As US regime-change agency NED admits interference in Belarus, leaked documents also implicate UK Foreign Office
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | May 21, 2021
The full extent of Western meddling in Belarus prior to the country’s contested August 2020 election may never be known. Yet the outlines of a wide-ranging foreign effort to destabilize the government are becoming ever clearer.
As RT reported earlier this week, a pair of Russian pranksters posing as Belarusian opposition figures have duped high-ranking representatives of US regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into exposing the extent of Washington’s clandestine involvement in the unrest that erupted across the country throughout 2020.
Among other bombshell disclosures, Nina Ognianova, who oversees the NED’s work with local groups in the country, suggested “a lot of the people” who were “trained” and “educated” via the organization’s various endeavors there were pivotal to “the events, or the build-up to the events, of last summer.”
Long-time NED chief Carl Gershman – who in September 2013, less than six months prior to the coup that shifted Kiev’s political orientation, dubbed Ukraine “the biggest prize” for Washington – added that his organization was working with controversial opposition figure Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her team “very, very closely.” In all, the agency bankrolled at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone.
The team’s unguarded comments represent a rare public admission of the insidious, destabilizing role played by the NED – in 1991, its then-president acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” However, leaked UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) files indicate that the US is far from the only foreign power attempting to undermine the country’s government.
In 2017, then-Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled a £100 million kitty, ostensibly for battling Kremlin disinformation. In practice, internal FCDO files leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous made clear the effort was primarily concerned with “weakening the Russian state’s influence,” particularly in its “near abroad.” As a close neighbor and arguably most important ally of Moscow, Belarus was unsurprisingly very much in the FCDO’s crosshairs.
In January of that year, Whitehall commissioned an extensive analysis of Belarusian citizens’ perceptions, motivations, and habits, in order to “identify opportunities” to “appropriately communicate” with them. In particular, London was interested in “existing or potential grievances against their national government” that could be exploited, and “channels and messages” by which the UK government could “appropriately engage with different sub-groups.”
The analysis was conducted by shadowy FCDO contractor Albany Associates, which has, in recent years, also conducted numerous information warfare operations in the Baltic states, in order to “develop greater affinity” among the region’s Russian-speaking minority for the UK, European Union and NATO. While carrying out another Whitehall-funded project targeted at Moscow, the firm closely collaborated with NED-connected French NGO IREX Europe.
An accompanying bio notes IREX has been working in Belarus since 2006 “with print, online and radio outlets,” to “improve the quality of their coverage,” and “increase their understanding of the EU and EU member states.” As part of its youth audience offering in the country, the organization was said to have founded the Warsaw-based Euroradio, along with online outlet 34mag.
Footage produced by Euroradio of violent crackdowns on protesters in Minsk was regularly aired by the Western media, including the BBC, during the strife. The outlet even specifically amplified calls from the British state broadcaster for activists to submit pictures and videos for use in news coverage. Franak Viacorka – an Atlantic Council senior fellow, and now senior advisor to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – prominently hailed its “fearless” reporting of the upheaval.
Euroradio also repeatedly crops up in documents related to the Open Information Partnership (OIP), which is the “flagship” strand within Whitehall’s multi-pronged propaganda assault on Russia. Bankrolled by the FCDO to the tune of £10 million, the organization maintains a network of 44 partners across Central and Eastern Europe, including “journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and factcheckers.” One of the collective’s primary, covert objectives is influencing “elections taking place in countries of particular interest” to the FCDO.
The classified files make clear the OIP has engaged in numerous astroturfing initiatives throughout the region, helping organizations and individuals produce slick propaganda masquerading as independent citizen journalism, which is then amplified globally via its network.
For instance, in Ukraine, the OIP worked with a 12-strong group of online ‘influencers’ “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models that reflected the complex and sensitive political environment,” in the process allowing them to “reach wider audiences with compelling content that received over four million views.”
In Russia and Central Asia, the OIP established a covert network of YouTubers, helping them create videos “promoting media integrity and democratic values.” Participants were also taught how to “make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding” and “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages,” while the consortium minimized their “risk of prosecution” and managed “project communications” to ensure the existence of the network, and indeed the OIP’s role, were kept “confidential.”
It would be entirely unsurprising if similar efforts were being undertaken in Belarus. After all, the country – along with Moldova and Ukraine – is referred to in the leaked documents as “the most vital space in the entire network,” and a “high-impact priority” for London, suggesting its 2020 election was very much “of interest” to Whitehall. If so, it would likewise be entirely unsurprising if many of the alleged so-called citizen journalists and media outlets covering the unrest in Minsk received funding and training from the OIP.
All along, too, MEMO 98, an OIP member coincidentally also funded by NED, kept a close eye on the incendiary proceedings, publishing several analyses of media coverage and social media activity related to the protests. It drew particular attention to the output of Belsat TV, a Warsaw-based channel – founded in December 2007 by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it seeks to influence political change in Belarus. MEMO 98 praised the station’s “extensive coverage of protests and related intimidation of activists.”
Strikingly, the leaked FCDO files indicate that Belsat TV received intensive, Whitehall-financed support from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the newswire’s international “charitable” wing, including 150 days’ consultancy in improving “TV output quality and audience reach.”
While the protests have largely fizzled out in recent months, and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s calls for Western leaders to recognise her as the legitimate president of Belarus continue to fall on deaf ears, there are clear signs many other media platforms in Belarus receive life-giving sponsorship from London to this day.
In March 2021, the FCDO published an update on the progress of its global ‘Media Freedom Campaign’, which revealed that, over the past year, Whitehall had allocated £950,000 in financing to Belarusian news outlets, enabling them to “remain open and maintain a functional level of equipment.”
“Without this support, they would otherwise have been forced to close by government measures,” the document stated. “The funding has saved jobs and ensured that independent media can still hold the government to account during a period of increasingly violent action by the security forces.”
Evidently, even during a global pandemic, the regime-change show must go on – and the UK government is committed to ensuring people the world over continue to receive a steady deluge of slanted agitprop from the streets of Minsk, in order to turn public opinion against the government not only of Belarus, but of Russia too.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
Facebook’s fact-checkers accused of censorship over mask-wearing in kids
The Manhattan Institute says their “fact-checking” is actually “fact-blocking”
By Ben Squires | Reclaim the Net | May 21, 2021
Facebook’s fact checkers are “fact-blockers,” according to Manhattan Institute’s John Tierney, whose article on the downsides of mask-wearing in children was flagged. Mask-wearing in children still remains a controversial topic, where there’s no scientific consensus.
In April, Facebook flagged Tierney’s article on the risks of mask-wearing in children, adding a warning label that the information in the article was “mostly false.”
In the article, published by the City Journal, Tierney argues that masks are not only ineffective, but also psychologically harmful for kids, because they harm the development of their linguistic skills, and cause psychological damage, and other effects.
“City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing,” Tierney wrote. “Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.”
A major flaw in Facebook’s appeals process is the lack of a neutral arbiter. Instead, the fact-checker, in this case Science Feedback, was allowed to be its own judge and justify why flagging the article was right.
“This exercise obviously wasn’t about accuracy. The fact-checkers were actually fact-blockers,” Tierney wrote.
Part of the reason Science Feedback flagged the article was because it cited a study by German researchers who interviewed parents about the effects of mask wearing in children. The fact-checker deemed the study flawed and self-selective.
“Any study can be faulted for methodological shortcomings, but that doesn’t mean its results should be ignored or suppressed, particularly when the findings are consistent with a large body of evidence from other researchers,” Tierney argued. He referred to another German peer-reviewed study, that concluded there is “statistically significant evidence of what they termed “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.’”
Another issue Science Feedback noted in Tierney’s article was the reference of a Swedish study that concluded that there was no significant difference in the spread of the virus in older kids studying online and unmasked kids attending in-person classes.
“This makes it seem as if mask-wearing is implemented primarily to protect kids or parents from dying or getting hospitalized. But in reality it is used to limit the spread of the disease in the population, control the epidemic, and prevent the death of individuals at risk,” Science Feedback said.
“To the extent that I can make any sense of this objection, it seems that the fact-checkers at Science Feedback believe that the unmasked schoolchildren were infecting large numbers of Swedish adults while miraculously leaving their own parents unscathed. And I’m the one guilty of ‘flawed reasoning’?” Tierney wrote.
According to Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, the censorship of such articles harms the trust the public has in science.
“Science depends on dissent, free speech, open debate. Yet in the name of science, they’re actually censoring those tools of the scientific method itself,” Ramaswamy said, in an appearance on Fox & Friends on Wednesday.
Hateful hypocrisy: In hate crime-obsessed Britain, vilifying Covid vaccine ‘refuseniks’ comes with establishment approval
By Neil Clark | RT | May 21, 2021
We hear so much in woke Britain about ‘hate crime’ and how terrible it is. But right now, we’re in the midst of an extremely nasty campaign against those who don’t wish to take a Covid vaccine and somehow that’s deemed acceptable.
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” From George Orwell’s ‘1984.’
“Selfish idiots.” “Refuseniks.” “Anti-vaxxer loonies.” “Holding the country to ransom.” “A menace to their own health and ours.” “They’re like drink drivers.” Just a few of the insults that have been hurled at Brits who, despite the biggest drug promotion campaign in our history, have decided they don’t wish to take one of the new-on-the-market Covid vaccines.
Freedom of choice? Bodily autonomy? They seem to have gone out of the window, along with all the other basic rights we have lost in Britain these past 15 months. The date is 2021, but we’re actually living in Orwell’s ‘1984,’ with its daily ‘Two Minutes Hate.’
A whole succession of obnoxious newspaper columnists, radio ‘shock jocks’ and some ‘celebrities’ have gone out of their way to be as rude as possible to those who don’t want to have a jab – and call for extreme measures to be used against them that would be more associated with a totalitarian state in mid-1930s Europe than a country which still styles itself a ‘democracy’. Or, indeed, with Pretoria, circa 1965.
Apartheid – which we all denounced when in place in South Africa – has had a 2021 public health makeover and is back in vogue, with ‘Covid vaccine passports’ replacing ‘pass laws.’
“Love the idea of covid vaccine passports for everywhere: flights, restaurants, clubs, football, gyms, shops etc. It’s time covid-denying, anti-vaxxer loonies had their bullsh*t bluff called & bar themselves from going anywhere that responsible citizens go,” tweeted media motormouth Piers Morgan.
Nick Cohen penned an article for the Observer entitled “It’s only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated.” “Rational people will ask why they should continue to accept restrictions on their freedoms because of ignorant delusions,” he wrote.
Columnist Richard Littlejohn went even further by calling for the unvaccinated to publicly declare themselves ‘Unclean.’ “If some people don’t like the idea of getting the jab, tough. I wouldn’t force them. But maybe refusniks should have to wear a bell round their necks and sport a sandwich board declaring themselves ‘Unclean’”, he wrote in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled “No jab, no job – it’s a no brainer.”
In similar vein there was Sean O’Grady, an associate editor of the supposedly ‘liberal’ Independent. His article, published earlier this week, was entitled “This is what we do about anti-vaxxers: No job. No entry. No NHS access.”
“The time has come when the hard choices are looming closer,” O’Grady opined. “If we don’t want this Covid crisis to last forever, we need some new simple, guidelines: No jab, no access to NHS healthcare; no jab, no state education for your kids. No jab, no access to pubs, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, stadiums. No jab; no entry to the UK, and much else.” I think we’ve got your point Sean. You wouldn’t make vaccination mandatory, but the unvaccinated wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, or do anything. And if they got ill? Well they’d just have to die because they shouldn’t have access to NHS healthcare. All in the name of ‘the common good’.
On the same day that O’Grady’s piece was published, we had one Sarah Vine weighing in with her penny’worth, too. “We can’t let idiots who don’t want Covid vaccines hold us hostage” was the title of her screed published in the Daily Mail. “You are stupid. Weapons grade stupid,” is how she addressed those who don’t want to take the Coronavirus vaccine. Who cares what this poisonous Vine thinks, I can hear you ask? But actually, it does matter, because her husband is none other than Michael Gove, the UK government minister currently heading a review into vaccine passports. If Gove’s wife thinks the unvaccinated are “weapons grade stupid” then it hardly gives us confidence that her husband won’t decide to discriminate against them.
It’s not just in print that the attacks on ‘refuseniks’ are coming. It’s on the airwaves, too. Iain Dale berated the unvaccinated on his LBC radio call-in show earlier this week. “The fact that people still refuse to get the vaccine for whatever reason, I don’t really care what the reason is, they are not only putting themselves at risk – they are putting other people at risk,” he said. “If you are 50, 60, 70, 80 years old and you still haven’t availed yourself of the opportunity of having the vaccine, I’m afraid you need your head read. You need your head examined. You are a selfish individual.”
Repeat after me: “I am a selfish individual. I am a selfish individual.” Gaslighting really doesn’t get any more obvious.
At least Dale didn’t suggest putting poison into ‘refuseniks’ coffee as his LBC colleague Shelagh Fogarty did. “I’d literally be in fights with these people (vaccine decliners),” she told a caller. “How do you keep seeing them at work without wanting to poison their coffee.”
Let’s not mince words: We are dealing here with the very open, plain-view demonisation of a group of people, with no consequences for those who are doing the demonisation. And all this is happening, lest we forget, in ‘woke’ times when anything you say might be seen as ‘offence’, ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘genderism’ or a form of ‘ism’ or ‘phobia.’
To see the egregious double standards, just replace the ‘unvaccinated’ with a minority racial or religious group. But the unvaccinated are fair game. Hate crime, according to the Crown Prosecution Service website, “can be used to describe a range of criminal behaviour where the perpetrator is motivated by hostility or demonstrates hostility towards the victim’s disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity.” Vaccine status is not a “protected characteristic” so it seems people can be as hateful to the unvaccinated as they like.
But that doesn’t make what’s going on right. Far from it.
If someone is vaccinated, why should they care if someone else isn’t? We never had these arguments before about the flu jab. Either the vaccine works to protect the vaccinated, or it doesn’t. Nor were those who decided not to have a flu vaccine labelled ‘anti-vaxxers.’ You can be generally pro-vaccination, but have rational ‘wait and see’ reservations about the new-on-the-market Coronavirus ones, especially if your chances of becoming ill or indeed dying from Covid are extremely low. But that nuanced position is simply not recognised in the current, coercive ‘Just take the bloody jab’ hysteria.
As for the line that it is the unvaccinated who are holding the country hostage by putting in jeopardy an end to Covid restrictions? Sarah Vine really needs to look closer to home. Literally. It was the government of which her husband is a prominent member which assured us that life would be back to normal as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated. In an interview with The Spectator in January, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he would “Cry freedom” as soon as the most vulnerable were vaccinated.
But we still don’t have freedom. The goalposts have moved from vaccinating the ‘most vulnerable’ to now vaccinating everyone. Is it any surprise there are those who wonder if this is motivated by the introduction of vaccine passports, which in turn could lead to other digitised social credit systems?
But, conveniently, it’s the vaccine ‘refuseniks’, the current subject of the daily Orwellian Two Minutes Hate, who are being blamed for continued restrictions and not the authorities. In these toxic times, ‘divide and rule’ has never been more blatant.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com.
“No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Unvaxxed”
By Dustin Broadbery | OffGuardian | May 21, 2021
The government is pressing ahead with its Vaccine Passport and plans for a two-tier society are afoot. The effrontery of those leading the charge beggar’s belief.
When they said ‘there were no plans for ‘discriminatory’ Covid vaccine passports’, they were quietly funding at least eight different vaccine passport schemes since last year.
And that’s just the half of it. We are midway through a Europe-wide feasibility study for the development of a common vaccine passport, launched by the European Commission in 2018.
They would have you believe – they were caught with their trousers down, their policies are proportionate to the emergency as it unfolds, and at all times they operate according to a system of informed consent.
But hang on a minute. Since the onset of SARS-CoV-2, they have played the most astonishing game of deception and manipulation. Cooking the books and fiddling the tills.
They have deliberately plunged society into two camps – skeptics and adherents, compliant and non-conformists.
Last year established the mood for pettifogging anyone questioning the narrative, while those refusing to comply were branded narcissists and psychopaths or denounced as ‘Covid deniers’ – the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
This government has polarised the nation on a scale never before attempted, legitimising a particular brand of prejudice and enmity not seen in Europe since the days of the Third Reich. And once the NHS App becomes your ticket to freedom on Monday, they will finally have means to weed out and punish dissidence while rewarding blind faith in authority. No matter how injurious their compliance is to society at large, the silent majority have lost their moral compass.
But it must be understood – this principle of divide and rule is as old as the hills. It was not so long ago that signs hung in the windows of establishments in Britain that read: ‘No dogs, No Irish, No blacks’. The difference today is that it won’t be the colour of your skin, your class, gender or sexual orientation that will condemn you, it will be something far more virulent – your ideology.
That this crucial point has been entirely missed by the chattering classes is astonishing. And despite the most flagrant attempts to marginalise large segments of society, identitarians, the woke brigade and other erstwhile defenders of the most marginalised remain largely unphased. Unless it is to flap their arms in the air over higher rates of vaccine hesitancy amongst ethnic minorities. But the rest of us can go to hell.
Who cares about anyone not from a protected social group, right?
In this bizarre parochial moral imperative, discrimination is only frowned upon if you’re discriminating against someone’s authorised and rubber-stamped marks of distinction, whereas discrimination, of and by itself, is entirely permissible.
These crowd-pleasers would defend their moral high ground by telling you “the unvaccinated are selfishly putting others’ lives at risk”, or that “mask refuseniks are superspreaders”. But hold on a minute. All of this is pure conjecture which, like everything else under the post-COVID sun, has been founded on speculative science and policies pulled straight from the magician’s hat.
Other than taking the government on its word, where is the actual evidence of asymptomatic transmission? Where is the evidence of mask efficacy?
In fact, can someone point me to a single risk assessment for any of these high-risk interventions? But to deny someone entry into an establishment, to prevent them from travelling, shopping, or worse, stepping foot outside of their own bolthole is no moot point. These are very real and tangible forms of discrimination, for no other reason than you personally disagree with their choices.
These people have clearly made peace with the fact that membership to society is now the exception rather than the rule. They labour under some neotribal sense of entitlement – if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like their neolithic ancestors they take refuge in the herd from an unseen predator threatening their hand to mouth existences. Positioning themselves in the upper echelons of this looming two-tier system, with others equally desperate to get their lives back and ready to submit to whatever ephemeral demands are made of them in return for one coveted free pass to re-enter polite society.
While the rest of us – who will not be spoken for, bribed or coerced – will risk excommunication from the social-balm in defence of our principles.
This loose association of the poorest and most marginalised, conscientious objectors, lockdown skeptics, and anyone with a shred of faith in their god-given sovereignty of being or bodily autonomy will wage a personal crusade of civil disobedience against the tyranny de jour, as Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King did before them. For them, braver men have endured far worse for much less.
But what the first group fails to realise is that they are doing the unofficial bidding of another group – the well-healed members of our political establishment to whom the rules do not apply. Who are protected by more exemptions than the rest of us are governed by regulations. And who, at the onset of the pandemic, were not caught with their pants down, as the general population was.
As this group spoke of herd immunity, they quietly struck a £119 million COVID advertising and propaganda deal with one of the world’s biggest marketing companies. Going on to become the UK’s biggest advertiser in 2020.
Just a day before the first lockdown, their Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) began work on the most criminal propaganda campaign in British history:
Extract from UK gov’t report “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures”, read the whole thing here.
What most card-carrying conservative voters fail to realise is that this group is the country’s biggest employer, with 17% of the British workforce employed in the public sector, whose every agency has been pointed like a cruise missile launch pad at the general population, to essentially knock our stuffing out and railroad us along a critical path, towards what is arguably a controlled destination – the complete nullification of our rights, indefinitely.
But that’s only half of it. Once you conflate unlawful policies with science that falls apart under the lightest of scrutiny to bring about the most controversial changes to Britain’s laws since the Norman Conquests, it is written in the cards that two types of citizens will be left in the wreckage: those wandering aimlessly into the trap having abandoned all reason and judgement to the trappers; and those whose contempt runs so deep they will lay their life on the line in opposition.
Now here’s the thing – there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about a two-tiered society or the discrimination of certain minority groups by the prevailing social order. And no matter what polite excuse is used to justify vaccine passports, it cannot be denied – this is the same system of caste, class, eugenics, apartheid, persecution and slavery that would inflict those toppling statues with an extreme case of dashed hopes.
But what is even more terrifying than the depths which the political class is prepared to sink, is the collusion of a silent majority – without a vested interest – whose own complicity will result in the persecution of everyone else not toeing the line.
And now, with 353,341 variants at their disposal, the government has 350,000 reasons to keep this fiasco going until hell freezes over.
Riding roughshod over the British public who, make no mistake, will continue to weather such violations, in spectacular ignorance of the fact that only 388 healthy people under the age of 60 died from COVID in 2020, the average age of death was 82, and strangely enough, the vast majority had pre-existing conditions. Equally unremarkable is the fact that between 23%-85% of all deaths attributed to COVID, died from other underlying causes.
And the fact that 2020 had a lower standardised mortality rate than every single year prior to 2009 can be found in the dictionary under ‘Ignorance is Bliss’.
You would also be forgiven for assuming that once the most vulnerable had been vaccinated (which is now), not much remains between the people and their freedom. That any further attempts to “protect us” with more turns of the screw entirely defy common reason.
Yet here we are, fighting a battle for humanity.
The trouble, therefore, with lockdown skeptics such as Peter Hitchens publicly throwing in the towel, or Lord Sumption accepting the inevitability of vaccine passports – they have raised the white flag long before the real battle has begun.
While lockdowns and social distancing represent the abstract of this ideological war, its frontlines are being waged on the physical surrender of our will and bodily autonomies. The former is arbitrary, the latter is systematised. One is going to happen with or without your consent, the latter is wholly dependent on it.
It follows that for each skeptic who surrenders their compliance, they sell the rest of us downriver. The balance swings more in favour of the New Normal. And let’s be honest, vaccine passports only work if a majority of us comply.
So while we still have the illusive veneer of democracy to hold onto, politicians remain duty-bound to at least pretend to be upholding some sort of system of informed consent. Just as we are compelled to at least give the appearance of upholding the necessary checks and balances.
Even if you accept the logic of vaccine passports, where exactly on your map does this end? Three weeks to flatten the curve, three lockdowns later and there is already talk of further lockdowns in the summer, or worse, restrictions lasting two more years.
Meanwhile, in the US, Sloppy Joe has made it clear: ‘get vaccinated or wear a mask indefinitely’.
If none of this strikes the fear of God into you, then perhaps this will:
The Pentagon have developed a microchip that will detect asymptomatic COVID. The chip would be inserted below the skin and trigger a sensor if COVID infects the body. This is despite the internet being flooded with factchekers and MSM pundits debunking what the so-called “tin foil hat brigade” has been warning of all along.
In plain sight, they hide their motives and by small degrees, we continue to surrender ancient rights and protections to an unthinkable dystopia that is now within sniffing distance.
Dustin Broadbery is based in London and is interested in social theory and particularly how a mutual society could bring about great advancements in the social fabric. You can read more of his work at TheCogent.org.
Israel bombing destroys water supplies of 20% of Gaza residents
MEMO | May 20, 2021
Israeli forces have deliberately targeted two water pipelines in the Al-Saftawi area cutting supplies to 20 per cent of the residents of Gaza City, the municipality said in a statement today.
“The Israeli air strikes on Al-Saftawi area last night damaged two main water pipelines feeding the northwestern residential areas,” the statement said.
“The Municipality of Gaza regrettably confirms that the bombing of these two water pipelines, one of which serves more than 200,000 citizens, leaves them with no water supply and aggravating the water crisis that the city suffers due to the deliberate targeting of its infrastructure,” the statement said.
The municipality of Gaza has begun inspecting the destruction and creating temporary solutions to reduce the water crisis caused by the destruction.
It went on to renew its condemnation of the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, buildings and vital facilities.
AP Writes False Claim That Climate Change Made Superstorm Sandy More Damaging
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | May 20, 2021
An Associated Press (AP) story, titled “Study: Climate change added $8 billion to Superstorm Sandy damages,” is getting wide pick-up by the mainstream media.
The story claims new research proves human-caused climate change resulted in an increase in the costs of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Data shows this is false.
There is no evidence the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy was more severe or extensive than it would have been absent the past century’s modest warming.
According to the AP story:
“During Sandy — a late fall freak combination of a hurricane and other storms that struck New York and surrounding areas — the seas were almost 4 inches (9.6 centimeters) higher because of human-caused climate change, according to a study in Tuesday’s journal Nature Communications.
The AP’s story draws on a report titled, “Economic damages from Hurricane Sandy attributable to sea-level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change by Strauss et al., published in Nature Climate Change.
This report can’t link any actual damage from Sandy to climate change, because it does not reference actual data, instead of as its authors write:
“We employ a high-resolution dynamic flood model and spatially varying error correction to simulate Sandy’s peak flood both as it occurred…”
To be clear, despite the fact that actual measurements of rising seas and the impact of flooding from Sandy were available, rather than reference actual data, the authors of the Nature report instead used a computer model to “simulate” flooding based on a number of assumptions.
Interestingly, the authors of the Nature report upon which the AP’s story is based admit there’s no actual evidence Sandy was enhanced by climate change.
They also acknowledge the best evidence indicates climate change will have little effect on tropical cyclones in the future.
“Studies have so far found no evidence that Sandy’s intensity, size, or unusual storm track were made more likely by climate change,” writes Straus, et al. “More broadly, a recent study found that future climate change effects on tropical cyclones will have only a small effect on extreme sea levels in New York Bight, relative to the effects of sea-level rise.”
The tidal gauge at the Battery in New York City confirms the rate of sea-level rise has not increased during the recent period of modest global warming.
As the figure below demonstrates, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show sea levels have been rising steadily by approximately 2.88mm (0.11 inch) per year since 1856 when the tidal gauge station was first opened; 1856 is long before “climate change” became the favorite boogeyman of science and socialists alike.
Figure 1. Sea-level data and trends in New York City since 1856, annotations added by Anthony Watts. Source
Simple math demonstrates that to reach the 4 inches of the effect claimed to be on top of the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, at the rate of 2.88mm/year they’d have to go back 35 years to 1977 to get that 4 inches of claimed sea level rise due to climate change.
Calculation: 2.88mm/yr x 35yr = 100.8mm or 3.96 inches
As I’ve pointed out in Figure 1, either ALL of the rise in sea level since 1856 is caused by climate change, or none of it is due to climate change, since there was no change in the rate of sea-level rise in the last 35 years compared to the previous 121.
You can’t scientifically claim the last 35 years were specific to climate change when they are identical to the rate of change for the previous 121 years.
There was no increase in the rate of sea-level rise before Hurricane Sandy struck 2012, and there has been no measurable increase since.
As a result, there is no evidence flooding during Sandy was enhanced by four inches due to climate change. The observed sea-level rise appears to be part of Earth’s natural process.
Computer model simulations are no replacement for actual data when such is available. The real data shows that sea levels have been rising at a small, steady unchanged pace, with no acceleration long before climate change became an issue.
Add The Wall Street Journal To The People Who Can’t Do Basic Arithmetic
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 17, 2021
Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there are plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.
But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars. For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic. Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.
Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished. I last considered this issue in a post last week titled “California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?” The answer for the California government electricity planners was a resounding “NO.” Today, the Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” (probably behind pay wall)
The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production, are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed:
[T]he combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves. . . . But renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.
To bolster the theme, we are introduced to industry executives who are shifting their investment strategies away from natural gas to catch the new renewables-plus-batteries wave. For example:
Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology. “I’m hellbent on not becoming the next Blockbuster Video, ” said Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan.
But how does one of these solar-plus-battery systems work? Or for that matter, how does a wind-plus-battery system work? Can anybody do the arithmetic here to demonstrate how much battery capacity (in both MW and MWH) it will take to balance out a given set of solar cells at some particular location so that no fossil fuel backup is needed? You will not find that in this article.
Here’s something that ought to be obvious: solar panels at any location in the northern hemisphere will produce less power in the winter than in the summer. The days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky and consequently weaker. Therefore, any system consisting solely of solar panels plus batteries, where the batteries are seeking to balance the system over the course of a year, will see the batteries drawn down continuously from September to March, and then recharged from March to September. Do batteries that can deal with such an annual cycle of seasons even exist? From the Journal piece:
And while batteries can provide stored power when other sources are down, most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages. . . . Most current storage batteries can discharge for four hours at most before needing to recharge.
OK, then, so if solar-plus-battery systems are about to displace natural gas plants, what’s the plan for winter? They won’t say. The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? That’s an arithmetic calculation that is not difficult to make. But the process of making the calculation forces you to actually propose the characteristics of your solar-plus-battery system, which then makes the costs obvious. How much excess capacity of solar panels and batteries do you plan to build to minimize the down periods? Do you need solar panel capacity of four times peak usage, or ten times? Do you need battery capacity of one week’s average usage (in GWH) or two weeks or a full month?
The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems. They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close. But no one in a position to know will make the relatively simple calculations to let us know how much this is going to cost. Even the Wall Street Journal can’t seem to grasp the math involved. And President Biden? It’s embarrassing even to ask the question.
Canada’s “private” COVID Alert app wasn’t so private after all
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 19, 2021
After by and large failing in its primary (and it was thought, the only) purpose, Canadian authorities are considering ways of repurposing their COVID Alert app to continue to collect a wider array of personal data.
The contact tracing app, which cost close to half a million dollars to develop and a further 16 million to promote, was hailed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on many occasions as a way to protect both people’s health and privacy.
But the app saw only six million downloads – about a fifth of mobile subscribers – with as few as 25,552 Canadians actually using it to enter data regarding their Covid status.
Now reports say that the government’s App Advisory Council is exploring ways to continue using it other than as a public healthcare tool – as something that would “also support Canadians and businesses in our economic, social and mental health recovery and restoration.”
Many privacy advocates have been warning ever since new apps and policies to track people and collect their data started appearing as a necessary way to protect health, that they would not just go away once the epidemic is over, or once they are proven ineffective in performing that task, as has been the case in a number of countries.
In Canada, the Council said they are consulting with Statistics Canada about what valuable data could be collected. According to reports, it has not been disclosed what type of data is collected from Canadians who have downloaded the app.
The Council stresses the critical need to create trust among individuals and businesses, i.e., persuade them that the use of the app will facilitate reopening of businesses and schools.
“The Council wants to continue to be engaged in discussions on collection of data, particularly the viability of data collection given privacy considerations,” it said, explaining that public perception of how additionally harvested data is handled is considered a risk, rather than the data collection itself.
To that end, the Council recommends “clear articulation” associated with additional data collection in order for that pitch to “outweigh the risk.”
In pushing for the app’s adoption last year, Trudeau said it was collecting data anonymously, but would also not rule out the possibility of implementing location tracking technology in an emergency. Last year, Toronto Mayor John Tory revealed this city was already doing that to track gatherings of people, thanks to phone operators providing “all the data on the pinging off their network on the weekend.
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Only a Beginning… Charles Malik’s vision of an emergent Pax Judaica
By David Miller | Tracking Power | November 12, 2026
In August 1949, three months after Israel joined the United Nations, Lebanon’s envoy in Washington sent his government a long report. Charles Malik, no firebrand, had signed the UN Charter and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His Report on the Present Situation lay largely unread until Dar An-Nahar printed it in 2002. … continue
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