RT | November 16, 2022
Poland should rethink its position towards the conflict in Ukraine after a “provocation” on the part of Kiev that cost two villagers their lives, a former city councilman in Lublin said on Wednesday. Jaroslaw Pakula, whose term ended four days before the incident, said the missile that struck Przewodow was obviously Ukrainian and that the government in Warsaw needed to send a message to Kiev instead of telling “fairy tales” to its citizens.
“Of course, this is a Ukrainian rocket. Of course, this is a provocation on the part of the Ukrainian authorities,” Pakula posted on his Facebook page. “The rocket could not be fired 100km in the opposite direction by mistake.”
The purpose of the provocation was to scare the EU and get civil society support for sending even more weapons to Ukraine, Pakula added. Instead of telling “fairy tales” about the missile, the Polish president should tell Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky that Warsaw “will no longer put up with this behavior” by Kiev.
“I urge you to rethink Poland’s position [regarding] this war in the event that the red line is crossed again!” Pakula concluded.
Pakula’s Facebook page still has a Ukrainian flag over his portrait photo, and lists him as chairman of the city council of Lublin, the seat of the region where Przewodow is located. The official city website, however, notes that he was no longer in office as of November 11.
Zelensky was quick to accuse Russia of attacking Poland and the entire NATO after a missile exploded in Przewodow on Tuesday afternoon, killing two people. The government in Kiev said the incident showed the need for NATO to “close the sky” over Ukraine, as they have demanded since February.
While Zelensky continues to insist the missile was Russian, Warsaw and Moscow have both identified it as a S-300 air defense missile, with Poland calling it “Russian-made” and Russia pointing out it was in Ukrainian service. The US and NATO have also described the missile as an air defense rocket that strayed, seeking to minimize the incident while also arguing that Russia was the ultimate culprit for bombing Ukraine in the first place.
The Russian military has pointed out that Tuesday’s missile strikes on Ukrainian military and energy infrastructure targets came nowhere close to the Polish border.
BY DR GARY SIDLEY | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 15, 2022
Throughout the Covid era, those expressing views at odds with the dominant narrative were often subjected to unprecedented levels of censorship and psychological manipulation. Academic journals played a significant role in this silencing of alternative voices by, for example, ignoring the work of established scholars, perpetuating bias, rejecting research papers that reached conclusions inconsistent with mainstream views, and demonstrating a financial motivation to only publish studies favourable to the pharmaceutical industry. As a consequence of this partiality, the perceived scientific integrity of academic periodicals has suffered considerable damage. Alas, a recent article in the once highly respected Nature journal will have done nothing to improve the credibility of the academic press.
The article, titled “Mastering the art of persuasion during a pandemic“, is a supplementary ‘outlook’ piece written by Elizabeth Svoboda, a Californian science journalist. Drawing on the perspectives of a cluster of social science experts, Svoboda lauds the importance of health policymakers deploying “effective communication strategies” so as to ensure that the populace do the right things when faced with the next global pandemic. She asserts that a range of behavioural science strategies, or “nudges”, will be of central importance in enhancing compliance with public health restrictions when the next novel respiratory virus emerges over the horizon. The article, however, is riddled with highly questionable assumptions and ideological biases.
The Covid science is not settled
Arguably the most blatant distortion, illustrated many times by both the author and the experts cited, is that the Covid science is settled and their version is the definitive truth. The article opens with the ludicrous suggestion that the official advice in early 2020 – that masking healthy people would achieve no benefit – was a “fateful moment”, a missed opportunity “to stop the virus bringing the world to a halt”. In support of this assertion, Rob Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University, describes this initial guidance as “a big credibility mistake”, and goes on to suggest that it was an example of public health experts trying to protect the supply of masks to healthcare. According to Willer, this noble white lie led to many people feeling “resentful” at having been misinformed and it fuelled their reluctance to adhere to subsequent mask requirements. Totally ignored is that most of the more robust, real-world evidence concludes that masking healthy people achieves no meaningful reduction in viral transmission, and the U-turn in mid-2020 towards mask mandates was not the result of new research findings but was – more likely – politically motivated.
Similarly, the raft of unprecedented Covid restrictions (lockdowns, shutting businesses, school closures) inflicted on Western citizens by the public health establishment are all assumed to achieve important benefits so that the only challenge for the pandemic experts is how to persuade the pesky people to comply with them. Consequently, the article cites the ideas of a number of social scientists regarding how to effectively lever compliance with future public health diktats. Varun Gauri, a senior economist, highlights the importance of making it easier for people to ‘do the right things’. Matthew Goldberg, a research psychiatrist, wants the psychological persuasion techniques of behavioural science to be used pre-emptively “so that when the time arises, people can act quickly”, a view echoed by infection-control researcher Armand Balboni. Katy Milkman, a behavioural scientist, promotes her strategies to enhance the take-up of Covid vaccines, including a “regret lottery” where people are informed that their names have been entered into a draw to win a lot of money, but that the “winner” will lose the prize if not vaccinated.
Despite the wealth of accumulated evidence that lockdowns are ineffectual in reducing Covid-related hospitalisations and cause huge collateral damage, alongside the emerging realisation that Covid vaccines may achieve no overall net benefits and can do considerable harm, nowhere in the article is there even a hint of recognition that the restrict-and-jab doctrine of mainstream public health failed to achieve many of its stated aims.
One important negative consequence of the flawed ‘science is settled’ assumption, as displayed by the author and her expert contributors, is that it justifies the censoring and vilification of anyone challenging the dominant narrative. For example, Varun Gauri says, “During the COVID-19 pandemic, disinformation played a major part in sowing division and undermining the authority of health officials” and that this “paved the way for fast viral spread and low vaccination rates”. His solution is for authorities to “take a bigger, legislative approach to the problem” – a euphemism for censorship. Similarly, Katy Milkman warns against allowing “conspiracy theories to slither in”.
The controversy surrounding the acceptability of state-imposed ‘nudging’
It seems that all those involved in the Nature article are blissfully unaware of the controversy surrounding the state’s use of covert psychological strategies (or ‘nudges’) to promote compliance with Government restrictions. Blinded by their fixed belief that the Covid science is settled, and focused only on the goal of persuading the populace to ‘do the right things’, the social scientists cited in the commentary blithely propose a range of behavioural science interventions without any questioning around the appropriateness and ethical acceptability of these clandestine methods.
Nudges are psychological strategies of persuasion that largely impact upon their targets below the level of conscious awareness – that is, people do not know they are being influenced. Such techniques have been heavily deployed throughout the Covid era, and have evoked a range of ethical concerns relating to the acceptability of the state strategically (and non-consensually) increasing the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of promoting compliance with unprecedented and largely non-evidenced public health restrictions. Also, as the strategies operate subconsciously, they could often be categorised as manipulative.
The expert contributors referenced in the Nature article repeatedly commend greater deployment of these ethically dubious techniques in future pandemics. For instance, Balboni urges political leaders to ensure human behaviour specialists play a much bigger part in health policy, bemoaning that, during the Covid era, “social scientists, anthropologists and psychologists were not used nearly enough”. Later in the article, the purported benefits of the “pre-emptive deployment of behavioural science” is highlighted.
More specifically, the value of equating virtue with compliance with the restrictions is lauded. This particular strategy – an ‘ego’ nudge in behavioural science parlance – was used repeatedly throughout the Covid event, effectively evoking shame in anyone who deviated from the demands of public health diktats and the vaccination doctrine. Many will recall the repeated ‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’ adverts, the ‘don’t kill your gran’ quips by ministers, and the close-up images of acutely unwell hospital patients with the voiceover, “Can you look them in the eyes and tell them you’re doing all you can to stop the spread of coronavirus?” Of the same ilk was the NHS document (later redacted) advising front-line staff to tell young people that, “Normality can only return, for you and others, with your vaccination” (my emphasis).
The Nature article endorses the same tactic of differentiating the goodies from the baddies. It is stated that, “Encouraging feelings of empathy in people could make them more likely to choose to protect others during a pandemic”. There are also references to the desirability of “invoking of empathy” and emphasising “the vaccines’ collective benefits, such as protecting others”. In the words of Balboni, it is really important to get people to recognise that “through their behaviour, they can actually protect other people”. Clearly, the considerable evidence demonstrating that Covid vaccinations do not prevent viral transmission has yet to reach these nudge enthusiasts.
In a Western supposedly liberal democracy, is it ethical for the state to strategically inflict shame on its citizens? Does the informed consent of the people, as to whether to accept a medical or psychological intervention, no longer matter? Is it acceptable to covertly influence the general population to follow contentious and largely non-evidenced Covid restrictions? Shamefully – pun intended – these key ethical considerations are totally disregarded in this Nature journal commentary.
The role of political ideology and conflict of interests
What might account for the publication of such a partisan article in an academic journal?
Many critics of Covid orthodoxy have raised the spectre of an underlying globalist agenda, removed from any democratic process, shaping Western responses to pandemic management. With the central involvement of the World Economic Forum (WEF), it has been argued that the crisis following the emergence of a novel respiratory virus has been opportunistically exploited in pursuit of wider, pre-existing goals pertaining to tackling climate change and the imposition of Covid Passes and Digital ID, Social Credit Systems, Central Bank Digital Currency and Universal Basic Income (as detailed in Agenda 2030). The authoritarian control over the world’s population (essential to realise such an agenda) is typically legitimised under the banners of ‘the greater good’ and ‘social responsibility’, two themes that run through the Nature article. Is it possible that the author and contributors adhere to this globalist ideology?
Exploration of the ongoing interests of those involved in the compilation of the article is revealing:
Would it be too speculative to suggest that those involved in the Nature article harbour a penchant for a new world order, and that these globalist proclivities may have compromised their objectivity?
Finally, my eye was drawn to a footnote to the article that read: “This article is part of Nature Outlook: Pandemic preparedness, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties.” And who funds this supplement? Astra Zeneca and Moderna.
I rest my case.
Dr. Gary Sidley is a retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist and co-founder of the Smile Free campaign. He blogs at Coronababble.
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | November 16, 2022
Last Monday I received an email from NewsGuard, “an independent organization that rates and reviews news outlets based on nine apolitical journalistic criteria.”
The analyst asked me to comment on two statements in my columns in which I am accused of “advancing false and unsupported claims.”
One false and and unsuopported claim is “a March 2022 article titled ‘Ukraine Hosted Illegal US Biowarfare Laboratories,’ repeated Russian and Chinese propaganda about the presence of U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine, which has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checking organizations and refuted by U.S. government officials.”
The alleged “fact checker’s” claim that I made a false and unsupported claim is incorrect for two reasons. One is the fact that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency produced official US government documents that state that the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a component of the U.S. Department of Defense, funded anthrax laboratory activities in a Ukrainian biolab in 2018. The US government’s records also show over $11 million in funding for the Ukraine biolabs program in 2019.
Apparently, it never occurred to the dumbshit “fact checker” that relying on assurances from a proven liar such as the US government is no way to check a fact. How, “fact checker,” does the government refute its own admission? Notice also that the “fact checker” thinks that a statement by the Russian government is “unsupported,” but a statement by the US government is considered “supported.” How does this obvious bias serve to verify any fact?
The second reason the “fact checker” is incorrect indicates that the “fact checker” is incapable of understanding that to report what the Russian government claims to have discovered in Ukraine is not misinformation or propaganda. It is correct information reporting Russian claims. What we see here is a “fact checker” who thinks or has been trained to see any report, whether or not endorsed by the reporter, of an item in the “impermissible to be mentioned” category as a “false and unsupported claim.” In other words, all is false except official narratives.
My other “false and unsupported claim” is that 100,000 vote spikes are indications of fraud, a conclusion endorsed by numerous experts. The “fact checker” alleges that vote spikes “are commonplace and due to the release of large batches of results all at once from solidly Democratic or Republican districts, or from mailed ballots.” What the “fact checker” does not account for is the extreme unlikeliness of a vote dump of 100,000 or more ballots that is all for one candidate, or how votes were mailed in such a way that all Democrat votes arrived in the same delivery. Perhaps it is statistically possible for 100,000 votes to arrive in an unbroken stream all for the same person, but the probability of such an event is far too low to account for the large number of times it throws a close election to a Democrat. Are there that many voting precincts in which not a single Republican voter lives? Republican vote spikes are rare and seem to happen when the algorithm of the voting machines has created an unbelievable margin of Democrat victory and has to be narrowed.
In my opinion, “fact checkers” are unintelligent people devoid of integrity who are hired to support official narratives by stamping out truth and dissenting opinion. Who checks the “fact checkers?” There is no reason to trust a “fact checker.” Anyone can set up a “fact check” site to protect any material or ideological interest from examination. Note that “fact checkers” appeared only after the official narratives became so blatantly false that they had to be protected from examination. Never before did we have an industry of censors employed to protect official narratives. “Fact checkers” are the true enemies of truth.
The heedless jingoistic war rhetoric of the German media
eugyppius: a plague chronicle | November 16, 2022
Yesterday, at around 3.40 in the afternoon, a rocket exploded in the Polish village of Przewodów. Two people died. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky immediately blamed Russia, later going so far as to characterise the alleged attack as a message from Putin to the G20 summit. Then the Associated Press reported that they had heard from “a senior U.S. intelligence official” claiming that “Russian missiles” were responsible for the attack, and thereafter the worst German journalistic actors embarked upon an evening of dark speculation about the proper NATO response to a Russian attack on Poland. Higher brow outlets, like ZDF, merely ran inflammatory headlines about Russian rockets, with the crucial information – that the rockets were Russian-made, while their immediate origins were unclear – buried in the body of the piece. Bild, on the other hand, went all-in, with this incredible rant from chief editor Johannes Boie:
The Russian army has bombed Poland, the AP news agency reports, citing a US intelligence official.
Two people are dead, murdered!
Accidental or not – this is an armed attack on NATO territory!
The two most likely possibilities are, first, that Putin’s soldiers hit Poland by mistake. They are often poorly trained and drunk. In this case, the tyrant must apologise formally, beg for forgiveness on bended knee, so to speak, while armed NATO fighter jets fly around his country.
He is not used to that. When his troops shot down a passenger plane in 2014, killing 298 people, there were no consequences.
Or alternatively, Putin attacked NATO on purpose. In this case, the alliance must hit back hard, because NATO cannot simply let its territory be bombed or let its citizens die in a hail of Russian bombs. Putin will only respond to force.
Should the unlikely third possibility be true, that the explosion was the result of Ukrainian air defence, then – indeed – the Russians are also to blame. For they are playing with fire on the NATO border.
The mad tyrant is bringing us ever closer to World War 3.
This morning, Boie’s paper carried a front-page headline screaming “Putin fires rockets at Poland.”
Now that both Poland and the Americans have clarified that the explosion was likely caused by a stray Ukrainian air defence missile, the story has disappeared entirely from the top of Bild.de. I guess they’re not so interested in extracting apologies from a kneeling Zelensky. Meanwhile, that other major Axel Springer organ, Welt, are running damage-control pieces, like this one from obnoxious mediocrity Clemens Wergin, claiming that “Without Russia’s war crimes, it never would’ve come to the accident in Poland.”
There are a few observations to make about this little storm in a teacup. The first is that, despite appearances, not all of the American government and not all of NATO have completely lost their minds. Scholz, Macron and others called for caution and avoided open statements of blame, and today we’ve seen a clearly coordinated campaign to shift direct responsibility away from Russia. The second is that there are, however, plenty of powerful people, in NATO and elsewhere, who are indeed totally, stratospherically crazy. These include very probably that anonymous senior intelligence official who spoke to the Associated Press, and also a great part of the media, who have made a habit out of printing reheated Ukrainian press releases as news, and who have never quite recovered their senses since they lost them in the great Corona panic.
It must be fun to rage about the tyrannical evils of Russia and the democratic virtues of the NATO countries, most of which have spent the last three years denying their allegedly free citizens all manner of basic rights and freedoms. It’s also incredibly, incredibly dangerous. A direct NATO attack on Russia would be a catastrophe for Europe. Maybe somebody should try to rein in the press and wean them from their crisis addiction before they happen upon another pretence to invoke Article 5. There’s no guarantee the next one will be clarified so quickly.
By Gilbert Doctorow | November 16, 2022
Yesterday’s incident of missile strikes on the Polish side of the border with Ukraine which killed two has been denounced by the Russians as a ‘provocation.’ The logic of such an incident would be for Poland and its NATO allies to denounce Russia as the culprit, as the violator of the sanctity of NATO territory, and to threaten Russia with the invocation of Article Five of the Alliance, a declaration of war in all but name. Indeed, that is precisely what we heard from President Zelensky in his first statements about the incident, and he was seconded by leaders of the war-mongering jackal states in the Baltics.
In fact, so far the Polish reaction appears to be restrained. Their president, Duda, has called upon his compatriots to remain calm while an investigation is underway. Polish authorities would say only that fragments of the missiles recovered at the site show that they were “Russian made,” which by itself means very little since both sides to the conflict use “Russian made” military hardware. Meanwhile, in far off Bali, Joe Biden responded to journalists’ queries, saying that examination of the trajectory of the missiles which struck farmland on the Polish side of the border with Ukraine made it ‘unlikely’ that they were launched from Russia. Of course, journalists did not ask the necessary follow-up question: so what does this known trajectory tell us about where in fact these missiles were fired from? And who is likely then to have fired them?
This morning’s Financial Times article on the subject adds speculation that possibly the missiles were part of the Ukrainian air defense system and were fired to bring down Russian cruise missiles attacking their energy infrastructure but “went astray.” In this same reporting, they do not bother to ask whether the fragments truly indicate ‘air defense’ projectiles or ground to ground missiles, which presumably would be manifestly evident from the large fragments seen in photographs from the site.
All of this prevarication and hesitancy on the part of the U.S. and Polish authorities in pointing fingers at the culprit for the attack in Poland is in direct contradiction with the longstanding pattern of U.S. and Western behavior in what we know were false flag incidents directed from Washington or London. In such cases, accusations against the Russia over the downing of Flight MH17, or against the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria over alleged chemical attacks on his own civilian population followed within minutes of the given incidents.
So I ask again, what happened yesterday in Poland and who is to blame? To find a plausible answer, I suggest applying the time proven Roman guiding principle of investigation and ask cui bono, whose interests are served by what has happened? This is a simple, reasonable approach which regrettably has gone out of style in our days of Information Wars.
Cui bono points to the Kiev regime as responsible for the missile attacks on Poland, for the sake of finally bringing NATO openly into the fight on their side against Russia. Poland is not yet ready for war against Russia, and will be ready only many months from now when it receives major arms deliveries from the United States. The USA does not want an unplanned escalation from proxy war to war of the principals that could easily lead to a Russian nuclear attack on the homeland. It is only Mr. Zelensky’s regime that can hope for total chaos in order to survive the destruction of his country’s core infrastructure that is now well on the way, at last.
Of course, in Washington, in Brussels these considerations must be well understood by key personnel. The coming consultations over activating Article 4 of the Alliance treaty, officially recognizing a threat to their territorial integrity, revolve around formulating a determination of responsibility for the incident that avoids blaming the present darling of our solicitude, Ukraine, for attacking a NATO country.
Postscript:
16 November afternoon. The latest statements from Poland and the U.S. in the past hour or so are saying the missiles which landed in Poland were Ukrainian air defense missiles, not downed Russian cruise missiles. It is of course possible they were Ukrainian ground to air missiles (S300), but it is also possible they were ground to ground missiles (Tochka) fired by Ukrainian units for the reasons I mention in this article; both missile systems are “Russian,” that is to say they come from the common Soviet past of the two countries. Since the US has recorded the trajectory of the missiles by one of its spy planes on location near the border, they know from where the missiles were launched and whether air defense units were there. They also have the missile fragments from the crash site and can identify exactly what type they were if they so wish. No one from NATO is going to look into these matters, or announce their findings if they do; you can be sure of that.
For their part, the Poles are indicating that they will not activate Article 4 provisions of the Alliance after all. We may assume that knowing what they do, they would prefer to remove this whole incident from public discussion as quickly as possible.
The Russians say their attack on infrastructure came nowhere near the Ukrainian border with Poland, and that is completely believable: they want to avoid precisely what happened yesterday.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | November 10, 2022
The conversation is exploding across Europe as politicians and media raise the alarm about record excess mortality rates in 2022. Why are so many non-Covid related deaths happening now?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | November 10, 2022
Obstetrician, Dr. James Thorp, and Postpartum Nurse, Michelle Gershman, speak out about unprecedented elevation of reproductive and pregnancy complications that have been reported that directly coincide with the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | November 15, 2022
Anyone following the news cycle since the Covid “vaccines” rolled out has seen a simply remarkable uptick in the number of things that can reportedly cause sudden strokes or heart attacks.
Cold weather, hot weather, depression, various food, long covid AND short covid, new magical chemicals just found in the atmosphere, “post-pandemic stress disorder”, undiagnosed aortic stenosis and expensive electricity.
That’s not even an exhaustive list, it just goes on and on and on.
… and now we can add pollution to the rogues gallery, according to this piece from Science Alert, which headlines:
Tiny Particles in The Air May Trigger Sudden Heart Attacks, Study Suggests
On a similar theme, the Daily Mail headlined yesterday:
America’s growing wildfire crisis could lead to a wave of heart attacks, lung disease and cancer diagnoses years down the line, scientists warn
Now, we don’t need to break down these articles piece by piece, it’s perfectly apparent what’s happening here.
The Covid vaccines are either causing more heart attacks, or the people in charge are aware they might, and are prepping fall-back stories accordingly.
We predicted that would be an ongoing story this year back in January, and they haven’t disappointed.
The new wrinkle here is working pollution and wildfires into the narrative, and associating heart attack risk with environmentalism and climate change.
This provides fuel for the metamorphosis of “climate change” from an environmental issue into a public health issue, allowing them to talk about it the same way they talk about “Covid”, and perhaps treat it the same way too (climate lockdowns etc.)
This is classic narrative braiding, the practice of intertwining two separate propaganda narratives together so they reinforce each other.
I coined the term, just this moment, but it’s the perfect metaphor.
It’s beautifully efficient, really. The vaccine-associated heart attacks provide evidence that “climate change” is a public health problem, while “climate change” can be used to conceal the vaccine-associated heart attacks.
Covering up something they caused with something they invented, and propping up something they invented with something they caused.
Clever in theory, but rather transparent in practice.
By Steve Watson | Summit News | November 15, 2022
As winter looms, NBC News has some top tips for parents who are concerned about their children catching respiratory viruses… keep them away from the dirty unvaccinated people.
In a recent segment, an infographic advised that those who want to “protect” their children should wash hands, stay home, get vaccines and “avoid physical interaction with unvaccinated individuals.”
There is no actual evidence that unvaccinated individuals are more at risk of transmitting COVID or that the vaccines prevent the spread of the virus, but never mind that inconvenient distraction.
The anchors then asked medical correspondent Dr. John Torres why more children are now so susceptible to RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), to which he responded “we don’t exactly know why.”
That is also not true, given that the CDC recently issued a report highlighting how a record number of children are now being hospitalised with common colds due to weakened immune systems.
Commenting on the findings, Dr Scott Roberts, a medical director at Yale University stated that lockdowns impacted the ability of children to build up immunity to common illnesses.
“There are two implications to this,” the doctor said, explaining “First, the gap gives time for the viruses to mutate even further to cause more severe disease.”
“And second, whatever immunity was built up to those viruses’ it will have waned making the immune response now much less potent,” Roberts added.
The doctor also noted that children, including his own son are now getting “constant infections.”
The CDC data is consistent with research by scientists at Yale who warned that it is not normal to see children with combinations of seven common viruses, including adenovirus, rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus, influenza and parainfluenza, as well as COVID-19.
But whatever, keeping your kids safely locked away at home and away from the unvaccinated is the smart move.
RT | November 15, 2022
Russia has not carried out any strikes against targets near the Polish-Ukrainian border, the defense ministry in Moscow said on Tuesday, following reports of a missile striking the village of Przewodow and killing two civilians.
Some Western media outlets and politicians have claimed that Russia is responsible for the incident. However, no evidence has been provided to support such assertions.
Missile fragments, photos of which were published by Polish media outlets on the scene, “have nothing to do with Russian weapons,” the Russian Defense Ministry said.
Statements by the Polish media and officials about the alleged ‘Russian’ missiles falling in the area of the village of Przewodow are “a deliberate provocation in order to escalate the situation,” the Russian military added.
Poland convened an emergency meeting of its national security council on Tuesday evening, after reports that at least two civilians were killed when one or more missiles struck the village in the Lublin region, just across the border with Ukraine.
While the AP reported that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland, citing an unnamed “senior US intelligence official,” the Pentagon declined to corroborate the claim.
“I can tell you that we don’t have any information at this time to corroborate those reports and are looking into this further,” Air Force Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters, when asked about the Przewodow incident.
Polish government spokesman Piotr Mueller called on the media and the public “not to publish unconfirmed information.”
Officials from the Baltic states blamed Russia and claimed that Poland should invoke NATO’s Article 5 in retaliation. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky accused Russia of “terrorism” and said NATO needed to “act” against this “attack on collective security.”
RT | November 15, 2022
RT has reached out to the UN special representative on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, to request a correction or retraction of a statement in which she accused the Russian Armed Forces of employing a deliberate “rape strategy” as part of its military campaign in Ukraine. Patten made the claim in October in an interview with the AFP only to admit she did not have any solid evidence to substantiate it a month later.
“The allegations Ms. Patten has brought forward are of a very serious nature, which have the power to shape public discourse around the events in Ukraine,” RT said in a statement, adding that her words were then “widely distributed amongst media outlets and social media, to create a misleading, if not entirely false, narrative.”
In October, Patten told the AFP that when “you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy.” Less than a month later, the UN official admitted that her words were based solely on some unverified reports disclosed to her in the presence of two Ukrainian officials. Speaking to Russian prank artists Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, also known as Vovan and Lexus, she recently said that it was “not her job” to conduct investigations anyway.
No evidence has since been provided to corroborate these claims. In its statement, RT asked Patten whether she “intends to issue a retraction – or at least a correction – of her original, misleading statement.”
“As a person holding such a public role with enormous responsibility, one would hope that Ms Patten seek to provide a true, verified testimony of her organization’s work,” the statement added.
RT also asked Patten’s office to provide some evidence to support her allegations in case the UN special representative believes a retraction would be “improper.” Neither Patten nor her office has commented on the request so far.
Moscow has previously denied the accusations made by Patten. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blasted the UN official’s claims as going “beyond the reach of reason.”
Samizdat – 15.11.2022
NATO powers are using the conflict in Ukraine as a testing ground for some of their newest weapons systems.
The US-led Western alliance has trialled intelligence, communications and weapons systems in combat against Russian forces — undermining its claim that it is not involved in the conflict.
Kiev regime’s Vice Prime Minister and Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov made the revelation at a NATO conference in Norfolk, Virginia in October, US media reported on Tuesday.
“Ukraine is the best test ground, as we have the opportunity to test all hypotheses in battle and introduce revolutionary change in military tech and modern warfare,” Fedorov said.
The systems being tried out include the Delta real-time battlefield monitoring system that tracks the positions of both friendly and hostile forces, Lithuanian-made ‘SkyWiper’ drone jammers and the explosive-laden unmanned marine vessels used to launch October’s unsuccessful attack on the Russian port of Sevastopol.
“In the last two weeks, we have been convinced once again the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans,” Fedorov added.
Although the British government has denied involvement in the Sevastopol attack that prompted a temporary suspension of the trilateral grain and fertiliser export deal between Turkey, Russia and Ukraine, the UK supplied six submersible drones to Kiev.
Ukrainian forces practiced for the attack, which used sea lanes reserved for ships carrying food as cover, over the summer.
The operation “has pushed the conflict envelope,” said Shaurav Gairola, a naval weapons analyst for British defence publisher Janes, and “imposes a paradigm shift in naval war doctrines and symbolizes an expression of futuristic warfare tactics.”
The SkyWiper anti-drone ‘gun’, which looks like a bulky science-fiction film prop, was developed during former Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite’s time in office. She said the program was part of moving the Baltic mini-state’s arms industry away from producing Soviet-era designs.
“We’re learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learning how to use our NATO equipment,” Grybauskaite said. “And, yes, it is a teaching battleground.” But she admitted it was “shameful” that Ukrainians “are paying with their lives for these exercises for us.”
Moscow has condemned NATO and other states for supplying Ukraine with hundreds of artillery pieces, thousands of armoured vehicles and millions of munitions since the conflict began on February 24, saying the shipments are legitimate targets, implicate the West in Kiev’s war crimes and will only prolong the conflict.
Russia has also debuted new weapons during its military operation in Ukraine, including the Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile — to which NATO has no counter-measures or equivalent system.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
This is what happens when you demand speedy production in an era of politicized regulation
By Meryl Nass, MD | February 12, 2022
All these tragedies have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes. Most occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987.
With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most using a shortened path for FDA review. Recalls and market removals of approved products are much more common than they used to be. We can only expect more of these disasters in the future, especially if the products are mandated for everyone. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
