humanity. But some nations, including Russia, believe them to be clandestine bioweapons research facilities.

Evidence of the labs’ true nature was uncovered by the Russian military during its offensive in Ukraine, Lavrov said, adding that Moscow will not allow the issue to slide.

“The experiments they conduct in those labs. We have long suspected that they are not peaceful and harmless,” he said.

“The samples of pathogens that were stored [at Ukrainian labs], the paperwork showed clearly the military character of the experiments. And the documents made it clear that there are dozens of these labs in Ukraine,” he added.

Moscow wants to update the Biological Weapons Convention, a 1972 international treaty that bans any research, stockpiling and use of such weapons and which both Russia and the US signed. The agreement has a major flaw in lacking a verification mechanism, similar to what the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons use to ensure compliance in their areas of non-proliferation.

The US has been stonewalling a proposal to establish such a mechanism for over two decades, since 2001, Lavrov stressed. “Now it has become clear to us why they took this position while creating military biological laboratories throughout the world over all these years,” he said.

May 27, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Why the vast majority of physicians have failed the public

By Joel S. Hirschhorn | May 26, 2022

This is the big ugly truth that many people will have trouble facing:

Only some independent physicians have been heroic during the pandemic.

In some of my past writings I have spoken about the failure of most physicians to truly understand pandemic issues and think and act independently to serve the public. Instead they have served the interests of Big Pharma, their corporate employers and government agencies, most clearly as big pushers of COVID vaccines. They do not follow or know the medical research on many pandemic issues. They either do not have the time or interest or skills to independently follow medical research. Instead they rely on big medical societies and government agencies.

Here is what Robert Malone just pointed out:

“The most common explanation for why physicians have not spoken up about the weaponization and manipulation of public health information and policies during the ‘Coronacrisis’ is that they are deeply indebted due to the loans taken out to enable their extended and expensive education, and have no practical choice other than to comply with the mandates imposed on them by government, insurance agencies, and their host institutions (academic or private hospital chains). They have a profound financial conflict of interest- comply or go bankrupt. In large part, the physicians and medical scientists who have spoken up about the compromised medical ethics, regulatory standards, mis- and disinformation propagated by governments and WHO (including intentionally withheld or manipulated medical and epidemiological information) have been financially independent, often senior with high status or established independent medical practices, or otherwise have been decoupled from mechanisms or institutions which have been weaponized to force compliance with centralized edicts. In other words, the majority of those who have spoken out have freedom to speak BECAUSE they are (relatively) financially independent.”

In my book Pandemic Blunder released about 1.5 years ago I gave attention to the innovative doctors who, starting in March 2020, were saving patients with generics; Dr. Zelenko wrote the Preface to my book. They still are saving lives with generics. They have withstood the ugly politics of the pandemic. Unlike the majority of doctors they truly follow the science and the data. Ordinary people will not easily find a doctor that can see past the mountain of pandemic propaganda that fuels public health and medical establishments.

The doctors we normally see to manage our illnesses should not be seen as competent about pandemic issues. That truth is difficult to swallow. It means that people must work hard themselves to find pandemic truths on sites like this one. That some one million Americans have died with or from COVID is proof that putting all your trust in most physicians can be lethal.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal Challenging New York’s Removal of Religious Exemption for Schoolchildren

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | May 26, 2022

The U.S. Supreme Court this week decided not to take up an appeal by parents seeking to challenge New York lawmakers’ 2019 removal of the religious exemption to vaccination requirements for schoolchildren.

The court’s May 23 order announcing its decision not to hear arguments in the case F.F. v. New York allows a lower court decision to stand. The lower court concluded the parents’ arguments lacked merit and the state was not targeting religion when it eliminated the religious exemption.

“Today we learned that the U.S Supreme Court will not hear the religious repeal case we have argued for the last almost three years,” lead attorney Michael Sussman told Autism Action Network (AAN).

Sussman said in an AAN email to members:

“As those who have followed the case know, the legislature in NY repealed the 50-year-old religious exemption for students in June 2019. It did so with hateful rhetoric accusing religious people of being fraudsters.

“I believe this violated the first amendment which this court explicitly has held does not suffer any state action smitten with religious intolerance. I had expected this court to reaffirm this principle, but four justices did not vote to hear our case.

“So, we have lost. The only hope now is in the state legislature and hope is hard to find there.”

Every year, the Supreme Court receives about 10,000 petitions for certiorari but hears only about 80 of them. If the case pertains to state law, or is comprised of parties from only one state, the chance that the Supreme Court will hear the appeal is small.

The lawsuit originated after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on June 13, 2019, signed into law a bill that repealed the religious vaccine exemption for children whose parents or guardians hold genuine religious beliefs that do not permit the child to receive vaccinations.

The state law applies to students under 18 in both public and private schools and prohibits unvaccinated children from attending school or daycare in the state unless they have a medical exemption.

“The science is crystal clear: Vaccines are safe, effective and the best way to keep our children safe,” Cuomo said after signing the bill. “While I understand and respect freedom of religion, our first job is to protect public health.”

The appeal stemmed from a lawsuit filed on July 10, 2019, by attorneys Sussman and Children’s Health Defense chairman and chief legal counsel Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on behalf of 55 families in the New York State Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of the legislature’s repeal of the religious exemption to vaccination.

The families who brought the case included those from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. They argued the repeal of the exemption violated their First Amendment rights, exhibited hostility toward religion and breached protections under the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, among other issues.

The families claimed the policy forced them to either violate their beliefs or homeschool their children.

“In lobbying for its passage, numerous legislators publicly mocked and ridiculed those seeking religious exemptions for their children, and the legislature left intact a medical exemption,” the parents’ brief stated.

“There is no dispute the repeal [of the religious exemption] has put tens of thousands of students to the Hobson’s choice of violating their sincerely held religious beliefs or being denied the right to attend any manner of in-person schooling.”

Sussman said there was ample evidence leading up to the passing of the bill that state legislators had shown open hospitality toward faith and people of faith.

“Comments of leaders of the New York legislature spoke of profound religious intolerance, which motivated the repeal of the religious exemptions,” Sussman told AAN.

For example, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins was quoted in a newspaper referring to the repeal by saying, “We have chosen science over rhetoric.”

Assembly sponsor Jeffrey Dinowitz said in a television interview, “There is nothing, nothing in the Jewish religion, in the Christian religion, in the Muslim religion … that suggests that you can’t get vaccinated. It is just utter garbage.”

State Sen. Brad Hoylman, Senate sponsor, deprecated those who hold religious exemptions, stating, “Let’s face it. Non-medical exemptions are essentially religious loopholes, where people often pay for a consultant to try to worm their way out of public health requirements that the rest of us are following.”

In an editorial, State Sen. James Skoufis referred to the “so-called ‘religious exemption,’” writing, “The time is now to end the state’s nonsensical and dangerous religious exemption.”

Skoufis added, “We’ve already wasted too much time debating this issue.”

Skoufis failed to mention that neither the Senate nor the Assembly convened even a single hearing on the topic.

“Short of some cataclysmic political upheaval, there is no future for ‘religious exemption’ in New York,” John Gilmore, executive director of AAN, said in an email.

But, he said, “that does not mean there is no hope that the power of the state to make vaccinations mandatory for our children and adults cannot be taken away from our overlords in Albany.”

Several other states prohibit K-12 schools from granting religious exemptions to required vaccinations for schoolchildren, including California, Mississippi, Connecticut, West Virginia and Maine.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

WEF wants kids to learn in the metaverse to curb climate change

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 26, 2022

“Disconnecting” children from the physical world and “plugging them” into a virtual one is the way to go when it comes to the future of education, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

This is one of the “gems” that have come out of this year’s gathering in Davos, with a post on WEF’s website arguing that this direction is necessary, among other things, to combat climate change – rather, pressure to do so will drive the digitization of education. Other reasons would be better quality, accessibility, and affordability of education.

Children, now overly “reliant” on items like textbooks, notebooks, and pencils as learning tools, should in the future become immersed in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality environments, writes Dr. Ali Saeed Bin Harmal Al Dhaheri.

The pandemic is cited as a good example of how digital tools can be used for online education, but, according to the author, they are not enough, because students were merely being transferred knowledge instead of having practical and “in person” experience.

The post laments that while technological advancements are being widely used to transform administrative and services sectors, this is currently not enough to disrupt education.

“These advancements’ infiltration of education systems has become an increasing imperative,” says Al Dhaheri, who thinks VR will be a crucial element in future “experiential learning” that lets students see, hear, touch, and act in a virtual world.

VR and metaverse combined will be where students and teachers will be immersed in communication and sharing, “overcoming space and time limitations.”

The writeup pays lip service to risks and concerns regarding the removal of children from human interaction in the education process and increasing their isolation, by acknowledging that VR “somewhat” does that, but only if it is not properly monitored, and if its introduction lacks “a guided system.”

Nevertheless, Al Dhaheri believes that the benefits here outweigh the risk and that students will find the virtual environment more appealing while developing “much stronger skillsets.”

The article urges leaders, educators, and regulators to promote this agenda proactively, and mentions that this push is already beginning to happen in countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

How common is myocarditis? It hugely depends how hard you look.

For smallpox vaccine in military recruits, 1 in 30 had clinical or subclinical myo and/or pericarditis/PLOS One

By Meryl Nass, MD | May 26, 2022

In 2015, US military physicians described a study of 1,081 healthy young soldiers who received a smallpox vaccine as part of their military service. [Smallpox vaccine is not used in the civilian population.] It is known to cause a high rate of side effects, including myo- and peri-carditis, heart attacks and heart failure.

They found:

  • 5 soldiers or 0.046% (about 1 in 216 vaccine recipients) developed a clinical case of myo or pericarditis. This is over 200 times the expected rate!
  • But an additional 31 vaccine recipients had elevated cardiac enzymes
  • Adding these 2 groups together (36 out of 1081 soldiers) we find that one in 30 soldiers had lab-diagnosed cardiac inflammation. The 31 didn’t complain of symptoms. But in the military, it never pays to complain.
  • They too were at elevated risk of a cardiac arrhythmia and/or reduced cardiac function, and may have been at higher risk of a myocardial infarction.

We don’t know how common mild or subacute myo/pericarditis is in young Americans after Covid vaccines, because the US health agencies have neither performed a similar study, demanded such a study from the vaccine manufacturers (while it is the responsibility of both FDA to request and the manufacturers to perform), and the FDA and CDC have kept the databases hidden that might help at least identify the “clinical” cases, the ones who complained and sought medical care.

The CDC or FDA could also have contracted with this group of military physicians to perform a similar study of Covid vaccine recipients.

Dr. Michael Nelson, this study’s second author, was made a member of the FDA vaccine advisory committee for Covid vaccines. But he has been mum about the potential similarities between the covid and smallpox vaccine side effects, and didn’t publicly mention this study when he spoke at the VRBPAC meetings.

In 2003, another group of military and civilian physicians (including at least 2 vaccine zealots as coauthors: Greg Poland and John Grabenstein) published a study of US soldiers receiving smallpox vaccine, in which they did not look carefully for cases. How common was myocarditis in their study?  One case in 12,818 soldiers. They found 400 times fewer cases than the authors of the 2015 study. The full text can be downloaded here as a pdf.

How hard are CDC and FDA looking for Covid vaccine myo-pericarditis cases? We heard about no prospective studies at the VRBPAC and ACIP (the FDA and CDC vaccine advisory committees’) meetings in June.

Below is the abstract, and here is the full text of the 2015 military study:

New onset chest pain, dyspnea, and/or palpitations occurred in 10.6% of SPX-vaccinees and 2.6% of TIV-vaccinees within 30 days of immunization (relative risk (RR) 4.0, 95% CI: 1.7-9.3). Among the 1081 SPX-vaccinees with complete follow-up, 4 Caucasian males were diagnosed with probable myocarditis and 1 female with suspected pericarditis. This indicates a post-SPX incidence rate more than 200-times higher than the pre-SPX background population surveillance rate of myocarditis/pericarditis (RR 214, 95% CI 65-558). Additionally, 31 SPX-vaccinees without specific cardiac symptoms were found to have over 2-fold increases in cTnT (>99th percentile) from baseline (pre-SPX) during the window of risk for clinical myocarditis/pericarditis and meeting a proposed case definition for possible subclinical myocarditis. This rate is 60-times higher than the incidence rate of overt clinical cases. No clinical or possible subclinical myocarditis cases were identified in the TIV-vaccinated group.

If you think one in thirty is impossibly high, a Finnish study of military recruits published in 1978 found the same 3% rate after smallpox and DTP vaccination, based on EKG changes.

Covid vaccines may be causing similar high rates of cardiac inflammation too. But today, who’s counting?

And did this cause the military to stop vaccinating for smallpox, a disease wiped out in 1977? No. Military smallpox vaccinations continued.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Nuland-Pyatt Tape Removed From YouTube After 8 Years

A popular version, with subtitles, suddenly was made unavailable on Wednesday. The tape provides evidence of US involvement in 2014 Kiev coup. 

By Joe Lauria | Consortium News | May 25, 2022

The smoking gun proving U.S. involvement in the 2014 coup in Kiev has been removed from YouTube after eight years.

It was one of the most watched versions of the intercepted and leaked conversation between then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in which the two discuss who will make up the new government weeks before democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown in a violent coup on Feb. 21, 2014.

The two talk about “midwifing” the unconstitutional change of government and “gluing it together” and of the role then Vice President Joe Biden should play and what meetings to set up with Ukrainian politicians.

The U.S. State Department never denied the authenticity of the video, and even issued an apology to the European Union after Nuland is heard on the tape saying, “Fuck the E.U.” Mainstream media at the time focused almost exclusively on that off-color remark, ignoring the greater significance of U.S. interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs.

Consortium News has numerous times embedded the YouTube video in articles about the overthrow of Yanukovych.

The video was posted on April 29, 2014 and had 181,533 views before it was taken down, was among the most viewed versions of the conversation on YouTube. Eight years worth of comments on the video have also been removed.

The same video can be viewed on Rumble here.

A version from a Russian YouTube channel with Russian subtitles, still available, has garnered 1.4 million views.

Timing of Removal

The removal of a video that had existed online for eight years raises major questions as it comes during the war in Ukraine. Corporate media has studiously avoided mentioning the causes of the current conflict, including NATO eastward expansion, the rejected Moscow treaty proposals in December, the civil war in Donbass and the 2014 coup in Kiev that led to the Donbass uprising and violent repression by the coup government.

The coup in 2014 is the starting point that led to all these events culminating in Russia’s invasion in February. Removing the video would be consistent with the suppression of any information that falls outside the enforced narrative of events in Ukraine, including whitewashing any mention of the U.S.-backed coup.

Transcript Still Online

The BBC on Feb. 7, 2014 — 14 days before Yanukovych was toppled — published a transcript of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation. Consortium News is republishing the transcript here, lest it be removed from the internet as well:

Warning: This transcript contains swearing.

Voice thought to be Nuland’s: What do you think?

Voice thought to be Pyatt’s: I think we’re in play. The Klitschko [Vitaly Klitschko, one of three main opposition leaders] piece is obviously the complicated electron here. Especially the announcement of him as deputy prime minister and you’ve seen some of my notes on the troubles in the marriage right now so we’re trying to get a read really fast on where he is on this stuff. But I think your argument to him, which you’ll need to make, I think that’s the next phone call you want to set up, is exactly the one you made to Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk, another opposition leader]. And I’m glad you sort of put him on the spot on where he fits in this scenario. And I’m very glad that he said what he said in response.

Nuland: Good. I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Pyatt: Yeah. I guess… in terms of him not going into the government, just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff. I’m just thinking in terms of sort of the process moving ahead we want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok [Oleh Tyahnybok, the other opposition leader] and his guys and I’m sure that’s part of what [President Viktor] Yanukovych is calculating on all this.

Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.

Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. OK. Good. Do you want us to set up a call with him as the next step?

Nuland: My understanding from that call – but you tell me – was that the big three were going into their own meeting and that Yats was going to offer in that context a… three-plus-one conversation or three-plus-two with you. Is that not how you understood it?

Pyatt: No. I think… I mean that’s what he proposed but I think, just knowing the dynamic that’s been with them where Klitschko has been the top dog, he’s going to take a while to show up for whatever meeting they’ve got and he’s probably talking to his guys at this point, so I think you reaching out directly to him helps with the personality management among the three and it gives you also a chance to move fast on all this stuff and put us behind it before they all sit down and he explains why he doesn’t like it.

Nuland: OK, good. I’m happy. Why don’t you reach out to him and see if he wants to talk before or after.

Pyatt: OK, will do. Thanks.

Nuland: OK… one more wrinkle for you Geoff. [A click can be heard] I can’t remember if I told you this, or if I only told Washington this, that when I talked to Jeff Feltman [United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs] this morning, he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry did I write you that this morning?

Pyatt: Yeah I saw that.

Nuland: OK. He’s now gotten both Serry and [UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, Fuck the EU.

Pyatt: No, exactly. And I think we’ve got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does start to gain altitude, that the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it. And again the fact that this is out there right now, I’m still trying to figure out in my mind why Yanukovych (garbled) that. In the meantime there’s a Party of Regions faction meeting going on right now and I’m sure there’s a lively argument going on in that group at this point. But anyway we could land jelly side up on this one if we move fast. So let me work on Klitschko and if you can just keep… we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing. The other issue is some kind of outreach to Yanukovych but we probably regroup on that tomorrow as we see how things start to fall into place.

Nuland: So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note [US vice-president’s national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need [US Vice-President Joe] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So Biden’s willing.

Pyatt: OK. Great. Thanks.

###

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Monkeypoxmania

By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory, Inc. | May 25, 2022

Lock yourselves down inside your homes! Break out the masks and prophylactic face-shields! Switch off what’s left of your critical faculties and prepare yourselves to “follow the Science!”

Yes, that’s right, just as the survivors of The Simulated Apocalyptic Plague of 2020-2021 were crawling up out of their Covid bunkers and starting to “build the world back better,” another biblical pestilence has apparently been unleashed on humanity!

This time it’s the dreaded monkeypox, a viral zoonotic disease endemic to central and western Africa that circulates among giant pouched rats, squirrels, dormice, and other rodents and has been infecting humans for centuries, or millennia. Monkeypox causes fever, headaches, muscle aches, and sometimes fluid-filled blisters, tends to resolve in two to four weeks, and thus poses absolutely zero threat to human civilization generally.

The corporate media do not want to alarm us, but it is their duty as professional journalists to report that THE MONKEYPOX IS SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE! OVER 100 CASES OF MONKEYPOX have been confirmed in countries throughout the world! MONKEYPOX TASKFORCES are being convened! Close-up photos of NASTY-LOOKING MONKEYPOX LESIONS are being disseminated! The President of the United States says “EVERYBODY SHOULD BE CONCERNED!”

The WHO is calling it “a multi-country monkeypox outbreak!” Belgium has introduced a mandatory quarantine. The CDC has gone to “Alert Level 2!” “Enhanced precautions” are recommended! In New York City, the nexus of probably the most paranoid, mask-wearing, quadruple-“vaccinated” New Normal fanatics on the face of the planet, the Department of Health is instructing everyone to wear the masks they are already wearing to protect them from both Covid and monkeypox, and smallpox, and largepox, and airborne cancer, and God knows what other horrors might be out there!

Here in the capital of New Normal Germany, Karl Lauterbach, who, despite wasting hundreds of millions of Euros on superfluous “vaccines,” attempting to compulsorily “vaccinate” every man, woman, and child in the country, and otherwise behaving like a fascist lunatic, remains the official Minister of Health, is excitedly hopping up and down and hooting like a Siamang gibbon about “recommendations for isolation and quarantine,” and other “monkeypox containment measures.”

As Yogi Berra famously put it, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Except that it isn’t … or it probably isn’t. Before I could even finish this column, the United GloboCap Ministries of Truth started dialing down the monkeypox panic. It appears they’re going with “it’s a gay pandemic,” or an “LGBTQ pandemic,” or an “LGBTQIA+ pandemic,” or whatever the official acronym is by the time I click the “publish” button, and making other noises to the effect that it might not be absolutely necessary this time to order a full-scale global lockdown, release the drones and robotic dogs, inject everybody with experimental drugs, and start viciously persecuting “monkeypox deniers.”

You didn’t really believe they were launching a shot-by-shot remake of Covid, did you? The showrunners at GloboCap may be preternaturally evil, but they aren’t stupid. Only the most hopelessly brainwashed New Normals would go along with another “apocalyptic pandemic” before the current one has even been officially cancelled. No, unfortunately, odds are, we’re just getting a preview of what “life” is going to be like in the New Normal Reich, where the masses will be perpetually menaced by an inexhaustible assortment of exotic pathogens and interchangeable pseudo-pathological threats.

The New Normal was never about Covid specifically. It was always about implementing a new “reality” — a pathologized-totalitarian “reality,” not so much ruled as discreetly “guided” by unaccountable, supranational, non-governmental governing entities, global corporations, and assorted billionaires — in which Covid, or monkeypox, or kangaroopox, or any other viral zoonotic disease, or any climate-related or economic development, or aberrant ideological or behavioral tendency, could be used as a pretext to foment another outbreak of mindless mass hysteria and impose additional restrictions on society.

That new “reality” has been implemented … perhaps not as firmly as originally intended, but implemented nonetheless. We are being conditioned to accept this new “reality,” as we were conditioned to accept the War on Terror “reality,” to pointlessly remove our footwear at the airport, place our liquids in travel-size containers, submit to groping by “security staff,” and otherwise live in a state of constant low-level fear of a “terrorist attack,” as we are now being conditioned to wear masks where we are told, submit to mandatory “vaccination,” and live in constant low-level fear of the next purportedly deadly pathogen.

Sadly, most of us will accept this conditioning, and adapt to the “minor inconveniences” that are being imposed on us at every turn. After all, what difference does it really make if we have to wear a little mask on an airplane, or on public transport, or at the doctor’s office? And is it really such a breach of our fundamental rights to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, association, privacy, and basic bodily autonomy if we have to allow governments and global corporations to censor our political opinions, prevent us from traveling, forbid us to protest, and force us to submit to invasive medical treatments in order to hold a job? We got used to taking off our shoes at the airport and watching the “security staff” fondle our kids’ genitals, and invading and bombing other countries and murdering whole families with drones, didn’t we? Surely, we’ll get used to this.

Or … OK, I won’t, and neither will you, probably, but the majority of the masses will. They just demonstrated that pretty clearly, didn’t they? As they demonstrated it during the Global War on Terror. As they demonstrated it during the Cold War. As they demonstrated it … oh, never mind.

Sorry, I really wanted to end this column on a positive note. All right, here’s one! A little good news, finally! According to the professional fact-checkers at Reuters, it turns out “there is no evidence at all that the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting [which is taking place in Davos right now] was scheduled to coincide with these outbreaks of monkeypox,” and anyone who says there is, or implies there is, or who deviates from or questions the “facts,” or the “Science,” or whatever, is a “monkeypox-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax, Putin-loving disinformationist,” and so everything is actually hunky-dory, or it will be as soon as we teach those evil Rooskies a little thermonuclear lesson!

I don’t know about you, but that’s a load off my mind. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.

###

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Ukraine threatens “something could happen” to oil pipeline serving EU member Hungary

Samizdat | May 26, 2022

Ukraine has “a wonderful lever of pressure” on Hungary via the Druzhba – which translates to ‘Friendship’ – oil pipeline, Ukrainian energy minister adviser Lana Zerkal claimed on Thursday.

Speaking during an online discussion at the Kiev Security Forum, Zerkal criticized the policy of the Hungarian government, which is blocking a sixth round of EU sanctions, one which would ban Russian oil. The Western countries have been imposing harsh restrictions since late February, when Moscow launched its military attack on Ukraine.

In Zerkal’s opinion, Hungary is using the Russian military offensive as an instrument to achieve its own goals and thinks that now it “can demand anything” from the EU.

“Ukraine has a wonderful lever of pressure in its hands – it’s the Druzhba oil pipeline,” Zerkal said, adding that “something could happen” with Hungary’s separate line of Druzhba.

“And, in my opinion, it would be very appropriate if something happened to it. But, again, it is in the hands of the government and the president to make decisions on political issues, to decide if we really want to talk to [Hungarian President Viktor] Orban in a language that he understands and that he imposes on the EU, or if we are not ready for that yet,” Zerkal stressed.

Zerkal later took to Facebook to clarify “her humble opinion” that “caused a diplomatic scandal,” saying “facts are a stubborn thing.”

“But, to calm the situation, it is worth specifying that the official position of the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine on this matter is unchanged. Ukraine is a reliable transporter of energy carriers to Europe,” she stressed.

While Zerkal’s words have already started to spread through Hungarian media, Budapest is yet to comment on the issue.

In a letter to European Council President Charles Michel, seen by the Financial Times, Orban reportedly told the EU that a bloc-wide ban on Russian oil would cause serious problems for his country’s economy and thus “urgent investments” from Brussels were needed.

Hungary is almost entirely dependent on Russia for its gas imports and relies on Moscow for more than half of its imported oil. The country gets 65% of its oil through the Druzhba pipeline from Russia. Addressing possible sanctions against Russia’s oil, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto previously said that Budapest would back a ban on maritime shipments, but not on deliveries through pipelines.

Despite the lack of consensus within the EU, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Monday that the bloc’s 27 member states “will reach a breakthrough within days” on an embargo. Any decision on EU sanctions must be made unanimously.

Ukraine has been consistently calling on the European countries to stop buying Russian energy resources, claiming that by doing so they are financing Moscow’s military offensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused European leaders of committing economic “suicide” by attempting to give up Russian energy.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

“Deaths Have Increased Cumulatively”: BBC Producer Defends False Extreme Weather Claim

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | May 25, 2022

Fresh insights into the techniques used by the BBC to catastrophise climate change are revealed in an exchange of letters with the producer of Justin Rowlatt’s  “Wild Weather” Panorama and a former producer of Top Gear. Justifying the Rowlatt suggestion that global weather is getting warmer and more unpredictable and the death toll is rising, the programme’s producer Leo Telling said the latter figure was “cumulative”. In reply, Ken Pollock called the explanation “asinine”, and suggested Telling recognised that: “The death toll in the U.K. is cumulative. It is difficult to imagine it not increasing, if you quote cumulative figures,” he explained.

The “Wild Weather” programme, broadcast in December 2020, was an emotion-charged rant that tried to show that human-caused climate change was behind a series of recent bad weather events. It led to two internal complaints being upheld against Rowlatt. On the death toll claim, the BBC accepted that deaths from natural disasters have actually been falling for many years.

Telling then went on to argue that heatwaves will lead to excess deaths in vulnerable groups with a lower tolerance to extreme temperatures. In addition, he stated that the heatwaves will lead to avoidable deaths through wildfires.

“How can you write with a straight face that heatwaves will kill more and more people,” replied Pollock, “without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”

How do you reconcile the fact that Singapore and Helsinki have average temperatures differing by 22°C, and yet you accept that a further 1°C could spell disaster, he went on to ask.

Pollock then wondered what the Panorama producer really meant by the suggestion that avoidable wildfire deaths would increase. “You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,” he wrote.

In Pollock’s view, much of what Telling produced was drawn from the World Health Organisation and “highly questionable” IPCC predictions. One might expect you to challenge some of them, or at least refer to the source and the speculative nature of the predictions, he contended. Pollock concluded by noting that in his 22 years as a BBC producer, he became alarmed at the inadequate use of statistics by the Corporation in current affairs and elsewhere: “Many BBC people repeated statistics without understanding them”.

On the BBC climate desk, repeating, seemingly without question, the catastrophe claims from third party sources is a normal method of operation. In February 2019, the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reported the view of Left wing think tank IPPR that “human impacts had reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy”. No attempt was made to examine these extravagant opinions. It later transpired that the report, which contained numerous false extreme weather claims, was part written by a young woman whose previous employment had been working as a volunteer for an Edinburgh ‘equality’ charity. Meanwhile, Matt McGrath, the first winner of the BBVA Foundation €100,000 award for climate journalism, wrote an article in July 2019  titled “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Accepting his award from BBVA, a Spanish bank with large green investments, McGrath defended the primacy of specialist journalism “that draws on sound scientific sources” in an era of fake news.

Barely a week goes by without the Net Zero-inspired fantasies of climate Armageddon being publicised from the work of academics, think tanks, meteorological operations like the Met Office and the IPCC. This latter body, heavily dependent on climate models and their to-date wildly inaccurate forecasts, is held in particularly high esteem. Writing in July last year, Harrabin looked forward to a new edition by stating, “computing will underpin the new climate science ‘Bible’ from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) next month”.

It might be suggested that an editorial emergency is awaiting the BBC in the near future. Most of its climate reporting seems to be little more than repeating bad (“extreme”) weather events, and claiming the climate is, somehow, breaking down. In reality, global warming has run out of steam with pauses and dips common in the record over the last two decades. The accurate temperature news from satellites is largely ignored, and there is little appetite for investigating how the major global surface datasets have quietly adjusted their records to add an extra 30% of heating over the last 20 years. Most of the bad weather claims are easily debunked, and are unlikely to be so well tolerated by the wider public if Net Zero leads to substantial reductions in personal freedoms, income and diet.

Writing an excoriating report on the “Wild Weather” programme, Ross Clark noted recently in the Daily Mail that there was a time when the BBC was committed to presenting both sides of the argument. He noted a 2018 instruction sent by the former BBC director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, demanding that “interviewees who were sceptical about man-made climate change were no longer to be invited regularly”. He concluded: “Unsworth’s instructions had clearly become the status quo.”

Last September, Insulate Britain activist Zoe Cohen told the BBC that climate change would lead to “the loss of all we cherish, our society, our way of life, law and order”. Ross noted that it was a hysterical claim that had no foundation in science, yet she remained unchallenged. Some at the BBC, he went on to suggest, were losing patience with their climate editor. “The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,” an unnamed BBC source is reported to have told another newspaper. “These are not mistakes; he’s a campaigner.”

Matt McGrath is another who might care to look into some of the sources that feed his doomsday copy. Around the time of receiving his BBVA present, he published  a story claiming that over 11,000 scientists were predicting “untold suffering” from the forthcoming climate emergency. Among those signatories promoting a “clear and unequivocal emergency” were Professor Mickey Mouse and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

The perfect BBC climate breakdown story. Making it up, in a world of make believe.

May 26, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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