Senators want DHS chief Mayorkas to answer for “misleading” testimony about disinformation board
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | June 15, 2022
In a letter to Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters, senate Republicans are demanding that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas answer for his testimony about the paused Disinformation Governance Board that contradicts newly-discovered documents.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
According to the letter, Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley obtained documents from a whistleblower with detailed information about the disinformation board that contradicts what Mayorkas testified.
According to the documents, the disinformation board was created to to monitor online speech about “conspiracy theories about the validity of elections” and “disinformation related to the origins of effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” It also said that the controversial board wanted to partner with Twitter to suppress certain speech and wanted to meet with Twitter executives to determine how this could be done.
Under oath on May 4, Mayorkas said that the disinformation board had not yet started working. Speaking to media outlets, Mayorkas said that the board would focus on cartels and foreign adversaries and would not spy on Americans, something that was contradicted by the leaked documents.
The letter demands that Mayorkas testify again to clear the contradictions between his previous testimony, his public statements, and the documents provided by the whistleblower.
The letter states: “We are deeply concerned that documents recently obtained by Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley contradict the Secretary’s testimony and public statements about the Board. The American public deserves transparency and honest answers to important questions about the true nature and purpose of the Disinformation Governance Board and it is clear that Secretary Mayorkas has not provided them – to the public or this Committee.
“Therefore, we request you hold a hearing with Secretary Mayorkas and join us in insisting that all records related to the Board be provided to the Committee prior to the hearing.”
Four Scare Stories designed to (literally) put you off your food
Suddenly perfectly ordinary foods are set to give you cancer, why? And who stands to gain?
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 14, 2022
We’ve been covering the emerging food crisis for months now. Detailing how the economy was deliberately sabotaged to drive up the cost of living, especially food, via lockdowns and sanctions.
But propaganda wars are like regular wars: They have theatres, fronts and overt for covert campaigns.
Yes, the big noise on food is that we need to change to “save the planet”, but there’s more going on in smaller spheres. A constant drip-feed of stories, articles and studies designed to undermine public faith in the food we eat.
Here are four examples, all from just the last ten days.
1. BEEF CAUSES CANCER
On June 3rd MedicalXpress reported on a new study which – allegedly – (we’ll be using that word a lot) found red meat increased cancer risk in certain people.
The “study”, carried out at the Boston University School of Medicine and originally published in the Journal of Nutrition, claims to have found that “unprocessed” red meat increased the risk of colorectal cancer {CRC} – in black women:
Unprocessed red meat intake was associated with an increased CRC risk in the present study, the first positive evidence that red meat plays a role in the etiology of CRC in Black women.
2. SO DOES FISH
Then, on June 9th, Sky News reported another study which found eating fish on a regular basis also increases your risk – this time of skin cancer.
This “study”, done out of Brown University and published in the journal Cancers Causes and Control, alleges those who eat over 40g of fish per day had a 22% increased risk of skin cancer:
We found that higher total fish intake, tuna intake, and non-fried fish intake were positively associated with risk of both malignant melanoma and melanoma in situ. Future studies are needed to investigate the potential biological mechanisms underlying these associations.
3. … EVEN MORE CANCER, THIS TIME FROM DAIRY
A third study, again in MedicalXpress and this time from June 9th, found an increased risk of prostate cancer in men who drink a lot of milk.
The “study”, done at Loma Linda University Health and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, concludes:
Men with higher intake of dairy foods, but not nondairy calcium, had a higher risk of prostate cancer compared with men having lower intakes. Associations were nonlinear, suggesting greatest increases in risk at relatively low doses.
This parallels a study from last year, done by the same researchers, which found drinking milk increased the risk of breast cancer.
4. OH, AND KEEPING YOUR OWN CHICKENS GIVES YOU FOOD POISONING
Not a study this time – and technically not just about food either – but on June 10th CBSNews reported that the US CDC was launching a “probe” into an increase in food poisoning cases allegedly linked to people keeping their own chickens:
Federal health officials are probing several multi-state outbreaks of salmonella infections linked to backyard poultry, saying more than 200 Americans have been stricken so far this year, with one death reported.
Already in vogue in parts of the U.S., the earthy hobby of raising backyard flocks grew even more popular during the pandemic, as Americans stuck at home set up coops with an eye on fresh eggs and animal companionship. But such efforts at small-time farming can come at a cost.
Of course, this is coming straight off the back of a “bird flu outbreak” which has seen 10s of millions of poultry culled, and price of eggs and chicken skyrocket.
Interestingly, organic and free-range chickens are already said to be the most impacted by bird flu, leading some to ask if bird flu could spell “the end of free-range chicken”.
No free-range chickens, no keeping your own chickens…hmmm…seems like some time soon the only way to get chicken (and eggs) will be through Big Food corporate giants.
THE SOLUTION
So, according to The ScienceTM – all natural food humans (and most other animals) have been eating for literally thousands upon thousands of generations is somehow suddenly contriving to give us all cancer.
Personally, I’m freaking out.
But don’t worry, because there’s a few ready made solutions to this problem: If you want to save yourself from all that nasty chicken, eggs and milk, try “alternate forms of protein”.
That’s media-speak for eating insects.
The push on that front started years ago, with articles like this one from March 2021: “If we want to save the planet, the future of food is insects”
There was a lot of pushback, with “Eat Ze Bugs” becoming an ironic slogan for those resisting the new normal. That reaction effectively bullied the “let’s eat insects” stories out of the news for a while. But now they’re back.
On May 22nd, Forbes reported yet another a new “study” which apparently found “Eating Insects Could Cut Your Environmental Impact By More Than 80%”.
On May 28th, The Sun claimed that eating insects (among other things) could “solve food shortages”.
On June 6th the BBC’s kid-focused Newsround prompted children to ask the (rather leading) questions “Eating insects: Should we be eating more? Why are they so good?
And then on June 11th, the Toronto Star simply asked
Why aren’t we all eating insects yet?”
So, yes, there’s a renewed energy behind the pro-bug-eating media. But the big move being touted is undoubtedly the pivot to lab-grown meat and dairy. The propaganda is flowing thick and fast on that.
In late May, science magazine FreeThink reported a new company called Formo is researching lab-grown dairy products – “real cheese without the cow”. While TechCrunch was talking up YoEgg’s plant-based egg substitutes.
On June 6th Forbes reported that “Cell-Cultured Seafood Isn’t just An Idea; It’s A Reality”.
Just three days ago it was announced the Israeli company ReMilk was approved to begin selling its “precision fermented cow-less dairy products” across the US.
So, while the news cycle floods with stories that beef and fish and milk are causing cancer or food poisoning, the mainstream media is packed with stories on the benefits of cultured proteins.
Medical journals are publishing articles like this one, suggesting lab-grown meat is “healthier” than natural meat.
A Schmidt Foundation-sponsored article in the Guardian, on June 4th, tells us that lab-grown meat could save the planet if people can be “convinced to make rational food choices”.
On June 6th, CNN headlined:
How ‘lab-grown’ meat could help the planet and our health
… and goes on to suggest fake meat would prevent “future pandemics” by removing the risk of zoonotic viral transmission.
The messaging could not be clearer.
CUI BONO?
So, let’s say that over the next year or so more and more natural meat/fish/dairy products are replaced on the market by lab-grown or vegetable-based alternatives. Who stands to benefit?
The answer to that is unfortunately predictable: It’s the same people that always benefit.
The problems are manifold, the reactions diverse, but the solution is always pretty much the same – giving the elite more money and more power.
Bill Gates has heavily invested in lab-grown meat companies, as well as companies that make vegetable-based “eggs”. Jeff Bezos has been doing likewise.
It’s interesting to note that, just yesterday, the CEO of one of the biggest poultry suppliers in the world has called on the EU to allow the sale of cultured meat.
Why?
Because, just as big oil companies have responded to climate change hysteria by heavily investing in renewables, corporate meat producers are busily buying up alternate “meat” companies.
As “market forces” and “climate friendly policies” come into play, governments will institute measures such as the proposed “meat taxes”, making it cheaper to buy fake meat than real meat.
In the end the same people benefit no matter where you get your electricity, and – as the war on food continues – the same people will benefit whether you get real meat, lab-grown meat or “alternate forms of protein”.
The people most hurt by this will be family farms, small local companies, and any producers of organic and ethically sourced meat and dairy. Many of whom will be driven out of business.
Meanwhile the public will be left with a “choice” between extortionately expensive mass-produced actual meat clogged with hormones and antibiotics, or fake lab-grown meat made of god-knows-what.
And since the same corporate giants will be making both options, you’ll line the same pockets either way.
Bon appetit.
They Attempt to Justify Approval for Use in Infants and Toddlers
They want the COVID-19 vaccine approval for children so bad, Peter Marks himself and his cronies published the very study he has to use to evaluate for approval.
By James Lyons-Weiler | Popular Rationalism | June 11, 2022
As promised, the FDA has ginned up a report that ostensibly will be used to try to justify “approval” (whatever they mean by that now) of COVID-19 vaccines for infants and toddlers (children < 5 years old). Here’s the report for your reference.
This report comes after a torrent of massive reports from Moderna and Pfizer that claim to review studies of the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines in children. It is not hard to see what shenanigans the FDA has been up to to try to bolster a vaccine that fewer and fewer adults want. It’s more of the same: exaggerate the apparent risk of the virus and minimizing the perception of risk. In other words, lies.
- There is no evidence of clinical urgency. Infants and toddlers (and children in general) do not get COVID-19; they do not (yet) die from COVID-19. All that can change when antibody dependent enhancement kicks in for the vaccinated. FDA’s own reports cites 1,086 deaths “from COVID-19” and 10,700,000 “cases” of COVID-19 in children aged 0-17. There have been 832 days since April 1, 2020 when diagnoses started for COVID-19. For the entire population of children in the US (73,000,000), the risk of COVID-19 infection since the onset of COVID is 10,700,000/73,000,000 = 0.14657. The risk of a child dying if they have a diagnosis is 1,086/10,700,00 or 1086/10700000 = 0.00010149532. The risk of any child dying of COVID-19 over this time period is 1,086/73000000 = 0.00001487671. The per-day risk is on the order of 1.78806611e-8 (0.000000001788). There is no real unmet clinical need and the FDA needs to go back to college to understand how to use RT-PCR correctly. Children do not get COVID-19, and they do not die.
- Inconsistent use of the idea “vaccinated”. This has been the pattern from the very first study. FDA, CDC, Moderna, Pfizer, and others pull out whatever definition of “vaccinated” they want. Examples: “Vaccinated” is defined in the original trials as people who received both doses and who did not develop COVID-19 before two weeks passed after the second exposure to the vaccine. In fact, that means that people who developed COVID-19 due to disease enhancement were dropped from the study calculations. First, this is the first time people were dropped from a vaccine trial for getting infected with the pathogen targeted by the vaccine up to 13 or 14 days after being vaccinated. Second, it’s actually five entire weeks – one month and one week – 44 days – after the first exposure. ALL of the vaccine efficacy being cited by FDA is suspect. Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines never achieved >90% true vaccine efficacy; the best estimate is more like 75%.
- Inconsistent use of the idea “vaccine efficacy”. Over the time period since the first COVID-19 vaccine trials, various definitions of “vaccine efficacy” have been used. Decreased transmission. Reduction in infection rates. Reduced hospitalization. Presence of neutralizing antibodies. Presence of antibodies. All are used and cited in FDA’s report whenever convenient, all in an ad-hoc manner. It’s more than irritating. It’s moving the goal post and represents reckless (and ineffective) attempts to manipulate public perception. This practice continues in the reports and studies that are cited by FDA. I do not trust the efficacy data FDA cites in their report (why would we given Point 1?).Further evidence of the futility of the evidence used to claim efficacy comes from Moderna’s Sponsor Briefing report to the FDA:“3.3 Regulatory Considerations for Clinical Development of COVID-19 Vaccines in Children
Effectiveness
Regulatory precedent with other preventive vaccines provides a basis for inference of vaccine effectiveness in pediatric populations based on immunobridging to a young adult population in which clinical disease endpoint vaccine efficacy has been demonstrated for the same prototype vaccine. The immune marker(s) used for immunobridging do not need to be scientifically established to predict protection but should be clinically relevant to the disease. Based on available data in humans and animal models, FDA considers neutralizing antibody titers (a functional measure of the vaccine immune response against SARS-CoV-2) to be clinically relevant for immunobridging to infer effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines in pediatric age groups. Because no specific neutralizing antibody titer has been established to predict protection against COVID-19, two immunogenicity endpoints (GMT and SRR) are considered appropriate for comparing the range of neutralizing antibody responses elicited by the vaccine in pediatric versus young adult populations.
Also embedded in this piece of work is the fact that FDA does not need evidence of long-term immunity; they are settling for something called “immunobridging” – guessing at the efficacy of a vaccine in one clinical population from measurements made from other clinical populaton.
They also are making people dependent on vaccines… expecting patients to have antibodies from one vaccine to the next. This makes no sense immunologically. We don’t need continuously high antibody levels against any pathogen. We have memory B-cells and T-cells. In accepting this paradigm, FDA is completely off its rocker and will cause immune exhaustion with constant vaccinations every 3-4 months.
- Incomplete consideration of the scientific data (Barnstable County, Israel, Ontario). We know that months after vaccination, those who are vaccinated are at higher risk of infection and now of hospitalizations. Data actually show negative vaccine efficacy in children (per Jeremy Hammond). See: “Evidence for Negative COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness in Children”. From that article:“vaccine effectiveness (VE) in children becomes(sic) negative within several months since receipt of the second dose.Researchers from the New York State Department of Health published a study on the preprint server medRxiv on February 28 noting that the evidence for vaccine effectiveness in children, particularly those aged five to eleven, was “limited”. So, they aimed to provide data to inform policymaking.“During Omicraon variant predominance,” the authors concluded, “VE against infection declined rapidly” for young children in the state of New York, “with low protection by one month following full-vaccination.”Comparing COVID-19 cases during January between unvaccinated and vaccinated children, they estimated initial vaccine effectiveness for children aged twelve to seventeen to be 76 percent, but this dropped to below 50 percent after just five weeks since receipt of the second dose.Moreover, for young children (aged five to eleven), they observed a drop from 65 percent to just 12 percent after only one month.Thereafter, their estimate indicated significantly negative effectiveness for this age group, as shown in Figure 2 of their paper: by 35 to 41 days, VE reached negative 10 percent, and by 42 to 48 days, it reached negative 41 percent.
Jeremy goes on to report (correctly) that the authors of the article misinterpreted their own data. History will remember Jeremy as a reporter with great integrity.
- Moderna and Pfizer reports fail to study long-term risks. Like I said, more of the same shenanigans. In this report, for example, Moderna offers data on myocarditis only up to Day 28 after the vaccine. Why Day 28? Why not “since the vaccine has been administered” to more accurately reflect the real-world clinical situation? They also state that myocarditis in a large concern in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 – but the comparison is to the uninfected, not the vaccinated, and we know that the spike protein is the cause (syncytia among heart muscles caused by the spike protein). The spike protein, of course, is the basis of their mRNA vaccines.
- Incestuous COIs/Unjustified Influence by Regulators. Peter Marks is charged with setting the decisions at FDA whether to consider vaccines for specific populations. Why the hell is he involved in a study conducted to bolster the vaccines he is going to have to decide upon? See “Benefit-risk assessment of COVID-19 vaccine, mRNA (Comirnaty) for age 16–29 years”. That “study” is also guilty of all of the same loose logic as above; it is noteworthy that the study assumes as “worst case scenario” of zero deaths from myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination (Credit: Toby McDonald, who wrote this to me:“I’m reading the Moderna “Sponsor Briefing Document” and they built their benefit-risk assessment off of Funk et al. (2022). So I looked up Funk and it’s a recent paper by six staffers at the FDA including Peter Marks, Richard Forshee, and Hong Yang (who wrote the dreadful benefit-risk assessment for kids 5 to 11 back in October). Quite literally in their “worst-case scenario” they predict 0 deaths from myocarditis in the vaccine group. It’s a stunning work of fiction.”
- I’m on an email thread with Steve Kirsch (he considers me part of his “debate team”. Last week, Steve challenged Peter Marks to a debate:“Hi Peter,You are right about the vaccine uptake problem. According to independent survey we just commissioned, only 33% of Americans opted to go further than the first 2 doses.You were quoted in that CNN article:“We do have a problem with vaccine uptake that is very serious in the United States and anything we can do to get people more comfortable to be able to accept these potentially life-saving medical products is something that we feel we are compelled to do,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.Isn’t it time for you to end the misinformation problem by debating us in a public forum?My colleagues and I look forward to hearing from you.
The only way to end the misinformation is to debate the top misinformation spreaders. You will never win by trying to censor us.
We would be HAPPY to debate to you to end the misinformation problem. As you can see from this slide deck, all the evidence we’ve been able to find shows there was clinical trial fraud and that the vaccines are very dangerous. We would love to know how we got it wrong
I look forward to hearing from you.
-steve
To my knowledge, Marks has not replied. I replied to Steve and the entire email thread, including Marks, though:
“Steve,
History is going to remember one person on this email thread in a manner in which I would not ever care to be seen associating with.
I would therefore decline to participate in such a debate.
Sincerely,
James Lyons-Weiler, PhD
I could continue and debate dozens more points in the report dump by the FDA. I don’t have to. Marks himself provides evidence of being way off-target immunologically and lying about the “need” for COVID-19 vaccines for children.
Here’s an old video of Prevaricating Peter lying about the need for “high antibody titres” for immunity, and that children’s immune response is “not enough for some of these variants” (no data on that, just words):
The comments in that video have not aged well. Call your Senator and Congressional Reps and demand that Peter Marks resign. Email them this article. Marks and the FDA are NOT basing their considerations on independent fact, science and logic. He and his cronies are either incompetent or working for the industry. Either way, he and his cronies have to go.
Met Police Invokes “National Security” about Epstein Meeting with US Senators in the UK
BY WHITNEY WEBB |
UNLIMITED HANGOUT| JUNE 13, 2022
A Freedom of Information request filed by UH in connection with Whitney Webb’s upcoming book was blocked by UK Metropolitan police on “national security” grounds. The request sought information on the two sitting US Senators who met with Jeffrey Epstein at a Wexner-owned residence in the UK, a meeting where Met Police officers had provided security.
In connection with Whitney Webb’s upcoming book on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, One Nation Under Blackmail, Unlimited Hangout filed a Freedom of Information request asking UK law enforcement and the Ministry of Defence the identity of two sitting US senators who were present at Foxcote House in North Warwickshire, UK on September 1, 2002. UH contributor Johnny Vedmore had previously obtained information from eyewitnesses of that meeting that, not only were two US Senators present at that location that day, but that Metropolitan Police officers had supplied security for the meeting. The FOI request was filed to Metropolitan Police, the UK Ministry of Defence and North Warwickshire Police and only a response from the Metropolitan Police was received.
The motive for UH’s FOI request is as follows. It is known that Jeffrey Epstein, as attested to by Epstein’s flight logs, was present in this part of the UK during this same period (from August 31, 2002 to September 2, 2002) and eyewitnesses saw him attend this specific meeting at this location with two attractive and glamorously dressed women on each arm. One of these women was Nicole Junkermann, a former model and apparent intelligence asset as revealed in Vedmore’s previous investigative work. The other woman was described by eyewitnesses as a tall brunette. Per those eyewitness accounts, Epstein personally escorted the two women into the room where the two senators were waiting.
Notably the house where this meeting took place, Foxcote House, has been owned by the family of Leslie Wexner, specifically his wife Abigail Wexner, since 1999. Wexner’s role in financing much of Jeffrey Epstein’s activities, legal and illegal, is a major focus of Webb’s upcoming book and Wexner has encountered considerable difficulty in explaining away his relationship with Epstein, despite the largely servile posture of mainstream media in this regard.
Given the circumstances, it seems highly likely that this meeting was a high-profile instance of Jeffrey Epstein engaging in the sexual blackmail of sitting American politicians. However, due to the well-known scandal around Jeffrey Epstein, his name was not used in our FOI request in order to avoid potentially “spiking” the response.
Despite the omission of Epstein’s name, Metropolitan Police responded to the request stating that they can “neither confirm nor deny whether it holds” the requested information. Their response goes on to state that confirming or denying “whether any United States of America (USA) senators were afforded protection could undermine the safeguarding of national security.” It also notes that it blocked providing the requested information on four other grounds aside from “national security” (five in total), including “international relations”, “law enforcement”, “health and safety”, and “personal information.” It also states that providing the requested information could place “those who are afforded protection, protection officers and members of the public at risk.”
Screenshot of the response from Met Police
UH has since re-filed a new, related FOI request asking why Metropolitan Police officers were providing protection to a meeting where Jeffrey Epstein was present, since his criminal activities are undeniable.
The UK changed the definition of “case” to INCREASE Covid numbers. Again.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 11, 2022
Yesterday Sky News and the Huffington Post and several other outlets all flared up near-identical headlines warning that …
Covid Infections Increase For First Time In Two Months
The HuffPo goes on to explain in more detail…
The jump is thought to have been caused by increases in cases compatible with the original Omicron variant BA.1 and the newer variants BA.4 and BA.5, according to the Office for National Statistics.
All the articles cite the Office of National Statistics (ONS) talking about Omicron and seem to consider this an explanation.
None of them mentions the fact the UK’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA) literally changed the definition of a Covid “case” back in February, making it almost inevitable cases would go up.
It’s all detailed in this post from the UKHSA site, helpfully titled “Changing the COVID-19 Case Definition”.
The article explains that the UKHSA will be moving on from the traditional meaning of “cases”, and instead counting what they call “case episodes”.
Meaning that, up until now, one person repeatedly testing positive for “Covid” throughout the pandemic was considered one “case”:
Until now, COVID-19 cases have been reported at the individual level: every positive test taken and reported by one person has been considered part of a single case record, initiated by their first positive test.
But from now on different positive tests of the same person will be considered separate “cases” as long as they are 90 days apart:
Positive test results that are 90 days apart (regardless of negative tests in between) will be considered as a separate episode of infection, and therefore the person is counted as a case more than once.
The supposed justification for this decision is “waning immunity” and the Omicron variant causing spikes in “reinfections”:
Although reinfections were initially very rare, we have seen the number rising slowly over the last two years, as immunity from prior infection wanes and new variants emerge. During the Omicron variant wave, the number and proportion of people being reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 has increased.
However, the inevitable consequence of this decision will be to make the case numbers go up. The press not including this in their story about the rising case numbers is – at best – astonishing incompetence.
In fact, making case numbers go up is literally the only impact it will have.
The UKHSA goes out of its way to point this out, highlighting that the change will have no effect at all on how they monitor infections, since they already treat new positive tests as new cases for the purpose of contract tracing, and have been doing so all along:
contact tracing has undertaken a very safe practice of following all positive cases, regardless of whether they were possible reinfections or cases of prolonged infection.
So, in short, whether or not the change is scientifically justified, it is a purely aesthetic one that will have no impact on anything, except to make case numbers look bigger.
And, of course, it’s not scientifically justified.
They have already stretched the meaning of “cases” well past its breaking point by defining anyone who tests positive as a “Covid case” whether or not they have any symptoms.
Now every single person who, over the past two years, tested positive on the useless PCR tests and was declared a “case”, can test positive again on the same useless PCR and be declared a new case.
Of course, messing with language to inflate statistics has been the modus operandi since the beginning of the “pandemic”. “Fully vaccinated”, “herd immunity”, “cause of death”, “vaccine”, “case” all have been subject to “updated” definition.
Clearly, this further torturing of statistics is about maintaining the flagging “pandemic” narrative.
Allowing people to become more than one “case” means the ever-increasing numbers of people rejecting the vaccines, masks and hysteria can be countered by the steadily dwindling number of NPCs who still religiously take Covid at face value.
It’s a desperation move. One that, hopefully, people will see right through.
Russia accuses US of concealing data on biolabs
Samizdat | June 12, 2022
The US has been concealing information about its “military biological activity” in the post-Soviet states, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday. This, according to Zakharova, raises “serious questions” about Washington’s compliance with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC).
In an interview with TASS published on Sunday, Zakharova said, “the United States prefers to remain silent about the ongoing work in the post-Soviet space and does not provide information within a framework of the BTWC confidence-building measures.”
“Assertions that the activity of the Pentagon and related structures is focused solely on health issues are not true. Clearly, health care assistance does not require the involvement of the US military,” Zakharova said.
She added that Washington’s claims that it is collecting biomaterial and monitoring the epidemiological situation “only reinforce and intensify” Russia’s fears over America’s compliance with the BTWC.
Moscow’s recently published evidence regarding the alleged sprawling network of US-funded biolabs across Ukraine only adds to the suspicions, Zakharova said.
In a series of briefings starting in March, the Russian military has presented evidence of the Pentagon’s involvement in funding laboratories in Ukraine. According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, the US poured more than $224 million into biological research in Ukraine between 2005 and early 2022. Western pharmaceutical giants, nonprofits, and even the US Democratic Party were involved in the scheme, Moscow claims.
The Pentagon has “significantly expanded its research potential not only in the field of creating biological weapons, but also obtaining information about antibiotic resistance and the presence of antibodies to certain diseases in populations of specific regions” while working in Ukraine, Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Force, said in May.
Zakharova also pointed out that the US has not yet withdrawn its reservation to the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the prohibition of biological and chemical weapons. The US was among the countries that declared the protocol would cease to be binding regarding enemy states that do not observe the prohibitions of the protocol.
In this regard, “the question quite reasonably arises about the real goals of the Pentagon’s international military biological activity,” Zakharova said.
Earlier this week, the Pentagon published the ‘Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries’. In the document, the US military said that following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and its partners have led “cooperative efforts to reduce legacy threats from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons left in the Soviet Union’s successor states, including Russia.”
According to the Pentagon, the US has “worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health,” by providing support to “46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.” These programs have focused on “improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.”
In the same paper, the US military accused Russia and China attempting “to undermine this work by spreading disinformation and sowing mistrust in the people and institutions all over the world that contribute to WMD threat reduction.”
According to Zakharova, Moscow considers this publication part of Washington’s “information campaign” aimed at justifying its military biological activities in the post-Soviet space and to “divert the attention of the international community from its true non-transparent and unseemly direction.”
Another nudge to vaccinate children and for whose benefit?
The runaway train that refuses to be knocked off course
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | June 10, 2022
When the JCVI considered covid vaccines for children in July 2021, they stated, “JCVI is of the view that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks”. Even in September 2021, they still said, “A precautionary approach was agreed given the very low risk of serious disease in those aged 12 to 15 years without an underlying health condition that puts them at increased risk.” As HART bulletin readers will know, the Chief Medical Officers eventually recommended the vaccine for 12-15s, in the vain hope of reducing school closures, which of course could have been achieved by simply stopping routine testing of asymptomatic school children and the sending home of healthy contacts.
Roll on to February 2022, when a ‘non-urgent offer’ was made of Pfizer vaccine for 5-11-year-olds, JCVI stated, “This advice on the offer of vaccination to 5 to 11-year olds who are not in a clinical risk group is considered by JCVI as a one-off pandemic response programme. As the COVID-19 pandemic moves further towards endemicity in the UK, JCVI will review whether, in the longer term, an offer of vaccination to this, and other paediatric age groups, continues to be advised.”
If any of our readers has seen this review, we would be pleased to know, as it might help us clarify the surprising appearance of Covid-19 on the NHS routine immunisation programme. Placing an unlicenced preparation onto the routine schedule is unprecedented. It raises serious questions of the legality, given the conditional authorisation was predicated on there being an emergency. It is also of course a subtle way of making parents think this vaccine is just run-of-the-mill. The current low uptake (53% of 12-15s and a mere 8.5% of 5-11s) suggests that at present, parents are well aware that covid-19 vaccines are not the same as other vaccines, either in terms of the risk of the disease for children or in terms of drug safety. They will also be well aware that lots of their triple vaccinated adult friends and family, have been catching covid regardless.
Not content with slipping this drug into the schedule under cover of the 4-day Jubilee holiday, the Local Government Association has been pushing behavioural psychology techniques to increase vaccine uptake in the young. Their opening gambit is, “Younger generations are more likely to be vaccine hesitant partly because they perceive themselves to be at lower risk of developing a severe form of COVID-19”. Surely, this is not a ‘perception’, it is a ‘fact’, which should surely have been viewed as a blessing, rather than an annoyance.
It gets worse: “Highlight the pro-social benefits of vaccination
Behavioural Insight: Emphasising the pro-social benefits of vaccination is particularly effective among young people. Prosocial benefits include achieving herd immunity and protecting others, especially those that are vulnerable and cannot get vaccinated. Combining both informational and emotional content can be effective.” Another one for the fact checkers – the JCVI say, “the benefits to the wider population are highly uncertain.”
And worse: “Highlight social norms about vaccination
Behavioural Insight: Highlighting that there are growing intentions to get vaccinated, that most people are getting vaccinated and that they approve doing so, can effectively encourage vaccine take up. Since young people tend to be more susceptible to peer influence, it is likely that social norms can be particularly effective when targeting this group.
Potential application: Emphasise Social norms in communications targeted towards young people. Make vaccination visible to other young people by setting up vaccination centres in university campuses or schools. Launch an ‘I will get vaccinated’-pledge on social media.”
And faintly ridiculous: “Second vaccine jab compliance
Ensuring residents take their second vaccine dose could be a challenge with which councils can support PHE and the NHS. This could be especially the case if news on vaccine efficacy and new strains undermines the perceived value of the second jab.” Again, the use of the word ‘perceived’ implies that the ‘news’ on vaccine efficacy and new strains is somehow irrelevant to informed consent. No wonder the powers that be don’t want people to see this graph from week 13 of 2022, dropped from the more recent weekly vaccine reports.
THE WHO, PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF FALSE MESSAGING
By Dr David Bell | Pandemics – Data and Analytics | June 9, 2022
The World Health Organization (WHO), and the growing pandemic preparedness industry sponsoring it, has faced considerable challenges in maintaining support for its COVID-19 response. It has addressed this difficult situation with simple and uniform messaging. The compliance thus achieved by the WHO has been vital to achieving a successful concentration of wealth, benefitting not just its major sponsors, but also the army of global health staff who have remained obedient throughout.
Threatening this progress, a skeptical minority within the public sphere have been using evidence and rational argument to undermine the pandemic industry’s potential. As the pandemic preparedness and response narrative is poorly defensible on rational criteria, such criticism and opposition must be dealt with and dismissed by other means. This is being achieved through the creation of a dogma around mass COVID-19 vaccination sufficiently separated from reality as to render the normal processes of debate irrelevant. If the gap between pandemic messaging and reality can be kept sufficiently wide, few passengers can step off, and this lucrative gravy train becomes unstoppable.
Small lies can be argued against, big lies become matters of faith
The development and mass deployment of vaccines has been a key component of the COVID-19 response, underpinning much of the transfer of wealth from lower-income people and countries to large Pharma, their investors and the global health workforce they sponsor. Against a background of rapidly increasing global poverty, this unprecedented increase in wealth has in turn raised the potential for unprecedented funding to global health institutions – the mostly Western-based industry that fills offices and drains aid budgets in Europe and North America. A significant cognitive decoupling has been necessary across this sector to achieve sufficient uniformity of voice and purpose, as the institutions involved were ostensibly intended to improve the health and uphold the rights of those less financially fortunate. To achieve success, staff of the WHO and other international organizations therefore had to be enabled to signal virtuous intent while acting in concert for corporate gain.
Vaccines traditionally protect the vaccinated against a target pathogen and humans tend to develop good immunity after respiratory virus infections. These two realities create an urgent problem for the pandemic preparedness industry, as the increased financing set to expand their reach is dependent on successfully convincing the world that these truths are indeed fallacies. Thus, to sell COVAX, the WHO’s financing facility for mass COVID-19 vaccination and the model for future pandemic responses, it was vital for the WHO to ensure that the obvious nonsensical nature of the programme would be ignored. This required coordination and adherence to a single simple message, repeated incessantly to stifle external opinion; a slogan so ridiculous that it becomes inarguable. In other words, it required propaganda.
It is essential to focus people on simplistic slogans if the aim is to suppress their tendency for independent thought and to make any venture in that direction a cause of stress. If people can see their respected authority figures standing behind a statement that is otherwise obviously false, it becomes easier to accept that the false must be true than to stand alone against authority and the crowd. Once one’s colleagues are on-board, the Asch conformity phenomenon kicks in – if everyone else is saying ‘X’, then it surely must be ‘X’, even if it looks like ‘Y’. If a health programme flies in the face of all existing medical knowledge, it must therefore be supported by a sufficiently strong dogma to negate evidence-based arguments. It is a testament to the power of group-think, loyalty to sponsors and the allure of money that this has, thus far, been brilliantly achieved.
COVAX – Selling the golden goose
“No one is safe, until everyone is safe”, the WHO’s COVAX motto, fulfills all the above criteria.
Most people want to be safe – and to achieve industry aims, the public must be convinced that others, not just themselves, are the key to their personal safety. They must support the blame or coercion being applied to these others. But the brilliance of ‘No one is safe, until everyone is safe’ is not just in its appeal to self-preservation and its divisiveness, but in its simple stupidity.
1) For the slogan to be true, the vaccine must be transmission-blocking only. It must not protect the vaccinated individual. Otherwise, their safety will not be dependent on the vaccination of others. However, the WHO and its partners also claim that “COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against serious illness, hospitalization and death”. Therefore, in promoting its ‘No one is safe’ slogan, WHO staff must collectively proclaim a falsehood. This builds loyalty and cohesion, as a lie is more easily maintained within a like-minded group.
2) To be ‘safe’ from a virus, one must either be intrinsically at very low risk (as most people are to most viruses) or gain immunity.
- ‘Intrinsic low risk’ created a huge problem for the mass-vaccination narrative early in the COVID-19 outbreak, as data from China showed the very strong skew of severe COVID-19 towards old age, and association with certain comorbidities. Most people are clearly at minimal risk. This had to be suppressed to enable mass-vaccination – all must consider themselves at risk. Public health agencies and their corporate backers even proclaimed impending catastrophe for the people of sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of whom are under 20 years of age. The use of age-based disease metrics, standard for disease-burden assessments up to 2019, were put aside and ‘COVID-19’ mortality reported as raw mortality numbers only.
- Immunity presents a problem, as it is both the pathway through which vaccines work, and the way we naturally gain protection. Immunity makes us safe, but natural immunity is useless to investors. While a safe vaccine would be preferable to a dangerous virus, once infection has occurred the gain from vaccination is minimal. This poses an immediate threat to profits and share price. The response to this dilemma included one of history’s more ludicrous statements from a global institution, when the WHO modified its herd immunity definition to only recognize immunity resulting from pharmaceutical intervention. This is nonsense to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of immunology, and of course the WHO’s staff have at least rudimentary knowledge.
Inevitably, SARS-CoV-2 has continued spreading, including from the vaccinated. Based on serology from Africa, India and the USA, and the highly transmissible Omicron variant, we can now be confident that nearly all the world’s population have post-infection immunity. It is no biological surprise that immunity gained from a respiratory tract infection with whole virus reduces disease severity more effectively than injection with spike-protein or its mRNA precursors. Claiming that mass vaccination still has public health relevance in these populations requires both abandonment of logic, and a willingness to dispense with decades of prior scientific learning. It requires acceptance of dogma.
A final component of the COVAX strategy, to lock-in celebrity support and enable those promoting the vaccine to still feel virtuous, is ‘vaccine equity’. People in rich countries are having boosters whilst many of the ‘global poor’ still await their first doses. The lack of benefit to be obtained from these doses, and the requirement of coercion to attain high coverage, are irrelevant – inequity in vaccine distribution simply has to be ‘bad’. Whilst pushing more boosters on high income markets, the same Pharma companies can look good by demanding vaccine equity, advocating for the ‘disadvantaged’. In reality this diverts resources from areas of greater need, thereby killing more children, but such fine print will never make the front pages. Commodity equity expands markets and provides returns, while health equity does not. Fear of being vilified as anti-equity helps keep skeptics quiet.
Bolting down the golden goose
Science, including public health, were previously held to be based on processes of logic, based on an acceptance that aspects of our world are grounded in discoverable truth. This concept is a threat to COVAX and the wider pandemic preparedness narrative. It is a threat to the return on investment of the pandemic industry’s sponsors. Greed is a stronger driver than truth, and it must be allowed to run free if society is to be truly reset in favor of those who wish to concentrate and control its wealth.
Despite its massive internal contradictions, disproportionate cost, coercion, and requirement for its promoters to live obvious lies, COVAX and the entire mass-vaccination paradigm has created a strong model for the success of the wider pandemic preparedness project. If truth in public health can be so readily dispensed with, and those working in the field so willingly corralled, the potential for milking the public’s trust and desire for safety presents unprecedented potential for profit. As this wealth accumulates, it supports the continuing advocacy and manipulation required to keep its adherents loyal. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle – we can expect to see more outbreaks, health emergencies and pandemics declared, more vaccines rolled out, and more wealth concentrated as a result. An unstoppable cycle burying truth under a growing fog of fear and falsehood.
That, at least, is the plan. The eventual outcome will depend on whether truth, human rights, equality and trust were ever fundamental to maintaining societal cohesion and peace. If they were, then let us hope the chaos that follows their abandonment is somehow contained. For now, business is business, and the golden goose, bolted down in a hall of lies, will keep on laying.
On Ukraine, ‘progressive’ proxy warriors spell disaster
Urging leftists to support the Ukraine proxy war, Bernie Sanders aide Matt Duss whitewashes the US role, attacks The Grayzone, and advocates dangerous militarism.
By Aaron Maté | The Grayzone | June 7, 2022
The unanimous vote by progressive lawmakers for the $40 billion Ukraine funding bill has been followed by a near-unanimous refusal to defend it. To date, no member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – with the sole exception of Cori Bush – has publicly explained why they chose to hand over billions of dollars to the weapons industry and intensify a proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia.
Amid this resounding silence, Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, has stepped in to fill the void. In a New Republic article titled “Why Ukraine Matters for the Left,” Duss attempts to convince fellow progressives that the “provision of military aid” to Ukraine “can advance a more just and humanitarian global order.” Duss has only praise for a Biden administration that, in his view, “should be applauded for its judicious reaction to the Ukraine crisis.” By contrast, Duss opts to launch an attack on dissident journalists, myself included, who don’t share his enthusiasm.
To make his case, Duss omits an abundance of inconvenient facts, betraying either considerable ignorance of the Ukraine-Russia conflict or a deliberate effort to distort it.
While apologia for US hegemonic projects is normal in DC foreign policy circles, Duss’ contribution is particularly noteworthy given his painstaking attempt to cast himself as an outsider. “Our political class,” Duss states, “advocates military violence with a regularity and ease that is psychopathic.” Duss’ comment is both accurate and wildly ironic, given his choice to advocate our political class’s military violence in Ukraine — with the remarkable ease that he identifies in others as psychopathic.
When it comes to how the Biden administration has handled the Ukraine crisis, Duss cannot identify a single fault. “The Biden team clearly did not seek this war,” Duss claims, and “in fact… made a strenuous, and very public, diplomatic effort to avert it.”
Duss does not explain what the administration’s “strenuous” diplomacy entailed, perhaps because even its top officials now openly admit that none existed.
In an interview with War on the Rocks, State Department counsellor Derek Chollet was asked if NATO expansion into Ukraine was “on the table” in pre-invasion contacts with Russia. “It wasn’t,” Chollet replied. The White House, Chollet explained, “made clear to the Russians that we were willing to talk to them on issues that we thought were genuine concerns they have that were legitimate in some way,” including “arms control.” (emphasis added) But when it comes to “the future of Ukraine” and its potential NATO membership, Chollet said, this was deemed a “non-issue.”
To Duss, the Biden administration’s (openly admitted) refusal to even discuss Russia’s core demands – and to only entertain issues that it deemed to be “legitimate” on Russia’s behalf – is apparently a “strenuous diplomatic effort.” If “diplomacy” amounts to enforcing US hegemony, as many in DC seem to believe, then Duss would have a case. But in the rest of the world, where diplomacy entails constructive dialogue with a semblance of parity, he does not.
Duss also takes aim at the argument, advanced by prominent leftists including former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, that a US-European pledge that Ukraine won’t join NATO “would have solved the problem” with Russia.
To refute Lula, Duss stresses that “in the weeks leading up to the war, U.S. allies, specifically German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, signaled clearly” that Ukraine’s NATO ascension “was not going to happen.” According to Duss, it is Putin who sabotaged their efforts by invading, and who “has now made that discussion moot.”
Duss omits what also happened in the weeks leading up to the war. While Germany and France did indeed float a proposal to keep Ukraine out of NATO, it was Ukraine – with US backing – that rejected it. According to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Scholtz proposed to Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 19 – five days before Russia’s invasion — that Ukraine “renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal,” signed by both Putin and Biden. But Zelensky rejected Schultz’s plan, a response that “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.” In dismissing the Germans’ NATO proposal, Zelensky joined the Biden White House, as State’s Derek Chollet acknowledged and other Biden officials made clear in public.
Ignoring US-Ukrainian rejectionism, Duss then declares that “it seems absurd to suggest that even an ironclad public pledge from President Biden that Ukraine would never be accepted into NATO would have convinced Putin to draw back the 180,000 troops he had placed on Ukraine’s borders.” Perhaps, but that very public pledge happened to be the centerpiece of Germany’s last-minute diplomatic effort – one that Duss himself invoked, and that Zelensky (along with Biden) chose to reject.
Duss’ whitewashing of the Biden administration’s rejection of diplomacy before the Russian invasion carries over to the period since.
Since Russia’s invasion, Duss says, the White House has “acted with restraint and care not to get drawn into a wider war with Russia.” While it is true that Biden has opted not to start World War III – in other words, has opted not to trigger a global suicide pact — he has done anything but act with “restraint.” One day before Duss’ article was published, Biden authorized the delivery of medium-range advanced rocket systems to Ukraine. These rockets have the capacity to strike inside of Russia; the US is acting on Ukraine’s assurance that it won’t.
Duss may support undermining diplomacy in Ukraine and shipping off billions of dollars worth of heavy weaponry instead, but this can only be described as “restraint” if the sole measure is an immediate — rather than merely prospective — nuclear holocaust.
Duss is so impressed with Biden’s handling of the war that he cannot even detect a tangible path that could end it. “As of this writing,” Duss declares, “I have seen no evidence of a settlement in the offing—as in, a deal that Putin would actually entertain, let alone accept—that we’re refusing to ‘push for.'”
If Duss cannot see evidence of a realistic settlement that Russia could accept, then he is being willfully blind. Russia’s explicit proposals, issued before the war and after, including two weeks into the invasion, called on Ukraine to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognise the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”
It is worth noting that the latter is Russia’s only new condition: for the eight years before the February invasion, Russia formally accepted the Minsk accords, which, to end the Donbas war, would have kept the Donetsk and Lugansk regions inside Ukraine’s borders, with limited autonomy.
Duss is free to argue that Russia’s terms for ending the war are unacceptable. But to pretend that Russia has not even laid out those terms, is to essentially advocate that the war never end.
By omitting Russia’s stated terms for a settlement, Duss also allows himself to erase one of the invasion’s key causes: the 2014 Maidan coup, and the ensuing eight-year Donbas war that had left more than 14,000 people dead by the time Russian forces crossed the border on February 24th.
In his 2500+ word piece, Duss makes no mention of the Donbas war and how it began: the 2014 ouster of a democratically elected Ukrainian president, with new leadership selected by Washington; the coup government’s assault on Ukraine’s ethnic Russian and anti-coup citizens, who launched a rebellion in the Donbas; the critical role of fascists and neo-Nazis in the Maidan coup and the Donbas war since; the fascist-led sabotage of the 2015 Minsk accords, which could have put an end to the conflict. By omitting this history, Duss can also omit how the US has helped undermine the Minsk agreements by siding with Ukrainian’s far-right and choosing to use the Donbas war to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain), because Ukraine’s “fight is our fight.” (Lindsey Graham).
After ignoring Russia’s stated grounds for a peace settlement, Duss goes on to disingenuously claim that the Ukrainian government has been pushing for one.
“Ukraine presented Russia with a far-reaching set of proposals over a month ago, including a commitment to ‘permanent neutrality,’” Duss claims. “Volodomyr Zelenskiy continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war.”
It is true that Ukraine presented Russia with a 10-point plan in late March. But Duss omits what happened immediately after: while Russia “signaled its preliminary support,” (RAND analyst Samuel Charap) Ukraine’s Western backers sabotaged it, and Zelensky acquiesced. In early April, Ukrainian and Russian officials were finalizing details for a Zelensky-Putin summit. But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and ordered him to halt diplomacy. Citing sources close to Zelensky, Ukrayinska Pravda reports that Johnson informed his Ukrainian counterpart that Putin “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” Johnson also relayed that even if Russia and Ukraine chose to sign security guarantees, the UK and its allies would not take part – rendering any such agreement worthless.
Zelensky clearly received the message, as Duss’s own source makes clear. When Duss claims that Zelensky “continues to offer to negotiate directly with Putin to end the war,” he links to a Reuters article that reveals such an “offer” to be hollow. Zelensky, Reuters reports, said he would only negotiate with Putin if Russia first withdrew entirely from Ukraine – an obvious non-starter. “Get out of this territory that you have occupied since February 24,” Zelensky said. “This is the first clear step to talking about anything.” Zelensky also “ruled out suggestions… that Ukraine should make concessions for the sake of securing a peace agreement that would allow Putin to save face.”
Thus, returning to Duss’ rendering, Zelensky’s “far-reaching proposals” were immediately rescinded under Western orders, and Zelensky’s “offer to negotiate” was premised on a condition that would have made negotiations impossible.
None of this is to suggest that Russia was justified in launching an invasion of Ukraine. To defend the use of force, which has been so catastrophic, Russia has to meet a high burden of evidence that, in my view, it has not. But one does not need to defend Russia’s invasion to see through Duss’ attempt to whitewash the US role in provoking and prolonging it.
Tellingly, Duss is openly hostile to journalists who have reported on the context that he has omitted. Out of nowhere, Duss introduces an attack on The Grayzone, the Max Blumenthal-founded news outlet that I work for. While Duss has nothing but praise for Biden, he has nothing but ad hominems for us (“pernicious authoritarian agitprop,” “atrocity-denying grifters” “click-baiting provocateurs”). After sharing this vitriol, he then immediately declares that engaging with us is “wasting time.”
I feel the same way about his juvenile name-calling, but interested readers can judge for themselves whether his insults are supported by facts. (He links to two “sources,” one a Medium blog post that, true to the neo-McCarthyite norm, peddles innuendo that The Grayzone is funded by Russia, among other smears).
If Duss is genuinely concerned about wasting time, he also might reflect on why he devotes ample space to paying lip service to progressive principles, only to ultimately endorse policies that flagrantly violate them. “Centering opposition to U.S. imperialism and militarism is an entirely appropriate starting point,” Duss states. Yet Duss’ desired end point would see leftists center U.S. imperialism and militarism, with disastrous results: among them, prolonging a proxy war against a nuclear armed power, threatening a worsening global food crisis, and sentencing more Ukrainians to death.
Even putting aside US complicity in the Ukraine proxy war and its dangers for the planet, progressives like Duss might wish to consider the likely political consequences. One obvious guide is the election of 2016, when Donald Trump won over a significant portion of voters by claiming to oppose the military interventionism that Duss is now urging progressives to embrace. Having seemingly learned nothing from 2016, Democrats in 2022 are again ceding anti-war sentiment to Republicans, 68 of whom voted against the $40 billion Ukraine bill in the House and Senate (versus zero Democrats).
As at least some Republicans vote against the proxy war, Biden has defended the domestic pain caused by his Ukraine proxy war by blaming “Putin’s Price Hike” and trying to argue that “defending freedom is going to cost.” Biden’s defense of “freedom” in Ukraine is now costing him a transatlantic flight to grovel at the feet of the Saudi autocracy, in the hopes of staving off a humiliating cost in the November midterms.
Continuing his mealy mouthed approach, Duss both claims to support diplomacy while simultaneously declaring it to be unattainable. The US, he says, “should certainly be actively engaged in finding a diplomatic path to end the war, and avoid committing to maximalist aims that could foreclose one.” But yet, according to Duss, “for the moment that path is unclear.”
If the path toward peace for Ukraine is unclear to Duss, then that can only be because he has chosen to erase the factual background and the diplomatic solutions on offer, thereby reinforcing the “maximalist aims” that he claims to oppose. Duss’s proxy war apologia will certainly win him a warm reception in establishment DC circles. For the US progressive movement, Ukraine, and the rest of the planet, it only spells disaster.
France investigating nuclear ‘cover-ups’
Samizdat | June 10, 2022
The French government is investigating whistleblower allegations that a state-run utility agency attempted to conceal safety issues at a nuclear power plant. Prosecutors confirm they are following up on complaints filed late last year.
Officials in Marseille launched an investigation into the alleged safety problems last month after an anonymous whistleblower said conditions at the Tricastin nuclear plant in southern France were “endangering the lives of others,” French newspaper Le Monde reported on Wednesday.
An engineer at the facility, the whistleblower also accused officials at the plant of “harassment,” as well as “violations of the criminal code, the environmental code, the labor code and the regulations relating to nuclear installations.” Though incidents continued – including a mysterious power surge at one reactor in 2017 and a flood at the same station one year later – no action was taken.
The largely state-run firm which operates the plant, Electricite de France (EDF), confirmed the ongoing investigation to the Wall Street Journal, saying the probe would help to “shed all necessary light on the alleged facts and thereby show the truth.”
Speaking to Reuters on Thursday, a lawyer for the whistleblower, William Bourdon, said the complaint was initially filed in November, but noted that the subsequent investigation does not target EDF directly. Instead, a probe “against X” has been launched, allowing prosecutors to look into the actions of multiple different parties.
The new investigation marks another blow for the French utility, which has recently taken half of the country’s nuclear reactors offline due to scheduled maintenance and refueling, and even outages caused by corrosion and damage. The spate of shutdowns coincided with soaring energy prices across Europe and elsewhere, driven in part by the conflict in Ukraine, as well as Western sanctions on Russian gas and oil exports.
The cost of inspecting and repairing the French nuclear plants could exceed €4.5 billion ($4.8 billion), according to recent EDF estimates, well beyond previous expectations. France derives around 70% of its electricity from nuclear power, and has seen a jump in prices throughout 2022.
Prior to the whistleblower filing, the Tricastin nuclear site had encountered some safety issues, including two separate uranium leaks within a matter of days in July 2008 which contaminated 100 employees at the plant and led to a ban on using local water for drinking, swimming, and agriculture.
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The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing serves as a stark warning of the danger these weapons pose
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 11, 2021
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent. … continue
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