Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

“Disinformation experts” blame “conspiratorial narratives,” “far-right websites,” for Silicon Valley Bank panic

Amidst calls for online censorship

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 18, 2023

Just days after a Senator was caught asking whether there were systems in place to censor social media in an attempt to prevent a bank run, “disinformation experts” are partially blaming the Silicon Valley bank collapse exacerbation on online conspiracy theorists on social media.

“Russian media outlets, far-right websites, short sellers and doomsday preppers were among those who pushed and amplified conspiracy theories online focused on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” Bloomberg alleges.

According to anti-disinformation for-profit firm Alethea, a wide range of accounts used the bank’s collapse to promote their own agendas.

The firm’s founder Lisa Kaplan told Bloomberg that the claims by venture capitalists speculating the collapse of the bank that were amplified “propagandists and foreign influencers” contributed to the collapse of the bank.

“We assess that these outlets may have increased online panic and contributed to the broader cross-platform spread of false or misleading content about SVB,” Kaplan said to Bloomberg.

“We also assess that conspiratorial narratives may have accelerated panic, which then posed a risk to the broader financial system,” she said.

“This shut down a bank, and I’m concerned about it happening again,” Kaplan added.

Multiple pundits and websites claimed that the bank collapsed because of the prioritizing of environmental, social, and government initiatives over risk management.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Bureaucracies Utterly Incapable Of Making Reasonable Tradeoffs

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | March 7, 2023

Often I focus on bureaucratic regulation of energy because the ability to restrict use of energy is the ultimate societal control. Once they have obtained the ability to restrict use of energy, bureaucrats could, if they choose, take away most of our freedom to enjoy life and return us to the income levels of the Stone Age. Will they stop before going that far, making reasonable tradeoffs to enable the people to flourish economically? Or will they instead pursue environmental purity without concern for the well-being of the populace?

So far all indications are that bureaucracies — and environmental bureaucracies in particular — are utterly incapable of making reasonable tradeoffs. You don’t go into a career as an environmental bureaucrat if you think that your concern for the environment is something that can or should be compromised.

In the U.S., battle is currently joined on multiple fronts as to whether unaccountable bureaucracies get to declare the non-toxic beneficial gas CO2 a “danger” to human health and welfare and thereby claim the ability to shut down the entire fossil fuel energy economy and force a multi-trillion dollar (and probably impossible and impoverishing) energy transition on the people. (One such front is the litigation where I am one of the lawyers, CHECC v. EPA, pending in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.). Also in the U.S., the Supreme Court, in the recent case of West Virginia v. EPA, has announced what they call the “major questions doctrine,” where bureaucrats, at least in areas of “major” economic impact, are to some degree constrained in their exercise of power by the explicit delegations of authority granted them by Congress. To the extent that restrictions on human activity in the name of the environment must gain approval from the Congress, there is at least a forum for competing interests to be heard, for tradeoffs to be considered, and for big mistakes to get corrected before enormous economic damage can be done.

But consider for a moment how it works in the different governance model of the EU, where bureaucrats answer to no one and are virtually unconstrained. This consideration is relevant to the U.S. situation, because the EU governance model of the unconstrained bureaucratic state, at least as to environmental issues, is the one favored by Democrats in our Congress and by the “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court.

Over in the EU, they have decided that nitrogen — or maybe it is “reactive nitrogen” — is a pollutant. And pollutants are bad, and therefore they should be reduced or, better, eliminated. And the bureaucracies have been empowered toward this goal.

Well, here’s the problem. Nitrogen is an essential building block of life, including human life, without which we all starve to death. Every protein is made up of amino acids, and every amino acid has at least one atom of nitrogen in it. Here is a table of the chemical formulas of the main amino acids:

So no nitrogen, no proteins. And no proteins, no people. So where are we going to get the nitrogen to make up our proteins? The air is about 78% nitrogen — how about just take it from there? But it turns out that neither plants nor animals have the ability to make direct use of the nitrogen in the air. Instead, the nitrogen needs to be “fixed” into the soil in some “reactive” form for plants to be able to use it; and then, animals get the nitrogen for their proteins from the plants. Throughout history, humans depended on the luck of the level of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil to grow edible plants to make their proteins. But often the soil quality would be low. One way to up the nitrogen content of soil was animal manure. And then came along the technological advance of figuring out how to combine nitrogen from the air with hydrogen, generally from natural gas, to make ammonia (NH3) for fertilizer that could be spread on the ground. Between widespread use of manure and increase in manufactured ammonia fertilizers, suddenly lack of usable nitrogen in the soil was no longer a limiting factor on ability to grow crops. Over the twentieth century, and particularly the later decades, yields soared.

Here is a stock photo of crops on the same field, with and without nitrogen fertilizer:

But meanwhile over in the EU (and not just there), the battle of the bureaucrats to eliminate nitrogen pollution is in full swing. You probably recall the protests of the Dutch farmers from last summer. From Reuters, June 22, 2022:

Thousands of farmers were gathering in a village near the centre of the Netherlands on Wednesday to protest a government plan to curb nitrogen pollution. . . . The protest in Stroe, 70 kilometres east of Amsterdam, follows the introduction last week of targets for reducing pollution by harmful nitrogen compounds in some areas by up to 70% by 2030. . . . Reductions are necessary in emissions of nitrogen oxides from farm animal manure and use of ammonia for fertilisation, the government says. Nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere help form acid rain, while fertiliser washed into lakes can cause algal blooms that kill marine life.

But how about the need for nitrogen for proteins to keep the human population alive? They seem to have completely lost track of that. This is an area where the absolute goal of “no nitrogen” is completely insane. Sure, too much nitrogen in the wrong form and in the wrong place at the wrong time can be a problem. But nitrogen in sufficient amounts in a form usable in the soil is completely essential to feeding the human population here on earth. Tradeoffs must be made. Yet the bureacuracies, in their zealotry, appear completely incapable of even considering such heritical ideas.

This week the farmer protests have moved on to Belgium, which has joined the war against nitrogen-emitting agriculture. From Reuters, March 3:

Farmers from Belgium’s northern region of Flanders drove thousands of tractors into Brussels on Friday in a protest against a new regional government plan to limit nitrogen emissions. . . . Agricultural organisations said in a joint statement that the nitrogen agreement as it now stands “will cause a socio-economic carnage”.

I’ve got news for the EU bureaucrats: you can put all your farmers out of business, but unless you are planning to starve your own people the food will have to be produced somewhere, and the nitrogen “emissions” will be essentially the same. They’ll just be moved somewhere else. I’m old enough to remember when being self-sufficient in food production and not dependent on food imports was considered a positive good for a country. But that was before environmental zealotry went to the extremes that we see today.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Environmentalism | , | Leave a comment

Putting Europe’s Energy Crisis into Perspective

By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | March 6, 2023

Europe has made it through the winter largely without incident: there were no major blackouts or power outages, and fears of large-scale civil unrest did not come to pass. What’s more, the price of natural gas – which in August was more than 18 times higher than its recent historical average – is now a mere 2.5 times higher.

That’s the good news.

Here’s the bad. We didn’t avoid catastrophe thanks to wise and far-sighted choices on the part of our leaders. We basically got lucky. The winter of 2022/23 was one of the warmest in recorded history, dramatically reducing the demand for natural gas. Had the temperature been normal, things could have gotten fairly dicey.

There’s more bad news. Keeping the lights on and the gas burning didn’t come cheap. As of September last year, European countries had earmarked €768 billion for energy subsidies. OECD countries (of which Europe comprises the lion’s share) spent about 18% of GDP on energy in 2022, compared to only 10% the year before.

As an apocryphal quote has it, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Just how much is €768 billion?

One potential yardstick is the cost of reconstruction for Ukraine, which in December was estimated at €500 billion and may now be as high as €600 or €700 billion. To be clear: this isn’t some estimate of the ‘total cost of the war’ – which would be far, far higher. It’s just the cost of reconstruction.

Nonetheless, it implies that the amount European countries have earmarked for energy subsidies would be enough to repair all the damage to Ukraine’s buildings and infrastructure that’s been sustained since the start of the war – a war that has seen whole towns reduced to rubble.

As the analyst Ralph Schoellhammer notes, European countries imported more LNG last year than Japan, South Korea and China combined. Yet this is set to change as China’s economy comes roaring back after the lockdown hiatus.

While the creeping global recession may temper demand for LNG, rising industrial activity in China will have the opposite effect. Keeping a lid on European gas prices thus requires ongoing ‘demand destruction’ – a fancy way of saying that factories will have to make do with less. (As of December, industrial gas demand is about 25% below the 2013–2019 average.)

Europe’s energy crisis still isn’t over. But we’re admittedly in a better position than I’d thought we’d be – owing mainly to warmer weather.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Berlin’s March 26th Climate Referendum… Unelected Council Could Have Immediate Dictatorial Powers

The road to tyranny begins in Berlin as climate gets framed as a state of emergency

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | March 12, 2023

If Berliners think protesters obstructing traffic by gluing themselves to the streets are a nuisance, just wait until what could be the case after March 26, when Berliners vote on climate referendum.

If the climate referendum is successful, a radical amendment to the current climate protection and energy transition law will be enacted. The online German Pleiteticker.de exclusively has an internal paper and reports of an “empowerment paragraph” in the proposed amended law.

The aim of the referendum is to amend the existing Climate Protection and Energy Transition Act (EWG Bln) in order to force the city of Berlin to achieve climate neutrality by 2030 instead of 2045.

The vote will be binding, which means that if the referendum is successful, the amendment will be enacted into law. The amendment is being pushed by the Green Party and radical groups like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.

Targets would become legal obligations

The amendment would be so radical that even Berlin SPD socialists consider it dangerous and speak of an “empowerment  paragraph” in the law that would transfer immense power to a small group of unelected people, namely a Climate Protection Council appointed by the Berlin Senate.

Concerning paragraph 6 of the new amendment, “Immediate program in the event of non-fulfillment of obligations”, the SPD explicitly  warns that climate targets have been changed to “obligations”, which would mean the Berlin Senate probably would have to implement immediate radical measures to achieve the obligations, even by court order.

Paragraph 14 provides for a “Climate Protection Council” to monitor compliance. It would be appointed by the Berlin Senate and not made up by democratically elected officials.

Good bye to cars in Berlin? 

“There is a danger that the possibility of immediate measures – which, according to the SPD, are not democratically legitimized – will be used excessively”, Pleiteticker warns. “If the climate referendum is successfully implemented, it will therefore not only be expensive for Berliners, but there will be many more restrictions on freedom than under the previous the Socialist-Green Senate – Berliners may then have to say goodbye to their cars completely.”

Reducing flights at Berlin’s BER airport?

According to paragraph 3 on “Climate Protection Obligations”, CO2 reduction should be 70 percent by 2025 and 95 percent by 2030 compared to 1990 levels! “The previous regulation has been changed so that the time periods are dramatically shortened,”

According to Clause 2, even the Berlin airport would be a part of the climate budget. Pleiteticker warns: “So there is a risk that an immediate measure for emissions reduction could be to reduce the number of flights.”

Property owners would be forced to make major renovations

The amendment also calls on the mandatory energy refurbishment of all public buildings by 2030 and the entire state administration would have to be CO2-neutral by 2030.

“Where the money is to come from remains a mystery once again,” Pleiteticker comments.

Paragraph 19, “Use of Renewable Energy”, could also mean the mandatory installation of solar panels for all homeowners. Again, no one knows how all of this would be paid for. Owning a home and property would certainly become unaffordable for many private owners.

Looking at it from a different angle, Berlin could serve as a pilot that would in all likelihood expose the shear folly of rapid climate neutrality once and for all. Maybe a “successful” referendum would be a good lesson for the rest of the world.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Sy Hersh: “Biden Admin Blew Up Nord Stream”

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 17, 2023

No one can say that Seymour Hersh hasn’t earned his spurs as a reporter of U.S. government and military skulduggery. In 1970 he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. In 2003 he accurately disputed the Bush Administration falsehoods about its grounds for invading Iraq. In April of 2004 he reported how U.S. military units in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison were torturing and abusing prisoners. Now, at age 85, “Sy” shows no sign of slowing down.

On February 8 of this year, Hersh reported on his Substack that the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines on September 26, 2022 was ordered by the Biden Administration and carried out by Navy divers. At first glance, Hersh’s report simply confirmed what President Biden unequivocally stated at a Feb. 8, 2022 press conference—that is, “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2; we will bring an end to it.”

Nevertheless, the Biden Administration vehemently denied Mr. Hersh’s report. Last week, in response to these denials, Mr. Hersh gave a long interview in which he reaffirmed his claim that the Biden Administration is responsible for destroying Russia’s gas pipeline, which supplied Germany with a vast source of affordable, clean-burning energy.

Shortly after the sabotage, former CIA Director John Brennan told CNN that Russia was “the most likely suspect” for sabotaging the pipeline—as though destroying its immensely valuable, strategic asset somehow yielded a greater advantage to Russia than simply shutting it down.

IF Hersh is correct and his protected source is telling the truth, it must surely be one of the whackiest things a U.S. President has ever done. Like Cortez burning his ships when he landed in Mexico in 1519 in order to impress upon his men that there was no turning back from their adventure to conquer the country—Biden (or whoever is pulling his marionette strings) ordered the sabotage in order to reinforce Germany’s commitment to the U.S. proxy war against Russia.

How do the German people feel about an American presidential administration wrecking their industry, high standard of living, and consigning them to paying 400% more to heat their homes?

As Hersh describes it, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is indistinguishable from Biden’s “lapdog.” Why? What has the U.S. done for Germany since reunification in 1990 that has instilled such a feeling of slavish docility in a German chancellor today?

As recently as 2015, America’s blundering wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria caused a major refugee crisis in Europe, and it was Germany that bore most of the cost and responsibility. One wonders why the Germans don’t tell the U.S. government to retreat to Washington to deal with its own, innumerable domestic problems of its own making.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

White House Rejects Ceasefire In Ukraine As China Mediation Intensifies

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | March 17, 2023

The White House is already condemning any possible China-brokered peace plan initiative related to Ukraine before it even gets off the ground. Following Beijing confirming on Friday that Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to Moscow on Monday through Wednesday to hold talks with President Vladimir Putin, the Biden administration is expressing concern and alarm over a potentially ‘bad deal’ for Ukraine.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby warned that any unconditional ceasefire would only benefit Putin and his forces as this point. This after it’s also been revealed that Xi is expected to hold a phone call with Ukraine’s Zelensky related to China’s 12-point peace plan. “A cease-fire now is… effectively the ratification of Russian conquest,” Kirby said. “And of course, it would be another continued violation of the U.N. Charter.”

The US is worried that China’s diplomatic intervention and peace plan could result in significant territorial concessions:

White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said Friday that an unconditional cease-fire halting Russia’s offensive in Ukraine would legitimize Moscow’s hold on an estimated 17 percent of Ukrainian territory that was taken by force.

This is chiefly in the east, namely the Donbas region, where Russia has been making gains of late and is poised to take the strategic city of Bakhmut.

But Kirby’s preemptively and outright rejecting any possible ceasefire is at odds with prior repeat US statements that it is solely Zelensky’s decision to make. The White House has lately really promoted the idea that it is not in the background making decisions for Kyiv, but that it’s the Zelensky administration exercising its own sovereign choices concerning war strategy.

But in this instance of Washington trying to slam the door on Chinese-mediated peace, clearly it puts pressure on Zelensky to do the same.

The US may also be alarmed at how open Ukraine appears to be in dealing with China. The Hill notes of the latest positive interaction between China and Ukraine:

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday said he spoke with China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Qin Gang, where the two discussed “the significance of the principle of territorial integrity” and underscored the importance of Zelensky’s “Peace Formula” to end Russia’s war, which in part calls for Russia to withdraw its troops from all the territory it occupies in Ukraine.

But from the moment it was unveiled, the US alleged cynical motives behind Beijing’s peace efforts, despite Zelensky hinting he is open to deepened discussion with Chinese leadership.

Kirby in his fresh remarks said that Moscow will use any possible ceasefire to solidify gains. Then Russian forces will “basically be free to use that ceasefire to further entrench its positions in Ukraine,” he stated.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Sy Hersh Slams ‘Stupid’ NYT Story on ‘Ukrainian’ Trace Behind Nord Stream Blasts

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 18.03.2023

The veteran investigative journalist best known for blowing the lid off major US government lies, from Watergate and the My Lai Massacre to the Syrian gas attacks, penned a series of explosive Substack pieces last month revealing direct US complicity in the Nord Stream pipeline attacks.

Seymour Hersh says he has even more details corroborating the Biden administration’s involvement in the Nord Stream sabotage attacks, but cannot share them for fear of outing his sources.

“Biden authorized the blast. And the people involved know what he did. You know what orders came. I know a lot more about this than I want to say. But I have to protect the people who talk to me,” Hersh said in an interview with Austrian media.

“I know what I wrote is true. I know that it is right. I know the meetings I have described and the details of what happened in Norway. I’ve been involved with the intelligence community for 50 years,” the 85-year-old veteran journalist said, addressing the smear campaign being run against him by the legacy media in the wake of his bombshell Nord Stream-related publications.

Commenting on the story put out by The New York Times and German media earlier this month claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without links to any state blew up the pipelines using a rented commercial yacht, Hersh called this version “stupid,” “unbelievable,” and a “crazy story with no sources.”

The veteran investigative journalist, one of the few in the contemporary US media landscape who still believes in the media’s role as the fourth estate, also took aim at the legacy media for ignoring his story in fealty to power. “If 90 percent of editors were fired, we’d be much better off, because they’re so afraid to write anything critical of Biden, thinking they’re going to put a Republican back in the White House,” he said.

Hersh said the attack on Nord Stream was a “signal” to the Western Europeans from Biden – that if they didn’t “want to go all the way” in the conflict with Russia, the US would cut them off. “He did it. And the price for that will be very high in Europe. Europe will not have the gas it needs and you will have to pay more for it,” he said.

Hersh, a sympathizer of the Democratic Party when it comes to social, environmental, and immigration issues, characterized Biden’s foreign policy as a disaster, with Washington’s badmouthing of China and Russia ultimately helping to “weld the two of them together.” As for the crisis in Ukraine, the journalist expects the NATO proxy conflict to fail. “Russia is going to win this war,” he said.

Seymour Hersh published his first piece on the Nord Stream attacks on February 8, detailing how US Navy divers laid the explosives that blew up the pipelines in June 2022 under the cover of NATO’s BALTOPS drills, with a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance aircraft triggering them to explode three months later. Hersh subsequently wrote several follow-up stories with additional information and historical context.

US and German media rolled out their own stories this month, citing intelligence officials, claiming that a “pro-Ukrainian group” without any ties to Kiev blew up the pipelines independently using a rented yacht. Moscow dismissed these stories as “disinformation” designed to divert attention from the real perpetrators, and repeated long-standing calls for thorough and transparent probes into the acts of terror.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

ICC Has Been ‘Weaponized to Buttress US Imperialism’ & ‘Deserves to be Abolished’

By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 18.03.2023

By issuing “warrants of arrest” against two senior Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has revealed its flagrant Western bias, Professor Alfred de Zayas, former UN independent expert on international order, has stated.

The decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to seek indictment of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin “may be the last nail in the coffin of the ICC’s credibility,” according to Professor Alfred de Zayas, former UN independent expert on international order.

Based in the Dutch city of The Hague, the ICC on March 17 purported to charge Putin, as well as his children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, with “unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population” over reports that Ukrainian children were taken from parts of western Russia that had previously seceded from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation. Moscow has dismissed the ICC’s “warrants of arrest,” with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeatedly stating that Russia is not a party to the ICC and its jurisdiction is not recognized by Moscow.

“No one from the West was ever indicted” after the establishment of the ICC in 2002, Alfred de Zayas pointed out to Sputnik.

“In 20 years it only indicted Africans and for that reason it was rightly called neo-colonial. Now it indicts Putin, revealing its flagrant Western bias. Since the entry into force of the Rome Statute there have been thousands of war crimes under the responsibility of NATO governments… War crimes have been documented in NATO wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Why has no one ever been indicted there?” the author of 10 books, including “Building a Just World Order,” asked.

At this point, the professor rolled off several names that he believed deserved indictment for a plethora of war crimes.

“If the ICC indicts Putin, why not Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Barack Obama (the king of the drones), Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Joe Biden…”

The current prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Asad Ahmad Khan KC, a British lawyer specializing in international criminal law who has served in the post since 2021, has blatantly “demonstrated his bias by discontinuing investigation of war crimes by the US in Afghanistan, but continuing investigations against Taliban,” Professor Alfred de Zayas clarified.

The prolific author also deplored the fact that while in his previous publications he had advocated for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, he has now been made aware of how the ICC has been “politicized and made irrelevant.”

“The ICC would only serve a purpose if it were rigorously independent, objective and professional. The weaponization of the ICC to buttress US imperialism is painful… After 20 years of largely political, not strictly legal activity, the ICC deserves to be abolished. Justice means Justice for all, not only for privileged countries,” Professor de Zayas summed up.

After the International Criminal Court issued its “warrants of arrest” against President Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova announced on Friday that, “Decisions of the International Criminal Court have no significance for our country, including from a legal point of view… Russia is not a party to the ICC’s Rome Statute and bears no obligations under it.”

As for the purported “unlawful transfer” of Ukrainian children, Western officials and media, along with Kiev regime officials, have been claiming for months that Russia has been “stealing” these minors by relocating them from the conflict zone’s front lines. Moscow has repeatedly explained that the civilians are threatened with regular shelling attacks by Ukrainian forces – hence the relocation.

“We do our best to keep young citizens in families, and in cases of the absence or death of parents and relatives, to transfer orphans to guardianship. We are ensuring the protection of their lives and well-being,” the Russian Embassy in the US said last month.

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

The False Tale of TWA 800

Tales of the American Empire | March 16, 2023

Those who control the United States government also control the major media and educational institutions so often create false realities. Anyone who questions obvious lies is demeaned and branded a conspiracy theorist. The best example in modern times occurred in 1996 when a US Navy missile accidentally shot down a huge airliner killing 230 people. The federal government and its lapdog media managed to suppress what happened despite overwhelming physical evidence and hundreds of eyewitnesses.

_________________________________________________

“Allegations that a missile hit Flight TWA 800”; Pierre Salinger news conference; March 13, 1997;    • France-Allegation…  

“Flight TWA 800 Independent Investigation”; C-SPAN; August 27, 1999;    • TWA Flight 800 In…  

“TWA 800 – with former CBS news producer Kristina Borjesson”; Democracy Now; PBS; June 20, 2013; https://www.democracynow.org/embed/st…

“Silenced: Flight 800 and the Subversion of Justice”; July 24, 2013;    • Feature Documenta…  

“TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover up, and the Conspiracy”; Jack Cashill; 2016;    • Video  

“TWA flight 800 NTSB investigator Hank Hughes”; News 12 Long Island; November 24, 2018;    • TWA flight 800 NT…   T

March 18, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

“A Policy Error of Historic Proportions”

1997 letter to President Clinton by US cold warriors who opposed Nato expansion

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | March 17, 2023

When Dr. McCullough and I started this Substack, we agreed that he would primarily focus on COVID-19 scientific-medical scholarship, and I would investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic response is related to other major public policy issues. Occasionally, some of our readers have exhorted me to “stay in our lane”—that is, to remain focused on matters pertaining to the COVID-19 fiasco.

Because Substack is a free speech platform, and because we welcome critical opinions, I have never felt compelled to respond to these exhortations to “stay in our lane.” To some degree, I consider my critics to have a valid point. As Fitzgerald elegantly put it in The Great Gatsby, “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”

On the other hand, I believe my critics are overlooking a point so obvious that it might as well strike them in the head with a baseball bat—namely, the same corrupt government nincompoops responsible for the COVID-19 fiasco are also responsible for every other catastrophic policy blunder they are currently afflicting on mankind.

For example, let’s take the U.S. government’s catastrophic mismanagement of its relations with Russia for the last thirty years. I have closely observed this disaster in the making since I moved to Vienna, Austria for an academic fellowship in 1996. On the plane to Vienna I read the July 15, 1996 Time Magazine cover story about how secret American advisors helped Boris Yeltsin to win that year’s presidential election.

Even at the time I remember thinking it was a bit presumptuous to think that it was perfectly okay for American agents to meddle in a Russian election, and I wondered how Americans would feel if it were reported that Russian agents had provided clandestine assistance to Bill Clinton in his 1996 presidential campaign against Bob Dole.

I read the Time cover story with keen interest, because for many years I’d been an avid student of 20th century Russian history. Yeltsin’s presidency marked the total triumph of American interests with respect to Russia, which had suffered a decisive loss of the Cold War. As I saw it—living in Austria, whose neutrality the Soviets had recognized and respected since 1955—in 1996 it was up to the Americans to welcome and assist Russia in becoming a partner with the West.

The following year, I read the news of how the Clinton Administration had decided to expand NATO membership to the east, ever closer to Russia’s border, and I wondered about the rationale for doing this. Though I’d never really known what to make of Henry Kissinger, I found his “Balance of Power” thesis compelling.

We humans are constantly making assurances of our good will and altruism, but it’s a rare man or woman indeed who doesn’t press his or her advantage if a disagreement arises. This is why the Soviet Premier Khrushchev refused to tolerate U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey, and why President Kennedy refused to tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba.

I therefore believed I understood why 50 major U.S. foreign policy experts—including top cold warriors such as Robert McNamara, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, and Stansfield Turner—wrote a letter to President Clinton on June 26, 1997, stating the following:

We, the undersigned, believe that the current U.S.led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability for the following reasons:

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West, bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement, and galvanize resistance in the Duma to the START II and III treaties; In Europe, NATO expansion will draw a new line of division between the “ins” and the “outs,” foster instability, and ultimately diminish the sense of security of those countries which are not included;

In NATO, expansion, which the Alliance has indicated is open-ended, will inevitably degrade NATO’s ability to carry out its primary mission and will involve U.S. security guarantees to countries with serious border and national minority problems, and unevenly developed systems of democratic government;

In the U.S., NATO expansion will trigger an extended debate over its indeterminate, but certainly high, cost and will call into question the U.S. commitment to the Alliance, traditionally and rightly regarded as a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy.

Because of these serious objections, and in the absence of any reason for rapid decision, we strongly urge that the NATO expansion process be suspended while alternative actions are pursued. These include:

—opening the economic and political doors of the European Union to Central and Eastern Europe;

—developing an enhanced Partnership for Peace program;

—supporting a cooperative NATO-Russian relationship; and

—continuing the arms reduction and transparency process, particularly with respect to nuclear weapons and materials, the major threat to U.S. security, and with respect to conventional military forces in Europe.

Russia does not now pose a threat to its western neighbors and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are not in danger. For this reason, and the others cited above, we believe that NATO expansion is neither necessary nor desirable and that this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post is the first in a series about the war in Ukraine.

March 17, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US and its ‘horrible’ leaders are greatest threat to Western civilization – Trump

RT | March 17, 2023

Former US president Donald Trump slammed “globalists” and the American neoconservative establishment in a video posted to his social media accounts on Thursday, declaring that the US and “some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us” are the “greatest threat to Western civilization today.”

“These globalists want to squander all of America’s strength, blood and treasure, chasing monsters and phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they’re creating right here at home,” the 2024 presidential candidate explained. “These forces are doing more damage to America than Russia and China could ever have dreamed.”

Trump warned that the Biden administration had brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe than ever before by pouring money and weapons into Ukraine. “Every day this proxy battle continues, we risk global war,” he insisted, arguing that a “total cessation of hostilities” should be the “central issue” for the nation.

The next order of business under a second Trump presidency would be a complete overhaul of the State Department, Pentagon, intelligence services, and other key agencies to “fire the Deep Staters and put America first” – followed by “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” Trump has long argued for European countries to shoulder more of the costs and responsibilities associated with the military bloc and recently described the Ukraine conflict as a “vital concern for Europe, but not for the United States.”

Trump reassured his supporters that he was ready to dismantle “the entire globalist neocon establishment that is perpetually dragging us into endless wars pretending to fight for freedom and democracy abroad while they turn us into a third world country, and a third world dictatorship, here at home.” While the 45th president did not name any of the globalists or neocons who have placed highly on his enemies list since taking office in 2016, he insisted that he alone knew “exactly what to do to get the job done.”

Trump is polling neck to neck for the Republican nomination with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has not yet officially declared his 2024 candidacy. DeSantis recently told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that supporting the Ukrainian military was not a “vital interest” of the US. Other presumed Republican candidates, including former UN envoy Nikki Haley and former national security adviser John Bolton, have embraced the Biden administration’s bottomless aid to Kiev.

March 17, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , | Leave a comment

Twitter directed to censor ‘factually correct stories’ on Covid

RT | March 17, 2023

A government-linked academic group pushed Twitter to censor factually correct stories about Covid-19 if they risked “fueling hesitancy” about vaccines, according to the latest batch of internal documents released by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.

Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday, the documents show that from February 2021 onwards, senior Twitter management – including former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth – signed up to a Stanford University initiative that would alert them to the latest “vaccine-related disinformation narratives” spreading on the platform.

Titled ‘The Virality Project,’ the initiative was led by a former CIA employee and comprised academics from several universities, as well as researchers from organizations funded by the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, and the US State Department. The Virality Project also stated on its website that it “built strong ties” with the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies and departments.

In its briefings to Twitter, the Virality Project recommended that “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy” – such as stories of side effects and certain vaccines being banned abroad – be censored. Posts raising concern about vaccine mandates were viewed as “anti-vax” misinformation, while “just asking questions” was deemed “a tactic commonly used by spreaders of misinformation,” and posting about the “surveillance state” was deemed a bannable “conspiracy” theory.

It is unclear how often Twitter acceded to the Virality Project’s demands, though Taibbi said that within a month, the platform’s staff began using the project’s recommendations when evaluating content to censor.

At the time, Twitter’s rules on Covid-19 “misinformation” required a specific post to be “demonstrably false,” while permitting “strong commentary,” opinion writing, and satire. The Virality Project, however, urged Twitter management to ban “repeat offenders” before they even made new posts.

Sharing the leaked emails of White House coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci could “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci and in US public health institutions,” the Virality Project warned in a June 2021 briefing, while a follow-up report highlighted the spread of “worrisome jokes” about harassing the door-to-door vaccine promoters deployed by the administration of US President Joe Biden.

“As Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success,” Taibbi wrote on Friday. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.”

Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously opaque censorship policies. A tranche of files released in December revealed that Twitter censored “legitimate content” on Covid-19 at the direct request of the White House.

March 17, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »