Absurd US propaganda claims China has more ICBMs than America
By Drago Bosnic | February 8, 2023
Mere days after the United States pompously announced that it has soundly defeated an adrift weather balloon, another absurdity has taken the headlines in the mainstream media. Apparently, China somehow managed to overtake America in the number of ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) launchers. This was reported by the Wall Street Journal on February 7, citing the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. According to WSJ, the commander of the US Strategic Command, which oversees America’s nuclear forces, notified the US Congress about the supposed Chinese advantage.
“The number of land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers in China exceeds the number of ICBM launchers in the United States,” the commander stated.
The author of the WSJ article himself admitted that the US is currently modernizing its entire nuclear triad (land, sea and air-launched nuclear weapons) and that “it has a much larger nuclear force than China”. The Strategic Command also notified US lawmakers that America still has more land-based ICBMs than China, as well as several times more thermonuclear warheads mounted on those missiles. Worse yet, the report doesn’t even include SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) and strategic bombers that make the US dominance even more pronounced.
But US officials and experts are claiming that “many of China’s land-based launchers still consist of empty silos”, meaning that Beijing “potentially has more launch options”. The lawmakers cited these launchers as “a portent of the scale of China’s longer-range ambitions and are urging the US to expand its own nuclear forces to counter the Russian and Chinese forces”. According to Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, “China is rapidly approaching parity with the United States”.
“We cannot allow that to happen. The time for us to adjust our force posture and increase capabilities to meet this threat is now,” Rogers stated.
He then criticized America’s compliance with the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), claiming this is “inhibiting the US from building up its arsenal to deter Russia and China”. And while China isn’t included in the treaty (set to expire in 2026), Russia is, meaning that Moscow is also “inhibited” by it, making the assertion all the more illogical. On the other hand, many US experts are now claiming that it’s in the US interest to preserve treaty limits with Russia and to also attempt to draw Beijing into it, while still continuing with constant modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal.
Rose Gottemoeller, a US arms control expert who took part in negotiating the New START, stated: “It’s in our national interest to keep the Russians under the New START limits. We need to complete our nuclear modernization according to plan, not pile on new requirements.”
The WSJ report posits that the US is now trying to deal with Russia and China by using a mix of arms control treaties and upgraded nuclear forces. The Pentagon’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review identified both superpowers as strategic rivals, stating that “by the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”
However, while claiming that it wants to preserve the New START, the troubled Biden administration seems to be working towards eliminating it. Just last week, the US accused Russia of violating the treaty by refusing to allow on-site inspections, although the US itself is doing the same, meaning Moscow is simply responding in kind. Such actions indicate that Washington DC might be trying to sabotage the New START because it’s frustrated that China isn’t included in it.
The Pentagon claims that Beijing will increase its current arsenal of 400 warheads to 1,500 by 2035. At present, China’s nuclear arsenal includes an unspecified number of mobile ICBM launchers, while the US military claims that the Asian giant also operates approximately 20 liquid-fueled, silo-based ICBMs, but that it’s also building three ICBM silo fields intended to house approximately 300 modern solid-fueled missiles. For comparison, the US fields 5,428 warheads, with at least 400 land-based ICBMs. In other words, the current American nuclear arsenal is over 13 times larger than China’s, while its land-based ICBMs outnumber Beijing’s by more than 20 times.
US experts are often debating what China plans to do with the aforementioned silos it’s now allegedly building. Some claim that, while Beijing currently doesn’t have enough nuclear-tipped ICBMs to fill all silos, it might leave some empty or install conventionally armed missiles. Still, the sheer magnitude of the mental gymnastics used by the US political establishment to present itself as the “party in jeopardy” in this case is ludicrous for anyone familiar with the size of America’s nuclear arsenal. Even with the assertion that China will have 1,500 nuclear weapons in 2035, including 400 land-based ICBMs, the US would still have a 3:1 advantage, making the accusations against Beijing a moot point.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
West uses chemical weapons watchdog to justify its aggression – Moscow
RT | February 7, 2023
The latest report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which blames Damascus for carrying out a chemical attack in Douma in 2018, looks like a political hit piece meant to justify the West’s continued military aggression against the Syrian government, says Alexander Shulgin, Russia’s permanent representative to the organization.
Speaking to RT, Shulgin vehemently dismissed the report, which was released in late January by the so-called Investigation and Identification Team (IIT). Calling the IIT “completely illegitimate,” he claimed the group’s creation was pushed through by the US and its allies in order to undermine the core principles of the OPCW and international law and replace them with their own “made-up rules.”
The IIT’s report, according to Shulgin, is riddled with inconsistencies and factual gaps, and barely holds together. Furthermore, none of Russia’s or any other country’s “uncomfortable” questions regarding the details of the IIT’s findings were even remotely addressed during an OPCW briefing on the report, the ambassador claimed.
Shulgin also noted that the report highlighted the double standards currently present within the OPCW. When Russia presented evidence of a chemical attack in Aleppo back in 2016, every minute detail of Moscow’s findings was heavily scrutinized by the organization, he said. However, when it comes to the attack in Douma, OPCW officials seem to turn a blind eye to basic questions such as how and when the evidence was gathered and presented during the investigation.
“For instance, they referred to the fact that some new sample has appeared, provided by a third party. What is this third party? Nothing is said about it. They just say ‘trust us’,” said Shulgin, noting that the sample in question had never been reported on in previous investigations.
“So before, there was no sample, but now, suddenly, it has somehow appeared. Without any explanations,” the ambassador stressed, suggesting its sudden appearance can only be explained by the need for the US, France, and UK to escape international accountability for their aggression against Syria.
The three NATO states launched a series of airstrikes against civilian and military targets in Syria in April 2018 after the so-called ‘White Helmets’ – an NGO operating in rebel-controlled areas of Syria – published a series of videos supposedly showing the aftermath of a chlorine attack on the residents of Douma.
Syria has vehemently denied any responsibility for the incident, and both Damascus and Moscow have repeatedly pointed to evidence, including testimonies from alleged victims, that suggests the incident was staged in order to justify a Western attack.
Canada passes online censorship bill
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 7, 2023
Canada‘s Senate has passed Bill C-11 (Online Streaming Act), which critics refer to as “the internet censorship bill,” along with several amendments.
The bill passed in the third reading with 43 votes in favor and 15 against, which means it is now inching ever closer to becoming law since in the next step it goes back to the House of Commons, which will consider the amendments.
The government proposed the bill as a way to amend the Broadcasting Act by modifying Canada’s broadcasting policy, and giving the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) new powers as a regulator.
Opponents of the bill, including Conservative politicians and advocacy groups, however, see it as a way to increase the government’s ability to censor online speech it dislikes.
The effort to bring this legislation to life in Canada has quite a story behind it: initially, the Online Streaming Act, then known as Bill C-10, passed in the House of Commons in June 2021 but failed in the Senate.
It made a comeback as Bill C-11 in February 2022, got cleared by the House in June, and finally last week made it through the Senate.
Reacting to the latest vote on the bill, Conservative Senator Denis Batters took to Twitter to slam both the legislative institution – calling it (Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau‘s “fake ‘independent’ Senate,” while referring to the bill itself as “awful.”
Supporters believe that once it becomes law, the bill will be beneficial for legacy media competing with digital outlets, and improve the “discoverability of Canadian content” on major international platforms.
Opponents, however, think that the CRTC will gain broad new powers without proper oversight by either the government or parliament.
Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms founder and president John Carpay says that the goal of the bill, on the face of it, is not the issue, since it is supposed to give the CRTC authority over companies like Netflix, Disney, and similar giants.
However, that authority will not end there, Carpay said, trotting out the same statement that has been made for months.
“Rather, the OSA (Online Streaming Act) will empower the CRTC to assume jurisdiction via regulation over any ‘program’ (audio or audiovisual online content) that is ‘monetizable’ because it ‘directly or indirectly’ generates revenues” Carpay added.
And that, according to him, includes private citizens.
“In the long run, the CRTC could end up regulating much of the content posted on major social media, even where the content is generated or uploaded by religious, political, and charitable nonprofits,” Carpay commented.
Ukraine purges libraries of Russian-language books – official
RT | February 7, 2023
Ukraine has removed millions of copies of Russian-language books from its public libraries, Yevgeniya Kravchuk, a senior member of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, said on Monday.
She stated that the Culture Ministry had provided recommendations on what titles should be taken off the shelves.
This comes amid an initiative declared by the Ukrainian government to “overcome the consequences of Russification,” which in practice means purging schools of certain literature, renaming streets, and dismantling monuments to Russian historical figures.
According to Kravchuk, the deputy chair of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, 19 million copies of books had been removed as of November, including 11 million in Russian.
“Some Ukrainian-language books from the Soviet times are being removed as well,” Kravchuk said. The MP noted that there was not enough literature available in the Ukrainian language.
“The ratio of books in the Russian and Ukrainian languages in our libraries is very disheartening. We are talking about the need to update the stocks more quickly and procure books in the Ukrainian language.”
Ukraine has a sizable Russian-speaking minority, and many Ukrainian speakers are fluent in Russian as well.
In June, the Ukrainian Education Ministry proposed removing more than 40 books by Russian and Soviet authors from the curriculum. The list included the works of such renowned classical writers as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Alexander Pushkin, as well as Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Sholokhov, both of whom won the Nobel Prize for literature. Ukrainian Culture Minister Aleksander Tkachenko urged the world in December to “boycott” Russian culture, arguing that Moscow has been using it for propaganda.
Since 2014, Kiev has adopted several laws aimed at restricting the use of the Russian language in the public sphere. Moscow, meanwhile, has described these moves as discriminatory. Last year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov condemned “Kiev’s policy of aggressive de-Russification and forced assimilation.”
Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine nearly a year ago, citing the need to protect the people of Donbass, a predominately Russian-speaking region, and Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk 2014-2015 peace accords.
Cochrane’s early and deliberate interference in the publication of efficacy of masking review results
Yet again, The Science follows politics.
There is zero evidence that this does anything
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | February 6, 2023
The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.
The dim and eternally concerned Twitter epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo (who would be a disgrace to her field, if the field of public health weren’t already a disgrace) posted a hilarious nineteen-tweet thread that gathers all the typical excuses and cries to the heavens for more studies, because the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Intriguingly, as others have noted, Nuzzo used to think totally differently about the utility of masking. In 2006, our epidemiological luminary co-authored a paper on Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza, which flatly admits that “the ordinary surgical mask does little to prevent inhalation of small droplets” and that no data support using N95 or FFP2 respirators outside of healthcare settings. Like all pandemic authorities, Nuzzo had sensible ideas right up until the moment her ideas became important.
Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, has added to the pain and embarrassment of Team Mask by granting this interview to Maryanne Demasi, in which he reiterates bluntly that “there’s no evidence that masks are effective during a pandemic,” no evidence that respirators do anything even in healthcare settings, blames misguided mask mandates on bad governmental advisers, and criticises the masking “craziness” that took root in 2020, in which “strident campaigners” – “activists, not scientists” – like “academics and politicians started jumping up and down about masks.” He also makes an observation that is often aired at the plague chronicle, namely that the failure of masks to do very much indicates that virus transmission itself is poorly understood, and far more complicated than we tend to assume. You should read the whole thing for yourself.
Here, I want to highlight one crucial point. Jefferson explains that he and his co-authors were ready to publish a review on the evidence for masking and other physical interventions in April 2020, but that Cochrane held up its appearance by “inexplicably” demanding a further peer reviewer. This effectively delayed publication by months, in precisely the period that novel mask mandates were emerging all across the world. When the review was finally cleared for publication in November – long after its chance to influence mask policies had passed – the authors were directed to insert all manner of language softening their conclusions, and Cochrane included an accompanying editorial on why “Policy makers must act on incomplete evidence in responding to COVID-19.”
Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.
In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.
UPDATE: See also this interview with Tom Jefferson published today in the Daily Sceptic
World Health Organization zero draft pandemic treaty pushes for increased surveillance powers
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 6, 2023
The World Health Organization (WHO) has released the latest zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new sweeping surveillance powers if passed.
The treaty requires the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) to strengthen the WHO’s “One Health surveillance systems.”
One Health is a WHO system that aims to “optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems” and “uses the close, interdependent links among these fields to create new surveillance and disease control methods.”
The WHO’s One Health fact sheet points to Covid-19 as one of the main reasons for expanding its One Health approach and states that it “put a spotlight on the need for a global framework for improved surveillance.”
The draft treaty also orders WHO member states to strengthen surveillance functions for “outbreak investigation and control through interoperable early warning and alert systems.”
Additionally, it requires member states to recognize the WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health work, in pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery of health systems, and in convening and generating scientific evidence, and, more generally, fostering multilateral cooperation in global health governance.”
We obtained a copy of the zero draft of the WHO’s pandemic treaty for you here.
Although the draft treaty doesn’t mention surveillance tools that were used during Covid, such as contact tracing, testing, and vaccine passports, the WHO has previously confirmed that it’s a big supporter of vaccine passports. In the early stages of the pandemic, the WHO also lauded China’s Covid response, which utilized intense digital surveillance, before changing its position and criticizing China’s zero-Covid policy.
This draft treaty has been in the works since December 2021. A final report on the treaty is expected to be presented to the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), in May 2024.
If passed, this treaty will be adopted under Article 19 of the WHO Constitution — an article that allows the WHO to impose legally binding conventions on the WHO’s 194 member states if two-thirds of the member states’ representatives vote in favor of the conventions.
Unlike the lawmaking process in most democratic nations, where elected officials implement national law, this WHO process allows a small number of global representatives, often unelected diplomats, to impose international laws on all of the WHO’s member states.
While some politicians have pushed back against this international pandemic treaty, it has the support of many powerful nations including the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Council (EC) (which represents 27 European Union (EU) member states).
This treaty is just one of the global surveillance proposals with ties to the WHO that is being pushed by influential global figures. At Business (B20) 2022, a summit of business leaders from Group of 20 (G20) countries, numerous countries agreed on a digital health passport that uses WHO standards. This digital health certificate will track whether people have been vaccinated or tested.
Ban on Russian media protects ‘freedom of expression’ – Borrell
RT | February 7, 2023
The EU’s crusade against Russian media does not seek to curb free speech but in fact pursues the opposite goal, the bloc’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said on Tuesday. His remarks triggered criticism from Moscow, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova saying that Russia has viewed the media crackdown as a sign of a dictatorship.
Speaking at a conference dedicated to the EU’s response to foreign disinformation, Borrell said that the sanctions on Russian media “effectively banned them from operating” within the bloc.
“In doing that, we are not attacking the freedom of expression, we are just protecting the freedom of expression,” he argued.
Borrell also noted that the EU is trying to support those media organizations that Russia has classified as ‘foreign agents’, a designation meaning that an entity is either funded from abroad or is under “foreign influence.”
“What I’m saying is not just rhetoric. I cannot go into detail, but believe me, we try to support them in practical terms,” he said, adding that he would not say how in order not to do them “a bad favor.”
In an attempt to defend the EU’s media policies, Borrell claimed that Russia is using “manipulation and interference as a crucial instrument” in the Ukraine conflict. In light of this, the diplomat said that the EU would launch a platform called the Information Sharing and Analysis Center to combat falsehoods.
“We need to understand how these disinformation campaigns are organized … to identify the actors of the manipulation,” he stressed.
Commenting on Borrell’s remarks, Zakharova stated that in the past Moscow regarded the media crackdown as “a manifestation of liberal dictatorship.” But the way the diplomat described these policies in his latest speech made them “sparkle with fresh colors with a shade of delusion,” she added.
In recent years, the EU has unleashed a campaign against Russian media which only intensified when Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. In March, the EU suspended the broadcasting activities of Sputnik and RT, with the number of blacklisted channels only growing in the following months as the bloc introduced new sanctions against Russia.
Elon Musk accused State Dept. agency of being “worst offender” in government censorship
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | February 7, 2023
Twitter owner Elon Musk accused the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) of being the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
Musk’s comments came after the latest release of the Twitter Files which focused on GEC’s attempts to get Twitter to censor accounts and content.
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned [such as] the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
According to its website, the GEC’s role is to direct and coordinate the US government’s efforts to combat foreign state and non-state misinformation and propaganda.
Then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth pushed back against GEC’s analysis based on data from Homeland Security that showed “nearly 250,000” Chinese accounts that were spreading propaganda about COVID-19.
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