The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is now the second most popular party in the country, is moving closer to being banned. Christian Democrat (CDU) MP Marco Wanderwitz says he has enough MPs in his corner to table a motion for an AfD ban in the Bundestag.
He noted that he has gathered 37 MPs who will support the ban while speaking with the far-left newspaper taz.
Wanderwitz is still waiting on the Münster Higher Administrative Court. That court has since agreed with the classification of the AfD as a “suspected right-wing extremist” organization in May; however, the court has not yet released a written justification behind its decision. Wanderwitz says he is waiting for the court to release its written report before moving forward with a ban proposal.
“Once the reasons for the ruling are available, we will take a close look at it and then submit our updated and well-founded application for a ban,” announced Wanderwitz. The court has at least five months from the date of its decision to release its written report, but it is unclear what the court will publish in its response.
If the Bundestag votes on a ban, the Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest court, would have the final decision on whether a ban is legal. In any case, an actual ban could throw the German political system into turmoil and raise questions about democratic legitimacy in Germany.
Notably, Wanderwitz lost his own seat to an AfD politician during local elections, making a ban personal for him. The AfD’s success in the east of Germany, where it is the number one party and likely to win several regional elections in the autumn, also means that the governing parties are facing the prospect of completely losing power in a number of German states. In some cases, their vote totals may be so low that they are completely kicked out of state parliaments, giving them a strong incentive to seek out a ban of the rival AfD. These eastern states may even become ungovernable without the AfD’s participation in government, which is upping the ante for the mainstream parties to fast-track a ban.
Other parties besides the CDU are racing to secure a ban of the party, which has surged on the popularity of its anti-immigration and anti-war proposals. Green politician Marcel Emmerich is calling on the conference of interior ministers to set up a task force against the AfD, which would collect evidence to support a ban.
“The AfD is a security risk for people and democracy,” he told the taz newspaper.
Notably, the open borders policies of the ruling mainstream parties have fueled a huge increase in violent crime in Germany, with approximately 6 out of 10 violent crimes committed by foreigners in 2023, a record high. Violent crime also hit a record high in the same year. Recently, a wave of knife attacks has made constant headlines in Germany, including an Afghan radical who killed a German police officer in Mannheim and another Afghan who attacked German football fans while they were watching the European Football Championships in Wolmirstedt. The latter stabbed one 23-year-old man to death and then attacked another party where he wounded three men, two seriously, before being shot dead.
The AfD has long argued that these attacks are the real security threat in Europe.
The red-red-green government in Bremen is also supporting such a task force, and Social Democrat (SPD) interior ministers are looking to discuss the issue of an AfD ban at a conference on Wednesday.
In regard of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s main challenge going forward is to find the equilibrium between strategic overestimation and underestimation. “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten,” as Bill Gates put it.
A triumphalist tone is unmistakeable in President Vladimir Putin’s speech on Friday to a special gathering of senior foreign ministry officials in Moscow presenting the guardrails for negotiations with Ukraine. Russia is a country of high-context culture, which communicates in ways that are implicit and relies heavily on context.
Putin underscored certain pre-conditions. Russia is ready to immediately cease hostilities if Ukraine begins withdrawing its military units beyond the administrative boundaries of Donbass, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions. This is a curious replay of the precondition that Moscow fulfilled in March 2022 when following the talks in Istanbul, Ukraine expected a rollback of Russian deployments around Kiev.
Once bitten, twice shy — Putin’s precondition implies that new territorial realities should be fixed by international treaties. Moscow is ready to negotiate only after Kiev formally notified NATO that it is abandoning the intent to seek membership. Russia expects a complete lifting of sanctions.
Evidently, Russia’s peace terms are, partly at least, based on certain prerequisites that are, conceivably, impossible for Ukraine and its mentors to fulfil. So, presumably, a further hardening of the peace terms is to be expected if Russian troops make more gains on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Moscow is signalling to its Western adversaries the inevitability of a massive redrawing of the Russian-Ukrainian border as the basis for peace.
Unsurprisingly, the Western powers view Putin’s peace terms as an ultimatum although Russian diplomacy propagates them as an important peace initiative. It is timed carefully, just as the G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia in Italy ended and on the eve of the Western-sponsored ‘peace meet’ in Bürgenstock.
The prognosis by the influential politician who has been a deputy speaker of the Duma since 2016 and the scion of an illustrious Russian family, Pyotr Tolstoy (great-great-grandson of Leo Tolstoy) is that Moscow will call out next only for the surrender of Ukrainian forces.
The mood in Moscow has become belligerent, as the EU, at sustained prodding by Washington, is inexorably moving toward the confiscation of Russia’s frozen assets in western banks — ostensibly for meeting Ukraine’s needs but in reality to defray the huge expenses Washington is incurring for its proxy war.
The G7 summit’s communique highlights that “In the presence of President Zelenskyy, we decided to make available approximately USD 50 billion leveraging the extraordinary revenues of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets, sending an unmistakable signal to President Putin. We are stepping up our collective efforts to disarm and defund Russia’s military industrial complex.”
The G7 formulation is a white lie. What is unfolding is a financial scam of the century and the largest theft of money in history. A clutch of modern-day brigands is literally grabbing about $260 billion of Russia’s sovereign assets and giving it the colouring of a legal translation by attributing to it the process the status of a financial collateral for an American loan to Ukraine in blatant violation of international financial law that would ultimately line the pockets of the US military-industrial complex and the politicians.
Suffice to say, Washington is making its proxy war in Ukraine a self-financing, cost-accounting enterprise with Europeans as guarantors. Washington is inflicting a big blow to Russia’s national honour and pride. The big question is where does Russia go from here, given its ‘high-context culture’?
One barely-noticed ellipsis in Putin’s speech on Friday was that he left his lengthy recap of Western betrayals hanging in the air without a foot note as to how Russia came to such a sorry pass at all historically.
If the willing submission to the avalanche of national humiliations was merely due to Russia’s weakness, surely, that is a thing of the past. Today, Russia stands tall as the fourth largest global economy, a great military power and the sole power on the planet with the strategic capability to reduce the US to thermonuclear ashes. Yet, minions like NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg are threatening Russia that he’s heading a “nuclear alliance.”
That is where the elucidation on Putin’s speech by the Dy Chairman of Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev — “on what he [Putin] carefully hinted at in his speech” — needs to be understood properly.
Medvedev made four key points:
The new territories that became part of Russia since 2022 will “remain so forever.”
A “catastrophic scenario” is developing for the Kiev regime.
The sanitary zone Russia will create on its western borders to prevent terrorist attacks may extend right up to Ukraine’s border with Poland, the staging post for NATO’s threats against Russia.
“The President did not say this [western Ukraine’s fate] directly, but it is obvious that such territories, if desired by the people living there, can become part of Russia.”
Most certainly, it is not a coincidence that Putin landed in Pyongyang this morning — or that, Russia’s Pacific Fleet commenced a large scale naval exercise from today till the 28th of Junein the Pacific Ocean, in seas of Japan and Okhotsk.
In the context of his state visit to North Korea, Putin wrote in an article for North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun, “We highly appreciate the DPRK’s unwavering support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine… We will… jointly oppose illegitimate unilateral restrictions [read sanctions], and shape the architecture of equal and indivisible security in Eurasia.”
By the way, if North Korea, which is a nuclear power, figures in the first circle of Russia’s strategic calculus as an ally, can Iran which is a nuclear threshold country be far behind — and, importantly, what could be its alchemy? Indeed, Russia has warned that it will give an asymmetrical response to the attack on its territory with western weapons allegedly aided by NATO personnel — something without precedent even at the high noon of the Cold War — and NATO secretary-general’s open, vociferous support for it.
In Strobe Talbott’s book The Russia Hand (2002), he narrates an aside with Bill Clinton during a US presidential visit to Moscow in 1995. Clinton told Talbott using a favourite metaphor that his instincts were that Russian elites were sulking and couldn’t take anymore the “shit” being shoved down their throat. Indeed, NATO’s eastward expansion was already on the drawing board in the White House by then.
However, it took Russia another quarter century till February 2022 to resist US bullying. To be sure, Medvedev’s candid ‘annotation’ could not have been without approval from Putin.
The challenge for the next two years is that Russia might overestimate the willingness of the US and EU to concede its legitimate demand of equal and indivisible security.
On the other hand, in a longer term perspective, Moscow should not underestimate the stubborn refusal by Europe’s declining powers — UK, France and Germany — to accept the rise of Russia as a compelling geopolitical reality that they must reconcile with.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orhan is spot on in estimating that it will be sheer naïveté to assume that the new EU leadership would moderate the policies towards Ukraine and Russia, despite the ascendancy of the right-wing parties in the recent elections to the European Parliament.
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, although claiming he would not comment on France’s ongoing domestic crisis, said that “I strongly believe it is in the interest of France, and all the allies, to keep NATO strong, because we live in a more dangerous world.”
France is right now facing a political crisis – maybe the wildest one in decades, as Arnaud Bertrand, businessman and commentator, writes.
French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved his country’s parliament and decided to gamble on a snap election, as a reaction against the rise of the so-called “far-right.” The problem is that the populist party National Rally (Rassemblement National), formerly known as the National Front, is projected to win 31.5 percent of the vote, which is over twice the 14.7 percent projected for Macron’s Renaissance party.
Bardella, who is the president of the National Rally’s party since 2022, and also currently a member of the European Parliament, and who is a likely next Prime Minister for France, has pledged to maintain Paris within NATO at least as long as the conflict in Ukraine keeps going: “The proposal we’ve always advocated … did not factor in war… You don’t change treaties in wartime.” Hence, Stoltenberg “warning”.
There is of course a catch in such a commitment: for one thing, Ukraine has never declared war against Russia to this day. In fact, on April, retired general Igor Romanenko, a former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said that doing so would go against Ukraine’s interests: “If we went to a state of war, then assistance for weapons and equipment would cease not only from the United States, but also from most of the allies.”
This could be just a legal technicality, but it does make it hard to draw the line about when exactly a “war” ended or started. For instance, Ukraine has been bombing the Donbass region since 2014. Even with a Russian de facto victory, Kyiv could just claim Crimea and Donbass indefinitely, and all the Ukrainian far-right militias can make sure that some sort of low-level or frozen conflict (with provocations and terror attacks) goes on for many years. On the other hand, this very ambiguity may give room to a hypothetical National Rally presidency in future France to deem that the war in Ukraine is “over” whenever it sees fit – and then proceed to withdraw from NATO. One should bear in mind that Bardella has only made this caveat with regards to an ongoing “war” in the Eastern European country. Other than that, he does claim that leaving NATO has always been his party’s proposal. As recently as 2022, French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (who is a member of Bardella’s party) promised to pull France out of NATO’s military command structure. One should also keep in mind that France did withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance’s integrated military structure in 1966, albeit not completely leaving the NATO Treaty, and even expelled all of its units and headquarters on French territory back then. The country’s “estrangement” from the Atlantic organization only ended in 2009 with then President Nicolas Sarkozy, which means it took no less than 43 years for France to change its course.
Today’s French Fifth Republic is a semi-presidentialism system, in which the French President (the executive Head of State) has more powers with regards to foreign policy, also being the commander-in-chief of the French Armed Forces. The Prime Minister, in turn, being the head of government, mostly occupies oneself with domestic issues. Of course, a National Rally government, if politically successful, could pave the way for a future National Rally presidency. Moreover, the French government, led by its Prime Minister, controls the budget and could therefore hamper military aid to Ukraine in a number of ways – this, by the way, would be a very popular measure in France, considering that just recently, in March 2023, Macron imposed a very unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 years old by unusually invoking a special constitutional powers and basically shunning parliament.
Even former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in his recent interview, has described Macron’s latest decision to dissolve the parliament as a “major risk for the country.” He added that the “endless enlargement of Europe towards Ukraine” is a mistake against which he “warned”: “I even dared to make a comparison, and I was widely criticized for, asserting that Ukraine risked becoming, for President Macron, what Turkey had been for President Chirac… Enlargement towards Ukraine is a contradiction, [it takes place] while the Balkan countries, which are European, have been waiting for so long.”
In France, the President names the Prime Minister, but in practice is forced to make a choice that would be able to get the support of a majority in the assembly, because the French National Assembly can dismiss the Prime Minister government.
Therefore, Macron has indeed placed himself in a very difficult and risky position. He has vowed to remain in the presidency regardless of the results of parliamentary elections (on July 7) he himself convoked. He thus might have to name a far-right government, depending on the results. Such results are to come a few days before the NATO summit in Washington, which Macron is of course expected to attend. In such a scenario, he would arrive there in a completely demoralized position.
Marine Le Pen’s 2022 proposal (to leave NATO) was just following the steps of Charles de Gaulle. Le Pen (who is the “far-right” most famous politician in France) is, truth be told, basically a Republican conservative. She supports left-wing economic policies, is pro-abortion, and is a vocal critic of the current “open-borders” migration policy.
For years, the “far-right” label has been the most feared political weapon in Europe and, more broadly, in the West. Far from being merely an accurate description of (very real) neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups, it has long been an umbrella concept that also includes all sorts of hardline nationalists and populists. On different occasions, this bogeyman enlarged concept (weaponized by both the left and the right) has served the purpose of setting up Establishment centrist coalitions everywhere.
Today’s mainstreamization of the so-called “far-right” thus serves justice – in a way. At the same time, it also opens the way for the rehabilitation of real Fascists – as long as they remain loyal to the European bloc and to the Atlantic alliance, as I wrote before. Part of the European center-right and conservative Establishment did hope to make good use of a co-opted and domesticated “far-right” – as seen with the Meloni-Von der Leyen political Alliance. The ongoing French situation brings back the specter of a rising NATO sceptic (and EU sceptic) political alternative and basically short-circuits the system.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has called for making China pay a price for allegedly propping up Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, saying Beijing is “fueling” the conflict by supplying microelectronics and other key components to Moscow.
“The reality is that China is fueling the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II,” Stoltenberg said on Monday in a speech at the Wilson Center in Washington. “At the same time, it wants to maintain good relations with the West. Well, Beijing cannot have it both ways. At some point, unless China changes course, allies need to impose a cost.”
Stoltenberg has repeatedly attacked China since the Ukraine crisis began in February 2022, arguing that Beijing was enabling Russia to fight against Kiev, a “European friend” of NATO. He has made such comments even as NATO states prolonged the conflict by providing hundreds of billions of dollars’ in economic and military aid to Ukraine.
Monday’s rebuke marked some of his most pointed criticism yet, suggesting that NATO may ramp up sanctions against China. He also called out North Korea and Iran for being supportive of Russia’s defense-industrial complex.
Stoltenberg reiterated an assertion that NATO – a military bloc originally formed against the Soviet Union – needs to get more involved in the Indo-Pacific to counter the “growing alignment between Russia and its authoritarian friends in Asia.” He noted that he invited the leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to next month’s NATO summit in Washington to work together on upholding the “international rules-based order.”
China is providing Russia with semiconductors and other key technologies with military applications, including parts needed to make missiles and tanks, Stoltenberg said. He added that Beijing also has supplied Russia with improved satellite and imaging capabilities. “All of this enables Moscow to inflict more death and destruction on Ukraine, bolster Russia’s defense-industrial base, and evade the impact of sanctions and export controls.”
The NATO chief also spoke of his China concerns in an interview with the BBC on Monday. Asked about what the Western military bloc might do about the issue, he said there was an “ongoing conversation” about possible sanctions. “At some stage, we should consider some kind of economic cost if China doesn’t change their behavior,” he said.
Beijing has repeatedly defied demands from the US and other NATO nations to join in sanctioning and isolating Russia. Chinese leaders have pushed a peace plan to end the fighting and have pointed out that Russia’s legitimate security concerns cannot be ignored.
Earlier this year, the Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced NATO as a “walking war machine that causes chaos wherever it goes.” Beijing has accused NATO of meddling in Asian affairs, saying the bloc is a “terrible monster” and has extended a “black hand” toward the region.
If you thought the documentary about Ivermectin suppression and Dr. Pierre Kory was eye-opening, perhaps you will find Dr. Wakefield’s newly released movie, Protocol 7, a drama starring Eric Roberts, even more astonishing. Life truly imitates art, and sometimes the two are indistinguishable, especially when it comes to Big Pharma’s protection of profitable vaccines at all costs.
Dr Wakefield’s special interest was inflammatory bowel disease and this paper reported a case series of 12 children with developmental disorders whose mothers also described a constellation of bowel symptoms appearing shortly after their child’s vaccination.”
However, the mainstream media prefers not to deal with facts that are troublesome to their argument. Instead, they use the more effective technique of name-calling.
The MSM used Wikipedia, Anderson Cooper, and Brian Deer to character assassinate Wakefield. Cooper, the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, is the broadcast journalist, embraced by mainstream media, who graduated from Yale University in 1989. He also served two internships at the CIA. Cooper’s interview with Wakefield was punctuated with this cheap phrase, “But, sir, if you’re lying, then your book is also a lie. If your study is a lie, your book is a lie.” Here is the transcript.
Wakefield’s prolonged vilification and lifelong persecution by Big Pharma make Pierre Kory’s battle look like a cakewalk.
However, like Pierre Kory, Wakefield relied on facts rather than name-calling and emerged stronger than ever. He now reaches his audience through what can only be termed America’s most effective medium, the Big Screen.
“Protocol 7 is a medico-legal thriller based on the true story of two Merck lab scientists who, in 2010, blew the whistle on the company’s fraudulent manipulation of lab data to support the company’s efficacy claim about the mumps component of its MMR vaccine. The case has been tied up in courts ever since.
Rachel Whittle plays a small-town attorney and mother of an autistic child. British star Matthew Marsden plays a doctor with a history of being a lone voice in the wilderness about MMR vaccines and autism. Another British actor, Harrison Tipping, delivers what struck me as the film’s best performance —that of a Merck lab scientist who is a willing participant in the fraud, but also one who is tormented by his recognition that he is debasing his work and talent in the service of an ugly lie. Eric Roberts elegantly plays Dr. Errani, the head of Merck’s MMR division, who demands that the lab team figure out a way to support the company’s efficacy claim by whatever means necessary.”
The current variant of Bird Flu appears to be a product of human agency, including mass vaccination of poultry with leaky vaccines and possible genetic manipulation in US and Chinese government funded laboratories. Thus, as was the case with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, official narratives about origins, spread, testing, and risk mitigation should be subjected to rigorous examination. Independent investigation, ongoing research, and analysis are critical to understanding the reality of this pathogen and the purported threat it poses to animal and human health.
Still no plausible natural explanation for new clade’s detection in Newfoundland and in South Carolina in December 2021
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse™ | June 17, 2024
As I have noted in previous posts, the conventional explanation in virology circles is that the new variant of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b was purportedly carried by migratory birds across the North Atlantic in 2021, and arrived in North America in the autumn of 2021.
The HPAI H5N1 viruses that were detected in Newfoundland in November and December 2021 originated from Northwest Europe and belonged to HPAI clade 2.3.4.4b. Most likely, these viruses emerged in Northwest Europe in winter 2020/2021, dispersed from Europe in late winter or early spring 2021, and arrived in Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
The first time I read this Conclusion, I interpreted it as suggesting that migratory birds from Northwest Europe arrived in Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
However, this morning I received an e-mail from a friendly reader who pointed out that, in fact, the authors of the “Transatlantic spread” paper proposed that birds migrated from Northwest Europe to Iceland in the spring of 2021. While on Iceland for the summer, these bird theoretically mingled with birds from North America who were also on Iceland for the summer, and then returned to Newfoundland in autumn 2021.
While I humbly confess that I should have read the body text of the paper more carefully instead of jumping ahead to the Conclusion, I would like to reiterate that there is a striking paucity of evidence to support the proposition that the new variant of bird flu—known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b—was borne across the North Atlantic by migratory birds in 2021.
1). While it apparently took nine years for earlier variants to spread from Europe to the United States, H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b was first detected in the Netherlands October 2020 and then in the United States in late 2021—that is, in only one year. The intercontinental spread of the previous variants are thought to have been from Eurasia to North America over the Bering Straight.
2). The hypothetical spread of a new avian influenza variant by migratory birds from Europe to North America by crossing the North Atlantic has never been documented before and therefore appears to be unprecedented.
3). We are being told that the new clade is highly pathogenic to wild birds, including ducks, which is not consistent with their fitness for flying 1400 kilometers from Ireland or Norway to Iceland, or 2,600 kilometers from Iceland to Newfoundland.
However, retrospective screening of wild bird samples from Iceland showed that an HPAI case was in a juvenile white-tailed sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) found dead in the southern Westfjords, Iceland, during October 2021.
Just one sick white-tailed sea eagle—a species notoriously susceptible to mortality by ingesting toxic, man-made substances—found in Iceland in fall 2021 is inconsistent with the proposition that large flocks of infected migratory birds spending summer 2021 on Iceland and infecting other large flocks from North America that were also summering on Iceland.
5). Conventional reporting invariably refers to the new variant first being detected in a sick great black-backed gull in a pond in Newfoundland in December 2021. No mention is made of other sick wild birds found in the same area around the same time. Moreover, the genetic sequence purportedly found in this sick gull has not been published in Genbank.
6). While the sick gull found in Newfoundland in December 2021 is frequently reported, I can find no other field biologist reports of sick birds from this variant anywhere on the North American east coast in 2021.
7). During the same month (Dec. 2021) the virus was detected in the sick gull in Newfoundland, it was also purportedly found in ducks in Colleton County, South Carolina—200 miles east of Athens, Georgia. Note that the winter migration from Canadian summer nesting grounds to the American South begins in September, peaks in October, and concludes in November.
CONCLUSION
There remains a paucity of evidence to support the hypothesis that Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Clade 2.3.4.4b was borne across the North Atlantic by migratory birds in 2021.
The new clade was first detected in the Netherlands in October 2020, not far from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where the prominent virologist Ron Fouchier—who happens to be a co-author of the “Transatlantic Spread” paper—is known to have conducted dangerous Gain-of-Function experiments on H5N1 bird flu in recent years.
It’s notable that the Erasmus Medical Center, headed by Ron Fouchier, previously collaborated closely with the SEPRL to develop vaccines against H9 avian influenza viruses, indicating the two laboratories likely share virus samples. This raises the suspicion that the Erasmus lab shared a sample of the new clade with the USDA poultry lab in Athens sometime in 2021, and that it somehow got out of the lab and spread to waterfowl on the Atlantic flyway.
Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.
To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis announced their policy in response to civilian deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza, but when the US and UK military became involved they announced they would target US and UK shipping as well.
The operation was supposed to be quick and easy. After all, the rag-tag Houthi militia was no match for the mighty US and UK navies. But it didn’t work out that way at all. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”
Meanwhile, the article informed us that a continued US effort to fight the Houthis over Red Sea shipping was “not sustainable.” Perhaps the most revealing part of the article comes from a Washington military expert, Emily Harding of CSIS: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long.”
It is reminiscent of a recollection by Col. Harry G. Summers of a discussion he had with North Vietnamese Col. Tu: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said Summers. Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”
Similarly, the US military spent a quarter of a billion dollars building a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to the starving Palestinians even though a land route already existed and would have been far cheaper to use. The project was doomed from the beginning, as days after opening stormy weather broke up the pier and washed part of it up on Israel’s shore. The US military managed to gather the pieces together again, but in total only a few aid trucks managed to use it before, over the weekend, the pier was again disassembled for fear of another weather-related break-up.
The only thing the pier was good for, it seems, was assisting the Israeli military in a Gaza raid on June 8th that killed 270 Palestinian civilians.
As neocons inside the Beltway continue to plot war with China over Taiwan, it seems someone should notice the trouble we have had dealing with Houthis and floating piers. For now, the growth in military spending seems unlimited, but increasing spending bringing diminishing results raises the question of just how much bang are we getting for our bucks?
We have the most expensive military on earth, they say. That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.
If it looks like a duck… and in particular, quacks like a duck, it’s highly likely a duck. And so, even though the Stanford Internet Observatory is reportedly getting dissolved, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) continues its activities. But that’s not all.
The groups led by both universities would publish their findings in real-time, no doubt, for maximum and immediate impact on voters. For some, what that impact may have been, or was meant to be, requires research and a study of its own. Many, on the other hand, are sure it targeted them.
So much so that the US House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization Select Subcommittee established that EIP collaborated with federal officials and social platforms, in violation of free speech protections.
What has also been revealed is that CIP co-founder and leader is one Kate Starbird – who, as it turned out from ongoing censorship and speech-based legal cases, was once a secret adviser to Big Tech regarding “content moderation policies.”
Considering how that “moderation” was carried out, namely, how it morphed into unprecedented censorship, anyone involved should be considered discredited enough not to try the same this November.
However, even as SIO is shutting down, reports say those associated with its ideas intend to continue tackling what Starbird calls online rumors and disinformation. Moreover, she claims that this work has been ongoing “for over a decade” – apparently implying that these activities are not related to the two past, and one upcoming hotly contested elections.
And yet – “We are currently conducting and plan to continue our ‘rapid’ research — working to identify and rapidly communicate about emergent rumors — during the 2024 election,” Starbird is quoted as stating in an email.
Not only is Starbird not ready to stand down in her crusade against online speech, but reports don’t seem to be able to confirm that the Stanford group is actually getting disbanded, with some referring to the goings on as SIO “effectively” shutting down.
What might be happening is the Stanford Internet Observatory (CIP) becoming a part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. Could the duck just be covering its tracks?
A senior Russian diplomat says the three European signatories to the Iran nuclear deal have failed to fulfill their commitments and are now blocking the negotiations to revive the US-abandoned agreement.
Russian Permanent Representative to International Organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov made the remarks in an interview with Russia’s daily broadsheet newspaper Izvestia.
He said the talks to revive the nuclear deal – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – have so far failed to yield any outcome due to insufficient efforts on the part of the European troika (France, Germany and Britain) as well as the United States.
It is not the Iranians who are blocking the negotiations now as they are ready to resume the talks, he maintained.
The top Russian negotiator added that the three European countries – also known as E3 – are playing a “strange game” but demand full compliance from Iran.
At the same time, the trio blames Russia and Iran for the failure of the JCPOA revival talks, Ulyanov said.
The negotiations to restore the JCPOA began in April 2021, three years after the US unilaterally withdrew from the UNSC-endorsed agreement and began to target Iran’s economy with tough economic sanctions.
Iran has criticized the lack of will on the side of the US and the E3 to revive the deal and has ramped up its nuclear activities in response to their non-compliance.
In a statement issued on Saturday, the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany condemned what they called “the latest steps” taken by Iran “to further expand its nuclear program.”
They also accused Iran of taking “further steps in hollowing out the JCPOA, by operating dozens of additional advanced centrifuges at the Natanz enrichment site as well as announcing it will install thousands more centrifuges at both its Fordow and Natanz sites.”
Iran on Sunday strongly condemned the E3 statement as absurd and based on false allegations, saying the country’s nuclear program has a completely peaceful nature and nuclear weapons have no place in the country’s military and defense doctrine.
German authorities have dismissed an undersecretary who started an investigation into whether financial support for academics who defended students protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza should be cut, Anadolu news agency reported.
Education and Research Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger announced Sunday the dismissal of Sabina Doring, the undersecretary responsible for higher education.
Underlining that initiating an investigation to cut financial support for academics contradicts the principles of academic freedom, Watzinger said: “In May of this year, a group of university lecturers wrote an open letter regarding the protest camps at universities. This is a legitimate part of debate and freedom of thought. Having a different opinion is equally natural,” she said.
Watzinger affirmed there is no doubt about the high value of academic freedom and its rightful protection under constitutional law.
“I defend academic freedom in all its aspects. Funding for science is based on scientific criteria, not political ideology. This is a fundamental principle of academic freedom,” she said.
A Texas political candidate for county commissioner has been charged with faking an online harassment campaign after he spent months sending racist messages to himself on Facebook.
“Whether Republican or Democrat, such tactics should be unequivocally condemned by all who value integrity and accountability in politics,” said local Republican Party chair Bobby Eberle.
Taral Patel, a Democratic Party candidate running in the third precinct of Fort Bend county, was arrested and charged with one third-degree felony count of online impersonation and a Class A misdemeanor charge of misrepresentation of identity after an investigation by the county district attorney’s office revealed he was responsible for a string of online hateful and derogatory comments purportedly directed at himself.
“As your Democratic candidate for County Commissioner, I am always open to criticism of my policy positions and stances on issues,” Patel said in an online post in September, posting a collage of the alleged harassing comments. “However, when my Republican opponents supporters’ [sic] decide to hurl racist, anti-immigrant, Hinduphobic, or otherwise disgusting insults at my family, faith community, colleagues, and me – that crosses a line.”
Patel’s Republican Party opponent incumbent Commissioner Andy Meyers requested an investigation of the comments after recognizing one of the partially-concealed usernames as an account that had previously launched attacks at himself.
The investigation revealed Patel had used an image of an actual local resident as the profile photo for one of the accounts, leading to the online impersonation charge.
Patel paid a total of $22,500 bond to leave county jail Thursday, with his court date scheduled for July 22.
The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.
In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.
Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.
After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)
Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)
Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.
The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.
Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.
It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.
In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.
That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:
“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”
“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”
“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”
Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.
The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.
Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.
Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.
This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.
Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.
Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.
This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.
The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.
The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.
Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC); its Director of International & Community Affairs, Jeremy Jones is in charge of lobbying religious community organizations, specifically Muslims and Christians. Consequently he convened the Faith Communities for Reconciliation, founding participant in the Australian Partnership of Religious Organisations and the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims & Jews.
AIJAC is a private political propaganda group. It is recognised as the main Israeli lobby in Australia. It coordinates its activities and works intimately with the Israeli embassy in Canberra and different institutions in Israel. It is privately funded by some Jewish businessmen. It monitors closely Australian politicians, the media, ethnic and religious groups, (especially Arabs and Muslims), unions and academics on their stands towards Israel and the Palestine question. … continue
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