Deepening Turkiye tanker logjam snarls Russia oil sanctions
MEMO | December 9, 2022
Turkiye emerged as a critical stumbling block to a complex international plan to deprive Russia of wartime oil revenues as the number of tankers waiting to exit the Black Sea through Turkish Straits continued to rise on Friday, Reuters reports.
Ankara has declined to scrap a new insurance inspection rule it implemented at the beginning of the month, despite days of pressure from Western officials frustrated by the policy.
A total of 28 oil tankers are in a queue seeking to leave the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits, the Tribeca Shipping Agency said on Friday.
G7 wealthy countries, the European Union and Australia agreed to bar providers of shipping services, such as insurers, from helping export Russian oil unless it is sold at an enforced low price, or cap, aimed at depriving Moscow of wartime revenue.
Turkiye’s maritime authority said it would continue to keep out of its waters oil tankers that lacked appropriate insurance letters.
Western insurers said they cannot provide the documents required by Turkiye as it may expose them to sanctions if it emerged that the oil cargoes they cover were sold at prices that exceed the cap.
The Turkish authority said that, in the event of an accident involving a vessel in breach of sanctions, it was possible the damage would not be covered by an international oil-spill fund.
“(It) is out of the question for us to take the risk that the insurance company will not meet its indemnification responsibility,” it said, adding that Turkiye was continuing talks with other countries and insurance companies.
It added the vast majority of vessels waiting near the Straits were EU vessels, with a large part of the oil destined for EU ports – a factor frustrating Ankara’s Western allies.
The ship backlog is creating growing unease in oil and tanker markets. Millions of barrels of oil per day move south from Russian ports through Turkiye’s Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits into the Mediterranean.
Kazakh oil
Most of the tankers waiting at the Bosphorus are carrying Kazakh oil and Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, said on Thursday the US administration saw no reason that such shipments should be subjected to Turkiye’s new procedures.
Washington had no reason to believe Russia was involved in Turkiye’s decision to block ship transits, she added.
The European Commission said on Friday the delays were unrelated to the price cap and Turkiye could continue to verify insurance policies in “exactly the same way as before”.
“We are therefore in contact with the Turkish authorities to seek clarifications and are working to unblock the situation,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
Turkiye has balanced its good relations with both Russia and Ukraine since Moscow invaded its neighbour in February. It played a key role in a United Nations-backed deal reached in July to free up grain exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
Relations between NATO allies, Ankara and Washington, have at times been rocky, as Turkiye last month renewed calls for the United States to stop backing Syrian Kurdish forces.
The Biden administration levied sanctions on Thursday on a prominent Turkish businessman, Sitki Ayan, and his network of firms, accusing him of acting as a facilitator for oil sales and money laundering on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says he “strongly” suspects federal government directed Twitter to blacklist his account
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | December 9, 2022
Stanford University Medical School professor and epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has responded to the bombshell revelation that Twitter secretly blacklisted his account by suggesting that the federal government could have been pulling the strings of this censorship.
“I suspect very strongly that there was some government direction of this,” Bhattacharya said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. ”
Bhattacharya continued by discussing the findings from a Biden administration-social media censorship collusion lawsuit that he’s involved in.
The documents that have been released and the sworn statements that have been made as part of this lawsuit have revealed that federal government officials have pressured Big Tech companies to censor many pieces of content that they deemed to be “misinformation.”
One of the documents that’s pertinent to Bhattacharya is an email from then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci where he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown” of the premises of The Great Barrington Declaration — an anti-lockdown statement published by Bhattacharya and other leading epidemiologists.
“We’ve uncovered tremendous evidence that… there were federal agencies that were… directing social media companies about what to censor, even who to censor,” Bhattacharya told Ingraham. “If that is actually the case… that this blacklisting was directed by the government against American citizens, that’s a direct violation of my civil rights, it’s a direct violation of the First Amendment, and every American should be outraged.”
Bhattacharya continued: “A lot of the leadership of Silicon Valley, a lot of… the people who give advice to Silicon Valley and to the government about about these content moderation policies, they’ve gone… way too far.”
The Stanford professor also commented on the far-reaching implications of this censorship of discussions about basic scientific policy.
“Imagine how different [things would have been],” Bhattacharya said. “All the small businesses could have stayed open, all the people that wouldn’t have missed their cancer screenings, all the kids that wouldn’t be depressed and suicidal, all the learning loss that could have been avoided if we just had an open scientific discussion.”
Additionally, Bhattacharya suggested that the censors deployed these tactics because “their arguments were not strong enough to survive the light of day” and called for a “national conversation that brings us back to the American commitment to free speech rights, the American commitment to… open discussion, and… honest dealings.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the legal group that’s representing Bhattacharya in the Biden admin-Big Tech censorship collusion lawsuit, said:
“We already know the federal government had a hand in Twitter censorship, especially of those who articulated perspectives that conflicted with government messaging on covid. As Elon Musk exposes further information about Twitter’s inner workings, we anticipate learning more about the extent of government involvement in blacklisting those who express disfavored views.”
Not only does the recent disclosure about Bhattacharya’s account being blacklisted shine a light on the pervasiveness of Big Tech’s censorship but it also demonstrates that Twitter was still engaged in this censorship more than a year after the pandemic began with Bhattacharya only joining Twitter in August 2021.
Twitter’s blacklisting of Bhattacharya’s account is the latest of several examples of the tech giants censoring him after he challenged the government’s Covid narrative. Reddit mods deleted The Great Barrington Declaration, Facebook deleted The Great Barrington Declaration page, and YouTube deleted a public health roundtable featuring The Great Barrington Declaration authors, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Scott Atlas.
Steeply falling birthrates worldwide
Free West Media | December 9, 2022
Climate fanatics demand that we stop driving, flying on holidays, eating meat and completely change our lives. But it’s not enough. We must have fewer children and decrease in numbers overall to save the planet, these self-proclaimed world-improvers claim. Otherwise, we are all threatened by overpopulation, despite the fact that in the West and large parts of the world we have a population decrease.
Their demands seem to be met when the number of new-born children has suddenly begun to drop dramatically and alarmingly.
We have all heard about the climate and overpopulation threat. But those who preach this rarely talk about the fact that it is almost only in Africa that there is a very large population growth, while in the West and large parts of the rest of the world there is a de facto population decrease.
We can expect this milestone to be used extensively in the globalists’ propaganda going forward. It is important then that we remember that countries like Japan can barely take care of their many elderly people and that millions of empty houses are now standing and decaying there. Or that rural areas are being depopulated in Sweden and other developed countries, so that in many places it is no longer possible to get even basic services. This despite the fact that the long-term trend of moving to the cities has reversed in many countries.
In Sweden, fertility has slowly fallen from 1.91 children per woman in 2012, to 1.67 children per woman in 2021. Each woman must have 2.1 children on average to keep the population stable. So despite mass immigration for a long time, also of predominantly fertile groups, the net birth rate in Sweden continues to shrink year by year. This is how it looks throughout the Western world. But despite that, we will be forced to change our lives and give birth to fewer children. The propaganda for this and other things that achieve the same result, such as abortion or same-sex relations, is much stronger in the West than in Africa. The globalists’ dream now seems to be coming true.
Sweden’s low birth rate, which had a stable downward trend over time, has suddenly collapsed this year. In Stockholm, the number of births has decreased by 14 percent in the first quarter of 2022, compared to 2021. And it’s not just in Stockholm, fertility has dropped all over Sweden.
– It is a drastic and remarkable reduction beyond the ordinary. We have never seen anything like this before, that the bottom completely disappears in just one quarter, Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, told Dagens Nyheter in July.
On 28 October, Åland’s Statistics and Investigations Agency presented a report called “Population movements in the third quarter of 2022”. Already in the subtitle we can read that “Fewer births and more deaths have reduced this year’s population growth”. From the statistics we can then deduce that the number of births has decreased by 15.6 percent compared to the same time last year and that 13.3 percent more have died.
It looks similar or worse across Europe and large parts of the world. In the Netherlands and Germany, for example, the negative figures for the number of births this year are 11 and 12 percent, respectively. Taiwan saw an alarming 27.7 percent drop – over a quarter – in birth rates for the month of June this year. At the beginning of October, Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior released statistics for the month of September, where it appeared that the country’s population decreased by 1 percent since September 2021. It is almost a doubling compared to the previous year, September 2020 to September 2021.
Newly released data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics ABS shows that from October to November 2021 there was a 21 per cent drop in the number of births compared to the ten-year average. From November to December 2021, just one month later, the figure was a frightening 63 percent. The information is said to be preliminary and may therefore be revised, but it nevertheless shows that something is not right. The December figure also coincides with the fact that approximately nine months have passed, the time for a pregnancy, since the corona vaccine was given on a larger scale in Australia.
MISCARRIAGE AND STILLBIRTH IN THE US between the years 1990 and 2022 where a reaction to a vaccine is listed as the cause. The increase is dramatic after mass vaccinations for the corona began around the turn of the year 2020-2021. There are fewer this year, because the statistics are lagging. There are also significantly fewer who took booster injections this year than those who received the first two doses in 2021, something some believe could possibly come into play. Systematic underreporting also means that there are usually at least 100 times more cases in reality. Source & graphics: OpenVAERS
A chart (above) is circulating on social media showing the number of miscarriages and stillbirths in the United States between the years 1990 and 2022 where a reaction to vaccines is listed as the cause. This is a dramatic increase over the past two years. Globalist-sponsored “fact checkers” quickly pounced, describing the chart as “misleading.” Reuters’ main argument for it was that it “contradicts the growing evidence that vaccines are safe during pregnancy”, something that goes completely against all the statistics that are starting to come out this year around the world. They then make a point of the graph coming from a “privately run website”, without mentioning that it is about OpenVAERS – a site that takes raw data directly from authority-run VAERS and gives the public the opportunity to use a simplified interface to search otherwise difficult-to-access government statistics.
Reuters then says that there were not 3 500 miscarriages and stillbirths at all in 2021, but they find in VAERS only 2 608 such cases linked to “vaccinations”. However, Reuters only finds 53 miscarriages and stillbirths for 2019. We can state that the “fact checkers” themselves thus admit an increase of 4 820 percent when comparing the years 2019 and 2021.
As final “proof” that the corona vaccine has nothing to do with the dramatic increase in miscarriages and stillbirths, they point out that the data in VAERS is only reported, but not investigated. However, they omit that several research reports over the years – such as the well-known Lazarus report – concluded that “less than 1 percent of all vaccine adverse events are reported”. This means that the already terrifying numbers are at least 100 times higher in reality. However, the reports were made before the alleged pandemic, so it can be assumed that health professionals, after the aggressive vaccine propaganda, are even more reluctant to report suspected vaccine injuries.
If the Corona vaccine is so “safe”, then why is this suddenly happening all over the world? And why is it so important for the establishment and its media to cover up everything that shows that vaccines are harmful, from clear statistics and new reports to scientists and doctors sounding the alarm? Shouldn’t it be natural for the authorities, with demands from massive drives in the media, to investigate what is happening and the bad wit? But the media is not doing its job, and neither are the regulatory agencies that exist solely to protect us from this very thing. If they do not do their duty, the alternative media and the people remain. It is high time to demand answers from politicians and the health establishment, especially those who have pushed for vaccinations – not infrequently in such a way that people felt forced to be inoculated against their will.
What a Bunch of Hooey about Viktor Bout
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | December 9, 2022
It would be difficult to find a bigger pile of hooey in the mainstream press than what they are saying about Viktor Bout. It’s almost as bad as their monumental hooey about Russian citizen Maria Butina. The hooey surrounding Bout and Butina only goes to show what happens to people’s minds when the government inculcates them with an extreme, obsessive anti-Russia hostility.
I’ve written repeatedly about the federal government’s ludicrous prosecution of Butina, and so I won’t repeat my analysis of her case. Let’s instead focus on Bout.
Bout is the Russia arms dealer who was just traded for Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who pled guilty to violating Russia’s drug laws and got sentenced to serve nine years in jail. Bout is the international arms dealer who got convicted of conspiring to sell arms to FARC, the rebel group in Columbia that U.S. officials labeled a terrorist group. He was also convicted of conspiring to kill DEA officials operating in Columbia. He was given a 25-year jail sentence and had served 10 years of it when he was traded for Griner.
The mainstream press is decrying the trade. They’re saying it’s just not fair. An arms dealer for a drug-war violator? Oh my gosh, how could President Biden permit himself to be taken in by the evil Russkies?
Unsaid in all this is that the U.S. government, like the Russian government, makes it a criminal offense to possess and distribute marijuana. Defenders of the U.S. drug war can say that the federal penalty for marijuana possession is lower in the U.S. than in Russia, but isn’t that a distinction without a difference? Moreover, let’s not forget that in the long, sordid history of America’s drug war, countless Americans have been forced to serve much longer jail sentences for marijuana possession than Griner.
The important question — one that the mainstream press dares not ask — is why the U.S. government (and the state governments) have drug laws at all. Given that Russia has drug laws, isn’t that a fairly good sign that drug laws are not consistent with he principles of a genuinely free society? Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning that former President Trump is promising to execute drug-war violators if he is put back into the White House. Don’t they do that in China and North Korea too?
The mainstream press continues to emphasize that Bout is an “international arms dealer,” which apparently makes him an extremely evil person. Well, if that’s true, then how about we focus on the world’s biggest international arms dealer. That would be the U.S. government! Yes, the pious, innocent U.S. government, the same government that prosecuted Bout and sentenced him to 25 years in jail.
Take a look at this web page entitled “U.S. Arms Exports in 2021, by Country.” It lists 65 countries to whom the U.S. government sells arms.
Is it possible — just possible — that U.S. officials went after Bout because he was in competition against them in the sale of arms? What better way to get rid of a competitor than by locking him up in jail for 25 years?
The mainstream press says that Bout was selling arms to terrorist groups. Well, notice on that list that the U.S. government knowingly sells arms to Saudi Arabia, a regime that most everyone in the world, including the family and former fiancé of Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi and even the CIA, knows is one of the most murderous regimes in the world. Is there really any difference in principle between selling arms to a terrorist group and selling arms to a murderous regime?
Let’s now go to to the offenses for which Bout was convicted — conspiring to sell arms to FARC in Colombia and conspiring to kill American drug-war officials operating in Colombia.
There is one big problem with those offenses, however. That problem is that FARC had nothing to do with any of this. Instead, what happened was that DEA agents who were playing like they were FARC representatives approached Bout and said that they wanted to buy arms from him. Bout agreed to sell arms to those DEA agents who he thought were FARC agents. That’s what they busted him for — for conspiring to sell arms to DEA agents who he thought were FARC agents.
In other words, if the DEA had not created the crime, it would not have been committed.
What about the conspiracy to kill American officials who were operating in Colombia. During the fake negotiations for the sale of arms to FARC, one of the DEA agents said that the weapons would be used to kill U.S. officials who were enforcing the drug war in Colombia. Bout allegedly responded indifferently, supposedly saying that they were his enemy too. That’s what got him convicted of conspiring to kill U.S. officials as part of fake negotiations for the sale of arms to DEA agents who were falsely posing as representatives of FARC.
The mainstream press continually claims that Bout was accused of selling arms to al Qaeda. But U.S. officials never charged him with that. Lacking the evidence to convict him of that offense, U.S. officials simply decided to make up a crime and convict him of the made-up crime instead. That’s what goes for “justice” in the federal criminal-justice system.
I’ve had personal experience with this type of federal drug-war “justice.” After I got my law license in Texas back in 1975, I returned to my hometown of Laredo, Texas, to practice law. Almost immediately, our local federal judge appointed me to represent an indigent defendant charged with a cocaine conspiracy.
My client told me that he was innocent. Hoping that I would encourage my client to plead guilty, the assistant U.S. attorney in the case turned over all of the very detailed investigative reports that the DEA had turned over to him. Every day I would pore over those reports and carefully chart them out. I finally realized that my client was, in fact, innocent. The DEA had put together a very sophisticated sting operation to get him convicted, just as they did with Bout.
Why would the DEA do that? Simple. They were convinced he was involved in the drug trade but they couldn’t catch him. So, they did the next-best thing. They made up a crime so that they could get him convicted and punished for the made-up crime.
Fortunately, I was able to make the jury see what the DEA had done and to recognize the manifest injustice of convicting a person of a made-up crime. The jury returned with a not-guilty verdict, which meant, after having been jailed for several months since his arrest, my client walked out of that federal courtroom a free man.
Unfortunately for Bout, the jury in his case was not so inclined. They obviously felt that a made-up crime was just as good as a real crime. However, the federal judge who sentenced Bout apparently didn’t feel totally comfortable with what the DEA had done. The judge sentenced Bout to the minimum amount of time possible, which was nonetheless 25 years.
There is something else worth noting about the Bout conviction. Bout never committed any offense within the United States. The fake negotiations took place entirely outside the United States. In fact, Bout was arrested while engaging in the fake negotiations in Thailand and then was extradited to the United States to stand trial on a fake made-up crime that never took place anywhere in the United States.
It is also worth asking: What business does the DEA have in setting up an international arms dealer on a fake weapons charge? I thought DEA stood for Drug Enforcement Administration, not Weapons Enforcement Administration.
Of course, don’t look to the mainstream press to address any of these discomforting matters. That would entail challenging the U.S. government on such things as its evil drug war, its arms sales to evil regimes, and its evil made-up crimes. As far as the U.S. mainstream press is concerned, it’s only permissible to criticize and condemn those evil Russkies, such as Maria Butina and Viktor Bout.
Who’s actually running out of missiles in Ukraine?
By Drago Bosnic | December 9, 2022
For nearly 10 months the mainstream propaganda machine has been trying to convince the world that Russia is running out of advanced weapons, particularly precision-guided munitions (PGMs) which are essential in long-range strikes against strategically important targets controlled by Kiev. The Russian military is supposedly so desperate that it is expropriating washing machines, smartphones, laptops or any other devices with microchips in them so it could maintain its arms production. Such nonsensical claims would never be accepted by anyone remotely familiar with how military technologies work. However, they are an important segment of the information war aimed to present Russia as supposedly “backward” or “technologically challenged”.
In the end, the proponents of such claims only embarrass themselves as Russia has not just been quite consistent with using advanced long-range PGMs, but has actually started using even more of them, especially in recent months. This was also recently confirmed by none other than the New York Times, one of the flagships of the political West’s massive mainstream propaganda machine. On December 5, the NYT published a report titled “Russian cruise missiles were made just months ago despite sanctions”, revealing that the so-called “severe PGM shortages” in the Russian military are nothing more than a myth. According to the report, weapons investigators hired by the Kiev regime determined that “at least one Russian Kh-101 cruise missile used in widespread attacks there on November 23 had been made no earlier than October.”
The remnants of Kh-101 cruise missiles found in Kiev had components made months after the supposedly “crippling” Western sanctions were imposed against Russia. The political West promised its favorite puppet regime that the restrictions would halt Moscow’s ability to produce advanced weapons, particularly long-range cruise missiles such as the air-launched Kh-101 or the seaborne “Kalibr”. Yet, since then, hundreds of these missiles have been made and used by the Russian military, resulting in disastrous consequences for the Neo-Nazi junta’s strategically important infrastructure. The damage to the power grid under the Kiev regime’s control has severely degraded the logistics of its forces, further resulting in the erosion of their ability to fight.
The NYT claims the investigators determined that one of the missiles was made sometime during the summer, while another was produced in late September or early October. According to one of the researchers, the findings support the claim that “Russia has continued to make advanced guided missiles like the Kh-101, [suggesting] that it has found ways to acquire semiconductors and other matériel despite the sanctions or that it had significant stockpiles of the components before the war began.” The investigation was conducted by the Conflict Armament Research (CAR), a self-described “independent group based in the UK that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars.” Apparently, the Kiev regime security services (presumably the SBU) asked CAR to send a small team of its investigators to study the remnants of missiles used by Russian forces.
The findings were also confirmed by Piotr Butowski, a Polish journalist who specializes in the Russian military. This was further acknowledged by an unnamed US defense intelligence analyst in an interview before the report was released. He stated that “Mr. Butowski’s analysis was consistent with the government’s understanding of how Russian missile producers — including those that make the Kh-101 — mark their weapons.” The US analyst further stated that “reports from Russia indicate that the government has ordered employees at munition plants to work additional hours in an effort to produce more ordnance.” This clearly implies that the US is aware that Russia has all the necessary components to produce advanced weapons such as the Kh-101, once again proving that the reports about the supposed lack of Russian PGMs are nothing more than propaganda.
In contrast, the US Military Industrial Complex, the largest and most powerful arms cartel on the planet, as well as the principal supplier of weapons to the Kiev regime, seems to be having problems with its stocks of advanced weapons. Recent data reveals the extent of production issues the US is faced with while trying to arm the Neo-Nazi junta forces. According to a report by the National Review, dated December 3, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes warned about the severe depletion of US stockpiles of Javelin ATGMs (anti-tank guided missiles) and Stinger MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems) due to the Biden administration’s insistence that the Kiev regime forces are to be supplied with such weapons.
Speaking during a panel on Ukraine at the Reagan National Defense Forum, Hayes said: “The problem is we have consumed so much supply in the first ten months of the war. We’ve essentially used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger production and five years’ worth of Javelin production.” According to Hayes, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are jointly producing 400 Javelins per month, but no new Stingers have been made since 2004. However, he stressed that “the ongoing fighting in Ukraine is burning through existing weapons stocks and the question is, how are we going to resupply, restock inventories.”
The National Review asserts that, as of May, the US sent 5,500 Javelins and 1,400 Stingers to the Kiev regime. As for the claims by the CEO of Raytheon, while they could be overblown, as it’s in the interest of the corporation to increase weapons production, there’s certainly some merit in his statements. However, there’s also growing frustration due to the lack of oversight for the massive weapons shipments to the Kiev regime, one of the most corrupt on the planet. The new GOP-dominated Congress is extremely likely to investigate the reports about Western arms being smuggled out of the country.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
UNTRUSTWORTHY
By Helmholtz Smith | Son Of The New American Revolution | December 8, 2022
Russian has a rather complicated adjective недоговороспособны (nedogovorosposobny) for which there isn’t any good English equivalent. Literally it means something like “not together in speaking to find a way”; the clumsy English word used is not-agreement-capable. The meaning is “you can’t make an agreement with them and, even if you could, they’d break it”.
The Minsk agreements were negotiated between Kiev and the breakaway regions of Lugansk and Donetsk with two variants in 2014 and 2015. In essence they agreed to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations on some form of autonomy for Lugansk and Donetsk inside the borders of Ukraine. The second version had big involvement by France (President Hollande) and Germany (Chancellor Angela Merkel) – they were its guarantors. Russia’s role was to force Lugansk and Donetsk to the table (they would have preferred independence or joining Russia.) The agreements never took effect.
Kiev never pretended to try and then-President Poroshenko has recently admitted that Kiev only saw it as a mechanism to buy time and Donetsk and Lugansk could “hole up in basements“. Western consumers/dupes of their media would only have heard of it in the context of “In Ukraine, we have maintained an effort under Ambassador Kurt Volker to provide the means by which Russia can live up to its commitments under the Minsk Agreements.” More lies – Russia had no commitments in the agreement, the obligations were entirely on the part of Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia delivered the latter two to the signing table and France and Germany were supposed to deliver the first. Had the agreements been lived up to – had France and Germany pressured Ukraine – Kievans would be cooking their meals in lighted rooms after a hot shower and sleeping in their own beds. Thousands of people would be alive and healthy today.
Putin recently told a group of soldiers’ mothers “In hindsight, we are all smart, of course, but we believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements… We were sincerely moving towards this.”
What did we just learn the other day from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?
And the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time. She also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve (railway town in Donbass, Donetsk Oblast, ed.) in early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.
[Sie hat diese Zeit hat auch genutzt, um stärker zu werden, wie man heute sieht. Die Ukraine von 2014/15 ist nicht die Ukraine von heute. Wie man am Kampf um Debalzewe (Eisenbahnerstadt im Donbass, Oblast Donezk, d. Red.) Anfang 2015 gesehen hat, hätte Putin sie damals leicht überrennen können. Und ich bezweifle sehr, dass die Nato-Staaten damals so viel hätten tun können wie heute, um der Ukraine zu helfen.]
Compare that with what she said at the time – “We are here to implement the Minsk deal, not to call it into question“.
So, Poroshenko was right – it was just a delaying tactic, NATO and Kiev never had any intention of negotiating an arrangement in which Lugansk and Donetsk, inside Ukraine, would enjoy a degree of autonomy and Germany, at least, never intended to push Kiev.
Putin was lied to and fooled.
I have three questions.
- Why would anybody in Russia ever bother negotiating with these people ever again about anything?
- Why would anybody in the rest of the world – China, India, Iran, the Middle East, Africa, South America – ever bother negotiating with these people ever again about anything?
- What possessed her to admit this now? An upwelling of conscience? Arrogance – we’re Number One and always will be and we don’t give a damn what you think? You’d think after the catastrophe that is hitting Ukraine and Europe because she (and others) ignored diplomacy and negotiation that she’d keep her mouth shut. (Korybko speculates on her motives.)
Недоговороспособны – even when you think you’ve made an agreement, they’re just trying to fool you.
US betrays EU allies’ interests skillfully using Ukrainian conflict to its advantage
By Uriel Araujo | December 9, 2022
This week London announced it has ordered thousands of new anti-tank weapons to restock, after sending thousands of its units to Ukraine. Meanwhile, it has been reported that Washington is weighing Kiev’s requests to provide the country with cluster munition warheads. Both the UK and NATO have been almost running out of weapons for Ukraine. Recently, US President Joe Biden has been struggling to maintain his international coalition to support Kiev, but hardly succeeded due to domestic problems (both in the EU and in the United States). The conflict in Ukraine aggravates Europe’s energy crisis and this is one of the very reasons Washington has fueled this conflict.
University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer has written extensively on how NATO’s enlargement policies over the years plus its strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit by integrating it into the political West are the very root of the conflict which started in 2014 – and 8 years on, this is still the case.
For almost 8 years, the Donbass conflict was Europe’s forgotten war, even though in April 2021 Kiev escalated the violence there once more, with Washington’s full support. Since 2014, NATO has been aggressively provoking and encircling Russia (even in the Arctic), and its member states have been sending massive arms shipments to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Washington-led West, including media conglomerates, has white-washed Ukraine’s far-right problem and the blatantly neo-Nazi nature of its Azov Regiment, as well Kiev’s mass killings, its human rights infringements, genocidal policies, and chauvinistic nationalism aimed against ethnic Russians.
For example, on February 18, before the beginning of the current Russo-Ukrainian military conflict (February 24), Kiev started a nasty bombing campaign on Donbass, targetting civilian infrastructure and even a kindergarden in Lugansk. Ironically, the week before that, Moscow had withdrawn its troops from the area near the border, which should have de-escalated tensions – much to no avail.
Up to February 18, in a series of provocations, Ukraine’s military personnel often broke the cease-fire in Donbass and shelled the region so as to instigate the local militias into responding, thus providing a pretext for further Ukrainian aggression while NATO kept sending weapons and mercenaries to Kiev and further fueling tensions. All of that, one can argue, had been escalating to the point of potentially becoming casus belli for Russia. And here we are today. Whether one is critical of Moscow’s decision to launch its military campaign or not, all the above is part of the larger context that one should always keep in mind.
Why then has the US played such a destabilizing role and has supported all that? I’ve written on how the geopolitics of Washington’s strategies is intertwined with geoeconomics and energy interests. The United State’s persistent campaign against Nord Stream and against any Russian-European gas cooperation is part of that. Geoenergetic interests are one of the main issues and driving forces of the 21st century and Washington has been waging a largely unilateral economic war through sanctions and legislative measures.
Its goal has always been to have Europeans buying American LNG, which is more expensive, in fact, even though Russia is quite literally at the “doorstep” of the continent. The truth is that Europe’s energy crisis from the very beginning has served American interests well. In addition, the US-led “Green Agenda” which hampers African energy security quite ironically also hurts European’s own.
One could very well argue then that Washington’s economic war is being waged not only against Moscow, but in fact also against its own European allies. If this sounds far-fetched, one should consider the fact that Biden’s recent aggressive $369 billion subsidies package (which hurts Europe) has been described by French President Emmanuel Macron as an issue that could “divide the West”. EU diplomats have been quoted as saying that the American initiative “changes everything” to the point of making some of them ask “is Washington DC still our ally or not?”. EU industry chief Thierry Breton even stated Biden’s package poses an “existential challenge” to the European economy and industry.
The UK economy is also collapsing over the energy issue, while recession and even depression haunt Europe. Philip Pilkington, an Irish economist famous for his contributions on the empirical estimate of general equilibrium and other fields, has been writing on how post-Nord Stream Europe faces possible deindustrialization. If the high energy costs, related to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, make European industry uncompetitive, Washington’s subsidy package is a nail in the coffin. In this scenario, Europe’s industry might be “wiped out by American rivals”, as Politico journalists Jakob Hanke and Barbara Moens put it. As the US stands ready to absorb European industrial potential, EU countries will face increasing unemployment, inflation and a decrease in living standards. That scenario of course promises social unrest.
In April, defeated French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen promised to pull France out of NATO. As temperatures decrease with the coming winter amid rising energy prices, one should expect European populism and the far-right to gain more and more political influence, as they have been successfully capitalizing on growing popular discontent with NATO and with the EU bloc itself. It is quite unfortunate that, in Europe, opposition to NATO and to suicidal policies has been largely marginalized to the point of almost becoming a monopoly of so-called extremist discourse.
It remains to be seen how European political elites will respond to the new developments, as the reality of an American economic war against their continent becomes increasingly impossible to deny.
How the ‘Twitter Files’ have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election
By Felix Livshitz | RT | December 9, 2022
Internal Twitter documents and communications published by the journalist Matt Taibbi have provided devastating detail on a sweeping censorship operation conducted by the social network. They expose the central role played by a senior FBI agent in potentially influencing the outcome of the 2020 US election.
Immediate reaction to the Twitter Files was mixed, but overwhelmingly the mainstream American media has rushed to pour cold water on Taibbi’s bombshell disclosures, with, for example, The Washington Post branding them a “dud” and CNN claiming they “largely corroborated what was already known.”
Such responses are quite extraordinary given that the Twitter Files offers incontrovertible evidence of one of the largest, most influential global social networks taking extraordinary measures – usually reserved to prevent the dissemination of child pornography – to block information on its platform.
In particular, Twitter banned, both publicly and privately, the sharing of a New York Post article, based on the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, pointing to possible corruption on the part of his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The report reinforced existing concerns about Hunter’s role with Burisma, for which he received up to $50,000 per month from the Ukrainian energy giant over a five-year period for attending a handful of corporate events.
The material exposed by Taibbi shows that a decision was made by individuals at the highest levels of Twitter – with direct connections to Biden’s Presidential campaign – due to apparent fears the laptop contents had been hacked and/or had been released as part of a Russian information operation. This was despite there being zero evidence or even a vague suggestion that either was the case, and significant internal concerns.
The Twitter Files show how, among the top brass involved in the suppression of this hugely significant story was the social network’s legal vice president Jim Baker, a former FBI general counsel. He was coincidentally also fundamental to the Bureau’s multiple attempts to fraudulently concoct a link between Trump’s campaign and Russia, one way or another.
It’s clear that many staffers didn’t believe there were grounds to ban the New York Post story on the basis of Twitter’s policies on sharing hacked materials. One communications department official wrote that they were “struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” while their superior fretted, “can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
However, their legitimate worries were overruled. Twitter later reversed this ban but by that point the false specter of Russian meddling had been so successfully cemented – including via a joint letter signed by over 50 senior US spies – that the story was largely discredited in the eyes of many Americans and, thus, ignored. It is only now, with Biden safely in the White House, that other outlets have begun to verify the laptop’s contents as not only real, but damaging.
Baker was central to overruling subordinates about the basis for banning the story. In an email published by Taibbi, he announced it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been” hacked.
It is not explained why it was “reasonable” to make this assumption, especially as Baker himself acknowledged there were instead indications that “the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.” Which is, of course, a total contradiction in terms. So the ban went ahead, despite internal concern about the decision.
“Hacking was the excuse but, within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” an anonymous Twitter source told Taibbi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
One of the reasons Baker’s intervention may have cut through initial misgivings, and no staffers then had the “guts to reverse it,” could’ve been his status as resident Russian “disinformation” expert at Twitter. He left the FBI in June 2018 on undisclosed grounds, although it was later confirmed he was the subject of a criminal Justice Department investigation due to alleged leaking to the media of scurrilous innuendo about Trump’s non-existent relationship with the Kremlin at the time.
Questions were also asked about whether, as General Counsel, Baker played any role in greenlighting or overseeing various failed FBI counterintelligence investigations into Trump’s election team. Known as Crossfire Hurricane, these related probes were built on extremely shaky foundations, and led to no evidence supporting suspicions of Trump-Russia ties being unearthed, but still remained open under internal pressure, in contravention of established investigative protocols.
A subsequent internal review found 17 separate “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s court submissions for warrants that it applied for to spy on campaign staffer Carter Page.
More recently, Baker testified at the trial of Michael Sussmann, a well-connected Washington DC lawyer tied to the Democratic party. He was charged by Attorney General John Durham with lying to the FBI when he presented to the Bureau falsified evidence of contact between Trump Tower and Moscow via Russia’s Alfa Bank, in the summer of 2016.
Sussmann claimed he was not representing a client in doing so, when in reality he was acting on behalf of the Democrats, and billed them for the service. Baker would’ve known anyway that this cover story was a lie, as he and Sussmann were longtime friends, but he recorded the delivery as the uninterested, selfless act of a concerned citizen. Quite why he wasn’t charged for procedural misconduct is not known.
It’s also not known why such dealings didn’t torpedo his professional credibility upon leaving the Bureau. Departing an organization like the FBI under such a dark cloud would normally mean the end of someone’s career. Instead, Baker was snapped up by Twitter to be the right hand man of Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal.
Throughout her time at the social network, she was derided as its censor-in-chief, and leaked documents reveal she regularly consulted with the Department of Homeland Security on how best to restrict inconvenient facts online. It’s understandable why Baker would be such an attractive hire for Gadde.
He was by that point clearly an expert in perpetuating false claims of “disinformation” and “Russian meddling” for political purposes, to tremendous effect. The Russiagate hoax almost took down President Trump, and meant his term in office was spent ramping up tensions with Moscow rather than improving relations as he’d repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.
It could have been calculated within Twitter HQ that Baker would be willing to play a similarly destructive role the next time round, and prevent Trump from getting re-elected in the first place. Helping suppress the damaging material facts contained in the New York Post may have done just that.
Twitter Update to Show Users if They Were ‘Shadowbanned’, Elon Musk Says
Samizdat – 09.12.2022
US billionaire entrepreneur and newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk said on Friday that the company had been working on a software update to let users know if they have been “shadowbanned.”
“Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” Musk said on Twitter.
In late October, Musk finalized the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Following the takeover, Musk changed the company’s day-to-day operations, including the termination of Twitter executives who were responsible for the platform’s privacy, cybersecurity and censorship, as well as about two-thirds of Twitter’s employees.
Shadowbanning is a practice of concealed restriction, when a person remains on a social media platform, but his or her content is not visible or only partly accessible to other users.
UK city defends new ‘climate lockdown’ policy
RT | December 7, 2022
The city of Oxford has embraced the concept of limiting citizens’ personal travel to fight climate change, an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
The Oxfordshire County Council’s so-called ‘traffic filter’ system, adopted last week, has gone viral, denounced as the first step toward “climate lockdowns” by climate skeptics and civil liberties activists.
The city will be divided into six “15-minute neighborhoods,” containing all local necessities, with residents required to register their cars so their comings and goings can be tracked by a network of cameras. They are allowed unlimited movement in their own neighborhood, but in order to drive through the filters, they must apply for a permit.
Even then, they are only granted access to other neighborhoods for an average of two days per week. Those who exceed their travel allotment will be fined.
Thousands of residents have expressed concern about the project, which has previously been rejected under a different name – including 1,800 who signed a single petition over worries it would actually increase congestion. However campaign director for Oxfordshire Liveable Streets, Zuhura Plummer, claimed that the initiative would “save lives and make our city more pleasant now and for future generations,” citing an “official analysis” that projected 35% less traffic, 9% fewer road casualties, 15% faster bus times, and 91% less air pollution.
The city will also benefit financially, with any driver caught passing through a filter without an exemption or a permit being charged a £70 penalty (just over $85) per violation. Planners expect the city could make as much as £1.1 million per year from fines.
Climate skeptics have attempted to raise the alarm about the measure since its passage, describing it as the first step toward the kind of “climate lockdowns” media outlets like The Guardian warned about at the height of the pandemic.
Economics professor Mariana Mazzucato outlined a grim future in which people would be required to submit to “climate lockdowns” for part of the year, barred from using personal vehicles and consuming red meat, while fossil fuel companies would be prohibited from drilling – all in the name of warding off catastrophic global warming.
When the essay was met with widespread public backlash, mentions of the phrase ‘climate lockdown’ were promptly scrubbed from news headlines, and the very notion of a government-mandated climate lockdown was declared a conspiracy theory.
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Why vaccines for children are Big Pharma’s holy grail – Part 1
By Serena Wylde | TCW Defending Freedom | October 18, 2023
James A Shannon, director of the US National Institutes of Health 1955-68, said: ‘No vaccination can be proven safe before it is given to children.’
When he made that statement, it was still possible in the US to sue vaccine manufacturers under tort law for vaccine-induced deaths and injuries, which is no longer the case.
Today the US has the world’s most aggressive vaccine schedule and ranks as the sickest country, with the highest infant mortality, in the developed world. The UK does not lag far behind.
Vaccines carry three separate areas of potential risk. Firstly, they artificially stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies, which temporarily inhibits another part of the body’s defence mechanism. In an infant, whose immune system is just developing, this high demand of energy can in some cases overwhelm its metabolic reserves, and cause brain inflammation. The brain is the highest energy-consuming tissue in the body, followed by the gastro-intestinal tract and the immune system.
Secondly, vaccines contain chemicals, metals and drugs. Thirdly, according to the former pharmaceutical R&D executive Sasha Latypova, traditional vaccines are consistently contaminated with plant and animal proteins which hyper-sensitise the body, especially in children, giving rise to allergies.
In the US in the 1970s there were three inoculations recommended for children… continue
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