By Maxim Minaev – Sputnik – 30.01.2023
The German chancellor’s office thoroughly documents the missteps of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, despite the lack of public criticism from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, German media reported, citing sources.
“At the chancellor’s office, Baerbock’s mistakes are carefully recorded,” an unnamed government source told German media.
According to the publication, Scholz allegedly adheres to a principle of not speaking ill of his ministers, regardless of the degree of his irritation. Reasons for Scholz’s being discontent with Baerbock have arisen several times recently, according to German media.
The newspaper notes that in September, the German foreign minister called for a quick solution to the issue of supplying tanks to Ukraine, which was followed by a “serious conversation” with the Chancellor’s Office. As a result, during the next interview, Baerbock was more restrained.
A week ago, in an interview with French TV, Baerbock said that Berlin was not going to block supplies of German tanks to Ukraine, the newspaper recalls. At the same time, according to the report, no final decision was made at that time and such a statement caused “stormy” dissatisfaction in the chancellor’s office.
In addition, Scholz and Baerbock allegedly had disagreements over the chancellor’s trip to China, as well as over the planned meeting of the Franco-German cabinet in October. At the time, Baerbock said she could not go to Paris because of a family vacation, although Scholz allegedly insisted on her visit. Nevertheless, Baerbock was adamant, saying that she was on vacation. Shortly thereafter, the event was canceled by the French side.
Baerbock had previously been criticized by a number of German politicians after her remarks about “war with Russia.” The minister said during the PACE session on January 24 that European countries “are waging a war against Russia” and called on them to do more for Ukraine together instead of looking for the guilty among themselves. At the same time, the German Foreign Ministry said in connection with her statement that support for Ukraine does not make Germany one of the parties to the conflict.
January 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | Germany |
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The United Kingdom is involved in the Ukrainian conflict and should “face Russia directly,” Tobias Ellwood, head of the UK Defence Select Committee, said on Monday.
“We are now at war in Europe, we need to move to a war footing, we are involved in that, we have mobilized our procurement processes, we are gifting equipment [to Ukraine]. We need to face Russia directly rather than leaving Ukraine to do all the work,” he said in an interview with UK broadcaster.
Ellwood said the UK government must “recognize the world is changing” and provide appropriate funding to the military.
“If we see Russia wants to do more things in the Baltics, for example, there will be an expectation, indeed, anticipation that we would participate in that. That requires land forces, air as well, and maritime too,” he said.
The senior Conservative lawmaker also urged the government to revoke an earlier decision to reduce the size of the country’s armed forces by 10,000 troops and increase defense spending, in particular, to modernize ground units, at the same time recognizing that UK ground forces are in a “dire state.”
“You have three main components to land warfare — that’s your tank, your main battle tank, your armored fighting vehicle and your recon vehicle. And in our case, you have the Challenger 2, you have the Warrior and you have the Scimitar, and they are all over 20, 30 or 50 years old without any upgrades,” he said.
Ellwood said the UK provided “huge investments” over the years to develop its maritime capabilities, build aircraft carriers, supply more fighter jets, but the number of tanks had been greatly reduced — from 900 tanks several years ago to 148 now.
In this regard, the UK government should be “very concerned,” especially against the backdrop of the Ukrainian conflict. It is necessary not only to invest in emerging industries, such as cybersecurity and space, but also to do so without compromising the military’s ground forces, he added.
The head of the Committee noted that the UK’s defense spending exceeds that of any other European country, in particular, in connection with the maintenance of nuclear potential and the active modernization of the army. However, new models of equipment will go into service only in a few years, and at the moment the size of the army is too small, given that the armed forces are often used in times of crisis in the country.
Western countries ramped up their military support for Ukraine after Russia launched a special military operation there in late February 2022, responding to calls for help from the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. In April 2022, Moscow sent a note to NATO member states condemning their military assistance to Kiev. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that any arms shipments on Ukrainian territory would be “legitimate targets” for Russian forces.
January 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia | NATO, UK |
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The Western public, like others, are justly appalled by the human suffering and the horrors of the Ukrainian war. Empathy is one of the great virtues of humanity, which in this instance translates into the demand for helping Ukrainians. Yet, propaganda commonly weaponizes the best in human nature, such as compassion, to bring out the worst. As sympathy and the desire to assist the displaced are used to mobilize public support for confrontation and war with Russia, it is necessary to ask if the Western public and Ukrainians are being manipulated to support a proxy war.
Is NATO helping Ukraine to fight Russia or is NATO using Ukraine to fight Russia?
The organization as a passive actor?
The US-led military bloc commonly depicts itself as an innocent third party that merely responds to the overwhelming desire of the Ukrainian people to join its ranks. Yet, for years NATO has attempted to absorb a reluctant Ukraine into its orbit. A NATO publication from 2011 acknowledged that “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support for it at is less than 20%”.
In 2014, this problem was resolved by supporting what Statfor’s George Friedman labelled “the most blatant coup in history” as there were no efforts to conceal Western meddling. Regime change was justified as helping Ukrainians with their “democratic revolution”. Yet, it involved the unconstitutional removal of the elected government as a result of an uprising that even the BBC acknowledged did not have majority support amongst the general public. The authorities elected by the Ukrainian people were replaced by individuals handpicked by Washington. An infamous leaked phone call between State Department apparatchik Victoria Nuland and Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that Washington had chosen exactly who would be in the new government several weeks before they had even removed president Yanukovich from power.
Donbass predictably rejected and resisted the legitimacy of the new regime in Kiev with the support of Russia. Instead of calling for a “unity government”, a plan for which Western European states had signed as guarantors, NATO countries quietly supported an “anti-terrorist operation” against eastern Ukrainians, resulting in at least 14,000 deaths.
The Minsk-2 peace agreement of February 2015 produced a path for peace, yet the US and UK sabotaged it for the next 7 years. Furthermore, Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Francois Hollande recently admitted that both Germany and France considered the deal an opportunity to buy time for Ukraine to arm itself and prepare for war.
In the 2019 election, millions of Ukrainians were disenfranchised, including those living in Russia. Nevertheless, the result was a landslide with 73% of Ukrainians voting for Vladimir Zelensky’s peace platform based on implementing the Minsk-2 agreement, negotiating with Donbass, protecting the Russian language, and restoring peace with Moscow. However, the far-right militias that were armed and trained by the US effectively laid down a veto by threatening Zelensky and defying him on the front line when he demanded to pull back heavy weapons. Pressured also by the US, Zelensky eventually reversed the entire peace platform the Ukrainians had voted for. Instead, opposition media and political parties were purged, and the main opposition leader, Viktor Medvedchuk was arrested. Subverting the wishes of Ukrainians in order to steer the country towards confrontation with Russia was yet again referred to as “helping” Ukraine.
Towards proxy war
In 2019, the Rand Corporation published a 325-page report ordered by the US Army titled “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground”. In the language of a proxy war, the report advocated arming Ukraine to bleed Moscow stating, “Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it”. The US Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, similarly explained in 2020 the strategy of arming Ukraine claiming, “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here”.
In December 2021, the former head of Russia analysis at the CIA warned that the Kremlin was under growing pressure to invade to prevent Washington from further building up its military presence on its borders, which included modernising Ukrainian ports to fit US warships. “That relationship [US-Ukraine] will be far stronger and deeper, and the United States military will be more firmly entrenched inside Ukraine two to three years from now. So inaction on [the Kremlin’s] part is risky,” George Beebe explained. Yet, despite being convinced that Russia would invade, Washington refused to give any reasonable security guarantees to Moscow.
Kiev agreed to enter into negotiations merely three days into the Russian invasion, which resulted in a peace agreement outline a few weeks later. Former intelligence official Fiona Hill and Angela Stent later penned an article acknowledging that “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbass region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries”.
However, after a visit by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Kiev suddenly withdrew from the peace negotiations. Reports in the Ukrainian and American media have suggested that London and Washington had pressured Kiev to abandon negotiations and instead seek victory on the battlefield with NATO weapons.
Johnson gave multiple speeches warning against a “bad peace,” while German General Harald Kujat, a former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, confirmed that Johnson had sabotaged the peace negotiations in order to fight a proxy war with Russia: “His reasoning was that the West was not ready for an end to the war”.
The American objectives also had seemingly little to do with “helping” Ukraine. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated US goals in Ukraine as the weakening of a strategic rival: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”. PresidentBiden argued for regime change in Moscow as Putin “cannot remain in power”, which was repeated by Boris Johnson’s op-ed stating that “The war in Ukraine can end only with Vladimir Putin’s defeat”.
US Congressman Dan Crenshaw advocated for a proxy war by supplying weapons to Ukraine as “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea”. Similarly, Senator Lindsey Graham argued the US should fight Russia to the last Ukrainian: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person”. The rhetoric is eerily similar to that of Hungarian billionaire George Soros, who argued that NATO could dominate if it could use Eastern European soldiers as they accept more deaths than their Western peers: “the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act”.
Following NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s recent Orwellian statement that “weapons are the way to peace”, it is worth assessing if NATO is helping Ukraine or using Ukraine. NATO powers have stated that they are supplying Ukraine with weapons to have a stronger position at the negotiating table, yet one year into the war, no major Western leaders have called for peace talks. NATO has a powerful bargaining chip that would actually help Ukraine, which would be an agreement to end NATO expansion toward Russian borders. However, whitewashing the bloc’s direct contribution to the war prevents a negotiated settlement.
Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
January 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Russophobia | NATO, UK, Ukraine, United States |
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By Lucas Leiroz | January 30, 2023
Ethnic persecutions have been commonplace in Ukraine since 2014, when the Maidan coup d’état established a neo-Nazi dictatorship that began an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Donbass region, exterminating the Russian population. Now, however, the Kiev regime’s blacklist of ethnicities appears to be expanding. Several sources report that Ukrainian citizens of Hungarian ethnicity are being systematically sent to the front lines of the current conflict. The objective would supposedly be to exterminate the Hungarian population inhabiting Transcarpathia, which raises concerns in the Hungarian government and increases the possibility of internationalization of the conflict.
A forced mobilization of ethnic Hungarians from Transcarpathia is currently taking place in Ukraine. According to several sources, Kiev’s officials are transferring hundreds of ethnic Hungarians to the contact zones in the conflict with Russia, where they are dying in large quantities. On January 25, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto confirmed the report and expressed concern about the case.
Previously, Ukrainian forces had already created the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade in the Transcarpathian region. This brigade has suffered heavy losses in Soledar and is now suffering casualties at the battle for Bakhmut. However, instead of putting soldiers from different regions on the front, Kiev is apparently planning to send all ethnic Hungarians to fight in the war zone at the same time, privileging the safety of ethnic Ukrainian soldiers.
There are many reasons why Kiev is planning ethnic cleansing against Hungarians. Tensions between Hungarians and Ukrainians have grown since the start of the Russian special military operation, as Hungary has been the country with the most sovereign stance within NATO and EU, avoiding direct involvement in the conflict, maintaining diplomatic ties with Russia, and severely criticizing western sanctions. Obviously, this deeply worries the Ukrainian regime, even more so considering the possibility of secessionist tendencies in the Transcarpathian region.
The situation in Transcarpathia is for Hungarians similar to the situation for Russians in Donbass. Despite being within the Ukrainian territory, the region is marked by very different characteristics from the rest of the country, with a Hungarian ethnic and cultural predominance. For Kiev, this apparently sounds like a threat, as Hungary refuses to support the neo-Nazi regime against Russia and could encourage Transcarpathia’s residents to do the same. Therefore, the Zelensky government is planning a “final solution” for Transcarpathia, in order to avoid Hungarian separatism or annexation. By systematically sending recently mobilized and militarily untrained ethnic Hungarians to the front, Kiev is provoking a true genocide, as virtually only Transcarpathians are dying during the combats.
However, it is important to note that there seems to be a collaboration on the part of the Transcarpathian authorities themselves with this Ukrainian policy. One of the most important local leaders, the oligarch and Rada deputy Viktor Baloga, has been cooperating for years with the racist policy of repressing the ethnic identity of Hungarians. In 2018, Baloga started a campaign for the departure of all citizens with dual Hungarian-Ukrainian citizenship from Ukraine, stating that they should move to Hungary. At the time, the deputy also defended the extinction of the Berehove city, which is an important cultural center for the ethnic Hungarians of Transcarpathia, alleging risks to national security with Budapest’s influence in the region.
The Baloga family maintains an important local commercial oligarchy, having business in the arms trade sector, and has economically benefited from an alliance with the Maidan regime. After the start of the Russian operation, with the Ukrainian dictatorship becoming more explicit due to the martial law, the persecution of Hungarians also intensified, and the Baloga family began to use its power and influence to support the policy of forced mobilization of Transcarpathian citizens.
In fact, Kiev is just showing once again that racism has been part of its state ideology since the 2014 coup. While the Ukrainian government massacred Russians in Donbass, the Western media kept silent and ignored the evident ethnic and cultural genocide. Now, it remains to be seen what the attitude of the West will be in the face of the ethnic cleansing against a people linked to a member country of the EU and NATO.
Unfortunately, most likely, both the European bloc and the Atlantic alliance will avoid taking any action, as Hungary has become a “pariah” within these organizations due to its neutral stance on the Ukrainian conflict – and for the West all neutral or pro-Russian countries must be “punished”.
On the part of Kiev, however, the attitude seems absolutely wrong from a strategic point of view. Budapest’s patience with Kiev may be running out. Ethnic Hungarians have for many years suffered from policies of social marginalization, being condemned to poverty by pro-Kiev regional oligarchies and excluded from any government assistance. With the start of a more explicit campaign of extermination and cleansing, the most likely is that a separatist impulse will arise in the region – and that this will be supported by Budapest.
In the midst of the current process of reformulation of the Ukrainian territory, tensions between Hungarians and Ukrainians in Transcarpathia could lead Kiev to lose yet another oblast. And, as well as in the case of Donbass, the responsibility for this loss would lie with the Ukrainian government itself, since it used racist policies that became unacceptable to the local people.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
January 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Ukraine |
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https://www.bitchute.com/video/SeVzU4k6EHgW/
Will Thailand become the first country to take Pfizer to court claiming fraud and declare the contracts null and void?
Professor Sucharit Bhakdi seems to think so. He claims to have talked to officials high up in government and told them that the contracts were fraudulent. According to him, the Thais want to be the first country in the world to declare the contracts null and void. If this goes ahead and found to be true in the courts, it will mean a significant sum of damages will have to be paid by Pfizer and set off a chain of events that will likely bankrupt the company.
23 days after the Thai King’s daughter had her booster, she collapsed and is still in a coma. Officially she has a bacterial infection but many claim she is the victim of vaccine damage. If the Thais do take Pfizer to court, will this have been the reason?
The National Institute of Health’s grant AI23946-08 issued to Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (officially classified as affiliated with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID by at least 2003) began the work on synthetically altering the Coronaviridae (the coronavirus family) for the express purpose of general research, pathogenic enhancement, detection, manipulation, and potential therapeutic interventions targeting the same. As early as May 21, 2000, Dr. Baric and UNC sought to patent critical sections of the coronavirus family for their commercial benefit.1 In one of the several papers derived from work sponsored by this grant, Dr. Baric published what he reported to be the full length cDNA of SARS CoV in which it was clearly stated that SAR CoV was based on a composite of DNA segments. “Using a panel of contiguous cDNAs that span the entire genome, we have assembled a full-length cDNA of the SARS-CoV Urbani strain, and have rescued molecularly cloned SARS viruses (infectious clone SARS-CoV) that contained the expected marker mutations inserted into the component clones.”2 On April 19, 2002 – the Spring before the first SARS outbreak in Asia – Christopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, and Ralph Baric filed an application for U.S. Patent 7,279,372 for a method of producing recombinant coronavirus. In the first public record of the claims, they sought to patent a means of producing, “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus.” This work was supported by the NIH grant referenced above and GM63228.
In short, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was involved in the funding of amplifying the infectious nature of coronavirus between 1999 and 2002 before SARS was ever detected in humans.
This dossier is by no means exhaustive. It is, however, indicative the numerous criminal violations that may be associated with the COVID-19 terrorism.
All source materials are referenced at https://archive.org/details/the-fauci-covid-19-dossier_202109
January 30, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Pfizer, Thailand |
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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 aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science |
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Soon there will be nobody left that does not meet the dictionary definition of “anti-vaxxer”
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 aletho |
Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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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 aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK |
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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 aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering |
3 Comments
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, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, 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 aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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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?
* 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.”
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?
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.
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 aletho |
Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | New York Times |
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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 aletho |
Film Review, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights |
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