Fossil Fuel Restriction Dam Starting To Break
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 4, 2021
Somewhere a couple of decades or so ago, the rich parts of the world embarked on a program of replacing energy from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy from intermittent “renewables” (mainly wind and solar). In trendy academic, journalistic, and otherwise progressive circles, the idea took hold that this was the way to “save the planet.” This program was undertaken without any detailed engineering study of how or whether it might actually work, or how much it might cost to fully implement. In the trendy circles, there took hold a blind faith in the complete ability of the government, by dispensing taxpayer funds, to order up whatever innovation might be needed to move us forward to this energy utopia.
The latest UN-orchestrated effort to implement the renewable energy program, known as COP 26, has just broken up. To read the verbiage emanating from the affair, all is on track, if a bit slower than one might have hoped.
But I have long predicted that this program would come to an end when (absent some miraculous innovation that nobody has yet conceived) the usage of the renewables got to a sufficient level that their costs and unworkability could not be covered up any longer. Until very recently the pressure of elite groupthink has been able to maintain a united front of lip service to the cause. But consider a few developments from the past few weeks, just since the end of COP 26:
Japan
Japan tends to keep its head down in international affairs, and at COP 26 signed on to the happy talk group communiqués without raising any particular issues. But there is no getting around that Japan has the third largest economy in the world — after the U.S. and China, and larger than any European country — so its actions in energy policy are inherently significant. Also, Japan has relatively little energy production of its own, is heavily dependent on imports, has harsh winters, and has a growing Chinese military and economic threat right on its doorstep. Is Japan really going to trust its fate to intermittent wind and solar energy?
On December 1 Bloomberg reported: “Japan Is Backing Oil and Gas Even After COP26 Climate Talks.” It seems that this rather significant country may be seriously re-thinking the move away from fossil fuels. Excerpt:
Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects, according to people within the Japanese government and industry, who requested anonymity as the talks are private.
What is motivating Japan to break from the world groupthink? According to the Bloomberg piece, the main motivator is security of energy supply — which wind and solar obviously cannot provide:
The officials are concerned about the long-term supply of traditional fuels as the world doubles down on renewable energy, the people said. The import-dependent nation wants to avoid a potential shortage of fuel this winter, as well as during future cold spells, after a deficit last year sparked fears of nationwide blackouts. . . . Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry declined to comment directly on whether it is encouraging industries to boost investment in upstream energy supply, and instead pointed to a strategic energy plan approved by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet on October 22. That plan says “no compromise is acceptable to ensure energy security, and it is the obligation of a nation to continue securing necessary resources.”
(Emphasis added.). Well, if “no compromise is acceptable” on “energy security,” that pretty much rules out principal reliance on wind and solar for powering the Japanese economy, at least until some magical new inventions come along.
United States
In the U.S., Republicans have only very gradually caught on to the idea that fossil fuel restrictions in the name of “climate” are becoming a political liability for the Democrats. Up to now, there have been some politicians willing to speak out in opposition to such restrictions, but little in the way of concrete steps taken in opposition. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to move forward with initiatives at the SEC, Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to pressure banks and other financial institutions to reduce their participation in the fossil fuel industries.
So this is a big development: On November 22, a coalition of state treasurers sent a letter to large financial institutions threatening to end relationships, including the deposit of state and pension funds, with institutions that cut off financing for the coal, oil and natural gas industries. National Review reports in a November 22 piece headlined “Fifteen States Respond to ‘Woke Capitalism,’ Threaten to Cut Off Banks That Refuse to Service Coal, Oil Industries.” Excerpt:
A coalition of financial officers from 15 states sent a letter to the U.S. banking industry on Monday warning they plan to take “collective action” against banks that adopt corporate policies to cut off financing for the coal, oil, and natural gas industries. . . . The letter puts the financial institutions that have “adopted policies aimed at diminishing a large portion of our states’ revenue” on notice, saying the banks have “a major conflict of interest against holding, maintaining, or managing those funds.”
According to the NR piece, the state treasurers signing on to the letter include those from West Virginia, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama, Texas and Kentucky. Recipients of the letter included JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Between the states’ own accounts and their pension funds, the amounts at issue would be well into the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars, if not approaching a trillion.
Meanwhile, over in Europe . . .
Another Bloomberg piece, this one from November 28, describes the sense of impending doom hanging over Europe with the combination of low natural gas supplies, price spikes, and complete inability to coax more production out of proliferating and essentially useless wind and solar generators. The headline is “Europe’s energy crisis is about to get worse as winter arrives.” Excerpt:
The situation is already so dire this early in the winter season because of a blistering rally in natural gas prices. Stores of the fuel, used to heat homes and to generate electricity, are lower than usual and are being depleted quickly. Analysts have warned that gas stores could drop to zero this winter if cold weather boosts demand. Rolling blackouts are a possibility, warned Jeremy Weir, chief executive officer of Trafigura Group, a Swiss commodity trading house on Nov. 16.
And then there’s this comment:
“If the weather gets cold in Europe there’s not going to be an easy supply solution, it’s going to need a demand solution,” said Adam Lewis, partner at trading house Hartree Partners LP.
I think that a “demand solution” means some combination of either blackouts or intentionally cutting people off and, I guess, leaving them to freeze. The “supply solution” mentioned by Lewis would be allowing fracking in the extensive shale formations underlying Western Europe. Such fracking is currently banned. Even if those bans were lifted today, it would be way too late for this winter. … Full article
The last time tony fauci was pushing masks for disease mitigation he was making up his facts and scare mongering too
el gato malo – bad cattitude – december 6, 2021
many of you are probably too young to remember the AIDS panic of the 80’s.
but when it came out, the NIH, with tony fauci leading the charge, was getting literally everything wrong.
they pushed a narrative of fear, vilified the infected, interfered with the development and adoption of effective treatments, and completely misrepresented spread and mitigation.
it’s how we wound up with absolute garbage like this ad:
it’s probably pretty jarring to see, but this is because you now have perspective. at the time, A LOT of people believed this. fear of getting AIDS from public toilet seats was a very real thing. fear of getting AIDS from casual contact or sharing dining or cooking facilities was a very real thing. people worried they might be sitting near a gay person on a bus. the “moral majority” of dingbat tele-evangelists thundered about it daily.
and then, as now, one jumped up bureaucrat with no idea what he was talking about was running around like chicken little screaming of falling skies and grandstanding about non-existent risks to children.
the fact that it was literally the same guy who is still at it should deeply embarrass us all.
i urge you to watch the video and hear him, in his own words. because this is who tony fauci was, and he has not gotten better. he’s just become more powerful and more nastily manipulative and narcissistic.
the appalling inaccuracy and vicious othering of the AIDS campaign is still his bread and butter play. it’s what tony does. only the scale and scope of power has changed.
one day, 20 years from now, people will look back on these rushed and slipshod vaccine approvals and mandates for products that are not at all suited to task and claims about masks and lockdowns and feel sick to their stomachs.
they will not be able to believe how such pseudoscience and rapacious world wrecking doctrine not only got foisted upon the world, but accepted and cheer led by it.
they will, in the light of perspective, marvel that the same man who convinced us that our kids would get AIDS from being near a gay teacher was allowed to generate pretext to close the schools to “protect” children from a disease that poses them almost no risk, a disease they do not contract nor spread serious cases of.
they will be appalled by the suggestion that a non-sterilizing vaccine was forced on them even after the fact that the vaccine does not mitigate spread was known and despite a towering and dangerous adverse events profile that rendered it a clearly of negative benefit to cost proposition to the young and healthy.
in short, they’ll feel just like you probably did looking at that AIDS ad.
think very carefully about just who you are choosing to trust here.
these “experts” do not have track records of being correct or even of being honest.
check the date on this:
they told you not only that these vaccines would stop spread, but that they literally changed the definition of “herd immunity” so that it could ONLY be achieved by vaccines.
then the vaccines failed to stop spread, likely made it worse, and they doubled down on “you need to get vaxxed” in spite of this, pivoting to this bizarre new take of “you need to get vaxxed to save hospital space” which, of course, is ALSO not working. now they want boosters. soon it will be “variant boosters.” if you don’t think annual covid shots are coming, you probably fell for the “did you know the word gullible is not in the dictionary?” trick. twice.
this is not “changing your views when new facts arise” this is “finding new justifications for doing the same thing despite the facts being 180 degrees opposite to what you claimed.”
this is not science, it’s scientology.
it’s the same people making the same mess.
isn’t it about time we broke this cycle?
food for thought.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra: Report Finds Dramatic Increase of Heart Inflammation Linked to Jabs
21st Century Wire | December 4, 2021
By now, many have seen the recent segment with cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra which aired on GB News last week. Here he is again, this time speaking with Maajid Nawaz on LBC radio about the article in the American Heart Association’s prestigious journal ‘Circulation’. The findings in this study should disturb everyone.
What is stated in this prestigious peer reviewed medical journal ties in with the numerous reports in recent weeks of young healthy people – including many of top-flight athletes – all suddenly suffering from serious cardiac incidents, and in many cases, dying. How many of these casualties are a result of the experimental mRNA COVID-19 vaccines?
In this recent interview with Dr. Malhotra, the so-called “fact checkers” are exposed as mouthpieces of government agencies, the WHO, and a wildly corrupt corporate pharmaceutical cartel determined to promote their experimental mRNA gene therapy jabs at all costs. Who benefits? This informative segment offers some answers to these questions.
What’s Left? How Greenwald, Covid and Rittenhouse Exposed a Plague Among Progressives
By Riva Enteen | MintPress News | December 1, 2021
Caitlin Johnstone asserts that “[t]he most significant political moment in the U.S. since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election wasn’t a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control.” Since Trump’s election, information control contributes to why those critical of Democrats are called Trump sympathizers. Journalist Paul Street epitomizes this tendency, seeming to speak for many who equate any criticism of Democrats with support for Trump and his policies. To the extent that this attitude serves to obstruct political dialogue and struggle, it does not serve us well — especially in these dark times, when we must pull our forces together to overcome the challenges we face.
Street’s CounterPunch article, “Glenn Greenwald is Not Your Misunderstood Left Comrade,” obstructs political dialogue and struggle. He gives no substantive rebuttal to a Greenwald article that declares “grotesque” the sight of “masked servants and unmasked elite at the New York Met Gala.” In a classic ad hominem attack, since Street couldn’t summon up an intelligent response, he just hurled insults. Sadly, this is what currently passes for political debate.
Compasses, nautical and political, are known to stop working in the vicinity of a strong electro-magnet. What has happened to our political compass? Street declares, “Glenn Greenwald is not a man of ‘the Left’ (or whatever’s left of ‘the Left’).” What does “Left” mean, post-Trump? The once-reliable compass seems now to be spinning wildly, as the political magnetic field does a headstand.
Street asserts that “Greenwald broke on through to the wrong side during the Trump years, so clouded by his understandable contempt for liberal and Democratic hypocrisy, corporatism, and imperialism as to become a willing accomplice of the white nationalist right.” Greenwald’s tireless and meticulous debunking of Russiagate has cast him as a Trump sympathizer to people like Street. Remarkably, many on “the Left,” still believe Russia did it, though the recent indictment of Hilary Clinton’s lawyer and arrest of the principal source of the bogus Steele dossier should put any such notion to rest.
Street snidely discounts Greenwald’s stated reason for leaving The Intercept — that “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New York-based [Intercept] editors involved in this effort at suppression.” Instead he claims that Greenwald, having submitted “a piece that tried to advance Trump campaign propaganda against Joe Biden on the eve of the 2020 presidential election,” regarded himself as “too good to be edited.” He lambasts Greenwald for being, as he put it, “all over the Hunter Biden-New York Post-deep state laptop story, even after CNN published an article titled “New Proof Emerges of the Biden Family Emails: a Definitive Account of the CIA/Media/BigTech Fraud.” Yet, even CNN recognized the bombshell.
Smelling (and finding) the rat
The World Socialist Website, in sync with Street’s “analysis,” calls Greenwald a “sly fascism-denier” who, Street says, “has creepily thrown in with the white nationalist right.” Why? Because in his impeccably documented piece, “FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots,” Greenwald discussed the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer. He concludes:
There was no way to avoid suspicions about the FBI’s crucial role in a plot like this absent extreme ignorance about the bureau’s behavior over the last two decades, or an intentional desire to sow fear about right-wing extremists attacking Democratic Party officials one month before the 2020 presidential election.
Greenwald was one of the few who smelled a rat in the Michigan kidnapping story and, after serious investigative journalism, he found the rat.
In sum, the FBI devised this plot, was the primary organizer of it, funded it, purposely directed their targets to pose for incriminating pictures that they then released to the press, and then heaped praise on themselves for stopping what they themselves had created. The Wall Street Journal’s headline declares “In Michigan Plot to Kidnap Governor, Informants Were Key,” yet Jan 6 is declared an attempted coup.
In spite of such headlines from the Wall Street Journal, Street says Greenwald “downplays the seriousness of the fascist-putschist Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021.” This doesn’t sound like downplaying to me: “Of course the FBI was infiltrating the groups they claim were behind these attacks,” Greenwald reported, concluding, “yet the suggestion that FBI informants may have played some role in the planning of the January 6 riot was instantly depicted as something akin to, say, 9/11 truth theories or questions about the CIA’s role in JFK’s assassination.”
Street claims Greenwald has a “curious alignment with the white-nationalist neofascist Donald Trump and the January 6 marauders in their purported struggle with ‘the deep state.’” Marauders or the FBI? Does Street not believe that a “Deep State” exists? Greenwald’s article “Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media” is subtitled “The FBI has been manufacturing and directing terror plots and criminal rings for decades. But now, reverence for security state agencies reigns.”
In a widely praised TED Talk, Trevor Aaronson states: “There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.” So why are Street, the World Socialist Website, Counterpunch, and many others well-versed in COINTELPRO tactics, now swallowing FBI words whole and calling people Trump fascists for raising the issue of possible FBI involvement in the January 6 riot?
Street claims that Greenwald “defends Trump and other Amerikaner neofascists against the ‘censorship’ of their supposed free speech right to spew sexist, nativist, and white power hatred on Twitter and Facebook.” An article I wrote about the new reality police revealed that Media Alliance, a San Francisco organization founded in 1976 to be mainstream media watchdogs, circulated a petition after Jan. 6 that says: “Facebook should create a circuit breaker to help prevent dangerous disinformation and incitements to violence from ever reaching a mass audience…”
That good minds sincerely believe Silicon Valley executives should be the gods of truth in today’s world makes Orwell look cheerily optimistic. Yet shockingly, many people agree with the unprecedented censorship of a former president. Nixon, even after his impeachment and resignation, was never gagged as Trump is. As a former constitutional lawyer, Greenwald addressed concerns of Silicon Valley censorship in his article “Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment.” Greenwald believes House Democrats are getting closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.
Visceral hatred and rational discourse
Greenwald recently wrote several pieces on COVID as well, one announcing that he was eagerly vaccinated. However, his questions about the cost-benefit analysis missing from the COVID debate and his support of the position taken by NBA star Jonathan Isaac have Street condemning him for “failing to mention the horrific, anti-science, COVID-fueling and pandemo-fascist anti-masking and anti-vax practices, policies, and politics of the Amerikaner Party of Trump (the Republicans).”
An article titled “Forced Vaccination Was Always the End Game” — from the non-profit National Vaccine Information Center, which advocates for informed consent protections in medical policies and public health laws — reports that breakthrough COVID infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in fully vaccinated people are on the rise; individuals who have recovered from the infection have stronger natural immunity than those who have been vaccinated; and officials at the World Health Organization now say that the SARS-COV-2 virus is mutating like influenza and is likely to become prevalent in every country, no matter how high the vaccination rate. Yet, in spite of such growing perspective, Greenwald’s piece supporting the NBA’s Isaac is subtitled, “It is virtually a religious belief in the dominant liberal culture that people who do not want the COVID vaccine are stupid, ignorant, immoral and dangerous.”
In a separate article, titled “The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics,” Greenwald writes that the “ACLU prior to its Trump-era transformation” had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics. The ACLU report cites important lessons from American history:
… vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated, rather than slowed, the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.
Greenwald legitimately questioned the ACLU’s about-face from the pre-Trump era to its current position, pointing out how the ACLU tweeted that “[f]ar from compromising them, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties.” Yet Street lauds the ACLU’s current position.
Many ask, as one article puts it, “Why Does Glenn Greenwald Keep Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Show?” The question I keep asking, but get no answer to, is why Greenwald, Tulsi Gabbard, Aaron Maté, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal, and Jimmy Dore can appear only on Fox. Why are they not invited onto “liberal” MSNBC or CNN, let alone Democracy Now? The apparent answer is that the dominant, ubiquitous paradigm, which cannot be challenged, is “don’t go after the Democrats.”
Much like Julian Assange, Greenwald began to be condemned by liberals only post-Trump. The liberal visceral hatred of Donald Trump has trumped rational discourse. If there were true rational discourse, Julian Assange would not be suffering in Belmarsh Prison as a consequence of his cardinal sin — publishing emails harmful to Democrats.
Facts and the distorting ideological lens
Following the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, Greenwald again went out on a limb in what a revolutionary comrade called a “rant,” but Greenwald’s message was essentially the same as that conveyed by Caitlin Johnstone:
If your opinion about a legal case would be different if the political ideologies of those involved were reversed and all other facts and evidence remained the same, then it’s probably best not to pretend your position on the case has anything to do with facts or evidence.
Yet Greenwald, once again, has found himself in the crosshairs of “progressives.”
I agree with Street that he and Greenwald are not “on the same side.” If Street, and countless others like him, engaged in true political debate and struggle rather than calling people “facetious,” “stupid,” and “snotty,” we might be closer to the revolution that Street claims to hunger for.
Riva Enteen, former Program Director of the San Francisco National Lawyers Guild, is a lifelong peace and justice activist, retired social worker, lawyer, and editor of “Follow the Money,” a collection of Pacifica Radio’s Flashpoints interviews. She can be reached at rivaenteen@gmail.com
Nobody can explain why the vaccinated are more likely to get COVID and die
By Steve Kirsch | December 5, 2021
ICYMI, here’s a chart from a recent post by my good friend Mathew Crawford. It basically shows, the more you vaccinate, the more cases and deaths you get.
Critics would argue, “it’s confounded! more elderly are vaccinated.” But the same critics cannot show us this is false. They can only do “hand-waving” arguments that it must be wrong. Not very convincing.
Governments won’t release the data to show vaccinations are safe. I wonder why?
However, we actually agree with the critics that it is confounded but here’s why: governments don’t release the breakdowns publicly so we can’t do any better than this. If the vaccines are so safe, why don’t they release the data to the public to show this?
Is this just a fluke? I don’t think so. Watch this video starting at 7:00. The line goes the wrong way. The more you vaccinate, the worse it gets.
The health authorities are never going to figure this out because it would discredit them. So they have to keep on singing the same tune: “Safe and effective.”
Democrats receive pushback over social media censorship bill proposals
The bill would make social platforms liable for user “harm”
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 4, 2021
House Democrats called for the introduction of legislation that would allow users to sue platforms for “emotional injury.” Critics warned that such a law would result in more censorship.
On Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed several pieces of legislation that would result in amendments to Section 230 (the law that protects online platforms from liability for content posted by users).
One of the proposals was the “Justice Against Malicious Algorithm Act.” The law would enable social media users to sue companies for causing “severe emotional injury.” However, the law does not define so-called emotional injury.
Rashad Robinson, the head of an advocacy group, was one of the people who testified in the hearing. He said free speech should be restricted to fight “misinformation.”
Robinson said that Congress should put legislative limits on the First Amendment rights, arguing that: “I understand that we have these conversations about the First Amendment, but there are limitations to what you can and cannot say.”
Democratic representatives agreed with the idea of limiting free speech to fight misinformation. Most of them said that online platforms should be forced to “deamplify” objectionable content.
One Democratic panelist said that free speech does not translate to “freedom of reach.” Another said that “lies are not free speech.”
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers warned that the “Justice Against Malicious Algorithm Act” was a “a thinly veiled attempt to pressure companies to censor more speech.”
She added that if “companies will have to decide between leaving up content that may offend someone and fight it in court, or censor content that reaches a user—which do you think they’ll choose?”
NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg needs to calm it down
By Daniel Larison | Responsible Statecraft | December 3, 2021
Twice in the last two weeks, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has made public comments that threaten to worsen already strained relations between Russia and the alliance.
Instead of calming things down, Stoltenberg has been carelessly ratcheting up tensions over nuclear weapons in Europe and the conflict in Ukraine. At exactly the moment when the U.S. and NATO need to be working to deescalate the situation with Russia over Ukraine, the top official in NATO has been throwing kerosene on the flames.
While he was urging the new German coalition government to continue hosting U.S. tactical nuclear weapons, Stoltenberg made the dangerous suggestion that the weapons could end up with NATO members to the east of Germany: “So, of course, Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in your country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany.” Raising the possibility of moving these weapons closer to Russia was bound to elicit a sharply negative reaction, and that is what happened.
Stoltenberg’s remarks prompted immediate outrage in Moscow, and it led the Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko to announce this week that Belarus would welcome Russian nuclear weapons to its territory in response to any NATO redeployment to the east. Stoltenberg’s warning may have been intended for Berlin, but it had its greatest and most destabilizing impact in Moscow and Minsk. At a time when the Russian government already perceives a growing threat coming from the West, talking about moving nuclear weapons into eastern Europe was a serious mistake.
It is worth noting that the continued presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe serves no real purpose. As Global Zero’s Derek Johnson has pointed out, these weapons are a relic of the Cold War and they were originally deployed to be used against countries that are now members of NATO. In any event, the new German government still supports nuclear sharing, so the weapons stored in Germany won’t be going anywhere in the near future. Nonetheless, conjuring up the specter of American nuclear weapons moving closer to Russia was enough to further sour relations. Coming on the heels of the breakdown in NATO-Russian relations that began with the expulsion of Russian diplomats in October, this could only serve to deepen mistrust between Russia and the alliance.
Stoltenberg also repeated the standard NATO line that Russia has no part in decisions about alliance expansion: “Russia has no veto, Russia has no say, and Russia has no right to establish a sphere of influence trying to control their neighbors.” Since Russia has already demonstrated its ability to thwart at least one aspirant state’s ambitions to join the alliance, the Secretary-General’s platitudes seemed almost as if he were trying to dare Moscow into taking more aggressive action. The U.S. and NATO may not like it, and it may not be the way that we want things to be, but the fact is that Russia absolutely does have a veto in practice over which of its neighbors become members of an anti-Russian military alliance. We already know that the Russian government will exercise that veto. The Secretary-General’s saying that Russia has no say is practically an invitation to Putin to prove him wrong.
Whether NATO officials agree with the assessment or not, the Russian government views NATO as the principal military threat to their country. Given the Russian experience of suffering devastating attacks from the west several times over the last two hundred years, their leaders have naturally been wary of the eastward expansion of the alliance, and they have made it very clear that they consider further advances to be intolerable. NATO’s “open door” to Ukraine and Georgia may seem like so much boilerplate rhetoric to Western officials, but it needlessly antagonizes Russia while offering these countries false hope of alliance membership that will likely never materialize. Stoltenberg’s latest remarks will likely have the same effect of angering Russia while giving the Ukrainian government the mistaken impression that their future entry into the alliance is guaranteed. One could hardly ask for a message more likely to promote misunderstanding and miscalculation.
It is not a coincidence that heightened tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been preceded by Kyiv’s frequent agitation for a Membership Action Plan over the last year and the Biden administration’s endorsement of Ukraine and Georgia’s future alliance membership in recent months. The Biden administration’s professions of “ironclad” and “unwavering” commitment to Ukraine have similarly been as unhelpful as they are hard to believe. While these statements of support are meant to discourage Russia from taking aggressive actions, it is the close military relationship between Ukraine and Western governments that so alarms Russia and provokes the behavior that these statements are supposed to deter. The more that the U.S. and its allies emphasize their commitment to Ukraine, the more that Moscow is liable to perceive Ukraine’s cooperation with Western governments as a threat.
Stoltenberg’s statement that Russia “has no right to establish a sphere of influence” is true but also irrelevant to the issues at hand. No state has ever had a “right” to establish a sphere of influence, but many states, including the United States, have had them all the same. All states in theory have the right to conduct their foreign policy however they see fit, but if a country chooses to align itself with its neighbor’s major power rival then that neighbor is bound to view this choice as a potential threat to its own security. When that country then builds up a military relationship with that rival and its allies, that will seem to be an even greater threat. That is how the Russian government views the intensifying military cooperation between Ukraine and Western governments.
The way out of this deteriorating situation is to scale back the confrontational rhetoric, rescind the empty promises of future NATO membership, and recognize how U.S. and NATO actions have fed into Russian threat perceptions. Secretary-General Stoltenberg has chosen to go in the opposite direction. That will make it more difficult to defuse tensions with Russia.
Putin has called for “legal guarantees” that there will be no further eastward expansion of NATO, and this is a demand that the alliance could agree to without much difficulty. Closing the door to further NATO expansion would not resolve all problems with Russia, but it would remove a significant irritant from the relationship. It would also stop stringing the Ukrainian government along with a promise that was never going to be honored. Since NATO made that promise in Bucharest in 2008, it has been the cause of nothing but instability and trouble, and the alliance, the U.S., and all of Europe would be better off without it.
First Comply, Then We’ll Grant You Some Rights
BY STACEY RUDIN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | DECEMBER 5, 2021
More and more people feel like something is “off” about our response to the “Covid” pandemic. This pandemic is claimed by political establishment prophets to be the first time in history that we need universal, worldwide “vaccination” to dissipate a respiratory pathogen. The proffered “vaccines” do not provide sterilizing immunity; rather, they lead to regular “breakthrough” infections. Yet we are directed to “mix and match” them as we like, on a regular basis, in order to eat in restaurants and attend events.
Having recovered from the disease itself does not suffice to maintain your rights. The ability to prove that you are not susceptible to the pathogen due to inherent good health does not suffice. To maintain freedom of movement, you must submit to the injections.
Something is off. They want us to take these “vaccines” very badly. They want to build a QR/tracking infrastructure on this “safety” premise very badly. One must ask: did they ever have a legitimate basis to lead us to this point? Did they really believe they could “save grandma” with a lockdown?
By picking apart the superficially flawed justification they gave to the terrified world population for first imposing universal house arrest, we can see that they did not. Both the WHO and the Imperial College modeler Neil Ferguson called for lockdowns specifically based on China’s Wuhan lockdown of January 2020. They admitted that “lockdown” was something no one previously believed would work. When “Xi Jinpeng succeeded,” they abruptly reversed course 180 degrees, calling for the entire world to “copy China.”
“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could…If China had not done it, the year would have been very different.” — Neil Ferguson
Six weeks after the discovery of the first case, the WHO, during a press conference, sold the world on lockdown by claiming that “Wuhan’s curve is flatter” compared to other regions of China. The data it used to make this case — a case that it knew would devastate world economies and any individual human who could not earn money by sitting in front of a computer screen— was presumably provided via the communist dictator.
“So here’s the outbreak that happened in the whole country on the bottom. Here’s what the outbreak looked like outside of Hubei. Here are the areas of Hubei outside of Wuhan. And then the last one is Wuhan. And you can see this is a much flatter curve than the others. And that’s what happens when you have an aggressive action that changes the shape that you would expect from an infectious disease outbreak. This is extremely important for China, but it’s extremely important for the rest of the world . . .
The Chinese government and the Chinese people have used the non-pharmaceutical measures (or the social measures) [to] effectively change […] the course of the disease, as evidenced by the epidemic curves… In the report we have recommended this method to the international community.”
This superficially pleasing explanation — one easily accepted by a trusting scared person — raises huge red flags on closer analysis. First, how was the testing in the various regions conducted? Was it randomized throughout the population, or were only those who presented at clinics or hospitals tested? How many tests were conducted per capita? Was that number standard throughout the regions? How can we be sure “asymptomatic” cases were captured?, and so forth. In short, each curve could simply have depicted testing protocol — the tester could quite literally have compiled any curve it wanted.
Even worse, there is a logical flaw so breathtaking that it is impossible to believe it could have been overlooked by all lockdown-imposing world governments. Of the thousands of national, state, and local political and media actors cheering on the lockdowns, at least one must have noticed that while the curve may have been “flatter in Wuhan,” the disease still went away in all of China. The supposed “flatter” curve in Wuhan had zero net benefit. The residents there suffered through the pain of lockdown, neighboring regions did not, and they all ended up at the same point.
China has not reported any Covid cases in nearly four months. Prior to that, its cases were flatlined for fifteen months, since March 2020. China’s disease “curve” would be comedic if the rest of the world had not given up democracy and precious constitutional rights to “fight the virus”:
Contrast this with the rest of the world — particularly the countries that tried the hardest to replicate the Chinese example — such as Peru, Israel, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, and Canada. All of them have reported multiple “waves” of Covid despite all of the pain of lockdown. Even mass vaccination has not “stopped” waves of cases. China is the only country with a perfectly flat “curve,” and it did that with a single-city lockdown, despite reporting the presence of the virus in many other regions. Magic.
World governments clearly know about this. They do not trust the communist dictator. If they really believed the disease was serious and China underreported cases, they would not be firing doctors and nurses who refuse the “vaccine” after working safely with covid patients for 18 months. Rather, they know that the rules have no effect. The disease curves rise and fall, rise and fall — it would be absurd and perverse to conclude the rules work sometimes and fail at other times.
Yet they keep imposing rules. The population complies, conditioned to an illusion of control; a superstitious belief that “because we did something, it must have had an effect.” But facts are facts: even the “vaccines” have not stopped the virus, there are “breakthrough infections.” Desiring to be “good people,” everyone stays unthinkingly on the track that started with Wuhan’s lockdown.
They are trying to save grandma, but grandma’s fate is sealed. What is actually happening is they are paving the way to routine universal mandatory vaccination. The political establishment intends to make “the unvaccinated” second-class citizens, to dehumanize them and deny them basic rights many generations have taken for granted. This conditions the population to movement restrictions based on behavior. Compliance gets you rights, like a dog earning treats.
In this system — which is steadily getting underway in country after country — a person who weighs 350 pounds, is completely sedentary, and eats a steady stream of Big Macs is considered “healthy” and accepted in society. The decisive factor is obedience: he dutifully takes all of the “boosters.” By contrast, a world-class athlete such as Novak Djokovic cannot play tennis at the Australian Open. He is deemed an “infection risk” because he insists on maintaining his body using eastern-style health practices, the same ones that made him into the greatest tennis player of all time. (The establishment would rather he copy the Big Mac devotee described above, because it earns them — not him —more profits).
The political establishment is so devoted to this cause that it is hard to see how we can extricate ourselves. Accepting the first lockdown was the decisive point. We sacrificed our rights due to fear, and nearly two years later, we still don’t have them back. It was as obvious then as it is now: power is never seized and then voluntarily returned.
Australia now has “quarantine camps.” “Unvaccinated” Canadians cannot use mass transit. Austrians who refuse the jab cannot leave their homes. It bears repeating: world governments are holding law-abiding adults in house arrest for refusing to take an injection. This is not a drill.
Combine this real-life dystopia with the twisted “logic” used to launch the lockdowns, and it is hard to ignore the sinking feeling that lockdown was a preconceived pathway to where we are now: staring down the barrel at permanent, regular, mandatory adult vaccination — your immune system is now a subscription service — and corresponding movement “passports.”
Why do they want to inject us so badly? Certainly not for our own good. They act in their own self-interest, under cover of fake, “grandma-saving” goodwill. They are stealing from us — from you. How much more will you let them take?
Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA.
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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