Biden signs off on more weapons for Ukraine
Samizdat | August 1, 2022
US President Joe Biden has ordered an additional $550 million in weapons shipments to Ukraine, largely to restock ammunition for the HIMARS rocket launchers that Kiev has touted as a “game-changer” in its conflict with Russia.
The latest round of weaponry for Ukraine was approved under Biden’s so-called “drawdown authority” on Friday, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a White House briefing. The new aid package will include rounds for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers and 155-millimeter artillery shells.
Top Biden administration officials – including Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan – spoke with their Ukrainian counterparts earlier on Friday to inform them of the latest aid approval, Kirby said.
Since the Russian military offensive against Ukraine began in February, Biden has authorized 17 aid packages for Kiev under his drawdown authority. Those approvals account for more than $8 billion of weapons shipments. Congress approved $40 billion in overall new aid to Ukraine in May after previously providing $13.6 billion.
Russian officials have accused Washington of pumping HIMARS launchers and other weaponry into Ukraine to draw out the bloody conflict in the former Soviet republic as long as possible. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexey Reznikov has claimed that the US-made rocket launchers have made a huge difference on the battlefield, but Russian forces have continued to make gains in the Donbass region.
Russian Aerospace Forces last week destroyed more than 100 HIMARS rockets in a strike on an ammunition depot in the Dnepropetrovsk region, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday. Moscow previously claimed to have taken out four of the 16 HIMARS launchers that the US had sent to Ukraine. Each rocket for the system reportedly costs about $150,000.
CDC changes its messaging after I caught them out on their moneypox vaccine lies
By Meryl Nass, MD | August 1, 2022
Here are a few of the lies they have backed off:
1. As of July 28, CDC has ceased claiming the monkeypox vaccine(s) is 85% effective. It now admits it does not know its effectiveness.
2. CDC has stopped recommending the OFF LABEL use of moneypox vaccine post-exposure (even up to 14 days post-exposure was the recommendation earlier). They are now telling the truth, which is that the vaccine is only approved as a two dose series and it is licensed as effective only 2 weeks after the second dose, which is 6 weeks after starting the series. There is no data to support post-exposure prophylaxis, which is OFF LABEL use.
3. CDC finally admits that everyone getting vaccinated is a guinea pig in a big experiment.
4. However, CDC still OMITS what it knows about the dangers of these vaccines, information it provided to its advisory committee a mere month ago. ACAM 2000 vaccine causes myocarditis in one in every 175 recipients. And Jynneos seems to cause myocarditis too, as well as making HIV worse, according to the FDA review issued when the vaccines was licensed in 2019. We just don’t have the Jynneos statistics to say how often these problems occur, but in one study more than one in 6 subjects had elevation of cardiac enzymes, which requires some heart muscles cells to die.
Below is the new CDC messaging.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/considerations-for-monkeypox-vaccination.html
- Two vaccines may be used for the prevention of Monkeypox virus infection:
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- JYNNEOS (also known as Imvamune or Imvanex), licensed (or approved) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the prevention of Monkeypox virus infection, and
- ACAM2000, licensed (or approved) by FDA for use against smallpox and made available for use against monkeypox under an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug application.
- In the United States, there is currently a limited supply of JYNNEOS, although more is expected in the coming weeks and months.
- There is a larger supply of ACAM2000, but this vaccine should not be used in people who have certain health conditions, such as a weakened immune system, skin conditions like eczema or other exfoliative skin conditions, or pregnancy.
- No data are available yet on the effectiveness of these vaccines in the current outbreak.
- The immune response takes 14 days after the second dose of JYNNEOS and 4 weeks after the ACAM2000 dose for maximal development. People who get vaccinated should continue to take steps to protect themselves from infection by avoiding close, skin-to-skin contact, including intimate contact, with someone who has monkeypox.
- To better understand the protective benefits of these vaccines in the current outbreak, CDC will collect data about adverse events and vaccine effectiveness, including whether the vaccine protects a person differently depending on how they were infected with Monkeypox virus.
Chief Medical Officer of Health was paid record cash bonus during height of lockdowns
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | August 1, 2022
During the height of lockdowns and mandates, when Albertans were fed daily fear propaganda, Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta Deena Hinshaw received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a cash bonus.
Last year, Hinshaw reportedly received $227,911 in “cash benefits,” nearly as much as her base salary of $363,634. This brings Hinshaw’s total annual earnings to over half a million at $591,545.
“The scale of the response to this unprecedented public health emergency required an extraordinary amount of additional work from the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, the Vaccine Task force, the Pandemic Response Team and others, which is reflected in the recent disclosure,” explained Ministry of Health spokesperson Mark Feldbusch in an email.
As previously reported by The Counter Signal, earlier this year, Hinshaw admitted that Alberta Health Services (AHS) reported non-ICU patients as ICU patients throughout the pandemic.
“As we have been doing continual quality assurance work with our data, it was identified over time some units in some hospitals have shifted back and forth between being available for use as an ICU unit or a non-ICU unit,” Hinshaw said.
“In some of our historical data, patients admitted for COVID treatment were categorized as being in ICU when the unit they were on, in fact, had been changed back to a non-ICU unit at that time.”
In other words, the figures were wrong. The entire time that ICU numbers were used as a key point to justify lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and vaccine passports in Alberta, the government intentionally or unintentionally utilized eschewed data, if not outright manipulated data.
Now, it looks like misreporting figures used in a fearmongering campaign apparently made Hinshaw worthy of a taxpayer-funded bonus.
New Evidence: Fauci Imposed a Vaccine Delay that Cost Trump the Election
By Toby Rogers | July 31, 2022
I. Fauci fires Trump
Think back to July 2020. Trump and Fauci were at war with each other. Key leaders within the Trump administration, including Peter Navarro, wanted to fire Fauci. There were riots in the streets as people protested the murder of George Floyd. And new evidence shows that behind the scenes, Fauci was working to torpedo Trump’s chances for re-election.
We already knew that Fauci, the FDA, CDC, and the pharmaceutical industry went to great lengths to block safe and effective treatments including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in order to prolong the pandemic and create the market for Covid-19 vaccines. But a new book reveals that Fauci also forced Moderna to delay their clinical trial by three weeks — which pushed the release of their preliminary results until after the presidential election.
This key piece of information comes from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World published last week by Harvard Business Review Press. The author, Peter Loftus, is a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and they published his essay about the book in their Review section on Saturday. What’s astonishing is that Loftus does not even realize the enormity of the story he just stumbled upon. Cultural capture and too many shots apparently prevent one from connecting the dots, so I will do it for him.
Most people already know the broad brush strokes of the Moderna story — they had never successfully brought a product to market before Operation Warp Speed. They were grifters — they took $25 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2013 to develop mRNA products that never worked and another $125 million from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in 2015 for a vaccine for Zika that also failed. But Fauci really liked these grifters and so when the pandemic began in 2020, BARDA directed $483 million to Moderna for Covid-19 vaccine development — and Moderna cut NIH in on the patents. That gave NIH and especially Fauci control over what came next.
The key paragraphs from Loftus’ WSJ essay are here:
Dr. Zaks [Chief Medical Officer for Moderna] had wanted to use a private contract research organization to run the whole trial, but NIAID officials wanted their clinical-trial network involved. Eventually, Dr. Zaks backed off, and both entities participated. “I realized we were at an impasse, and I was the embodiment of the impasse,” Dr. Zaks said.
Next, when Moderna’s 30,000-person study began enrolling volunteers in July 2020, the subjects weren’t racially diverse enough. Moncef Slaoui, who led Warp Speed’s vaccine efforts, and Dr. Fauci began holding Saturday Zoom calls with Mr. Bancel and other Moderna leaders to “help coax and advise Moderna how to get the percentage of minorities up to a reasonable level,” Dr. Fauci recalled.
Drs. Fauci and Slaoui wanted Moderna to slow down overall enrollment, to give time to find more people of color. Moderna executives resisted at first. “That was very tense,” Dr. Slaoui said. “Voices went up, and emotions were very high.” Moderna ultimately agreed, and the effort worked, but it cost the trial about an extra three weeks. Later, Mr. Bancel called the decision to slow enrollment “one of the hardest decisions I made this year.”
The claim that Fauci cared about racial diversity in the clinical trial is a lie. How do we know this? Later “clinical trials” for Pfizer and Moderna in kids looked at antibodies in the blood, not actual health outcomes, in only about 300 study participants. The number of people of color enrolled in those undersized trials were in the single digits (literally two or three Black participants total) — so those results were not statistically significant. Yet this did not stop authorization. It appears that Fauci’s delay tactics were designed to accomplish a different goal.
Let’s do the math:
Moderna released their preliminary results — claiming 94.5% effectiveness — on November 16, 2020.
The presidential election was less than two weeks earlier — on November 3, 2020.
Trump lost by less than 1% of the vote in 4 key swing states.
Fauci’s demand to slow down enrollment in July 2020 cost Moderna 3 weeks.
If Moderna had released their results 3 weeks earlier — on October 25, 2020, Trump would have scored a major win in the final week of the campaign and won the election.
It does not matter how one feels about Trump or Biden. A massive political win in the week before the election would have convinced enough voters of Trump’s competence and thus pushed Trump’s vote total over the top.
What about Pfizer? They also could have published their preliminary results prior to the election which would have secured Trump’s re-election. According to Loftus, Pfizer “opted out of Operation Warp Speed for fear it would slow the company down.” Pfizer still took $2 billion off of the Trump administration for advance purchase orders. But Scott Gottlieb and Pfizer clearly preferred Biden and so they held their preliminary results until November 9, 2020 — just 6 days after the election. The Biden administration returned the favor by giving Pfizer a blank check and authorizing shots for additional age groups based on the worst “clinical trial” results anyone has ever seen.
The important thing to understand in all of this is that Fauci, the FDA, NIH, and CDC are political functionaries pretending to be scientists. Pandemics, vaccines, and public health are a way for the Democratic Party machine to direct billions of dollars to their base and reward large donors to the party. These companies and their bureaucratic enablers were happy to take money off of Trump. But they knew that they could get an even better deal from Biden.
As you know, the results of this criminal scheme are gruesome. The Covid-19 shots authorized right after the 2020 election have made no discernible impact on the course of the pandemic. Far more people have died of Covid-19 since the introduction of the shots under Biden than during the Trump administration when no Covid-19 shots existed. The Covid-19 shots have negative efficacy and even quadruple-dosed Biden and quadruple-dosed Fauci have contracted Covid-19, twice. These are the deadliest and most toxic shots in the history of the world.
So what started out as a grift turned into mass murder and a crime against humanity.
And now it’s happening again…
II. Pfizer and Moderna move up the release date for reformulated Covid-19 shots in the effort to help Democrats win the midterm elections
On Thursday of last week, the White House and the FDA told their favorite stenographers at the NY Times that Moderna and Pfizer are going to release their reformulated Covid-19 shots, that will completely skip clinical trials, in mid-September.
As readers of my Substack will recall, back on June 28, Pfizer said that the fastest the reformulated shots could be released was October; Moderna said “late October or November” — provided they could skip clinical trials (which of course the FDA granted because they work for Pharma). Did Pfizer and Moderna not understand their own production capabilities? How did Pfizer and Moderna suddenly speed up their production schedule by 6 weeks?
It appears that once again, the public health gatekeepers are doing politics not science. If shots go into bodies in the last two weeks of September, Democrats will claim progress against Covid during October right before the midterm elections on November 8. It’s basically the political win that these same actors denied to Trump (it’s not a public health win, as I will show below).
What’s likely driving this is that Fauci, Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, CDC, and NIH all want Democrats to retain the House and Senate in order to prevent hearings into their bungling of the Covid-19 response. Of course they also want to keep the Covid-19 vaccine gravy train going as long as possible.
But, you’re surely saying to yourself, we know that these 5th dose reformulated shots are likely to cause catastrophic harms. We’re already seeing a 5% to 15% increase in all-cause mortality across the most heavily vaccinated countries as a result of non-specific effects from these shots. There are 29,790 VAERS reports of death following these shots and this is likely an underestimate by a factor of 41 (so actual death toll = 1,221,390). These reformulated shots are going to use a form of mRNA never tried before and skip clinical trials altogether, so the harms could be even worse. There also seem to be cumulative harms from these shots — the more doses, the more messed up the immune system, the more vulnerable one is to Covid and all sorts of other diseases including cancer.
So how exactly do they plan to get away with this, especially right before an election?
The same way they always get away with it — they own the media. Pfizer and Moderna will rush out press releases claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The CDC’s in-house newsletter, MMWR, will rush out articles and janky studies claiming that these reformulated shots are a miracle. The mainstream media will dutifully report that these reformulated shots are a miracle. Meanwhile, people you know and love — coworkers, friends, neighbors, and family — will be getting injured and killed by these shots. Yet all of the stories in the news will be hosannas about the genius of Tony Fauci, Peter Marks, and the FDA. Billions of dollars of dark money from Pharma will flow into Democratic Congressional campaign coffers. If Democrats can retain the House and Senate they will reward Pfizer and Moderna by blocking any inquiry into the failed Covid-19 response. Win, win, win for Pharma. Everyone else loses.
Which brings me to my last point….
III. Republicans, you have to step up and fight for us or you will lose
Republicans thought that they could take back the House and Senate simply by not being Democrats. Most Republicans did not really fight for us, they just sat back and let Dems destroy themselves. That plan was working until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. Now the Republican advantage in the generic Congressional ballot (‘which party do you prefer’) has evaporated. Pelosi has passed a range of popular bills. Manchin has fallen in line so Biden will likely get some late legislative wins. Gas prices have declined somewhat. And now it appears that Democrats, who were left for dead just weeks ago, will retain the Senate and may retain the House.
IF REPUBLICANS WANT TO WIN THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS THEY HAVE TO MAKE IT ABOUT DEMOCRATS’ FAILED RESPONSE TO COVID!
No more sitting back. No more making warrior mamas do all of the emotional labor for our country. If Republicans want to win they have to make it clear that they will fire, arrest, and prosecute Fauci (and all of his lieutenants) as soon at Republicans take power. Fauci funded the creation of the chimera virus, blocked access to safe and effective treatments, and inflicted deadly toxic vaccines on the entire population. Over 2 million Americans are dead as a direct result of Fauci’s corruption (1 million dead from/with Covid, over 1 million dead from the shots). If Republicans cannot be bothered to sink this two-foot putt then they don’t deserve to win. If Republicans want the votes of the 18 million single-issue medical freedom voters who decide every national election these days — that’s what they have to run on: #ArrestFauci!
Israel demands disbanding of UN committee investigating attacks on Gaza
MEMO | August 1, 2022
Israel demanded on Sunday the disbanding of the UN committee investigating crimes committed during the occupation state’s military offensive against Gaza in May last year. It is alleged that remarks made by one member of the committee were “anti-Semitic”.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid made the demand in a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in which he referred to the statements by Miloon Kothari, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry, in a media interview.
“We are very disheartened by the social media that is controlled largely by, whether it is the Jewish lobby or specific NGOs,” Kothari said on a Mondoweiss podcast on 25 July. “A lot of money is being thrown into trying to discredit us.”
Israel boycotted the investigation and prevented the commission’s investigators from entering the apartheid state. It claimed that the commission’s partial findings in June were “the latest in a series of biased reports.”
In his letter to Guterres, Lapid claimed that, “The fight against anti-Semitism cannot be waged with words alone, it requires action. This is the time for action; it is time to disband the Commission. This Commission does not just endorse antisemitism — it fuels it.”
The UN spokesman did not respond immediately to requests for comment, but Mondoweiss published a message from the committee’s chair, Navi Pillay, in which she said that Kothari’s comments were intentionally taken out of context.
The US and other Western countries, including Germany, Britain and Austria, denounced — very predictably — Kothari’s comments as “anti-Semitic”.
The US representative to the UN Human Rights Council, Ambassador Michele Taylor, tweeted, “We are outraged by recent anti-Semitic, anti-Israel comments made by a member of the Israel COI. These unacceptable remarks sadly exacerbate our deep concerns about the open-ended nature & overly broad scope of the COI and the HRC’s disproportionate & biased treatment of Israel.”
Although the commission was set up to investigate the Israeli attack on Gaza, which lasted 11 days in May last year, its mandate includes human rights violations before and after that, in addition to investigating the root causes of the tension.
At least 250 Palestinians as well as 13 people in Israel were killed during the Israeli aggression, which saw severe Israeli attacks and raids that exacerbated the destruction caused by the 2014 military offensive. Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip fired several thousand rockets in response to Israel’s ongoing brutal military occupation and siege.
Is Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan the ‘Pearl Harbour Moment’ Jake Sullivan Called for?
By Cynthia Chung | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 30, 2022
In October 2019, Jake Sullivan, who became U.S. National Security Advisor in 2021, stated in an interview that the U.S. needed a clear threat to rally the world and play the role of saviour of mankind and that China could be that organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. In the 2019 interview, he acknowledges that the problem was that people were not going to believe that China is a global threat, that their view of China is too positive and that the United States would need a “Pearl Harbour moment,” a real focusing event to change their minds, something he calmly stated that “would scare the hell out of the American people.”
According to Sullivan, from the same man who called for Libyan and Syrian military interventionism, American exceptionalism needed “rescuing” and “reclaiming,” not of course with actual qualitative actions that would earn one’s position as a model of true democratic governance with American citizens and the world, but rather through ever aggressive PR and media shame-based social conditioning, labeling whoever points out the clear hypocrisy of these statements as “threats to national security.” Actors like Sullivan have shown that they are willing to do anything to achieve that “Pearl Harbour moment,” even if acts of terrorism on their own people are required in order to paint their “enemy” as a monster in the eyes of their citizens.
This is by no means a new strategy. Operation Gladio is a perfect example of how NATO conducted a decades-long secret war against its own European citizens and elected governments under the guise of “communist terrorism.”
In 1962, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed Operation Northwoods, which was a proposed false-flag operation against American citizens, which called for CIA operatives to both stage and actually commit acts of terrorism against American military and civilian targets and subsequently blame the Cuban government in order to justify a war against Cuba. The plan was drafted by General Lemnitzer specifically and has a striking similarity with NATO’s Operation Gladio.
The logic of Northwoods was the stripe of Gladio. The general staff inclined towards prefabricated violence because they believed benefits gained by the state count more than injustice against individuals. The only important criterion is reaching the objective and the objective was right-wing government.
Operation Northwoods memorandum March 13, 1962.
There was not a single item in the Northwoods manual that did not amount to a blatant act of treason, yet the U.S. military establishment dispatched “Top Secret – Justification for U.S. military Intervention in Cuba” straight to the desk of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, for onward transmission to President Kennedy.
Needless to say, President Kennedy rejected the proposal and a few months later General Lemnitzer’s term was not renewed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served from October 1st 1960 to September 30th 1962.
However, NATO lost no time, and in November 1962 Lemnitzer was appointed commander of U.S. European Command and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, the latter to which he served from January 1st, 1963 to July 1st, 1969.
Lemnitzer’s was a perfect fit to oversee the cross-continental Gladio operations in Europe. Lemnitzer was a prime motivating force in setting up the Special Forces Group in 1952 at Fort Bragg, where commandos were trained in the arts of guerilla insurgency in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Before long, the men who proudly wore distinctive green berets were cooperating discreetly with the armed forces of a string of European countries and participating in direct military operations, some of them extremely sensitive and of highly dubious legality.
The New American Century
Jake Sullivan’s statement that we need a “Pearl Harbour moment” is nothing new.
In September 2000 a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century” was published by none other than The Project for the New American Century. In the report it is written (pg. 51):
“… the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Interestingly, within this same report, published by The Project for the New American Century, it is written (pg. 60):
“Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and ‘combat’ likely will take place in a new dimensions: in space, ‘cyber-space,’ and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Richard Perle, called the “Prince of Darkness,” by his adversaries and the “Pentagon’s Brains” by his admirers was an acolyte of Albert Wohlstetter, you could say the “brains” behind the RAND Corporation (for more on this refer here). Paul Wolfowitz was another of Wohlstetter’s acolytes. The followers of Wohlstetter were so numerous, whom Perle said Donald Rumsfeld was among (1), that they called themselves “the St. Andrews prep” boys. (2)
Perle stated (3) the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert [Wohlstetter]’s vision of future wars. That it was won so quickly and decisively, with so few casualties and so little damage, was in fact an implementation of his strategy and his vision.”
In fact, this call for the need of a “Pearl Harbour moment” originally came from the Wohlstetters themselves.
A New Pearl Harbour Moment
In the mid-1950s, Roberta Wohlstetter, Albert’s wife and RAND peer, produced her seminal analysis of Pearl Harbour, recognised by the Pentagon as a definitive work of twentieth-century American military history. The study began as an internal RAND document based on unclassified documents drawn from the congressional record.
Warner Schilling noted in his perceptive review of Roberta’s work on Pearl Harbour that “The main concept that Mrs. Wohlstetter brings to bear on these events [is that]… the pictures of the world that government officials build from intelligence… are not so much a matter of the ‘facts’ their sources make available as they are a function of the ‘theories’ about politics already in their minds which guide both their recognition and their interpretation of said ‘facts’.”
The primary practical lesson of Roberta’s Pearl Harbour was that the United States should invest in rapid and aggressive means for responding to surprise attacks (for more on this story refer here).
On January 12, 2003, Los Angeles Times published an article titled “Agenda Unmasked,” where they write:
“In the hours immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, long before anyone was certain who was responsible for them, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly asked that plans be drawn up for an American assault on Iraq…
At first consideration, Rumsfeld’s early targeting of Iraq seems odd. Too little was known, too much uncertain. But the Defense secretary’s desire to attack Iraq was neither impulsive nor reactive. In fact, ever since the first American war against Iraq in 1991, Rumsfeld and others who planned and executed that war have wanted to go back and finish what they started. They said so in reports written for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in the last years of the George H.W. Bush administration, and they continued the push when they were out of power during the Clinton years. In the spring of 1997, their efforts coalesced when Rumsfeld, Cheney and others joined together to form the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, and began concerted lobbying for regime change in Iraq.
In an open letter to President Clinton dated Jan. 26, 1998, the group called for “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,” and in a letter dated May 29, 1998, to then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.)… Signatories to one or both letters included Rumsfeld; William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine and chairman of the PNAC; Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator whom President Bush last year named director of Middle Eastern policy for the National Security Council; Paul D. Wolfowitz, now Rumsfeld’s deputy at the Pentagon; John R. Bolton, now undersecretary of state for arms control; Richard N. Perle, now chairman of the Defense Science Board; Richard Armitage, now Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department; and Zalmay Khalilzad [another Wohlstetter acolyte(4)], former Unocal Corp. consultant and now special envoy to Afghanistan.
… They expected that the radical changes in U.S. military policy they favored would have to come slowly in the absence of, as the PNAC report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” put it, a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” On Sept. 11, 2001, they got their Pearl Harbor.”
As the Los Angeles Times article also observes, without 9/11 as their Pearl Harbor, their entire campaign against terror in the Middle East could never have been justified.
In fact, since the disastrous PR campaign of the Vietnam War, most Americans had become horrified at the prospect of entering any more foreign wars on the clearly false and hypocritical terms of bringers of “peace” and “freedom.”
9/11 changed all that.
Thus, when Jake Sullivan observes that there is not enough anti-China sentiment to bolster an image of the United States as a “saviour of mankind” against China and that America is in need of a “Pearl Harbour moment” I would be very wary.
The circus around Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in the coming days, and evident glee that is coming forth from many of these neocons frothing at the mouth over this prospect is a clear sign that something incredibly reckless and stupid is about to happen.
Pelosi’s airplane might indeed be shot down on her completely irrelevant and unnecessary trip to Taiwan, and if it is, don’t be surprised if it was the Americans themselves who are behind it, who have shown they are willing to do anything for that “Pearl Harbour moment.”
‘Ukraine scattering mines in Kharkov Region’
A photo purportedly showing a PFM-1 anti=personnel mine in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Samizdat – July 31, 2022
The military-civilian administration in the Kharkov Region has accused Ukrainian forces of using cluster munitions to disperse anti-personnel mines in the village of Tokarevka.
The munitions, which are banned by a 1997 agreement, have also been deployed in Donetsk, officials say.
The administration announced having discovered the mines on Sunday and in a Telegram post showed a picture of a green butterfly-shaped device nestled in a patch of weeds. The object, apparently a Soviet-era PFM-1, was almost invisible among the foliage.
Such munitions are typically scattered in large quantities, either by aircraft or artillery. Designed to maim rather than kill, they are capable of blowing off or disfiguring a victim’s foot. The PFM-1 is banned under the 1997 Ottawa Convention, to which Ukraine is party.
The Kharkov administration accused the “Kiev regime” of planting the explosives.
The same mines have been showered across the city of Donetsk, in the Donetsk People’s Republic, throughout the past week. Donetsk Mayor Alexey Kulemzin said on Sunday that two people had sustained injuries from the landmines, including a first responder who lost a foot.
Photos and video footage from the city showed residents placing cardboard boxes over the mines and marking the surrounding areas with warning signs. Kulemzin said on Sunday that more than 600 such mines had been disposed of in the preceding two days.
Russia would help Serbia if conflict were to break out – senator
Samizdat | August 1, 2022
If Serbia-Kosovo tensions spiral into an outright conflict, Moscow is ready to assist Belgrade without playing a direct role, a Russian senator has said. The two sides clashed on Sunday, with demonstrators building barricades and unknown gunmen reportedly firing on Kosovo police.
“It is very dangerous, it is the center of Europe, and everything can end in a very sad way, because NATO forces are stationed there (in Kosovo),” Russian Federation Council member Vladimir Dzhabarov said in an interview with RIA Novosti news agency on Monday.
According to the lawmaker, the situation “may end in an armed conflict, and as soon as NATO countries get in there, of course, there is a danger that other countries that are allies of Serbia will be drawn in.”
His remarks were in response to a feud between Serbia and its breakaway province, officially called the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija in the Serbian constitution, which received recognition by several Western powers in 2008.
The government in Kosovo planned to ban the use of Serbian-issued license plates and ID papers starting from August 1, and to prohibit entry for anyone using Serbian-issued plates or documents, while also refusing to print temporary papers for travelers.
Belgrade officials have called it an attack on Kosovo’s Serb minority, and President Aleksandar Vucic accused Pristina of violating the rights of local Serbs, who “will not suffer any more atrocities.” While offering a chance for peace, he warned on Sunday that his government would not sit idly by if Serbs were targeted.
Kosovo has denied a crackdown on Serbs and accused Belgrade officials of undermining “the rule of law” on their territory. Prime Minister Albin Kurti has accused local Serbs of opening fire on police, and claimed his government is facing “Serbian national-chauvinism” and “misinformation” from Belgrade.
Tensions flared on Sunday on the Kosovo-Serbia border. Serbs in the north of the breakaway province set up roadblocks and rang alarm bells, as heavily armed special police under Pristina’s authority took control of two administrative crossings with Serbia.
After a discussion with Washington, Kosovo officials decided to postpone the implementation of the controversial law for 30 days on the condition that Serbia remove barricades from the de facto border.
What The Future Holds For Our Climate Leaders
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 28, 2022
If my posting has been a little light for the last month or so, it’s because I’ve been working on a big Report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the subject of energy storage as a means to back up electricity generation from wind and solar facilities. The Report is basically finished, and now going through an editing process. It will probably be published some time in September.
In doing the research for the Report, I have had occasion to look carefully into the plans of many countries and U.S. states that claim to be the “leaders” in climate virtue, specifically on the subject of how they intend to reach the goal of Net Zero carbon emissions from generation of electricity. These climate “leaders” include, in Europe, Germany and the UK, and in the U.S., California and New York. One would think that for any jurisdiction pursuing Net Zero ambitions, and seeking to abolish use of fossil fuels, it would be completely imperative that some energy storage solution absolutely must be found to provide back-up for the electricity system when the wind and sun are not producing. But what my research has shown is that every one of these jurisdictions seeking to be the leader toward Net Zero has given astoundingly insufficient consideration to the energy storage problem.
I previously have covered some of the more incredible deficiencies in the Net Zero planning of these places, for example in “Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?” on May 16, and “And The Winner Is, Germany!” on June 29.
The single most astounding universal failure of all jurisdictions pursuing Net Zero is the failure to pursue any sort of working prototype or demonstration project of a Net Zero electricity system before committing the entire jurisdiction to the project on the basis of a blank check to be paid by the taxpayers and ratepayers. Who has ever heard of such a thing? in the 1880s, when Thomas Edison wanted to start building central station power plants to supply electricity for his new devices like incandescent lightbulbs, he began by building a prototype facility in London under the Holborn Viaduct, and followed that with a larger demonstration plant on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan that only supplied electricity to customers within a few square blocks. Only after those had been demonstrated as successful did a larger build-out begin. Similarly, the provision of nuclear power began with small government-funded prototypes in the late 1940s and early 1950s, followed by larger demonstration projects in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Only in the late 1960s, twenty years into the effort and after feasibility and cost had been demonstrated, were the first large-scale commercial nuclear reactors built. No competent person would take any other approach.
But somehow our politicians have now become so filled with hubris that they think they can just order up a functioning wind/solar electricity system and assume that backup energy storage devices will magically get invented and it will all work fine and not be financially ruinous, all by some arbitrarily-ordered date in the 2030s.
Today, all the mentioned jurisdictions and many more have embarked on ambitious Net Zero plans, and yet there does not exist anywhere in the world a functioning prototype or demonstration project that has actually achieved Net Zero in electricity generation, or anything even close. Indeed, it’s worse than that. There is a fairly substantial project that set out to achieve Net Zero (although they weren’t using the term at the time, which was 2014), and has fallen remarkably short. That project is on the island of El Hierro, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. El Hierro installed a collection of wind turbines and a pumped storage/hydro reservoir as back-up to great fanfare, but it struggles to achieve 50% of the electricity from the wind/storage system over the course of a year. The rest comes from a diesel generator. The system operator puts out monthly statistics (with substantial lag), typically with excited verbiage about “tons of carbon emissions saved,” without ever admitting that the system has totally failed in its original goal of getting rid of the fossil fuel piece. Instead they now have three redundant systems for providing the electricity — wind turbines, hydro reservoir and turbines, and the diesel generator — all of which must be paid for, and all to provide the same electricity that the diesel generator was fully capable of providing on its own. The cost has been calculated at about 80 euro cents per KWh, roughly 7 to 8 times average U.S. consumer rates; but the cost is largely hidden from El Hierro ratepayers by subsidies from the EU and government of Spain.
My research also covered in depth the question of how much energy storage would be needed for various jurisdictions to fully back up a predominantly wind/solar generation system without any use of fossil fuels. Credible calculations previously discussed here have included the calculation of Roger Andrews, done in 2018, that either California or Germany would require at least about 25,000 GWh of energy storage to back up a fully wind/solar generation system for a year without use of fossil fuels; and a calculation by Ken Gregory done on very similar methodology in late 2021 showing that the full U.S. (lower 48 states) would require about 250,000 GWh of storage for the same purpose. These are truly huge numbers.
Facing such requirements to reach Net Zero and banish fossil fuels from the electricity system, the plans of these jurisdictions for acquisition of storage are quite shocking. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie reported on April 11, 2022 that Germany had announced plans to acquire all of 8.91 GWh of energy storage by 2031 — a ridiculously puny amount if Germany is actually serious about Net Zero. Utility Dive reported on April 12, 2022 that New York had plans to acquire all of 6 GW of storage (likely corresponding to about 24 GWh, since the batteries are to be of the lithium-ion type that generally have capacity for four hours of discharge at full capacity). This figure is only slightly less puny than Germany’s. Another piece from Utility Dive on April 6, 2022 reported that California’s regulators had ordered utilities to acquire what would be the equivalent of about 42 GWh of storage as part of the Net Zero plans of that jurisdiction. All of these storage acquisition plans are in the range of about 0.1% to 0.2% of the storage that would actually be needed to achieve the Net Zero goal.
So what will the future of energy usage actually look like in these places as fossil fuels get phased out and wind and solar take over, with woefully insufficient energy storage to cover the intermittencies? To get an idea, let’s take another look at the Report for California put out by consultancy Energy Innovations on May 9, with the title “Achieving an Equitable and Reliable 85 Percent Clean Electricity System by 2030 in California.” Note that this in not actually Net Zero, but only 85% of same. Here are a few tidbits. First, their graphic on the nature of the transition:
We’re going to have a “paradigm shift” in “RA,” which seems to mean “Resource Adequacy.” Check out that list on the right under “clean reliability resources” — “Energy availability depends on weather.” Are you starting to get the picture now?
Read through the report until you get into pages in the mid-30s, where the subject becomes what they euphemistically call “demand response.” It’s a lot of bafflegab to make it seem oh so pleasant. Excerpt:
Demand-side measures can substitute for supply-side resources and therefore contribute to resource diversity; their increased availability hedges against the risk of deploying new clean supply-side resources too slowly (including generators and storage). For example, the technical report finds that deploying Load Shift could reduce load by 1,500 MW in the early evening hours solar output falls, hedging against battery deployment challenges such as supply chain. . . . Demand-side measures also provide complementary reliability, resiliency, and public safety benefits to supply-side solutions or imports, as they lie closest to the affected load. While centralized generators provide the bulk of our power under most system conditions, they can be rendered less effective or useless under certain disaster conditions.
This is bureaucratese meaning “we’ll turn off your electricity at random times when we feel like it.” Get ready for this, California, Germany, et al. I guess New York is on the same path too, but I have my secret escape plans ready.
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China names world’s ‘hacking empire’
RT | March 15, 2022
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February. … continue
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