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Was 2023 REALLY the second hottest year since 1884?

By Iain Davis | OffGuardian | January 14, 2024

According to the UK Met Office, 2023 was the second hottest year in the UK since 1884.

Quite obviously, this is complete nonsense. Unless they are troglodytes that never venture out in daylight, why would anyone in the UK believe such absurd drivel?

The Met Office states:

2023 is provisionally the second warmest year for the UK according to mean temperature. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C and ahead of 2014’s 9.88°C.

Right, it’s “provisional” drivel.

The UK summer of 2023—where I live—was a thoroughly miserable affair. We had a few weeks of decent sunshine in the spring and a couple of hot weeks of Indian summer. That was it!

The rest of it was cold, wet and comprehensively devoid of anything we might traditionally call “summer.” The winter preceding and following it wasn’t particularly cold, but nor was it unusually warm.

I’m knocking on a bit and can remember about 50 years of my life. I know, for a fact, that I have lived through many warmer years. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I haven’t completely taken leave of my senses and I still have a functioning memory. No way am I unquestioningly buying the Met Office’s silly claim.

Neither do I believe any of the legacy media reports trying to convince me that the Met Office’s preposterous assertion is evidence of an alleged climate crisis. It simply isn’t true, so it is not “evidence” of anything at all. Although it does suggest deception.

The Met Office—obviously unreliably—tells us “UK mean temperatures have been shifting over the decades as a result of human-induced climate change. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C.”

For a start, “human induced climate change,” or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), is a questionable and unproven scientific theory, not scientific fact. This too is just another claim from the Met Office which it wrongly asserts as fact.

The Met Office also tells us that “sunshine was near-average for much of the UK.” If we have got this right, the Met Office is claiming that, with average hours of UK sunshine in 2023—which also seems pretty dubious to me—somehow, since 1884, the only year that has been “hotter” was 2022. Which doesn’t ring true either.

What’s going on?

What does the Met Office mean—pardon the pun—by “mean temperature”? It reports that its 2023 alleged “provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C” had been obtained via the HadUK-Grid data set. The Met Office also cites its 2023 rapid attribution study. It is from this that we can—eventually—glean how the “UK mean temperature” is calculated by the Met Office.

In its rapid attribution study, the Met Office states:

Observed values of the UK annual mean temperature are obtained from the HadUK-Grid dataset v1.2.0.0. The time series spans 1884 – 2023, with the 2023 values being provisional as of 2nd January 2024.

“Observed,” that’s what we want to hear. So what observations are reported in the HadUK-Grid dataset? The Met Office claims:

HadUK-Grid is a collection of gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations.

If we look at the HadUK-Grid methodology, the Met Office adds:

The gridded data sets are based on the archive of UK weather observations held at the Met Office.

So far so good. The HadUK-Grid reportedly records real data, such as sunshine hours, rainfall and even temperature. We live in hope. Unfortunately, there are some caveats. The Met Office continues:

The methods used to generate the daily grids are described in more detail in [this] report.

OK. So beyond just recording real-world data, what are the “methods” outlined in said report?

[. . .] the Met Office climate data archive [. . .] contains a simplified version of the raw observations generated according to well-defined rules. [. . .] Mean temperature [. . .] is the average of the maximum and minimum temperatures.

At last we have a definition of the “mean temperature” the Met Office claims to be the second highest since 1884. Apparently, it is “generated according to well-defined rules.”

In Met Office speak “mean temperature” isn’t the actual arithmetic mean of daily temperatures but rather the “average” of minimum and maximum temperatures recorded between 09:00 and 21:00 on any given day. Begging the question how are the minimum and maximum UK temperatures “observed”?

Although the data ha[s] undergone some quality checking, the extent and effectiveness of this has changed through time since the 1960’s. [. . .] NCIC climate data analysis software was again used to create the gridded data. [. . .] The station data were normalised with respect to the monthly 1km x 1km gridded 1961-1990 climate normals described by Perry and Hollis (2005a).

So the minimum and maximum allegedly “observed” 2023 “mean UK temperature” wasn’t actually observed at all. It was calculated from normalised data using computers running software based upon the “climate normals” defined in Perry and Hollis (2005).

The related paper considered how to calculate long term averages (LTAs) and suggested a methodology by which “mean” temperatures could be calculated:

For air temperature, 1490 stations reported at some point between 1961 and 2000 but only an average of 560 of these were open at any one time. This gives an array which is 38% complete. [. . .] [T]he solution is to fill in the gaps using an appropriate estimation technique. [. . .] Once the gaps in the array have been filled, long term averages for the periods 1961-1990, 1971-2000 and 1991-2000 can be calculated for each station from the complete array. [. . .] The regression model parameters provide an estimation of [. . .] the UK climate, explaining between 29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.

Potentially, up to 62% of the data forming the Met Office’s “Mean UK temperature” is “generated” by “fill[ing] in the gaps.” This is based upon an “estimation technique” which supposedly explains between “29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.” This doesn’t mean that the estimated fill-ins are inaccurate but they cannot be called “observations” either.

We seem to be moving further away from empirical science. Surely the Met Office isn’t claiming that it knows what the average UK “provisional” mean temperature was in 2023 based upon such limited observations? With regard to how it interprets the HadUK-Grid dataset the Met Office states:

The HadUK-Grid dataset is produced on a 1km x 1km grid resolution on the Ordnance Survey’s National Grid. To facilitate comparison of the observational dataset with the UKCP18 climate projections [. . .]. All the gridded datasets use the same grid projection. The re-gridding is conducted through averaging of all 1km grid points that fall within each of the coarser resolution grid cells.

Whoa there! We already know that the “observational dataset” is created by “fill[ing] in the gaps”—around a 60% gap apparently—with computer modelled estimates. Now we are told some sort of “re-gridding” is necessary to “facilitate comparison” with UKCP18 climate projections. Why is that necessary?

The UK Met Office adds:

Area averages are also produced based on averaging the 1km grid [data] across a set of geographical regions to provide spatial statistics for country, administrative regions and river basins. The details of these areas can be found in the UKCP18 guidance notes.

Now we’ve got “spacial statistics,” instead of empirical measurements, based upon “area averages” that facilitate, for some unknown reason, comparison with “UKCP18 climate projections.” OK, so how are the “area averages” constructed in accordance with the UKCP18 guidance notes:

Before using [UKCP18 guidance notes], it is important to understand the assumptions made, the caveats and limitations and the appropriate use of the results.

Assumptions made, caveats and limitations! What bloody assumptions, caveats and limitations? Just measure the temperature and calculate some sort of meaningful average for crying out loud!

Let’s look at the caveats and limitations:

Our understanding and ability to simulate the climate is advancing all the time but our climate models are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate and there are still limitations in our ability to project 21st century weather and climate.

Why are the Met Office “generating” temperature datasets to “facilitate comparison” with climate models if those models “are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate.” Surely the models should be based upon the empirically observed and measured features of the “real climate,” as opposed to creating “area averages” containing “spacial statistics” to fit in with the models?

Almost unbelievably, this is evidently what the UK Met Office is doing:

The relative probabilities indicate how strongly the evidence from models and observations, taken together in our methodology, support alternative future climate outcomes. [. . .] The probabilities are conditioned on methodological choices and expert judgement. The results may change if a different methodology is used.

In essence, the Met Office uses a tortuous and unnecessarily convoluted methodology to make up the bulk of its UK “temperature” data. While the Met Office claims that the provisional UK mean temperature was for 2023 was 9.97°C it also states that its results might change “if a different methodology” was used.

What’s more, the data it uses is normalised, based upon a wide gamut of climate assumptions, in order to fit in with its own climate models. Again, it admits its so-called observations, of things like mean temperature, are “taken together in [its] methodology” expressly in order to “simulate the climate.”

Most of these modelling shenanigans are utterly superfluous if your objective is to calculate the arithmetic mean annual UK temperature. Of course anomalies, such as heat islands, need to be normalised in the data but the rest of the Met Office’s “methodology,” which doesn’t even attempt to calculate an arithmetic mean temperature anyway, is about as far removed from empirical science as it is possible to venture.

Inevitably, it produces completely meaningless pap. The problem with such allegedly “scientific” rubbish is that, rather than being laughed off, it is then taken seriously by millions—thanks the unquestioning propaganda reports of the legacy media—and used to advance policy agendas, such as Net Zero.

Apart from the fact that it is blatantly obvious, to anyone who has lived in the UK from more that a couple of decades, that 2023 was not a warm year, there are other notable reasons not to automatically trust the Met Office’s makey-uppy “climate science.” Its entire claim is reliant upon the HadUK-Grid dataset which is a project funded by the UK government. As is the Met Office itself.

Apparently, the UK government is irreversibly committed to UN Sustainable Development and the associated UK Net Zero policies. The Met Office’s alleged scientific “observations” suffer from an enormous financial conflict of interest. Providing any evidence that contradicts the notion of “unprecedented global warming” couldn’t be further removed from the Met Office’s and the UK government’s own declared interests.

There is absolutely no reason to believe any of it. As “science” goes, it’s complete junk. I’ve read comics with more credibility that the Met Office’s claim that 2023 was the second warmest year in the UK since 1884.

Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it.

January 15, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

55 U.S. Doctors Behind Psychiatric Diagnosis Manual Took $14M From Drug Companies

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 11, 2024

Fifty-five of the U.S. doctors who helped decide what diagnoses and treatments were included in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) main diagnostic manual received more than $14 million in undisclosed industry funding, a special report in The BMJ revealed.

According to The BMJ :

“The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association standardizes symptom criteria and codifies psychiatric disorders. This manual plays a central role in the approval of new psychiatric drugs and the extension of patent exclusivity, and it can influence payers and mental health professionals who seek third party reimbursements.”

The manual, now in its fifth edition, DSM-5-TR, is often referred to as the “bible” of psychiatric disorders. It was released in 2002 and includes changes made since the APA first published the manual in 2013.

The authors of The BMJ report wrote that “industry influence over the development of this diagnostic guideline can have a profound effect on public health (eg, by broadening diagnostic categories and influencing what drugs will be prescribed and covered by insurance). It is thus critical that authors of this psychiatric taxonomy should be free of industry ties.”

Research consistently shows that conflicts of interest lead to “pro-industry thinking and conclusions,” the authors of the report said.

The BMJ found that the doctors who received the most money — often in the form of food, beverages, travel and consulting reimbursements — were those working in diagnostic areas “where drug interventions are often the standard treatment, such as depressive disorders, neurocognitive disorders, and drug induced movement disorders.”

The study’s lead investigator, Lisa Cosgrove, Ph.D., a professor and clinical psychologist in the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, told Medscape Medical News, the study’s intent was “not to point fingers at the APA or individual members of the APA but rather to provide hopefully a small piece of research data that would help the APA look at the larger systemic issue of conflicts of interest.”

Justine Tanguay, a lawyer with Children’s Health Defense and research director for the organization’s Reform Pharma initiative, praised the researchers for bringing public awareness to the issue.

Tanguay told The Defender :

“It’s an outrageous concept to think that if a doctor, scientist or public health official is paid or funded by Big Pharma that he or she can present or recommend an independent viewpoint.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that even the perception of a conflict of interest undermines the integrity of medicine.”

The Reform Pharma campaign is working “to systematically remove Big Pharma corruption and to restore the healthcare system” — which is needed now more than ever because “such conflicts of interest … have become the norm,” Tanguay said.

A problem for over a decade

Cosgrove — who previously served as a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University — has for over a decade studied conflicts of interest among contributors to the APA’s manual.

The high percentage of doctors with industry ties reported by the latest BMJ study, published Wednesday, mirrors the findings reported in her previous work.

“What we also see that’s consistent with our 2016 study and 2012 study is the panels for which the members had the most financial ties to industry were those for which pharmaceutical interventions are the first line of therapy,” Cosgrove said.

After duplicate names had been removed, The BMJ identified 168 individuals who served as either panel or task force members of the DSM-5-TR. Of those, 92 met the inclusion criteria of being a physician based in the U.S. and therefore could be included in Open Payments, a publicly accessible database.

Eighty-six of the doctors were panel members for the DSM-5-TR. The other six were task force members who also had decision-making powers.

Of these 92 individuals, 55 (60%) received payments from industry. The authors used OpenPayments to look at the funding the 92 doctors received from 2016 to 2019 — the years just before and during the development of the DSM-5-TR.

The amounts ranged from just under $14 per doctor to $2.7 million per doctor. Collectively, the doctors received more than $14.2 million.

Cosgrove and her co-authors found it particularly unethical that more than one-third of the doctors received money as “compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program.”

In other words, these individuals were hired by drug companies as “key opinion leaders” to speak at pro-industry events. Cosgrove and her co-authors said:

“Being on a speakers bureau or being a key opinion leader is widely recognized as an egregious financial conflict of interest because the role of the key opinion leader is essentially a marketing one; the talks given are usually presented at educational events sponsored by industry.”

Dr. Bernard Lo, professor emeritus of medicine and director emeritus of the Program in Medical Ethics at the University of California, San Francisco, agreed. He told Medscape that key opinion leaders are hired by drug companies to give talks, meaning they are used by the industry as “basically salespeople trying to increase sales of a product.

Full public disclosure needed

Before the development of the DSM-5, the APA claimed the organization’s goal was to develop a “transparent process of development for the DSM, and … an unbiased, evidence-based DSM, free from any conflicts of interest.”

An APA spokesperson told Medscape that DSM-5-TR decision-makers were not allowed to participate if the organization was made aware they had received more than $5,000 in industry payments and that all who worked on the text revision were required to disclose all sources of income prior to their participation.

“The APA implemented and enforced a rigorous process for DSM-5-TR that required transparency by all contributors of their personal and professional interests, followed by an independent review to ensure that personal and professional interests did not bias any results,” the spokesperson said.

The study’s findings, however, contradicted that claim by the APA. And the APA did not publicly disclose industry ties for the latest edition of the manual, according to the study authors.

The APA also did not publicly disclose minutes of the DSM meetings, summaries of changes proposed by the panel and task force members or reasons for those changes.

Public disclosure of all industry funding is critical, according to Lo.

“Part of the report should be, ‘Here are the conflicts of interest reported by the members of the panel’ … Failure to do that in the DSM-5-TR is unacceptable from an ethical and transparency point of view,” Lo said.

The APA’s failure to adequately address conflicts of interest doesn’t promote transparency or public trust in the diagnostic criteria published in the DSM-5-TR, he said.

Tanguay agreed. “In order to have trust in medicine, we need to have transparency, whether it covers medical research, scientific publications or public health policy.”

Those with industry ties should be barred

Cosgrove recommended the APA follow the 2011 report, “Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust,” produced by the Institute of Medicine (IOM, now called the National Academy of Medicine). The report is an updated and streamlined version of a 2009 conflicts of interest guideline co-authored by Lo.

“The IOM recommends that the whole guideline development group be free of industry ties,” Cosgrove said. “At a minimum, the chair … and the majority of folks should not have ties to industry.”

Tanguay went further by saying scientists with industry ties should be barred from publication because such ties distort the scientific literature.

Dr. Giovanni A. Fava — a highly regarded researcher and clinician — in 2009 warned, “The increasing influence of the pharmaceutical industry on psychiatric research and practice is leading to an intellectual and clinical crisis.”

While some might argue that banning all those with industry ties would shrink the expert pool that develops the DSM and other guidelines, Cosgrove said that’s not the case.

“There are hundreds of experts in all medical disciplines that do not have industry ties,” she said. “The ‘most experts have industry ties’ is a spurious and unsupported argument.”

The APA should especially ban those who received industry money for serving as key opinion leaders, Lo said.

The APA did not immediately respond to The Defender’s request for comment.

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

FBI Director Says Public-Private Sector Partnerships Are Important for Guarding Against “Misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 14, 2024

During an interview with CNBC, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray lauded his agency’s partnerships with the private sector to target “misinformation” and “disinformation,” despite growing scrutiny over the way these types of partnerships have been used to censor the speech of Americans.

Wray complained that social media has escalated misinformation and disinformation and that AI is “taking it to the next level.” He then lauded private sector partnerships as a way to defend against the proliferation of AI misinformation and disinformation.

“I come back to the importance of partnerships to guard against it,” Wray said. “Not just our partnerships, but there’s an important role for the private sector. For example, AI companies, which many of which are very actively engaged in this fight to help detect deepfakes. You know, in some ways, AI is quite good at detecting AI, and so seeing the private sector invest its own time and money into trying to help detect some of the things that you’re describing I think is an important piece of it. Obviously, government partners, research community, etc., is another piece of it.”

After praising these private sector partnerships that target misinformation and disinformation, Wray attempted to downplay censorship concerns and insisted that these efforts only target foreign actors.

“To be clear, our role at the FBI is focused on the role of the foreign actors, as in the source of the information, not the content,” Wray said. “We’re not the truth police. We don’t aspire to be.”

While Wray asserted that these efforts target foreign actors, lawmakers have previously challenged this assertion and pointed to a federal court ruling that stated the FBI had flagged domestic speech as potential misinformation. This federal court ruling is part of a legal case that’s headed to the Supreme Court and alleges several federal agencies, including the FBI, violated the First Amendment by pressuring Big Tech companies to censor the speech of Americans.

Numerous reports have also detailed how the FBI has flagged the speech of Americans to Big Tech companies for censorship.

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

ORDER OUT OF CHAOS | VOL. 1: THE B-THING

MouthyBuddha | May 25, 2022

Celia Farber | The Truth Barrier | January 11, 2024

I knew parts of this. Bits. I’d heard of an “art project.”

But the way this film is made is so clear, it feels almost disorienting.

You brain only produces: “Why don’t we all know this? All of this?”

I found it at an X account with 273 followers. I always go looking where people say no blueberries grow.

Am I wrong? Did all of you know all of this? Not the “bits” we all knew but this. (Sum total of film.)

A few things I want to stress: The shot where the artist group, all men, are wearing string bikinis. Monarch Monarch Monarch. Everything is a disordering of the eye’s expectations shrouded in hypnosis that commands you not to find it strange, if you wish to be cool and included.

All the layers of humiliation, degradation, and especially complicity.

This actually made me really angry.

Where are they today?

The two members in the two YT videos below have different accents. The one at the bottom does seem to have an Austrian accent. The one droning on in the sand, unsure.

And as people have noted, he can’t draw. But he’s an “artist.”

Here’s a link to the film on YouTube.

**********

January 14, 2024 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

New Zealand’s “Warming” Is Based On Temperature Adjustments & Artificial Airport Heat Islands

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 13, 2024

Graeme Hook left this comment yesterday:

image

Unfortunately Wayback does not have a copy of the earlier Berkeley Earth graph; if anybody can track it down, give me a shout.

However what I have found is just as interesting.

Let’s start with the current Berkeley Earth graph for New Zealand:

image

https://berkeleyearth.org/temperature-region/new-zealand

Since the 1880s, temperatures have risen by about 1C, up to 2020. Most of this increase has occurred since the 1950s.

This is more or less in line with the GISS chart of adjusted temperature data for Auckland Int Airport – (ignore the 2023 spike):

image

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v4.cgi?id=NZM00093110&ds=15&dt=1

However the unadjusted data tells a completely different story; as is often the case, GISS have cooled the past, by about half a degree. In particular, there appears to have been little increase since the 1950, prior to last year:

image

Far from cooling the past at Auckland, GISS should be doing the opposite.

There are, apparently, two weather stations at Auckland Int Airport. This is the location of the one that GISS quote:

image

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/homr/#ncdcstnid=30095746&tab=LOCATIONS

It’s on top of a roof of an airport building, in the middle of the airport complex. But a closer look shows it is just yards from a number of air conditioning vents:

image

The other station is no better, about 20m from the tarmac:

image

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/homr/#ncdcstnid=30151541&tab=LOCATIONS

What is absolutely certain is that the airport would have looked much different in the 1950s. It started life in 1928 as a dairy field with three Gypsy Moths.

In 1965, when the first commercial flight took off, a DC8 to Sydney, it looked like this:

image

Over the years, of course, the airport has been massively expanded, and now handles 16 million passengers a year, now looking like this:

image

The so-called New Zealand temperature record, which claims to show significant warming since the 19thC, is based on heavily adjusted data and artificial,warming at airports. It has no basis at all in reality.

January 13, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

COURT DECISION FORCES CDC TO RELEASE V-SAFE ‘FREE-TEXT’ DATA

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | January 11, 2024

The Attorneys that represent ICAN have won a huge case for transparency around COVID vaccine injuries.

A Texas judge has ruled that CDC must produce 7.8 million “free-text field entries” in the V-safe reporting app, which they had previously omitted from a production they were supposed to provide ICAN back in September of 2022. These entries are highly significant because they represent accounts of the victims injuries in their own words, rather than simply checking a box.

The CDC must provide 390,000 entries a month, starting Feb 15th, and every month thereafter for the entire year. The productions will be available to download or view at http://www.icandecide.org/vsafe.

January 13, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

UK Covid Vaccine Investigation ‘Unexpectedly’ Postponed

BY IGOR CHUDOV | JANUARY 10, 2024

The long-awaited “Covid vaccine inquiry” has been postponed for mysterious reasons.

The hearings have been postponed to occur ‘after the general election.’

The Covid inquiry will not start hearing evidence about the development of vaccines and other drugs this summer, as originally planned. Witness hearings will be postponed until a later date, likely to be after the next general election.

Interestingly, it took roughly eleven months to develop, test, and approve COVID-19 vaccines. The UK’s own AstraZeneca vaccine development started in February 2020, and the MHRA approved it in December 2020. However, it will take longer than that even to begin the UK Covid vaccine investigation.

When there is a will, there is a way. Here, we are witnessing the opposite: the UK’s powers-to-be want to postpone the COVID vaccine investigation for as long as possible and, most importantly for them, until after the next election.

The investigation into vaccines was meant to look in detail at the rollout of jabs across the UK, including the setting up of the UK vaccines taskforce and the role of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.

It will also cover concerns around vaccine safety, including any suggested link between the jabs and heart issues, and whether reforms are needed to the scheme which is meant to pay out if an individual’s health is damaged after taking the jabs.

No timing has been given for the postponed hearings, with further details promised “in the next few weeks”.

It is thought the decision is likely to push that part of the inquiry until after the next general election, which has to take place before 28 January 2025.

Why the connection to the ‘general election’? Is that related to the incumbents’ desire to keep their elected positions, which could be threatened by the ‘vaccine inquiry’? Are there hopes that COVID vaccine skeptics like Andrew Bridgen will lose their districts?

Are they hoping the general public will forget “Covid vaccines” by then?

Will there ever be an honest official “Covid inquiry”?

January 12, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , | Leave a comment

Corruption, disinformation, warnings about assassinations: What to make of the latest Biden Ukraine links claims

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | January 12, 2024

At first it feels like a blast from the past but it’s really about the present and future: Journalist Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos has released a long interview with former Ukrainian MP Andrey Derkach. In which Derkach makes allegations about corruption in the US and Ukraine. In particular about the American President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

With regard to graft, while the various allegations (by no means only Derkach’s) and ongoing investigations are complex, in essence several simple questions are at stake: Did the current president’s son, Hunter Biden, sell his services as a Washington influence-peddler by using the “brand” (as one witness, Devon Archer, has put it) of his father’s connections (as then vice-president under Barack Obama)? And, potentially even more disturbingly, did the elder Biden himself profit from such influence-peddling? Finally, most disconcerting of all, did the current president use his leverage as Obama’s point-man on Ukraine to shield his son and, possibly, himself from investigations in Ukraine? Including by bringing down Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who got too close to the truth about Hunter Biden’s shady role in the Ukrainian Burisma gas company?

In sum, did the highest-ranking American official, charged with overseeing (among other things) Kiev’s putative “fight against corruption,” make things even worse by injecting a strong dose of US-establishment corruption into Washington’s newest client state? And, if so, could that two-sided entanglement have left a legacy, including of compromising actions, that has been influencing America’s reckless and failing (even on its own misconceived terms) proxy war policy in Ukraine?

Full disclosure: I happen to believe that the answer to all these questions is yes. Which is depressing, since it means that decisions, costing many human lives and making our shared global politics very dangerous, have been influenced by corrupt motives reminiscent of the world of organized crime.

But we do not know, yet. It is certain that Hunter Biden, a textbook failed-son and pampered heir, used his dad’s name to cash in, to the tune of (at the very east) $7.5 million. That much even the pro-Biden Washington Post had to admit (while revealing its bias with the packaging of the story, which accuses Republicans of “hyping” the numbers). As to whether Joe Biden himself also got a share and how all of this affected his policy on Ukraine – compelling proof, as opposed to plausible conjecture, is not available. At least at this point. But the Republicans, for their own selfish yet, politically, perfectly normal reasons, are digging for it through an impeachment inquiry into the current president’s record.

This is the background against which Derkach has now spoken up. Make no mistake: There will be attempts to dismiss all of this as – yes, you guessed it – the beginning of BIG BAD RUSSIAN MEDDLING in the 2024 presidential elections. In fact, they have already started. Frankly, yawn: Let’s not be distracted.

Such attempts will inevitably seek to make use of Mangiante Papadopoulos’ and Derkach’s own records. Mangiante Papadopoulos is a journalist and the wife of the former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. As such (though, to be precise, still his girlfriend at the time), she was questioned by the FBI in 2017, during the hot phase of the neo-McCarthyite campaign commonly known under the misleading label “Russiagate.”

Misleading because it was not really about Russia, but about the American Democrats’ foul-play attempt to undermine the reality of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. (which was really down to Trump’s gifts as a populist and the Democrats’ arrogant decision to try and ram down the country’s throat the unelectably unappealing and politically terrifying candidacy of Hillary Clinton.)

“Russiagate” was, in reality, Russia Rage, a mix of Centrist and Liberal conspiracy theory-mongering and mass hysteria. The true scandal was that a sizable part of the US political and media establishment further ruined what was left of any working relationship with Russia, and undermined the American public’s faith in a legitimate election result. (No, Trump was not the first one to do so in 2020/21: The roots of the January 6 riot in Washington are deeply bipartisan.)

Derkach came to international attention a few years later, with respect to Trump’s successor. A Russian-Ukrainian businessman and politician (who is open about receiving elite Russian intelligence training in the early 1990s), American and Ukrainian officials have accused him of playing an important role in “meddling” in the election of 2020, specifically by helping undermine Biden’s reputation. Derkach released recordings of what he claimed were conversations between then-vice-president Biden and then-Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko that, critics argued, pointed to illicit dealings. (Ironically enough, for a while these revelations were welcomed by the team of Poroshenko’s successor Vladimir Zelensky because they embarrassed his opponent.)

Derkach has also been accused of – and in Ukraine formally charged with – working for Russian intelligence and with treason. No wonder he fled the country in 2022 and now lives in exile in Belarus. The 56-year-old is, in sum, a very ambiguous figure whose statements should be treated with caution.

Yet they should not be dismissed wholesale. Simply branding anything inconvenient to the American Democrats and their media clique as “information warfare” or “Russian meddling” is how “Russiagate” has done so much damage. That was, after all, the manner in which the authentic and very relevant news about the compromising data on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was suppressed before his father’s election. If the evidence pointing to corruption (and revolting personal depravity) had been allowed to be subjected to ordinary scrutiny and public debate – as it certainly would have been if it had concerned a member of the Trump family – the chances of Biden senior would have suffered.

Derkach is a complicated source; Mangiante Papadopoulos has also been accused of promoting Russia’s interests. (But then, frankly, who hasn’t?) But the question among adult observers is not who may be interested in a given piece of information seeing the light of day. Because here’s a little secret: As long as the information is of any political relevance at all, there’s always someone interested (as, by the way, Derkach openly admits in the interview, as far as his case is concerned). And here’s another one: That doesn’t mean that a given piece of information is untrue (“disinformation,” as we have been trained to say now). And finally: Remember, interests are involved not only in revealing, but also in hiding facts. Or, indeed, in pooh-poohing inconvenient revelations as nothing but propaganda.

So, what to make of what Derkach has had to say now? In the interview, which is almost an hour long, he makes many detailed statements, involving a large number of specified persons, especially in Ukraine. Let’s try to focus on key aspects and look at three of his most striking allegations one by one.

First, Derkach states that the Ukrainian authorities started going after him in earnest, including by extra-legal and life-threatening means, when (or because?) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told them to resolve that Derkach problem. The interview is somewhat ambiguous: Is Derkach saying that Blinken himself gave, in essence, an order to use criminal methods or that Blinken – Henry II/Thomas Becket-style – “merely” called for someone to somehow rid his president of that turbulent Ukrainian?

Either way, it would have been a highly incriminating and tawdry act on Blinken’s part. But it would be naive to consider the current Secretary of State incapable of stooping so low. We are, after all, talking about the man who, during Biden’s election campaign, played a devious behind-the-scenes role in organizing the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Back then, by mobilizing the American intelligence community to, once again, serve party-political purposes, Blinken helped Biden win and, in the long term, further shredded what’s left of American establishment credibility. (Not to mention that, currently, Blinken is displaying his absolute legal nihilism in stunning fashion by shielding Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.)

Secondly, Derkach also maintains that former Ukrainian chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who lost his job for going after a Biden (or was it even two of them?), is in danger of assassination and should receive help to leave Ukraine. What makes this claim sound improbable is the fact that Shokin is still alive. What makes it plausible is the fact that there has already been at least one attempt on his life, although that took place years ago when he was still in office: As a matter of fact, for Shokin, losing his job may have made losing his life less likely.

Third, Derkach claims that, inside Ukraine, a large bribe linked to the fallout from the Burisma affair has been turned into funding for the Ukrainian intelligence services, in particular for assassinations in Russia and the attack on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Can he prove this specific connection, namely that precisely that dirty money was used for this dark purpose? Maybe, maybe not. Yet there is no doubt that Ukraine’s military intelligence service in particular has organized assassinations. Indeed, some Western media have quite openly sung its praises for this, such as The Economist.

As regards Nord Stream, after an initial period of plainly silly Western disinformation absurdly trying to point the finger at Russia (anyone remember that?), it is now fashionable to blame it all on Ukraine, as if the latter could have acted without NATO permission and assistance. So, here as well Derkach gets a grade of ‘at least partly true’; and his allegation about how some of these activities have been financed cannot be dismissed as implausible either.

Let’s return, however, to the biggest issue at stake here: the Bidens. And let’s note a simple but generally overlooked fact: They are amazingly good at lowering expectations. They and their media allies are engaged in an ongoing, largely successful operation of shifting US baselines even farther down: In a normal country, there simply should not be an endless, partisan struggle over whether and how much money exactly went to the current president personally. In a normal country, the fact that, at the very least, Joe Biden has long tolerated, facilitated (to one extent or the other) and, finally, defended and shielded the screamingly unethical behavior of his son, should be more than enough to have forced him to resign.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

January 12, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

US quietly sent American Air Force unit to aid Israel in Gaza genocide

MEMO | January 12, 2024

The US is quietly providing intelligence to Israel for targeting purposes in Gaza, deploying US Air Force “intelligence engagement officers on the ground,” according to a deployment order obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and published at the Intercept.

While the administration of President Joe Biden has publicly insisted US forces are not directly aiding Israel’s military campaign in Gaza beyond the rescue of prisoners of war, the newly uncovered deployment orders suggest American personnel are secretly advising on offensive target selection and intelligence gathering.

Freedom of Information Act materials show the US Air Force dispatched officers specialising in “targeting intelligence” to Israel in late November as concerns that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza started to grow. The revelation contradicts assurances that US advisers are solely focused on hostage recovery.

“I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said Biden three days after the Hamas attack.

But several weeks later, on 21 November, the US Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel, the Intercept reported.

Experts say the team would likely provide satellite imagery and analysis directly used for Israeli bombing of suspected Hamas sites in densely populated Gaza. This sensitive targeting support allows the US to coordinate with Israel’s military while avoiding public scrutiny.

The deployment order was issued by the Pentagon’s air component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central (for Central Command). The document provides deployment instructions to airmen sent to the country, including “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO)” — personnel who specialise in sharing sensitive intelligence with partner militaries.

Rights advocates argue that by bolstering Israeli capabilities, Washington makes itself complicit in potential war crimes including genocide. US administration statements celebrate supporting Israel’s “self-defence” but conceal specifics of weapons supplied to the occupation state and intelligence provided to target Palestinians.

“As a general matter, US officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group, told the Intercept.

January 12, 2024 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Former Ukrainian chief prosecutor ‘fired’ for Biden could be assassinated – ex-MP

Viktor Shokin has dirt on the US president’s family and Kiev is using him as a bargaining chip, Andrey Derkach has claimed

Viktor Shokin in February 2015, after his appointment as Prosecutor General. © Vladimir Shtanko / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
RT | January 11, 2024

The former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was famously sacked by then-President Pyotr Poroshenko under pressure from US President Joe Biden, is being used by the current government in Kiev as a bargaining chip with Washington, controversial former MP Andrey Derkach has claimed in an interview.

Biden had Poroshenko sack Shokin in 2016, when he was vice president in the Obama administration, threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan unless his demands were met. The now-incumbent US president claimed that the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, but also bragged about getting rid of the man. Critics of Biden have alleged that he used his office to derail an investigation into the gas firm Burisma, which infamously retained his son Hunter on a well-paid board position during his father’s tenure as Obama’s VP.

Derkach made his explosive claims in an interview recorded in Minsk, Belarus, with Italian-US journalist Simona Mangiante, published on Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter).

“Shokin is now a hostage on Ukrainian territory. As far as I know, he is not allowed to leave Ukraine. He is under the total control of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),” he claimed.

President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the US side, and President Vladimir Zelensky and his chief-of-staff Andrey Yermak on the Ukrainian side, are interested in information possessed by Shokin, according to Derkach.

He claimed that last October Shokin had contacts with two attorneys “working with the US Congress,” Jake Greenberg and Clark Abourisk. The SBU “recorded those conversations, where Shokin told the Congress about real criminal acts of Blinken and Biden, and about the corruption of the Biden family.”

The former official said he’d been tipped off about the surveillance by sources inside the SBU. Derkach is an intelligence officer by background and served in the Ukrainian agency before being elected to parliament.

He claimed that his sources had told him that “the question of liquidating Mr Shokin on the territory of Ukraine is under consideration.” He urged the US Congress to ensure the man’s safety and extraction from his home country.

Derkach spoke in Russian throughout the hour-long interview and touched on a number of sensitive aspects of US-Ukraine relations, including those he’d been personally involved in.

He was the official that published in 2020 what he claimed to be recordings of conversations that Biden and Poroshenko had in 2015-2016. In the interview this week he claimed that at the time he was acting with the blessing of Zelensky’s office, which was seeking to discredit the former president.

Washington branded Derkach a Russian agent in 2022 and indicted him for allegedly interfering in the 2020 US presidential elections. Last year, Ukraine accused him of treason, also claiming he was working for Moscow. Zelensky stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship in January 2023.

Derkach has denied the accusations and claims in the interview that the Ukrainian charges against him were brought after Kiev failed to dispose of him by other means, on a direct request from Antony Blinken.

January 11, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , | Leave a comment

‘I Don’t Recall’: Fauci Unable to Answer Key Questions in Pandemic Probe

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 9, 2024

On the first day of a two-day closed-door interview before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), frequently evaded questions about gain-of-function research and the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), in a statement following Monday’s interview, said, “Dr. Fauci’s testimony today uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems” and that Fauci “had no idea what was happening under his own jurisdiction at NIAID.”

According to The Hill, Fauci offered “his expertise on preparing for potential outbreaks in the future.” But according to The Washington Times, he “couldn’t remember many details about his advocacy of lockdowns, his flip-flopping on mask mandates and his decision to allow government funding of gain-of-function research in China that might have led to the pandemic.”

Fauci “claimed he ‘did not recall’ pertinent COVID-19 information or conversations more than 100 times,” and “profusely defended his previous congressional testimony where he stated the National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” according to the subcommittee statement.

Fauci also “repeatedly played semantics with the definition of gain-of-function in an attempt to avoid conceding that NIH funded potentially dangerous research in China,” the subcommittee stated.

Responding to Monday’s testimony, Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a frequent critic of gain-of-function research, told The Defender :

“Fauci repeatedly and flagrantly violated U.S. government policies implemented to protect the public from lab-generated pandemics. He lied — brazenly — to Congress about his policy violations in three Senate hearings in 2021-2022. He lied — brazenly — to Congress about his policy violations again yesterday.”

Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker, who has documented attempts by Fauci and other government officials, federal agencies and leading scientists to cover up the U.S. government’s role in funding gain-of-function research in China, told The Defender he was not surprised by Fauci’s stance.

“As I documented over two years ago, Anthony Fauci has lied about funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. That’s fine. People in Washington lie all the time,” Thacker said.

“But when he lied during a congressional hearing, wagging his finger at Senator [Rand] Paul … I knew immediately he had broken the law. His lies about this pandemic have been documented in multiple media outlets and I hope he is eventually prosecuted,” he added.

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender Fauci should be prosecuted.

“Fauci knew exactly what was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 [biosafety level 4] and the University of North Carolina BSL3 — he was paying for it,” Boyle said. “He has repeatedly perjured himself in testimony before Congress. This is just more of the same.” … Full article

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

The Definition of Insanity

AARP: “Keep getting boosters even though previous ones didn’t work.”

BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 9, 2024

This morning someone sent me a link to Alex Berenson’s post about the AARP advising its nearly 38 million members to get another COVID-19 booster shot, even if they have already had five boosters.

This prompted me to visit AARP’s website, which features an entire category of content titled Scams & Fraud—that is, warnings to older people about all the predators out there who wish to manipulate and deceive them in order to steal their money.

Under the category Caregiving is posted an articled titled COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths Climb Ahead of Expected Winter Surge.

The article laments that nursing home residents and staff have lost interest in getting the latest booster, and suggests this is a likely explanation for why COVID-19 mortality in nursing homes has risen in recent months as we head into winter.

The author, Emily Paulin, does NOT mention the common experience of older people repeatedly falling ill with COVID-19 even after receiving multiple boosters. She also doesn’t mention a word about TREATING nursing home residents who fall ill with COVID-19. Four years after this mess began, an AARP writer about nursing home policy still has nothing to say about treating the illness.

Reading this article reminded me of a Joe Rogan podcast I watched yesterday in which his guest—an earnest and callow young man who says “like” every fourth word—asserts the following two propositions:

1). Most popular sports were conceived and developed to give men an advantage over women. For example, in basketball, “the way the ball moves” gives biological males an advantage.

2). Biological males who receive gender reassignment procedures to become women have NO advantage over women in sports.

The same kind of insanity is also evident among the foreign policy crowd that continues to advocate the war in Ukraine. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are run into the meat grinder of Russian defensive positions in the eastern part of the country, these lunatics continue to insist that the Ukrainians KEEP DOING THIS until they get their desired result.

All of the above is further evidence of the mental illness underlying what I call the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle:

1). COVID-19 vaccines are saving mankind. Anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of the vaccines is guilty of heresy.

2). The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is a sacred mission and NO negotiated settlement with Russia shall be countenanced. Anyone who criticizes the Ukrainian and U.S. governments, and any attempt to understand the war from the Russian point of view, is guilty of heresy. Indeed, as Ukraine’s American, transgender military spokeswoman asserted back in September, journalists who question this article of faith should be hunted down and killed.

3). Human induced climate change will soon destroy the earth if trillions aren’t spent to overhaul our entire energy policy. Anyone who questions this proposition is guilty of heresy.

4). The concept of biological sex is a mere “construct.” Skilled surgeons and endocrinologists can transform a boy into a girl or vice versa. Anyone who questions this assertion is guilty of heresy.

For my part, I have lost all patience with people who subscribe to the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle. In my view, they have become indistinguishable from sleep-deprived children. There is no sense in trying to have a conversation or reason with them. I can only hope that their insane assertions and conduct will ultimately be rejected by the great majority of adults in the United States and the rest of the world.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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