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Death and denial inside the Covid Cult

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom |  May 30, 2023

The writer is in New Zealand

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) has announced that the incidence of atrial fibrillation has increased by 50 per cent over the last decade. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a condition which causes an irregular and often rapid heart rate. It can lead to stroke and heart failure. The BHF did not release any supporting figures by year which might point to a potential cause. Here Dr John Campbell describes both the huge rise in AF and the lack of detailed data as ‘astonishing’.

Here in New Zealand heart disease is at record levels, but politicians of all parties are repeating again and again that there are no excess deaths. As if repeating a lie will make it come true. However the official tally of OECD statistics shows that in 2023 New Zealand deaths are running at an astonishing 18.2 per cent above the long-term average – the second-highest rate among 31 OECD nations.

This doesn’t appear to matter one whit to our politicians, who remain confident they are the one source of truth, fully in control of mainstream media, backed by the medical establishment, able to censor social media, protected from the courts by parliamentary privilege and not required to answer any questions.

It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that all these are recognised characteristics of cult leaders who systematically manipulate their followers and seek to exercise total control. To say that cults do not end well would be an understatement. Once your followers are sufficiently prepped to ignore fact, any crooked and perverted manipulation becomes a possibility.

Once indoctrinated, it is difficult to persuade cult followers they have been duped. Leaders ensure that every event that runs counter to their ideology is neatly fitted into their world view whether based on fact or not. It becomes especially damaging when the force of law is used to ensure compliance and eliminate redress.

You can hardly avoid news of sudden-onset illness or unexpected deaths in the daily newspapers or among friends, but there is always an innocuous-sounding cause on offer. If considered rationally, the unprecedented number of unusual deaths would render these excuses implausible. However, cults don’t do rational.

This brings us to a rather sad realisation: with all the elected political parties complicit in Covid policy, it is almost ludicrous to believe that the coming election will change anything. Prepandemic, our current situation was almost inconceivable, but quietly disaster has been creeping up on us.

Published in 2020, an article in Harvard University Health Publishing gives us a hint. Senior Editor Robert Shmerling argues that it is not possible or even practical as a medical practitioner to be guided by ‘do no harm’ as the Hippocratic oath suggests, instead saying: ‘You can’t tell ahead of time whether a test or treatment will “do no harm”.’ In other words, it has become widely accepted in medical practice that adverse events are inevitable and unpredictable. This is an argument which seeks to justify the irresponsible push for risky and dangerous biotech medicine and experimentation at any cost.

So what will change minds? When you look at Ponzi schemes, dictators and cults, the answer is always the same. They end when total disaster strikes. Just how high will excess deaths have to rise before the powers that be accept that a giant mistake has been made?

Inside the Covid cult there are a few cracks appearing in the ‘safe and effective’ narrative. It has quietly become acceptable for doctors to advise their patients privately that they might be vaccine-injured, for pathologists to advise the children of friends that they should avoid Covid vaccination, for vaccinologists to say they won’t be getting any more boosters. These are small steps which indicate a direction of change and that those at the health front line know something has gone radically wrong.

However, the political and media endorsement of biotechnology remains near-total. Given the weight of Covid science publishing, there is no justification for this.

The suggestion that New Zealand’s pandemic policy has been world-beating is a hollow lie, pandering to notions of national pride and allegiance. Like the medicos who think it is impossible to ‘do no harm’, politicians are denying the obvious. By doing so they are tacitly endorsing inevitable deaths in the course of policy. This is a militaristic, self-obsessed and flawed way to think – glorious sacrifice, ‘Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die’.

Pandemic policy has stolen our bodily autonomy, our right of medical choice. It has overruled nature’s design of immunity and health. It has debased truth, substituting government pronouncement. It has seized control of children from families. It has inserted propaganda into education. It has rendered employees subservient. It has cancelled dialogue.

In short, it has taken the world in which we thought we lived and turned it upside down. It is no good thinking this is a battle between right and left. That too is a story to keep everyone distracted from the real issues. It is a question of what kind of fundamental individual rights can we retain? Rights that we previously took for granted.

By framing the world as vaccinated vs unvaccinated, political power backed by pharmaceutical money has redrawn ideological boundaries along the lines of novel biotechnologies. This is a giant act of deception.

When I was growing up, we gave thanks for the harvest. The modern age has joined in the cult of biotechnology which seems to offer supremacy over nature, but it hasn’t worked. To succeed, to know, to enjoy, you have to work with nature.

I have just finished reading The History of the World in 100 Plants by Simon Barnes. Barnes concludes that we are descended from the biodiversity and bioabundance of plants: ‘Look at this planet and its uncountable plants. We owe them everything.’  We depend entirely on the natural world around us, yet biotechnology is seeking to overthrow this mutual interdependency and substitute an ephemeral figment of man’s imagination and pride – an impossible dream and a hideous nightmare that puts our continued existence at risk.

Voting for today’s crop of politicians is a forlorn hope. It is a blank cheque for continued biotechnology experimentation on ourselves. This is not a time to give up our rights, and hand them to the same politicians who have already laughed at medical choice and mocked those suffering serious adverse events. They don’t deserve our vote. Under their leadership it could all begin again.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | , , | 1 Comment

Zero healthy young adults died of Covid-19 – Israel

RT | May 29, 2023

Not a single healthy person under age 50 died of Covid-19 in Israel, according to data released by the country’s ministry of health in response to a freedom of information request from lawyer Ori Xabi.

“Why were all the extreme measures of school closures, vaccination of children, and lockdowns needed?” internal medicine specialist Yoav Yehezkelli, a prominent critic of Israel’s Covid-19 policies, asked the Epoch Times.

In addition to requesting the number of Covid-19 deaths that had occurred in patients under 50 with no underlying health conditions, Xabi also asked the ministry to provide the average age of patients who died of the disease, segmented by vaccination status, as well as the annual number of cardiac arrest cases between 2018 and 2022.

The average age of fatalities among those vaccinated against Covid-19 was 80.2 years, while the average for the unvaccinated was 77.4, according to the ministry.

However, the MoH claimed to be unable to provide cardiac arrest information for the years 2021 and 2022, explaining that the information had not yet been transferred to them.

A study published last year analyzing data from the Israel National Emergency Medical Services found a shocking 25% spike in emergency services calls due to cardiac arrests for patients aged 16 to 39 taking place from January to May 2021.

However, Sharon Elroy-Pries, head of Public Health Services for the Ministry of Health, condemned efforts to draw a connection to the start of the Covid-19 vaccination program in December 2020 and denied that there had been an increase in cardiac arrests during that time, or any increase in deaths of young people.

Cardiologist Retsef Levi, one of the authors of the study, pointed out that the ministry had claimed not to have information on cardiac arrests for 2021 and 2022, meaning one of the two claims had to be false.

While the MoH insisted the data it provided to Xabi regarding patients aged 18 to 49 was limited to cases in which an epidemiological investigation had been completed, it is known to have access to a database that includes extensive data on all patients, including underlying conditions, irrespective of whether an epidemiological investigation was performed.

Yehezkelli called the MoH’s response “a bit naive,” questioning why it had withheld the full data, but pointed out that the statistics vindicated government critics. “It was definitely a disease that actually only endangered the elderly,” he said, pointing out that the MoH’s numbers showed the average age of death from Covid-19 was 80.

The MoH has promised to supply all-cause mortality data segmented by vaccination status and age by the end of the month, following more than two years of stonewalling in response to Xabi’s freedom of information requests.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Is BBC Verify Britain’s Answer to the Disinformation Governance Board?

BY TONY MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 29, 2023

A surprise popped up on my Twitter feed last week – the launch of BBC Verify, as announced by BBC journalist Marianna Spring. Apparently, the state broadcaster is now going to verify what is fact and what is fake news. Better late than never, I suppose, given the BBC’s relentless promotion of pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine misinformation during the Pandemic. However, as the presentation went on it revealed a somewhat different agenda – less of the fact-checking and more of the “searching for conspiracy theories from the far-right”. This was in support of the noble goal of protecting the British people from outbreaks of civil disorder supposedly linked to ‘conspiracy theories’, like the Jan 6th brouhaha. And Spring herself is going to get her hands dirty, at least as much as can be done using such tools as Google Maps and Facebook, along with 60 other BBC journalists. (How much is this costing?)

There was something very familiar about Ms. Spring for U.S. audiences. We had a ‘disinformation tsar’ just like her a year ago in the form of Nina Jankowicz.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decided last year that it had fulfilled its primary mission of securing our borders by throwing them wide open, and instead decided to take on real issues such as rooting out disinformation to protect the homeland. In April 2022, DHS Top Man, Alejandro Majorkas, announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) and the hiring of disinformation ‘expert’ Nina Jankowicz to run it.

Ms. Jankowicz was not exactly well qualified for the job of rooting out fake news. She agreed with the 51 former Intelligence officials who proclaimed the laptop owned by Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation, when in fact the officials’ statement turned out to be disinformation. Ditto the Steele dossier procured by the Hilary campaign to trash Trump in the 2016 Presidential race. She believed this dodgy dossier was true even after reporting in 2017 showed it was not, and after 2019 when the Mueller Report confirmed this beyond doubt. In an unfortunate Tik Tok video, Jankowicz channeled Mary Poppins with an updated version of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ which referenced Democrat Party talking points on Ukraine and Covid. None of this is surprising as Jankowicz’s professional career up until that point had been spent in traditional Democrat Party training grounds such as the National Democratic Institute.

The brief of the DGB (one letter different from the KGB as the Wall Street Journal pointed out) was remarkably similar to that of BBC Verify, although it was based in a state agency as opposed to the state broadcaster. It intended to put a government imprimatur on what was fact and what was disinformation. To most Americans outside of Washington DC this is anathema. Americans believe the arbiter of truth is the individual, not the state, and that belief is enshrined in our Constitution as well as our laws.

Within three weeks of being born, the Disinformation Board was dead. The battle was not won on philosophical or constitutional grounds, but because of the ridicule inspired by Jankowicz’s antics. She came across as a less sympathetic version of Elizabeth Warren, if such a thing is possible, with the icing on the cake being the Mary Poppins video. Although in the minority in both the House and the Senate, Republicans killed the Board by mostly playing or referring to the video.

But a word of warning to those thinking that laughing at Spring and the rest of the BBC Verifiers will bring about another easy victory for free speech. The DHS may have ‘paused’ the Board and got rid of Ms. Jankowicz in May 2022, but the need to fight against certain points of view under the guise of protecting the American people from ‘far-right’ extremism is still being pursued only in more devious ways.

Last week, for example, the Media Research Center published some interesting reporting on the DHS. The DHS has changed the focus of the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP) from real terrorism to the political Right. In the last two years, it has provided $40 Million in funding for 80 projects by various public institutions and private organisations that seem to be operating under the assumption that ‘far-right’ includes 50% of the American population, and that it is directly tied to white supremacy. One particularly disgraceful chart, taken from material developed by one of the grantees – the University of Dayton – shows the Republican Party, Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, Prager U and Quillette, among other perfectly respectable organisations, linked directly to Nazi-supporting fringe organisations.

Given that the organisations at the top of this pyramid supposedly pose the biggest threat to the homeland since Al-Qaeda, it’s remarkable that no-one seems to have more than a hazy idea of who they are. Even the Southern Poverty Law Center has acknowledged that the number of these supposedly dangerous, far-right organisations is down and identifies the threat as follows: “as organisational loyalty has dwindled and the internet has become white nationalism’s organising principle, however, the ideology is best understood as a loose coalition of social networks orbiting online propaganda hubs and forums.” Of course, such vagueness is ideal for the anti-disinfo grant applications – the vaguer things are, the easier it is to conjure up far-right conspiracies. No need to bother with real terrorists coming through our open borders when shadowy people linked to right-of-centre media companies and free speech organisations represent the real threat.

This is BBC Verify’s view as well, if their launch video is anything to go by. Spring defines their journalistic approach as setting up fake accounts on social media, aka ‘trolls’, to monitor sinister stuff going on in chat rooms, FB groups, and no doubt Twitter, now Elon Musk has gone over to the dark side with his support for free speech, a tool of white supremacy. Spring is promising a podcast called ‘Marianna in Conspiracyland’ inspired by Alice In Wonderland (she has to go down various alt-media rabbit holes to chase the conspiracy theorists).

The predilection of these two young women an ocean apart for using children’s literature to articulate their concerns about disinformation is not a coincidence. Our real problems in both the U.S. and the U.K. are largely the responsibility of our dysfunctional governments – porous borders, high inflation, rampant crime, Net Zero, the blowback from the disastrous lockdown policy. The narrative that the real threat to our prosperity and well-being is lurking in dark corners of the Internet is essentially a fairy story.

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

‘Climate’ activists, thinly veiled agents of the state, have received broad license to disrupt and vandalise

The question to ask of every leftist protest, is not why nobody is stopping it, but whose interests it serves.

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | May 29, 2023

It is hard not to laugh at the self-gluing climate lunatics of Letzte Generation.

Their members often make incredibly naive public statements and beclown themselves with stupid public actions, their environmental concerns are incoherent and unsupported, and their membership is larded with young middle-class women who quickly forget their apocalyptic obsessions when the school holidays roll around.

This makes it easy to overlook the fact that they are deeply embedded in the dense NGO climate-change network. Key activists receive salaries from a Berlin organisation called the Wandelbündnis (the ‘Alliance for Change’), which channels money from the Climate Emergency Fund. The latter, co-founded by American oil heiress Aileen Getty, funds similar activist organisations in other countries, like Renovate Switzerland and Just Stop Oil in the United Kingdom. It’s an international web of activist organisations funded from the very centre of empire – where, mysteriously, it seems that such protests rarely if ever occur.

It can’t be an accident that Letzte Generation have focused on blocking traffic in Berlin, precisely as Robert Habeck, the Green Minister for Economic Affairs, seeks to realise a series of long-planned and economically catastrophic energy transition measures for the Federal Republic. Their constant protests maintain an environment of disorder and hysteria in the German capital and ensure that climate change never leaves the headlines. It also can’t be an accident that the German state should work very hard to maintain a veneer of opposition to these obnoxious protesters, while never actually doing very much. Olaf Scholz used a public appearance to call the activists “crazy” and they responded by smearing Berlin SPD headquarters in orange paint. The most significant enforcement action to date unfolded several days later, as Munich prosecutors ordered broad-scale raids on the activists’ apartments, shut down their website and seized some of their assets. This provoked a bizarre condemnation from Amnesty International and even prompted the United Nations to demand the protection of climate activists. It did little stop Letzte Generation, however, who capitalised on the publicity and continued protesting as before.

In fact, as the Berliner Zeitung points out, the police and state prosecutors have adopted an overwhelmingly lenient approach to Letzte Generation, investigating and charging the traffic-blocking activists for the lesser offence of “coercion,” rather than the much more serious “deprivation of liberty,” which is what trapping thousands of motorists in their cars actually amounts to. And when they are tried even on these lesser offences, activists generally receive nothing but fines from a complicit judiciary and are rarely imprisoned. This is important, because there aren’t very many of them; if the state started systematically imprisoning Letzte Generation members, the traffic blocking would soon be over with.

Protests against authoritarian hygiene measures were systematically outlawed all across the West during the Corona pandemic. In Germany, protesters faced incredible police brutality and substantial sentences, and political police investigated their organisations as alleged “enemies of democracy.” While leftist protesters like Letzte Generation could far more easily be classified as anti-democratic, they’re not opponents of the state at all, but rather its loosely affiliated agents. Police and prosecutors could stop the blockades and the vandalism at any time, but they won’t. Letzte Generation and its sister organisations are actors in an elaborate charade, intended to lend a populist democratic aura to climate protection policies, which flow not from the people but from unaccountable out-of-sight think-tanks, NGOs and bureaucratic institutions. Their radical rhetoric also allows the truly crazy politicians managing the energy transition to appear reasonable and moderate. We’re seeing before us the emergence of a totally new kind of authoritarianism, one which clothes itself in the forms and orders of liberal democracy, while imposing top-down policies on a confused and disoriented citizenry. The authoritarianism of the DDR was far more direct and hence more easily opposed.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

American Officials Erase US Role in Empowering Their New Number One Enemy China

By Conor Gallagher – naked capitalism – May 28, 2023 

As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.

Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.

One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.

The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process. Now they claim taking on China will bring back jobs and help tackle climate change. Nevermind that much of the American industry now being relocated out of China is going to other “low-cost” countries or that the US war machine is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.

How are Yellen and Sullivan portraying the US as an innocent bystander that never could have foreseen the loss of US manufacturing to China?

Here’s Yellen speaking on April 20 at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

Over the past few decades, China has experienced an impressive economic rise. Between 1980 and 2010, China’s economy grew by an average of 10 percent per year. This led to a truly remarkable feat: the rise of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s rapid catch-up growth was fueled by its opening-up to global trade and pursuit of market reforms. … China has long used government support to help its firms gain market share at the expense of foreign competitors.

…The actions of China’s government have had dramatic implications for the location of global manufacturing activity. And they have harmed workers and firms in the U.S. and around the world…. China’s unfair economic practices have resulted in the over-concentration of the production of critical goods inside China.

And here’s Sullivan in his big speech about the new US international economic policy  speaking at the Brookings Institution last month:

The so-called “China shock” that hit pockets of our domestic manufacturing industry especially hard—with large and long-lasting impacts—wasn’t adequately anticipated and wasn’t adequately addressed as it unfolded.

First off, to the point of government support. China no doubt provides subsidies for firms largely in fields deemed strategic. The US also does so (see: Inflation Reduction Act, oil, agriculture, auto, etc.).

No doubt that China has bent and broken WTO rules, but that was working just fine for US officials until it wasn’t. Now that officials like Sullivan have woken up to the fact that offshoring everything to China was a disastrous long-term security plan, they say it’s Beijing’s fault for the “China shock.” But contrary to Sullivan’s claim such an outcome couldn’t have been foreseen, it was “adequately anticipated.” Here’s a piece from the New York Times back in 2000 titled “Unions March Against China Trade Deal”:

Thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers, auto workers and other union members rallied on Capitol Hill and swept through the halls of Congress today in a show of muscle intended to block a trade agreement with China.

Their message, conveyed by union leaders and rank-and-file members who came from as far away as Michigan and Nebraska, was that trade was working for American corporations but not for American workers.

… [the union members] said, they are only opposing a deal with a country that does not respect workers’ rights and would stop at nothing, in their view, to steal the jobs that are the backbone of the American middle class.

It was obvious at the time what was happening; the real story is well-known, but just to recap: it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018.

Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce tell the story from a national security perspective in a 2019 piece at The American Conservative. Using old US telecom equipment company Lucent Technologies as a starting point. In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Labs into Lucent, which began to buy up companies in an effort to keep its stock price high. Lucent also lended money to risky startups who would then buy Lucent equipment. Then came the dot-com bust, and the company, already dealing with accounting scandals, began massive layoffs. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Stoller and Kunce write:

In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers in China were making virtually all of it. American telecom capacity would never return.

Lucent didn’t recover its former position. Chinese entrants, subsidized heavily by the Chinese state and using Western technology, underpriced Western companies. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. In 2006, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel bought Lucent, signifying the end of American control of Bell Labs. Today, Huawei, with state backing, dominates the market.

The erosion of much of the American industrial and defense industrial base proceeded like Lucent. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government’s ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.

Can you blame Beijing? If the US wants to sell off their industry, wouldn’t it be crazy not to take it? The fact is the Chinese used the system Washington built against them, and now the likes of Sullivan and Yellen cry foul.

Long Yongtu, China’s chief negotiator for WTO accession has defended Beijing’s role in the country’s economy, saying “when we promised to adopt a market economy, we made it absolutely clear that it would be a socialist market economy.”

The loss of US manufacturing decimated the country’s research capacity. It means the US relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly behind the increased defense spending in the first place.

Of course, Yellen and Sullivan admit no mistakes by the US ruling class. It was impossible to know this would happen, they say, despite warnings at the time that this very situation would arise.

Not surprisingly, when Politico did a 20-year-anniversary story on China’s accession to the WTO, most US lawmakers didn’t want to talk about their vote to normalize trade relations with China in 2000 (which paved the way to the WTO).

But four American “experts” who did the planning and negotiating of the normalization of trade ties with China have zero regrets. That’s hardly surprising as it seems the number one qualification to become an expert is the ability to never admit being wrong. It also probably didn’t hurt that all these experts were rewarded with better positions and often cashed in afterwards.

***

Yellen and Sullivan also play up how confronting China is part of their newfound focus on minerals critical for a green economy, but what they’re really doing is disguising another lack of foresight by American elites. Sullivan says critical minerals are “the backbone of the clean-energy future” and that “clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022.”

Many of these minerals are controlled by China and are also critical for the US defense industry. Who could have foreseen? Here’s another tidbit from that 2000 New York Times article:

In an effort to counter the unions’ message, the administration released a Commerce Department study showing that every state would benefit from increased trade with China. And Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, endorsed the agreement, saying that among its other benefits it would be in the nation’s security interests.

How has that worked out? Well, it’s now unclear. As Army Technology points out:

The US Department of the Interior released a list of 35 minerals it deems essential to the economic and national security in 2018 (updated in 2022), amongst them many REEs. The problem for the US is that the local production of these materials is hugely limited.

The extent of reliance on imports varies from mineral to mineral. Beryllium is mainly used to create lightweight material used in fighter jets, lithium is essential for modern battery production and tin is used in electronics, including soldier semiconductors, a sector that is projected to reach a value of $17.5bn by 2030.

Whereas the US produces some of the minerals mentioned above, it entirely relies on China and other countries for many other supplies. Cerium is used in batteries and in most devices with a screen and magnets forged from neodymium and samarium are impervious to extreme temperatures that are used in fighter jet fin actuators, missile guidance, control systems, aircraft and tank motors, satellite communications and radar and sonar systems.

Here again, it was the US that moved rare earth and other mineral processing to China, that sold off mining operations to Chinese companies, and reaped the rewards for doing so. As Stoller and Kunce describe:

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA’s investment wasn’t restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.

China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth,” to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.

Two of Xiaoping’s sons-in-law approached investment banker Archibald Cox, Jr. in the mid-1990s to use his hedge fund as a front for their companies to buy the U.S. rare-earth magnet enterprise. They were successful, purchasing and then moving the factory, the Indiana jobs, the patents, and the expertise to China. This was not the only big move, as Cox later moved into a $12 million luxury New York residence. The result is remarkably similar to Huawei: the United States has entirely divested of a technology and market it created and dominated just 30 years ago. China has a near-complete monopoly on rare earth elements, and the U.S. military, according to U.S. government studies, is now 100 percent reliant upon China for the resources to produce its advanced weapon systems.

And now as the US presses the situation in Taiwan and enacts chip controls (and pressures other countries to do the same), how is China considering retaliating? From Nikkei Asia:

China is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.’s advantage in the high-tech arena.

Japan specializes in making high-performance magnets from rare earths while the U.S. produces products that use the magnets… Washington has since moved to forge a rare-earth supply chain on U.S. soil. China’s share of all rare earths produced globally dropped to roughly 70% last year from about 90% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

At the same time, China still holds a tight grip on processing rare earths. Most rare earths extracted in the U.S. go to China for refining before being shipped back to the U.S.

The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have added roughly 77,000 jobs so far, according to Jack Conness who does a neat job tracking the investments. That’s still a far cry from the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018, and it doesn’t look like many more will be returning despite the push to move production out of China as ties deteriorate. There’s the problem of automation, which FiveThirtyEight noted back in 2016:

 Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.

And there’s always the pesky issue of American workers asking for decent wages. Both Yellen and Sullivan waxed on about “friendshoring” – relocating from China to friendly countries, which also happen to be low-wage. This is evidence of more short term thinking and prioritizing profits. Recall that China was initially thought of as friendly, and the selling point was that gifting it American industry would only make it friendlier.

Companies from China are already out in front of the friendshoring trend and are increasingly setting up shop in Mexico in order to be closer to their biggest market in the US.

Sullivan and Yellen don’t touch on that or just how difficult this reorganizing of supply chains will be. A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European  firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China.

Additionally, China remains the main player in East Asian production networks, which makes manufacturing electronics products, for example, without Chinese parts and components increasingly unrealistic. Meanwhile, the US is still the largest source of inward foreign direct investment flows into ASEAN. From The Diplomat :

These different roles played by the U.S. and China in the East Asian economic system are a result of the distinct fundamentals of their domestic economies. China has pursued a production – and investment – based growth model in the past few decades, while the United States is a post-industrial, heavily financialized economy, sustained by high consumption and its central position in the global financial order. These fundamentals will prove to be harder to shape than unilaterally altering trade policies.

On the one hand, this means that attempts at isolating China are limited by the economic realities. “Friend-shoring,” “nearshoring,” and newfound industrial policies in the United States (and Europe) could very well lead to the diversification of U.S. imports, lessen the perceived national security risks associated with import dependence, and provide economic benefits to ASEAN countries by shifting some manufacturing activity from China to Southeast Asia. However, these policies are unlikely to fundamentally challenge China’s central position in regional trade and production networks in the mid-term. As Apple’s struggles in diversifying the production of the iPhone show, China-centered production networks are not easy to replicate in other countries, as Chinese logistics and suppliers possess significant advantages.

With that in mind, it’s likely this ends up as another situation similar to the purchasing of Russian oil via India:

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

50 injured as NATO troops clash with Serb demonstrators

RT | May 29, 2023

NATO forces attacked a group of demonstrators in the majority-Serb town of Zvecan in Kosovo, RT Balkan reported on Monday. Stun grenades and tear gas were deployed, and around 50 people were injured.

Serb demonstrators staged a sit-down protest outside municipal buildings in Zvecan, Zubin Potok and Leposavic on Monday morning, preventing ethnic Albanian officials from taking office after elections boycotted by the Serb population as illegitimate.

Kosovo police officers arrived on the scene in Zvecan, backed up by members of NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR). The heavily-armored NATO troops surrounded the demonstrators, who refused to disperse, RT Balkan’s journalist on the scene reported.

KFOR then threw stun grenades and tear gas into the crowd, provoking a riot. The Serb demonstrators pelted rocks at the NATO troops, and received baton strikes and rubber bullets in return. Fifty people went to a hospital in nearby Mitrovica, and two were admitted to the emergency room.

25 KFOR soldiers were injured in the melee, Italy’s ANSA news agency said. 11 of those reportedly hurt were Italians.

The protesters broke up shortly after the clashes, vowing to return and continue their demonstration on Tuesday.

The latest flareup in tensions began when local mayors in four majority Serb towns in northern Kosovo resigned last year after authorities in Pristina announced plans to force residents to switch their Serbian identity documents for Kosovo-issued ones. The Serb population of these four towns boycotted elections in April in which four ethnic Albanian mayors won with a turnout of less than 4%.

Nevertheless, the government in Pristina treated the votes as legitimate and the mayors were installed on Friday amid fierce opposition from the Serbs, who view the debacle as a naked power grab aimed at driving them from the breakaway province.

Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008 with the support of the US and many of its NATO allies. Kosovo was historically a province of Serbia, and Belgrade – along with many world governments – does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state.

While NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and a number of Kosovo’s Western backers have urged Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leader, Albin Kurti, to de-escalate the situation in the north of the province, he has apparently not heeded their warnings. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said on Sunday that Kurti “longs and dreams of being a [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky.”

Due to the clashes, Serbia placed its army on high alert, moving some units closer to the region’s border. Defense Minister Milos Vucevic said that “it is clear that terror against the Serb community in Kosovo is happening.”

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Zelensky wants to sanction Iran ‘for 50 years’

The Cradle | May 29, 2023

President Volodymyr Zelensky drafted and submitted a law to Ukraine’s parliament calling for the imposition of sanctions against Iran for a period of 50 years, Ukrainian state-media reported on 28 May.

“The document has already been submitted for consideration by the parliament’s leadership and the Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence,” state-media outlet Ukrinform said on Monday.

The draft was initially put forward on Saturday, 27 May.

“To approve the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine dated May 27, 2023 ‘On the application of sectoral special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions) to the Islamic Republic of Iran,’ put into effect by Presidential Decree No. 308/2023 dated May 27, 2023,” Ukrinform cites the draft as reading.

“The sanctions are to be imposed for 50 years,” it adds.

According to Kiev, the early hours of Sunday saw a massive Russian attack against Ukrainian forces, which involved the use of over 50 Iranian Shahed drones.

The Ukrainians claimed to have shot most of them down.

“This was the largest-ever drone attack on the capital since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, particularly using Shahed loitering munitions,” Ukrainian media cited a military official as saying.

Ukraine has consistently condemned Iran for its alliance with Russia, accusing Tehran of supplying military assistance, namely its Shahed 136 drones, to Russian forces fighting the Ukrainian army.

The Islamic Republic has denied supplying any drones to Russia during the conflict, admitting only to deliveries made before the war in Ukraine.

In November last year, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian revealed that Tehran and Kiev had agreed to hold a meeting to discuss the drone issue diplomatically but that the US and its allies sabotaged the meeting.

The US pressured Ukraine to cancel the talks because of its wish to take advantage of the Iranian drone issue and use it as part of its policy against the Islamic Republic, Abdollahian claimed at the time.

Iran has repeatedly asserted its neutrality in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and has, on many occasions, offered to mediate between the two sides.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | 1 Comment

Iran to unveil hypersonic missile ‘soon’: IRGC commander

Press TV – May 29, 2023

Iran’s Mersad air defense system fires a missile during the final stage of a massive maneuver, codenamed ‘Guardians of Velayat Sky-98,’ in the central province of Semnan.
A top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) says the country will unveil a homegrown hypersonic ballistic missile in the near future.

“The hypersonic missile has passed its tests and will be unveiled soon,” Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Division, said on Monday.

He added that the new missile is capable of bypassing all air defense missile systems and targeting the enemy’s anti-missile systems.

The IRGC commander described the development of the missile as a “great leap in the field of missiles.”

“The hypersonic missile has a high speed (around 12-13 Mach) and can maneuver both in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere,” Hajizadeh said.

Hypersonic missiles can fly at speeds at least five times faster than the speed of sound, making them virtually impossible to intercept.

Back in November, Hajizadeh for the first time announced that Iran had developed a homegrown hypersonic ballistic missile capable of penetrating advanced aerial defense shields and striking designated targets.

Iran on Tuesday successfully test-launched its most advanced Khorramshahr-class ballistic missile, called Kheibar, a medium-range precision-guided missile that can carry a 1,500 kg warhead.

Kheibar is a liquid-fueled missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers and a warhead weighing 1,500 kilograms, designed by the Ministry of Defense’s Aerospace Industries Organization.

Despite being under sanctions for decades, Iran has become self-sufficient in designing and manufacturing different types of military equipment, including missiles.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | | Leave a comment

Washington’s obsession with crushing Russia has dismantled its Middle East agenda

By Robert Inlakesh | RT | May 29, 2023

Once the undisputed hegemonic power in the Middle East, thought to be indispensable for the security and success of a range of regional leaderships, the US has been fading into the background to the benefit of its adversaries.

As armed conflict erupted between NATO-backed Ukraine and Russia in February of 2022, the Joe Biden administration in Washington decided to throw its weight behind Kiev and focus on a project to bog down Moscow, while unleashing wave after wave of sanctions. Despite spending at least $75 billion dollars on assistance to Ukraine and making Russia the most sanctioned nation on earth, the US has failed to bring Moscow to its knees. In fact, one could say that it is the US that has been cut down to size in the global arena, especially in the Middle East, an area it once considered its own backyard.

As the months pass, blow after blow has been inflicted on US power in the Middle East. In direct opposition to Washington’s agenda, the Syrian Arab Republic was readmitted to the Arab League following a 12-year hiatus, paving the way to end the crisis in Syria, which the US seeks to prolong. China has also entered Middle East politics in a dramatic way, brokering an Iranian-Saudi rapprochement back in March, and this then spurred a wider normalization wave. Although the US attempted to play off the Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement as an acceptable and welcomed move, this has now clearly worked to collapse Washington’s long-term effort towards regional supremacy, which was based on feeding a proxy conflict between the two powers.

The failure of US sanctions

Western leaders publicly predicted that Russia’s economy would collapse under sanctions, a result which clearly has not materialized, with the IMF predicting the Russian economy will grow. Similarly, the US “maximum pressure” sanctions that were first introduced against Iran under the Trump administration, were expected to severely hinder the Islamic Republic’s ability to continue its developments in the defense field, but have failed to achieve those goals.

Russia is now exporting more oil than it did in 2021, as its relations with China, the primary global competitor to the US, have advanced. Gulf States have also repeatedly let the US down and refrained from yielding to pressure to cut oil production. There is also the example of Algeria, which has become Italy’s largest gas supplier and raked in over $50 billion dollars in oil and gas revenues during 2022 alone, even as it retains close relations with Moscow. And when it comes to the West’s ban on Russian gold bullion, the UAE, Türkiye and China have reportedly stepped in to fill the gap.

However, perhaps the worst blowback against Russia sanctions has been the nullification of previous limits to Moscow-Tehran economic relations. The two nations are already the most sanctioned on earth, so they need not worry about the potential consequences from their trade, which has encouraged further cooperation between them. Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi signed a deal to finance an Iranian railway line as part of a North-South Transport Corridor.

Failed propaganda

The Biden administration has employed hardline propaganda tactics in order to demonize Russia and lionize Ukraine. Although for some Western audiences the arguments set forth may have proven effective, in the global community and especially the Middle East, such rhetoric is tiresome and clearly hypocritical.

After having illegally invaded Iraq, inflicting around a million deaths, over a concoction of factually-challenged conspiracy theories about weapons of mass destruction, it comes off as laughable that the US is now claiming to oppose illegal invasions. Former Bush administration officials, such as Condolezza Rice, have even appeared on national television shows in the US to condemn illegal invasions of foreign countries. Even former US President George W. Bush seemingly condemned the “holy unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean of Ukraine” in a Freudian slip.

The US has positioned itself now as being opposed to the illegal occupation of foreign territory, in addition to claiming it stands in principle against annexation. When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked by a CNN correspondent whether his government supported the annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights by Israel, he answered: “Look, leaving aside the legalities of that question, as a practical matter, the Golan is very important to Israel’s security,” again demonstrating Washington’s double standards. Washington continues to maintain its recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory, which not only defies international law, but also the majority opinion at the United Nations.

The faltering image of the US

From the perspective of Middle Eastern nations, the US is overcommitted to the conflict in Ukraine, even as they have refrained from taking a clear side and instead remained neutral for the most part. Neither the people nor the governments of these countries buy the platitudes espoused by US officials when it comes to Ukraine. The stark difference between the way Palestinians and Ukrainians are portrayed for the exact same actions are enough to make eyes roll.

Now that China is presenting opportunities for countless Middle East nations, especially in the economic sphere, the US has a real competitor. However, the US continues to operate as if the world has not undergone a dramatic shift and refuses to rein in its allies. Ukraine in some respects is getting the special treatment that Israel has enjoyed for years: unlimited aid with few or no questions asked. In the case of Israel, as its government proceeds with introducing controversial legal reforms, takes steps to change the status quo at the al-Aqsa Mosque and pursues hardline far-right policies against the Palestinian people, all coming at a cost to Washington itself, the Biden administration refuses to put it in its place. What Israel is currently doing is embarrassing its own Arab allies that recently normalized ties, even threatening to put a wedge in relations with the likes of neighboring Jordan.

It is this refusal to recalibrate that is not only costing the US its influence, but also evaporating the prize of bringing Israel and Saudi Arabia together, which has clearly been a foreign policy achievement goal dear to the Biden administration. Now that Riyadh and Tehran have restored relations, the excuse of combating Iran’s regional influence is gone for negotiating a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement. The refusal to punish Israel for its constant provocations also makes it more difficult for Saudi Arabia to normalize with an unrestrained Israeli government that continues to insult the Muslim world and invites popular Arab support for the Palestinian cause. If there is no change to the arrogant and out of touch approach of the US, which rules with an iron fist and a “my way or the highway” approach, it will be the US itself that is going to be taking a hike from the Middle East.

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | 4 Comments

What Are Anti-Drone Systems and How Do They Work?

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 29.05.2023

The NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the significance of drones in modern warfare, with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used by both sides for reconnaissance, targeting, and kamikaze attacks. What are the four main kinds of anti-drone defenses? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Sputnik explores.

“The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots and as you go forth today remember always – your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.”

That was the humorous but eerie prediction by the military school commandant in the 1997 The Simpsons episode “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson.” A quarter of a century later, the idea of using drones in warfare has become ubiquitous, and The Simpsons’ comedic flourish has been forever tainted by real-life conflict.

Although small propeller and rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones fitted with film cameras have been around since the Cold War, modern drone warfare, including camera-mounted, remote-operated GPS-equipped spy and strike drones, is a product of the early 21st century, with the United States kicking off the world’s first campaign of targeted killings using UAVs in 2002.

As small, inexpensive, off-the-shelf drones began entering the commercial market in the 2010s, they started to be used by non-state actors to attack armies and governments – with US-backed terrorists using them in the Syrian dirty war against Syrian and Russian forces, and Yemen’s Houthi militants deploying them against the Saudi-led coalition.

Large, military-grade drones were used to effect in the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenian volunteers in Nagorno-Karabakh, and, starting in 2022, have been deployed extensively by NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Donbass and throughout Ukraine against Russian forces. Russia has countered them using a series of domestically-developed drone defense systems. But more on that below.

Drone Defenses: What Types Are There?

In the second half of the 20th century, the USSR and the USA focused their air and missile defense research on targeting big, expensive manned fighters, bombers, transport planes, and ballistic and cruise missiles. Although this included research into fantastical concepts including the use of powerful lasers in space under Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program, its main focus remained missiles – rocket-powered projectiles designed to intercept and destroy enemy aircraft and missiles.

Can Missiles Be Used to Down Drones?

For drones that are large enough – including unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) like the Bayraktar TB2, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, or the Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk, which have wingspans of 12, 20, or even 40 meters, respectively, the most effective defenses are still good old-fashioned missiles designed to target jet aircraft.
Last month, Russian Air Defense Force Commander Andrey Demin reported that over 100 Bayraktar drones had been destroyed in fighting in Ukraine.

“There are practically no fundamental distinctions between fighting against strategic drones like the US Global Hawk (RQ-4) or Reaper (MQ-9) or Turkiye’s operational-tactical Bayraktar-TB and counteraction to crewed aircraft. The elimination of more than 100 Bayraktars, delivered to Ukraine throughout the period of the special military operation, is clear evidence of this,” Demin said, speaking with Russia’s official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.

For the battle against large drones, including their detection and destruction, the same monitoring and strike systems as those used against traditional aircraft can be used. This has been demonstrated not only in Ukraine, but with the June 2019 shootdown over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz of a $220 million Global Hawk operated by the US Navy by an Iranian road-mobile air defense system known as the 3rd Khordad.

How Can Electronic Countermeasures Be Used to Destroy Drones?

Smaller drones, including so-called mini and micro UAVs, are more difficult to detect, Demin admitted, pointing to these weapons’ “small effective reflective surface” for radar detection, and saying that tracking such systems and revealing their trajectory using standard radar equipment is “rather problematic.”

For this purpose, the Russian military has developed an air defense system of a different sort – the RLK-MTs Valdai, a special-purpose radar designed specifically to detect, suppress, and neutralize small drones with extremely low radar cross sections.

Developed by Almaz-Antey, manufacturer of the Buk and S-300/S-400/S-500 series of air and missile defense systems, the RLK-MTs is a vehicle-mounted radar complex designed to detect enemy drones at distances of up to 15 km, and to take them down using electronic countermeasures (using a control and navigation signal suppression module) at close-in ranges of 2 km or less. The complex’s detection systems include an X-band radar module, thermal imagers and cameras, a radio signal source-finder module. The vehicles can be operated remotely.

Demin confirmed that the RLK-MTs is “already performing combat missions to cover critical military and state facilities, including those in the special military operation zone,” and said he expects production of the systems to ramp up dramatically in the coming years.

Large, vehicle-based systems stuffed with detection systems and powerful electronic countermeasures are arguably the most capable defenses against small drones, but certainly aren’t the only ones. Smaller systems, ranging from commercial and industrial anti-drone monitoring and suppression hardware, to military-grade man-portable anti-drone rifles have been created by several Russian manufacturers. These weapons include the PARS-S Stepashka – a 9.6 kg anti-drone gun with the capability to hijack enemy drones and force them to land or return to their launch sites. The system is effective at ranges between 500 meters and 1.5 km.

Other, similar portable anti-drone systems have been spotted in footage from the battlefield, including the Stupor electromagnetic rifle – which uses electromagnetic pulses to suppress drones’ control channels and force them down.

How Can Lasers Fight Drones?

Advances in laser pulse weaponry have enhanced prospects for their use in modern warfare. Last year, Yuri Borisov – the former Russian deputy prime minister responsible for defense and the space industry since appointed boss of Roscosmos, revealed that the Russian military has tested a mystery combat laser system known as the Zadira that’s capable of incinerating drones in seconds at distances of up to 5 km in Ukraine. Its development began in 2016 under the auspices of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, a subsidiary of Rosatom.

The Zadira is not to be confused with the Peresvet – a strategic laser weapon designed to target an enemy up to 1,500 km in orbit over the planet. That system entered combat duty on a test basis in December 2018, but has not been used in Ukraine.

Russia is not the only country tinkering with the use of laser weapons for anti-drone warfare, with the United States and Israel also working on such weapons.

Lasers have several clear advantages over conventional air defense missiles – including their low cost (Israeli officials have boasted, for example, that the new Iron Beam laser-based air defense system uses just $2-worth of electricity – 10,000-50,000 times less than conventional Iron Dome missiles). But lasers also have a number of drawbacks, including the need to secure large amounts of electricity (limiting their mobility), plus problems operating in certain weather conditions, including fog and cloud cover).

Can Drones Be Used to Counter Other Drones?

Last but not least in the list of portable anti-drone defenses are other UAVs. Systems like the ZALA Lancet multipurpose loitering munition/kamikaze drone are capable of targeting enemy UAVs, with its developers creating a concept which they’ve dubbed “air mining” involving the deployment of large numbers of Lancets in an area of the front to protect against incursions by heavy attack drones. As an enemy drones approach, the Lancet locks on to the enemy target and dives onto it at high speeds to force it from the skies.

How Successful Has Russia’s Anti-Drone War Been?

Since Russia entered the Ukraine crisis, it has made many of the difficult but necessary changes to supply the Army with the equipment it needs for effective drone warfare.

Last week, an unclassified intelligence assessment by Britain’s Ministry of Defense concluded that Russia’s military had successfully integrated drone reconnaissance into operations involving long-range missile strikes in the Ukrainian hinterland. Also last week, a separate report by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute calculated that Russia has been using electronic warfare capabilities to destroy upwards of 10,000 Ukrainian drones per month. According to the assessment, Russia maintains “a major electronic warfare system roughly every 6 miles (9.6 km)” along the entire 1,200 km front line.

These assessments echo complaints by an insider at Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, who told one Western outlet in March that Russian forces had obtained “black magic” capabilities against Ukraine’s vast arsenal of NATO-supplied drones, including the ability to “jam frequencies, spoof GPS, [and] send a drone to the wrong altitude so that it simply drops out of the sky.”

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s prized drone fleet almost grounded

RT | May 29, 2023

Turkish Bayraktar UAVs were touted as wonder weapons, with officials in Kiev saying they would give them an advantage against Russia. One year later, however, only a few remaining units are being used far from the battlefield, and for reconnaissance rather than attack missions, a Pentagon-linked analyst has told Business Insider.

Ukraine purchased dozens of Bayraktar TB2 drones and used them to strike Donbass in violation of a ceasefire agreement at least once, even before the conflict with Russia began last February. Kiev also claims to have received an unspecified number of additional drones during the past year, despite Türkiye’s official neutrality.

In the first months of the conflict, Kiev routinely claimed to have conducted successful strikes using TB2s, but by July, the Bayraktars became “almost useless,” and Kiev reserved them for “rare special operations,” Ukrainian pilots told Foreign Policy at the time.

Russian forces destroyed “more than 100 Bayraktar drones” in Ukraine, the deputy commander-in-chief of the Air Force, Lieutenant-General Andrey Demin, claimed in April.

As of now, the Ukrainian fleet of “once-prized drones have almost entirely been shot down,” Business Insider wrote on Sunday, citing an expert in unmanned and robotic military systems at the Center for Naval Analyses, Samuel Bendett.

“As a relatively slow and low-flying UAV, it can become a target for a range of air defense systems that are well organized,” Bendett said, adding that “once the Russian military got its act together, it was able to down many TB2s.”

The Bayraktar TB2 is a design of Turkish company Baykar Makina, which costs around $2 million per unit. Ankara has touted the drones since 2020, when they were said to have helped Azerbaijan prevail in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Turkish troops have also deployed them in Syria and Libya.

Responding to a prank caller last year, the head of the Association of Defense Enterprises of Ukraine admitted there was “more PR and corruption in Bayraktar than combat use,” and claimed “they were all shot down within a week.”

Earlier this month, a Bayraktar TB2 was destroyed after it reportedly went rogue over the Ukrainian capital, with a video showing the drone being taken down by a shoulder-fired rocket.

While pro-Ukrainian ‘open source intel’ accounts initially claimed it was a Russian Corsair, the Ukrainian military later admitted that they had to destroy their own drone after the operators failed to regain control.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Cataloging a tsunami of Covid scandals

By my count, they’re at least 10 … and they are all massive

BY BILL RICE, JR. | MAY 26, 2023

If you have an hour to spare, I highly recommend reading this document, which summarizes and debunks many of the false and counterproductive “mandates.” This 22,000-word paper was produced by authors from the Isle of Man of all places.

It is divided into five sections including in-depth treatment of virus origins, iatrogenic deaths, lockdowns, mandated masking and “vaccines.” I think it might be the most impressive and persuasive piece of Covid writing I’ve read.

After reading the document, I was struck by the sheer number of massive scandals that have overlapped and cascaded – like a series of tsunamis – on the world in the past three-plus years.

By orders of magnitude, every one of these scandals dwarfs Watergate. As the authors point out, all are “horrific” and “nightmarish.”

Building upon the author’s arguments and adding a few of my own “scandals” that weren’t highlighted in this paper, I’ve identified 10 of these scandals. Again, each one by itself would probably qualify as the greatest scandal and outrage of our lifetimes.

When listed one after the other, readers are left with overwhelming evidence that our world must have gone completely mad. These scandals, roughly in chronological order, include:

(Mad) Scientists – funded and encouraged by our own government – probably created this virus.

The above  possibility is not discussed in the document. However, from my perspective, I see only three virus-origin possibilities:

  1. The virus crossed over into the human population via bats and then other animals.
  2. The virus was created or modified in a lab and either accidentally “escaped” or was intentionally released.
  3. … And a theory that is embraced by a growing number of people … there was no new novel coronavirus.

The latter two possibilities should, of course, qualify as massive, historic scandals.

If government-funded scientists (in America and China and perhaps other countries) created this virus, all they did was turn the world upside down and kill and sicken tens of millions of people (either from said lab-created virus and/or from the response to the alleged pandemic.)

Similarly, if one is convinced there was no new novel virus, our scientific experts and authorities would have perpetrated the Mother of All deadly scams on the world (somehow no virus ended up causing tens of millions of deaths).

(I happen to think there is a novel coronavirus and it probably was created in a lab, but it’s not any more lethal than the common flu.)

“Early spread” was either completely missed by the experts or, once certain officials realized this was happening, they covered up evidence of widely-circulating early transmission.

The authors of the Isle of Man document do address this possibility and even twice cite an article that I wrote on this topic.

As mega scandals go, “missed early spread” probably doesn’t register on the radar of 99 percent of the population.

However, I still think this might be the most important unreported story as, if this was known, the world should not have had to endure lockdowns and experienced mass panic. People would have realized there was no way to “slow” or “stop” the “spread” of this virus as the virus horses had already galloped across the globe.

This theory would also tell us that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of this virus was minuscule as millions of people had already been infected with no noticeable spike in all-cause deaths. So the necessity of rolling out a new mRNA “vaccine” to “save millions of people” would have been viewed as a nonsensical head-scratcher to far more people.

The question would have become why do we need a possibly dangerous and rushed vaccine to save people … who weren’t dying or who faced no real risk from this virus.

The scandal here would have two components: Either our trusted public health officials didn’t know early spread was happening; or at least some did know this and went to great extremes to cover up this knowledge.

The bottom-line is the same with all these scandals: The public should NOT trust the experts. In fact, large numbers of alleged experts and government officials should be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned or at least disgraced and charged with professional malfeasance, a result that would make sure these people could never “serve” (harm) the public again.

Lockdowns were a public health, economic, psychological, sociological and civil-liberties-eviscerating disaster. Any benefit from this unprecedented mitigation strategy was dwarfed by massive harms.

The authors excel in their effort to expose this particularly mind-boggling scandal.

Iatrogenic deaths almost assuredly killed far more people than Covid proper. 

Faulty medical protocols and guidance – coupled with (unnecessary) mass panic in the population and among health-care professionals – killed untold numbers of people and, by themselves, account for the massive spike in deaths in some cities.

Said differently, the surge in deaths that largely explains the ramped-up panic and justified all the draconian mandates probably had little or nothing to do with this virus.

This outstanding section includes many first-hand testimonials from witnesses to (arguably) mass murder that will leave readers irate. Iatrogenic deaths is perhaps the least-publicized massive Covid scandal.

Mandatory masking was a scientific farce and the masks caused far more harm than has been fully acknowledged.

The authors note that mask mandates perhaps seem “trivial” compared to other Covid scandals. However, the authors then proceed to make readers better appreciate the harm caused by these unnecessary mandates. They also do an excellent job showing how the alleged “science” on masks rapidly flipped.

I’ve been reading Covid stories for three-plus years and hadn’t seen some of the compelling arguments the authors make about masks. The document is worth reading just for the excellent points made about iatrogenic deaths and masks.

Vaccines are not safe and effective, weren’t needed and are causing untold numbers of deaths and serious medical conditions.

The authors dive into politically-incorrect waters by providing contrarian history on vaccines and questioning the conclusion that other well-accepted vaccines produced the positive health results they are widely considered to have made possible.

In my opinion, the authors could have included far more evidence and anecdotes about the obvious harm the Covid “vaccines” have produced, but the items they do include are compelling and worth the read.

Accurate Covid data is being concealed, spun or obfuscated by public health agencies.

This header is not included as a separate category in this document, but every section provides evidence this is occurring to a scandalous degree.

Genuine transparency does not exist with important Covid data. Indeed, the authors show that officials charged with reporting important health data seem to be going out of their way to conceal this data from the public. This by itself should be another major scandal and has already eroded “public trust” in public officials and our medical/science community.

The following are my own contributions to any inventory of massive societal scandals.

Censorship is out of control. We now live in a world where genuine free speech is considered a threat to the state and the world’s real rulers.

It should be noted that censorship is not yet all-encompassing. The Isle of Man document proves this good news by citing hundreds of articles and studies that did reach the attention of the authors.

However, most of these citations are from the “alternative press” (including plenty of independent Substack authors).

The important studies the authors cite – FWIW, studies produced by “real” scientists – never or rarely received significant coverage from the corporate or mainstream press. Many of these contrarian authors or dissident voices have indeed been censored, attacked, de-platformed, bullied and even lost their jobs.

It could be argued that every scandal itemized in this document might not have happened if censorship did not exist. The authors make clear that the promulgation of false fears is the root of all totalitarian mandates. It should be obvious that this level of requisite fear would have been much lower if the public had received fair and balanced coverage of true, off-limits facts.

The mainstream press is 99.9 percent captured.

The “gatekeepers of the news” have become stenographers of virtually every dubious or false public health narrative. Nobody (who really matters in the Big Picture) is challenging the never-ending lies, manipulated data and false narratives.

If this lack of skepticism persists, it seems almost a certainty that all the important organizations in the world will continue to be led by people who either aren’t intelligent enough to challenge false narratives or know the narratives are false and simply don’t care.

Big Tech and social media companies are actively censoring real debate and genuine free speech. 

Furthermore, many of these companies seem to be working in concert with government officials and agencies to target individuals who are not afraid to dissent from the various “authorized” narratives.

The above points make it far more likely that past scandals will not be exposed and that future society-damaging agendas will be more likely to be brought to fruition.

In sum, these waves of over-lapping and cascading scandals produce a tale that does qualify as a real-world horror story.

The greatest horror might be the realization that most citizens are still unaware they’re living through an unfolding nightmare. Hopefully, excellent and important documents like the one just described will open more eyes.

May 29, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment