BBC Admit Their Pakistan Floods Claim Was False
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | November 13, 2022
There’s been an interesting follow up to BBC’s recent story about the Pakistan floods at the end of August.
Readers will recall that the claim that one third of the country was under water immediately set off my BS detector, and I did a full analysis here, totally debunking it.
But just a couple of days after my piece, the BBC’s More or Less radio programme also looked at the claim, after some viewers had complained.
They interviewed an environmental scientist who checked out what the various satellite records indicated. His conclusion was that the true figure was that about 10% of the country had been affected by floods, and much of this was short term.
In fact, all the BBC had to do was what I did in a few minutes, and check what NASA were reporting.
It was plainly evident that nothing like a third of the country had flooded. Indeed a simple look at the map would have shown them that much of Pakistan is either mountainous or desert, which would be impossible to flood.
They could also have checked with the UN disaster agency, OCHA, who were publishing regular reports on the flooding.
According to them, the area affected was 75000 sq km, or 9% of the country.
In fact, these are precisely the sort of checks the BBC should have carried out before making their absurd claim. One which anybody with an ounce of common sense, or integrity, would have immediately suspected was wrong.
It is doubly ironic that the BBC’s defence was that the one third claim had been widely reported across the media. This shows just how utterly corrupt most of the media is nowadays.
Russia brands US weapons claim ‘a lie’
RT | November 9, 2022
US accusations that North Korea was supplying Russia with ammunition are lies, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said on Wednesday. She added that Washington was just looking for a pretext to impose new sanctions on North Korea and made up the ammunition claim for that purpose.
“There was no clear explanation for these statements, nor could there be, because everything said by American representatives is a lie from the beginning to the end,” Zakharova said in a daily briefing, further describing the claim as “another example of [fake news] and speculations spread by the West about Russia.”
On November 2, the US National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, announced that North Korea had sent a “significant” number of artillery shells for resupplying the military effort in Ukraine. CNN also reported the claim, citing US intelligence assessments.
North Korea denied the accusations on Tuesday. “We once again make clear that we have never had ‘arms dealings’ with Russia and that we have no plan to do so in the future,” said the Defense Ministry in Pyongyang, accusing the US of “persistently spreading a groundless rumor.”
US claims about North Korean ammunition supplies to Russia date back to September. In response, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, demanded in the Security Council that the US and UK provide evidence of their claims, or be considered peddlers of fake news.
Meanwhile, the US has supplied Ukraine with weapons, ammunition, and assorted military equipment valued at over $54 billion since the hostilities escalated in February. Most of its NATO allies have followed suit, all the while insisting they were not a party to the conflict.
Last month, Czech media reported that Washington was looking to buy $3 billion worth of anti-aircraft missiles and artillery ammunition from South Korea. When Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned that report at the Valdai Discussion Club, South Korea denied it.
“We’ve provided humanitarian and peaceful assistance to Ukraine but never lethal weapons,” said South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, adding that his country is “trying to maintain peaceful relations with all countries around the world, including Russia.”
American voters don’t need Russian trolls to tell them how bad things are
By Robert Bridge | RT | November 8, 2022
As US voters head to the polls for the much-anticipated Midterms, talk of Russian trolls monkeying with US democracy is back in the news. But does the country really need Russia’s help in “stoking anger” among the electorate?
If the hyper-liberal New York Times can be taken at face value just two days before an epic election, Russia’s underground army of trolls is, once again, attempting to seed the minds of malleable US voters to the Kremlin’s advantage. If those charges sounded outlandish in 2016, when the Democrats accused Russian ‘influencers’ of denying Hillary Clinton the presidency, they seem doubly so today.
The Times reported that the goal of the reactivated Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg is to “stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system.” Judging by the looks of things, the Russians are a bit late to the party. It would be hard to name another period in US politics when the level of anger and distrust has been so extreme, and that is something the Russian trolls, despite their supposed superhuman abilities, can’t take credit for.
Take inflation, for example, the single most pressing issue among US voters. It doesn’t require any sort of Russian mind-bending operation to inform Americans that the economic situation is deteriorating before their eyes, and has been ever since Biden entered office. They only need to look at their food and utility bills each month, and the price at the gas pump, to feel fury for what the Biden administration has done to the economy in a shockingly short period of time. Any effort to blame these negative sentiments on “the Russians” is just another way of the Democrats saying that soaring prices is “disinformation” and unworthy of your attention.
The Times mentions another point of contention among US voters, particularly the Republicans, and that is the blank-check powers that have been awarded to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Citing the work of “cybersecurity researchers,” the article alleges that the Russian influence campaign “appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.” Again, here is an issue that has already been undermined by the Republicans ever since the Democrats commenced with their proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, a massively hazardous venture where no expense is considered too great.
On this point, the Democrats are able to claim, much like in 2016, that the Russians and the Republicans are working in collusion, this time against Kiev. The Russians are anxious to see US military spending on Ukraine come to an end as all of those sophisticated weapons are only prolonging the conflict. Meanwhile, some of the Republicans campaigned on promises to terminate funding to the Zelensky regime and divert those billions of dollars to national security projects, like fortifying their own border and fighting crime.
It would be a mistake to think that Americans are not acutely aware of the issues now dividing the country. Every day, social media users can see for themselves everything they need to know about crime, inflation, transgender issues, and the border, to name just a few of the hot-button issues dividing the country. To suggest that Russian trolls are required to “stoke conservative anger” is to grossly underestimate the political intelligence of the average US voter, who appears better informed than ever before. The fact is, the Democrats are afraid of being wiped out in a landslide come Tuesday. Conjuring up the ghost of Russia interference at the 11th hour reveals their insecurity and will provide them some partial excuse in the event of a blowout.
With regards to these latest accusations of election interference, Moscow is understandably losing its patience. It requires either a certain lack of self-awareness, or an astonishing excess of arrogance, for the United States to lecture any country on the question of meddling. After all, in the case of Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, we’re talking about a mere $150,000 spent on several thousand Facebook ads, many of which had no political message whatsoever. When it is considered that US presidential elections have turned into multi-billion-dollar pageants, with no expense spared on campaign attack ads, it is hard to imagine that Russia’s severely limited campaign had any effect whatsoever (it needs emphasis that not even Facebook is entirely sure where the posts originated from. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, would only say they “likely operated out of Russia”).
Now compare that to the way the United States “meddles” in the affairs of foreign countries, like Ukraine. In November 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovich opted in favor of closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union instead of the EU, protests broke out in the country. How did the United States respond? Not with internet trolls, that’s for sure. It dispatched high-ranking US officials to Kiev, like Senator John McCain and Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, where they agitated the masses against the democratically elected government. On the question of who would ultimately govern the splintered country, Nuland was overheard in a phone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine handpicking the eligible candidates.
Once again, the United States proved that there are rules for itself and rules for the rest of the world, and increasingly it is the American people who must pay the price for that supreme arrogance.
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.
How sarcastic remarks became basis for resurrecting ‘Russiagate’
By Drago Bosnic | November 8, 2022
The so-called “Russiagate” conspiracy theory has been the main go-to scapegoat for the failures of the DNC, be it the 2016 presidential or 2018 midterm elections. For six years the mainstream propaganda machine has been parroting the supposed “Russian election meddling” narrative.
Despite the official investigation giving no proof to support the claims that Moscow secured the United States presidency for Donald Trump, “Russiagate” persisted even after he left office. Several major events, such as the humiliating US defeat in Afghanistan and the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, pushed the debunked conspiracy theory out of the spotlight for some time. Still, just when the world forgot about “Russiagate”, the propaganda machine decided to resurrect it as a scapegoat once again, this time for the 2022 midterms.
On November 7, The New York Times published a report claiming that the Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, the alleged “true founder and financial backer” of the “Wagner” PMC (private military company), made a “sardonic” statement about the supposed Russian meddling in 2022 US midterms. The Western mainstream media regularly accuse Prigozhin of “having close ties” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and they’ve even given him a rather cliché “supervillain” nickname – “Putin’s Chef”. Despite holding no official position in the Russian government, he is accused of conducting “clandestine operations” for the Kremlin, including alleged election interference.
“Gentlemen, we have interfered, we do interfere and we will [continue to] interfere,” Prigozhin said in a statement in response to a question from a Russian news outlet. “We will do it carefully, precisely, surgically as we are capable of doing it. During our targeted operations, we will remove both kidneys and liver at once,” he concluded in what was quite obviously a sarcastic remark. Russian news agency RIA Novosti described the comments as such as well, but the US mainstream propaganda machine is adamant that the statement is “clear proof” that Russia will supposedly affect the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections.
In 2018, Prigozhin was even indicted by the US that he funded and organized the so-called “troll factory” to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections, which was one of the staples of the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory. Despite no clear evidence that he did any of this, in 2021 the FBI put Prigozhin on its most-wanted list, while the US Treasury imposed sanctions on him for allegedly “organizing disinformation campaigns” in elections in Asia, Europe and Africa. The Biden administration placed additional sanctions on Prigozhin in March, due to his supposed “crucial role” in Russia’s counteroffensive against NATO aggression in Europe.
The US State Department also commented on Prigozhin’s statement, with the spokesman Ned Price calling it “a bold confession”. She added that it was “clear that a person of Mr. Prigozhin’s stature would not be in a position to make such claims unless the Kremlin, at some level didn’t approve.”
According to The New York Times, the unnamed “researchers” have supposedly “detected a new, though more concentrated, campaign by Russia to try to influence Tuesday’s midterm elections.” The alleged goal is “to empower angry conservative voters with the aim of undermining faith in American democracy … at a time when soaring energy prices and inflation threaten to dent support for the war, the campaign also appears intent on undermining the Biden administration’s extensive financial and military support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.”
The report further claims that “the campaign — using accounts that pose as enraged Americans — has specifically targeted Democratic candidates in the most heated races, including the Senate seats being contested in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania.” The alleged “calculation appears to be that a Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives could dent American support for the war in Ukraine.”
The claims are quite clearly yet another attempt to use foreign powers as scapegoats and an excuse between political opponents in the US. The New York Times is infamous for being one of the strongholds of the neoliberal portion of the US establishment. By accusing the “angry conservatives” of working with Russia, the outlet is obviously trying to discredit the GOP to help the Democrats and give them at least somewhat better chances in the midterms.
The Republicans themselves aren’t immune to this, as they also resort to it by accusing the DNC of working with China. However, in this particular case, the Democrats, terrified of the prospect of losing both the House of Representatives and the Senate, are trying everything in their power to sway public opinion toward supporting their policies, both domestic and foreign, the unpopularity of which has reached its peak in recent months.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
The climate scaremongers: Health chief’s nonsensical warning of doom
By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | November 4, 2022
We are used to silly, irresponsible climate scare stories from the BBC and the papers, but when they come from the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency it is quite another matter.
According to the Guardian last week: ‘The climate crisis poses a “significant and growing threat” to health in the UK, the country’s most senior public health expert has warned.
‘Professor Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, said there was a common misconception that a warmer climate would bring net health benefits due to milder winters. But the climate emergency would bring far wider-reaching health impacts, she said, with food security, flooding and mosquito-borne diseases posing threats.
‘Referring to the recent floods in Pakistan, Harries said the UK needed to build resilience to protect the population from the health impacts of extreme weather events. “Colleagues from Pakistan . . . are suffering from the impacts of flooding. They are dealing with stagnant water, higher risks of sewage overflowing into publicly accessible water spaces,” she said. “We are seeing some of the things that could be happening in the UK”.’
She went on to repeat the fake claims that this summer’s heatwave had killed 2,800 people, a claim already exposed as a sham on TCW. And she warned us that we would have to stay indoors in the middle of the day in summer, and have longer summer holidays for schools. She even ridiculously claimed that we would soon have outbreaks of dengue fever.
The comparison with Pakistan is utterly absurd, and there’s no evidence that summers in England are getting wetter, or for that matter drier.
Indeed, even her claim that we would soon be having Mediterranean summers is just as ridiculous. The simple fact is that even this summer was not as hot as 1976. The average summer temperature may have increased, as cold summers become less frequent, but even with the wall-to-wall sunshine we had this year, summers show no sign of breaking through that 16C barrier:
By contrast, average summer temperatures in the south of France are typically six or seven degrees higher.
Harries’s comments about dengue are particularly misleading. The spread of dengue globally has not been because of climate change, as one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases, Professor Duane Gubler, has explained.
According to him, the principal drivers are urbanisation, globalisation and lack of effective mosquito control. The mosquitoes which carry the virus thrive in urban habitats, where dengue quickly spreads, while air travel provides the ideal mechanism for transport of viruses to new cities, regions and continents. The result, he says, is epidemic dengue.
The World Health Organisation also notes that the mosquito which has brought the dengue virus to Europe is actually adapted to cold weather: ‘Aedes albopictus, a secondary dengue vector in Asia, has spread to North America and more than 25 countries in the European Region, largely due to the international trade in used tyres (a breeding habitat) and other goods (e.g. lucky bamboo). Aedes albopictus is highly adaptive and, therefore, can survive in cooler temperate regions of Europe.’
Britain is no stranger to mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue. Large epidemics of dengue have been recorded here and elsewhere in Europe since the 18th century. One massive epidemic, estimated at one million cases with at least 1,000 deaths, occurred in Greece in 1927-28. Climate change has nothing to do with the spread of dengue.
And what about this ‘food security’ Harries is waffling on about? Agricultural output has been rising since the BSE scare of the 1990s:
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
If the professor is worried about Britain’s food security, maybe she should be objecting to the government’s plans to rewild large swathes of our countryside, to attack the dairy and meat industry and to build solar farms on prime agricultural land.
BBC’s Arctic warming trick
ACCORDING to a BBC report, Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago deep inside the Arctic Circle, is heating at six times the global average. (The BBC and Guardian now routinely call it ‘heating’ rather than ‘warming’, though I don’t think the Svalbarders would call average annual temperatures of 1C ‘hot’!)
The report, Svalbard: The race to save the fastest-warming place on Earth, states: ‘Svalbard is home to the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, Longyearbyen, which is estimated to be heating at six times the global average. So what is being done to save it?
‘Svalbard’s church is a blood-red wooden building with bright white trim – the most northerly place of worship in the world. Its priest, Siv Limstrand, has been here for only three years but is shocked by the impact of climate change she has witnessed in that time. “Every Sunday when we gather for worship, a part of our intercessions is always about climate change and its threats,” explains Limstrand. “We know that the clock is ticking.”
‘You feel on borrowed time here in what successive scientific studies have found is the fastest-warming place on Earth. Experts from the Norwegian Polar Institute are among those who calculate it is heating six times faster than the global average. The consensus is that the temperature in Svalbard has jumped 4C in the past 50 years. Wildlife and human life are now in a struggle to survive. This is why Limstrand’s congregation is praying for help.’
Obviously a priest who has been there three years is an expert on Svalbard’s climate!
But as this is the BBC, they tell you only half the story. In line with most of the Arctic, Svalbard was virtually as warm as now in the 1930s and 40s, as the chart for Bjoernoeya (Bear Island) shows:
https://www.ecad.eu/indicesextremes/customquerytimeseriesplots.php
In between, as the chart highlights, Svalbard went through a drastic cooling episode in the 1960s and 70s. It is from this unusually cold base period that the BBC claim their 4C of warming. That extreme cold interval affected much of the Arctic, and had a particularly catastrophic effect on countries like Iceland. Trausti Jonsson, senior researcher at the Iceland Met Office, lived through those times and said this:
‘In 1965 there was a real and very sudden climatic change in Iceland (deterioration). It was larger in the north than in the south and affected both the agriculture and fishing – and therefore also the whole of society with soaring unemployment rates and a 50 per cent devaluation of the local currency,’
Going further back in time, ice core studies have shown that Svalbard was as warm as now, if not warmer, in the 1300s, before temperatures plunged in the Little Ice Age. The 1800s were the coldest period of the lot in the last 1,000 years.
There is nothing unprecedented or unusual about Svalbard’s climate nowadays. But the BBC would rather the inhabitants return to the freezing days of the 1960s!
How the US regime attempts to control public perception of its aid to Ukraine
By Scott Ritter | RT | November 5, 2022
NBC News has reported that, according to four people familiar with the incident, a phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, turned testy after the Ukrainian leader pressed Biden for more assistance.
On June 15, Biden called Zelensky to inform him of the recent release of some $1 billion in assistance (this included the drawdown of arms and equipment from US Department of Defense inventories valued at $350 million, and $650 million in additional assistance under the department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative). This type of person-to-person communication had become commonplace since Russia’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022, with Biden informing Zelensky of each major assistance allocation in a program that had, as of June 15, seen the dispatch of some $5.6 billion in American military aid.
This time, however, rather than thank the US president, as had been the previous practice, Zelensky proceeded to ask for more assistance, citing specific requests for equipment that had not been included in the June allocation of aid. At this point, NBC’s sources say, Biden lost his temper. “The American people were being quite generous, and his administration and the US military were working hard to help Ukraine, he said, raising his voice, and Zelensky could show a little more gratitude,” the NBC story reports.
According to NBC, the source of Biden’s anger went beyond the lack of gratitude shown by Zelensky (NBC reports that the two leaders have since warmed to one another), but rather the growing realization on the part of the Biden White House that support for the blank check being written for Ukraine’s war effort is waning among members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. With the Republicans expected to retake control of the House of Representatives and positioned to do the same in the Senate in the upcoming mid-term elections, the Biden administration appears poised to try to squeeze out another $40-60 billion in aid during the lame duck session between the election and when the present term of Congress expires next January. It is expected that this new aid package will be challenged by the Republicans, who will seek to have its consideration postponed until the new Republican-controlled Congress is sworn in.
Shortly before NBC News broke the story of the contentious Biden-Zelensky phone call, The New Yorker ran a glowing review of the state of US-Ukrainian military cooperation. Entitled ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine, the piece, authored by Joshua Yaffa, a contributing writer for the magazine, provides an expansive and yet intimate look at the complex interaction between the US and Ukraine about not only the provision of military equipment, but also the active cooperation between US and Ukrainian military and intelligence officials concerning the actual conduct of the conflict, including the provision of targeting data in support of US-provided artillery systems such as the M777 howitzer and the HIMARS multiple rocket launch system.
Its two main messages can be summarized as follows: first, American weapons are helping Ukraine stand up to Russia and showing the world Putin can be defeated, and second, the US is taking every care not to cross any lines that would escalate the conflict into a direct confrontation with Moscow.
Yaffa is an accomplished writer on Russian affairs. His most recent book, ‘Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia’, has won several prizes, and he has published numerous articles in The New Yorker about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But even this extensive journalistic record doesn’t prepare one for the scope and scale of the sources Yaffa was able to draw upon in writing his most recent article. It is a ‘who’s who’ of US and Ukrainian officialdom, both named and unnamed, all of whom are well positioned to provide Yaffa with the kind of inside information that makes his article so attractive, both from an informational aspect, and readability.
On the Ukrainian side, Yaffa interviewed Aleksey Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister; Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Zelensky; Aleksey Danilov, Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council; and “a senior Ukrainian military official” close to the commander in chief of the military, Valery Zaluzhny. Ukrainian officials habitually interact with Western journalists as part of their effort to shape the narrative about the ongoing conflict with Russia. The surprise isn’t that Yaffa was able to interview these individuals, but rather what they were willing to open up about – the hitherto obscure details of the sensitive cooperation between the US and Ukraine in the actual conduct of the conflict.
The US is very controlling about the release of information about classified cooperation with other nations. This reticence to be transparent extends not only to the US officials involved, but also to the foreign nationals participating in the secret work. In short, there is no way the three Ukrainians would have agreed to sit down and talk to Yaffa about these issues unless their participation had been green-lighted by the Biden administration beforehand.
The extent to which the Biden administration was behind the decision to cooperate with Yaffa on this story becomes clear upon closer examination of the anonymous sources drawn upon for the article. “A Biden administration official involved in Ukraine policy”; “a senior official at the Defense Department”; “a person familiar with Biden White House discussions of Ukraine”; “an administration official”; “a senior US official”; “a US military official” close to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley; “a senior Biden administration official”; and “a senior US intelligence official.”
Numerous other sources, both named and unnamed, were also interviewed by Yaffa.
Anyone with any experience with sensitive national security activities knows that there are two hard-fast truths when it comes to such activities – they are highly classified and compartmentalized, and any unauthorized release of information pertaining to such activities is a serious violation of the law, subject to prosecution and imprisonment for anyone caught leaking such information to the press.
Accordingly, either every source cited by Yaffa had been simultaneously overcome with a Lemming-like desire to jump off a figurative cliff, risking losing their careers and going to prison in order to help the young New Yorker contributing writer pull off the scoop of a lifetime, or the Yaffa article was part and parcel of a Biden administration information operation designed to inject a positive narrative about US-Ukrainian military relations into the mainstream discussion on Ukraine in a concerted effort to shape public perception in the lead-up to the mid-term elections.
My money is on the latter.
Good journalism is all about ‘bottom-up’ reporting, where a reporter conceives a story and then runs it to the ground by seeking out interviews with relevant sources. Stenography is about having a story spoon fed to you by sources for the purpose of serving an agenda that has nothing to do with the pursuit of fact-based truth, but rather shaping public opinion about a matter of importance.
Yaffa’s ‘Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine’ is a clever piece of government-dictated stenography disguised as journalism and should be treated as such by all who read it.
Russia Says “Top Priority” Is To Avoid Nuclear Clash, Reiterates Purely Defensive Use
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 2, 2022
Russia on Wednesday warned that the world’s “top priority” should be the nuclear-armed super powers avoiding confrontation at all costs or else this would lead to “catastrophic consequences.”
“We are firmly convinced that in the current difficult and turbulent situation — a consequence of irresponsible and shameless actions aimed at undermining our national security — the top priority is to prevent any military clash of nuclear powers,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.
While not naming its chief nuclear-armed rivals the United States or the United Kingdom specifically, the Kremlin called on all other nuclear states to “abandon dangerous attempts to infringe on each other’s vital interests.”
The statement reiterated a key tenet of Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, saying, “Russia is strictly and consistently guided by the tenet that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” It reemphasized a nuclear doctrine that is “purely defensive in nature” – which only allows deployment of nuclear arms “when the very existence of our state is threatened.”
In a statement early last month, President Joe Biden expressed that he doesn’t think Russia’s Vladimir Putin will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. “Well, I don’t think he will,” Biden previously said in a CNN interview. “But I think that it’s irresponsible for him to talk about it.”
Also on Wednesday The New York Times has published some hugely significant claims…
Senior Russian military leaders recently had conversations to discuss when and how Moscow might use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, contributing to heightened concern in Washington and allied capitals, according to multiple senior American officials.
President Vladimir V. Putin was not a part of the conversations, which were held against the backdrop of Russia’s intensifying nuclear rhetoric and battlefield setbacks.
But the fact that senior Russian military leaders were even having the discussions alarmed the Biden administration because it showed how frustrated Russian generals were about their failures on the ground, and suggests that Mr. Putin’s veiled threats to use nuclear weapons might not just be words.
According to follow-up reporting in CNN, the alleged Kremlin discussion among top officials of using tactical nukes against Ukraine is based on a US intelligence assessment.
But importantly, CNN cites that there remain dissenting opinions within the US intelligence community. CNN’s reporting begins, “Russian military officials have discussed how and under what conditions Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield in Ukraine, according to a US intelligence assessment described to CNN by multiple sources who have read it.”
“The assessment, drafted by the National Intelligence Council, is not a high confidence product and is not raw intelligence but rather analysis, multiple people who have read it told CNN,” the report continues, before emphasizing: “For that reason, some officials believe the conversations reflected in the document may have been taken out of context, and do not necessarily indicate that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.”
It is a significant and eye-brow raising moment when CNN spotlights the likelihood of intelligence ‘cherry picking’ in a story which relates to Russia, which indeed casts serious doubt on the original NYT Times reporting and claims by unnamed US intelligence officials.
On The Worship Of Sacred Cows
The strange death of real journalism
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | November 1, 2022
One of the extraordinary things about the past few years is the extent to which data which very obviously suggests one thing has been reinterpreted to suggest something else, merely to fit the “approved” narrative.
For no subject is this more apparent than that of the miracle covid injections. As a society we strained to attribute as many deaths as possible to “covid” — however unlikely they seemed to be connected. When discussing the vaccines, however, many defenders of the covid-cult seem willing and able to twist themselves into ludicrous contortions in an attempt to explain away any observations which don’t fully support the “safe and effective” (and necessary) official narrative.
This week has actually seen a flurry of such articles, of which the three below are just a selection.
Firstly, Canadian TV News excitedly reported on a study published in JAMA which found that the more severe the symptoms after mRNA vaccination, the higher the antibody levels generated.
This is, of course no surprise whatsoever, though is of questionable relevance given that even the CDC has said that there are “no correlates of protection” in terms of antibody levels. This is amply illustrated by the fact that despite extremely high Spike protein antibody levels in the population, seasonal waves of covid infections still appear to come and go in highly vaccinated countries, and triple (or more) vaccinated people still seem to be getting severely ill and even dying from covid.
The authors, all US clinicians or scientists, conclude their paper thus:
“In conclusion, these findings support reframing post vaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults.”
So, despite a complete lack of evidence for the clinical relevance of the raised antibody levels, they’re essentially saying “tell them that the more ill you are, the better it is working”.
Aside from the dubious ethics of this approach given the lack of supportive evidence of clinical relevance, this would of course discourage recipients from reporting adverse events, further compromising proper safety surveillance and signal detection in relation to these products, not that regulators appear to have actually performed any such useful analysis.
Lest those NOT experiencing side-effects be concerned about a lack of protection, CTVNews was of course happy to reassure them, apparently unaware of the contradiction with their main “message”, stating that:
But even though some people may have small, localized side effects or no symptoms at all, the vaccine still elicits robust immune responses in them too. Nearly all study participants exhibited a positive antibody response after completing a two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.
Our second example of delusional thinking this week is from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Their staff writer Sarah Knapton, who has fairly reliably been against the lockdowns and other restrictions, still cannot bring herself to question the “vaccine is our saviour” story, as evidenced in this bizarre piece, claiming, “Covid vaccines appear to work better for active people… suggesting that hard lockdowns were counterproductive.”
It is of course well known that fit and healthy and regularly active people were always at much lower risk from covid and stopping people exercising during lockdowns was just one of the more ridiculous features of such policies.
Hence it is difficult to see why this observation by a researcher in South Africa should come as a surprise to anyone:
“In terms of policy, retrospectively we can say those hard lockdowns were counterproductive from an immune point of view, and trying to facilitate exercise is beneficial.”
The paper’s authors, writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, conclude that:
“Public health messaging should encourage physical activity as a simple, cost-effective way of enhancing vaccine effectiveness to mitigate the risk of severe Covid-19 illness requiring hospital admission.”
So, apparently, the reason exercise works in reducing covid mortality is by “enhancing vaccine effectiveness”? It seems hard to believe that anyone could fail to see the ridiculousness in that conclusion. However, Sarah clearly doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to promote the vaccines, hence, combining her disdain for lockdowns with her cult-like devotion to the vaccines, she gives her piece the title:
Covid vaccine study finding contradicts lockdown rule
Later, she states that:
A new study by South African researchers has found that people who got the most exercise responded better to the vaccine, with fewer ending up in hospital following the jab.
So basically: lockdowns are bad as they reduce vaccine effectiveness.
You really cannot make this stuff up (well, apart from the fact that some people are making this stuff up).
Finally, this week also saw the publication of a major analysis of the waning over time of vaccine efficacy (for both Astrazeneca and Pfizer mRNA products) in the United Kingdom in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
This was a “target trial”, which seeks to emulate a “real” trial by identifying naturally occuring exposure groups. The study is notable for its size, covering 12.9m people.
Here is not the place to delve into the results in detail, except to mention that within the period of the study vaccine efficacy became negative (meaning an increased risk over the unvaccinated) for deaths and hospitalisation within just a few months of injection for all doses except the 2nd dose of the Pfizer product.
The results are summarised here:
The curious reader may ask why they are combining deaths and hospitalizations into a single metric; if there had actually been any reduction specifically in deaths (or the waning for protection against death had been less), the authors would surely have highlighted that.
The next point about this is that when they say the vaccine efficacy remained above zero “throughout” what they mean is “throughout the period observed”, which was stated to be 98 days (although in the graphs the data appears to extend approximately another week or so beyond that).
It can clearly be seen from the graph below that efficacy is tending consistently downwards (as the RR, or relative risk, trends upwards towards 1), and by eye one can estimate that it too would turn negative after around 120 days, or 4 months.
No mention of this is made in the paper.
The final point to make is that in attempting to explain away this phenomenon, the authors claim that:
We believe that the most likely explanation for negative VE/rVE is that vaccination caused recipients to believe they were protected, leading them to change their behaviour in ways that increase their chance of contracting the infection.
Aside from there being no evidence for this assertion (or “belief” as they quite rightly call it), it is to be noted that most of the severe illness is seen within the elderly and frail, and it is hard to imagine these people deciding suddenly to start partying after vaccination.
In fact, a notable feature of the vaccination campaign was that, in the elderly at least, the level of fear and apprehension about the virus appeared to be largely unchanged afterwards.
Moreover, for the authors’ explanation to have any credence, the vaccinees’ confidence would have had to have increased over time since injection, to account for the direction of travel of vaccine efficacy, whereas surely the opposite would seem more likely.
Stop Press:
Sarah Knapton has written a further piece for the Daily Telegraph. The headline and byline are below. The word “vaccine” does not appear anywhere in the article, despite the plethora of published papers now linking the mRNA vaccines to cardiac issues.
The BBC’s Hurricane Unreality Checked
By Paul Homewood |October 26, 2022
I have collaborated with Net Zero Watch to produce this video on hurricanes.
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Israeli rabbi says ‘kill everyone in Gaza, including babies’
The Cradle | March 24, 2024
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the Shirat Moshe yeshiva (religious school) in the occupied city of Jaffa, called on the Israeli army to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
During a conference on 8 March, Mali said that “according to the halachic principle (a religious-ethical system of legal reasoning in Judaism), all residents of Gaza must be killed.”
When asked during the conference if babies should be killed as well, he said: “The same thing. You can’t be clever with the Torah. Today he’s a baby, tomorrow he’s a fighter. There are no questions here. Today’s terrorists were previously 8-year-old children.”
“Those who create the terrorists” should also be killed, he said in reference to women in Gaza.
The Rabbi went on to explain that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “Mitzvah war,” which is defined as a war of “commandment” in Jewish tradition. According to Jewish law, this kind of war does not require permission from a “Sanhedrin,” also known as a council or assembly, such as the war against Amalek – previously declared in a biblical reference by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the war on Gaza.
“There is a difference between a civilian population in other places and a civilian population in Gaza. In Gaza, according to estimates, 95 to 98 percent want us destroyed.”
“Since this is a sensitive issue, and I was told that it is being uploaded on the Internet, I want to be ahead of the curve and say that the bottom line is that you have to do exactly what is said in the IDF’s order,” Mali added.
The rabbi’s students in the Shirat Moshe yeshiva serve in the Israeli army. The Yeshiva is sponsored by the Israeli government. … Full article
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