When a globalist mafia cartel — or a garden-variety tyranny — wish to silence dissent, they like to make ‘examples’ of those who resist. Here in New Zealand, under the sway of Jacinda Ardern’s ‘single source of truth’, a few doctors who three years ago raised their voices against the government’s woefully destructive covid measures — measures that included severe lockdowns, ineffectual masking, anti-social distancing, and the vehement suppression of early treatment, so that the one-size-fits-all death jab could be introduced as our salvation — found that their practising certificates were suspended by the FSMB-directed Medical Council of New Zealand. I was unfortunately one of these, as I discovered when I went to renew my certificate in November 2021.
If any other doctors dared to uphold the principles of their profession and inveigh against the demolition of informed consent, individualised treatment, and the Hippocratic Oath they swore when they received their medical degrees, they knew what was coming. Thus the silence of the sheep, which paved the way for the consequence of excess deaths and debilities thanks to the mandated jab, along with all of the other globalist paraphernalia, most of which I have described in many other essays.
As I write a number of good decent doctors who dared, for example, to prescribe Ivermectin, or who opposed the topsy-turvy institutional recommendations to jab as many people as possible so that we may all ‘stay safe’, are being persecuted and harassed when they should in fact be commended by the very Medical Council that purports to be protecting the public weal.
Suppressing dissent is something far more contagious than covid, and the New Zealand Law Society, taking a leaf out of the Medical Council’s playbook, decided to go after intrepid lawyer Sue Grey, hauling her before the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal for charges of misconduct and ‘unsatisfactory’ conduct.
Ms Grey represented herself at the Tribunal hearing and a decision has been rendered in her favour.
I frankly admit to being shocked by this decision — not because I questioned Ms. Grey’s fact-founded defense, but because I had resigned myself to believing that the fix was in.
Fortunately, we now have glimmers that truth will out, that not all institutions are irrevocably corrupt, and that standing tall in defense of the rights and principles of free speech can result in victory even within a system that is itself compromised.
This is our first real legal victory, in my opinion, a victory that paves the way for others, such as physician Peter Canaday who, fifteen weeks after his appearance at the Health Professionals Disciplinary Tribunal, has yet to receive a decision.
We’ve been fighting a long and irregular war in defense of freedom and good medical and legal sense, a fight against mandates and against the upending of professional duty and responsibility.
Sue Grey has been a beacon all along and her surprising triumph deserves accolades.
It reminds me, if you will permit a moderately hyperbolic analogy, of George Washington’s pivotal battle against British forces in Trenton on the day after Christmas 1776. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware was a highly risky enterprise that came after a string of woes; with it he turned the tide and the rest, as they say, is history.
Sue Grey has made history. Let us now go forward and press our rightful and truth-inspired advantage.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, New Zealand |
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Last week was the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. In a low-key commemoration, the White House Press Office issued a statement from President Biden calling to “renew our commitment to the democratic values for which [American troops] served and sacrificed.” In reality, almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict to buttress the principle that presidents could deceive the nation and intervene wherever they damn well chose.
If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border between the two Koreas, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces — a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States — more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the Friends of Leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean war as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’ — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” Gen. Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea … and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” the New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out — ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Korea, United States |
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The indictment of Donald Trump indicates that the Biden administration is trying to prevent the 45th US president from effectively campaigning in the 2024 election race, analysts have told Sputnik.
Former US President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday to four federal charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The first hearing for the trial is expected on August 28.
The ex-POTUS was indicted earlier this week as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s purported push to reverse the results of the election, which was followed by the January 6, 2021 US Capitol breach.
“The case brought against Trump on Thursday is another example of judicial intervention in the electoral process,” Dr. Harvey Schantz, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, said.
He added that the 45th US president’s indictment “goes to the core of the American political system because it involves the transfer of power” from a Republican Party president to a Democratic Party president. According to Schantz, such a change is “more momentous than ever because the two parties have very alternative views of public policy and markedly different supporters.”
The political scientist argued that the Trump indictment “divides people along party affiliations, exacerbating differences between Democrats and Republicans and between Trump and [US President Joe] Biden voters.”
Schantz pointed out that “the multiple cases” against the former American president “have strengthened his hold on the Republican presidential nomination, and contrary to conventional wisdom, have not as yet hurt Trump in the 2024 general election contest, in which polls have Trump and Biden running neck and neck.”
Dr. Nicholas Waddy, political analyst and Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred State College, for his part, told Sputnik that Thursday’s arraignment of Trump “[…] represents a new low for the Biden Administration, progressives, and the Deep State,” who he said “are, in effect, trying to criminalize dissent, criticism, differences of opinion, and political opposition.”
Waddy insisted that ex-US president “isn’t being charged because of his actions, or his words, but because of who he is and what he represents.”
“The Deep State, including [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and [Special Counsel] Jack Smith, hates Trump with every fiber of its being. They are terrified that he might be able to defeat [President] Joe Biden in the 2024 election and win a second term as president, and thus they, and numerous other state and federal prosecutors, have decided on a strategy of ‘lawfare’ to kneecap him as a candidate,” the political analyst claimed.
According to him, these officials “would love to imprison Trump for the rest of his life, but their primary aim is to tie him up in legal knots throughout 2024 so that he cannot campaign effectively, and so that the entire election revolves around a debate about Donald Trump’s criminality, rather than Joe Biden’s performance in office.”
“The goal here – to interfere with the electoral process itself – is so transparent that no fair-minded person could deny it,” Waddy added. He claimed that “It isn’t Trump that poses an ‘existential’ threat to Democrats, It’s democracy itself, and that’s what they are trying to snuff out.”
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News |
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WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice is committing election interference by attempting to prosecute former President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump, US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said in a statement.
“Biden’s Department of Justice is actively participating in election interference by trying to put his top political opponent, President Donald Trump, behind bars,” Greene said on Thursday.
Earlier in the day, Trump pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges brought against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election.
Trump called the charges against him “persecution of a political opponent.” Greene characterized the prosecution as “pure corruption.”
The charges against Trump were announced amid his 2024 presidential campaign. Trump currently leads the pack of Republican candidates ahead of the debates and primary elections.
The charges also come as lawmakers in Congress investigate potential weaponization of the US government and its justice system.
On Wednesday, Congressman Matt Gaetz said lawmakers must demand an interview with Smith to provide information on his decision to charge Trump, as well as be willing to issue a subpoena and hold the special counsel in contempt of Congress.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | United States |
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Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani. © Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Italy’s reaction to the patriotic military coup in Niger late last month has been surprisingly pragmatic. It could have easily jumped on the bandwagon of supporting the planned NATO-backed Nigerian-led ECOWAS invasion aimed at reinstalling ousted President Mohamed Bazoum and going along with his Ambassador to America’s claim that Russia had a hand in the coup. Instead, the Italian Foreign Minister described any Western military initiative as “a new colonization” and denied any Russian role in events.
Italy supports the West’s anti-Russian sanctions and arms Kiev against that country so Rome wasn’t expected to behave so independently towards a comparatively less significant matter than the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine. That’s not to downplay the devastation that could soon ravage West Africa if it descends into a regional war, but just to point out that the precedent set by Italy’s compliance with Western demands vis-a-vis Russia suggested that it would also comply with their Nigerien policy too.
This exception is explained by the fact that Italy is very serious about combating illegal immigration at its roots, which was the official reason behind its decision to deploy a little less than 500 troops to Niger over half a decade ago in late 2017. While it’s difficult to assess whether this stated mission was a success since information about it has remained suspiciously scarce since then, the pretext for its troops’ deployment remains in place as evidenced by the related rhetoric espoused by its latest premier.
Giorgia Meloni rose to power partially because of her promise to drastically curtail illegal immigration to Italy, which would be very difficult to do if a major war breaks out in West Africa and results in an unfathomable number of desperate people fleeing across the Mediterranean to her country as refugees. It would already be bad enough if Nigeria soon leads an invasion of Niger, but this would be even worse if Italy’s French neighbor joined in and thus played a role in catalyzing another humanitarian crisis.
Italy might not be able to stop the US from coercing Nigeria into doing its bidding against Russia’s regional strategic interests by proxy, but its Foreign Minister’s description of potential Western involvement in this operation as “a new colonization” could make France think twice about participating. Bilateral relations were recently damaged due to their differences over migrants/refugees so it’s likely that Meloni’s top diplomat was sending a signal to Paris through his strong words on this issue.
She’d come under intense pressure on the domestic front if France was responsible for another humanitarian crisis that crashed into her country’s shores, plus responding to this would entail considerable costs that would be better spent on socio-economic investments if war could be averted. These calculations explain why her government broke ranks with the West on this issue since her political career could be threatened if this situation spirals out of control.
Her country’s policymakers are also impressively thinking ahead by tempering their rhetoric in order to avoid provoking the junta into pressuring their troops to leave and thus weakening Rome’s ability to at least keep an eye on this migrant/refugee corridor through their deployment in Niger. They still oppose the patriotic military coup, but they’re doing so in a measured way that reduces the risk of blowback while still at least formally paying lip service to the so-called “rules-based order”.
As for the second part of Italy’s pragmatic response to recent events, this builds upon the motivations that were just described above regarding the self-interested need to not provoke the junta. Rome isn’t suggesting that this regime change was legitimate, but it’s also not fueling the information warfare campaign being waged by some like Bazoum’s Ambassador to America, which is intended to precondition the Western public for NATO’s potential involvement in any possible invasion of Niger.
This stance hasn’t had any influence on reshaping Italian-Russian relations since it’s driven purely by Rome’s interests in retaining its military presence in Niger for the purpose of monitoring the migrant/refugee corridor through that country. These domestic political motivations, which also have an inextricable security dimension to them too, are so important to the present Italian government that they resulted in its top diplomat publicly counteracting fake news about Russia’s involvement in events.
What this insight shows is that it’s possible for Western states to behave independently of their peers on certain issues if sensitive domestic interests are threatened, be they Italy’s migrant/refugee ones in the Nigerien Crisis or Poland’s agricultural interests regarding the subject of importing Ukrainian grain. Each of these two examples is also connected to their leaders’ political interests, which cynically suggests that they’ll only act in a sovereign fashion on these aforesaid sensitive issues if their careers are on the line.
Even so, it’s still intriguing to observe them putting their interests above their de facto New Cold War bloc’s, thus proving that it’s not impossible for this to happen. Under the specific conditions that were just described where sensitive domestic interests converge with the political ones of any given Western leader, it can’t be ruled out that they’ll act more independently than their peers. This has already happened twice thus far in just as many weeks, which makes it a documented fact and not speculation.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Russophobia | Africa |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s fifth-generation Su-57 fighter has been equipped with new short-range missiles, the RVV-MD2, which outperform similar American munitions, representatives of the developer company, JSC GosMKB Vympel, said in an article for the Arsenal Otechestva (lit. Arsenal of the Fatherland) magazine.
“It is a fact that Russia’s development of the fifth generation of ‘air-to-air’ missiles, now in industrial production, is five to ten years ahead of similar developments in the United States,” the report stated.
The authors emphasized that, unlike the United States, Russia has managed to develop and test these missiles quickly, and the stage of their introduction into service has already begun.
The RVV-MD2 can be installed in the internal fuselage compartments of the fifth-generation Su-57 fighter, the specialists explained.
The RVV-MD2 is the first short-range missile to use an inertial guidance system to control and stabilize the missile during autonomous flight, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Viktor Murakhovskiy, pointed out.
The inertial system allows the munition to autonomously determine its coordinates in space without relying on external references or signals.
In addition, Murakhovskiy noted that the RVV-MD2 is equipped with a radio correction line, which allows the aircraft to refine target coordinates from onboard, increasing the likelihood of hitting enemy aircraft.
According to the editor-in-chief of “Arsenal Otechestva,” another advantage of the new missile is its multi-element dual-band infrared homing head with improved anti-jamming capabilities.
The new missile is capable of attacking targets from all angles, including from the rear. In other words, the RVV-MD2 is launched forward, maneuvers in the air and engages the enemy aircraft located behind the Su-57, Murakhovsky explained.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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The Biden Administration’s Ukraine strategy is increasingly disconnected from political and military realities on the ground, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“Joe Biden cannot articulate what the goal of the American military involvement [in Ukraine] is,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court judge and host of the Judging Freedom podcast, told Sputnik. “The neocons around him just love the concept of war, particularly war against Russia, particularly against Russia while Vladimir Putin is in office.”
Delusional Neocons Set Biden’s Ukraine Agenda
The US has been involved in the Ukraine conflict for 17 months and has already transferred over $68 billion. Nevertheless, Kiev cannot boast any considerable progress on the ground with their much-discussed counteroffensive having eventually stalled. As the conflict is continuing to drag on, Biden administration officials and the US president are still asserting to Kiev that Washington will support it “as long as it takes.”
“If you ask him, as long as it takes to do what he can’t answer the ‘To do what?’ As long as it takes to produce a stalemate? As long as it takes to produce a cease fire? As long as it takes, if you ask Victoria Nuland, to drive President Putin from office? I mean, they can’t answer that question,” Napolitano noted.
Can Trump Strike Ukraine Peace Deal?
The Ukraine conflict has been presented in the Western mainstream press as a way to bleed Russia dry and drain President Vladimir Putin’s “political standing with the Russian people,” the judge opined.
In February 2023, President Biden made a claim in front of a Polish crowd that suggested he wanted to see the Russian president deposed: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden stated. The White House later downplayed this rally cry as a gaffe.
Still, what Team Biden and their neocon allies “don’t understand is that President Putin is enormously popular, that he’s fighting a patriotic war for a return of land, for which there is a valid legal argument, it has always been a part of Russia, culturally a part of Russia, linguistically a part of Russia,” according to Napolitano.
“They think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. They’re crazy. It’s not going to work. Joe Biden does not have an off ramp. He doesn’t have the ability to say, okay, we’ve we’ve succeeded. It’s time for us to stop. There’s no goal and there’s no off ramp. His internal goal is to run for reelection as a wartime president like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1940. But this is not a war like World War Two. This is not a war that the American public perceives as a threat to American national security. All the politicians will argue that. But they’re so tied up with the military industrial complex that, you know, you have a majority in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that like all wars because it enriches the military industrial complex and keeps people working in the factories.”
What’s more, there is no American national security interest at stake in Ukraine, despite US neocons arguing to the contrary, according to the judge.
US war hawks are continuing to claim that Washington’s military aid to Kiev is a great investment since Russia is being bashed without American lives being lost. “The Russians are dying. The best money we’ve ever spent,” as US Senator Lindsey Graham said back in May. As long as no American body bags are coming home, the public is buying into this argument.
Still, it’s no longer a secret that a limited contingent of US servicemen has been operating on the ground in Ukraine. “We know the US military is there in Ukraine out of uniform. We know it is there in Poland, operating equipment that is shooting projectiles at Russian boys,” noted the judge. US mercenaries have also joined Ukrainian battalions on the battlefield.
And these Americans are dying in Ukraine: a sad statistic has already found its way out, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of US citizens have been killed in the conflict zone since February 2022.
Dissent is Brewing Within the US Military and Intel Community
Meanwhile, the US president and his administration are continuing to assert to the American public that Russia is losing and that Ukraine is going to prevail.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently insisted that Russia had “already lost” while speaking to an American broadcaster. However, this triumphalist stance is not unanimously shared by US Department of Defense officials and the US intelligence community. The so-called Pentagon leak – that caught the headlines in April – shed some light on what the US military and spies really think about the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
“There is a 21 year old young Massachusetts National Guardsman sitting in a federal jail cell as we speak, named Jack Teixeira, who is accused of leaking secret documents – to which he had access by virtue of his work in the National Guard – to a chat room,” said Napolitano.
“The documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which have never been challenged by the government, reveal the government’s own internal deliberations as showing it expects Ukraine to lose. To lose. So if the Department of Defense expects Ukraine to lose and the Secretary of Defense goes before a Senate committee and says under oath ‘Ukraine is going to win’, who are you going to believe? You’re going to believe their candid, unvarnished statements recorded in documents that they believed would forever remain secret.”
Prior to the scandalous leak, American army and intelligence veterans voiced their skepticism with regard to Biden’s Ukraine strategy in their podcasts or interviews with alternative media.
“On my podcast, Judging Freedom, where we have a number of ex-CIA and ex-military harshly critical of the current CIA and the current US government, who are, I believe, giving a far more accurate version of what’s happening there,” Napolitano pointed out, referring to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired US Army colonel and government official Douglas Macgregor, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern. All of them have stated loud and clear that “it is inconceivable that the Ukraine military can prevail,” the judge underscored.
On top of that, it has been almost impossible for the US and NATO military officials to ignore massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in terms of military equipment and manpower since the beginning of their counteroffensive.
As of mid-July, Ukraine had lost 26,000 servicemen, 21 aircraft, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Thus, unsurprisingly, Western leaders in private conversations cast doubt on Kiev’s odds of winning at the recent Aspen Security Forum despite publicly trying to put a positive spin on Ukraine’s military efforts.
Why is the US Public Buying Into Biden’s Ukraine Narrative?
Meanwhile, the Western mainstream press has been busy spreading the one-sided Biden administration’s Ukraine narrative since the outset of the conflict. Judging from polls, most of the public in the West appear to have swallowed the bait.
“The American public still seems to be in favor of the war. Again, they only hear one side,” highlighted the judge.
“While the Biden administration, through the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6, has succeeded in taming the press,” continued Napolitano. “So the press and the American media, even my friends and former colleagues at Fox, are giving a version of these events which is not based in reality on the ground. The version of events that Americans are getting is that the so-called spring offensive, even though we’re now in the middle of the summer, is slow, methodical, but but a steady movement eastward by the Ukrainian forces, Whereas in reality, as you just pointed out, the Russian military has established three runs of defenses and the Ukrainians haven’t even approached, much less breached the first of those three rings. So the American public is not getting a true and accurate view of the so-called spring effect offensive from mainstream media.”
What’s making the West’s Ukraine narrative even less credible is that there are very few American journalists on the ground, according to the judge.
“The military won’t allow them there, Napolitano said. “The Ukrainians won’t allow them there. They don’t want the true story to be told. So the American public hears that same drumbeat over and over and over again, which you so nicely articulated. But in reality, it is not our war, it is not our fight. We shouldn’t be losing any blood and we shouldn’t be losing any money over it. And we are losing.”
In addition, most US presidential candidates from both sides of America’s political aisle are also promoting the US proxy war in Ukraine. Just two major candidates – Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – are against the conflict. “Everybody else is lockstep in favor of it for a variety of what I think are nonsensical reasons,” Sputnik’s interlocutor added.
However, over the past two weeks or so, a growing number of mainstream media outlets have started to release unflattering reports about the Ukraine situation on the front lines. They are even publishing interviews with Ukrainian soldiers where they talk about how this counteroffensive is not exactly going to plan. This could be a harbinger of some potential change, according to the judge, even though Team Biden is still wearing a brave face.
“It’s very telling that that is beginning to happen. So that would mean the president’s political advisers are taking polls saying the American public’s getting tired of this war. There doesn’t seem to be any progress. We need an off ramp. The off ramp is not going to come all at once. The off ramp is going to come gradually and slowly with the American public acclimated to the coming off ramp. If the Biden administration were to say, that’s it, we’re not involved anymore, well then everybody would say, what about the $68 billion already spent? Are we going to get that back. I mean, was it wasted? What was accomplished by it? So in order to prevent that kind of a blowback, they need this gradual acclimation to the likelihood of Russian success and Ukrainian defeat,” Napolitano concluded.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
2 Comments
Court documents stemming from Hunter Biden’s failed plea-bargain deal on federal criminal charges have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s son brought in income of more than $4.4 million, mostly from China and Ukraine, while paying no taxes in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017 alone, Hunter Biden netted nearly $2.3 million from foreign sources, including over $1.6 million from his Chinese business interests and $500,000 in director’s fees from a Ukrainian energy company, according to a filing released on Wednesday by US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika in Wilmington, Delaware. He also had $70,000 in earnings from a Romanian business and $48,000 from a multinational law firm.
The president’s son belatedly reported an additional $2.1 million in earnings from 2018. He didn’t pay taxes for either year, despite having enough money and being repeatedly urged by his accountant to do so, according to the documents, which Noreika released in response to a request from NBC News.
Biden became addicted to crack cocaine in 2016, contributing to the collapse of his marriage and his most significant business relationship the following year. Despite his escalating drug use, “Biden successfully entered into business ventures and landed legal clients, earning millions of dollars.”
Republican lawmakers have accused the Biden family of soliciting bribes through Hunter Biden’s overseas business forays, including a stint serving as a director for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky reportedly urged Hunter Biden, whose father was then the US vice president, to help end a corruption investigation against the company in 2015.
Zlochevsky later told an FBI informant that he was coerced into paying a $10 million bribe to the Bidens and that he had multiple recordings to verify his claims.
Hunter Biden’s substance abuse worsened in 2018, when he moved to Los Angeles for a “spring and summer of nonstop debauchery,” according to the plea agreement. Weeks before his 2017 tax return was due to be filed, he received a $1 million payment for legal services to Chinese business associate Patrick Ho, but he spent almost all of the money over the next six months on travel, entertainment and other expenses. Similarly, around the time his 2018 return was due, in April 2019, he received $758,000 and spent almost all the money by the end of May.
The documents showed that an unidentified third party paid Biden’s nearly $2 million in combined tax liabilities for 2017 and 2018 in October 2021. That same person also paid about $243,000 on Biden’s behalf for unresolved tax liabilities from 2016 and 2019. Media outlets have identified that backer as Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother” lawyer in Los Angeles.
Noreika refused to accept the plea agreement last week, saying she had concerns about the terms granted to Biden. Republicans had accused prosecutors in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) of giving the president’s son a “sweetheart” deal on the tax charges against him and a separate case involving an illegal gun purchase. Republican lawmakers launched an investigation this week of the DOJ’s handling of the plea and diversion agreements in Hunter Biden’s cases.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Hunter Biden, Ukraine, United States |
1 Comment
Nicole Schwab explains how lessons learned from the Covid Crisis can be applied to Climate Crisis
A video of Klaus Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, giving a talk in June of 2020, is getting a lot of attention. Nicole is co-director of the Platform to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions & 1t.org, at the World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
In the video, she can be seen and heard saying the following:
This [Covid] crisis has shown us how, first of all, things can shift very rapidly when we put our minds to it and when we feel the immediate emergency to our livelihood. And second, that clearly the system—I mean you mentioned it earlier—that we had before is clearly not sustainable. So, I see it as a tremendous opportunity to really have this Great Reset, and to use this, you know, huge flows of money, to use the increased levers that policymakers have today in a way that was not possible before to create a change that is not incremental, but that we can look back and we can say that this is the moment where we really started to position, you know, nature at the core of the economy.
Note the elements of her assertion:
1). The Covid Crisis and response provide a model response for the Climate Crisis.
2). Both crises are emergencies that provide tremendous opportunities for the Great Reset agenda.
3). The huge flows of money resulting from the Covid emergency may flow again in response to the Climate emergency.
4). Both emergencies produce increased levers that policymakers can use to force immediate and dramatic change instead of the sort of incremental change that is less disruptive to the economic lives of ordinary citizens.
In other words, with the “tremendous opportunity” of the Covid Crisis now a thing of the past, it appears that the Olympians at Davos and their well-positioned friends are making arrangements for the Climate Crisis and the huge flows of money that will go to them for their “solutions” to the crisis.
Get ready for a coming propaganda blitz, an Emergency Declaration, and huge money flows from public coffers for Emergency Countermeasures to deal with the Climate Emergency.
If you are in the business of providing emergency countermeasures to the climate crisis, you will do well. If not, you will probably be tormented and burdened with onerous and arbitrary restrictions that do nothing for the environment but that make your life more expensive and difficult.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video |
1 Comment
Everyone seems to know someone taking Ozempic these days. But, it’s not all roses for the wonder weight loss drug, with serious side effects including suicidal ideations and stomach paralysis. Jefferey Jaxen reports.
A Louisiana woman who sued the manufacturers of popular diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Mounjaro is alleging the drugmakers failed to warn the public about the risk of severe gastrointestinal problems.
Jaclyn Bjorklund, 44, who on Wednesday filed the 26-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Lake Charles Division, claims she was “severely injured” after taking the two medications.
According to the complaint, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Ozempic and Mounjaro, respectively, “downplayed the severity of the gastrointestinal events,” such as gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, caused by the drugs.
Gastroparesis, a disorder that “slows or stops the movement of food from your stomach to your small intestine, even though there is no blockage in the stomach or intestines” is frequently caused by diabetes. Narcotics and antidepressants also are linked to gastroparesis.
Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) are injectable diabetes medications, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CBS News reported. Mounjaro was approved in May 2022. Ozempic was first approved in December 2017, and approved at a higher dose in March 2022.
According to NBC News, Bjorklund is the first person to come forward alleging that the drugs in question cause gastrointestinal injuries.
The two drugs are part of a new category of medicines known as glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, receptor agonists. They are intended to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their blood sugar levels. However, the medications are also commonly prescribed off-label for weight loss.
According to CBS News, “These drugs were originally developed to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes as they produce insulin and lower blood sugar. They also release a hormone that slows down digestion and keeps food in a patient’s stomach longer.”
However, their long-term impact is unknown.
According to CNN, “The lawsuit is seeking compensatory and punitive damages for past and future pain and suffering Bjorklund will have including health care costs and medical monitoring as well as her attorney’s fees and court costs.”
Attorneys Paul Pennock and Jonathan Sedgh, of Orlando-based Morgan & Morgan, said during a press conference, that the basis of the lawsuit is “a failure to warn,” CBS News reported. Pennock told the press:
“It is our opinion that these drugs are causing these problems. We think that the evidence is sufficient for us to be able to prove it or we would not have filed the case, and we intend to file many more in the coming days and weeks.
“[Bjorklund’s] problems have been so severe that she’s been to the emergency room multiple times, including last weekend. She’s actually even thrown up so violently that she’s lost teeth.”
This is the first lawsuit alleging the two drugs caused gastrointestinal injuries, however, lawyers representing Bjorklund said hundreds more similar lawsuits are ready to be filed by victims across the U.S.
Ozempic recently was linked to a range of other health issues, including kidney disorders and causing suicidal thoughts.
Plaintiff suffered from ‘severe gastrointestinal events’
The lawsuit states that Bjorklund, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2017, was prescribed Ozempic and took the drug for more than a year before switching to Mounjaro.
During this period, she experienced “severe gastrointestinal events,” including severe vomiting — which also led to the loss of teeth, gastrointestinal burning and stomach pain. As a result, the complaint states, Bjorklund “sustained severe and permanent personal injuries, pain, suffering, and emotional distress, and incurred medical expenses.”
The lawsuit also alleges the two companies “knew of the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis.”
The companies’ “failure to disclose information that they possessed regarding the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, rendered the warnings for this medication inadequate,” the lawsuit adds.
According to The Hill, “While the labels for both medications note that they delay gastric emptying and can cause a variety of stomach problems — including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation — they do not explicitly warn of gastroparesis as a risk.”
CNN reported that “Ozempic’s prescribing information says the most common adverse events related to the drug are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation. Under a section on drug interactions, it says that Ozempic delays gastric emptying, which may impact absorption of oral medications.”
Similarly, “Mounjaro’s prescribing information also says nausea, diarrhea, decreased appetite, vomiting, constipation, dyspepsia, and abdominal pain are the most common adverse events, and that Mounjaro delays gastric emptying, which may impact medication absorption.”
However, due to the lack of an explicit warning regarding gastroparesis, the lawsuit alleges that Bjorklund “was and still is caused to suffer from severe gastrointestinal issues, as well as other severe and personal injuries which are permanent and lasting in nature, physical pain, and mental anguish.”
In statements, both companies defended their products. Novo Nordisk claimed that gastrointestinal events are “well-known side effects of the GLP-1 class,” according to CBS News. The company added:
“For semaglutide, the majority of GI side effects are mild to moderate in severity and of short duration. GLP-1’s are known to cause a delay in gastric emptying, as noted in the label of each of our GLP-1 RA medications. Symptoms of delayed gastric emptying, nausea and vomiting are listed as side effects.”
And, as reported by The Hill :
“Patient safety is of utmost importance to Novo Nordisk. … We are continuously monitoring the safety profile of our products and collaborate closely with authorities to ensure patient safety, including adequate information on gastrointestinal side effects in the label.”
Eli Lilly said patient safety is its “top priority,” according to CBS News, and the company is “actively engage[d] in monitoring, evaluating and reporting safety information for all our medicines.”
NBC News cited FDA spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai, who said it’s “unclear” whether GLP-1 medications are connected to occurrences of gastroparesis.
A separate FDA statement cited by CNN states the agency has “received reports of gastroparesis with semaglutide and liraglutide, some of which documented the adverse event as not recovered after discontinuation of the respective product at the time of the report.”
‘This medicine made my life hell’
However, lawyers for Bjorklund say that many more patients are ready to come forward with lawsuits of their own.
According to CBS News, Pennock’s firm “is investigating 400 other inquiries from clients across 45 states,” while according to The Hill, Pennock ultimately expects to see “thousands of such cases.”
Several patients also spoke to media outlets regarding their injuries.
Brea Hand told CBS News, “The stomach pain was just unbearable and I couldn’t keep anything down. I would drink something and within minutes, like five, 10 minutes later, I would be throwing up.”
Hand visited the hospital six times while taking Ozempic and was admitted to an intensive care unit. She is not involved in the lawsuit.
A July 25, CNN featured the stories of other patients, including Louisiana resident Joanie Knight, 37, who said “I wish I never touched it. I wish I’d never heard of it in my life,” referring to Ozempic. “This medicine made my life hell. So much hell.”
And Emily Wright, a 38-year-old teacher from Toronto, began taking Ozempic in 2018. Today though, despite not having taken the medication “for a year,” she said, “I’m still not back to my normal.” She told CNN she is now vomiting so frequently that she was obliged to take a leave of absence from her job.
In recent months, several reports have indicated that Ozempic in particular is linked to a range of other health problems.
Last month, health regulators in Iceland, followed by the European Medicines Agency, began investigating reports that Ozempic and other popular weight-loss drugs are linked to the inducement of suicidal thoughts.
In June, a report by Dr. Joseph Mercola referenced studies based on data from Eudravigilance, Europe’s system for analyzing adverse reactions to medications. The data showed a link between Ozempic and a high prevalence of gastrointestinal disorders. This confirmed findings from a separate study conducted in 2018.
Ozempic also was linked to an increased risk of adverse kidney events, diabetic retinopathy, and metabolic, nutritional, eye, retinal, urinary and cardiac disorders.
And in April, the FDA warned that Ozempic should be discontinued at least two months prior to pregnancy because it takes that long for the body to eliminate the drug.
However, those warnings are buried, and long-term testing won’t be completed for years. The drug was not studied in pregnant women during clinical trials.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception | FDA, United States |
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