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Trump a ‘threat’ to UK – ex-MI6 chief

RT | January 15, 2024

Former US President Donald Trump’s potential reelection could be “problematic” for British national security due to his stance on NATO, former head of the MI6 intelligence service has warned.

Richard Dearlove, who led MI6 from 1999 to 2004, was discussing potential threats to the UK in 2024 in an interview with Sky News on Sunday, during which he pointed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the “long-term behavior of China,” before moving to the US presidential race.

“You have to add a political threat, which I am worried about, which is Trump’s reelection… which I think for the UK’s national security is problematic,” Dearlove said. If Trump, given his critical attitude towards NATO, “acts hastily and damages the Atlantic alliance, that is a big deal for the UK,” he warned.

“We’ve put all our eggs in defense terms in the NATO basket. If Trump really is serious about, as it were, changing the balance, I mean the American nuclear umbrella for Europe is, in my view, essential to Europe’s security and defense,” the former spymaster said.

During his time in the White House, Trump disparaged NATO, calling it “obsolete,” and questioned the bloc’s relevance in the modern world. He also cast doubt on Washington’s commitment to defend its allies and argued that other NATO members were not contributing enough.

“Look, NATO has taken advantage of our country. The European countries took advantage,” the former president recently told Fox News, adding that his attitude towards NATO depends on whether “they treat us properly.”

Despite several court cases against him, Trump remains the frontrunner for the Republican Party nomination as presidential candidate. A recent Morning Consult poll indicates that he is leading with 69% support, while the nearest rival is trailing far behind.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Was 2023 REALLY the second hottest year since 1884?

By Iain Davis | OffGuardian | January 14, 2024

According to the UK Met Office, 2023 was the second hottest year in the UK since 1884.

Quite obviously, this is complete nonsense. Unless they are troglodytes that never venture out in daylight, why would anyone in the UK believe such absurd drivel?

The Met Office states:

2023 is provisionally the second warmest year for the UK according to mean temperature. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C and ahead of 2014’s 9.88°C.

Right, it’s “provisional” drivel.

The UK summer of 2023—where I live—was a thoroughly miserable affair. We had a few weeks of decent sunshine in the spring and a couple of hot weeks of Indian summer. That was it!

The rest of it was cold, wet and comprehensively devoid of anything we might traditionally call “summer.” The winter preceding and following it wasn’t particularly cold, but nor was it unusually warm.

I’m knocking on a bit and can remember about 50 years of my life. I know, for a fact, that I have lived through many warmer years. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I haven’t completely taken leave of my senses and I still have a functioning memory. No way am I unquestioningly buying the Met Office’s silly claim.

Neither do I believe any of the legacy media reports trying to convince me that the Met Office’s preposterous assertion is evidence of an alleged climate crisis. It simply isn’t true, so it is not “evidence” of anything at all. Although it does suggest deception.

The Met Office—obviously unreliably—tells us “UK mean temperatures have been shifting over the decades as a result of human-induced climate change. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C.”

For a start, “human induced climate change,” or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), is a questionable and unproven scientific theory, not scientific fact. This too is just another claim from the Met Office which it wrongly asserts as fact.

The Met Office also tells us that “sunshine was near-average for much of the UK.” If we have got this right, the Met Office is claiming that, with average hours of UK sunshine in 2023—which also seems pretty dubious to me—somehow, since 1884, the only year that has been “hotter” was 2022. Which doesn’t ring true either.

What’s going on?

What does the Met Office mean—pardon the pun—by “mean temperature”? It reports that its 2023 alleged “provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C” had been obtained via the HadUK-Grid data set. The Met Office also cites its 2023 rapid attribution study. It is from this that we can—eventually—glean how the “UK mean temperature” is calculated by the Met Office.

In its rapid attribution study, the Met Office states:

Observed values of the UK annual mean temperature are obtained from the HadUK-Grid dataset v1.2.0.0. The time series spans 1884 – 2023, with the 2023 values being provisional as of 2nd January 2024.

“Observed,” that’s what we want to hear. So what observations are reported in the HadUK-Grid dataset? The Met Office claims:

HadUK-Grid is a collection of gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations.

If we look at the HadUK-Grid methodology, the Met Office adds:

The gridded data sets are based on the archive of UK weather observations held at the Met Office.

So far so good. The HadUK-Grid reportedly records real data, such as sunshine hours, rainfall and even temperature. We live in hope. Unfortunately, there are some caveats. The Met Office continues:

The methods used to generate the daily grids are described in more detail in [this] report.

OK. So beyond just recording real-world data, what are the “methods” outlined in said report?

[. . .] the Met Office climate data archive [. . .] contains a simplified version of the raw observations generated according to well-defined rules. [. . .] Mean temperature [. . .] is the average of the maximum and minimum temperatures.

At last we have a definition of the “mean temperature” the Met Office claims to be the second highest since 1884. Apparently, it is “generated according to well-defined rules.”

In Met Office speak “mean temperature” isn’t the actual arithmetic mean of daily temperatures but rather the “average” of minimum and maximum temperatures recorded between 09:00 and 21:00 on any given day. Begging the question how are the minimum and maximum UK temperatures “observed”?

Although the data ha[s] undergone some quality checking, the extent and effectiveness of this has changed through time since the 1960’s. [. . .] NCIC climate data analysis software was again used to create the gridded data. [. . .] The station data were normalised with respect to the monthly 1km x 1km gridded 1961-1990 climate normals described by Perry and Hollis (2005a).

So the minimum and maximum allegedly “observed” 2023 “mean UK temperature” wasn’t actually observed at all. It was calculated from normalised data using computers running software based upon the “climate normals” defined in Perry and Hollis (2005).

The related paper considered how to calculate long term averages (LTAs) and suggested a methodology by which “mean” temperatures could be calculated:

For air temperature, 1490 stations reported at some point between 1961 and 2000 but only an average of 560 of these were open at any one time. This gives an array which is 38% complete. [. . .] [T]he solution is to fill in the gaps using an appropriate estimation technique. [. . .] Once the gaps in the array have been filled, long term averages for the periods 1961-1990, 1971-2000 and 1991-2000 can be calculated for each station from the complete array. [. . .] The regression model parameters provide an estimation of [. . .] the UK climate, explaining between 29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.

Potentially, up to 62% of the data forming the Met Office’s “Mean UK temperature” is “generated” by “fill[ing] in the gaps.” This is based upon an “estimation technique” which supposedly explains between “29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.” This doesn’t mean that the estimated fill-ins are inaccurate but they cannot be called “observations” either.

We seem to be moving further away from empirical science. Surely the Met Office isn’t claiming that it knows what the average UK “provisional” mean temperature was in 2023 based upon such limited observations? With regard to how it interprets the HadUK-Grid dataset the Met Office states:

The HadUK-Grid dataset is produced on a 1km x 1km grid resolution on the Ordnance Survey’s National Grid. To facilitate comparison of the observational dataset with the UKCP18 climate projections [. . .]. All the gridded datasets use the same grid projection. The re-gridding is conducted through averaging of all 1km grid points that fall within each of the coarser resolution grid cells.

Whoa there! We already know that the “observational dataset” is created by “fill[ing] in the gaps”—around a 60% gap apparently—with computer modelled estimates. Now we are told some sort of “re-gridding” is necessary to “facilitate comparison” with UKCP18 climate projections. Why is that necessary?

The UK Met Office adds:

Area averages are also produced based on averaging the 1km grid [data] across a set of geographical regions to provide spatial statistics for country, administrative regions and river basins. The details of these areas can be found in the UKCP18 guidance notes.

Now we’ve got “spacial statistics,” instead of empirical measurements, based upon “area averages” that facilitate, for some unknown reason, comparison with “UKCP18 climate projections.” OK, so how are the “area averages” constructed in accordance with the UKCP18 guidance notes:

Before using [UKCP18 guidance notes], it is important to understand the assumptions made, the caveats and limitations and the appropriate use of the results.

Assumptions made, caveats and limitations! What bloody assumptions, caveats and limitations? Just measure the temperature and calculate some sort of meaningful average for crying out loud!

Let’s look at the caveats and limitations:

Our understanding and ability to simulate the climate is advancing all the time but our climate models are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate and there are still limitations in our ability to project 21st century weather and climate.

Why are the Met Office “generating” temperature datasets to “facilitate comparison” with climate models if those models “are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate.” Surely the models should be based upon the empirically observed and measured features of the “real climate,” as opposed to creating “area averages” containing “spacial statistics” to fit in with the models?

Almost unbelievably, this is evidently what the UK Met Office is doing:

The relative probabilities indicate how strongly the evidence from models and observations, taken together in our methodology, support alternative future climate outcomes. [. . .] The probabilities are conditioned on methodological choices and expert judgement. The results may change if a different methodology is used.

In essence, the Met Office uses a tortuous and unnecessarily convoluted methodology to make up the bulk of its UK “temperature” data. While the Met Office claims that the provisional UK mean temperature was for 2023 was 9.97°C it also states that its results might change “if a different methodology” was used.

What’s more, the data it uses is normalised, based upon a wide gamut of climate assumptions, in order to fit in with its own climate models. Again, it admits its so-called observations, of things like mean temperature, are “taken together in [its] methodology” expressly in order to “simulate the climate.”

Most of these modelling shenanigans are utterly superfluous if your objective is to calculate the arithmetic mean annual UK temperature. Of course anomalies, such as heat islands, need to be normalised in the data but the rest of the Met Office’s “methodology,” which doesn’t even attempt to calculate an arithmetic mean temperature anyway, is about as far removed from empirical science as it is possible to venture.

Inevitably, it produces completely meaningless pap. The problem with such allegedly “scientific” rubbish is that, rather than being laughed off, it is then taken seriously by millions—thanks the unquestioning propaganda reports of the legacy media—and used to advance policy agendas, such as Net Zero.

Apart from the fact that it is blatantly obvious, to anyone who has lived in the UK from more that a couple of decades, that 2023 was not a warm year, there are other notable reasons not to automatically trust the Met Office’s makey-uppy “climate science.” Its entire claim is reliant upon the HadUK-Grid dataset which is a project funded by the UK government. As is the Met Office itself.

Apparently, the UK government is irreversibly committed to UN Sustainable Development and the associated UK Net Zero policies. The Met Office’s alleged scientific “observations” suffer from an enormous financial conflict of interest. Providing any evidence that contradicts the notion of “unprecedented global warming” couldn’t be further removed from the Met Office’s and the UK government’s own declared interests.

There is absolutely no reason to believe any of it. As “science” goes, it’s complete junk. I’ve read comics with more credibility that the Met Office’s claim that 2023 was the second warmest year in the UK since 1884.

Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Updates On The March To The Great Green Energy Future

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | January 12, 2024

The cries of climate alarm get ever louder and more urgent. (E.g., New York Times, January 9, “It’s confirmed: 2023 was the planet’s warmest year on record and perhaps in the last 100,000 years. By far.” ) We’re all about to boil! Something must be done!

OK, but then there is the proposed solution: Order up by government fiat that our current fully working and inexpensive energy system must be replaced with a never-demonstrated pipe dream conjured up by political science and gender studies majors who know nothing about how an energy system works. We’re far enough into this by now that some of the pieces are starting to blow up in dramatic fashion. Are we allowed to notice?

Here in New York, we got into this game mainly with two pieces of legislation, both enacted in 2018 — at the state level, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act; and in the City, Local Law 97. With both laws the pols set the deadlines for compliance at dates seemingly far in the future, expecting that they would no longer be around to be held accountable. The first of those two laws ordered up state-wide mandates for “decarbonizing” the economy, starting with a requirement for 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030; and the second set limits for carbon emissions for buildings in New York City, some of which have just kicked in effective January 1, 2024. Sure enough, the Mayor at the time of enactment is gone, almost the entire City Council is gone (term limits), and the Governor at the time is also gone.

So where are we?

The Manhattan Contrarian Energy Storage Report of December 1, 2022, led off by sounding a clear alarm: getting electricity from intermittent wind and solar well past 50% of total generation would require enormous quantities of energy to be stored, with technical requirements, including duration of storage, well beyond the capability of any battery currently existing or likely to be invented any time soon. Essentially, if fossil fuels are to be eliminated, there is only one realistic possibility for meeting the storage requirements: hydrogen.

In mid-2023, the New York Independent System Operator, to its credit, recognized the problem — although it buried that recognition deep in a report when it should be shouting about the problem from the rooftops. From NYISO’s Power Trends 2023 Report, revised August 2023, page 7, starting in the middle of a paragraph and without any emphasis:

[T]o achieve the mandates of the CLCPA, new emission-free generating technologies with the necessary reliability service attributes will be needed to replace the flexible, dispatchable capabilities of fossil fuel generation and sustain production for extended periods of time. Such emission-free technologies, either individually or in aggregate, are not yet available on a commercial scale.

With hydrogen as the only possible such “emissions-free generating technology,” how much would hydrogen cost as the solution to this problem, particularly if one follows the hypothesis that it must be created without any use of fossil fuels? My Report, page 14, noted that existing commercial production of this so-called “green” hydrogen was “negligible,” leaving no good benchmark for understanding what the costs might be. As a substitute, I ran some rough numbers based on cost of wind and solar generators to make the electricity and efficiency of the electrolysis process. The result was a very rough estimate that this “green” hydrogen would cost “somewhere in the range of 5 to 10 times more” than natural gas (page 17).

Well, now some new precision has come into view. In July 2022 the UK government launched what it calls its First Hydrogen Allocation Round (HAR 1), to obtain bids and award contracts to produce this so-called “green” hydrogen using wind power. The process took a while, but here from December 14, 2023 is the announcement of the first round of contract awards. Excerpt:

Following the launch of the first hydrogen allocation round (HAR1) in July 2022, we have selected the successful projects to be offered contracts. We are pleased to announce 11 successful projects, totalling 125MW capacity. HAR1 puts the UK in a leading position internationally: this represents the largest number of commercial scale green hydrogen production projects announced at once anywhere in Europe. . . . The 11 projects have been agreed at a weighted average strike price of £241/MWh.

£241/MWh? At today’s exchange rate of 1.27 $/£, that would be $306/MWh. Prices of natural gas are generally quoted in $/MMBTU rather than per MWh, but here is EIA’s latest Electricity Monthly Update, dated December 21 and covering the month of October 2023. It gives natural gas prices in the per MWh units. The “price of natural gas at New York City” is given as $11.32/MWh. That would make the price that the UK has just agreed to pay to buy this “green” hydrogen stuff approximately 27 times what we can buy natural gas for here in New York to obtain the same energy content.

And that $306/MWh is just for the hydrogen. It includes nothing for the massive new facilities (underground salt caverns?) to store the stuff, for a new pipeline network to transport it, and for a new collection of power plants to burn it.

To be at least a little fair, natural gas prices do vary considerably by location. Even within the U.S., some prices per the EIA Report are about double the New York City price, and in Europe maybe four times the New York City price. But those prices are affected by European demand for LNG from the U.S., due to their own stupid decision to ban fracking for natural gas combined with the unpleasantness in Russia.

And even if you figure that green hydrogen can be produced for “only” 7 – 10 times what it costs to buy natural gas, rather than 25 – 30 times, is anybody really going to go forward with such a project to replace all natural gas in an entire modern economy? It would be completely nuts.

Finally, let’s take a look at how New York is progressing toward that 2030 mandated goal of 70% of electricity from renewables. Data on electricity production for New York State for 2023 are just out from the NYISO. The good people from Nuclear New York (advocates for more nuclear power plants) have compiled the ISO data into a helpful aggregate chart covering the years 2019 (immediately after enactment of the Climate Change Act) to 2023. Here is the chart:

Out of 152.3 TWh of electricity produced or imported in 2023, fossil fuels continued to provide 63.3 TWh (41.5%). Most of the imports (14.5%) are undoubtedly from fossil fuels as well. Wind/solar/other provided just 12.1 TWh, or 7.9% of the total, barely up from about 6% in 2019. And that’s now suddenly going to go to 70% by 2030? Ridiculous. Meanwhile, the big story leaps off the page, as the Nuclear New York guys emphasize in the headline. The State forced the premature closure of two nuclear plants in 2020 and 2021, which caused the (carbon free) nuclear share of the total to drop from about 29% to only 18%; and almost all of that was taken up by two new natural gas plants, causing the fossil fuel share of the total to soar from only 34% to 41.5%. No person looking at this chart would ever conclude that New York has spent the past five years embarked on a crash program to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar. That process is going absolutely nowhere.

The truth is that the march to the Great Green Energy Future is over, but no one is yet willing to admit that.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

Germany: Scholz’s ‘green’ government wants to buy 3 VIP helicopters for €200 million

By Denes Albert | Remix News | January 15, 2024

At a time when farmers are staging mass national protests over austerity measures that they say will put them under tremendous financial strain, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his ministers are aiming to purchase three new, luxury VIP helicopters that will cost €200 million.

However, the budget cuts for farmers are just one austerity measure, with the total budget cut expected to be €17 billion. The opposition is reacting with outrage over the news of the helicopter purchases, with the luxury helicopters designed for Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius to attend appointments in Germany.

The German armed forces are supposed to replace the aging Cougar helicopters currently stationed in Berlin, which have a range of 850 kilometers and a cruising speed of up to 315 kilometers per hour. The VIP helicopters became famous when the former Social Democrat (SPD) Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht took her son on holiday in one of them.

The German newspaper Bild says that government officials probably suspect that citizens will not be happy about spending taxpayers’ money in a time of crisis, which is why they wanted to hide the €200 million expense.

German MPs do not recall this type of spending ever being discussed in the budget committee, and the helicopters were not included in the December budget proposal. The news is especially surprising considering German police still have so-called VIP Super Puma helicopters, which government representatives can fly in to emergency meetings.

The opposition is stunned, with Christian Democratic Union (CDU) budget expert Ingo Gädechens telling Bild that the government has lost touch with reality. He points out that the government wants to take €176 million from farmers this year, almost as much as the new helicopters cost.

“All of Germany is suffering from the collapse of fiscal policy. Austerity is everywhere,” the politician said. He added that it is obvious that Scholz’s travel convenience is the reason for the purchases and that ministers are more important than budgetary discipline.

However, Scholz may never get to experience the joy of riding a brand-new luxury helicopter, as the government cannot buy new helicopters without parliamentary approval. Now, it is up to the budget committee.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

UK to send 20,000 troops to NATO exercise

RT | January 15, 2024

The UK is set to deploy around 20,000 service members – as well as modern warships and fighter jets – to Europe to take part in a major NATO exercise amid rising tensions with Russia, the Defence Ministry has announced.

In a statement on Monday, the ministry, citing excerpts from a speech to be delivered by Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, said that some 16,000 army troops – along with tanks, artillery, and helicopters – will join other bloc members on the continent to participate in Exercise Steadfast Defender 24, scheduled to take place in the first half of this year.

The effort will be supported by eight warships and submarines, as well as 2,000 Royal Navy sailors. The UK will also deploy a number of aircraft, including F35B Lightning fighters and Poseidon P8 surveillance aircraft, the ministry said.

Meanwhile, Shapps is expected to call the drill “one of NATO’s largest deployments since the end of the Cold War,” adding that the UK and its allies have found themselves “in a new era” and “must be prepared to deter our enemies,” according to the statement. The statement specifically referred to the threat from the Russian “menace.”

NATO began reinforcing its military footprint in Europe first after a Western-backed coup in Kiev triggered hostilities in Donbass, which is now part of Russia. However, the most drastic build-up occurred after Russia launched its military campaign against Ukraine in February 2022. In June of the same year, the US-led military bloc agreed to put 300,000 troops on high alert, up from 40,000, to deter Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously said that Moscow has no plans to attack NATO, arguing that there was “no geopolitical, economic … or military interest” in waging war against the bloc. Still, Moscow has also repeatedly warned that the alliance’s military activities close to its border warrant additional security measures. Putin has also said that Ukraine’s desire to join NATO was one of the key reasons for the current conflict.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Scholz pushes fake Russian threats to distract Germans from economic problems

By Ahmed Adel | January 15, 2024

Germany is preparing for a war between NATO and Russia, which, according to the scenario of the German Defence Ministry, could begin in the European summer of 2025 after the defeat of the Ukrainian Army, reported Bild with reference to a secret document of the Bundeswehr. This is evidently a desperate attempt by the German chancellor to distract citizens from their economic woes.

According to the newspaper, citing a classified German military document, the escalation could begin as early as next month with the start of an active Russian offensive against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

According to Bild, the German military considers the Suwałki Gap between Belarus and the Russian region of Kaliningrad to be the most likely site of confrontation. A situation could escalate in October if Russia deploys troops and medium-range missiles to Kaliningrad, and from December 2024, an artificially induced “border conflict” and “clashes with numerous casualties” could unfold as Russia would take advantage of political chaos in the US following the presidential election.

“The actions of Russia and the West are described precisely, indicating the location and month, and will culminate in the deployment of hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and the imminent start of war in the summer of 2025,” writes the article.

However, the article’s authors leave open the question of how this hypothetical escalation will end.

This is, of course, a ridiculous suggestion by the German Defence Ministry, especially as Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it does not want conflict with NATO or anything beyond its special military operation in Ukraine. Rather, this is an attempt by Chancellor Olaf Scholz to instil an unjustified fear in German society as his popularity continues to plummet in the context of a stuttering economy and continued failed policies.

More than 70% of Germans are dissatisfied with Scholz, according to a survey carried out by the INSA Institute for Bild. Specifically, 72% of voters do not approve of his performance, which is three percentage points more than at the beginning of December. Only one in five, 20%, think that Scholz has done a good job.

According to the researchers, 76% of those surveyed are generally dissatisfied with what the federal government does, whilst only 17% of citizens are satisfied. It is the worst indicator of the ruling coalition since it was formed in December 2021, Bild noted.

In 2023, the Scholz-led government faced numerous economic and leadership challenges that undermined public trust. Persistent inflationary pressures, exacerbated by fiscal policy, undermined household budgets, which caused widespread discontent. The lack of strategic direction and perceived indecision on critical issues, such as energy policy following the adoption of sanctions against Russia, further fuelled scepticism among voters. The leadership crisis, characterised by internal conflicts and disagreements, damaged the effectiveness and cohesion of the German government.

What especially frustrates Germans is the fact that sanctions were imposed on Russia, which has become the fifth-largest economy in the world by volume, whilst Germany is in recession. With a public budget deficit estimated at around 60 billion euros, the very model of the German economy appears to be threatened.

Germany is officially in recession and is expected to have ended 2023 with a drop in GDP of around 0.3%, according to a forecast from the European Commission. This is one of the worst economic results in the bloc, given that the growth forecast for the entire European Union in 2023 is 0.6%. Among the causes is the energy crisis that has hit Germany harder than the rest of the European bloc, mainly because the Germans slashed their supply of Russian energy after the start of the special military operation in February 2022.

Furthermore, with the increase in energy prices resulting from sanctions against Russia, Germany has also suffered an increase in general price inflation in the economy, forcing the European Central Bank to raise interest rates, thus affecting the population’s purchasing power and impacting consumption. Consequently, German companies have not only lost international competitiveness with the application of sanctions against the Russians, but now the country runs the risk of entering a process of deindustrialisation.

Under these conditions, the extreme right is experiencing a resurgence. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has hit an all-time high approval rating of 24% and has the potential to gain a few more percentile points with the immense failure of the ruling coalition.

What is undeniable is the fact that Germany is experiencing a rapid decline, all spurred on by the reckless policies of Scholz that prioritised American interests instead of German, and he is now resorting to a fake Russian threat in a desperate attempt to distract citizens from their social and economic problems that he is responsible for.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

COVID-19 Vaccines May Cause Harm Five Years after Injection

US Congressional Testimony from Drs. McCullough, Cole, and Milhoan on Long-Term Health Impact of Genetic Vaccination–Full Hearing

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 13, 2024

Friday January 12, 2024, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene held a historic US Congressional Panel in The Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill to learn why COVID-19 vaccination continues to cause record injuries, disabilities, and deaths, even years after the primary series in 2021.

The hearing was attended by Greene (R-GA), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), US Representatives Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and Any Biggs (R-AZ) and the witnesses were Dr. Peter McCullough adult internal medicine, cardiology, Dr. Ryan Cole, clinical pathology, and Dr. Kirk Milhoan, pediatrics, pediatric cardiology.

The two hour session was nonstop from opening statements and questions from our lawmakers to the experts. It was live-stream broadcasted through many channels and press took interviews from Greene and Johnson. The audience included stakeholders who have suffered injuries from COVID-19 vaccination, students, corporate executives, independent media, and the Children’s Health Defense.

Dozens of citations are given for the Congressional Record from the peer-reviewed literature, safety databases, and slides were shown demonstrating COVID-19 vaccine Spike protein doing widespread damage to the human body. Dr. McCullough pointed out for genetic products, the FDA regulatory window for safety concerns is five years. Americans are worried. A Rasmussen poll out on the day of the hearing reported 53% of Americans think severe side effects from the vaccines are leading to large numbers of unexplained deaths.

Please take the time to review this hearing and please share it widely with your family, friends, and colleagues. At the end Senator Johnson makes a plea to physicians and other healthcare workers to come forward, be honest in their missteps, and get on the right side of history. COVID-19 vaccination has been a biological safety catastrophe for the world. On January 12, 2024, all three witnesses called for market withdrawal of all COVID-19 vaccine products for safety concerns—its in the record.


Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Techno-Hell: ‘Natural’ Breastfeeding Condemned as ‘Ethically Problematic’

By Ben Bartee | Armageddon Prose | January 13, 2024

One would be hard-pressed to imagine a human activity more natural than a mother breastfeeding her infant, aside from, perhaps, eating, sleeping, and sex.

The pharmaceutical front group American Academy of Pediatrics, which touts the virtues of transing children just as soon as it can wrangle their doomed genitals into its vice grip, disagrees.

Via American Academy of Pediatrics

“Medical and public health organizations recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed for at least 6 months. This recommendation is based on evidence of health benefits for mothers and babies, as well as developmental benefits for babies.

A spate of recent work challenges the extent of these benefits, and ethical criticism of breastfeeding promotion as stigmatizing is also growing.

Building on this critical work, we are concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the “natural” way to feed infants. This messaging plays into a powerful perspective that ‘natural’ approaches to health are better, a view examined in a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Promoting breastfeeding as ‘natural’ may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that ‘natural’ approaches are presumptively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination.”

Note the passive-aggressive placement of the term “natural” in quotation marks, so as to emphasize that breastfeeding being natural is a dubious or disputable claim — as if every female mammal on Earth for millions of years hasn’t breastfed its young, as if that’s not, in fact, one of the defining features of mammalism.

Once you’ve downloaded the technocratic paradigm blueprint from which this kind of tripe emerges, the aims of this propaganda come into clearer focus. (Spoiler alert: it’s not about “gender equity” or whatever nonsense.)

As far as I can tell, there are two main biomedical and social control advantages to phasing out breastfeeding as a barbaric, filthy relic of the past, in the tradition of Brave New World:

  • Mothers pass their adaptive immune systems to their babies through breastmilk. One might call this “nature’s pharmacy.” All of the antibodies that the mother has accumulated through her life on Earth are gifted to her baby, to the obvious benefit of the child’s needy and developing immune system.
  • Breastfeeding enhances the mother-child bond, the first and arguably most important social bond that serves as the foundation for all others.

Each of these effects of breastfeeding enhances the baby’s physical and psychological health and fosters a functional society. Conversely, neither enhances pharmaceutical profits or the social control of the state.

Which means — as in the case of mothers protesting school boards a year ago or so over transing kids who were subsequently targeted by the DOJ — promoting breastfeeding is a vocation fit only for domestic terrorists. Will breastfeeding mothers one day find themselves on a DHS watchlist for the sin of feeding their babies?

Transhumanist ideology is hellbent on severing every physical and emotional tie that binds people — actual, biological, honest-to-God people — together and weaponizing human physiology for profit and social control.

The social engineers want us isolated, atomized, afraid, sick, and sad. Ultimately, they want us dead. Anti-humanism is at the heart of their ethics.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

55 U.S. Doctors Behind Psychiatric Diagnosis Manual Took $14M From Drug Companies

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 11, 2024

Fifty-five of the U.S. doctors who helped decide what diagnoses and treatments were included in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) main diagnostic manual received more than $14 million in undisclosed industry funding, a special report in The BMJ revealed.

According to The BMJ :

“The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association standardizes symptom criteria and codifies psychiatric disorders. This manual plays a central role in the approval of new psychiatric drugs and the extension of patent exclusivity, and it can influence payers and mental health professionals who seek third party reimbursements.”

The manual, now in its fifth edition, DSM-5-TR, is often referred to as the “bible” of psychiatric disorders. It was released in 2002 and includes changes made since the APA first published the manual in 2013.

The authors of The BMJ report wrote that “industry influence over the development of this diagnostic guideline can have a profound effect on public health (eg, by broadening diagnostic categories and influencing what drugs will be prescribed and covered by insurance). It is thus critical that authors of this psychiatric taxonomy should be free of industry ties.”

Research consistently shows that conflicts of interest lead to “pro-industry thinking and conclusions,” the authors of the report said.

The BMJ found that the doctors who received the most money — often in the form of food, beverages, travel and consulting reimbursements — were those working in diagnostic areas “where drug interventions are often the standard treatment, such as depressive disorders, neurocognitive disorders, and drug induced movement disorders.”

The study’s lead investigator, Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., a professor and clinical psychologist in the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, told Medscape Medical News, the study’s intent was “not to point fingers at the APA or individual members of the APA but rather to provide hopefully a small piece of research data that would help the APA look at the larger systemic issue of conflicts of interest.”

Justine Tanguay, a lawyer with Children’s Health Defense and research director for the organization’s Reform Pharma initiative, praised the researchers for bringing public awareness to the issue.

Tanguay told The Defender :

“It’s an outrageous concept to think that if a doctor, scientist or public health official is paid or funded by Big Pharma that he or she can present or recommend an independent viewpoint.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that even the perception of a conflict of interest undermines the integrity of medicine.”

The Reform Pharma campaign is working “to systematically remove Big Pharma corruption and to restore the healthcare system” — which is needed now more than ever because “such conflicts of interest … have become the norm,” Tanguay said.

A problem for over a decade

Cosgrove — who previously served as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University — has for over a decade studied conflicts of interest among contributors to the APA’s manual.

The high percentage of doctors with industry ties reported by the latest BMJ study, published Wednesday, mirrors the findings reported in her previous work.

“What we also see that’s consistent with our 2016 study and 2012 study is the panels for which the members had the most financial ties to industry were those for which pharmaceutical interventions are the first line of therapy,” Cosgrove said.

After duplicate names had been removed, The BMJ identified 168 individuals who served as either panel or task force members of the DSM-5-TR. Of those, 92 met the inclusion criteria of being a physician based in the U.S. and therefore could be included in Open Payments, a publicly accessible database.

Eighty-six of the doctors were panel members for the DSM-5-TR. The other six were task force members who also had decision-making powers.

Of these 92 individuals, 55 (60%) received payments from industry. The authors used OpenPayments to look at the funding the 92 doctors received from 2016 to 2019 — the years just before and during the development of the DSM-5-TR.

The amounts ranged from just under $14 per doctor to $2.7 million per doctor. Collectively, the doctors received more than $14.2 million.

Cosgrove and her co-authors found it particularly unethical that more than one-third of the doctors received money as “compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program.”

In other words, these individuals were hired by drug companies as “key opinion leaders” to speak at pro-industry events. Cosgrove and her co-authors said:

“Being on a speakers bureau or being a key opinion leader is widely recognized as an egregious financial conflict of interest because the role of the key opinion leader is essentially a marketing one; the talks given are usually presented at educational events sponsored by industry.”

Dr. Bernard Lo, professor emeritus of medicine and director emeritus of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed. He told Medscape that key opinion leaders are hired by drug companies to give talks, meaning they are used by the industry as “basically salespeople trying to increase sales of a product.

Full public disclosure needed

Before the development of the DSM-5, the APA claimed the organization’s goal was to develop a “transparent process of development for the DSM, and … an unbiased, evidence-based DSM, free from any conflicts of interest.”

An APA spokesperson told Medscape that DSM-5-TR decision-makers were not allowed to participate if the organization was made aware they had received more than $5,000 in industry payments and that all who worked on the text revision were required to disclose all sources of income prior to their participation.

“The APA implemented and enforced a rigorous process for DSM-5-TR that required transparency by all contributors of their personal and professional interests, followed by an independent review to ensure that personal and professional interests did not bias any results,” the spokesperson said.

The study’s findings, however, contradicted that claim by the APA. And the APA did not publicly disclose industry ties for the latest edition of the manual, according to the study authors.

The APA also did not publicly disclose minutes of the DSM meetings, summaries of changes proposed by the panel and task force members or reasons for those changes.

Public disclosure of all industry funding is critical, according to Lo.

“Part of the report should be, ‘Here are the conflicts of interest reported by the members of the panel’ … Failure to do that in the DSM-5-TR is unacceptable from an ethical and transparency point of view,” Lo said.

The APA’s failure to adequately address conflicts of interest doesn’t promote transparency or public trust in the diagnostic criteria published in the DSM-5-TR, he said.

Tanguay agreed. “In order to have trust in medicine, we need to have transparency, whether it covers medical research, scientific publications or public health policy.”

Those with industry ties should be barred

Cosgrove recommended the APA follow the 2011 report, “Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust,” produced by the Institute of Medicine (IOM, now called the National Academy of Medicine). The report is an updated and streamlined version of a 2009 conflicts of interest guideline co-authored by Lo.

“The IOM recommends that the whole guideline development group be free of industry ties,” Cosgrove said. “At a minimum, the chair … and the majority of folks should not have ties to industry.”

Tanguay went further by saying scientists with industry ties should be barred from publication because such ties distort the scientific literature.

Dr. Giovanni A. Fava — a highly regarded researcher and clinician — in 2009 warned, “The increasing influence of the pharmaceutical industry on psychiatric research and practice is leading to an intellectual and clinical crisis.”

While some might argue that banning all those with industry ties would shrink the expert pool that develops the DSM and other guidelines, Cosgrove said that’s not the case.

“There are hundreds of experts in all medical disciplines that do not have industry ties,” she said. “The ‘most experts have industry ties’ is a spurious and unsupported argument.”

The APA should especially ban those who received industry money for serving as key opinion leaders, Lo said.

The APA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.


Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.

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.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

“Preparing for Disease X”

WEF panel session on Jan. 17, 2024 will discuss preparations for “unknown disease.”

BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 14, 2024

Last night at dinner with Dr. McCullough, he asked me to do some research on the dread “Disease X” about which we’ve been hearing a lot of chatter since it was announced that the Davos crowd will be talking about it at their annual WEF meeting this January.

I agree that it’s always a terribly ominous sign when the WEF talks about saving humanity from a hypothetical threat. When those guys start chatting about saving us from an “unknown” pathogen, it’s a safe bet that bio-labs are already tinkering around with a “candidate pathogen.” The stated objective of their work is to develop vaccines against the candidate pathogen should it (God forbid) evolve to infect humanity.

To get a sense of how this industry works, check out this Sky News report from August 7, 2023 headlined: ‘Disease X’: UK scientists begin developing vaccines against new pandemic.

Further investigation of the literature on Disease X led me to a book, published about a year ago, titled Disease X: The 100 Days Mission to End Pandemicsby Kate Kelland with a Forward by Tony Blair.

Ms. Kelland is a former Global Health Correspondent for Reuters and is now Chief Scientific Writer for CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations). As many readers of this Substack are aware, CEPI was founded in 2016 by the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, and other key players in the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.

Its Preliminary Business Plan, published in 2017, is a blueprint of what I call the Pandemic Predicting and Planning Industry, which positions itself to rake in billions of public money when the next infectious disease pathogen strikes humanity.

An attractive Englishwoman who studied French and German at Durham University, Ms. Kelland’s career as a news correspondent seems to have really taken off around the time of the 9/11 attacks. As she put it on her LinkedIn profile: “Two years in the lobby tracking the Blair government during the crisis surrounding the 9/11 attacks on the United States.” In 2009—probably with the arrival of the grossly overblown Swine Flu Pandemic—she became a Health and Science correspondent for Reuters.

A conference on Disease X at the WEF’s annual meeting is scheduled to take place in Davos on January 17, 2024. As it is described on the WEF website:

With fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that an unknown “Disease X” could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic, what novel efforts are needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead?

This session is linked to the Partnership for Health System Sustainability and Resilience and the Collaborative Surveillance Initiative of the World Economic Forum.

This first sentence raises the question: Why is the WHO issuing “fresh warnings… that an unknown “Disease X” could result in 20 times more fatalities than the coronavirus pandemic”? On what intelligence is the WHO basing its fresh warning? A Google search for “WHO issues fresh warning about Disease X” resulted in this report of 26 May 2023 headlined After WHO chief’s warning, ‘Disease X’ raises concern

It seems to me that all reasonable adults are justified in asking the question: What are these gangsters cooking up now?

The above timeline of announcements does indeed resemble the autumn of 2019, when the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex engaged in a huge amount of of chit-chat and pandemic planning simulations about a hypothetical “coronavirus” pandemic.

To make matters even more ominous, the chatter about Disease X is happening at the beginning of another election year, with Donald Trump once again leading in the polls and the representation of a man named “Joe Biden” challenging him.

Heaven help us.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

China Rebukes US State Dept for Sending ‘Gravely Wrong Signal’ to Taiwan

Sputnik – 14.01.2024

China resolutely opposes any official interaction between the US and Taiwan and any American interference in Taiwan’s internal affairs, regardless of the reasons, and calls on Washington to strictly adhere to the one-China principle and the joint communiques.

China has condemned the US State Department’s recent remarks on Taiwan’s election, saying they blatantly disregard the one-China policy and the agreed China-US joint communiques, the country’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

“The US State Department’s statement […] also sends a gravely wrong signal to the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces. We strongly deplore and resolutely oppose it, and have made serious representations to the US side,” the statement read.

Emphasizing the importance of the Taiwan issue to China’s core interests, the ministry reiterated that upholding the one-China principle is crucial to maintaining stable China-US relations and is a globally recognized norm in international affairs.

The ministry also warned US leaders against supporting Taiwan independence, the notion of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan,” and against using the Taiwan issue to contain China.

“China firmly opposes the US having any form of official interaction with Taiwan and interfering in Taiwan affairs in any way or under any pretext. We urge the US to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiqués and act seriously in accordance with the commitments that have been reaffirmed multiple times,” the statement explained.

“We urge the US to stop interactions of an official nature with Taiwan and stop sending any wrong signal to the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence’,” it added.

Elections for Taiwan’s regional leader and members of parliament were held on Saturday with a 69.8% voter turnout, according to the local election committee. Lai Ching-te of Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was declared the winner leader’s election with 40.05% of the vote, with ballots from 17,759 of 17,795 polling stations counted. However, the DPP itself lost 11 parliamentary seats in the election. Lai will be inaugurated on May 20, 2024.

Congratulating Lai on his victory, the US State Department released a statement saying: “We also congratulate the Taiwan people for once again demonstrating the strength of their robust democratic system and electoral process.”

“The partnership between the American people and the people on Taiwan, rooted in democratic values, continues to broaden and deepen across economic, cultural, and people-to-people ties. We look forward to working with Dr. Lai and Taiwan’s leaders of all parties to advance our shared interests and values, and to further our longstanding unofficial relationship,” it added.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment