India Situation: What does the Current Data Say?
Ivor Cummins | April 27, 2021
So then, what DOES the actual DATA say? Surely we should care, right?
*** NOTE THIS IS NON-CENSORABLE – NO medical advice or information here, NO conflicting with the WHO (remember they shared the Prof Ioannidis paper in their Oct 2020 bulletin).
Just the data and some scientific inferences – period. DOWNLOAD here and use with my permission (just click yes to cookies – no need to subscribe): https://we.tl/t-aRo1uhxv2c
My Odysee link: https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f
CNN’s New “Reporter,” Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist
CNN’s new national security reporter Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and NBC News, with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Sept. 19, 2019
By Glenn Greenwald | April 27, 2021
The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.
The classic case is Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote one of the most deceitful and destructive articles of his generation: a lengthy New Yorker article in May, 2002 — right as the propagandistic groundwork for the invasion of Iraq was being laid — that claimed Saddam Hussein had formed an alliance with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. In February, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, NPR host Robert Siegel devoted a long segment to this claim. When he asked Goldberg about “a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” Goldberg replied: “He is one of several men who might personify a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
Needless to say, nothing could generate hatred for someone among the American population — just nine months away from the 9/11 attack — more than associating them with bin Laden. Five months after Goldberg’s New Yorker article, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to impose regime change on Iraq; ten months later, the U.S. invaded Iraq; and by September, 2003, close to 70% of Americans believed the lie that Saddam had personally participated in the 9/11 attack.
Goldberg’s fabrication-driven article generated ample celebratory media attention and even prestigious journalism awards. It also led to great financial reward and career advancement. In 2007, The Atlantic‘s publisher David Bradley lured Goldberg away from The New Yorker by lavishing him with a huge signing bonus and even sent exotic horses to entertain Goldberg’s children. Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of that magazine and thus one of the most influential figures in media. In other words, the person who wrote what is arguably the most disastrous article of that decade was one most rewarded by the industry — all because he served the aims of the U.S. security state and its war aims. That is how U.S. corporate journalism functions.
Another illustrative mascot for this lucrative career path is NBC’s national security correspondent Ken Dilanian. In 2014, his own former paper, The Los Angeles Times, acknowledged his “collaborative” relationship with the CIA. During his stint there, he mimicked false claims from John Brennan’s CIA that no innocent people were killed from a 2012 Obama drone strike, only for human rights groups and leaked documents to prove many were.
A FOIA request produced documents published by The Intercept in 2015 that showed Dilanian submitting his “reporting” to the CIA for approval in violation of The LA Times’ own ethical guidelines and then repeating what he was told to say. But again, serving the CIA even with false “reporting” and unethical behavior is a career benefit in corporate media, not an impediment, and Dilanian rapidly fell upward after these embarrassing revelations. He first went to Associated Press and then to NBC News, where he broadcast numerous false Russiagate scams including purporting to “independently confirm” CNN’s ultimately retracted bombshell that Donald Trump, Jr. obtained advance access to the 2016 WikiLeaks archive.
On Monday, CNN made clear that this dynamic still drives the corporate media world. The network proudly announced that it had hired Natasha Bertrand away from Politico. In doing so, they added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies.
Bertrand’s career began taking off when, while at Business Insider, she abandoned her obsession with Russia’s role in Syria in 2016 in order to monomaniacally fixate on every last conspiracy theory and gossip item that drove the Russiagate fraud during the 2016 campaign and then into the Trump presidency. Each month, Bertrand produced dozens of Russiagate articles for the site that were so unhinged that they made Rachel Maddow look sober, cautious and reliable.
In 2018, it was Jeffrey Goldberg himself — knowing a star CIA propagandist when he sees one — who gave Bertrand her first big break by hiring her away from Business Insider to cover Russiagate for The Atlantic. Shortly after, she joined the Queen of Russiagate conspiracies herself by becoming a national security analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. From there, it was onto Politico and now CNN : the ideal, rapid career climb that is the dream of every liberal security state servant calling themselves a journalist. Her final conspiratorial article for The Atlantic before moving to Politico is the perfect illustration of who and what she is:
CNN’s new national security star was no ordinary Russiagate fanatic. There was no conspiracy theory too unhinged or evidence-free for her to promote. As The Washington Post‘s media reporter Erik Wemple documented once the Steele Dossier was debunked, there was arguably nobody in media other than Rachel Maddow who promoted and ratified that hoax as aggressively, uncritically and persistently as Bertrand. She defended it even after the Mueller Report corroborated virtually none of its key claims.
In a February, 2020 article headlined “How Politico’s Natasha Bertrand bootstrapped dossier credulity into MSNBC gig,” Wemple described how she was rewarded over and over for “journalism” that would be regarded in any healthy profession with nothing but scorn:
Where there’s a report on Russian meddling, there’s an MSNBC segment waiting to be taped. Last Thursday night, MSNBC host Joy Reid — subbing for “All In” host Chris Hayes — turned to Politico national security reporter Natasha Bertrand with a question about whether Trump “wants” Russian meddling or whether he can’t accept that “foreign help is there.“ Bertrand responded: “We don’t have the reporting that suggests that the president has told aides, for example, that he really wants Russia to interfere because he thinks that it’s going to help him, right?”
No, we don’t have that reporting — though there’s no prohibition against fantasizing about it on national television. Such is the theme of Bertrand’s commentary during previous coverage of Russian interference, specifically the dossier of memos drawn up by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. With winks and nods from MSNBC hosts, Bertrand heaped credibility on the dossier — which was published in full by BuzzFeed News in January 2017 — in repeated television appearances.
Wemple systematically reviewed the mountain of speculation, unproven conspiracies and outright falsehoods Bertrand shoveled to the public as she was repeatedly promoted. But it was the document that gave us deranged delusions about pee-pee tape blackmail and Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague that was her crown jewel: “The Bertrand highlight reel features a great deal of thumb-on-scale speculation regarding the dossier,” Wemple wrote.
And when information started being declassified that proved much of Bertrand’s claims about collusion to be a fraud, she complained that there was too much transparency, implying that the Trump administration was harming national security by allowing the public to know too much — namely, allowing the public to see that her reporting was a fraud. A journalist who complains about too much transparency is like a cardiologist who complains that a patient has stopped smoking cigarettes, or like a journalist who voluntarily rats out her own source to the FBI or who agitates for censorship of political speech: a walking negation of the professional values they are supposed to uphold. But that is Natasha Bertrand, and, to the extent that there are some people who still believe that working at CNN is desirable, she was just rewarded for it again yesterday — just as journalists who rat out their own sources to the FBI and advocate for internet censorship are now celebrated in today’s rotted media climate.
Bertrand’s trail of journalistic scandals and recklessness extend well beyond her Russiagate conspiracies. Last October, she published an article in Politico strongly implying that Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe was speaking without authorization or any evidence when he said Iran was attempting to undermine President Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. But last month, the Biden administration declassified an intelligence report which said they had “high confidence” that Iran had done exactly what Ratcliffe alleged: namely, run an influence campaign to hurt Trump’s candidacy. A former national security official, Cliff Sims, said upon hearing of CNN’s hiring that he explicitly warned Bertrand’s editors that the story was false but they chose to publish it anyway.
It was also Bertrand who most effectively laundered the extremely significant CIA lie in October, 2020 that the documents obtained by The New York Post about the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine were “Russian disinformation.” Even though the John-Brennan-led former intelligence officials admitted from the start that they had no evidence for this claim, Bertrand not only amplified it but vouched for its credibility by writing that the Post‘s reporting “has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump” (that those 2016 DNC and Podesta documents produced “few damaging revelations” would come as a big surprise to the five DNC operatives, led by Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who were forced to resign when their pro-Hillary cheating was revealed).
It was this Politico article by Bertrand that was then used by Facebook and Twitter to justify their joint censorship of the Post‘s reporting in the weeks before the 2020 election, and numerous media outlets — including The Intercept — gullibly told their readers to ignore the revelations on the ground that these authentic documents were “Russian disinformation.” Yet once it did its job of helping defeat Trump, that claim was debunked when even the intelligence community acknowledged it had no evidence of Russian involvement in the appearance of these materials, and Hunter Biden himself admitted he was the subject of a federal investigation for the transactions revealed by those documents.
Politico, Oct. 19, 2020
But even when her fantasies and conspiracies are debunked, Bertrand — like a good intelligence soldier — never cedes any ground in her propaganda campaigns. She was, needless to say, one of the journalists who most vocally promoted the CIA’s story — published as Trump was announcing his plans to withdraw from Afghanistan — that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban for the death of U.S. soldiers. Yet even when the U.S. intelligence community under Joe Biden admitted last week that it has only “low to moderate” confidence that this even happened — with the NSA and other surveillance agencies saying it could find no evidence to corroborate the CIA’s story — she continued to insist that nothing had changed with the story, denying last week on a Mediaite podcast that anything had happened to cast doubt on the original story: “I think it’s much more nuanced than it being a walk-back. I don’t think that’s right actually.”
Even a cursory review of Bertrand’s prolific output reveals an endless array of gossip, conspiracy and speculative assertions masquerading as journalism. The commentator Luke Thomas detailed many of these transgressions on Monday and correctly observed that “arguably no single reporter has contributed more to the deranged and paranoid national security fantasies of the center-left than Natasha Bertrand. She’s an embarrassment to her profession and will, therefore, fit right in at CNN.”
As Thomas noted, beyond all of Bertrand’s well-documented and consequential propaganda, “she sees conspiracies and perfidiousness around every corner,” pointing to this demented yet highly viral tweet that deciphered comments from former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) as inadvertently revealing some secret scheme to expand Trump’s pardon powers. That scheme, like most of her speculative predictions, never materialized.
Then there is her garden-variety ethical scandal. In January, freelancer Dean Sterling Jones accused Bertrand of stealing his work without credit or payment. In a post he published, Jones documented how he emailed Bertrand a draft with reporting he had been working on, and in response she agreed to report it jointly with him on a co-byline. Yet two weeks later, the article appeared in The Atlantic with Bertrand as the only named reporter. Only after Jones complained did they insert a sentence into the story begrudgingly citing him as a source. “By my count,” Jones wrote, “Bertrand’s article contains at least six unequivocal examples of direct copying and revisions of my work.” When he published his post detailing his accusations, Bertrand arrogantly refused even to provide comment to the freelancer whose work she pilfered.
Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.
Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.
I’ve long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.
The Truth About the Covid ‘Crisis’ in India
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • April 27, 2021
Now that Chile is settling down a bit, the latest Covid cautionary tale is India, which never seems to be out of the news at the moment as its positive cases and deaths have rocketed in the past few weeks.
Even the usually level-headed Kate Andrews in the Spectator has been painting the situation in lurid colours.
As it happened, the UK’s worst nightmares were never realised. The Nightingale hospitals built to increase capacity were barely used. But what the British Government feared most is now taking place elsewhere. India is suffering an exponential growth in infections, with more than 349,000 cases reported yesterday, as well as nearly 3,000 deaths. Hospitals are running out of oxygen for patients and wards are overflowing. There are reports of long queues as the sick wait to be seen by medical professionals. It’s expected the situation will deteriorate further before it gets better.
Jo Nash, who lived in India until recently and still has many contacts out there, has written a very good piece for Left Lockdown Sceptics putting the current figures in context – something no mainstream outlet seems to have any interest in doing.
Jo makes the crucial point that we need to keep in mind the massive difference in scale between India and the UK. At 1.4 billion people, India is more than 20 times larger than the UK, so to compare Covid figures fairly we must divide India’s by 20. So 2,000 deaths a day is equivalent to a UK toll of 100. India’s current official total Covid deaths of approaching 200,000 is equivalent to just 10,000 in the UK.
In a country the size of India and with the huge number of health challenges faced by the population, the number of Covid deaths needs to be kept in perspective. As Sanjeev Sabhlock observes in the Times of India, 27,000 people die everyday in India. This includes 2,000 from diarrhoea and 1,200 from TB (vaccinations for which have been disrupted by the pandemic). The lack of adequate hospital provision for Covid patients may be more a reflection of the state of the health service than the severity of the disease.
Jo Nash also points out that poor air quality plays a role.
Delhi, the focus of the media’s messaging, and the source of many of the media’s horrifying scenes of suffering, has the most toxic air in the world which often leads to the city having to close down due to the widespread effects on respiratory health…
Respiratory diseases including COPD, TB, and respiratory tract infections like bronchitis leading to pneumonia are always among the top ten killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises…
According to my contacts on the ground, people in Delhi are suffering from untreated respiratory and lung conditions that are now becoming serious. I’ve also had breathing problems there when perfectly healthy and started to mask up to keep the particulate matter out of my lungs. I used to suffer from serious chest infections twice yearly during the big changes in weather in India, usually November/December and April/May. When I reluctantly masked up that stopped. My contacts have reported that the usual seasonal bronchial infections have not been properly treated by doctors afraid of getting Covid, and people’s avoidance of government hospitals due to fear of getting Covid. Undoubtedly, these fears will have been fuelled by the media’s alarmist coverage of the situation. Consequently, the lack of early intervention means many respiratory conditions have developed life-threatening complications. Also, people from surrounding rural areas often travel to Delhi for treatment as it has the best healthcare facilities and people can go there for a few rupees by train. This puts pressure on Delhi’s healthcare system during respiratory virus seasons.
Positive cases look like they may be peaking in many regions now.
One mystery, as yet unexplained, is why India, which has not experienced a strong surge like this so far, suddenly did in March and April. Adding to the mystery is that the simultaneity of the surge across the regions is unexpected in a country as large as India and contrary to earlier outbreaks last year. Nick Hudson from Panda suggests it means there must be something artificial about it as it is not a natural pattern, since viruses naturally spread across the country with some delay and variation evident between regions.
It hasn’t escaped people’s attention that one novel factor is the nationwide vaccine programme rollout, beginning in January and accelerating during March. Is this a further example of the post-vaccine infection spike seen in the various trials and population studies, possibly caused by temporary suppression of the immune system?
Testing is another possible factor, as the number of tests being carried out surged in March and April – though so did the positive rate, suggesting this can’t be the only explanation.
Whatever is going on, it’s a pity there is not more curiosity among our scientists and journalists. Instead, it’s just the usual scaremongering driven by the misrepresentation of data.
Stop Press: Former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Professor Ramesh Thakur has been in touch with a comment he left on a story in the Australian.
Some context and perspective. India’s Covid deaths yesterday were 2,163 (seven-day rolling average). India’s average daily death toll is 25,000 from all causes.
Second, despite this surge, as of now India’s Covid mortality rate is 140 dead per million people. This compares to 401 for the world average, 1,762 for the US, and 1,869 for the UK. It puts India 119th in the world on this, the single most important statistic for comparison purposes.
Third, the crux of the problem in India is not the proportion of cases and deaths from Covid. Rather, it is the lack of a fit-for-purpose public health infrastructure and medical supplies of equipment and drugs.
Fourth, although Government neglect of public health while prioritising vanity projects like a new Parliament building during the pandemic, building temples and statues etc. is a contributory factor, the real cause of a poor public health system is poverty. Put bluntly, poverty is the world’s biggest killer.
Fifth and finally, this is why a strong economy is not an optional luxury but an essential requirement for good health.
ITV’s Lorraine Show Caught Lying! Photoshops Picture To Push For Climate Lockdowns
WE GOT A PROBLEM
Show was aired thursday 22/04/21 https://www.itv.com/hub/lorraine/1a93…
HOW TO WRITE A BAD ARTICLE ABOUT RUSSIA
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | April 26, 2021
Several press articles I’ve seen in the past few days have annoyed me rather, but I think that they are useful as examples of how reporting on Russia is distorted. For they demonstrate the methods used by journalists to paint a picture of the world that is far from accurate.
The articles in question come from those bastions of balanced reporting, The New York Times and The Guardian. The first is from Sunday’s edition of the NYT, with the title ‘The Arms Dealer in the Crosshairs of Russia’s Elite Assassination Squad’. This discusses Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, whose weapons were destroyed in an explosion in the Czech Republic in 2014, allegedly by Russian secret agents.
The second article is also from the NYT. This one has the title ‘After Testing the World’s Limits, Putin Steps Back From the Brink,’ and analyzes what author Anton Troianovski calls Russia’s ‘escalatory approach to foreign policy’, as seen by the Russian military build up near the Ukrainian border.
The third and final piece is from The Guardian, and is about last week’s protests in support of jailed oppositionist Alexei Navalny. This is somewhat schizophrenic, on the one hand saying that the pro-Navalny movement is in trouble, but on the other hand portraying the protests as a relative success and ending on a confident note that however grim things look for the opposition now, this can change at any moment.
Anyway, as one reads these articles one notices certain techniques that are used to paint a distorted picture of reality. So if you want to be a journalist, here’s what the articles teach that you should do:
1. Make stuff up. In the Guardian article, authors Andrew Roth and Luke Harding (yes, he!) begin by telling readers that ‘The future looked unspeakably grim for Alexey Navalny’s supporters before this week’s protests’. But it then lifts our spirits with the following:
What followed was surprisingly normal: a core of tens of thousands of Navalny supporters rallied near the Kremlin, waving mobile phone torches and chanting “Putin is a thief!” The police stood back in Moscow (there was a violent crackdown in St Petersburg). For an evening, the crowd roved the streets of the capital at will.
“This feeling of enthusiasm, of overcoming fear, the protest ended on a positive note … It left me with the feeling that nothing is lost, it’s still not the final battle, and that street protests in Russia are not over forever,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, in an interview from Europe.
Ah yes, the protests were a huge success, euphoric. There were ‘tens of thousands of Navalny supporters rallied near the Kremlin.’
Except that most reporters said that there was nothing of the sort, and that the turnout was far below expectations.
Estimates of the size of the protest crowd vary, but the Russian Interior Ministry reckoned the numbers as 14,000 across the entire country and only 6,000 in Moscow. Interior Ministry counts tend to be on the low size, so you can treat them with a pinch of salt, but Russian media outlets were claiming a crowd in Moscow of 10,000 to 15,000, , while Western journalists’ estimates were in the same ballpark. Max Seddon of the Financial Times, for instance, reckoned the number at about 10,000 and commented that it was much lower than in the last protests in January. So ‘tens of thousands’ as The Guardian claims? Apparently not.
The Guardian isn’t alone in providing misleading data. In its article about the Bulgarian arms dealer, The New York Times has the following to say:
After pro-democracy protestors toppled the Kremlin’s puppet government there [i.e. Ukraine], Russia special forces units wearing unmarked uniforms seized and annexed the Crimean peninsula and also instigated a separatist uprising that is still going on in the east.
Let’s unravel this a bit: Were the demonstrators in Kiev really ‘pro-democracy’? Debatable, though not provably 100% false. But definitely untrue is the idea that the Ukrainian government that was toppled in February 2014 was a ‘Russian puppet’. That’s simply false. As for Russian special forces ‘annexing’ Crimea, it’s true in a way, although not the whole story of what happened. But the claim that Russian special forces ‘instigated a separatist uprising’ in Donbass is without foundation. I know of no evidence of ‘Russian special forces’ having been present in Donbass in the early weeks of the uprising there. (Strelkov and his goons were not ‘Russian special forces’, and most analyses of the uprising show how it was overwhelmingly spontaneous and local in origin.)
So, again, making stuff up.
2. Mention that others have ‘reported’, ‘claimed’, or ‘alleged’ something without pointing out that the claim in question is dubious at best, or false at worst.
For example. The NYT piece about Mr Gebrev talks about the alleged Russian spy unit, Unit 29155, and tell us that:
Last year, the Times revealed a CIA assessment that officers from the unit may have carried out a secret operation to pay bounties to a network of criminal militants in Afghanistan in exchange for attacks on US and coalition troops.
This is superficially true in that the Times did reveal this assessment. But what it doesn’t tell you is that the US government only has low to medium confidence that the claim is true. That’s kind of important, don’t you think? Shouldn’t it be mentioned? By failing to do so, the Times makes out that something is true that probably isn’t.
It’s not the only example. Talking of Ukraine a little later, the same article tells us that after war broke out in Donbass,
Russian assassins fanned out across the country, killing senior Ukrainian military and intelligence officials who were central to the war effort, according to Ukrainian officials.
They did, did they? Well, maybe ‘according to Ukrainian officials’ they did. But I have to say that it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it, and if it were true wouldn’t there have been news of lots of dead Ukrainian military and intelligence officers? Given that there wasn’t any such news, why repeat the claim? Shouldn’t the Times at least check it first.
3. Cite only sources that back up the narrative you are trying to tell. Ignore alternative viewpoints.
This kind of follows on from the last. If you are writing about Ukraine, cite ‘Ukrainian officials’. But don’t cite rebel spokesmen. If you’re talking about Russia, cite oppositionists. Ignore pro-government analysts.
We can see this in the Guardian piece. This quotes a couple of members of Navalny’s team, a British professor, a pro-Navalny Russia high schooler, and then to finish off some completely random former advisor to one-time British foreign minister Robin Cook, whose connection to, and knowledge of, Russia is completely unexplained. The only reason for giving him the final word seems to be that he came up with some nice lines about how opposition movements can suddenly triumph even when they seem to be losing. Needless to say, dissenting viewpoints are nowhere to be heard in the article.
The NYT piece about Russia stepping ‘back from the brink’ is similarly loaded with carefully chosen sources. First up is the ever-present Gleb Pavlovsky, a one-time advisor to Vladimir Putin turned oppositionist, who seems to be the eternal go-to person for anti-Putin quotes. After him, the article gives us a quote from Navalny’s assistant Leonid Volkov, a statement from Ukrainian National Security Advisor Oleksiy Danilov, and a few words from the generally pretty anti-Putin Estonian analyst Kadri Liik. For a pretence of balance we also get a statement by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov and the opinion of Konstantin Remchukov, editor of Nezavisimaia Gazeta, a newspaper whose political stance isn’t 100% clear to me but strikes me as sort-of oppositional, sort of not (given that Remchukov ran the re-election campaign of Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin). All in all, the anti-government voices get the bulk of the space.
So there you have it. Make some stuff up. Reference ‘claims’ and ‘allegations’ without pointing out that they are unsubstantiated or even false. And throw in lots of quotes from pundits who support the chosen narrative. Easy as pie. A career as a journalist awaits you. Just don’t bother trying to be accurate. Understood?
Putin keeps the door open for diplomacy with the US; too bad it’s falling on deaf ears
By Scott Ritter | RT | April 22, 2021
Putin warns of Russia’s ‘red lines’, comparing the West’s actions to ‘The Jungle Book’, but says Moscow doesn’t want to burn bridges with anyone. His message falls on deaf ears in the US, largely thanks to establishment media.
In his annual address to the Federal Assembly – the Russian parliament – President Putin devoted most of his time to domestic issues. His comments regarding national security and foreign affairs were brief, but telling.
While many pundits had predicted he would use the occasion to announce major actions that would signify a decisive break with the West in the aftermath of the US imposing a new round of economic sanctions, Putin, while lamenting the “unfriendly actions” and “outright rudeness” of the US and its allies, highlighted the fact that Moscow wants to maintain good relations with them.
“We don’t want to burn bridges,” Putin declared.
Lest those in the West who were listening to the speech mistake Russia’s “good intentions as indifference or weakness,” Putin waxed poetic in putting down a marker that Russia would have none of it.
He alluded to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’ in describing the present situation vis-à-vis Russia and the West, observing that there are “all kinds of small Tabaquis [a reference to the sniveling jackal featured in the book] running around Shere Khan [a tyrannical Bengal tiger]… howling to gain the favor of their ruler.” While not naming names, Putin’s allusion is clear – the US (Shere Khan) and its Tabaquis (NATO) are harassing Russia (Mowgli, the unmentioned hero of the tale.)
The Jungle Book reference takes on a darker meaning when the Russian president warns those countries who have “made it a habit to pick on Russia,” that if “they want to burn bridges, or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetric, swift and tough.”
It should be noted that in ‘The Jungle Book’, Tabaqui the jackal was killed by Mowgli’s allies, while Shere Khan died at the hands of Mowgli himself, led into a fiery trap – the ultimate form of asymmetrical combat.
To the would-be Shere Khans and Tabaquis listening to Putin’s address, the Russian president could not have made his message any clearer – do not provoke the Russian bear. “Russia has its interests which we defend and will defend within the framework of international law,” he declared.
While some observers have interpreted Putin’s brief comments on foreign and national security as ‘war-mongering’ and ‘bellicose’, it was anything but. Putin made it clear that diplomacy, not military action, was Russia’s preferred methodology, emphasizing Russia’s “good intentions” and its desire to keep the existing bridges linking it and the West open, as opposed to burning them down.
Putin’s posture was consistent with the evaluation contained in the US intelligence community’s Global Threat Assessment for 2021, which described Russian intent as follows: “We expect Moscow to seek opportunities for pragmatic cooperation with Washington on its own terms, and we assess that Russia does not want a direct conflict with US forces.”
The document further noted that “Russia seeks an accommodation with the United States on mutual noninterference in both countries’ domestic affairs and US recognition of Russia’s claimed sphere of influence over much of the former Soviet Union.”
There is no sunlight between this assessment and the tone and content of Putin’s address.
But to read the US media’s reaction to his speech, one would get the impression that America occupied an alternative reality where the constant threat posed to Russia by the real-life Shere Khans and Tabaquis of the world has been flipped, with the Russian government assuming the role of the predatory figure threatening the existence of ‘democracy’ – apparently personified in the form of the Western-backed opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and the perpetually victimized Ukraine.
While providing dismissive lip service to the content of Putin’s address, the Washington Post instead highlighted what it reported as “a wave of protests” which “started rolling across Russia’s Far East in support of imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny.” The New York Times followed suit injecting the Navalny drama, while Newsweek took a different tack and ran an article with the inflammatory headline, “Ukraine President Zelensky Is Ready for War With Russia, Vows to ‘Stand to the Last Man.’” It covered a speech delivered by Volodymyr Zelensky as if it were the geopolitical equivalent of Putin’s address. “Does Ukraine want war?” Zelensky asked. “No. Is it ready for it? Yes,” he said, adding that while “Ukraine does not start a war first,” it “always stands to the last man.” Zelensky urged Putin to meet with him “anywhere in the Ukrainian Donbas where there is war” for peace talks.
By emphasizing Navalny and the conflict in the Donbass region while simultaneously giving short shrift to the content and intent of Putin’s address, the US media has continued a course which has sought to minimize Russian statesmanship and diplomacy in favor of a Hollywood-like narrative which paints that nation and its leader as the quintessential bad guys.
Given the role played by the US mainstream media in creating an environment that compels US leaders to craft policy which conforms to domestic political imperative as opposed to legitimate national security interests, this emphasis is unfortunate. The failure on the part of the US media, and by extension, the Biden administration, to recognize this reality is reflective of the suicidal hubris and arrogance that has gripped what passes for an understanding of modern-day Russia. Read ‘The Jungle book’; it’s not an ending any would-be Shere Khan should desire.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Zero mainstream coverage today of the foiled, U.S. backed plot to assassinate Belarus president Lukashenko
By Gilbert Doctorow | April 19, 2021
In his last book “War with Russia?” my friend and colleague Steve Cohen wrote about the flagrant censorship of news being carried on by The New York Times in support of its Russia-bashing editorial policies. Said Cohen, the newspaper’s century old slogan of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” has been turned into “All the News that Fits” when it comes to coverage of Russia.
But the problem goes far deeper than the professional malpractice of one leading newspaper in America. The censorship of news carried by mainstream media by U.S. authorities covers not only the domestic press but also the mainstream of Allied countries. News blackouts are imposed when something ugly arises implicating the United States in violation of international norms of state behavior for which the State Department has no ready explanation or white wash.
This very situation seems to have arisen over the weekend, when news broke in Moscow over the arrest of two conspirators plotting a coup d’état in Minsk, to be carried out by the Belarus armed forces tentatively during the 9 May parade celebrating victory over fascist Germany in the Second World War.
Other leading English-speaking papers such as The Guardian and The Financial Times have front page reports on Alexei Navalny’s near death condition in a prison camp but not a word about Belarus. Ditto the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Le Figaro. Curious, n’est-ce pas? Warum? Let’s look into the story in its full dimension.
Last night’s News of the Week program hosted by Dimitry Kiselyov, Russia’s top manager of state news programming, began with a 20 minute report on the extraordinary arrest of two conspirators plotting armed rebellion entailing the murder of Lukashenko and his family, abolition of the post of President, installation of a Committee of Concord such as previously had been headed by the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
But these were not empty allegations. The arrests followed on a meeting by the two conspirators with Belarus military officers held in a downtown Moscow restaurant which was filmed from start to finish by the Russian state security agency, the FSB. Lengthy segments of recordings from their meeting and discussion of their treasonous plans were aired on the Kiselyov program. Moreover, the accused are not some unknown pawns such as the British presented to the world press when they released their accusations against Russia over the Skripal poisoning. No, one of the two arrested was the former press secretary of Lukashenko, a person who would have had all the contacts necessary to organize such a rebellion. The other plotter has dual US-Belarus citizenship and was well known as a fighter against Lukashenko’s rule.
The two were turned over to the Belarus KGB for interrogation in Minsk. Surely further information about the links of the plotters to Ukraine, to Poland and to the United States will come out in the next few days.
What we have here is “very likely” (to use current Anglo-American political jargon) involvement of the United States in yet another regime change operation. The revolution from below in Belarus led by Tikhanovskaya with support from Poland and Lithuania failed. The anti-Lukashenko street demonstrations led to nothing. And now Plan B, a putsch from above, was being organized to achieve the objective of removing Lukashenko both politically and physically. We have not seen such openly murderous plans with “likely” U.S. backing since John Kennedy’s days when the assassination of Fidel Castro was the hot game in D.C.
On the same “very likely” logic, I permit myself to take this all back to the door of the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Policy designate Victoria Nuland. The links to Warsaw and Kiev that appear present are all in line with what she was doing to precipitate the Maidan in 2013 and violent overthrow of the sitting President in Kiev amidst attempts to murder him as he made his escape to Russian territory in February 2014.
From all of the foregoing, it looks as though U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s pledge several weeks ago that the US would no longer pursue “orange revolutions” was either an out and out lie or made without his knowing that control of foreign policy no longer is in his hands, but is being carried out by his nominal subordinate, Mme Nuland. No wonder that the U.S. has ordered “stop the presses” on this story until it can put together some plausible response.
In the meantime, the same news program delivered the Kremlin’s response to the Czech action over the weekend to expel 18 diplomats from the Russian embassy in Prague over allegations that Russia was involved in blowing up an arms depot near the capital back in 2014, an event which previously the Czech authorities had blamed on the owners-managers of the depot. Per the Kremlin, these new and absurd Czech charges of Russia’s nefarious activities were agreed with Washington to direct attention away from the pending story about U.S. involvement in plans to murder the Belarus head of state.
Are we headed to World War III? If the war machinery today were like what existed in August 1914, the answer would be unquestionably yes. It is our good fortune that until someone on either side of the East-West divide pushes the Red Button, there are ways back from the abyss. However, we are still heading in the wrong direction, towards the abyss, and the United States is the prime mover.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2021
NYT ‘bounties’ non-story shows US/UK media has got so used to blaming Russia, it’s now doing it out of habit
By Paul Robinson | RT | April 20, 2021
As holes predictably appear in claims that Russia paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers, questions arise as to why such erroneous stories keep appearing in the American press. Domestic US politics provide part of the answer.
“A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories.” So ran a headline in the New York Times in August 2016. If it were only a Russian phenomenon, the world would be a much better place. Alas, the Times is far from immune from spreading “false stories” itself. From Walter Duranty’s reporting from the Soviet Union, through Judith Miller’s articles on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, up to its coverage of accusations that US President Donald Trump had colluded with the Russian government, The New York Times has had its fair share of “fake news” experiences.
“A little tiny bit flat footed,” was how the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described the newspaper when the Mueller investigation failed to find Trump guilty of collusion. “I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?” added Baquet.
You have to feel a bit for him. He really believed in collusion. In his eyes, it did “look a certain way.” It was rather embarrassing when he turned out to be completely wrong.
The New York Times’ iffy relationship with reality is back in the news today. US presidential spokesperson Jen Psaki admitted that the US intelligence community was not at all convinced by accusations first aired in the Times that the Russian government had paid bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers. Rather, it had only “low to moderate confidence” that the story was true. Psaki explained:
“The reason that they have low to moderate confidence in this judgment is in part because it relies on detainee reporting, and due to the challenging environment and also due to the challenging operating environment in Afghanistan. So it’s challenging to gather this intelligence and this data.”
The accusation against Russia appeared in The New York Times in June last year. The Times then followed up with additional stories on the same topic. “Afghan Contractor Handed Out Russian Cash to Kill Americans, Official Say,”claimed the headline of a second article. “How Russia Built a Channel to the Taliban, Once an Enemy,” read the headline of a third.
Commentators soon pointed out problems. While the CIA had moderate faith in the claim, the National Security Agency didn’t. In any case, the primary sources of information were Afghan prisoners who hadn’t themselves been involved in the alleged transaction. Their claims needed to be treated with a fair degree of caution.
Others pointed out that the story didn’t make any sense from a Russian point of view. The Russian government values the stability of Afghanistan, and had consistently supported both the Afghan government and the US military presence there. There was no obvious motive for killing Americans.
Furthermore, it’s not as if the Taliban needed to be incentivised to fight America. They were already killing as many Americans as they were able to. Paying them to do what they were doing already would have been odd, to say the least.
Now, Ms. Psaki admits what people have long since suspected: that the accusation against Russia is not well-founded. But anyone with any sense realized that from the get-go. Why, then, did The New York Times report it?
The Times’ explanation is that the story was true. It didn’t say that the accusation was accurate; it merely reported the accusation. In an article on Thursday, Times reporter Charlie Savage notes that the newspaper had stated that the CIA had only “medium” confidence in the story and the NSA had “low” confidence. It had also reported that the Afghan prisoners who recounted the story hadn’t actually been present when the alleged meetings with Russians took place. In other words, The New York Times’ reporting was accurate.
Maybe so, but that begs a question – why report a story that makes an extremely explosive allegation if you’re not at all confident that the accusation is true? Isn’t there some responsibility to hold off from repeating libelous claims until such time as you can substantiate them?
Apparently not. It seems as if the Times wanted to believe the story. It “looked a certain way,” to use Dean Baquet’s phrase. Which in turn begs another question. Why did it look that way to the Times?
The obvious answer is that it fitted the political needs of the moment. For the real target of the Russian bounty story was never Russia but Trump. Its purpose was to show that the president had in some way betrayed America’s soldiers by continuing to talk to Russia even though he had evidence that the Russians were killing Americans.
The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, thus remarked, “The administration’s disturbing silence and inaction endanger the lives of our troops and our coalition partners.”Meanwhile, then presidential candidate and now president, Joe Biden, responded to the story by saying that Trump’s “entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way. It’s a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas.”
Russia, in other words, was merely a pawn in an internal American political struggle. Sadly, though, this is far from an isolated incident. Furthermore, the Democratic Party and its backers in the USA have now become so habituated to spreading dubious stories about Russia that they seem to be unable to stop, even though the original political motivation has vanished. The Russian bounty wasn’t the first “false story” to appear, and it won’t be the last.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is the author of the Irrussianality blog.
WaPo-Style Fake News Russia Bashing
By Stephen Lendman | April 20, 2021
Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post provides propaganda services for Washington’s intelligence community.
Like other establishment media, the broadsheet is militantly hostile toward nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests.
Relentless Putin bashing reflects his model leadership and prominence on the world stage — in stark contrast to pygmy US and other Western counterparts.
According to neocon WaPo editors, UN Charter-breaching Biden regime sanctions on Russia weren’t tough enough.
Imposed for invented reasons as part of longstanding US Russia bashing, WaPo claimed “punches were pulled (sic).”
International investors can still buy Russian bonds unobstructed, the broadsheet complained, adding:
Russian energy and mineral enterprises weren’t sanctioned.
A typical litany of Big Lies followed.
WaPo falsely accused Moscow of paying bounties to kill US forces in Afghanistan — citing no evidence because there is none.
Defying reality, the broadsheet falsely claimed that Russia “sponsored… attacks that seriously injured US officials in Moscow, Havana and China” — again no evidence cited.
Fake news accusations of Russian “aggression” persist — how hegemon USA and its partners operate.
The Russian Federation never attacked or threatened other nations.
Under Putin, the Kremlin prioritizes peace, stability, cooperative relations with other countries, and compliance with international law – worlds apart from how the US and its imperial partners in high crimes operate.
In response to years of US-orchestrated Kiev aggression against Donbass, WaPO falsely accused Moscow of US-led high crimes of war and against humanity.
Calling for more illegal sanctions on Russia, perhaps its editors won’t be satisfied unless US hardliners launch WW III.
Separately, WaPo ignored US war on humanity at home and abroad while falsely accusing Russia of “crush(ing) opposition” elements.
Falsely accusing China of spying on and repressing Uyghur Muslins, WaPo defied reality by claiming Russia operates the same way against targeted individuals.
It lied claiming Putin amassed billions of dollars of hidden wealth.
It lied saying he heaps “extravagances” on political allies.
It lied accusing him of poisoning political nobody Navalny.
It lied claiming he persecutes protesters and activists.
It lied accusing democratic Russia of being authoritarian, calling Putin a dictator.
Compared to low approval ratings for US leaders and Congress, nearly two-thirds of Russians approve of Putin’s leadership.
According to Statista Research on February 25, “65 percent of Russians approved of activities of Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
Biden’s approval rating hovers around 50, almost entirely from undemocratic Dem support.
Mind-manipulated Americans don’t understand how badly they’re harmed by US policymakers until they’re bitten hard on their backsides.
Even then, it takes multiple abusive practices for them to realize that dominant US hardliners are their enemies, not allies.
State-sponsored repression and other forms of abuse are longstanding US practices, notably against its most vulnerable people, as well as against targeted individuals of the wrong race, ethnicity, and/or nationality.
In stark contrast to long ago US/Western abandonment of international law, Russia scrupulously abides by its principles.
On all things related to truth and full-disclosure, the US, its hegemonic partners and press agent media stick exclusively to the fabricated official narrative.
On all things related to nations from from US control, both right wings of its war party target them for regime change — wars by hot and/or other means their favored strategies.
On issues mattering most, the US and its hegemonic partners consistently breach the rule of law, operating by their own rules exclusively.
Instead of straight talk, US-led Western officials and their press agent media feature managed news misinformation and disinformation exclusively — truth and full disclosure nowhere in sight.
The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick’s Death. And They Just Got Caught.
Nancy Pelosi at a congressional tribute to the late Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who lies in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 3, 2021. (Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool/Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | April 19, 2021
It was crucial for liberal sectors of the media to invent and disseminate a harrowing lie about how Officer Brian Sicknick died. That is because he is the only one they could claim was killed by pro-Trump protesters at the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
So The New York Times on January 8 published an emotionally gut-wrenching complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died — and, just like the now-discredited Russian bounty story also unveiled by that same paper, cable outlets and other media platforms repeated this lie over and over in the most emotionally manipulative way possible. Just watch a part of what they did and how:
As I detailed over and over when examining this story, there were so many reasons to doubt this storyline from the start. Nobody on the record claimed it happened. The autopsy found no blunt trauma to the head. Sicknick’s own family kept urging the press to stop spreading this story because he called them the night of January 6 and told them he was fine — obviously inconsistent with the media’s claim that he died by having his skull bashed in — and his own mother kept saying that she believed he died of a stroke.
But the gruesome story of Sicknick’s “murder” was too valuable to allow any questioning. It was weaponized over and over to depict the pro-Trump mob not as just violent but barbaric and murderous, because if Sicknick weren’t murdered by them, then nobody was (without Sicknick, the only ones killed were four pro-Trump supporters: two who died of a heart attack, one from an amphetamine overdose, and the other, Ashli Babbitt, who was shot point blank in the neck by Capitol Police despite being unarmed). So crucial was this fairy tale about Sicknick that it made its way into the official record of President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, and they had Joe Biden himself recite from the script, even as clear facts mounted proving it was untrue.
Articles on this Substack, Feb. 16, 2021 and Mar. 5, 2021
Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as “Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.
For the crime of trying to determine the factual truth of what happened, my character was constantly impugned by these propagandistic worms, as was anyone else’s who tried to tell the truth about Sicknick’s tragic death. Because one of the first people to highlight the journalistic truth here was former Trump official Darren Beattie of Revolver News and one of the few people on television willing to host doubts about the official story was Tucker Carlson, any doubts about the false Sicknick story — no matter how well-grounded in truth, facts, reason and evidence — were cast as fascism and white supremacy, and those raising questions smeared as “truthers”: the usual dreary liberal insults for trying to coerce people into submitting to their lies:
Because the truth usually prevails, at least ultimately, their lies, yet again, all came crashing down on their heads on Monday. The District of Columbia’s chief medical examiner earlier this morning issued his official ruling in the Sicknick case, and it was so definitive that The Washington Post — one of the media outlets that had pushed the multiple falsehoods — did not even bother to try to mask or mitigate the stark conclusion it revealed:
The first line tells much of the story: “Capitol Police officer Brian D. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled.” Using understatement, the paper added: “The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.”
This definitive finding from the medical examiner not only rids us of the Fire Extinguisher lie but also the second theory to which these media outlets resorted once they had to face the reality that they spent weeks spreading an outright lie (needless to say, they provided no real accountability or even acknowledgement for the fact that they did spread that Fire Extinguisher tale, instead just seamlessly moving to their next evidence-free claim). They changed their story to claim that pro-Trump protesters still murdered Sicknick, not with a fire extinguisher but with bear spray, which video shows at least one protester using in his vicinity.
Clockwise: Tweet of Associated Press, Jan. 29; Tweet of NBC’s Richard Engel, Jan. 9; Tweet of the Lincoln Project’s Fred Willman, Jan. 29; Tweet of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kirstof, Jan. 9
The problem with that theory is that bear spray is not usually fatal, and the medical examiner’s findings ruled out the possibility that this is what caused his death:
In an interview with The Washington Post, Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, said the autopsy found no evidence the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants, which Diaz said would have caused Sicknick’s throat to quickly seize. Diaz also said there was no evidence of internal or external injuries…
Diaz said Sicknick suffered two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by a clot in an artery that supplies blood to that area of the body. Diaz said he could not comment on whether Sicknick had a preexisting medical condition, citing privacy laws.
So there goes that second fairy tale. The Post did note the medical examiner’s observation regarding Sicknick’s participation in defending the Capitol that day that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” That of course is true: just as it is true for the two pro-Trump supporters who had heart attacks that day and the other pro-Trump supporter who died from too much amphetamine in her system, having a stressful encounter as a police officer likely played a role in why someone would have two strokes the following day. But police officers are trained for stressful encounters, and that obviously is a far cry from being able to claim that any pro-Trump supporter murdered Sicknick.
I’ll have much more on this story as it unfolds. A significant amount of media accountability is warranted. But you’re seeing why there is so much resentment and so many attacks on platforms like this one that permit journalists to report and analyze facts and dissect media narratives without being constrained by liberal orthodoxies and pieties and while remaining immune from liberal pressure tactics: it’s one of the few ways that real dissent to their lies and propaganda can be aired.
The New York Times, in a now-”updated” article, Jan. 8, 2021
Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause, especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing this: their audiences want to be lied to — they are grateful for it — and would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan interests will not be undermined.
What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals. They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6 protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung fluids. None if it was true, but that did not matter — and it still does not to them — because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.
Overexposed Fauci has nothing to add to gun debate and his intervention is an insult to firearms victims
By Micah Curtis | RT | April 19, 2021
CNN’s invitation to Dr. Anthony Fauci to opine on whether gun violence is a health issue in the US was totally misplaced. He’s not qualified to comment, and after his performance on Covid, few will be prepared to listen anyway.
The president’s chief medical adviser has been the darling of the political left ever since Covid-19 changed our world. He has been pushed and promoted outside his normal sphere to the extent that he was even invited to talk at the Latin American Music Awards alongside Ricky Martin. Boy, do I wish I was kidding…
Now that he’s the poster boy for all things health-related in America, it was perhaps not surprising that he was asked to appear on CNN’s State of the Union program for his opinions on whether or not gun violence is a health issue in America. But there’s a problem with that. Because Dr. Fauci is an immunologist, not a psychologist.
Sure, the good doctor has a right to his opinion. He gets to enjoy that right just as much as any other American. However, some opinions have more value than others. And in this particular case, I think that Fauci’s opinion is worthless. I have nothing personal against him, but I would much rather hear a psychologist discuss this particular topic. After all, there is always an individual or individuals behind the violence, and I think we need to know what goes into the decision-making process to compel someone to kill so many people with a gun.
Then again, I’m also cognizant enough to know that the left does not care at all whether or not Dr. Fauci is qualified to give his opinion. At the moment he is their go-to guy, as opposed to someone like Bill Nye. And, ultimately, the reason that Fauci is given airtime has nothing to do with his actual qualifications, but everything to do with the fact that he is to be used as a cudgel. The administration that he works for declared gun violence a public health epidemic earlier this month. So he is there to make it seem like its decision to make such a declaration is rooted in science.
It’s a rather cynical move, and one that clearly is not very well thought out. Trying to use an overexposed immunologist to push gun control is not exactly going to be something that resonates with a lot of people in America. Many are simply sick of seeing this guy everywhere, so there’s no way that they’ll listen to what he has to say with regard to what should be done with firearms.
Whichever way you look at it, Dr. Fauci is as qualified to comment on this as he is on how to repair a muffler on a semi truck, and everyone knows it. And what makes it even worse is that his contribution to the debate solves nothing.
Right now, Democrats simply do not have the numbers to push through an assault weapons ban on Capitol Hill. And no matter how much data is brought together to show how many people are killed by guns, there is an overarching issue that isn’t being addressed. And that is why people are pulling the trigger in the first place.
In my opinion, this is the question we should be striving to find the answer for. And our failure to do so makes the situation even worse and more depressing. It shows a lack of care for the people who are victims of gun violence, and a lack of desire to figure out what exactly drives people to do such things.
Whether it’s extreme mental duress or an actual mental illness, at some point our culture is going to have to figure out exactly what causes people to kill so freely if we ever want America to get better.
Parading Dr. Fauci around like a prize parrot is going to do nothing more than annoy people… while others lose their lives.
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US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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