Kiev amasses troops on Donbass border – official
Samizdat | October 8, 2022
Kiev has deployed some 40,000 troops to the border with the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), which recently became part of Russia, the LPR’s top representative in Moscow, Rodion Miroshnik, has said.
“In the areas where attempts of a breakthrough are being made [by Kiev’s forces], large quantities of manpower and hardware have been concentrated on the Ukrainian side,” Miroshnik said during an appearance on the Soloviev Live program on YouTube on Friday.
According to estimates by the LPR’s forces, “we’re talking about 40,000 men,” the official added.
Kiev’s troops have been gathering to the north and northwest of the LPR, as well as in the area around the town of Krasny Liman in the Donetsk People’s Republic, from where Russian forces withdrew a week ago amid a Ukrainian offensive, Miroshnik added.
On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin signed into law unification treaties with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, officially making them part of Russia. The four territories overwhelmingly supported the move during referendums in late September.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
NORDSTREAM SABOTAGE: A NEW LOW FOR WESTERN MAINSTREAM MEDIA
By Dimitri Lascaris | October 7, 2022
The Guardian’s coverage of the recent Nord Stream sabotage highlights the increasingly absurd lengths to which Western media will go to promote the U.S. government’s hegemonic agenda.
Guardian coverage of this portentous event has included at least three, shameless exercises in propaganda-masquerading-as-journalism.
On September 28 – two days after natural gas began belching into the Baltic Sea due to multiple blasts targeting Nord Stream – the Guardian published an article by Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief, entitled “Nord Stream blasts could herald new phase of hybrid war, say EU politicians”.
By focusing attention on the perspective of EU politicians, the title of Oltermann’s article left no doubt as to its bias: E.U. governments have flooded Ukraine with weapons and have imposed sanctions on Russia that were plainly designed to destroy its economy. None of the E.U. officials quoted in the article can plausibly claim to be independent, objective arbiters of the debate over who attacked the Nord Stream pipelines.
According to Oltermann:
Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of parliament for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the Guardian the pipeline attack had the hallmarks of the “hybrid warfare approach” Russia has pursued for the last decade, with the aim of “dividing the European Union not by military but through social and diplomatic means”.
“We have to ask who has an interest in destroying this infrastructure,” said Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag’s committee on foreign affairs. While it was in the interest of the US, states in central and eastern Europe and the Baltics that Nord Stream 2 would never be activated, he argued that an act of state-sponsored sabotage by a Nato ally would have come attached with too large a risk of a political backlash.
“Russia, on the other hand, has an interest in sending us a signal: to threaten it could cause similar damage to pipelines between Algeria and France, to our power lines or submarine fibre-optic cables […] I consider it likely that Russia was behind this attack.”
What does Keisewetter mean by “hybrid warfare approach”, and why is this approach uniquely that of Russia? For decades, the U.S. military has degraded and destroyed the civilian infrastructure of its official enemies – for example, in Iraq and Libya. Therefore, one could just as easily argue that this act of sabotage has all “the hallmarks” of U.S. aggression.
Keisewetter does acknowledge that the U.S. (as well as certain unnamed European states) had an interest in killing the Nord Stream pipelines (more on that later), but he claims that the political backlash from their sabotage of Nord Stream would constitute “too large a risk”.
Yet, if recent history teaches us anything about relations between the United States and the E.U., it’s that the U.S. can get away with just about any betrayal of the E.U.’s trust.
In 2014, the Guardian and other Western media outlets revealed, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the U.K. intelligence agency, GCHQ, had tapped into fibre-optic cables carrying global communications, and that GCHQ had shared vast amounts of data with its U.S. counterpart, the NSA. The targeted fibre-optic cables included three undersea cables with terminals in Italy.
The Snowden documents also disclosed that the U.S. had spied on E.U. internal computer networks in Washington and the E.U.’s United Nations office in New York, and that the NSA had conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the E.U. Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.
At the time, Western media outlets also reported that the U.S. had secretly intercepted and monitored cell phone conversations of Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s Chancellor.
What was the “backlash” resulting from U.S. spying on Merkel and other top E.U officials? What price did the U.S. government pay for undermining the integrity of telecommunications infrastructure in the E.U.?
Apart from a few theatrical, you-hurt-our-feelings protestations from E.U. leaders — for example, Merkel’s pathetic complaint to Obama that U.S. spying on her cell phone conversations was “completely unacceptable” — there was no meaningful “backlash”.
The E.U. imposed no sanctions on the U.S. It did not sever diplomatic relations with the U.S.. It did not close down a single U.S. military base. Indeed, since the Snowden revelations emerged, U.S.-E.U. relations have been conducted essentially on a business-as-usual basis.
Predictably, Oltermann mentions none of these facts in his article of September 28. In fact, Oltermann evinces no scepticism that the political backlash would be too great if, indeed, the U.S. and/or its proxies had sabotaged Nord Stream.
Oltermann continues:
Nord Stream has been at the heart of a standoff between Russia and Europe over energy supplies since the start of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, but it is not immediately clear who stands to benefit from the destruction of the gas infrastructure.
Several paragraphs earlier, Oltermann had revealed that a member of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee had acknowledged that the U.S. and certain European states had an interest in preventing the activation of Nord Stream, yet it was “not immediately clear” to Oltermann who stands to benefit from the destruction of that infrastructure?
Oltermann then acknowledges that, in Germany, there had been calls recently “to open the pipeline as an energy crisis looms over Europe”, but he dismisses those calls as having come from “political parties on the far right and the far left.”
The reality is that, due to the inaccessibility of affordable Russian gas, Germany’s economy is now on the verge of collapse. That is why, immediately prior to the sabotage of Nord Stream, German protesters took to the streets to demand that Nord Stream be reopened and that a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine war be pursued.
Oltermann evidently believes that only Germans on the “far right” and “far left” are alarmed about the immense hardships that Germany’s economic collapse will inflict upon their families and millions of ordinary Germans.
On September 29, the day after the Guardian published Oltermann’s article, it published an editorial focused on the Russian Federation’s just-completed annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. In that editorial, the Guardian’s editors wrote:
The annexations come alongside the mobilisation order, and, many believe, the damage to the Nord Stream pipelines (while Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit, US intelligence has been notably cautious about ascribing blame).
Nowhere in the editorial, however, does the Guardian explain the basis for its claim that “Russia clearly appears the most plausible culprit”. Its editors do not offer a scintilla of evidence or logic to support their eye-popping claim that Russia may have blown up its own pipelines. Nor do they explain why U.S. intelligence would hesitate to accuse Russia of sabotage if Russia “clearly” was “the most plausible culprit”. When has U.S. intelligence been reluctant to level evidence-free accusations of criminality at Russia’s government?
Finally, on September 30, the Guardian published an article by Kate Connolly, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, entitled “Size of Nord Stream blasts equal to large amount of explosive, UN told”. Connolly wrote:
Intelligence sources quoted in the news magazine Spiegel believe the pipelines were hit in four places by explosions using 500kg of TNT, the equivalent to the explosive power of a heavy aircraft bomb. German investigators have undertaken seismic readings to calculate the power of the blasts.
The first signs of explosions were registered on Monday morning by a Danish earthquake station after suspicious activity in the waters of the Baltic Sea. A monitoring station on the Danish island of Bornholm measured severe tremors.
A representative of the Swedish coastguard told AFP: “There are two leaks on Swedish territory and two on the Danish side.”
It remains a mystery as to how the explosives reached the pipeline. According to initial reports, the explosions happened at depths of between 70 and 90 metres.
There has been speculation that mini submarines might have been used to deliver the explosives. However, the amount of explosives that would have been necessary to cause such large blasts make this theory increasingly unlikely.
Instead, experts are suggesting that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline structure may have planted the bombs during repair works.
If this theory proves to be right, the sophisticated nature of the attack as well as the power of the blast would add weight to suspicions that the attacks were carried out by a state power, with fingers pointed at Russia. Moscow has repeatedly underlined its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
On Friday, Vladimir Putin blamed the US and its allies for blowing up the pipelines, raising the temperature in the crisis. Offering no evidence for his claim, the Russian president said in a speech to mark the annexation of four Ukrainian regions: “The sanctions were not enough for the Anglo-Saxons: they moved on to sabotage. It is hard to believe but it is a fact that they organised the blasts on the Nord Stream international gas pipelines.”
Three elements of Connolly’s report merit commentary.
First, who are “the experts” who suggest that maintenance robots operating within the pipeline may have planted bombs during maintenance? Connolly doesn’t tell us, nor does she explain why she omitted to reveal their identities. Are they government “experts”? Were they not authorized to speak publicly? If they were government experts, to what governments do they belong? Without this information, Connolly’s readers are unable to assess whether her sources do indeed have relevant expertise and are truly objective.
Second, Connolly claims that Moscow has repeatedly “underlined” its capability to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. Really? I have never seen a threat from the Russian government to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure. If indeed the Russian government ever issued such a threat, then why doesn’t Connolly tell us when, how and by whom that threat was issued?
By contrast, the President of the United States explicitly threatened earlier this year to “bring an end” to Nord Stream if Russia invaded Ukraine. That threat was issued in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz:
What is most damning about Biden’s threat is his response to a reporter’s question about Germany. When the reporter points out to Biden that Germany – a supposedly key ally of the United States – is part-owner of Nord Stream, Biden doesn’t flinch. He simply disregards Germany’s stake in the project and declares (with the hapless, weak-kneed Scholz standing near him) “I promise you, we will be able” to bring Nord Stream to an end.
For the sake of appearances and diplomacy, Biden could have dissembled. He could have said something like “of course, we will consult with our German partners before taking any action to end Nord Stream” or “the decision about ending Nord Stream will be made jointly with the German government”. Yet Biden said no such thing, evidently believing that the whole world should know that Germany’s view of the matter was irrelevant to the U.S. government.
Connolly says nothing in her article about Biden’s recent, explicit threat to ‘bring an end’ to Nord Stream, but she does make an unsubstantiated claim that Moscow had “underlined” its capacity to disrupt Europe’s energy infrastructure.
Finally, Connolly reports that Putin blames “the Anglo-Saxons” – presumably, the British and Americans – for the Nord Stream sabotage.
Let us contemplate that fact for a moment.
If in fact Russia did not blow up its own pipelines, and if the Russian government is convinced that the British and Americans sabotaged Nord Stream, the world is likely heading toward a very dark place, both figuratively and literally. The Russian government is not likely to tolerate Western attacks on vitally important Russian energy infrastructure. Somehow, at some point, Russia is liable to retaliate against the West’s energy infrastructure. The disabling of key energy infrastructure may well have dire consequences for Western economies that are already reeling from a global energy crisis.
If one or more Western governments are behind the sabotage of Nord Stream, they have crossed a red line that will expose Western economies and citizens to heightened energy insecurity in the months and years ahead. They may well have hurt the West far more than they have hurt Russia.
The Case Against Russia
I am a lawyer. I was first called to the bar in the State of New York thirty years ago. For most of my career, I have specialized in class action litigation. Typically, on behalf of my clients, I’ve prosecuted claims of fraud and other forms of corporate wrongdoing. Often, the claims I advance involve potential criminality. The complex evidence underlying these claims must be assessed and interpreted with meticulous attention to detail, but also with a healthy dose of scepticism and common sense.
Like any case of potential criminality, I approach the question of who sabotaged Nord Stream like a lawyer. I bring to bear my experience litigating claims of wrongdoing. Among other things, I ask: who possessed a motive to commit the crime? Who had both the ability and the opportunity to carry it out? Are the protagonists and the witnesses marshalled for and against those protagonists credible? What do qualified experts say? Are those experts unbiased? Taking into account these and other considerations, what are the most rational inferences to be drawn from all available evidence?
Certainly, the Russian military possessed the capacity to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines, but what possible motive would it have to do so?
Gazprom, a fossil fuels behemoth that is controlled by the Russian state, invested over US$5 billion in Nord Stream 2. Moreover, had Russia wanted to stop the flow of gas to Europe through Nord Stream, all it had to do was turn off the gas taps in Russia. There was no need for Russia to destroy those pipelines and jeopardize a state-owned entity’s multi-billion-dollar investment.
As long as Nord Stream remained functional, the Russian government was able to offer an enticement to Germany to remove sanctions on Russia. As long as Nord Stream remains non-functional, Russia’s leverage over Germany is diminished considerably.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the Russian military had the opportunity to commit this sabotage.
The explosions occurred near Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. Bornholm is surrounded by states that are either members of NATO or have applied to join NATO (Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Poland). It is only 100 km from the Polish coastline.
NATO heavily monitors and effectively controls the western Baltic Sea, where the sabotage occurred. How could Russian saboteurs execute this challenging operation while escaping detection by NATO?
The Case Against the United States
Arguably, no government had a greater motivation to destroy Nord Stream than the United States government.
Joe Biden was by no means the first U.S. politician to express a desire to see Nord Stream terminated. For years, U.S. government officials have condemned Nord Stream 2 and have pressured Germany’s government to abandon the project.
Here are but a few examples.
In 2014, former U.S. Secretary of State and unrepentant war criminal Condoleeza Rice gave an interview in which she was asked whether Germany had been sufficiently “aggressive” with Russia. In response, Rice expressed her desire that Europe “depend more on the North American energy platform” and “the tremendous bounty of oil and gas we are finding in North America.” “You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia,” she added. “For years, we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It’s time to do that.”
In December 2021, as fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine intensified, Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, was questioned by Republican Senator Ron Johnson about the Biden administration’s plans for sanctioning Russia. Johnson prefaced his questions by noting that, despite their differences, Republicans and Democrats were united in their hostility to Russia. Johnson also stated that it was important to make Vladimir Putin understand how “harmful” U.S. sanctions would be to the “Russian people”. Then, after noting the Senate’s strong support for sanctions on Nord Stream, Johnson asked Nuland whether the Biden administration was contemplating sanctions that “would prevent Nord Stream 2 from ever being completed.” Nuland replied “absolutely”.
If Victoria Nuland is familiar to you, that might be due to her infamous 2014 conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. A leaked recording of that conversation revealed that the U.S. government had handpicked the next Prime Minister of Ukraine in advance of a coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych. In Nuland’s conversation with Pyatt, Pyatt noted that E.U. officials did not agree with Washington’s choice for Ukraine’s next PM. In response, Nuland said to Pyatt “fuck the E.U.”
One cannot overstate the U.S. government’s contempt for the priorities of its European allies vassals.
Despite the extensive and unambiguous record of U.S. government hostility to Nord Stream, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken laughably claimed, on the day after the sabotage, that the destruction of Nord Stream was in “no one’s interest”. If that were true, why would anyone destroy it?
It took the dim-witted Blinken less than one week to publicly contradict himself. On October 2, he giddily declared in a press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly that the destruction of Nord Stream presented to the United States a “strategic” and “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.
Even in the absence of these and similar statements by U.S. officials, it would be obvious that the U.S. government has a motive to “bring an end” to Nord Stream.
The neocons who control U.S. government foreign policy covet, above all else, global hegemony. Maintaining U.S. global hegemony requires that the U.S. effect regime change in Russia and that it replace Russia’s nationalist government with a Yeltsin-like buffoon who will slavishly do the bidding of his American handlers. Only then will it be possible for the U.S. to isolate and ‘contain’ China, whose growing wealth and power is the primary impediment to U.S. hegemony. As long as the powerful German economy is closely intertwined with that of Russia, the U.S. government’s ability to undermine Russia’s economy will be limited.
Quite apart from that, the U.S. fossil fuels industry stands to gain enormously from the E.U.’s rejection of Russian fossil fuels. As Blinken acknowledged, U.S. gas producers are undoubtedly licking their chops at the “tremendous opportunity” created by Nord Stream’s destruction.
Not only did the U.S. have the motive to destroy Nord Stream, it had both the technological capability and the opportunity to do so.
The site of the sabotage lies in waters that are effectively controlled by NATO.
According to Flightradar24 data, U.S. military helicopters habitually and on numerous occasions circled for hours over the site of the Nord Stream sabotage near Bornholm Island earlier in September.
Moreover, in June of this year, the U.S. military conducted the BALTOPS naval exercise off the coast of Bornholm to demonstrate NATO’s mine hunting capabilities. According to an official publication of the Navy League of the United States, this exercise was used as “an opportunity to test emerging technology”:
In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.
Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68.
By contrast, I’m aware of no reports of the presence of Russian military assets at or near the site of sabotage in the months leading up to the incident. (If you have seen such reports, I encourage you to share them with me.)
Immediately before the explosions that disabled Nord Stream, German protesters had taken to the streets to call for the reopening of Nord Stream in the face of skyrocketing energy bills. What better way to prevent the German government from acceding to public pressure than making it impossible for Nord Stream to deliver gas to Germany?
Of course, this circumstantial evidence does not prove definitively that the U.S. military or a proxy acting with the consent and support of the U.S. government sabotaged Nord Stream, nor does it disprove definitively that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines.
Nonetheless, the totality of the circumstantial evidence makes a mockery of claims by the Guardian and other pro-NATO, Western media outlets that Russia is ‘the most plausible culprit’.
By any rational measure, the United States government is, by a wide margin, ‘the most plausible culprit’.
Another plausible culprit is Poland.
Not only is Poland closer to the site of the sabotage than Russia, Poland’s government is intensely hostile to Russia.
Poland’s government detests the Nord Stream pipelines. Using highly undiplomatic language against a fellow NATO and E.U. member, the Polish government has repeatedly castigated Germany’s government for the Nord Stream project. In 2021, for example, it accused Germany of forming a “brutal alliance” with Russia against the interests of other European states.
Shortly after the sabotage was revealed, Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, tweeted an image of natural gas spewing from the site of the Nord Stream sabotage, along with the words “Thank you, USA.” He quickly deleted the tweet after it went viral.
It may well be that Poland played a role in the attacks on Nord Stream, but it is difficult to imagine that it would commit a crime of this magnitude without the consent and support of the U.S. government, NATO’s dominant member.
Where do we go from here?
Danish and Swedish authorities are reportedly conducting an investigation into the Nord Stream attacks. The Kremlin claims that it has not been invited to participate in the investigation, while Nord Stream operators say that they were unable to inspect the damaged sections of the pipelines because of restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish authorities who had cordoned off the area.
Denmark is a member of NATO, while Sweden has applied for NATO membership.
If Germany was a truly sovereign state, its government would demand an independent, international investigation into the attacks on Nord Stream.
Moreover, no investigation supervised by a NATO or a wannabe-NATO government could be truly independent, especially if Russian authorities have been excluded from the investigation. All NATO states, and particularly NATO’s most powerful member (the U.S.), have a strong interest in pointing the finger at Russia.
The fact that Germany’s government has not demanded a truly independent investigation speaks volumes about Germany’s supposed sovereignty, but the German government’s feeble response should surprise no one. At the behest of their masters in Washington, German ‘leaders’ committed their country to economic suicide months ago.
Sooner or later, however, the truth about Nord Stream may well emerge. If it is ultimately demonstrated that the United States or a U.S. proxy attacked Nord Stream, and did so at a moment when Germany’s economy is collapsing under the weight of an energy crisis, the consequences will be enormous, not only for Russia’s relations with the West, but also for Germany’s (and the E.U.’s) relations with the United States and NATO.
Indeed, the Nord Stream sabotage may ultimately prove to be one of the most consequential crimes of the twenty-first century. If the U.S. committed the crime, Western media will have played a key role in protecting the criminals who did it.
I leave you with this video clip of an October 3, 2022 interview of Professor Jeffrey Sachs, former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. When Dr. Sachs has the temerity to suggest that the U.S. government is behind the Nord Stream sabotage, two Bloomberg reporters freak out and attempt, unsuccessfully, to shut him down. (Check out his priceless facial expression when the Bloomberg reporters lose it.)
Preliminary investigation shows that three people were killed as a result of Crimean Bridge blast
Samizdat – October 8, 2022
Saturday’s explosion on the Crimean Bridge, which connects the peninsula with Russia’s Krasnodar Region, claimed the lives of three people, the country’s Investigative Committee said in a statement, citing preliminary data.
“These are, presumably, those riding in a car that was next to the blown-up truck,” the committee said.
It also revealed that the bodies of two of the victims, a man and a woman, have already been recovered from the water and their identities are being established.
According to the investigators, the explosion on the part of the bridge used by automobiles caused the ignition of seven fuel tanks of a train that was heading toward Crimea. The truck was owned by a resident of Russia’s Krasnodar Region, the committee said. A search of the owner’s residence is now underway.
“The route of the car and the corresponding documentation are being studied,” the statement reads.
Earlier on Saturday, the All-Russian Union of Insurers estimated the damage caused to the bridge at 200-500 million rubles ($3.2-8 million).
Since the launch of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in late February, various Ukrainian officials have promised to attack the Crimean Bridge, which is the only one connecting mainland Russia with Crimea. Kiev views the peninsula as its own territory that was illegally “annexed” by Russia.
Ukraine has stopped short of claiming responsibility for the explosion, but an aide to President Vladimir Zelensky, Mikhail Podoliak, warned on Twitter that what happened on Saturday was “just the beginning.”
EU Ban on RT, Sputnik Breaches Swedish, Danish Constitutions – Danish Journalists
Samizdat – 07.10.2022
The EU ban on Russian news outlets is in breach of Swedish and Danish constitutions, which explicitly prohibit all forms of censorship, Danish journalists and media educators said Friday.
The EU Council of Ministers banned the dissemination of RT and Sputnik content in March and added three other Russian outlets to the blacklist in June. The European Court of Justice defended the controversial measure, saying the rights of journalists were protected as long as they acted “in good faith.”
This is despite that legal safeguards in the Swedish Constitution’s freedom of the press act protect “the right of everyone to publish without prior interference by a public authority,” whereas the Danish constitution states that “Censorship and other preventive measures shall never again be introduced.”
Media experts argued in an article in the EUobserver that the EU intervention effectively overrode the basic laws of Sweden and Denmark, raising doubts about the EU leadership’s commitment to democratic values and the rule of law.
The journalists said the EU executive set aside constitutional defenses of freedom of expression with the silent approval of media and the public. The only exception was Norway, which is not a member state but is closely associated with the union.
They said the EU’s court in Luxembourg had granted itself the right to decide what journalism was acceptable while denying European citizens the ability to deal themselves with “unfiltered statements from questionable sources.”
“There is no confidence in our ability to deal with contradictory views of events. The EU institutions decide what we can cope with. Freedom of expression is not absolute, and never was,” they said.
Monkeypox is quickly evaporating, but the liability-free shots continue
By Meryl Nass | October 7, 2022
A long WaPo nothing piece discusses how the intradermal injection of Jynneos leaves a nasty lesion for up to six weeks, marking gay men. The article fails to touch on the evidence that it does or does not actually work, nor why the shot causes this prolonged misery. TB tests given intradermally only left a lesion for about a day, so what is so noxious about the Jynneos vaccine, which was diluted to only 20% of the original strength, that it causes such a prolonged lesion of the upper arm?
CDC buried the graph below, but eventually I found it. New monkeypox cases are only one fifth what they were in August, a mere 8 weeks ago. Soon it will be gone.
Before that happens, however, NYC wants to inject as many people as possible. It has expanded eligibility to anyone who wants the vaccine, and has advertised 30,000 newly available doses.
US figures: From 10million jabbed, 770,000 needed medical care
By Mark Sharman | News Uncut | October 5, 2022
THE wall of defiance and secrecy that protects the Covid jab narrative is crumbling so fast that one can see right through to the deceitful heart of this medical scandal.
To quote Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in” and thank God for that.
The latest beam of truth comes from American lawyer Aaron Siri, who revealed some damning statistics in an interview with Fox News.
Siri has been trying to force the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to release data on jab side-effects. After 463 days and two law suits, he finally has the figures.
And they are shocking.
Of 10million users on the CDC’s V-Safe system, 7.7 per cent had to seek medical care after vaccination.
He says: “That’s an incredible percentage, it seems to me.”
It is simple maths. No less than 770,000 people required medical treatment after the Covid jab from a sample of just 10m. On top of that, 25 per cent – or two and half million – took time off from work or school after an injection.
The population of America is 330m and most States have pursued an aggressive jab policy, so just how much damage has really been caused? Their VAERS system is currently showing more than 30,000 reports of jab-related deaths; it is highly plausible that this represents an underestimate by a factor of 10, at least.
Of course, none of the above has been reported in UK mainstream media which, GB News excepted, remains wilfully blind to the mountain of evidence.
News Uncut has been consistent with concerns over one-sided news reporting, together with the suppression of opposing opinions in MSM and social media, the labels of ‘misinformation’ and the cancelling of eminent voices who dared to speak out.
The Trusted News Initiative, “an industry collaboration of major news and global tech organisations working together to stop the spread of disinformation,” is at the heart of this censorship and, shamefully, the BBC is a prominent participant along with Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, to name just some. They have pronounced the facts and denied any counter argument, any fair debate.
In the recently released film Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion, the BBC was asked what happened to impartial reporting, balance and free speech. They refused to comment.
Now the Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications at the United Nations, Melissa Fleming (below), has admitted that the UN partnered with several big tech companies to control Covid and climate narratives while claiming “We own the science”.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Sustainable Development Impact meetings, Fleming told a panel on Tackling Disinformation that the UN had partnered with Google so that ‘authoritative’ narratives would appear at the top of search results.
Meanwhile, a judge in America has ordered the White House to release emails between various federal Agencies and Big Tech companies, with the paintiffs alleging collaboration over the suppression of free speech and information on Covid and the associated jabs.
Yes, the wall is crumbling under the weight of truth. But how many of the silent journalists here and abroad will be buried under the debris?
News Uncut suggests that now would be an appropriate time to find your voices.
The FBI is sued for withholding Facebook censorship records
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 7, 2022
The FBI has been sued for withholding records of communications with Facebook about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that before the 2020 election, the FBI warned Facebook about Russian propaganda.
“The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that,’” he said.
The FBI did not explicitly mention the laptop story but Facebook thought the story fit the pattern that the federal agency described and decided to limit the reach of the story.
Following Zuckerberg’s comments, the America First Legal (AFL), a legal nonprofit founded by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, requested the FBI for the communications it had with Facebook between October 1, 2020, and November 15, 2020. The FBI refused to comply, claiming the request could not be done “with a reasonable amount of effort” because it was “overly broad.”
This week, the AFL filed a lawsuit to force the FBI to comply with its request.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
The lawsuit states: “Barely a month before the 2022 midterm election, FBI officials continue to suppress information of great interest to American voters and stonewall AFL’s request for records relating to the FBI’s collusive scheme with Facebook to censor news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
The AFL is convinced there was “comprehensive collusion” between the FBI and Big Tech to put Joe Biden in the White House.
“The evidence is that during the 2020 Presidential election campaign, the FBI conspired and combined with large corporations, including Facebook, to censor and suppress the damning evidence of
Biden family corruption and influence peddling found on Hunter Biden’s laptop,” said AFL Senior Counselor Reed Rubinstein.
“This was done to help Joe Biden and the Democrats win the 2020 election.”
Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley wrote letters to FBI Director Chris Wray and Zuckerberg asking for the names of the employees involved in the communications about “Russian disinformation.”
“The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden,” the senators said in the letters.
Food, energy, housing: True German inflation is 56 percent
Free West Media | October 7, 2022
Prices are skyrocketing and we are all getting poorer – everyone feels the price shock, but in statistics it shows up much smaller. Official inflation figures are around 10 percent. But many citizens notice in their everyday life: Prices are rising – in the supermarket, at the gas station – much faster.
The true inflation is much higher: That’s why there is now the inflation radar from pleiticker.de – one can find it updated daily on their homepage. They have calculated price developments in the areas that really matter: housing, energy and basic foodstuffs. With the latest figures, inflation there was a whopping 56,3 percent over the past year – and 11,6 percent over the past week alone. For the average net income of a German household (€3 600), this means a loss in value of €1 296. This is mainly driven by the rise in energy costs. The price of electricity has risen by an unbelievable 344 percent in the past year.
The official figures, on the other hand, are hardly meaningful: The figures from the Federal Statistical Office are significantly lower and not very plausible for the reality of people’s lives for two reasons: On the one hand, it includes hundreds of products in its unrealistic “shopping basket”. On the other hand, the price shock for electricity and gas only becomes visible in the Federal Statistical Office’s inflation calculator with a long delay. Instead of the market price, the current consumer price is used, which reflects even more favorable market prices from the past. The real market price only reaches the end consumer after many weeks.
Germany economy is grinding to a halt
The German economy is slipping as a consequence of the exploding electricity and gas prices and the galloping inflation, which has now solidified in the double-digit range. The former Bild editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt has been documenting the German economic bankruptcy with a new project, called pleiticker.de.
The project is described as follows on the website pleiticker.de: “Every day, companies collapse under the exploding energy costs and file for bankruptcy. More and more people can no longer afford to live. Pleitticker.de documents the crisis that Economics Minister Robert Habeck doesn’t want to see […] The truth is: the wave of bankruptcies has long been here.”
At the beginning of September, the Economics Minister said: “I can imagine that certain sectors will simply stop producing for the time being. Don’t become insolvent.”
This is illustrated on the website not only by the sheer numbers, but also by numerous reports on the effects of the failed policy – for example on already known company bankruptcies, impending waves of insolvencies in clinics and other sectors or the mass terminations of gas customers by the public utility company.
The website also examines actual inflation, because according to Reichelt, the so-called “shopping basket” of the Federal Statistical Office does not reflect the price increases for many everyday products, but, for example, prices for home cinema systems, surfboards, services from domestic staff or visits to the opera. Essentially these are items and services that few avail themselves of.
Reichelt’s new portal therefore calculates the authentic inflation rate in the areas of housing, energy and staple foods.
Journalists who touted ‘climate’ price hikes demand pay rise
Hacks from the German regional public broadcaster WDR, have been demanding inflation compensation for themselves – in order to cope with the price increases that they themselves have demanded
Lorenz Beckhardt, WDR journalist and Quarks editor, called for a “warning strike in WDR” on Twitter: “With a few exceptions”, public service broadcasting is not done by people who “earn top salaries”. He does not offer any details on his own remuneration and whether he counts himself among his “struggling colleagues”.
The journalists want to push through a 5 percent salary hike and inflation compensation – mainly to be able to cope with the massively rising food and energy prices. For this reason they stopped work on Wednesday, October 5.
The irony is particularly biting: Not long ago, Lorenz Beckhardt had personally demanded price increases – for the sake of the “environment”. In July 2019 he appealed to politicians in a comment on: “Make meat, driving cars and flying so damn expensive that we can put an end to it. Please! Quickly!”.
Now that he has got what he wanted, he is whining about money. For the likes of Beckhardt this is obviously not a contradiction.
Totally clueless or complicit politicians?
The next hurdle facing the Scholtz federal government’s energy policy is that nobody in Berlin can say how much gas will actually be available to supply the country in winter. Despite – allegedly – well-filled storage tanks, gas in unknown quantities are not intended for Germany at all, but flows abroad.
Officially, Germany’s gas storage facilities are more than 90 percent full. But that is no reason for relief, because the gas is not reserved for German consumers and companies. The news magazine Focus recently reported on a letter from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to the deputy chairman of the Union parliamentary group, Jens Spahn, which stated: “The Federal Government does not have any knowledge of where the individual stored gas is going.”
The Federal Network Agency told the German weekly Bild am Sonntag: “The stored gas is largely owned by gas traders and suppliers who often operate across Europe.”
Particularly riling is that this also applies to the gas that Trading Hub Europe buys with state aid and has stored under trusteeship of the Federal Network Agency in the former Gazprom storage facility in Rehden. So, although this gas was financed with tax money, it is not reserved for Germany.
It can be purchased by all national and international companies registered on the German gas market to the highest bidder. For German gas customers, whether private or corporate, this is tantamount to a resounding slap in the face: their own government obviously shows no interest in ensuring energy security and giving preference to German customers.
CDU politician Jens Spahn, also criticized this outrage: “The very expensive gas bought in our storage facilities must reach German consumers in winter,” he demanded. In view of the crisis, that should actually go without saying, but in Germany, of course, politicians are pursuing Anglo-Saxon priorities.
Incidentally, neighboring Austria has a similar problem: according to the head of Austria’s largest energy storage company, RAG, a gas storage capacity of 85 percent should be reached by the end of the month. But even there, the country owns just under half of the gas.
The geopolitical consequences of the OPEC+ agreement
By Hazem Ayyad | MEMO | October 7, 2022
Amir Hossein Zamani Nia, Iran’s OPEC governor, announced when he left a meeting with representatives of the 13 member states of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and their ten allies – known as OPEC+ – the decision to reduce oil production by two million barrels per day for November.
The initial reactions to the large production cut were hysteria. One American journalist asked the Saudi Minister of Energy, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, if he was worried about the American reaction to the production cut. He sarcastically told her to enjoy the sun in Vienna; a clear indication of the difficulties that Europeans will face next winter.
The American reactions to the decision of the OPEC+ countries were quick and distinct. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre commented on the decision by saying it was clear that the OPEC+ alliance was “aligning with Russia” and was making a “short-sighted decision” to reduce oil production at the height of the conflict in Ukraine.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan noted that US President Joe Biden was feeling “disappointed” with the decision of the OPEC+ alliance to reduce its oil production.
The reactions confirm President Biden’s failure to manage the sanctions against Russia and the dismantling of the OPEC+ alliance, whose decisions ruined the ambitions of the US administration, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve to fight inflation and reduce interest rates.
The OPEC+ alliance has once again proven its strength and the unity of its countries, which include Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia. Despite the disparity, competition and conflict between its countries, the OPEC+ agreement exceeded the limits of technical performance confirmed by UAE Energy Minister, Suhail Al Mazrouei, when his country announced it was joining the efforts to reduce production. Its geopolitical reach extended from the Gulf and Yemen to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
The agreement that included regional opponents such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and international sponsors such as Russia, stressed the geopolitical dimensions as it coincided with a meeting held by the Russian President’s Special Envoy to the Middle East and Africa, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, on Wednesday evening with the Emirati Ambassador to Moscow, Mohammed Ahmed Al-Jaber, to discuss the situation in Yemen and the Gulf region after the expiry of the deadline for the truce agreement in Yemen on 2 October.
This meeting came at the request of the Emirati ambassador and coincided with threats made by a member of the Political Bureau of the Houthi movement, Muhammad Al-Bakhiti. He said: “We have the ability and the courage to strike the Saudi and Emirati oil facilities if our demands are not met.”
The meeting with the Emirati ambassador coincided with a press conference held by the US special envoy to Yemen, Tim Lenderking, during which he discussed his country’s position on renewing the truce in Yemen between the countries of the Arab coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the Houthi group. The US official held the Houthis responsible for hindering the reaching of an agreement without providing practical solutions for resuming the truce or dealing with Houthi threats.
These actions and movements confirm the connection between the regional files and their connection to the international mediations led by both America and Russia in Yemeni. Saudi Arabia and the UAE view the OPEC+ agreement as a trump card and a comprehensive framework that allows activating mediations and truces in Yemen, with the positive and consensual atmosphere it provides, which the Biden administration was unable to provide. This is despite its frequent talk about security cooperation in the Red Sea and the Gulf and naval and air manoeuvres, but it quickly turned into a political and economic framework that serves Israel and its interests more than it serves the interests of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.
OPEC+ has shifted from a technical framework to an emerging economic and geopolitical framework; fuelled by the Ukrainian war and Russian demands. The tense American reactions deepened the Arab Gulf states’ mistrust of the American partner, which repeatedly failed to deal with the Yemeni and Iranian file. It also failed to deal with the economic requirements of the Gulf states and their political and cultural specificity, which put them in conflict with the powers of the region and threatened their political and religious legitimacy.
This article first appeared in Arabic in Arabi21 on 6 October 2022.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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