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Canada Launches UN Declaration Pledging Restrictions On Online “Disinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 22, 2023

A “global” declaration – that only manages to garner the support of 27 out of 193 UN member countries. How dreadfully humiliating – some might say.

But rest assured, Canada’s government will find a way to spin this abysmal result of its effort to use this year’s (likely, as ever, a waste of time and taxpayer money) UN General Assembly gathering in NYC to push some of its own agenda – or the agenda it’s tasked to push.

First, what is this yet another “global declaration” – and why has it failed so spectacularly? (The answer may in fact be the same.)

According to an announcement by the Canadian government, cited by the press, the purpose of the “global” declaration is to combat “disinformation.”

“Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online,” is what it’s called, and besides the “trusty” Canadians, the Dutch were also seemingly randomly thrown (an EU country, one or the other) into drafting it.

And look who was readily on the side, to sign it: the US, the UK, Germany, Australia, Japan, Korea, etc.

There are (not many, though) more countries here, but their alignment on “issues” was never in question; and now, instead of a UN General Assembly as a place of the meeting of the minds and meaningful discussions, we have it as a showdown for a world aligning into different, this time huge and truly global blocs, to showcase their different allegiances.

How dreadful – for world peace, going forward.

Meanwhile – what does the Canadian document that only managed a meager backing at the UN have in mind?

It’s “necessary and appropriate measures, including legislation, to address information integrity and platform governance.”

If any of us tried to make the Canadian proposal more ludicrously broad-worded than this is, I’m sure we’d not succeed. But there is an attempt to narrow the “declaration” down. If suitable, “we” go back to “international human rights law.”

So – those who sign the document will do so in a way that complies “with international human rights law.” (?)

Problem: a number of full-fledged UN members are saying, the very UN founding Charter really any longer means anything – having been broken by the likes of Canada, time and time again.

There’s other usual declarative tosh as you might see from these governments’ daily briefings – the only time they ever try to narrow down or clearly define any of the “definitions” is when they mention the tech they’d like to better control – such as ChatGTP.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel undercover forces kill Palestinian child after he discovers operation in Jenin

MEMO | September 21, 2023

Undercover Israeli Special Forces killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy when he saw them sneaking into the Jenin refugee camp during an operation, making it the latest arbitrary execution of a Palestinian by Occupation forces this year.

In a report yesterday by Defence for Children Palestine (DCIP), the Palestinian sector of Geneva-based Defence for Children International (DCI), Rafat Omar Ahmad Khamayseh left his grandfather’s house in the northern West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp on Tuesday this week, when he then “saw Israeli Special Forces exiting three Palestinian licensed cars and surround the home of the father of a Palestinian man wanted for arrest.”

The report stated that “Rafat fled, yelling, ‘Special Forces! Special Forces!’ One Israeli soldier chased Rafat and shot him in the abdomen from a distance of 10 meters”.

The Occupation forces then shot at the boy again, as a Palestinian man came to his aid and “threw himself on top of Rafat and rolled him toward his house, less than five meters away. The man and his family sheltered Rafat for about an hour and a half as the Israeli military prevented ambulances from accessing Jenin refugee camp.”

The boy was reported to have been “struck with one bullet that entered his abdomen and exited from the upper right side of his chest … He bled extensively from his mouth and nose while waiting for an ambulance.” The DCIP stated that “Rafat died before an ambulance transferred him to Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin.”

Khamayseh’s murder is the latest killing of a Palestinian – especially a minor – by Israeli forces or settlers this year, with at least 240 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip having reportedly been killed since the beginning of 2023, including 46 children.

The human rights group acknowledged the killing of Palestinian minors as a common practice by Occupation forces, stating in its report that “Investigations and evidence collected by DCIP regularly suggest that Israeli forces use lethal force against Palestinian children in circumstances that may amount to extrajudicial or wilful killings”.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

China and Syria forge ‘strategic partnership’ – leaders

RT | September 22, 2023

Beijing and Damascus announced a new “strategic partnership” during Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ongoing visit to China. President Xi Jinping met him in the city of Hangzhou before this week’s launch of the Asian Games, a high-profile international sports event.

Assad is visiting China for the first time since 2004, when he met then-President Hu Jintao. Xi announced the new agreement as he welcomed his guest in the capital of Zhejiang Province on Friday.

The Chinese leader stated that the relationship between the two nations has “withstood the test of international changes” and pledged to maintain them in the face of international “instability and uncertainty.”

The US and its allies have been seeking to oust Assad for over a decade, accusing him of various transgressions during an armed conflict in the country. The bloodshed started in 2011 as mass protests surged against the Syrian government but were soon hijacked by international jihadist organizations. These elements sidelined other anti-government forces, which Western nations touted as “moderate rebels,” as the main threat to Damascus.

Russian intervention in 2015 turned the tide and helped the Syrian Army oust Islamist militants from most of the country. Some portions, where Turkish and American troops or their local allies are present, remain outside Damascus’ control.

The US has imposed crippling unilateral sanctions on Syria, which hamper its ability to reconstruct after this brutal conflict. Xi expressed support for Assad’s efforts to rebuild the nation, keep terrorists in check, and seek a political settlement for the Syrian people.

The Arab League readmitted Syria in May as Damascus seeks to normalize relations with its neighbors. Beijing had facilitated the restoration of diplomatic relations between regional rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in June. Both nations played significant roles in the Syrian crisis, the former supporting Assad’s government and the latter initially vying for his ouster.

The Syrian president and First Lady Asma Assad arrived in Hangzhou on Thursday. On Saturday, the visiting dignitaries are set to attend the opening ceremony of the 19th Asian Games alongside a dozen other foreign guests.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

US bioweapons in Nigeria endanger Africa and the whole world

By Drago Bosnic | September 22, 2023

Revelations about what Victoria Nuland ever so euphemistically called “biological research facilities” in Ukraine are usually tied to the start of Russia’s strategic counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe (SMO). However, the truth is that the United States has had a massive bioweapons program for well over half a century and that it has become unprecedentedly globalized in recent decades. The belligerent thalassocracy carefully disguises it under the pretense of “battling epidemics” and “improving health services” of host countries, but the very fact that the Pentagon is directly involved in these projects is a major red flag that indicates such claims are at the very least highly questionable.

Expectedly, the US-led political West is adamant that Russia is “engaged in disinformation” and that these “biological research facilities” are not only “harmless”, but also “benevolent”, as Washington DC is “simply trying to help”. And yet, as soon as the Russian military came into possession of materials housed in these biolabs, Nuland complained before the US Congress that the “benevolent research” could become “dangerous in Russian hands”. It’s important to note that independent investigators have been researching this topic for years before the SMO started, including the respected Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, who has also experienced numerous unpleasantries because of it.

For instance, in 2018, Gaytandzhieva was expelled from the EU Parliament for confronting the US Assistant Secretary of Health over Pentagon-funded biolabs in 25 countries around the world. Her fascinating and groundbreaking work was smeared by the mainstream propaganda machine as “fake news”, although the high-ranking US official could’ve simply given a short explanation about the “benevolence” that’s taking place in these “biological research facilities”. Gaytandzhieva also broke the story about similar biolabs in Georgia, where she interviewed numerous locals who contracted “mysterious” diseases just because they were living in the vicinity of the “benevolent” facilities.

As if that isn’t frightening enough, there are at least 336 Pentagon-run “biological research facilities” spread across the world, although the actual number could be several times higher. Africa is particularly exposed to such “benevolent research”, especially populous countries such as Nigeria. Russian military intelligence has identified at least four US biolabs in the African nation. Major General Igor Kirillov, the commander of Russian Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense Troops, pointed out the “strange coincidences” of epidemic outbreaks in the vicinity of these facilities. The involvement of the Pentagon is further reinforced by the participation of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

Namely, the DTRA has been involved in “modernizing and reconstructing” the National Veterinary Research Institute in Vom, central Nigeria. Why would a US Department of Defense (DoD) agency take part in supposedly “non-military” activities that could’ve easily been conducted by public health services? And yet, the involvement of DoD doesn’t stop there, as the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) has been conducting similar activities at the facilities of the Nigerian Defense Ministry, where they’ve been testing particularly dangerous pathogens without notifying local authorities, thereby exposing thousands of regular Nigerians (and possibly millions in the long term) to serious biohazard.

American military virologists in Nigeria are engaged in classified research that involves pathogens that cause tuberculosis, malaria, monkeypox and even COVID-19 and AIDS. Local sources indicate that tens of thousands of samples and genetic materials are being covertly transferred to other US-run biolabs, not only in Nigeria, but also abroad. Needless to say, the risk of causing yet another pandemic of global proportions because of such activities is substantial, even if the research conducted there is as “benevolent” as the Pentagon claims. The complete lack of transparency on the part of the US State Department, even toward the host country, only further reinforces this notion.

Frequent rotation of military personnel involved in the controversial “research” can only be described as an attempt to better conceal the nature of the Pentagon’s bioweapons program in Nigeria. What’s more, the recommendations of specialists from other US agencies, such as the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), actually lead to a worsening of the epidemiological situation in Nigeria, including an increase in cases of Ebola, Lassa, Crimean-Congo and similar types of hemorrhagic fever, as well as other dangerous diseases. Nigerian military personnel are probably the most vulnerable category, as the Pentagon exerts substantial control over Nigeria’s military and medical system.

Apart from DTRA, other US agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and USAID (US Agency for International Development) have varying degrees of involvement. Under the pretext of “improving the sanitary and epidemiological situation” in Nigeria, the US government is exerting a tremendous amount of control over the country’s bioscientific infrastructure. The European Union is also cooperating with its US counterparts, although the troubled bloc disguises the involvement of its agencies by presenting it as a “humanitarian” effort. Unfortunately, Nigerian authorities are either unaware or are turning a blind eye to the fact that their citizens are effectively being used as guinea pigs.

These activities only serve to create conditions for conducting more effective dual-use “biological research”, the purposes of which are beneficial not only to the interests of the Pentagon, but also the so-called Big Pharma. All of the aforementioned pathogens (in addition to numerous others) are a deadly biohazard that endangers the lives of not only millions of Nigerians, but billions of people in Africa and around the world. The question is – cui bono? Well, it’s certainly not the Nigerian people (or any other for that matter). However, taking into account the astronomical profit margins of American and other Western pharmaceutical corporations, we get the idea of who does.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Almost Half of US’ F-35 Fleet Not Capable of Flying at Any Time – Watchdog

Sputnik – 22.09.2023

WASHINGTON – Almost half the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that are supposed to be operational are not capable of flying and it will cost $1.3 trillion to keep them operational, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report.

“The F-35 fleet mission capable rate – the percentage of time the aircraft can perform one of its tasked missions – was about 55% in March 2023, far below program goals,” the report said on Thursday.

The GAO called this level of operational readiness “unacceptably low.”

“The program was behind schedule in establishing depot maintenance activities to conduct repairs. As a result, component repair times remained slow with over 10,000 waiting to be repaired – above desired levels,” the report said.

Organizational-level maintenance has also been affected by a lack of technical data and training, the report added.

It will cost $1.3 trillion to keep the full F-35 fleet operational and flying even if or when all the repair and maintenance bottlenecks, as well as ongoing development problems with the aircraft’s cannon, ejector seat, software and hardware are fixed, the report said.

However, despite the downfalls associated with the F-35 program, the report also determined that the Biden administration and the Department of Defense remain committed to a $1.7 trillion expenditure on buying a total of 2,500 F-35s for the US armed forces.

“In the coming decades, the Department of Defense plans to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion on nearly 2,500 F-35s,” the report stated, acknowledging that the majority of the funds will go to operating, maintaining, and repairing the aircraft.

The F-35 aircraft now represents a growing portion of the Defense Department’s tactical aviation fleet with about 450 of the aircraft fielded, the GAO said.

From the start of the F-35 program, officials have dealt with a variety of major setbacks with the fleet, ranging from costly fixes to sensitivities with overheating and lightning strikes.

More recently, the program made global headline news after a US Marine Corps F-35B crashed in South Carolina and sent authorities on a hunt after being unable to track the fighter once its pilot safely ejected.

September 22, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Sunak’s Net Zero ‘U-turn’ – or is it?

By Ben Pile – September 20, 2023

Rishi Sunak’s ‘watering down’ of certain Net Zero targets is the first time that the green policy agenda has had ANY scrutiny of any consequence, despite many failures, starting with the ruinously expensive Renewable Obligation, extending into the totally failed CfDs that allowed wind farm developers to lie to achieve planning consent over rival generators and technologies. Not one part of the green policy agenda has lived up to any promise to deliver good to the British public.

It was the mildest possible reversal. It is in fact an attempt to SAVE Net Zero, not roll it back.

Complaints that it has left Britain without an ‘industrial policy’ or has left ‘investors’ without ‘confidence’ are for the birds. It has put the UK in the same policy position as the EU (more on which in a bit), and there is no evidence of green policies having delivered any significant industrial development to these shores. No green jobs. No green growth. No green industrial revolution. Not even a BritishVolt. It is a farce.

Politicians, who know nothing of the subject in fact, have been misled into believing that strong climate targets encourage domestic manufacturing. That is a lie. The main beneficiary of UK & EU climate laws has been China, of course, which benefits from cheaper energy prices (among other things) precisely because China does not have energy policies like ours. Strict targets are not industrial policy. Nobody was looking to develop ‘Gigafactories’ in the UK for the fact of the UK having the earliest ICE car sales ban. It’s a nonsense.

Sunak has taken stock of the simplest elements of green policy failure:

1. No politician has any clue how to realise Net Zero targets. To understand this, you need to drill down into the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) advice to Parliament, and advice from wonks and academics to the CCC itself. They speak more candidly the deeper you investigate. The promises of upsides are simply lies. There are no drop-in replacements for the things that make our lifestyles today. That is why the CCC told Parliament that up to 62% of emissions reduction is going to come from ‘behaviour change’, which is to say that Net Zero requires government to use the criminal law and price mechanisms to regulate what people can do. That is what Sunak means when he says that previous governments have not been straight with the public. It is fact.

2. The green lobby has LONG promised lower prices and greater energy security but has failed to deliver. There have been many claims that the costs of wind power have fallen based on low ‘strike prices’ offered by wind farm developers since the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme was introduced in 2017. None of those miraculous strike prices have been achieved. The wind farm developers simply reneged on them. They were never going to take them up. They calculated that they would never have to. This came to crunch in the latest auction, when the government removed the wind farm operators’ ability to walk away from the contract — they called the wind sector’s bluff. No bids were offered. The major promise of renewable energy has been utterly debunked by the green lobby’s own actions.

3. Behind the scenes, the failure of both global and national climate policy has been known for a long time — since the Paris Agreement (PA) at the latest. The PA is not in fact a ‘global agreement’; it allows countries to determine their own commitment. And all that has done in turn is reignite the talking point that beset global climate policymaking in the 1990s and 2000s: the ‘free rider’ problem. Some emerging one-time ‘developing’ economies, are now booming, whereas much of the West/G7 is stagnant and facing deindustrialisation, precisely as critics of climate policy had argued, decades ago. This is why there has been so much emphasis since the PA on LOCAL government, such as LTNs/ULEZ/CAZs, using ‘air pollution’ as a proxy battle in the climate war. This was encouraged by central government, which accelerated this fake ‘localism’ during lockdowns by making large grants available to local authorities to restrict private car use. Sunak has seen the robust response to this in London, in Wales, and in cities that have adopted them, and has realised that the public has been setting down its own red lines. The green agenda is now visible to all and politically toxic.

4. Despite claims that other countries are steaming ahead with boiler bans, car bans, heat pumps, and championing Net Zero policies, especially in Europe, they are in fact creating deep schisms between and within EU member states. Auto manufacturers in Germany are warning that they cannot compete with Chinese rivals. Germany, struggling to find energy, itself is racing towards deindustrialisation, threatening the economic foundations of the Union. Its boiler ban, advanced by psychopathic Greens threatens to destabilise its own political centre of gravity, with a huge surge of interest in the AfD, now biting on the heels of the CDU in the polls. This risks not only the destabilisation of Europe, but geopolitical schism that could ultimately undermine NATO. Poland is pushing back against EU climate targets. The Netherlands, having overextended its green agenda looks set to oust its political establishment at the November election following the growth of the BBB movement, and the even newer New Social Contract party. There is the obvious polarisation of French politics, which needs no repetition here. And there is the case of Sweden’s new right-of-centre government abandoning its Net Zero targets in favour of a technology-first approach. Sunak can see all this green policy failure *everywhere* that green blobbers point to, while claiming such chaos is success.

5. ESG is failing. Former BoE governor Mark Carney, who just this week ranted against Liz Truss, disgraced his former office. Carney was appointed by Johnson to lead the The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), which claimed to have aligned financial institutions with $130 trillion AUM. Vanguard and BlackRock seem to be reversing out of the Alliance. And a number of major insurance firms, including Munich Re and Zurich too, have joined the backlash. And Sunak knows about markets.

6. Ukraine, Russia, and the realignment of geopolitics. Who really believes that Western diplomats now have any chance of bringing Russia, China, and India into the Net Zero suicide pact? The drawbridge is up. And the G20 meeting saw Modi humiliate the entire green movement. Sunak offered the climate fund £1.6 billion — roughly speaking a quid per Indian. And as many Indians said “What?!! We’re going to the Moon, mate!”

Sunak can see all of these problems. And none of them are going to be solved by banning petrol and diesel car sales in 2030, or by banning boilers. The world is a fundamentally different place now, post-Brexit, post-covid, post-Russia-Ukraine, after 15 years of Climate Change Act failures, and the deindustrialisation of the West. All that carrying on with Net Zero as usual is going to do is, far from strengthening Britain’s position on the ‘world stage’, is further undermine our economy and industries, and political stability. Nobody else, except countries facing equivalent problems, perhaps, cares about our degenerate political class’s ideological fantasies. Global climate policy is collapsing as global politics shifts, whereas the basis for the UK’s draconian domestic climate policy agenda was ALWAYS global political institutions: the EU & UN etc, not domestic popular support. It’s not 2008 any more. Neither the ROW nor the UK public are as tolerant of being pushed around. And utopian, technocratic, supranational political ambitions look like so much cynical build-back-better bullshit that simply do not wash.

The histrionics that are now the counterpoint to Sunaks mildest possible Net-Zero flip-flop are the chorus of an extremely small, but extremely noisy and over-indulged part of British society that has got far to used to not being slapped down by reality, and, like spoilt infants, they are determined to find the boundaries of their behaviour. They are utterly deranged by ideology, and incapable of allowing their claims to be tested by simple arithmetic. They speak glibly in the most superficial terms about things they know nothing about: how the world must be organised; how the entire economy will be powered; how ordinary people’s lives will be managed. They lie. They try to tell people that banning things and imposing expensive restrictions will make them better off, make them safer and ‘create jobs’. From bottomless bank accounts, they commission idiot wonks at remote think tanks to produce glossy ideological bunk.

Sunak could not have done less to correct this mess. But what he has done is a good thing. And it includes setting a trap for the eco-catastrophists. The more they howl and wail, the more they will expose their utter contempt for ordinary people. It is not in Sunak’s gift, even if he wanted it, to reverse the entire sorry policy agenda. Too much stands in his way. But every scream and tantrum from the blobbers will bring that possibility closer to him or a successor. Because no person with a functioning brain believes that banning the boiler later, rather than earlier, is a good thing. And so the blobbers are set to out themselves, for the duration of this controversy, as brainless ideological zombies. Long may it continue.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

The climate scaremongers: Shoddy dams to blame for Libyan floods, not global warming

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 22, 2023

I sometimes think there is a competition among the MSM to see who can publish the most absurd climate change stories.

Last week Sky News’s Tom Clarke, who calls himself ‘Science and Technology Editor’, claimed that climate change had ‘set the stage’ for the Libyan floods, and that the disaster highlighted the ‘injustice of climate change’ which affects poorer countries most.

The floods and resulting deaths had nothing at all to do with climate change, and were instead caused by the collapse of two dams built by a Yugoslav company in the 1970s and which had had no maintenance for the last 20 years. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Clarke failed to provide any evidence that the heavy rainfall which triggered the dam failures was in any way unprecedented or made worse by climate change. But facts don’t seem to matter any more to Sky News.

A quick check of the history books would have told Clarke that much worse floods have occurred in North Africa in the past. The Great Tunisian Flood in 1969, for instance, was on a completely different level. The death toll was 540, and nine out of 13 provinces were affected, as well as parts of neighbouring Algeria. Fifteen inches of rain, five times the annual amount, fell on the Tunisian city of Gabès in just 24 hours and intermittent heavy rain continued for 38 days.

Four years later, two more major floods hit Tunisia, killing more than 100. The first, in March, led to a major rescue effort by the US Sixth Fleet. The New York Times reported:

‘The Government has not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage to crops, livestock and property, but it is estimated that there have been 86 killed, plus 33 missing, 53,000 people left without shelter and 6,000 houses destroyed or damaged. About 10,000 cattle have been lost.’

British Pathé films of the 1969 and 1973 floods can be viewed here and here. 

It is utterly shameful for Tom Clarke to ignore the fact that catastrophic floods have always occurred in North Africa, abandon any pretence at objective analysis, and instead promote his own warped political agenda.

The harsh reality is that poor countries are always impacted more by natural disasters. That is why we should allow them to develop their economies in order to make them more resilient. Blocking their access to cheap fossil fuel energy will make matters worse, not better.

The Telegraph’s Gates-funded nonsense

The Telegraph went one better publishing an even more ridiculous article last week with the headline ‘The world has experienced its hottest ever three-month period – what comes next?’ 

Neither of the co-authors appears to have any expertise in climate matters. Harriet Barber is described by the Telegraph as specialising in human rights, violence against women and the refugee crisis, while Verity Bowman’s LinkedIn page says she is a ‘Foreign news reporter for the Telegraph’.

The article droned on about droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods, as if they never used to happen in the past. The commenters, who evidently understand these matters better than the young writers, almost to a man pointed out the absurdities in the article and left no doubt what they thought of it!

It turns out that the article was ‘partly’ funded by Bill Gates’s Global Health Security initiative, as the link at the bottom of the page confirms. 

According to that link:

The area of global health security is broad and includes topics such as:

•    Covid 19 and other pandemic threats

•    the spread of other communicable diseases like Ebola and Zika as well as a wide range of rare diseases

•    the dramatic impact of ‘non-communicable diseases’ including obesity, heart disease and diabetes

•    the rise antibiotic resistance and new superbugs

•    the growing threat of bio-terrorism

•    social and political instability sown by war and natural disasters including climate change

In short, the Telegraph has prostituted itself for Bill Gates’s millions.

Although it insists that ‘this support comes without strings and The Telegraph retains full editorial control over all the content published’, there is no way the paper would have published such ill-researched, manifestly fake news in the past when it could still rightly lay claim to being a serious newspaper.

What extreme weather looked like 70 years ago

Why are the media so desperate to push the UN’s climate agenda?

Nearly all press and TV coverage obediently parrots the same tired lies emanating from the UN and the rest of the manmade climate change establishment. The above Telegraph piece, for instance, quoted UN secretary general António Guterres’s latest alarmist pronouncement: ‘Climate breakdown has begun’.

There is never any attempt at balance, nor any challenge to such absurd statements. And this is in spite of the fact that both history and the actual data show that extreme weather was every bit as bad in the past.

For example, let’s go back 70 years. January 31, 1953, is a night that will long be remembered in the folklore of Britain and the Low Countries. It was the occasion of the Great North Sea Flood, when a wall of water surged from the North Sea, over-topping sea defences and leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. 

The storm sank the Stranraer to Larne ferry Princess Victoria before heading around the north of Scotland and into the North Sea. It claimed more than 500 lives on the east coast of Britain, plus maybe 2,000 in the Low Countries. It was the worst natural disaster to hit Britain in living memory.

A few months later, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation took place in the middle of what was called the worst June weather of the century. Three weeks later, more stormy weather brought severe flooding in Britain.

Further afield, major flooding occurred at various times of the year in several parts of the US, including Oregon, California, Louisiana, Iowa and Montana. Japan was badly hit by two devastating floods, each killing more than 700 people.

While some parts of the US were inundated in 1953, others were in the middle of exceptional droughts. From 1950 to 1957, for instance, Texas experienced the most severe drought in recorded history. Most of the Midwest and Great Plains were similarly affected.

1953 was a devastating year for typhoons in the Western Pacific, with seven ‘super typhoons’ claiming at least 430 lives. It was also one of the deadliest years for tornadoes in the US, killing 519. There were five F5 tornadoes during 1953, the third highest total on record for these most powerful of all tornadoes. Meanwhile, wildfires in the US burned 9,976,000 acres, four times this year’s total so far. You can see more details here.

In those days weather disasters occurred with little or no media coverage – unlike today when we are bombarded with 24/7 footage. There was nothing special about 1953 either. You could go back to pretty much any year in the last 100 and find a similar tale of disaster, death and destruction. There is no evidence that our weather nowadays is any worse than it used to be.

Which brings us back to the question of why are the media trying so hard to cover this up?

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Spikes in Heart Deaths Among Japan’s Working-Age Men Support the ‘Hot Lot Hypothesis’

By Guy Gin | Making (Covid) Waves in Japan | September 21, 2023

My last post presented evidence for what I’ll call the hot lot hypothesis (HLH): the different rates of reported deaths among Covid vaccine batches are due to differences in toxicity, with the earlier batches being especially bad.

But some commenters brought up a legitimate issue with the HLH, which I’ll call the unhealthy vaccinee bias (UVB): the earliest batches were given to the eldest of the elderly and the sickest of the sickly who die at higher rates regardless of what does or doesn’t get injected into them. So hot lots might just be a statistical illusion that goes away once you control for pre-existing health factors, kind of like Covid vaccine effectiveness.

But in Japan, the sick and elderly didn’t get the jabs first; healthcare workers did. In fact, the high-risk elderly only started getting jabbed almost two months after low-risk healthcare workers (February 17th vs April 12th 2021). This is noteworthy not just because it reminds us that the jabs were primarily sold to the population as a way to ‘stop the spread’ but also because it means the earliest batches delivered to Japan went to working-age people, giving us a chance to test the hot lot hypothesis free from the unhealthy vaccinee bias.

And if we were to search for evidence of, say, higher cardiovascular deaths in working-age males, where better to look than the monthly statistics for deaths due to arrhythmia and heart failure rather than just deaths reported after the jabs? The below graphs come yet again from Nagoya University’s Prof Seiji Kojima.

Monthly changes in the number of deaths among men aged 10 to 49 due to arrhythmia from 2018 to 2022
Monthly changes in the number of deaths among men aged 10 to 49 due to heart failure from 2018 to 2022

Did you notice anything odd that happened between February and April 2021? Now, these clear spikes in deaths among men aged 20-49 due to arrhythmia and heart failure don’t necessarily prove the hot lot hypothesis beyond doubt. Maybe the CIA was trying out a new version of its heart attack gun in Japan at the time. But absent any other convincing explanation, I’m going to assume that Pfizer and BioNTech were scraping the bottom of the vat to enable healthcare workers in Japan to roll up their sleeves for their first and second Covid jabs back in early 2021.

Well, any healthcare workers who got lucky in the lot lottery and who’ve kept up to date with their shots will now be able to get the seventh from this week. But not to worry. I’m sure the manufacturers have fixed any and all quality assurance issues they’ve never publicly acknowledged.

Or maybe not.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Iran’s top medical association blasts The Lancet for ‘spreading disinformation’

The Cradle | September 21, 2023

The president of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Iran, Dr. Alireza Marandi, on 18 September issued an open letter blasting renowned UK medical journal The Lancet for publishing “completely false information” about Iran’s healthcare system and the circumstances that led to the death of Mahsa Amini one year ago.

“We are very disappointed to see the republishing of completely false information about the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially regarding doctors and the health service delivery system, in a publication that is known as a scientific magazine,” Marandi writes in a letter addressed to The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief, Professor Richard Horton.

Marandi says the article, published on the one-year anniversary of Amini’s death, “does not have any scientific documentation” and accuses the UK publication of getting involved in “material and political interests [by] writing such false reports.”

The article in question, penned by Horton, claims Amini “died in Kasra Hospital … after being arrested, tortured, and beaten” by the Gasht-e-Ershad, or Guidance Patrol, for the alleged improper wearing of the mandatory hijab.

“She was 22 years old and her murder, for that is what it was, triggered unprecedented nationwide protests,” Horton continues, alleging the mobilizations “continue in more muted forms to this day.”

Horton’s accusations are a word-for-word repetition of claims made by western governments, news agencies, and US-funded “human rights” groups since last year. These have, for the most part, ignored visual evidence that shows Amini calmly speaking with an officer before suddenly collapsing in the waiting room of a police station, as well as an autopsy report that concluded her death was caused by severe cerebral hypoxia aggravated by a pre-existing condition.

Nonetheless, eyewitnesses of her detention alleged she had been mistreated.

“As I wrote to you in the previous letter, if the accusations mentioned in that article were supposed to be based on science, they would at least been quoted from sources that are not so utterly hostile to our people and country,” Dr. Marandi writes in his letter to Horton, taking aim at several anti-government Iranian activists cited by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet.

“I wish you had for once exposed the enormous support of Western countries and the US for Saddam Hussein, who committed unique and historical crimes with chemical weapons against our people, including Iranian and Iraqi Kurds residing relatively close to where Mahsa Amini lived. All carried out amidst the deadly silence of western-dominated scientific and international bodies,” the letter continues.

The article by The Lancet last week came as part of a renewed anti-Iran campaign led by western media outlets and governments, which included new economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, some of which targeted news organizations.

Recent US efforts to spark unrest that could force regime change in Iran date back to the so-called “Green Revolution” in 2009.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

U.S. Project to Split Syria Up Is Entering a New Phase in Suwayda

By Steven Sahiounie | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 20, 2023

Thousands of Druze in Suwayda, in the southwest of Syria near Jordan, have been protesting inflation and economic woes facing all of Syria because of U.S.-EU sanctions, and the economic collapse after the long armed conflict. But, recently, they are calling for regime change, and the U.S. is supporting them.

In late August, Ben Cline of Virginia, French Hill of Arkansas and Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin, all Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, entered Syria from Turkey illegally, without any VISA, via the Bab al-Salam crossing north of Aleppo, under the control of Al Qaeda linked terrorists. They met with Syrian opposition members living in terrorist control areas.

Recent media reports are circulating that Congressman French Hill discussed the Suwayda protests on the phone for more than an hour with the spiritual leader of Syria’s Druze community, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajri.

The Syrian conflict began in March 2011 not far from Sawayda; however, the city did not get involved in the “Arab Spring”. The Druze are a close-knit minority, neither Christian nor Muslim, who have communities in Suwayda, the Damascus suburb of Juramana, and Lebanon.

The Druze attempted to sit-out the 2011 conflict, and preferred to be neutral. The instigators of the violence in Deraa in March 2011 were followers of Radical Islam, and wanted ‘regime change’ to install a pro-U.S. government in Damascus. The Obama administration, with VP Joe Biden, supported the terrorists fighting for “Holy War” because they were the only available boots on the ground. The CIA ran a multi-billion-dollar project supplying and training the terrorists in Turkey who crossed the border into northern Syria. In 2017, Trump cut the CIA program off, which has since left Syria in a quiet stalemate.

Suwayda is an agricultural area, and though it is close to Deraa, it did not have a stake in the uprising to install an Islamic State in Syria. Suwayda, similar to Aleppo, kept its collective head down and kept working hoping that the armed conflict between U.S.-NATO and the Damascus central government would pass them by, and they could survive on the sidelines.

The Druze and the Christian community of Syria are minorities under a secular Syrian government which has protected minorities. The armed opposition was comprised of followers of Radical Islam, such as those who are aligned with Al Qaeda and ISIS. The Druze have no connection with Radical Islam or “Holy War”. For this reason, they felt collectively as if the conflict did not include them, and they wanted no part in it.

But now, after 13 years of armed conflict which has turned into a status quo, Suwayda has taken the center stage and is protesting and they are asking for ‘regime change’ as well as economic reforms.

Why now, after years of neutrality and dodging the fighting? Experts have pointed a finger at the U.S., which is instigating the protests and promising support. Damascus, Aleppo and Homs are all quietly suffering the same economic hardships, but they are not protesting. Electricity is supplied just a few hours per day, gasoline is very expensive and the prices of basic food stuffs have gone up by the day, making some basic needs now a luxury item.

Expert analysis in the early days of the 2011 conflict pointed to the overarching U.S. goal of breaking Syria into small pieces, such as the U.S.-NATO attack achieved in Yugoslavia. Small places, each governed by different leaders, would be easier to control and denominate for U.S. interests.

The protesting Druze in Suwayda are separatists. They are asking for their small piece of the pie from the U.S. map of the new Middle East. Suwayda, Deraa and the U.S. occupation military base at Al Tanf would be connected in a crescent shaped border with Jordan and Iraq.

The Al Tanf base is positioned to prevent Iranian cargo from entering Syria on the Baghdad-Damascus highway.

Deraa was the starting point of the March 2011 conflict. The Al Omari Mosque was used as a weapons storage for the terrorists who were supplied with Libyan arms confiscated from the U.S. military and transferred through the neighboring U.S. military base in Jordan.

Recently in Suwayda, protesters attacked the Ba’ath Party headquarters which has an arsenal stored there for use by the Syrian Arab Army.

The original map drawn by the U.S. State Department in 2011, showed Syria cut into small pieces. It now appears that the northwest province of Idlib is proposed to be part of the Turkish occupied border area, and the border with Turkey north of Aleppo is also proposed to be under Turkish administration, which they would like to annex later. The U.S. sends no humanitarian aid of any kind to Syria, even for the 7.8 magnitude earthquake relief, except to Idlib alone, which is under terrorist control. The former ISIS leader of Idlib, Mohammed al-Julani, has already changed into a suit and tie and has given interviews to U.S. media in an effort by the State Department to rebrand his image as a western supported leader, transformed from his time with ISIS and Al Qaeda.

The Kurds are also on the same separatist band wagon with Idlib and Suwayda. The Kurds were a sizable community in the northeast of Syria, but were never the majority, who were Arabs and Christians. But, the Kurds had the backing of the U.S. military who partnered with them in the fight to defeat ISIS. The actual victors over ISIS were the Syrian Arab Army, the Iraqi Army, Russian military, along with the U.S. military and Kurds. The Kurds have established their own Communist administration under the tremendous financial support of the U.S. government. Usually the U.S. government takes a dim view of Communism, but in the case of the Kurds they have fully supported them, which reinforces the fact that the U.S. government will work with, and support any group, as long as it is in the U.S. interest.

Suwayda is just the newest proposed project in a long list of U.S. regime change projects which have resulted in dividing a sovereign nation into small pieces. Yugoslavia was the first, and the next big U.S.-NATO regime change project was the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has left Iraq split into the northern section of Kurdistan, and the southern section of Iraq, which has never recovered from the U.S. invasion and destruction.

Then Libya was attacked in 2011 by U.S.-NATO forces for regime change, and is now split into two separate sections with separate governments. Sudan and Yemen were both attacked and split up.

A project still in progress is the partition of Syria into at least five sections, and also on the drawing board in Washington, DC. is the partition of Lebanon, which will first depend on the culmination of the partition of the south of Syria including Suwayda.

Lebanon has been purposely left without a President for one year, and a government and parliament which is flying on auto-pilot. Israel’s goal, which is jointly a U.S. goal, is to contain Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon and to cut off its support from Iran, and Syria.

When Condoleezza Rice called for a New Middle East, she was referring to an Arabic styled patchwork quilt, made up of bits and pieces of formerly defiant and resistance supporting countries, who had called for the end of the occupation of Palestine as a core national cultural value. The American-engineered New Middle East demands forgetting resistance, and acquiescing to normalization with Israel as the prerequisite to peace and prosperity.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ukrainian leader hysterically accuses the notoriously Russophobic Polish of helping Moscow

By Rachel Marsden | RT | September 21, 2023

Ukraine and Poland’s relationship has apparently reached the throwing toys out of the pram phase. Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly this week, President Vladimir Zelensky said it was “alarming to see how some in Europe… are helping set the stage for a Moscow actor.” Who could he have been talking about?

“I hope these words are not addressed to Poland,” replied a Polish government spokesman. If you have to ask yourself the question, you probably already know the answer. Yep, Zelensky is accusing Poland of cheating – with Russia.

It seems like just yesterday that Poland was bullying its fellow European Union member states to cough up gifts of weapons for Zelensky. Back in May, it managed to get Denmark and Finland on board with sending their German Leopard tanks to Kiev and browbeat Berlin for dragging its feet on giving permission to re-export the vehicles. “Even if, eventually, we do not get this permission, we – within this small coalition – even if Germany is not in this coalition, we will hand over our tanks, together with the others, to Ukraine,” declared Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki at the time.

Fast forward to this week. “We are no longer transferring weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland with more modern weapons,” Morawiecki said. In other words, Warsaw has decided that it needs to focus on itself. Isn’t that what every exasperated partner says after spending time on a therapist’s couch and coming to their senses?

Last week, Poland withdrew – along with  Hungary and Slovakia – from the EU’s platform to coordinate Ukrainian grain imports. Sources claimed that the countries feared that details from any such involvement could be used against them in a lawsuit that Kiev filed earlier this week. This was at the World Trade Organization in response to them maintaining their bans on Ukrainian grain imports despite Brussels’ decision to lift them on September 15.

Thus, Poland has gone from loudly proclaiming its love for Kiev to suddenly acting like a party to a potentially messy divorce, now taking self-preservation measures against a toxic partner. One who keeps making demands even when you say “no.” And that’s exactly what these countries did by insisting that Ukraine’s grain be banned lest it compete with their own farmers’ produce, driving its value down – and not even a month before the next Polish parliamentary election on October 15.

Instead of trying to see the situation from these countries’ perspectives, Kiev blew a gasket. “The systemic approach of Budapest and Warsaw of ignoring the position of the EU institutions in trade policy, I think that will be a problem for the EU in general because there is no unity there,” said Taras Kachka, a trade representative. Kiev is acting like it can’t understand why Brussels is backing the three while it keeps stringing Ukraine along with promises of commitment.

It’s because they’re in a binding relationship with the EU. By contrast, you’re a side piece hoping for a ring and using toxic tactics to try to manipulate everyone into getting whatever you want all the time.

The gloves have really come off now, though, with Ukraine daring to suggest that the EU isn’t united. That threatens to ruin the main theme of unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s virtue signaling.

Kiev is now doubling down on the psycho-ex vibe by threatening that unless the unilateral bans on grain are lifted, it will go after Polish apples and onions and Hungarian cars with retaliatory restrictions. (Why do bad breakups always have to target innocent cars – whether it’s keying/scratching, smashing, or blocking?) Poland has since pushed back in a tit-for-tat. “I warn the Ukrainian authorities because if they escalate this conflict in this way, we will add more products to the ban on import into the territory of the Republic of Poland,” Prime Minister Morawiecki said on Wednesday.

Where’s the EU in all of this, you might ask? Brussels is currently busy ducking criticism from its own member states for lifting the ban on Ukrainian grain, with Hungarian Agriculture Minister Istvan Nagy underscoring, in the wake of a meeting of the bloc’s agriculture ministers, that von der Leyen consulted on this topic not with the leaders of member states, but with the Ukrainian president. He has also suggested that the EU was selling out its farmers in favor of Saudi, American, and Dutch investments in Ukrainian grain production. Not that this would be the first time that the EU screwed over itself and its people to benefit American interests, using Ukraine as a pretext. Just ask the millions of European citizens currently struggling to pay for the bloc’s decision to replace cheap Russian energy with much pricier liquified natural gas from the US.

Poland has led the way in defying Queen Ursula, with the payoff being that it isn’t having to contend with the kind of protests that Bulgarian officials are now facing, having complied with Brussels’ lifting of the grain ban. Bulgarian farmers blocked highways and border crossings earlier this week. At least so far, it seems that Brussels really doesn’t want to get too deeply involved in the crossfire as Poland and Ukraine throw their tantrums.

Kiev did suddenly acknowledge “close and constructive ties” with Warsaw on Thursday, after a phone call between their agriculture ministers and “agreed to work out an option to cooperate on export issues in near future.” Sounds like someone’s suddenly concerned what the neighbors might think and making an effort to keep up appearances.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

One Western Official Finally Comes Clean About NATO Expansion

By Ted Galen Carpenter | The Libertarian Institute | September 21, 2023

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg likely surprised both factions in the ongoing debate about NATO expansion and its role in triggering the Russia-Ukraine War. He also undermined (perhaps fatally) the official cover story about the reasons for the Ukraine war. Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion, Western officials and their allies in the corporate media have insisted vehemently that the alliance’s addition of Eastern European nations after the Cold War and giving a pledge to Ukraine that it would become a member someday had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin’s decision to attack his neighbor. Indeed, anyone who argued otherwise risked being accused of echoing Russian propaganda and being “Putin’s puppet.”

Both the official explanation and the pervasive narrative regarding the war were unequivocal. Putin was power-hungry and unwilling to tolerate an independent, pro-Western Ukraine on Russia’s border. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Steven Pifer’s interpretation was typical; “For the Kremlin, a democratic, Western-oriented, economically successful Ukraine poses a nightmare, because that Ukraine would cause Russians to question why they cannot have the same political voice and democratic rights that Ukrainians do.” Even when Pifer published his piece in July 2022, that explanation was extremely weak, given Ukraine’s own corruption and authoritarianism. Volodymyr Zelensky’s subsequent systematic assault on civil liberties makes the notion that Putin felt threatened by Ukraine as an irresistible democratic magnet patently absurd. Ukraine is not a democratic country by any reasonable definition of the term.

Nevertheless, other analysts made arguments similar to Pifer’s thesis. That Russian grievances over NATO helped spark the war “makes no sense,” wrote Rutgers professor Alexander Motyl. “NATO cannot have been the issue,” historian Timothy Snyder insists; Putin “simply wants to conquer Ukraine, and a reference to NATO was one form of rhetorical cover for his colonial venture.” Such comments matched the official positions that the U.S. and other NATO governments adopted. Interventionist opponent Caitlin Johnstone was accurate that “arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word ‘unprovoked’ in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

In a September 6, 2023 speech to the European Union Parliament, Secretary General Stoltenberg contradicted the entrenched official narrative, most likely inadvertently. “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade (sic) Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.”

Stoltenberg emphasized, “He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.” Consequently, “he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” [Emphasis added]

Several scholars and former officials had warned for years that NATO’s expansion to Russia’s border would end badly, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine confirmed those predictions. George Kennan, the intellectual father of America’s containment policy during the Cold War, perceptively warned in a May 1998 New York Times interview about what the Senate’s ratification of NATO’s first round of expansion would set in motion. “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.”

NATO’s attempt to make Ukraine a full-fledged military asset was especially provocative. Kremlin leaders regarded Ukraine as not only being in Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence, but in Russia’s core security zone. Putin made that point clear on numerous occasions at least as far back as his speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Instead of taking those warnings seriously, Western leaders blew through one red light after another. NATO’s leader, the United States, especially worked to forge ever-closer military ties with Ukraine. In essence, the Trump and Biden administrations began to treat Ukraine as a NATO member in all but name.

Extensive arms shipments to Kiev along with U.S. and NATO joint military exercises constituted the centerpiece of that policy. But that was not the extent of Washington’s provocations. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the CIA initiated secret paramilitary training programs for Ukrainian special operations personnel in the United States and in Ukraine. Massive arms shipments to Kiev along with joint U.S. and NATO military exercises with Ukrainian forces constituted the centerpiece of that policy. Yahoo national security correspondent Dan Dorfman noted that “U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence have even participated in joint offensive cyber operations against Russian government targets, according to former officials.”

Such actions make a mockery of the argument that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. That assertion is convenient propaganda, but it was always devoid of both facts and logic. Stoltenberg’s comments merely confirm what should have been obvious to both the foreign policy community and the news media from the beginning.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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