Partnership with Russia in Hungary’s national interest – FM
RT | October 15, 2023
Budapest will stick to agreements with Russia in the energy sphere despite Ukraine-related sanctions and pressure from EU peers, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told RT on Friday, on the sidelines of the annual Russian Energy Week forum. The official stressed that his country will always put its national interests first and that energy cooperation with Russia is among its key priorities in this regard.
“Our national interest is to definitely have reliable, mutually respectful cooperation with Russia. Without Russian energy we would not be able to guarantee the safe supply of energy for our country,” he stated, adding that, for Hungary, the supply of energy “is not a political issue or an ideological issue, but a physical one.”
The official noted that his country is in constant contact with Moscow “to make sure our cooperation continues according to our existing contracts.” Hungary continues to buy Russian gas under the 15-year contract with energy major Gazprom signed in 2021, which provides for the supply of 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually. The country is also buying Russian oil via pipelines that run through Croatia and Ukraine, having secured an exemption from the sanctions imposed by Brussels on Russian crude oil imports last year.
Another large part of Russian-Hungarian cooperation is the work on new reactors for Hungary’s Paks-2 nuclear power plant under a contract with Russia’s Rosatom. According to Szijjarto, the construction process has already started.
“The cut-off walls are now under construction – that gives us hope that by the beginning of the next decade we will be able to connect the two new blocks to the grid, which will increase the nuclear capacity from 2,000 megawatts to 4,400 megawatts,” he said, adding that the project will make Hungary’s power production “more competitive, safer and more environmentally-friendly.”
Szijjarto conceded that the project faced much pressure, especially with the EU continuously pitching the Russian nuclear industry as a potential candidate for sanctions. However, according to the foreign minister the EU is unlikely to go through with these threats.
“We made it very clear that we will not agree to any sanctions package which will include the nuclear industry… because for us it would be totally against our national interests if the nuclear industry was under sanctions. And since the US has bought 416 tons of uranium from Russia during the first half of this year, I think no real arguments are there for the EU to put the Russian nuclear industry under sanctions… that would be a huge hypocrisy.”
Szijjarto reiterated previous statements that the West’s anti-Russia sanctions policy has failed, and urged the collective EU to help Russia and Ukraine bring the conflict to an end instead of heaping more punitive measures on Moscow.
“The EU is struggling when it comes to economy and when it comes to competitiveness, it’s obvious – there are figures – China has already overtaken us when it comes to share of global GDP. So, the EU should make the decisions in order to improve competitiveness… and sanctions [against Russia] have contributed to the loss of competitiveness, for sure… Instead of imposing sanctions and delivering weapons, we should start discussions about peace,” he stated, warning that circumstances for peace talks will become less favorable as time passes by.
Luton Car Park Fire Update
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 12, 2023
There’s some more footage of the Luton fire, which gives a much clearer idea of just how big and explosive it was:
https://twitter.com/BabylonBulletin/status/1711879370741067949
https://twitter.com/FanHubHatter/status/1712043494598902266
https://twitter.com/omario_omari/status/1711865889295937959
https://twitter.com/CHSandhu886/status/1711875340614644195
It has been claimed by the Fire Service that the fire started on a Range Rover diesel, but experts are dismissive of this.
For instance, AA technical expert Greg Carter said the most common cause of car fires is an electrical fault with the 12-volt battery system. But he added that diesel is “much less flammable” than petrol and in a car it takes “intense pressure or sustained flame” to ignite diesel.
Regardless of the initial cause, it is difficult to see how the fire could have spread so rapidly without EVs being involved. According to Andy Hopkinson of the Bedfordshire Fire Service, within ten minutes, the fire had already spread across a “large number of vehicles and a number of floors”.
Can anyone honestly remember such a fire in a multi-storey car park before?
We should not regard it as a coincidence that Sydney Airport had its own electric car fire in its car park just a month ago:
We’ll have to wait for the facts to emerge in due course to find out what caused the fire in the first place.
But the explosions reported, the collapse of the floor and the speed at which the fire spread certainly raise the suspicion that one or more EVs were involved.
Even if not, we do know that a car park full of EVs, which will be the case in a few short years time, would be lethal in the event of a fire.
Just imagine an underground car park beneath a block of flats.
Until the full facts emerge, EVs should be banned immediately from all multi-storey car parks.
‘Austria has paid enough!’ – Austria’s anti-sanctions FPÖ party tables motion to stop funding Ukraine
By Denes Albert | Remix News | October 09, 2023
The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which is currently the most popular party in Austria according to the latest polling, has tabled a motion demanding Austria withdraw funding of Ukraine given what it says are the billions of euros already gifted from Brussels.
The motion was rejected by all parties except the FPÖ.
“The EU must finally stop throwing billions of member states’ money out the window,” said MP Petra Steger, FPÖ spokesperson for its European policy, while speaking to the Austrian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
“We say: Enough is enough. Austria has paid enough! Our job is to represent the interests of Austrian taxpayers. So, we are campaigning to put an end to this irresponsible policy at the expense of net contributor states and to suspend contributions until we are assured that our money is being used in a contractual and responsible manner and this huge waste is stopped,” Steger said after the meeting. The MP said that the EU institutions have lost all common sense when it comes to budgetary policy, with one budgetary excess following another in a totally irresponsible manner.
The conservative party has long argued against the EU’s sanctions regime against Russia, saying it has not hurt the Russian war effort and led to severe economic hardship for both Austria and Europe at large.
Austria will pay €3.6 billion in membership fees to Brussels this year, which includes contributions to the European Peace Facility to buy arms for Ukraine, as well as money for the Turkey Refugee Facility.
“As a result, Austrian citizens have been sending billions of euros to the EU institutions for years, and the EU institutions have been rewarding them with climate madness and the highest inflation since 1952. From the ban on internal combustion engines to absurd vaccine contracts and billions of euros in gifts to the Zelensky regime, the EU institutions are not acting in the interests of the Austrians. They are distributing the money they collect according to their ‘moral’ compass, instead of addressing the real concerns of Europeans,” said Steger.
FPÖ MEP Harald Vilimsky also said that Ukraine cannot join the European Union, and the Austrian government should stand by this position tooth and nail, as the consequences of Ukraine’s accession would be very serious. He stated that Ukraine’s accession to the EU, which Brussels is now pushing through wittingly or unwittingly, should be rejected for a number of reasons, one of which is the dramatic impact it would have on the EU budget.
“According to press reports, the EU commission is now modeling the consequences on the example of the current financial framework 2021-2027. According to this, Ukraine alone would receive €186 billion. If the six Western Balkan states plus Georgia and Moldova are included as additional accession countries, they would receive a total of €257 billion. Put simply, this means that Ukraine alone would need around 15 percent of the total EU budget,” Vilimsky said.
He added that in the area of agricultural subsidies, too, the Ukrainians could claim almost a third of the budget. In addition, Ukraine should receive €61 billion from the EU’s cohesion fund, as its GDP per capita is on a par with Algeria or Sri Lanka — about a tenth of the EU average.
Americans get poorer as Washington throws cash at Ukraine and migrants
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 8, 2023
As Uncle Sam continues to pump billions of dollars into Kiev’s flagging fight against Russia and provide tempting handouts to illegal migrants, why is the average American worker forced to live paycheck to paycheck?
Here’s a question that most people have considered at least once in their lives, and probably a lot recently: How much annual income would you need to feel financially secure? For the average American, the magic number comes out to be $233,000 a year, according to a survey by Bankrate.
To bring the ’99 percent’ back down to Earth, the US Census Bureau released some sobering data that dashed those elusive six-digit dreams. Inflation-adjusted median household income fell to $74,580 in 2022 – a 2.3% decline from the 2021 average of $76,330. This marks the third-straight annual decrease since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, taking a wrecking ball to the heart of the economy.
The bad news doesn’t end there for US consumers, who are now struggling with the consequences of a foreign conflict in a distant land and a wide-open border. Those factors have prompted the cost of living to surge higher than it has in over four decades amid runaway inflation. In June 2022, the year-over-year inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, hit a jaw-dropping 9.1%, the highest it’s been since the administration of former President Ronald Reagan.
A significant reason for the increase in inflation happened on March 3, 2022, when President Joe Biden signed an executive order to ban the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the US. This decision has had disastrous results for the local economy. Since Biden’s inauguration, the cost of gasoline alone had jumped at one point by 100% (as of September 27, the average price of regular gas was $3.832 per gallon, according to the AAA, while gas prices were an average of $2.3 per gallon when Biden entered office), forcing just about everything else to skyrocket, including the number of poor people.
The poverty rate in the US exploded last year, the first increase in 13 years, according to the Census Bureau. In 2022, the rate was 12.4%, up 4.6 percentage points from 2021, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), a method for tallying government welfare programs and tax credits designed to assist low-income families.
Meanwhile, the Expectations Index, determined by consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business, and labor market conditions, sunk to 73.7 in September. That follows a drop to 83.3 in August. The worrisome part is that an Expectations Index below 80 generally indicates an impending recession.
An economic tragedy is already quietly happening for millions of American consumers who are now living paycheck to paycheck precariously and who have been forced to use the payment method of last resort to make ends meet: the almighty credit card, with its exorbitant interest fees. On this score, the US economy has broken yet another record, although not in a way that could be considered something to cheer about.
“US credit card debt rose by $45 billion to $1.03 trillion in the second quarter from the first quarter, a 4.6% quarterly increase,” The Street reported. “It’s the first time in US history that household credit card balances topped the $1 trillion mark as the number of credit card accounts expanded by 5.48 million to 578.35 million in the quarter.” When consumer debt suddenly equals the amount the US spends on its military-industrial complex, you know there’s a problem.
Clearly, the US has some serious domestic issues that need to be resolved, but instead, it would rather fund a totally senseless proxy war against a nuclear power halfway around the world.
Washington has given Ukraine close to $100 billion in aid, with more in the pipeline, since Moscow launched its military operation in February 2022. The cash, however, has not only been used to fund Ukraine’s military. Billions of dollars have subsidized participants of the Ukrainian economy, like farmers and small business owners, market players whose counterparts in the US desperately need help, too. A recent study conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations shows that more than $30 billion – around 40% of total US aid to Ukraine as of July 31 – has been financial or humanitarian assistance that is not directly connected to military support. Military funding comes out to around $50 billion.
As if that were not enough, the Biden administration continues to welcome illegal migrants at a price that is more than what is being spent fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Yes, you read that right; the annual cost of providing care for the millions of illegal migrants entering the US is $150.7 billion, according to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers (FAIR).
In August, US Border Patrol recorded 232,972 migrant encounters along the southwestern border, a jump from 183,494 in July. The number of crossings for September is predicted to be higher than the previous month.
So here we have two concurrent events – a disastrous military conflict in Ukraine and a leaky US border – that are sucking away precious funds from the American taxpayer. It’s important to note that the king’s ransom that is being handed over to support these deranged Democratic agendas will never be returned, not in our lifetime. Instead, it will just be added to the unsustainable US national debt load, which is currently at $33 trillion, according to the US Debt Clock. That is an astronomical sum of money that we or future generations will someday be forced to deal with, and probably sooner rather than later.
What American citizen could possibly believe that any of this government funding has been a good investment for the American people? Well, they’re representatives in Washington, DC, for one. In May, ‘conservative’ US Senator Lindsey Graham, during a meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Kiev, pronounced joyfully that “the Russians are dying” and aid to Ukraine is “the best money we’ve ever spent.” Aside from discounting the chances that such an “investment” could have towards unleashing World War III, Graham never thought for a second that such funds could have gone far at rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, like that non-existent wall on the US-Mexico border. It would have been a wonderful work program for the US economy.
In short, it’s just another day in the discombobulated American empire, which, much like its ancient Roman precursor, could learn the lesson of overexpansion and overspending in the most brutal way imaginable – with its total and complete dissolution.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.
Biden’s Semiconductor Spat With China Could Backfire, Warn US Chipmakers
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 06.10.2023
As the Biden administration pushes on with efforts to curb China’s technological progress with new restrictions, America’s semiconductor giants are indicating alarm, warning that the US may be shooting itself in the foot, according to a media report.
Amid the semiconductor trade spat with Beijing that Washington launched last year with a plethora of restrictions, and fueled further with new attacks across the past months, America’s semiconductor companies have responded with the unabashed warning that such poorly thought out measures could eviscerate their own businesses. Furthermore, slashing sales to China could wreck the Biden administration’s ambitious plans of building new semiconductor factories on US soil, according to the report, citing scores of industry interviews.
Three global giants in the chip-making industry – Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm – have reportedly been meeting with officials in the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, along with representatives of an array of think-tanks to press the case for reconsidering additional chip restrictions to China.
China accounts for close to a third of the global semiconductor market, and more than $50 billion in combined annual revenue for Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.
Leaders of these companies have, thus, been justifiably pointing out that loss of revenue on such a scale could provoke inevitable cuts in jobs, spending, and technology development, affecting US semiconductor hubs located in Ohio, New York, and Arizona.
The chief executives of these companies have warned that Washington’s attacks on Beijing could result in China speeding up the creation of its own independent chip industry.
Thus, they claimed, America’s ill-conceived semiconductor trade war would result Chinese-created chips dominating globally.
“What you risk is spurring the development of an ecosystem that’s led by competitors… And that can have a very negative effect on the US leadership in semiconductors, advanced technology and AI,” Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, was cited as saying.
Lobbying by these chip giants has brought results, according to cited sources, resulting in both a delay in issuing new restrictions, and a reportedly “narrowed list” of further changes that the Biden administration might potentially embark upon.
After last year’s restrictions stemming from the CHIPS Act signed by Biden, the American companies cited above have sought to “adjust” their businesses, revealed the report.
Thus, Nvidia was forced to come up with a new version of its AI chip, the H100, specifically tailored for China. To ensure compliance with US restrictions, that chip’s performance power was “lowered below the maximum levels allowed”, said the report. Nevertheless, losses grew and when chatter of impending new restrictions surfaced this summer, the chief executives ostensibly set off on more lobbying to Washington. Intel’s Patrick Gelsinger, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm met with White House officials.
“Without orders from Chinese customers, there will be much less need to go ahead with projects such as Intel’s planned factory complex in Ohio,” Gelsinger reportedly told US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Furthermore, the Semiconductor Industry Association was cited as issuing a statement slamming the government’s restrictions as “broad, ambiguous and at times unilateral,” warning they could harm “the industry’s competitiveness”.
“Right now, China represents 25 percent to 30 percent of semiconductor exports. If I have 25 percent to 30 percent less market, I need to build fewer factories… You can’t walk away from 25 to 30 percent and the fastest-growing market in the world and expect that you [continue] funding the [R&D] and the manufacturing cycle that we’ve released… This is strategic to our future; we have to keep funding the [R&D], the manufacturing, etc… Today, we have more than 1,000 companies on the entities list, many of which have nothing to do with national security and nothing to do with security concerns in China,” Gelsinger subsequently said at the Aspen Security Forum in July.
Semiconductor Trade War
It has been slightly more than a year since the Biden administration took its first shot, with the US commerce department prohibiting companies from supplying advanced chips and chip-making equipment to China, and thus taking the trade war that his predecessor Donald Trump had waged against Beijing into the technological sphere.
The restrictions, along with the Washington’s CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, were portrayed as limiting China’s technological prowess. The US government had cited national security concerns, claiming that it was restricting the export of cutting-edge technologies that China could use for military purposes or to enhance its domestic semiconductor capabilities. The Act included more than $52 billion in subsidies for US semiconductor manufacturers. In response, China warned that the industrial policy bill to support the local producers of semiconductors would disrupt global supply chains and hamper international trade.
“The United States said that the Act aims to increase the competitiveness of US technologies and semiconductor production. However, this Act provides huge subsidies to US enterprises producing chips and introduces a differentiated policy of industry support, some provisions of which, among other things, restrict normal investment and trade and economic activities of relevant Chinese enterprises, as well as normal scientific and technical cooperation between China and the US,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin had said.
Beijing reached checkmate by saying it needed to protect its own “national security and interests”, and first sanctioned US semiconductor giant Micron Technology in May, 2023. It then set in place export restrictions on rare earths – including gallium and germanium which are crucial for the world’s electronic chip-making industry. Since China produces upwards of 80 percent of the world’s gallium, and 60 percent of its germanium, experts were quick to predict that it could take “generations” for the US to replace lost Chinese capacity.
In early August, the White House announced that US President Joe Biden signed an executive order that authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to regulate certain US investments into Chinese entities engaged in activities involving national security-sensitive technologies in three sectors: semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and certain artificial intelligence systems.
The US has also urged its partners – South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and the government in Taiwan – to restrict or ban chip sales to China, and to relocate production facilities out of or away from China, such as to Europe or the United States.
China, the largest global semiconductors market, has repeatedly warned that by imposing restrictions on normal trade, the United States will end up harming itself as well as other market players.
“The US measures to restrict chip exports to China violate market rules and lead to fragmentation in the global semiconductors market, which not only harms lawful rights and interests of Chinese companies, but also significantly affects the interests of semiconductors manufacturers throughout the world, including in the US,” China’s Commerce Ministry spokesman He Yadong said in September.
To counter Washington’s restrictions, reports surfaced in September that Beijing was seeking to provide its own semiconductor chip-manufacturing industry with financial support. The People’s Republic of China was described as gearing up to launch a state-backed investment fund to bolster the country’s semiconductor industry.
German city residents protest construction of weapons factory to equip Kiev
By Ahmed Adel | October 5, 2023
Residents of a German city in Saxony protested the construction of a factory to produce ammunition to supply Ukraine, The New York Times reported. According to the article, Grossenhain residents want to live in peace with Russia and disapprove of Germany’s aid to Ukraine.
The New York Times highlighted that government leaders in Saxony thought that the plans of Rheinmetall, Germany’s most prominent arms manufacturer, to construct a new munitions factory would lead to an economic boom.
“Some in the chosen city of Grossenhain, with a population approaching 20,000, saw it differently. Sixteen of 22 members of the City Council signed a letter to Chancellor Olaf Scholz urging him to block the project,” the article reported.
Opposition to the factory is widespread along the political spectrum, with the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a Far-Right political party, holding a rally in June against arms sales to Ukraine, while residents signed a petition circulated by the Left Party.
“We reject a further economic-military use after years of military use,” the petition read. “We do not want to be involved in wars all over the world in a roundabout way.”
According to the article, resistance to the factory in Grossenhain signals that the Germans are concerned about the commitments made by the country to arm Ukraine.
“Perhaps easily dismissed as small-town politics, the revolt in tiny Grossenhain in fact reveals far larger unease among some Germans,” the author writes, adding: “Many Germans still hold a deep aversion to war and to defence spending in a country whose Nazi past has made it reluctant to invest in military power.”
Grosssenhain is not the only city in Germany with residents critical of support for Ukraine. As recently as October 3, thousands of residents of the capital, Berlin, took to the streets to demand Scholz’s resignation, speak out against economic policy, and call for a diplomatic resolution to the Ukrainian conflict and the resumption of cooperation with Russia.
In the same light, retired German colonel Wolfgang Richter warned that more important than Ukraine losing weapons is its loss of human potential, a consideration Berlin is not taking into account as it prefers to follow blindly Washington’s interests rather than its own.
Despite the possibility of reducing military assistance to Ukraine, much more important is that, in perspective, the country may lose its human potential, Richter said in an interview with ZDFheute media when commenting on Slovakia’s possible reduction of military assistance to Ukraine. According to Richter, in the short term, the lack of assistance from Slovakia will not significantly affect Ukraine’s defence capability. Instead, prolonging military actions will lead to more serious problems.
“Factors other than armament must be taken into account,” he said. “Ukraine’s personnel reserves will be depleted in the long term, and there is a risk of high demographic losses.”
His comments came as American magazine Newsweek reported that Ukraine risks being left without military assistance from two NATO allies – Slovakia and the USA. It is worth noting that the head of the White House, Joe Biden, signed a law approved by Congress on temporary government financing that does not provide for allocating funds for Ukraine’s needs, making Germany’s insistence on building an unpopular factory in Grossenhain even more bizarre.
It is recalled that the Joint Economic Forecast, commissioned by Berlin and published twice a year, announced on September 28 that Germany’s economy is set to hit a slump in 2023. The Joint Economic Forecast expects a downswing in Germany’s gross domestic product (GDP) of 0.6% this year after initially predicting in their spring report growth of 0.3%. The revision comes as official numbers showed stagnation in the second quarter of 2023.
The new Joint Economic Forecast confirms the International Monetary Fund’s earlier year forecast that Germany’s economy is set to shrink in 2023. Across the European Union, the European Commission currently predicts 0.8% growth, putting Germany well below the bloc’s average.
According to German economists, skyrocketing energy prices in 2022 — linked to sanctions on Russia — halted post-pandemic economic recovery and is also why the German economy is struggling in 2023. Yet, a small town in Saxony is being forced to host an armaments factory it does not want under the justification of bringing economic prosperity. Rather, the quickest way to economic prosperity for all of Germany is to end its self-sabotaging policy of arming and funding Ukraine in a futile war it cannot win and end the sanctions on Russia.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Ukraine Fatigue Is Worrying NATO Elites – and So They Should Be
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2023
On both sides of the Atlantic, there is now discernible fatigue and anger among citizens over the bottomless money pit that is NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.
The only wonder is that it has taken so long for the Western public to get wise to the scam.
The disgraceful adulation of a Nazi war criminal by the whole Canadian parliament in a perverse show of solidarity with Ukraine against Russia has helped focus public attention on the obscenity of the NATO proxy war.
All told, since the NATO-induced conflict blew up in February last year, the American and European establishments have thrown up to €200 billion into Ukraine to prop up an odious Nazi-infested regime.
All that largesse that is billed to U.S. and European taxpayers has resulted in a slaughter in Europe not seen since the Second World War – and a failed Ukrainian state. And of course huge profits for the NATO military-industrial complex that bankrolls the elite politicians.
Times are changing though. In the United States, the financially conservative Republicans have had enough of the blank checks to the Kiev regime. The U.S. Congress finally showed a modicum of sanity to prevent a government financial shutdown – by dropping military aid to Ukraine. That shows how twisted Washington’s priorities have become when national self-interest has to wrestle with funding for a Nazi regime.
And then following the Congressional vote to temporarily end funding for Ukraine, the Kiev regime’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba dared to reprimand American lawmakers: “We are now working with both sides of Congress to make sure that it does not (get) repeated under any circumstances.”
Meanwhile in Europe, Slovakian citizens have voted for a new government to end the military fueling of war in Ukraine. The Smer-SD party led by Robert Fico won the parliamentary elections primarily on the vow to shut off any further weapons supply to the Kiev regime.
This week also saw massive protests in Germany against Olaf Scholz’s coalition government over the latter’s abject pro-war policies in Ukraine. German Unity Day on October 3 prompted a mass rally in Berlin denouncing the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and calling for peace negotiations to end the conflict.
There were also unprecedented protests across Poland in Warsaw, Lodz and other cities against the PiS government’s slavish implementation of the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Faced with millions of Ukrainian refugees and neglect of social needs for Poles, the PiS ruling party has recently threatened to end weapons supply to Kiev – a move less about principle and more about trying to buy votes in the forthcoming election on October 15. Nevertheless, the belated move by the Polish government illustrates the concern among European leaders about growing public disdain over the seemingly endless financial aid allocated to Ukraine.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, says it is a “worrying” sign that Washington for the first time closed the coffers for Ukraine.
The EU foreign ministers held a summit in Kiev on Monday. It was the first time that their summit was convened in a non-EU country. The agenda was a little too self-conscious, slated as a show of “solidarity” with Ukraine.
Borrell and the other EU diplomats said the summit was a warning to Russia to not count on “weariness” among Europeans over support for Ukraine. Who is he trying to convince? Russia or Europeans?
The unelected European elites described the war in Ukraine as an “existential crisis” which requires never-ending support for the Nazi regime against Russia.
Such melodrama needs serious qualification. The conflict is only “existential” for certain people: the NATO ideologues, the elitist leaders, the military-industrial complex, and the corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev. But it’s not existential for most other people who want to end this insane slaughter, grotesque wasting of public finances, and perilous flirting with nuclear war.
Significantly, the contrived EU summit in Kiev was not attended by Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. In highly critical comments on the EU’s misplaced priorities, he said that other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.
The Hungarian diplomat slammed the EU leaders for their double standards and hypocrisy, adding: “I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized.”
At least two members of the EU and the NATO alliance – Hungary and Slovakia’s new government – are opposed to the absurd military and financial support fueling the war in Ukraine. Both countries want peace negotiations with Russia to be prioritized. There is an unavoidable sense that this common sense dissent will grow into a domino effect because it is the truth and has an unassailable moral force.
What the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated clearly to the Western public is just how morally bankrupt their governments and media have become. American and European elitist leaders may kid themselves a little longer by pretending there is no weariness and fatigue over their proxy war against Russia. The more they pretend the greater the eventual crash and downfall from public anger.
Netherlands sued for stopping ship deliveries to Russia
RT | October 4, 2023
The largest Dutch shipbuilder is seeking compensation from the government for damage caused by the sanctions on Russia, which have prevented it from honoring a number of contracts.
The ongoing legal battle, which started in May with a suit filed by Damen Shipyards Group at the district court in Rotterdam, was revealed by Bloomberg on Tuesday. Company spokesman Rick van de Weg later confirmed the pending proceedings to other media outlets.
Damen is a 90-year-old Gorinchem-based family-owned business which builds various types of vessels, from warships to luxury yachts. Days before the hostilities in Ukraine erupted in February last year, the company delivered a dredger to Russia for duty in the Arctic, according to Bloomberg.
Sanctions banning most business transactions with Russia, which the EU imposed in retaliation for the conflict, have prevented Damen from fulfilling its obligations under several contracts. It has also suspended its engineering branch in the country.
The Western sanctions supposed to cripple the Russian economy and force Moscow to concede defeat in Ukraine have not been as efficient as their architects had hoped.
The G7 oil price cap, a mechanism intended to force Russia to sell crude at or below $60 per barrel, does not appear to be working, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted last week. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak stated on Tuesday that the impossibility of enforcing the price cap was apparent to Moscow from the start.
The EU’s decision to decouple from cheap Russian gas undermined the competitiveness of its heavy industries, in some cases forcing energy-intensive manufacturing to shut down.
Nevertheless, Germany is likely still consuming natural gas originating in Russia, Uniper CEO Michael Lewis said last week. The German wholesaler buys liquified natural gas in the open market and cannot be certain about where it comes from, he explained.
EU prepared to give in to Hungarian demands – FT
RT | October 3, 2023
The European Commission is expected to unfreeze about €13 billion ($13.6 billion) in EU funds for Hungary by the end of November, aiming to secure the country’s support for an increase to the bloc’s budget and massive financial assistance to Kiev, according to three officials briefed on the discussions cited by Financial Times.
In December, Brussels froze €22 billion ($23 billion) in cohesion funds allocated to Hungary. The money was blocked over major concerns related to the independence of judges and the country’s failure to comply with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights on issues including LGBTQ rights, academic freedom, and asylum.
The funds were supposed to be frozen until Budapest complies with rules protecting human rights and the rule of law. In May, the Hungarian government reached a preliminary deal on key judicial reforms. As a result, Brussels agreed to release more than half of the amount.
By unblocking the funds, EU authorities expect to gain Hungarian support for boosting the bloc’s budget and providing significant financial aid to Ukraine.
The commission had previously proposed a €66 billion increase to the EU’s shared budget to cover increased costs, part of which are expected to contribute to a €50 billion financial package for Kiev to help in covering the country’s expenses for the next four years.
Since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s line of argument has been broadly different from that of the EU and its allies. The PM has repeatedly criticized sanctions against Russia and refused to send weapons to Ukraine. Orban also urged the EU to persuade Moscow and Kiev to begin peace negotiations.
In retaliation, the Ukrainian National Corruption Prevention Agency (NCPA) designated Hungary’s largest commercial lender OTP Bank an “international sponsor of war” over allegedly providing preferential lending terms to the Russian military.
Budapest responded by blocking the release of funding totaling €500 million earmarked for military aid to Ukraine by means of the European Peace Facility (EPF) mechanism.
Russia raises military budget for 2024 by 70%: what does this mean?
By Gilbert Doctorow | September 30, 2023
It is always a pleasure to have an on-air chat with WION, the premier English-language global broadcaster of India. Yesterday was especially so when their program host posed a series of very relevant questions about the just announced Russian military budget for 2024 showing a 70% increase in spending over the current year. Naturally, one wonders about Russia’s intentions: how will these new funds be spent? On which weapons systems? What kind of message is Russia sending to the West by this increase? How will the increased military spending impact on social spending within Russia or, put another way, are guns and butter a sustainable political course?
In this introduction, I will not telescope my answers. I am hopeful that readers will watch the interview and follow the logic set out therein.
However, I can say here that I set out the key drivers for the increased spending. One is the latest Russian assumptions on when the war in Ukraine will end, on how it may escalate into a general Russia-NATO war as the Biden administration resists admitting defeat in Ukraine, which is possibly imminent, by expanding the conflict and introducing NATO forces on the ground. The second is the expenses related to the near doubling of the size of the Russian army now underway following the induction of 300,000 men one year ago by mobilization of reserves and the sign-up of more than 400,000 volunteers that we have seen since the start of this year.
As regards the other issues, such as the 6% of GDP that the new military budget represents, or the 2% overall budget deficit that Russia is now incurring, I explain in this interview why such figures cannot be commented upon as if in a vacuum but must be compared to what countries in the West are now experiencing, as well as to Russia’s own Soviet past.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023
A Semi-Competent Report On Energy Storage From Britain’s Royal Society
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | September 28, 2023
If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.
Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.
But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”
Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.
On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.
But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.
But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:
Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.
Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.
Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:
The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):
Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.
As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.
Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.
I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:
This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.
But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?
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How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
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How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
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They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
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And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?
The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.
Britain is Leading the World in Committing Economic Suicide
BY DAVID CRAIG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
As our leaders bicker over how fast Britain should get to Net Zero, you’ll hear politicians, eco-zealots and media pundits claiming that Britain is leading the world in reducing our country’s CO2 emissions. This is one of the few statements about climate made by our ruling elites which does actually appear to be true. Since 1990, Britain’s CO2 emissions have almost halved from 604 million metric tons to just under 350 million tons by 2022. That equates to a drop from 10 metric tons per capita in 1990 to below five tons per capita:
While celebrating this great supposed ‘success’, our politicians, media and eco-activists often seem less keen to explain how this reduction in CO2 emissions was achieved.
Here’s another chart. It shows the share of the U.K.’s GDP made up by manufacturing:
Since 1990, the year U.K. CO2 emissions started falling, the percentage of U.K. GDP from manufacturing has also halved from just over 16% to around 8%.
Moreover, during the same period, the number of people employed in U.K. manufacturing has dropped from 4,963,000 to just 2,601,000. A cynic mighty be tempted to wonder what happened to all those hundreds of thousands of highly-skilled, highly-paid green jobs that our rulers promised us would be created in Britain by the energy transition away from fossil fuels to renewables.
For years the U.K. has had some of the world’s highest energy prices due to our replacement of cheap, reliable fossil fuels with expensive, unreliable and intermittent supposed ‘renewables’. In 2022, in the U.K., which gets only 42% of its electricity from fossil fuels, household energy cost $0.41/kWh. In France, where 70% of its electricity comes from cheap, reliable nuclear, electricity costs were just $0.21/kWh – almost half the U.K. price. In the U.S., which generates about 60% of its energy from fossil fuels, the price was $0.18/kWh – less than half the U.K.’s cost. In China, where 55% of electricity comes from coal and a total of 83% comes from fossil fuels, household electricity costs are only $0.08/kWh – a quarter of the U.K.’s cost. There is a similar picture in India, where over 75% of electricity generation is from fossil fuels, of which three quarters comes from cheap, energy-rich coal, household energy costs only $0.07/kWh – a sixth of the U.K. cost.
So, just to put all of this into context, we can look at how much of the U.K.’s GDP comes from manufacturing – making real things that people in Britain and abroad want to buy – compared to our major competitors. In 2022, 8% of the U.K.’s GDP came from manufacturing compared to 9% for France, 12% for the U.S.A., 13% for India, 14% for Italy, 18% for Germany and a massive 28% for China.
A picture is emerging which suggests that the more a country relies on renewables for its electricity, the higher are its energy costs and the lower is the percentage of its GDP made up by manufacturing.
Economist Richard Salsman wrote: “The science of economics is clear: the production of money and debt is not equivalent to the production of real wealth. To claim otherwise is to follow fantasy, not reality – or science.”
As we in Britain enthusiastically print money and increase national debt in pursuit of our Net Zero goals, we seem to be wrecking U.K. manufacturing with high energy prices thus committing economic suicide as U.K. manufacturing moves to countries with lower energy costs. It’s more than astonishing that not a single one of our politicians and media supposed ‘experts’ seem to understand or are willing to admit what is actually happening and how the U.K. is committing an extraordinary act of self-mutilation by cutting the country’s CO2 emissions.
If there really was a climate crisis, the U.K.’s economic suicide to supposedly save the planet might be justified. But as I try to explain in my most recent book There is No Climate Crisis, there is no emergency that warrants such extreme actions. Yes, the Earth has probably warmed up a little since the freezing 1960s and 1970s when many experts were panicking about global cooling and the advent of a new ice age, which experts predicted would cause crop failures, mass starvation, the migration of millions from the cooling North towards warmer countries and wars over scarce food supplies. But this warming is just part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling driven mainly by the Earth’s rotation, solar activity and cloud cover. Moreover, the ice caps aren’t melting, in spite of the Guardian and the New York Times regularly predicting their demise. The polar bears are doing fine. In fact there may be so many of them that they may have difficulty finding sufficient food. The Great Barrier Reef has record levels of coral. Around five times as much U.S. forest burned each year in the scorching hot 1920s and 1930s as is burnt now. Even the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) admits that there has been no acceleration in sea level rise for the last 100 years. And the number of people killed by extreme weather events has fallen by over 95% in the last 120 or so years in spite of the world’s population quadrupling from under two billion in 1900 to almost eight billion now.
It’s a pity that those dragging us towards their Net Zero nirvana aren’t a bit more forthcoming about the economic devastation that their deluded policies are inflicting upon us.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
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