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Scientists Struggle to Understand Why Antarctica Hasn’t Warmed for Over 70 Years Despite Rise in CO2

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 29, 2023

Scientists are scrambling to explain why the continent of Antarctica has shown Net Zero warming for the last seven decades and almost certainly much longer. The lack of warming over a significant portion of the Earth undermines the unproven hypothesis that the carbon dioxide humans add to the atmosphere is the main determinant of global climate.

Under ‘settled’ science requirements, the significant debate over the inconvenient Antarctica data is of necessity being conducted well away from prying eyes in the mainstream media. Promoting the Net Zero political agenda, the Guardian recently topped up readers’ alarm levels with the notion that “unimaginable amounts of water will flow into oceans”, if temperatures in the region rise and ice buffers vanish. The BBC green activist-in-chief Justin Rowlatt flew over parts of the region and witnessed “an epic vision of shattered ice”. He described Antarctica as the “frontline of climate change”. In 2021, the South Pole had its coldest six-month winter since records began in 1957, a fact largely ignored in the mainstream. One-off bad weather promoter Reuters subsequently ‘fact checked’ commentary on the event in social media. It noted that a “six-month period is not long enough to validate a climate trend”.

A recent paper from two climate scientists (Singh and Polvani) accepts that Antarctica has not warmed in the last seven decades, despite an increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gases. It is noted that the two polar regions present a “conundrum” for understanding present day climate change, as recent warming differs markedly between the Arctic and Antarctic. The graph below shows average Antarctica surface temperatures from 1984-2014, compared to a base period 1950-1980.

The scientists note that over the last seven decades, the Antarctica sea ice area has “modestly expanded” and warming has been “nearly non-existent” over much of the ice sheet. NASA estimates current Antarctica ice loss at 147 gigatons a year, but with 26,500,000 gigatons still to go, this works out at annual loss of 0.0005%. At current NASA ice loss melt, it will all be gone in about 200,000 years, although the Earth may well have gone through another ice age, or two, before then.

Most alarmist commentary centres around the cyclical loss of sea ice around the coast and some warming on parts of the west of the continent. But sea ice cover is running at levels seen around 50 years ago, as the graph below shows. Small rises and falls in the early 2010s have been followed by a reversion to the mean.

The warmth to the west, seen in the first graph, could have been caused by any number of natural localised events including warmer oceanic waters and the effects of under-water volcanic activity. It has, of course, attracted widespread alarmist interest – in particular, the fate of the Thwaites ice stream, also known as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’. However, recently a group of oceanographers discovered that Florida-sized Thwaites had retreated at twice the rate in the past, when human-caused CO2 could not have been a factor. The retreat could have occurred centuries ago and is said to have been “exceptionally fast”.

Much of climate science today seems to suffer from confirmation bias. Few grants are available to those who don’t start with the premise that the climate is changing mostly, or entirely, due to humans burning fossil fuel. But many present, historic and paleo climate observations fail to establish a clear connection between temperatures and CO2 levels. In the past, the life-enhancing gas has occupied a space in the atmosphere up to 20 times higher, without evidence of huge temperature rises.

Singh and Polvani’s explanation for expected warming in Antarctica is the depth of the continent’s ice. To this end, they use two climate models that purport to show that the “high ice sheet orography” robustly decreases the climate sensitivity to extra CO2, and that “a flattened Antarctic ice sheet would experience significantly greater surface warming than the present-day Antarctica ice sheet”. This conclusion comes from computer models, but later in the paper is an admission that they fail to agree on significant matters. It is revealed that one of the models predicts less sea ice retreat in a flattened Antarctica when CO2 doubles, and the other one, more retreat.

In the science blog No Tricks Zone there has been an interesting debate on the lack of Antarctica warming. It was noted that NASA also tends to support the role of higher elevation of the ice as an explanation. For the rest of the world, states NASA, “the greenhouse effect still works as expected”. The average ice thickness in Antarctica is about 2,160 metres and compares with Greenland at around 1,600. The fact that Greenland has warmed of late might lead to the cynical observation that Antarctica has the wrong type of ice. One correspondent summarised the paper as the “lack of warming in spite of greenhouse gases is the wrong conclusion. The lack of warming is because of the increased greenhouse gases.” Another sighting, it would appear, of the old chestnut, “global cooling is caused by global warming”.

The science, as always, must be out. Attempting to connect every natural variation in weather and long-term climate to just one trace gas produced by humans leads to some unconvincing explanations, not least when climate models are involved.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | 4 Comments

The Dictionary Definition of “Anti-Vaxxer” Has Broadened

Soon there will be nobody left that does not meet the dictionary definition of “anti-vaxxer”

By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | January 29, 2023

The common response to any criticism of a vaccine or a vaccine mandate is to yell, “anti-vaxxer,” rather than address the substance of the criticism.  Here is a recent tweet reflecting this reality:

Even those opposed to receiving an endless stream of COVID-19 boosters based on cogent reasoning are often met with the retort of “anti-vaxxer.”  This reality is now reflected in the updated definition of “anti-vaxxer” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

The old definition included “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination”:

The new definition is “a person who opposes the use of some or all vaccines, regulations mandating vaccination, or usually both”:

So now to be an “anti-vaxxer,” per the dictionary, one need only oppose receiving some vaccines.  For example, annual ever-changing flu shots or numerous and changing COVID-19 vaccine boosters.

Consider that, despite spending billions in taxpayer dollars promoting flu shots and COVID-19 booster shots, polling reflects a majority of Americans do not plan to get either of these shots and hence are dictionary definition “anti-vaxxers.”

The irony is that rationally considering each of these medical products and making an informed medical decision makes you a thinking, rational human being.  But if you mindlessly get every single vaccine, then there are those would claim you are making an intelligent, thoughtful decision?!  Hats off to the public relations firms representing pharma and CDC/FDA in being able to convince the public that up is down and down is up on this one.

The next time someone calls you an anti-vaxxer because you have made a decision regarding whether or not to engage in a medical intervention, you let them know that, yes, you did make an informed, independent medical decision.  And wish them luck doing the opposite.  Worked out for Novak Djokovic who just won the Australian Open!

You can also let them know that since “anti-vaxxers” are now the majority, you can understand their insecurity and hostility.  But they should not worry: the thinking majority is not interested in taking away their rights and choices.  They can feel free to vaccinate all day long.  You, and the majority, just ask that those individuals respect our right to do the same.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | 3 Comments

The 77th Brigade Spied on Lockdown Sceptics, Including me

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 29, 2023

A shadowy unit of the British Army, as well as secretive ‘disinformation’ agencies within Whitehall, spied on British citizens who challenged the Government’s pandemic response, including Peter Hitchens and me. These revelations are contained in a report by Big Brother Watch due to be published tomorrow, which includes the results of subject access and freedom of information requests submitted by me and others. The Mail on Sunday has more.

A shadowy Army unit secretly spied on British citizens who criticised the Government’s Covid lockdown policies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Military operatives in the UK’s ‘information warfare’ brigade were part of a sinister operation that targeted politicians and high-profile journalists who raised doubts about the official pandemic response.

They compiled dossiers on public figures such as ex-Minister David Davis, who questioned the modelling behind alarming death toll predictions, as well as journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Toby Young. Their dissenting views were then reported back to No. 10.

Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch, and shared exclusively with this newspaper, exposed the work of Government cells such as the Counter Disinformation Unit, based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office.

But the most secretive is the MoD’s 77th Brigade, which deploys ‘non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of adversaries’.

According to a whistleblower who worked for the brigade during the lockdowns, the unit strayed far beyond its remit of targeting foreign powers.

They said that British citizens’ social media accounts were scrutinised – a sinister activity that the Ministry of Defence, in public, repeatedly denied doing.

Papers show the outfits were tasked with countering ‘disinformation’ and ‘harmful narratives… from purported experts’, with civil servants and artificial intelligence deployed to ‘scrape’ social media for keywords such as ‘ventilators’ that would have been of interest.

The information was then used to orchestrate Government responses to criticisms of policies such as the stay-at-home order, when police were given power to issue fines and break up gatherings.

It also allowed Ministers to push social media platforms to remove posts and promote Government-approved lines.

How did the Government manage to convince these supposedly independent state agencies, with powers to monitor the activities of British citizens, that critics of its barmy lockdown policy were enemies of the state? And does this mean James Delingpole has been right all along? We will discuss tomorrow on London Calling and I’m going to write about it for this week’s Spectator.

Worth reading in full.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Are We the Mainstream Media Now?

BY NICK DIXON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 29, 2023

The other day I saw a video on Twitter of parasites controlling a dead insect and making it walk around as if it were alive.

I suddenly realised, to paraphrase an old Newman and Baddiel sketch: that’s our media, that is.

The legacy media now exists almost solely as a propped up corpse whose only function is to facilitate the formerly neoliberal, now woke elite. Rather than expose truth, its main purpose seems to be to suppress dissent, as became blindingly apparent during the Covid era.

But are we about to hit a tipping point where things like Twitter, and whatever similar platforms may emerge, will be considered the ‘real’ media?

James O’Keefe of Project Veritas believes we’re already there. Someone on a Twitter space told him it was a shame their recent video exposé of Pfizer employee Jordan Walker hadn’t garnered much coverage in the mainstream media, to which O’Keefe countered that it had received over 20 million views on Twitter already. A quick check shows it is up to 38.6 million at the time of writing.

He challenged his interlocutor on what really constitutes the mainstream media now. Yes, the story was swiftly taken down by MailOnline and has been largely ignored by American legacy media platforms. But it’s already reaching a far greater audience on Twitter.

It reminds me of the attempt to shut down Joe Rogan over his platforming of dissenting voices on Covid, such as Dr. Robert Malone. An attempt that comprehensively failed, leading to amusing memes like the one above, based on the movie Captain Philips.

Rogan had an estimated 11 million listeners per episode last year. It is probably higher now. In fact, it was probably higher even then.

Brian Stelter, who used his platform on CNN to attack Rogan, ended up being the one who had his show cancelled, and was last seen at the World Econonic Forum’s annual jamboree in Davos, hosting a panel entitled – wait for it – ‘The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation’. You will be beyond parody, and you will be happy.

Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and various other disappointing boomer icons also failed to stop Rogan, and his podcast juggernaut rolls on.

Of course, our media and political elite will continue to desperately hold onto power, with their sad meetings and threats to censor Elon Musk. But a large and ever-increasing number of people see through their nonsense, and now choose to get their information from sources like Twitter, Rogan and other podcasts, and even the humble Daily Sceptic. (On track to set a new site record, with >2.5 million page views this month).

So how long can the cadaver of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media stagger around before everyone realises the wretched creature is already dead?

The tipping point is coming.

Nick Dixon is Deputy Editor of the Daily Sceptic. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 3 Comments

Department of Health and Human Services is sued after ignoring freedom of information request over censorship demands

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 29, 2023

Activist group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for all records and communications between the Surgeon General’s office and social media companies about COVID-19 vaccines.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit after the HHS refused to adequately respond to a FOIA request filed in March 2022.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

The request was for: “All records, including, but not limited to, electronic mail, texts, memoranda, and handwritten notes, of, regarding, referring, or relating to any efforts of Alexandria Phillips, Communications Director, Office of the Surgeon General, to contact any employee of Facebook, Twitter, , , Snapchat, Reddit, , LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest concerning COVID-19 vaccines.”

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has previously called for censorship of Covid misinformation. In 2021, he published a report titled “Confronting Health Misinformation,” which aimed to “slow the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.”

The report encouraged platforms to censor vaccine misinformation and other misinformation related to the pandemic.

In March 2022, Murthy ordered social media platforms to hand over information about accounts spreading Covid misinformation.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, “Biden’s Surgeon General is abusing his office to pressure Big Tech companies to censor Americans. This lawsuit aims to uncover the details of this government attack on the First Amendment.”

Related: US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy suggests Joe Rogan should be censored

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

What if the NY Times covered the Project Veritas Pfizer revelations?

By Bill Rice, Jr. | January 29, 2023

This is an addendum to yesterday’s “thought exercise” …. example No. 10,000 of how the mainstream press exerts its real power through its intentional (and daily) decisions to NOT write articles about important news.

The main thought here is that if the mainstream media doesn’t cover X, X is not really “news.” At least not news that’s “fit to print.”

Here are a few of the known knowables about the Project Veritas undercover sting operation.

  • An executive with Pfizer seems to say that his company is performing, or will soon perform, “gain of function” research on viruses … although the company doesn’t label these type of virus manipulations “gain-of-function” research. They instead manipulate the language and call them “directed evolution” experiments.
  • The executive admits that Covid “vaccines” – which increasing numbers of every-day citizens and the company knows are not effective at preventing infection or spread – are still a “cash cow” for the company and will probably remain a “cash cow” for the company for many years, maybe for the rest of our lives.
  • The executive admits this is not good for the public, but this is very good for Pfizer.
  • The executive acknowledges that the “regulators” who are supposed to regulate Pfizer are captured and that many of them will end up working in the industry they are supposed to be regulating.

In a sane world, all of the above revelations would be “newsworthy” as Pfizer is the company that is producing a “vaccine” and booster shots that have been injected into billions of arms.

The question reporters might want to ask is should the people of the world really trust such a company … or the government regulators who are supposed to regulate such a company.

The real question is why wouldn’t these revelations qualify as a “story” that’s worth reporting to the billions of people who are receiving experimental shots from this company and other vaccine producers?

Here are three other “known knowables” …

* The Project Veritas videos have now been viewed by approximately 20 million people in the world. This right here tells us there is tremendous interest in this story.

But, still, as of this writing, I don’t think The New York Times has published one story about any of this.

Building on my theme that the Times is the “leader of the pack” of “pack journalism,” I also note that The Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN (I’m going to stop here for space reasons) have also found this “story” is unworthy of any coverage.

* YouTube (owned by Google) pulled the video for violating one of its “guidelines.” (Apparently, sting journalism – the type journalism that made “Sixty Minutes” a cultural icon – now violates their guidelines).

That is, per the organizations that helped create and defend all the official narratives, this story is actually NOT a story. In fact, any story that challenges any important narrative cannot become a story.

I would argue that all the stories that can never be allowed to become “stories” is the great unreported story (scandal) of our times.

If you read my piece on “Good vs. Evil,” you might believe as I do that this is, in fact, a silver lining of our New Normal times. At least “Evil” has shown its face. Some of us at least know – without question – the news sources we should NEVER trust.

The news organizations that will not run stories like this are the Bad Guys who must be exposed.

In fact, they long ago exposed themselves as operatives who exist to conceal and cover-up important stories and facts. The silver lining is that more people are starting to understand this valuable lesson, which can’t be a bad thing.

Continuing with yesterday’s “thought exercise,” what would happen if The New York Times did fairly cover all of the news elements of the Project Veritas story?

If this happened, even more people would know about this story, including every New York Times subscriber who has (inexplicably) bought the official narrative that Pfizer is doing great good for the world.

At least a few of these subscribers might conclude, “Maybe we should reconsider our blind trust in this company.”

More Thought Exercise Questions …

Would Pfizer continue to shower this newspaper with advertising spends if the Times wrote a few Page-1 stories that called into question Pfizer’s wonderful humanity?

Would the Bill Gates Foundation continue to dole out hundreds of millions of its “excellence in journalism” grants/subsidies to news organizations that questioned or attacked Big Pharma?

If The New York Times wrote a critical story that followed-up on the Project Veritas revelations, would any other mainstream news organization follow their lead and do the same thing?

Some precedents are more dangerous than others …

If the Times did fairly report the newsworthy elements of this story, wouldn’t this set a precedent that the working press no longer views the pronouncements of supposedly infallible companies and science experts as “settled science” after all?

If some prestigious news organization can produce journalism that embarrasses Pfizer’s top brass, couldn’t the same journalists do other pieces that embarrass the leaders of the government/science complex? You know … “hypothetically speaking.”

My thought all along has been that these “news organizations” (or officials) can’t do one real investigation because if they did one, they’d have to keep going. People would say, “Well, if they lied about that, they might have also lied about that …”

So the “key to the operation” is NOT performing the first real investigation.

Which leads me to this thought … If someone would just do the first big-time real investigation … all the faux-narrative dominoes might start to fall.

Or … maybe not. Per my thought-exercising, the first news organization that breaks ranks and performs real journalism is going to be attacked unmercifully by the rest of the pack (club). A message will be sent: Do not go THERE.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks got that message loud and clear – which is probably why nobody else has started another version of WikiLeaks.

What to make of Fox News?

Fox News is a very interesting player in this “groupthink” landscape. Fox News did cover the Project Veritas bombshell. Tucker Carlson led with this story the other night.

Tucker Carlson happens to host the highest-rated primetime news/commentary show in North America …

… so there’s probably a key lesson here: If you do report the truth, you are not going to lose audience. You are going to gain audience.

At least in the “mainstream press,” Tucker Carlson had/has a monopoly on this shocking story.

So we have a story that tens of millions of people are very interested in … that 98 percent of the rest of the mainstream press won’t even cover.

If they do eventually cover it, it will be some kind of “fact check” that tries to tell us that this guy’s comments were all “misinformation.”

The message will be: Don’t trust what this guy said – or none of what he said matters. Or Project Veritas is a front for Q-Anon and its founder should be thrown into the gulag just like Assange was.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Vimeo bans documentary about parents’ concern over transgender surgery for minors

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | January 28, 2023

Video-sharing platform Vimeo has removed a documentary titled “Dead Name” about parents and guardians trying to prevent their kids from getting gender-related surgeries.

Vimeo claimed that the video violated its policy on “hateful conduct.”

“We can confirm that Vimeo removed the video in question for violating our Terms of Service prohibiting discriminatory or hateful content,” the video platform said. “We strive to enforce these policies objectively and consistently across our platform.”

According to the maker of the film Taylor Reece, Dead Name is “subtly explosive but does not contain hate speech or anything hateful.

“All these people talk about is how much they want to protect their children,” Reece told The Daily Signal.

Reece said that transgender activists pressured Vimeo to remove the video and that it was only online for 34 days before it was removed.

“Parents are living in the Twilight Zone, they are beside themselves and don’t know what to do about it,” Reece said. “This film is an attempt to force a conversation, not just in Republican legislatures, but around the country.”

“In the transgender world, the name is the first thing that most of these children shed,” the filmmaker added. “The erasure of who they are, their name, their history, their identity, it erodes little by little until it becomes a physical manifestation — like double mastectomies.”

Reece also said that “unless you are the parent of that child, you have no idea what this journey actually is.”

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Film Review, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Hamilton 68: Brief Addendum Comparing their response Friday to the site’s original mission statement

By Matt Taibbi | Racket | January 29, 2023

Hamilton 68 responded to a #TwitterFiles thread Friday with a series of claims, including that their site was always intended to be understood as “nuanced,” that they always maintained that “witting or unwitting” accounts could be on their list, and that “some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users.”

They could also have inserted the disclaimer added to the new Hamilton 2.0 page, which as a helpful reader noted this morning, includes in red font a blaring warning to all that it would INCORRECT to label anyone or anything that appears on their dashboard “as being connected to state-backed propaganda”:

Thank heaven for the Wayback Machine. Here’s what was written on the original Hamilton page:

These accounts were selected for their relationship to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns, and not because of any domestic political content.

We have monitored these datasets for months in order to verify their relevance to Russian disinformation programs targeting the United States.

… this will provide a resource for journalists to appropriately identify Russian-sponsored information campaigns.

High on that original page, the Hamilton founders explained they monitored two types of accounts:

There are two components to the dashboard featured here.

The first section, “Overt Promotion of Content,” highlights trending content from Twitter accounts for media outlets known to be controlled by the Russian government.

The second section, “Content Tweeted by Bots and Trolls,” highlights themes being pushed by Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns.

The Hamilton list tracked overt Russian media on the one hand, and “bots and trolls” on the other. Note the difference between that language and the language Friday: “Some accounts we track are automated bots, some are trolls, and some are real users.” That Hamilton Friday was also trying to distance itself from headlines about “bots” is particularly grotesque, given that it was so overt in identifying the composition of its list this way at the start.

I encourage everyone to read language from the original site, then look at Friday’s ironically named “Fact sheet,” and compare for yourselves.

Finally I want to note a passage from the Friday “fact sheet” I somehow overlooked:

Individual accounts were algorithmically selected based on analytic techniques developed by J.M. Berger that were used to identify the most influential accounts within those networks. The Hamilton 68 team did not individually review or verify all accounts because the focus of the dashboard was to analyze behavior in aggregate networks, not specific accounts.

Translating: individual accounts were chosen through a method developed by J.M. Berger, a writer and think-tanker whose usual specialty is extremism (he’s written about ISIS and domestic white nationalism in the U.S.). Still, it wasn’t even Berger’s fault that ordinary Americans ended up in the list, since said people were chosen “algorithmically.” The Hamilton 68 team also “did not individually review or verify” all the names, because their “focus” was “aggregate networks,” not “specific accounts.”

So, nobody looked at the list.

The list that was “the fruit of more than three years of observation and monitoring.”’

Sounds solid.

Yes? No?

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Syria blasts ‘misleading’ OPCW report on alleged Douma attack

The Cradle | January 29, 2023

Syria made a statement on 28 January rejecting the report issued a day earlier by the Investigation and Identification Team of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), regarding the alleged use of chlorine by the Damascus government in Douma in 2018.

“Syria totally rejects the report released by the so-called ‘Investigation and Identification Team’ of the [OPCW] about the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018, in addition to its conclusions,” the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said.

“Those who prepared this report … insist to ignore all the objective information which was provided by some countries, parties, experts, academics, documented media reports, and former OPCW inspectors with knowledge and expertise … which confirmed beyond any doubt that the Douma incident was completely fabricated,” the ministry’s statement added.

The Syrian statement was a response to the new report released by the OPCW’s Investigation and Identification Team on 27 January, which after five years, has renewed the accusation against Damascus “that the Syrian Arab Air Force carried out the chemical weapons attack on Douma.”

In April of 2018, Damascus was accused of a chemical attack against civilians in the city of Douma, resulting in illegal US military strikes against Syrian government positions. This was despite the fact that Syria had welcomed an OPCW fact-finding mission to inspect the alleged site of the attack.

A year later, WikiLeaks revealed that the OPCW had suppressed the initial results of the fact-finding mission deployed to Syria, results which suggested that the incident was, in fact, staged. That same year, a MintPress News report revealed that several journalists from a number of mainstream agencies had come to the conclusion that the Douma attack was staged with the help of the White Helmets, a criminal organization posing as the Syrian Civil Defense. This was initially brought to light by a whistleblower from within the OPCW.

In 2021, during a visit to Douma, The Grayzone reporter Aaron Mate referred to the 2018 incident as “one of the biggest pro-war hoaxes since Iraq.”

Since 2013, armed groups in Syria have attempted to pin chemical attacks on the government in attempts to instigate internationally-led regime change operations against it. This comes in the form of staged attacks, or actual false-flag chemical attacks which leave many dead and are designed to implicate Damascus – as was the case in Ghouta in 2013 and in Khan Sheikhoun in 2017.

The latest OPCW report comes as Washington is desperately trying to obstruct the reconciliation process currently underway between the Syrian and Turkish governments.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , | 2 Comments

Moscow assesses NATO’s ‘war crime’ in Donbass

RT | January 29, 2023

Kiev and its Western backers bear responsibility for the deadly destruction of a civilian hospital in Donbass, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday. The perpetrators of the “war crime” will not escape punishment, it added.

On Saturday morning, Ukrainian troops fired rockets from the US-made HIMARS system at a hospital in the city of Novoaydar, killing 14 people and injuring 24, the Russian Defense Minitry said earlier. According to the military, the facility was treating local residents, as well as Russian soldiers.

The Foreign Ministry claimed that Ukraine used Western intelligence and satellites owned by NATO countries to target the hospital.

“The deliberate shelling of functioning civilian medical facilities and the purposeful killing of civilians are grave war crimes committed by the Kiev regime and its Western handlers,” the ministry said in a statement.

“The lack of reaction from the US and other NATO countries … once again serves as proof of their direct involvement in the conflict and the culpability for the crimes.”

The ministry added that it has been thoroughly documenting attacks on civilians. “The criminal acts … will not be left unpunished,” it said.

According to the 1949 Geneva Convention, warring parties cannot attack civilian hospitals under any circumstances.

Novoaydar is dozens of kilometers away from the frontline in Russia’s Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR). Local officials posted a video of the hospital building shortly after the attack.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Kiev of hitting civilian targets with Western-supplied rockets and artillery. This month alone, officials said that HIMARS launchers were used to strike two hospitals in Zaporozhye Region. The region, along with the LPR and two other former Ukrainian territories, joined Russia following referendums in September of last year.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Did Germany just declare war against Russia?

Free West Media | January 29, 2023

Is it a real declaration of war? Yes. On January 24, Baerbock gave a speech to the Council of Europe – not to be confused with an institution of the European Union. Although this speech contained borderline provocations, it was a scripted intervention. However, in the subsequent hearing, Baerbock had to answer questions without a prepared text.

She uttered a sentence in English that she obviously did not grasp: “We are fighting a war against Russia and not against each other.”

It was Baerbock’s response to a question from Norwegian MP Ingrid Schulerud, who wanted to know when Germany would decide to deliver Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Baerbock responded that criticism and comparisons of shipment volumes were not helpful to Ukraine’s proxy war effort.

How does a country formally declare war?

So that misunderstandings are ruled out and the spectre of war is not inadvertently released, international law provides for high formal hurdles for a legally valid declaration of war.

The self-proclaimed international law expert Baerbock overcame them all with the power of indescribable stupidity: Because at that moment when she spoke, 77 years after the end of the war, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Russian Federation were actually and truly officially at war with one another.

For a formally valid declaration of war, this must first be pronounced by an official representative of one state. As Federal Foreign Minister, Baerbock fulfilled this requirement. This declaration must take place in an official setting. A speech before the Council of Europe, which has the task of securing peace in Europe, also satisfied the second condition. Only the third condition is somewhat problematic. Because an official representative of the other state must be present to receive this declaration.

On March 15, however, Russia was expelled from the Council of Europe, a move which evidently was bad for peace, but at least this time it probably saved the world from Baerbock’s moronic grandstanding.

If an official representative of the Russian Federation had been among the spectators, that person would then – for better or for worse – have had to acknowledge the declaration of war. As it is, however, it is easy to argue that a public television broadcast is sufficient to officially inform the other state.

The Foreign Office quickly jumped in to cover for the statement of its erring chief. “During her meeting with members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on January 24, Foreign Minister Baerbock emphasized that Europe must stand together against this war.”

In view of the delivery of Leopard tanks to Ukraine, more and more people are concerned that Germany could become a direct party to the conflict. Last but not least, these concerns were fueled by the statement from Baerbock in the Council of Europe. Germany’s arms deliveries to Ukraine are undeniably now perceived as involvement in the conflict.

Russia’s cool response

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, the statements by Baerbock as well as former Chancellor Angela Merkel suggest that the West planned a war against Russia from the outset. On Wednesday, on her Telegram channel, she quoted Baerbock’s other statements at the PACE meeting that more had to be done “to protect Ukraine”.

As is well known, Merkel said in an interview for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in December last year that the German and French mediation efforts in the Minsk format were aimed at deceiving Russia in order to “strengthen Ukraine”. These words were echoed by former French President François Hollande, who noted that Ukraine had increased its military potential since 2014.

Director General of the Russian Foreign Affairs Council Andrei Kortunov recalled that Baerbock had always taken “radical” positions: “The conflict between the Greens and the Social Democrats was very serious from the start. Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for moderation and restraint, while Baerbock tended to be decisive and uncompromising. Far more than Scholz, she is in solidarity with the radical stance of the Baltic States, Poland and recently Finland’s too.”

He pointed out that while Baerbock was saying one thing, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on the same day said that the alliance was not directly involved in the Ukraine conflict. NATO and its member states want to position themselves as comfortably as possible: on the one hand to offer Ukraine increasingly intensive supplies, on the other hand to pretend to stay out of the conflict.

NATO has been pursuing this tactic since the beginning of the confrontation, with a “gradual escalation of engagement, while at the same time it is constantly emphasized that neither NATO nor its individual countries are directly involved in this conflict,” underlined the political scientist.

Maybe Baerbock just said the quiet part out loud…

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Militarism | , | 3 Comments

Pfizer admits it ‘engineered’ new Covid mutations

RT | January 29, 2023

US drugmaker Pfizer admitted on Friday that it “engineered” treatment-resistant variants of Covid-19 in order to test its antiviral medicine. The admission partially backs up earlier claims by an executive with the company who told an undercover reporter that Pfizer was deliberately “mutating” the virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”

In a statement posted on its website, Pfizer said that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” referring to the practice of amplifying a virus’ ability to infect humans and the process of selecting ‘desirable’ traits of a virus to reproduce, respectively.

However, the pharma giant said that it combined the spike proteins of new coronavirus variants with the original strain in order to test its vaccines, and that it created mutations of the virus to test Paxlovid, its antiviral drug.

“In a limited number of cases… such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells,” the company said, adding that this work was carried out in a secure laboratory. The work also sought to create “resistant strains of the virus,” it added, describing a process commonly understood as being ‘gain of function’ research.

Pfizer’s statement came two days after Jordon Trishton Walker, an executive involved in the firm’s mRNA division, told an undercover reporter that the company was “exploring” ways to “mutate [covid] ourselves so we could create, preemptively develop, new vaccines.” Walker said that scientists were considering infecting monkeys with the virus, who would then “keep infecting each other.”

“From what I’ve heard, they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it, but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious,” he explained. “Obviously they don’t want to accelerate it too much. I think they are also just trying to do it as an exploratory thing because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”

Pfizer’s statement makes no mention of the supposed plan to infect monkeys, instead explaining that any work on live viruses is carried out in vitro, meaning inside test tubes or other lab equipment.

Walker was told on camera that he was speaking to a journalist with Project Veritas, a conservative outlet known for its hidden-camera sting operations. After hearing this, Walker insisted that he was lying to impress his date, before attempting to steal an iPad from Project Veritas CEO James O’Keefe.

January 29, 2023 Posted by | Deception | , , , | 2 Comments

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