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Babyon Bee’s legal counsel demands retraction of NYT article that paints satire as “misinformation”

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 3, 2021

Seth Dillon, CEO of Christian news satire site TheBabylon Bee, has announced that his legal counsel has sent a letter to The New York Times demanding the retraction of an article that insinuates The Babylon Bee is “misinformation.”

“We took this action because their article was—and remains—defamatory,” Dillon tweeted.

The original version of The New York Times’ article branded The Babylon Bee “a far-right misinformation site” that “sometimes trafficked in misinformation under the guise of satire.”

After pushback from Dillon and The Babylon Bee’s founder, Adam Ford, The New York Times replaced these claims with the claim that The Babylon Bee “has feuded with Facebook and the fact-checking site Snopes over whether the site published misinformation or satire.”

But Ford slammed the update, describing it as “awful and malicious and precisely worded to be so.”

In a subsequent interview, Dillon said The Babylon Bee was considering legal action against The New York Times and argued that mainstream media outlets that accuse The Babylon Bee of being misinformation are doing so in an attempt to get the satire site deplatformed by Big Tech.

“They put this stuff out there and if they can get it to stick, then then we have no platform remaining,” Dillon said. “There’s not going to be anybody who wants to host our stuff. … It’s an effort to try and cancel us.”

And Big Tech’s previous treatment of The Babylon Bee highlights how characterizing its content as something other than satire can have a negative impact on its business. Last year, Facebook claimed a Monty Python spoof post from The Babylon Bee was “inciting violence” and demonetized its entire page.

Following the announcement of this legal demand letter, Dillon picked apart The New York Times’ update and noted that Snopes had retracted its insinuations that The Babylon Bee was pushing misinofrmation.

“We have not, in fact, feuded with Snopes as to whether we publish satire or misinformation,” Dillon wrote. “Snopes retracted that insinuation with an editors’ note saying it was never their intent to call our motives into question. It’s therefore misleading and malicious to characterize that incident as a feud, as if Snopes ever openly stood by the claim that we are misinformation and not satire.”

“For better or worse, the NY Times is considered a ‘reliable source,’” Dillon added. “We cannot stand idly by as they act with malice to misrepresent us in ways that jeopardize our business.”

The Babylon Bee’s legal demand letter to The New York Times follows investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas filing a defamation lawsuit against The Times earlier this year after it described Project Veritas reporting as “false,” “deceptive,” and “with no verifiable evidence.”

A judge has ruled that The New York Times used “actual malice” when it accused Project Veritas of being deceptive and the lawsuit is now approaching the discovery phase with The New York Times recently filing a motion for stay of discovery process in an attempt to delay discovery.

June 3, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Response to Fauci emails proves everything is fake, narrative management trumps reality, and those in power want it so

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | June 3, 2021

Watching the media coverage – or lack thereof – of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails and what they mean for the origin of the coronavirus, one is struck by how relentlessly fake everything is, from public health experts to science.

One of the things the emails suggest is that Fauci colluded with Peter Daszak – head of the EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled US research funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – to suppress and dismiss any notion that the virus causing Covid-19 may not have evolved naturally.

Thing is, Daszak actually went around giving interviews about his work in China throughout last year, and nobody in the media thought to connect the dots. Simply put, Donald Trump said the virus came from China and might have come from a lab, therefore that had to be wrong and racist, end of story, case closed.

That’s just one, most recent and most acute example of Narrative trumping reality at all cost. Millions of deaths, widespread destruction of the economy, tectonic changes in society itself? Small price to pay for “progress” and ensuring the “correct” outcome of the 2020 election, the fortifiers of Our Democracy might say, without anyone batting an eye. “Build back better!” the press parrots instead.

Trump disagreeing with CNN is a mortal threat to democracy and free speech, but Biden telling a reporter he’d rather run her over with an electric truck than answer a question about the war currently going on in Israel is a funny joke, haha, how hilarious. What flavor of ice cream did you order, sir?

This may seem partisan at first blush, but let’s remember this is the same media that once proudly carried water for the narrative about “Saddam’s WMDs.” So the old Democrat-vs-Republican dichotomy doesn’t really work here, and misses the bigger picture to boot.

A truly free society would have no official narratives, Australian columnist Caitlin Johnstone wrote earlier this week. Thing is, modern societies are not free, and official narratives are all they really have. Where would Joe Biden’s legitimacy be without the January 6 Capitol “insurrection” narrative?

American founders codified the First Amendment because they regarded a free press necessary for a free republic. Yet the corporate media complex and their Big Tech counterparts have become a lapdog, not a watchdog, of power. Even the agencies, once thought neutral and objective, are in on it. AP literally rewrote its stylebook to limit the use of “riot” last summer. Reuters “fact-checked” Biden’s eulogy for Robert Byrd as false because the Democrat senator wasn’t a “grand wizard” of the KKK but merely an “exalted cyclops.”

What this Orwellian replacement of facts with narratives does is condition the public to echo Hillary Clinton’s infamous Benghazi defense: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

“Facts” mean nothing to this crowd. “Science” isn’t a rigorous process of finding the truth, but a word-totem invoked to grant authority and banish dissent. “Truth” is whatever they declare it is at the moment, and when it stops being convenient they’ll shamelessly go back and rewrite their own words, pretending all along that that’s what they’ve always believed. Yes, it’s literally Orwellian behavior, but they don’t seem to care.

After all, what are you going to do, change the channel? Actually, that’s happening. Month after month, ratings reports show CNN and MSNBC getting their clock cleaned by Fox News – and Tucker Carlson in particular. The response is to triple down on wokeness and Democrat talking points, while waging a veritable jihad against Fox for “misinformation.”

To think that the media will come to their senses when the reality of ratings hits them in the face, therefore, is foolish. They simply don’t give a damn. Could it be that they don’t care for money as much as they care about power? And not just proximity to political power, but the power to shape and control reality itself, to remake society according to their utopian ideas. Even assuming those ideas are good – and that’s debatable at best – having that sort of power corrupts absolutely, to borrow the expression from Lord Acton.

The media were meant to be a means through which the public collectively perceives reality – not the creators of reality itself! Yet they act as if the latter is true and intended. That’s dangerous. They believe themselves in control of reality, to the point where they’re impossible to reason with. Confront them with actual facts, or principles, or laws of physics, and they either censor you – or cackle and carry on.

Biden’s behavior starts making sense when you understand he exists in a fantasy world, entirely conjured by the press and his staff. As do thousands of activists, ‘NGOs’ and cultist consumers of US government grants around the world. How does one reach these people, who have internalized the “logic” of Who/Whom? That might be the most important question facing not just the US, but the world, very soon.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator

June 3, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

Australia’s drug regulator considers referring vaccine hesitant Facebook posts to police

The regulator cited potential two-year jail terms in some instances

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 1, 2021

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), is considering referring Facebook posts containing claims about COVID vaccine deaths to the police after a post showing Labor backbencher Julian Hill getting his vaccine was met with mass pushback from vaccine skeptics.

The post was ratioed with almost twice the number of comments to engagements – a common sign that a post is unpopular.

Many of the comments noted that the vaccine is “experimental,” described Hill’s post as “propaganda,” and voiced their objections to the vaccine.

But The Guardian Australia focused on alleged posts from some Facebook users that purportedly contained an image that cited the TGA and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 200 deaths.

The figure is a reference to the TGA’s disclosure in its May 27 COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report that it has received “210 reports of deaths following immunisation.” However, the TGA insists that only one of these deaths was caused by the vaccines.

After The Guardian Australia contacted the TGA, it said the alleged posting of claims that the vaccine had caused more than 200 deaths were “particularly concerning” and that it would consider referring these posts to the federal police.

Additionally, the TGA noted that it’s a criminal offense, punishable by two years in prison, to represent oneself as a commonwealth body or claim to act on behalf of one.

The Guardian Australia also contacted Facebook which swiftly removed the posts for violating its far-reaching “COVID-19 misinformation” rules.

Despite the threat of police referrals from the TGA and Facebook removing the posts, Hill demanded that Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, take further action to “combat vaccine hesitancy, and the bat shit crazy conspiracy theories circulating online.”

He also warned “Australians will continue to be exposed to restrictions and lockdowns… until enough of the population is vaccinated.”

These developments come months after Australian lawmaker Craig Kelly had one of his Facebook posts about masks removed after complaints from the opposition party. Days after this post removal, his account was temporarily suspended and he was then permanently banned a couple of months later.

Facebook also expanded its crackdown on vaccine skeptic content last month by starting to “fact-check” and suppress individual users that repeatedly share misinformation. This followed whistleblowers exposing the tech giant’s secret algorithm that suppresses negative vaccine experiences.

June 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 1 Comment

COVID Corruption: Assaulting Human Norms

By Omar Khan | Uncommon Wisdom | May 31, 2021

Well, the seminal errors of the Covidian narrative stockpile so fetidly, you keep thinking one day, the stench will be so overpowering, that even those who have essentially put their critical faculties into suspended animation, will rally, finding that this reeks to high Heaven. Some restoratives surely, we think, will thaw their frozen wits.

I keep meandering back through the history of this ill begotten assault on life and liberty.

Imagine this being designated a “novel” Coronavirus. Well, if it was “massaged” in a Wuhan lab as it now seems all the craze to assert, perhaps there was some novelty to it. Otherwise, as we are advised, there are numerous coronaviruses parading around. Even C-19 is now relegated to only being the fourth most widespread in the US.

And now we find, from antibody tests and more, that some varietal was already doing the circuit in 2019. At any rate, some prior immunity exists. And if this is truly the descendant or even Frankensteinian stepchild of SARS, then as former Chief Medical Officer of Pfizer, Michael Yeadon has reminded us, though it is 80% identical, the immune systems of those exposed to SARS seem to “recognize” SARS-CoV-2, even these 17 years hence. Novelty therefore takes another nosedive.

So, this first assertion, right out of the gate, meant to terrorize us by suggesting an unknown pathogen without parallel, that could hoodwink our immune system completely, was poppycock. And we knew soon enough, it was far more infectious than SARS, but far less lethal. And mortality is where we should have kept our eyes fixed, not the delusions of asserted “cases” from unreliable tests. So, no, not so “novel” at least in impact.

Then, you have to wonder, if even mistaken as “novel,” surely there would be extraordinary curiosity, not fixated dogmatism, about this pathogen. However, it took only a few months, before torrential disdain was showered on any who raised questions as to whether we were over-reacting.

There was censorious outrage lavished on some of the world’s most eminent research experts in meta-analysis like John Ioannidis of Stanford, when he pointed out the lethality seemed less than was being forecasted for example, or when the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship kindly offered itself up as a floating case study, or when Knut Wittowski “sacrilegiously” suggested sunshine and fresh air are lethal to viruses with seasonality as a fairly evident way to corroborate that, and so many others. They were literally chased from the public sphere.

They have been only vindicated since, and why rationally, anyone actually interested in public health as a leader, wouldn’t have wanted a big tent of diverse views, a kind of Manhattan Project to tackle this virus and grapple with providing care, cannot be logically answered, except by accepting they were engaged in a charade of public health only, and other agendas were afoot that could brook no dissent.

In fact, if you consider it, how could they know who to censor? In other words, how with a “novel” coronavirus, could you have so readily stress tested alternatives to arrive at any credible consensus by then? Surely if genuinely interested in leadership and health, immensely experienced and credible experts indicating we may be overzealous, that this may be less deadly, more treatable and more manageable, would be manna from heaven. Such views would surely be welcomed, and would be carefully assessed, with trials done before the world was blown up, and irrevocable harm done to urban centers, small businesses, people needing desperate attention for other health issues, and before children’s lives and educations were turned topsy turvy. Yes, “if.”

By the way, it wasn’t even just Ioannidis and Wittowski. Similar alarms were raised and alternatives suggested by luminaries as diverse as Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, specialist in microbiology and one of the most cited research scientists in Germany; Dr. Pietro Vernazza, Swiss specialist on Infectious Diseases at the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen; Professor Hendrik Streek, Professor of virology and director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at Bonn University; Dr. David Katz founding director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center; Dr. Peter Goetzsche, Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford and later co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration; Dr. Anders Tegnell, that sainted man, Swedish State Epidemiologist who showed the world all of these contrary views were essentially right; Dr. Pablo Goldschmidt, Argentine-French virologist, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at Universite Pierre et Marie Curie Paris; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Stanford and later co-author of The Great Barrington Declaration; Dr. Tom Jefferson, British epidemiologist based in Rome; Dr. Michael Levitt, Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford; German Network of Evidence Based Medicine… and so many more (distillations of their points can be found archived on Off-Guardian who collated these remarkable instances of “informed lack of consent.”)

When such a phalanx of experience, talent and credibility speaks at a seemingly desperate time, how could jurisdiction after jurisdiction, pillory them, ostracize them, mischaracterize what they had to say? Why that, rather than be desperately curious, and gratefully keen to explore their insights?

This is particularly so as you cannot possibly imagine that this constellation of talent had any motivation other than wishing to save and serve our global and local cultures, lives and livelihoods. And that they have continued to do so, despite media attacks, smears, economic disincentives, renders every word more plausible. After all, we know there are evident incentives of being proponents of the prevailing mythos. We cannot assert any incentive other than integrity and genuine conviction for refusing to acquiesce to the pervasive gaslighting and whitewashing.

Mass Manipulation

While stifling what should have been real life-lines, and once more we are seeing virtually all of their assessments vindicated today, we were run over by a freak-show of blatant stupidities.

With constant panic porn flashing incessantly, a multi-billion dollar industry of fraudulent tests is pushed through a 2-day peer review, by Dr. Doom (Drosten, who helped create the application of the test, sat on the review board of the publication “validating it” and profits from the tests that were mysteriously ready for production and shipping almost ahead of need). We were to ignore demonstrations of false positives, the need for amplification settings to be below 30 (WHO and others initially set them between 35 and 45, at the latter, a papaya fruit tested positive), as well as clarifications the test is not meant to be diagnostic (as per its inventor and as per the literature found in each test and finally “confessed” to post Trump by WHO as well).

And in one of the greatest bits of medical fraud, in plain sight, known by all, but still glossed over, a “case” was converted from someone who had symptoms to “someone who tested positive.”

The latter could be manipulated by the above settings, further counted on to be magnified via false positives, which ironically get worse in percentage terms as incidence goes down. The whole world held hostage to the vagaries of a non-diagnostic test, whereas had we focused on the symptomatic, no one would even have known we were in more than a really ugly influenza season.

Next, we were invited to ignore the age stratification, as the median age of death was over 80. So, lest people be cut down in the bloom of their 70’s and 80’s (and even there we can improve their odds with early treatment, which has been scrupulously avoided, or again smeared, or else “slow walked” almost catatonically en route to being reviewed), we were ready, for the first time in history, to quarantine the healthy!

We asserted “asymptomatic transmission” of which no credible instance has been found in over 14 months, being confirmed again and again even with the recent UK trials done with 9 large, teeming events that barely scraped together 16 “cases” from 60,000 people applying no COVID protocols, including a football FA Club Final and Brit Awards. You will have noticed, a very appreciable lack of media coverage of this “welcome” news. And the US CDC, now in the “vaccine selling” business has instructed clinics to only count as an instance of post-vaccination reinfection, those who, wait for it, have “symptoms.” The blood curdles at these fork tongued guideposts.

So, when the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration pointed out that when risk profiles are so vastly different, we should address and target care accordingly, there was howling and venting and the attacks were unleashed far and wide. They had pointed out this particular pathogen seems to focus on the elderly and so this pandemic tracks normal mortality and therefore in terms of both population size and adjusting for age, is considerably less lethal than the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 and the Asian Flu of the late 50’s, saying nothing of the epochal Spanish Flu in 1918 which infected one third of the global population of that time of which 10% perished!

By comparison, the current Indian death tally after all the shamefully imbalanced reporting is about 325,000 (despite the most egregious liberties with death certificates there, reported on by 161 doctors from N.I.C.E, National Influenza Care Experts, on May 24th in a letter to Prime Minister Modhi claiming guidelines given to them indicate that if PCR test is positive, even if someone died of accidents or clearly of other causes, the cause of death is to be recorded as C-19). Yet applying conventional death certificates, where only direct causation led to an entry, India lost 20 million in the Spanish Flu.

Painfully but necessarily, life went on. High time to adjust our hackles… and self-imposed shackles.

The Indian instance cited above is simply symptomatic of another fraud we embarked upon early on, taking liberties with how death certificates were filled out. Riddle me this, if truly so lethal, why was this necessary suddenly, after norms of indicating primary cause of death were the mainstay of medical practice for decades?

Why did we have to, in the US, incentivize via insurance, labeling COVID deaths? Why in the UK did we originally say anyone tested positively in the last 6 months, irrespective of comorbidities was a COVID death? This shrieks of outright dark comedy or at least ludicrous parody. But that was “fixed” to only doing that for those who tested positive in the last 28 days! So no one knows. Families have howled outrage, reported of course in secondary media, about their loved one being mis-tagged in this way, when they clearly passed from other causes. Who cares? Can’t interfere with the noxious narrative. In parts of South Asia, with cancer and blood poisoning along with a positive test on the death certificate, you guessed it, COVID wins the prize!

And the booby traps for sanity abounded. And the question to be asked is, why? For example,

why do we “lock down”?

This is a penal remedy, never applied before, disdained in public health literature until 2020, indicated in a 2019 report by WHO to

“not be done in any circumstances.”

One month in Wuhan blows up centuries of experience? Really? Are we welding doors shut next? Or staging collapsed bodies on streets with people in alien suits standing over them (you wondered about all those UFO sightings… voila!)?

As Dr. Risch of Yale has pointed out, with such tonic simplicity, “locking down” is not even coherent once the pathogen has spread! It’s fairly obvious once that’s pointed out. And it’s airborne, and almost all infections are in tight indoor spaces. Anyone not pledging fealty to a cult religion, can work this out. And in the face of non locked down jurisdictions with open societies and economies (US States, Sweden, Bulgaria) flourishing, and 30+ studies confirming no benefit from this illogical imposition, and the Oxford Stringency Index showing an inverse relationship between degree of shutdown and health outcomes, we are truly “stoned” on some narcotic to keep invoking this. Oh, and the belligerence if you question it, as if some canonical certainty was being desecrated.

Masking was not recommended by Fauci or WHO, and suddenly realizing that it could be a signature of totemic compliance, it was asserted, though study after study and simply common sense indicates it is a life leeching absurdity, to have you inhale your own waste, while choking off your oxygen supply. As one eminent, also censored, once tenured professor of Physics, Denis Rancourt says,

“The magical ‘one way mask’, which does not protect the wearer but acts as ‘source control’, is an invention of propaganda. It is contrary to the physics of breathing aerosol particles suspended in the fluid air. It is ridiculous fantasy.”

Frankly, the size of the particles are so small as to make this beyond fantasy. And if we truly believed they captured viral particles, would we blithely be leaving these masks lying around, or even throwing them in the open trash, so their harvest can waft at will? The boxes the cloth masks come in, have disclaimers to confess they don’t protect you against C-19. After all, they have openings so you can breathe and see. And there is no correlation between masking or its absence and COVID results. Again, the open US States have put that to rest. But thou must not question! “They say,” is the holy homily, and it must prevail.

So the round-up is: stifle dissent (which admits we have an agenda), create a “test” that doesn’t test and which can be manipulated, change all the guidance based on one month in Wuhan and Italian nursing home deaths (of which later authorities said 12% only could be directly ascribed to C-19), “order” indefinite mass incarceration, and decide without debate that this one source of harm, this one consideration, trumps everything else in the world: health, wealth, family, work, education, poverty, everything.

Why? Who says? A few models. Hmm. Sounds pretty sane. I’m ready to jettison everything I worked for, lived for, my city, culture, neighborhood, travel, way of life, on “asserted apocalypse” without discussing less destructive mitigation with a slew of the world’s most eminent doctors and scientists who say, based on data, we can do better. No agenda there. And if you don’t want the above poison pill, you’re out to kill everyone!

You’re out to kill me, the holy, carcass preserving, center of all global paranoia, me!

Vaccinating Sense

I don’t want to go over past ground to make the necessary point here. As medical luminaries like Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Pierre Kory and many others have pointed out, we know there are clearly effective, preventive treatments, and even some real treatments post hospitalization far more effective than the ‘wait and see’ nihilism that so many of these doctors at the forefront of treatment consider “medical malpractice.”

Of course, these treatments were slandered, fraudulently attacked, even though these are widely in use, no side effects, with multiple studies and numerous countries where they’ve been shown to work magnificently (Mexico, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, parts of the US and more). But since our so called “vaccines”, perhaps the real “point” of this whole inhuman grotesquerie, are only approved tentatively for “emergency use” (safety trials won’t be complete until 2023), then other treatments if established, would remove “the emergency necessity” and that would jeopardize the whole scabrous scam.

Serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch has even offered $2 million to anyone who can demonstrate that all the randomized trials and global as well as research evidence is wrong, and that the NIH and WHO concern about Fluvoxamine and Ivermectin is justified. A straight $2 million windfall or grant. No one has taken him up on it. His credibility as a medical entrepreneur and philanthropist is unimpeachable.

A few points. You don’t have to remotely be an “anti-vaxxer” (those who oppose them on principle) to be concerned by any or all of the following:

Safety protocols are incomplete

The mRNA treatments are not “vaccines” they are symptom suppressors. Since the vulnerable were not part of the clinical trials, and those trials had such a small subset of the population anyway (‘nominal’ is a generous term), we really don’t know how well they do for the elderly, the vulnerable, etc. And how in that period could we know anything about “safety” and “efficacy?” Booster shots are already being discussed.

All of them have blood clotting issues, 4,000 deaths plus in the US, 10,000 in Europe, both very likely an undercount, as only a small percentage make it into the adverse effects database, and we have swelling evidence, of doctors extremely reluctant to link “anything” to a vaccine, even if a healthy person, within days, dies. Of course you can say, “healthy people also die.” But since in tabulating COVID lethality the norms were at the other extremity, where a “whiff” of COVID put it on the death certificate, we can clearly see again, wanton inconsistency, and again narrative protection at all costs. These deaths are more than the cumulative recorded death from all other vaccines combined, for an illness you have to be tested for to even know you have!

Re-infection has been rife, and mass surges in cases and deaths after mass vaccination in populations (Israel, UK, Gibraltar, Seychelles, Maldives), and now with the Chinese vaccines, Bahrain, Chile and UAE, either no improvement or serious spikes in cases and deaths.

How can anyone call this normal? And so people are opting out, and mania has set in. To induce you to get vaccinated, free ice cream, drinks, the NYC Mayor offering free burgers, lotteries linked to vaccination, dating apps linked to incentivize sexual license.

Yet, as noted, we hear people are getting re-infected? Doesn’t matter, speed past that, just get a jab in every arm. And children? They have no risk, they don’t transmit the disease, shown over and over, Sweden had no deaths in schools with schools open throughout. But suddenly, a 12-year-old can consent in North Carolina to being “jabbed”? Can they also vote, drive, have sex, smoke and drink while they’re at it?

Can anyone call this remotely normal? Experimental gene therapy asserting “safety” you cannot possibly even know (Salk Institute Study indicates that the spike proteins being injected themselves, without even a virus involved, can cause the virus). Future impact is unknown, people are understandably spooked. How is this anywhere close to “informed consent” by the Nuremberg standards?

And what has happened to the EU? But for a few standouts like Denmark and Sweden, they are ready to require “vaccine passports” thereby ignoring those who have recovered and don’t need experimental substances in their body, or those below 60 and healthy with no statistical risk, or children with a truly non-existent risk profile (symptoms easily treatable for them), and with abundant, far safer, preventive treatments? With plummeting numbers, no “pandemic” in Europe, no excess mortality for 2020, what in God’s name is the panic to just jab everything and everyone in sight, including innocent children we are conducting “human trials” on?

This is horror movie material, but chillingly real.

By the way, despite a nominal surge (large in a relative sense as their numbers are so tame), Japan still has among the lowest numbers of deaths per million in the world. 1% of the population is vaccinated.

None of it makes sense, none of it is plausible, any more than the face diapers, penal lock ups, fake non-diagnostic tests, death certificate manipulation, avoiding treatment that reduces hospitalization risk by over 85%, censoring new insights from the most credible experts. All this while blowing up the economy, magnifying poverty, killing children through hunger and awaiting the reckoning when all the currency printing eventually comes home to roost.

So, we have to stop “asking” for relief and move to “demanding” it. And we have to stop acquiescing and trying to “persuade.” No one is this villainously stupid. Villainous maybe. So you can’t “persuade” someone out of a pathology or a psychosis. We can be respectfully, lawfully, civilly disobedient, and make our voices heard, in concert, and purposefully.

This isn’t Life

C.J. Hopkins, writing from “New Normal” Germany describes this version of “living”:

“Perfectly healthy, medical-masked people are lining up in the streets to be experimentally ‘vaccinated’.”

Lockdown-bankrupted shops and restaurants have been converted into walk-in “PCR test stations.” The government is debating mandatory “vaccination” of children in kindergarten. Goon squads are arresting octogenarians for picnicking on the sidewalk without permission.” Sound appealing?

Should I await docilely to be told when to go out, where to go out, what experimental substance to have shot into my body and that of my family? Should I welcome no stimulus, no abandon, no real laughter or mirth, no experiencing of human aptitudes, or going freely to other lands and immersing in other cultures or relishing the world as a part of my birthright? Is it really all right for us to have these political scavengers pick on the remains of our autonomy?

Poet laureate Seamus Heaney writes so unforgettably:

“History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.”

Time to see if we can’t catch one of those waves.

The prose, the poetry, the rhymes, the chimes, of our lives are at stake. And there we must all decide to take a stand, however, whenever and wherever we can, for the future we seek.

June 1, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Russia Falsely Accused of Hacking USAID

By Stephen Lendman | May 29, 2021

Virtually all accusations by Washington and its complicit partners against Russia and other nations free from US control lack evidence supporting them because none exists.

Yet they surface time and again, supported by Western press agent media.

On Friday, the Russophobic NYT was at it again, falsely accusing Moscow of hacking USAID.

In response to an earlier phony US accusation of Russian hacking last year, its US embassy said the following:

“We paid attention to another unfounded attempt of the US media to blame Russia for hacker attacks on US governmental bodies.”

“We declare responsibly: malicious activities in the information space contradicts the principles of the Russian foreign policy, national interests and our understanding of interstate relations.”

“Russia does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain.”

“What is more, the Russian Federation actively promotes bilateral and multilateral cyber security agreements.”

“In this regard, we would like to remind (the US regime) of the initiative put forward by President Vladimir Putin on September 25 on a comprehensive program of measures to restore Russian-US cooperation in the field of international information security.”

“We have received no reply from Washington.”

“Many our other suggestions to start constructive and equal dialogue with the US remain unanswered.”

Hacking and countless other crimes are how the US-dominated West and Israel operate.

In sharp contrast, Russia fully complies with its international obligations, according to the rule of law.

Yet once again, NYT fake news falsely claimed the following:

“Hackers linked to Russia’s main intelligence agency surreptitiously seized an email system used by (USAID) to burrow into the computer networks of human rights groups and other organizations of the sort that have been critical of President Vladimir V. Putin, Microsoft Corporation disclosed on Thursday (sic).”

When accusations are unsupported by independently verified evidence, they’re baseless.

None exists to support accusations against Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Will the latest phony one be used as a pretext to cancel a scheduled mid-June summit between Putin and Biden’s impersonator — because he can only recite lines scripted for him.

If held, the summit will be farcical — a know-nothing imposter engaging with a world leader of Putin’s stature.

Perhaps the latest phony accusation against Russia will be used to cancel it — to avoid US embarrassment if they meet face-to-face.

No Russian hack of USAID occurred, no evidence suggesting it.

What the Times indicated as the aim of the phony claim fell flat like earlier baseless accusations against Russia.

An invented scenario by the Times reads like a rejected grade B Hollywood script.

Corporate predator Microsoft is complicit with wars by hot and/or other means on invented US enemies.

So are the Times and other establishment media — operating as mouthpieces for US imperial interests on all things geopolitical, notably against Russia, China, and nations victimized by US aggression.

No phony NYT claim of Russian “malicious activity (or) appetite for disruption” against the US or other countries exists, no evidence suggesting it.

An unnamed DHS official falsely claimed that the agency was “aware of the potential compromise” at USAID (sic) and is “working with the FBI and (the State Department’s agency) to better understand the extent of the compromise (sic) and assist potential victims (sic).”

No Russian SolarWinds hack occurred earlier or other hacking it was falsely accused of earlier.

Yet Microsoft and the Times falsely claimed a Nobelium group in Russia hacked SolarWinds and USAID despite no verifiable evidence because there is none.

Time and again, Times reports don’t pass the smell test.

Its daily editions feature managed news misinformation, disinformation and fake news on major domestic and geopolitical issues — far removed from all the news it claims to be fit to print.

A Final Comment

Undemocratic Dem war goddess Samantha Power heads USAID.

Like other interventionist extremists, she never met a nation free from US control she didn’t want smashed.

She once called US foreign policy “a tool box” with a range of options to advance the nation’s hegemonic aims.

Civil rights lawyer Chase Madar earlier called her hellish agenda “a richly instructive example of the weaponization of human rights.”

Like other US hostile to the rule of law officials, she falsely blames others for its high crimes of war and against humanity.

Chances are she was behind the latest false accusation of Russian hacking, enlisting Microsoft to make the phony claim.

Her maliciously destructive worldview is polar opposite values just societies cherish.

May 29, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 6 Comments

Media outlets try to deflect from lab leak theory and censorship

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | May 29, 2021

Mainstream media, now embarrassingly forced to follow President Biden’s policy and abruptly reverse course on the Wuhan lab leak theory – after branding and ridiculing it as a conspiracy theory for months – are working to downplay the importance of censorship around the topic that was enforced until just a few days ago.

One would think it would be hard to find a single person who has been through more than a year of lockdowns and myriads of restrictions who would not be interested to learn what the virus is and where it came from – but apparently, such people exist, in media outlets like The Verge.

An article that could easily be described as a distraction in its own right from the topic of why the lab leak theory was suppressed and censored so vigorously, now claims that the origin of coronavirus doesn’t really matter and suggests that it should be swept under the rug as a distraction from truly important topics.

While briefly paying lip service to the importance of discovering the origin of the virus, the article’s real goal is to convince its readers to change the topic. Forced to eat their own words, this class of media are no longer calling the Wuhan theory a fringe conspiracy, but “an extraordinary claim” that is “technically possible.”

But discussing the topic is discouraged as no less than “a distraction from the rest of the urgent work governments and health agencies around the world need to do in order to end this pandemic and prepare for the next one” – while at the same time calling for vaccination efforts to be doubled.

And as scientists who have tried to study the origin of coronavirus, including the possibility that it was artificially created, are finally getting a chance to speak after being censored and ostracized for a long time – mainstream media are scrambling to adjust to the new reality around the topic.

The New York Times has already done its U-turn, reporting on Friday that US intelligence agencies have a large amount of evidence concerning the Wuhan lab – but one of its reporters, Apoorva Mandavilli, didn’t get the memo immediately.

On the same day President Biden announced an investigation, Mandavilli tweeted, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here” – only to quickly delete the post after receiving backlash for making the claim that it was “racist” to consider the possibility that the virus was engineered by humans.

May 29, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Widespread distribution of ivermectin proves effective in Mexico against COVID-19

By Juan Quintero | TrialSiteNews | May 28, 2021

One country that has had remarkable success in the war against the COVID pandemic, but has received little to no global media coverage, is Mexico. Like the rest of the world, COVID cases in Mexico exploded in April 2020, the first hot spots flaring up along the northern border with the United States, in Mexico City and Quintana Roo, a popular tourist destination in the Caribbean. At the beginning of the pandemic, Mexico took recommendations and followed protocol set forth by the World Health Organization (WHO) and watched the virus spread from state to state, engulfing the entire country.

First COVID Outbreak in Mexico

On June 10, the Spanish-speaking media began reporting on the success that Peru was having in controlling the virus using ivermectin as a treatment. Mexico was in the middle of its worst peak of cases and deaths with records breaking daily, and interest in the drug – as well as sales – rose dramatically.

On June 20, the pan-American WHO (OPS/OMS) issued a statement strongly opposing the use of ivermectin. Additionally, other media sources started publishing anti-ivermectin articles all over Mexico. And as the number of deaths slowly decreased, interest in ivermectin subsequently died down.

Google trends. Google seaches in Mexico about iveremctin

In October 2020, cases in Mexico began spiking again; the outbreak this time started in Chihuahua, the state on the border of Texas. Texas was also experiencing an outbreak at this time, so it’s likely that the cases in Mexico were sparked in the US. From Chihuahua, cases spread south and into Mexico City igniting the worst outbreak yet. Mexico City was an inferno of COVID cases and death, and health workers rushed to the capital city from all over the country to help.

Determined to stop the spread at any cost, Mexico City officials held a meeting at the end of December, 2020, and invited the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) among other groups of doctors. Together, they decided to begin distribution of ivermectin kits in Mexico City and Mexico State to anyone who tested positive for COVID and wanted to take the drug, and to closely monitor hospitalizations to keep tabs on ivermectin’s efficacy. The kits distributed included ivermectin, aspirin and paracetamol. Between the end of November 2020 and the end of January 2021, more than 200,000 people tested positive for COVID, and of these, nearly 80,000 used the ivermectin kits. Results showed up to 76% reduction in hospitalization in the group that was taking ivermectin.

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/r93g4/

On January 22, 2021, the mayor of Mexico City, Claudia Scheinbaum, held a live televised press conference where she talked about the positive results from the ivermectin distribution from December. Following the press release, the kits were made available for everyone in the whole of Mexico, and nation-wide results of ivermectin use were monitored. Amazingly, after mass distribution of ivermectin, every single COVID indicator in Mexico improved. Over the course of 18 weeks, COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths continuously dropped, and on May 14, the mayor held another televised press conference sharing the positive results of the months’-long campaign.

What is astonishing, however, is that the media outlets in Mexico have not reported on this astounding result. They continued to report on the number of excess deaths from before the ivermectin intervention – and not one has covered the current situation of declining cases and deaths due to wide-spread ivermectin intervention.

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May 29, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 4 Comments

Global heating: Study shows impact of ‘climate racism’ in US – BBC

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | May 26, 2021

The clown Matt McGrath is at it again:

A new study says that black people living in most US cities are subject to double the level of heat stress as their white counterparts.

The researchers say the differences were not explained by poverty but by historic racism and segregation.

As a result, people of colour more generally, live in areas with fewer green spaces and more buildings and roads.

These exacerbate the impacts of rising temperatures and a changing climate.

Cities are well known magnifiers of a warmer climate.

The surface urban heat island effect is the technical term for the impact that the buildings, roads and infrastructure of cities have on temperatures.

All that concrete and asphalt attracts and stores more heat, ensuring that both days and nights in big urban areas are much warmer than the surrounding locations.

But, within cities, there are often large differences in this heat island impact, with areas rich in trees and green spaces noticeably cooler than those that are dense with housing and industry.

A previous study in the US found a correlation between warmer neighbourhoods in big cities with racist housing practices dating back to the 1930s.

Back then, areas with large African-American or immigrant populations were “redlined” in documents by federal officials, and deemed too hazardous for home loans and investment.

This led to a concentration of poverty and low home ownership rates in some parts of big cities.

This new study takes a broader look at these warmer neighbourhoods and the people who are affected by them.

Using satellite temperature data combined with demographic information from the US Census, the authors found that the average person of colour lives in an area with far higher summer daytime temperatures than non-Hispanic white people.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-57235904

The actual paper, which is here, does not mention “racism” at all. So why does McGrath introduce it as a concept, never mind inventing the term “climate racism”?

Quite what the “racist” housing policies of the 1930s have to do with 21st century America is beyond me. There has been nothing to stop people moving out of those areas since, as millions have. (This is known as “black flight”, with first the black middle class, followed by the working class, moving out to the suburbs, as the whites did before them. What is left tends to be the “underclass”. See here for more details.)

It is well known that poor people, particularly in inner cities, all around the world suffer worse outcomes in all sorts of ways, for instance healthcare, education and job prospects. And, as McGrath now seems to have realised, the urban heat island effect is far more significant than the tiny amount of climate warming seen in the last century.

Maybe instead of wasting trillions on fighting climate change, we should spend a fraction of it on improving inner cities.

May 26, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

The Myth of the ‘Asymptomatic Spreader’ Dealt Another Blow This Week

21st Century Wire | May 24, 2021

Since the pandemic crisis began in early 2020, government and public health officials have been adamant that any difficult measures taken were all being done in order to ‘control the spread of the virus’ or ‘stop the disease.’ Thus, a litany of so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions, and also pharmaceutical interventions – were deemed by the consensus to be essential measures in fighting the spread of what was being characterized as an asymptomatic disease.

Over a year later, a few industrious ‘public health’ mavens have summoned the courage to actually test this fundamental assumption. Recently in the UK, officials have staged and monitored nine large-scale events, including an FA Cup final football match, and the Brit Awards – both of which were exempt from the usual COVID rules. The results of this test should be hailed as good news, but for those heavily invested in the narrative, it’s nothing short of a meltdown: little to no coronavirus “cases” turned up.

Officials managed to scrape together just 15 alleged “cases” or “infections” (deemed as such merely from a single ‘positive test’) out of some 60,000 total attendees.

The result of this experiment has dealt a crushing blow to the central myth upon which the entire COVID-19 ‘global pandemic’ crisis has been built – namely the myth of the asymptomatic spread, and the much-maligned notorious “super-spreader” events.

Sky News UK reports…

Nine large-scale events were staged as part of the government’s plan to allow for the return of big crowds this summer. Those who attended were exempt from certain coronavirus rules, such as the rule-of-six.

The government confirmed to Sky News that 15 COVID cases had been recorded out of nearly 60,000 people who attended the events, which “is in line with the broader population”.

Latest figures show the rate of people testing positive for COVID in the UK is 22 infections per 100,000 people.

The pilot events included three football matches at Wembley Stadium – the FA Cup final which was attended by 21,000 supporters, an FA Cup semi-final and the Carabao Cup final.

IMAGE: Animated graphic from NPR’s debunked April 2020 propaganda article entitled, “What We Know About The Silent Spreaders Of COVID-19.”

Combine this latest UK admission with the recent backtracking by Dr. Anthony Fauci and the US Center for Disease Control CDC on masks and asymptomatic transmissions, and it’s clear that officials will have no choice now but to back-off supporting the nonscience-based myth of the asymptomatic spreader or “silent spreaders,” and it’s not difficult to see how problematic this widely held assumption is now becoming, with many media doctors and public health officials now facing challenges over what can only be described as a collective propaganda effort deployed by government, media and medical industry over the last 14 months.

The peer-reviewed literature is also clear, with large-scale studies conducted, including at the supposed epicenter of the pandemic in Wuhan, China – all of which showed no evidence of alleged asymptomatic spreading of the ‘novel’ coronavirus. See their results here, here, and here.

Of course, none of this should surprise any honest doctor or real scientist. We’ve always known that any disease requires symptoms first. But somehow, common sense has been completely abandoned during the Covid crisis.

Of all the widely-held assumptions and hysteria surrounding the COVID crisis, none has been more pivotal than the myth of the ‘asymptomatic spread’ in ballasting every single unprecedented ‘health intervention’ policy including:

  • Social Distancing
  • Mass Testing
  • Reliance on non-diagnostic PCR and Lateral Flow tests
  • Track and Trace bio surveillance
  • Lockdowns
  • Quarantining the healthy
  • Masks
  • Border Closures
  • Business Closures
  • School Closures
  • Mass Vaccinations
  • Vaccine Passports

It’s astonishing to consider that every single one of these emergency measures have been predicated on the widely-held, nonscientific myth of the asymptomatic spread.

Perhaps more shocking is the fact that no one in government, media or the legions of newly-crowned ‘public health experts’ – have bothered to challenge this key assumption, perhaps out of fear, or more likely because it was politically and economically expedient for stakeholders of the current crisis narrative.

It is not uncommon the see the bevy of experts and media anchors, all repeating ad nauseum presumptive statements like:

“A third of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus have no symptoms but are just as infectious as those with COVID-19.”

Unraveling the murky ontology of the myth of the asymptomatic spreader, we can point to an informative piece published recently in Lockdown Skeptics entitled, “How Did a Disease With no Symptoms Take Over the World?” A fair question, and indeed a necessary one too.

The article answers this question quite simply – it’s so obvious and still profound if one pauses to consider just how many of the so-called experts and health ministers have routinely avoided applying any real epistemology or scientific method to the wild ‘pandemic’ claims which have become so commonplace over the last 14 months:

“Given that this is all so blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever been near a biology textbook, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.”

It’s been 14 months, and the world has been turned upside-down, and the billionaire class have reached new heights in wealth and consolidation of power and influence, while everyone else has slid downwards.

Let there be a reckoning. It’s time to talk about the real science – which does not even remotely support the inflated ‘global pandemic’ narrative.

May 24, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

CNN anchor flies into rage after Pakistani FM says Israelis control media

This photo shows CNN anchor Brianna Golodryga’s twitter page, accusing Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi of anti-Semitism.
Press TV – May 22, 2021

A CNN news anchor has accused Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi of anti-Semitism after he said the Israeli regime has lost the media war in the latest aggression against Palestinians.

During a live interview with CNN on the latest Israeli war, Qureshi was accused of “invoking an anti-Semitic slur” after he simply said Israelis “control the media,” and have influential “connections”.

“Israel is losing out. They’re losing the media war despite their connections. The tide is turning,” the Pakistani foreign minister told CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga.

An apparently outraged Golodryga, who is Jewish herself, put aside her supposed journalistic impartiality, pouncing on the remarks to accuse Qureshi of anti-Semitism.

The journalist followed the statement asking for clarification on what their connections were. “Deep pockets,” he replied, adding later, “they are very influential people. They control media.”

Golodryga went on to accuse the FM of making an anti-Semitic remark, to which he responded, “Well, you see, the point is, they have a lot of influence. They get a lot of coverage. Now, what balances that is the citizen journalist who has been reporting, sharing video clips, and that has jolted people, and woken up people, and people who were sitting on the fence are today speaking up.”

Golodryga then took her inquisition to the next level, asking if the FM would condemn the anti-Jewish sentiment that is allegedly taking hold due to the Israeli violence in Palestine.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 248 Palestinians were killed in the new Israeli offensive, including 66 children and 39 women, and at least 1,910 were injured.

Golodryga repeated her accusation later as she tweeted a clip of the interview, saying, “I had planned to speak with Pakistan’s foreign minister about paths towards a peaceful resolution between Israel and Hamas. Instead, he began the interview by invoking an anti-semitic slur.”

The interview prompted a chorus of support for the Pakistani foreign minister, while pro-Israeli voices cast scorn at his remarks.

Journalist and talk show host Fereeha Idrees defended Qureshi.

“He didn’t even utter the word ‘Jew’ or even made a feeble reference to it. All he said was media is controlled by Israel,” Idrees wrote on Twitter.

Idrees pointed out that during the recent aggression, Israeli jets had leveled a high-rise building in Gaza that housed the offices of several media outlets, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera.

May 22, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 4 Comments

As US regime-change agency NED admits interference in Belarus, leaked documents also implicate UK Foreign Office

By Kit Klarenberg | RT | May 21, 2021

The full extent of Western meddling in Belarus prior to the country’s contested August 2020 election may never be known. Yet the outlines of a wide-ranging foreign effort to destabilize the government are becoming ever clearer.

As RT reported earlier this week, a pair of Russian pranksters posing as Belarusian opposition figures have duped high-ranking representatives of US regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) into exposing the extent of Washington’s clandestine involvement in the unrest that erupted across the country throughout 2020.

Among other bombshell disclosures, Nina Ognianova, who oversees the NED’s work with local groups in the country, suggested “a lot of the people” who were “trained” and “educated” via the organization’s various endeavors there were pivotal to “the events, or the build-up to the events, of last summer.”

Long-time NED chief Carl Gershman – who in September 2013, less than six months prior to the coup that shifted Kiev’s political orientation, dubbed Ukraine “the biggest prize” for Washington – added that his organization was working with controversial opposition figure Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and her team “very, very closely.” In all, the agency bankrolled at least 159 civil society initiatives in Belarus, costing $7,690,689, from 2016 to 2020 alone.

The team’s unguarded comments represent a rare public admission of the insidious, destabilizing role played by the NED – in 1991, its then-president acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” However, leaked UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) files indicate that the US is far from the only foreign power attempting to undermine the country’s government.

In 2017, then-Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled a £100 million kitty, ostensibly for battling Kremlin disinformation. In practice, internal FCDO files leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous made clear the effort was primarily concerned with “weakening the Russian state’s influence,” particularly in its “near abroad.” As a close neighbor and arguably most important ally of Moscow, Belarus was unsurprisingly very much in the FCDO’s crosshairs.

In January of that year, Whitehall commissioned an extensive analysis of Belarusian citizens’ perceptions, motivations, and habits, in order to “identify opportunities” to “appropriately communicate” with them. In particular, London was interested in “existing or potential grievances against their national government” that could be exploited, and “channels and messages” by which the UK government could “appropriately engage with different sub-groups.”

The analysis was conducted by shadowy FCDO contractor Albany Associates, which has, in recent years, also conducted numerous information warfare operations in the Baltic states, in order to “develop greater affinity” among the region’s Russian-speaking minority for the UK, European Union and NATO. While carrying out another Whitehall-funded project targeted at Moscow, the firm closely collaborated with NED-connected French NGO IREX Europe.

An accompanying bio notes IREX has been working in Belarus since 2006 “with print, online and radio outlets,” to “improve the quality of their coverage,” and “increase their understanding of the EU and EU member states.” As part of its youth audience offering in the country, the organization was said to have founded the Warsaw-based Euroradio, along with online outlet 34mag.

Footage produced by Euroradio of violent crackdowns on protesters in Minsk was regularly aired by the Western media, including the BBC, during the strife. The outlet even specifically amplified calls from the British state broadcaster for activists to submit pictures and videos for use in news coverage. Franak Viacorka – an Atlantic Council senior fellow, and now senior advisor to Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – prominently hailed its “fearless” reporting of the upheaval.

Euroradio also repeatedly crops up in documents related to the Open Information Partnership (OIP), which is the “flagship” strand within Whitehall’s multi-pronged propaganda assault on Russia. Bankrolled by the FCDO to the tune of £10 million, the organization maintains a network of 44 partners across Central and Eastern Europe, including “journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and factcheckers.” One of the collective’s primary, covert objectives is influencing “elections taking place in countries of particular interest” to the FCDO.

The classified files make clear the OIP has engaged in numerous astroturfing initiatives throughout the region, helping organizations and individuals produce slick propaganda masquerading as independent citizen journalism, which is then amplified globally via its network.

For instance, in Ukraine, the OIP worked with a 12-strong group of online ‘influencers’ “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models that reflected the complex and sensitive political environment,” in the process allowing them to “reach wider audiences with compelling content that received over four million views.”

In Russia and Central Asia, the OIP established a covert network of YouTubers, helping them create videos “promoting media integrity and democratic values.” Participants were also taught how to “make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding” and “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages,” while the consortium minimized their “risk of prosecution” and managed “project communications” to ensure the existence of the network, and indeed the OIP’s role, were kept “confidential.”

It would be entirely unsurprising if similar efforts were being undertaken in Belarus. After all, the country – along with Moldova and Ukraine – is referred to in the leaked documents as “the most vital space in the entire network,” and a “high-impact priority” for London, suggesting its 2020 election was very much “of interest” to Whitehall. If so, it would likewise be entirely unsurprising if many of the alleged so-called citizen journalists and media outlets covering the unrest in Minsk received funding and training from the OIP.

All along, too, MEMO 98, an OIP member coincidentally also funded by NED, kept a close eye on the incendiary proceedings, publishing several analyses of media coverage and social media activity related to the protests. It drew particular attention to the output of Belsat TV, a Warsaw-based channel – founded in December 2007 by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it seeks to influence political change in Belarus. MEMO 98 praised the station’s “extensive coverage of protests and related intimidation of activists.”

Strikingly, the leaked FCDO files indicate that Belsat TV received intensive, Whitehall-financed support from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the newswire’s international “charitable” wing, including 150 days’ consultancy in improving “TV output quality and audience reach.”

While the protests have largely fizzled out in recent months, and Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s calls for Western leaders to recognise her as the legitimate president of Belarus continue to fall on deaf ears, there are clear signs many other media platforms in Belarus receive life-giving sponsorship from London to this day.

In March 2021, the FCDO published an update on the progress of its global ‘Media Freedom Campaign’, which revealed that, over the past year, Whitehall had allocated £950,000 in financing to Belarusian news outlets, enabling them to “remain open and maintain a functional level of equipment.”

“Without this support, they would otherwise have been forced to close by government measures,” the document stated. “The funding has saved jobs and ensured that independent media can still hold the government to account during a period of increasingly violent action by the security forces.”

Evidently, even during a global pandemic, the regime-change show must go on – and the UK government is committed to ensuring people the world over continue to receive a steady deluge of slanted agitprop from the streets of Minsk, in order to turn public opinion against the government not only of Belarus, but of Russia too.

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.

May 21, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , , | Leave a comment

Add The Wall Street Journal To The People Who Can’t Do Basic Arithmetic

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 17, 2021

Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there are plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.

But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars. For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic. Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.

Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished. I last considered this issue in a post last week titled “California’s Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?” The answer for the California government electricity planners was a resounding “NO.” Today, the Wall Street Journal joins the math-challenged club with a front page story headlined “Batteries Challenge Natural Gas As America’s No. 1 Power Source.” (probably behind pay wall)

The theme of the story is that “renewable” energy sources, such as solar, paired with batteries to balance periods of low production, are rapidly becoming so cheap that they are likely to “disrupt” natural gas plants that have only recently been constructed:

[T]he combination of batteries and renewable energy is threatening to upend billions of dollars in natural-gas investments, raising concerns about whether power plants built in the past 10 years—financed with the expectation that they would run for decades—will become “stranded assets,” facilities that retire before they pay for themselves. . . . But renewables have become increasingly cost-competitive without subsidies in recent years, spurring more companies to voluntarily cut carbon emissions by investing in wind and solar power at the expense of that generated from fossil fuels.

To bolster the theme, we are introduced to industry executives who are shifting their investment strategies away from natural gas to catch the new renewables-plus-batteries wave. For example:

Vistra Corp. owns 36 natural-gas power plants, one of America’s largest fleets. It doesn’t plan to buy or build any more. Instead, Vistra intends to invest more than $1 billion in solar farms and battery storage units in Texas and California as it tries to transform its business to survive in an electricity industry being reshaped by new technology. “I’m hellbent on not becoming the next Blockbuster Video, ” said Vistra Chief Executive Curt Morgan.

But how does one of these solar-plus-battery systems work? Or for that matter, how does a wind-plus-battery system work? Can anybody do the arithmetic here to demonstrate how much battery capacity (in both MW and MWH) it will take to balance out a given set of solar cells at some particular location so that no fossil fuel backup is needed? You will not find that in this article.

Here’s something that ought to be obvious: solar panels at any location in the northern hemisphere will produce less power in the winter than in the summer. The days are shorter, and the sun is lower in the sky and consequently weaker. Therefore, any system consisting solely of solar panels plus batteries, where the batteries are seeking to balance the system over the course of a year, will see the batteries drawn down continuously from September to March, and then recharged from March to September. Do batteries that can deal with such an annual cycle of seasons even exist? From the Journal piece:

And while batteries can provide stored power when other sources are down, most current batteries can deliver power only for several hours before needing to recharge. That makes them nearly useless during extended outages. . . . Most current storage batteries can discharge for four hours at most before needing to recharge.

OK, then, so if solar-plus-battery systems are about to displace natural gas plants, what’s the plan for winter? They won’t say. The fact is, the only possible plans are either fossil fuel backup or trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of batteries. But the author never mentions any of that. How much fossil fuel backup? That’s an arithmetic calculation that is not difficult to make. But the process of making the calculation forces you to actually propose the characteristics of your solar-plus-battery system, which then makes the costs obvious. How much excess capacity of solar panels and batteries do you plan to build to minimize the down periods? Do you need solar panel capacity of four times peak usage, or ten times? Do you need battery capacity of one week’s average usage (in GWH) or two weeks or a full month?

The simple fact is that wind/solar plus battery systems would not need any government subsidies if they were cost effective. The Biden Administration is proposing to hand out many, many tens of billions of dollars to subsidize building these systems. They are clearly not cost-effective, and not even close. But no one in a position to know will make the relatively simple calculations to let us know how much this is going to cost. Even the Wall Street Journal can’t seem to grasp the math involved. And President Biden? It’s embarrassing even to ask the question.

May 20, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 1 Comment

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