Wuhan probe members blast NYT story for ‘misquoting’ them as Beijing mocks US bid to hold WHO ‘to higher standards’
RT | February 14, 2021
Experts sent to China by the WHO to investigate the origins of Covid-19 lashed out at the New York Times for allegedly twisting their words. Meanwhile, Beijing hit back at Washington’s skeptical remarks about the probe.
The independent expert team returned this week from a month-long fact-finding mission to Wuhan, where they were searching for a better understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic started. Their mission was subject to politically charged attention, stemming from widespread accusations from some Western officials that the Chinese government had conducted a cover-up of the original outbreak in the Hubei Province and its capital.
The scientists, who worked under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), returned with new data and plans for further investigation. The coverage in the Western press, however, focused on parts of their investigation that came up short on expectations and alleged pressure put on the team by Beijing.
One particular story of that kind was run by the New York Times, titled “On WHO Trip, China Refused to Hand Over Important Data.” This was angrily rebuked by two members of the probe, who were extensively quoted in it. British zoologist Peter Daszak tweeted a link to the article on Saturday, commenting that “this was NOT my experience” and that the team “DID get access to critical new data throughout.”
Danish epidemiologist Thea Kolsen Fischer, a fellow investigator, agreed, saying the same was true on her side of the mission.
“Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room,” she said, referring to the Times’ framing of debates between visiting scientists and their hosts as something abnormal and indicative of obstruction by the Chinese side.
“Our quotes are intendedly twisted casting shadows over important scientific work.”
Daszak added that after spending much time explaining to the media the key findings made by himself and others in China, it was “disappointing” to see “our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began. Shame on you [New York Times ].”
The WHO-mandated panel is yet to present its final report on the Wuhan mission, but they have made their general conclusions public. Some of these confirmed the generally accepted theory of the coronavirus transmission from bats to humans via a yet-unknown intermediary animal. The team also agreed to further investigate the possibility of transmission through packages of cold-stored food, which some Chinese scientists favor over the alternative.
The team all but ruled out the ‘virus lab leak’ theory, which was the preferred line of attack against China by the Trump administration. The Biden administration’s rhetoric so far has been less openly accusatory towards Beijing, but it nevertheless has been highly skeptical about China’s intentions.
Commenting on Saturday on the WHO mission’s return, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the Americans “have deep concerns” about the probe’s early results “and questions about the process used to reach them.” President Biden’s decision to reverse the Trump-era withdrawal from the UN health body “means holding it to the highest standards” of transparency and accountability, the official added.
Beijing hit back on Sunday, as its embassy in Washington remarked that Trump has “severely undermined multilateral institutions, including the WHO, and gravely damaged international cooperation on Covid-19.” Now the Biden team is “acting as if none of this had ever happened” and “pointing fingers at other countries who have been faithfully supporting the WHO and at the WHO itself.”
Washington should “hold itself to the highest standards, take a serious, earnest, transparent and responsible attitude, shoulder its rightful responsibility, support the WHO’s work with real actions and make due contribution to the international cooperation on Covid-19,” the statement added. “The whole world will be looking.”
`We Don’t Debate with Anti-Vaxxers – Whether They’re Right or Wrong’ – Says BBC
Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA | February 12, 2021
At the beginning of what I started off calling the coronavirus hoax, but which I now prefer to refer to as the covid fraud, I expected to see some fairly active debate about the importance of what seemed to me to be a rather over-marketed disease.
The forecasts upon which governments were basing their decisions were clearly over-dramatic and the main forecaster, Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, has a terrible track record – having already been seriously wrong about a great many things.
In 2001, the Imperial team did the modelling on foot and mouth disease which led to a cull of six million sheep, pigs and cattle. The cost to the UK was around £10 billion. The Imperial’s work on this has been described as `severely flawed’. In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would die from mad cow disease. He said that could rise to 150,000 if sheep were involved. In the UK the death total was 177.
In 2005, Ferguson said that up to 200 million people could be killed by bird flu. The total number of deaths was 282 worldwide so he was out by 199 million 999 thousand seven hundred and eighteen. If Ferguson designed a mug he’d put the handle on the inside.
In 2009, Ferguson and his chums at Imperial advised the Government again, and they then warned that swine flu would kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end swine flu killed 457 people in the UK.
Finally, Ferguson is said to have admitted that his model of the covid-19 is based on undocumented 13-year-old computer code that was intended for use with an influenza epidemic.
And it has been reported that early modelling which helped guide the British Government’s approach in 2020, used Wikipedia – which is edited by all sorts of saddos, wierdos and freaks as well as by people with very particular political agendas to pursue. Read what co- founder Larry Sanger has to say about Wikipedia.
So those of us with some experience in these matters decided that the Government had got it wrong again.
And then on March 19th 2020, the public health bodies in the UK, and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens, decided to downgrade the coronavirus to flu level. The proof of this is on my website.
Naively, I thought that would be that.
Sadly, I was wrong.
Around the world governments have continued to lie, to deceive and to create fear and the media has aided and abetted the lies. All debate has been suppressed and the many doctors and other practitioners who have spoken up and tried to share the truth have been abused and demonised and had their careers ruthlessly destroyed.
The result is that the millions who doubt the Government’s propaganda and who question the safety and efficacy of the jabs have been disenfranchised by the media.
No media organisation has, in my view, been more egregiously dishonest than the BBC which has exhibited staggering ignorance mixed with prejudice and has forgotten that its job is to report the news not to bend it.
I am tired of them ignoring the science, avoiding debate and demonising those of us speaking the truth. I am convinced they believe that by demonising us they can silence us and more easily sustain the fraud and perpetuate the hoax.
They also seem to believe that they are immune to the consequences of this fraud. Do they think they and their relatives will escape the dangers of these lethal jabs?
The tragedy is that the BBC, funded with public money, deliberately suppresses valuable information that could help its viewers and listeners.
Speaking last autumn a BBC presenter called, Emma Barnett, said `we actually don’t, as a matter of editorial policy, we don’t debate with anti-vaxxers, whether they’re right or wrong. We actually don’t do that.’
There’s the proof of the BBC’s one-sided, corrupt approach to the biggest fraud in history. Right or wrong the BBC suppresses the truth.
Why does the unjustifiably arrogant BBC think it knows better than the science? Who told them that vaccines are so good that there is no need to debate their value, their safety or their effectiveness? Is it a stretch to fear that there’s drug company influence lurking somewhere.
And it’s no stretch to conclude that the BBC won’t allow me live on air to counter its misinformation because I can prove that vaccines kill and injure and often don’t work at all, and that would upset Bill Gates and the Government.
The BBC won’t let me discuss covid-19 because I can prove that masks kill and don’t work, that social distancing and lockdowns do far more harm than good, that the Government policy is arguably responsible for more deaths than covid-19 and that the experimental jabs being so heavily promoted are already killing and maiming thousands of people who have been denied informed consent.
Could it be that the bean counters at the BBC are frightened that the truth might upset the BBC’s cosy relationship with arch pro-vaxxers the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Gates, remember, has boasted that putting money into vaccines was the best investment he’s ever made.
Why do the BBC staff allow this to happen? Whatever happened to editorial integrity and independence?
I’m not what the BBC would call an anti-vaxxer, I am simply interested in facts and scientific truths, but I can prove that some of the companies making vaccines have over the years been found guilty of fraud and I can prove that billions of dollars have been paid out in compensation to people injured by vaccines.
The BBC isn’t interested in any of those uncomfortable truths. When faced with scores of scientific papers proving that face masks are dangerous, they dig out a scientist who will follow the party line – and then claim that a few quotes trump the inconvenient scientific truths.
Decent broadcasters and journalists would walk away from an organisation which has such oppressive policies – out of tune with an obligation to the public – but they stay for the big salaries and the power and the modest and ethereal fame.
The BBC seems to me to be a propaganda department for, among others, the powerful, rich and fraudulent vaccine industry. They don’t seem to care how many people die as long as they get their fat salaries, fat pensions and a chance to get their picture in the papers occasionally.
Lord Reith would weep.
Many BBC presenters probably don’t know who the hell he was. But he’d weep. He is identified with the BBC’s aims to educate, inform and entertain.
In my view if you deliberately suppress scientific truths that would be inconvenient to one of your financial partners then you deserve all the opprobrium that is available.
Could the BBC and its vast army of reporters and presenters be legally responsible when people who have been denied the truth, fall ill?
I believe so.
The BBC has a legal responsibility to provide both sides of a scientific discussion with a voice but it has deliberately chosen to provide only one point of view.
The BBC is a self-confessed biased organisation and I don’t think it is a stretch to describe it as corrupt. It is, after all, helping Gates get ever richer by silencing, libelling, trashing and attempting to humiliate those trying to reveal the science behind this scam.
The BBC refuses to allow presenters to discuss the downside of vaccination. It is deliberately and knowingly refusing to allow any debate on an issue which affects the health, and possibly the life, of everyone.
Let us not forget, too, that the BBC has financial links with the world’s arch pro-vaxxers – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has interests in a number of vaccine makers – including Pfizer.
In the US the National Vaccine Information Center has so far reported 501 deaths and 10,748 other injuries following the covid-19 jab.
That was before the end of January so I expect its higher now. And don’t forget that in America, as in the UK and elsewhere, they admit that they only receive details of a tiny proportion of the problems after vaccination.
Sadly, the figures from the UK are also horrifying. Officially, more than a third of those having the jab have a reaction. But it’s the serious adverse events that worry me.
UK Government figures show that the Pfizer jab in the UK is already responsible for 107 deaths and 49,472 people injured. In the first few weeks.
If you want to see the horrifying details of the UK government figures they are on my website. Press the health button and the figures are there, near the top in an article entitled `How many are the vaccines killing?’. (Note: Since this video was recorded, there has been an update on the UK Pfizer deaths and injuries. There are now 143 deaths)
This isn’t a vaccination programme. It’s genocide, supported, defended and protected by the BBC. Still, some people are happy. The UK Government is delighted. It will save £600 million in pension payments because of all the old people who’ve been murdered in the last twelve months. And the Financial Times reports that covid-19 deaths, and presumably the jab deaths, will cut £60 billion from corporate pension costs. I have no doubt that the BBC is aware of these figures. After all the Government has appointed, as the new chairman of the BBC, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker – a money man. Goldman Sachs, in my opinion, one of the most corrupt companies in the world has rightly been described as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. I’m guessing that the BBC might have welcomed Goebbels as their new chairman if he’d been alive.
Instead the BBC got an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who was appointed by the conservative party and who has allegedly given more than £400,000 to the conservative party. He’s being paid a huge salary and will doubtless get a peerage or a knighthood in due course.
Don’t the coincidences just keep mounting up. You couldn’t make this up. You couldn’t satirise it.
The BBC’s financial partner, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has financial links to The Guardian, and since BBC job ads often appear in The Guardian, advertising provides a constant source of new, hubristic pseudo journalists. And, of course, the Gates have a huge shareholding in the Pfizer vaccine. Oh what a simple web these conspirators have woven. Whenever the BBC is involved the stench of corruption seems to me to be nauseating.
Bill and Melinda will no doubt be delighted to hear that Pfizer expects to generate $15 billion, or a quarter of its total revenue, from sales of its experimental covid-19 jab. Moreover Pfizer say they expect there to be a long lasting need for covid-19 vaccines to combat new variants and boost waning immune responses.
As far as I know the BBC has failed to tell the public that both the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority and Public Health England have received huge sums of money from Gates.
Is there not one person at the BBC with the integrity, the wisdom, the decency, the self- respect to be ashamed that the corporation has allied itself to one of the most reviled men in modern history, and that in doing so they have betrayed themselves, their families and their viewers, listeners and readers?
Corruption, remember, is fraudulent conduct by those in power – often involving money.
If you lay down all the lies the Government has told in the last twelve months they would go round the world twice and end up on the steps outside Broadcasting House. If you give money to the BBC you are buying the bullets to kill your family. There appears to be no end to the lack of integrity at the BBC. Without talent, without honour and without self-respect – that’s the BBC in 2021.
I haven’t seen the BBC warning that the second dose of the jab may well cause worse problems than the first dose. I doubt if you have either.
Nor have I seen them warn that people who are receiving the jab are going to be in real trouble when they next come into contact with a coronavirus. There will be a problem called a cytokine storm or pathogenic priming, their immune systems will overreact and that’s likely to be when there are lots of deaths. Details can be found on my website and in the International Journal of Clinical Practice for October 2020. If there is someone at the BBC who can read they might like to take a look.
The BBC deliberately and cold-bloodedly suppresses the truth about vaccines (because the pro-vaxxers aren’t going to tell you about the dangers) and has financial links with people promoting vaccines.
Is that corruption?
The BBC derides the truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists.
But the BBC itself is now part of a huge conspiracy and a conspiracy which is practice – not theory. Hundreds of BBC staff are involved in a self-aggrandising, self-enriching betrayal of duty. Every truly independent scientist knows that the covid jabs are experimental and hugely dangerous.
Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose would be welcomed into the bosom of the BBC.
The sooner we get rid of this wretched, treacherous organisation the safer and healthier we will all be.
We can easily judge if the BBC has a shred of honesty left. Here is a simple challenge, a chance for the BBC to redeem itself and show that it is prepared to allow debate of the most important health issue in modern times.
I am prepared to debate the fraud, and the vaccination programme, with any combination of Dr Whitty and Dr Vallance and Mr Hancock live on BBC television. I will try to avoid mentioning that Dr Vallance has shares in his former employer vaccine manufacturer and that Dr Whitty has loose financial links with Bill Gates. I will point out that informed doctors know that the death totals for covid-19 have been grossly exaggerated. Indeed, I’m convinced that in the long run the lockdowns will kill far more people than covid-19.
I also suspect that the vaccines may eventually kill as many as covid-19 – though the vaccine deaths will be wrongly blamed on covid-19. And the side effects will be blamed on mutant strains of the virus or the so-called long covid.
One stipulation: the programme must be live.
I doubt if am alone in not trusting the BBC to edit a programme fairly and without bias. I’ll hire a couple of guys to bring a few thousand scientific papers with me as evidence.
Unlike the BBC which too often relies on a quote from an isolated government approved scientist, I prefer to use scientific papers from reputable journals.
Why should they debate with me? Well, I’m medically qualified and I’ve been writing about medicine and drug companies and vaccines for over 50 years. In 1975 my book, The Medicine Men exposed the way the drug industry had bought control of the medical establishment. Ironically, the BBC made a film about that book.
Today, my books sell around the world and have been bestsellers for years. This is no time for false modesty – I have for many years been the world’s leading medical author. My campaigning has in the past changed government policy.
If the BBC prefers someone else for the live debate then that’s absolutely fine with me. I have, in the past, presented scores of programmes for the BBC but I have now absolutely no personal interest in ever going into a BBC studio again.
If the BBC is to salvage anything from its shattered reputation it has to arrange a debate – otherwise everyone will know that what they have long suspected is true: the BBC is a propaganda machine which is paid for by the British public but which has sold its allegiance to the Government and, quite possibly, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their massive commercial interest in vaccines. The BBC gleefully defends the medically and scientifically indefensible – preferring, it seems to me, to deceive rather than inform.
They know as well as I do that the debate I have proposed would produce huge ratings. It’s the debate people want to see.
But I doubt if the BBC, or indeed Whitty, Vallance or Hancock, will accept my challenge. It is no idle boast when I say that they are rightly afraid that I will destroy all their arguments and expose the fraud. I have facts and scientific truths on my side.
If they had confidence they would jump at the chance to debate with me but they know they’ll lose and so they’ll ignore the challenge.
However, if they don’t accept the challenge everyone in Britain will know the truth: the BBC and the Government are frightened that their paper thin deceits will not stand up to scrutiny.
What reason, other than cowardice, could there possibly be for rejecting the debate?
Finally, I leave you with these thoughts.
First, through ignorance or a lack of integrity the BBC has suppressed the truth, and silenced and sneered at the truth-tellers. The only things it seems to do well these days is, it seems to me, to lie and cheat.
Second, the Government’s programme has undeniably resulted in huge numbers of deaths from the lockdowns and from the jabs. There will be thousands more deaths from these indefensible policies.
I believe the BBC staff who are guilty of suppressing the truth are responsible for many of these deaths.
Third, of course, the BBC has close links to vaccine company investors.
Remember, John Reith, the BBC’s first director general originally demanded that the BBC inform and educate – as well as entertain.
Current BBC staff have failed miserably to inform and educate or to represent the huge part of the country which has serious doubts about government policies. The BBC has become a crude propaganda machine, with a vast army of squalid and overpaid pseudo journalists spewing out a never ending stream of lies, deceptions and half-truths and sneering at passionate, caring health practitioners who have spoken out, not for money or prestige, but because they believe it is their duty to share the truth even when doing so costs them dearly – leaving their reputations dishonestly trashed by hundreds of scummy, crooked pseudo-journalists.
It has been well-known for years that the BBC is unreliable and dishonest. The BBC’s biased support of the EU and opposition to Brexit was outrageous. But the BBC’s role as a ruthless propaganda tool, fear creator and disinformation medium has become embarrassingly apparent in recent months. When the BBC opens its mouth it’s the voice of Bill Gates which we hear.
We should work together to demand that the BBC licence fee is stopped. Meanwhile, we should all look for legal ways to stop paying it.
As I have shown in precise detail in previous videos there is no doubt whatsoever that the BBC is our mortal enemy.
Don’t watch any of their programmes. Don’t listen to any of their lies. Shun anyone who works there. The BBC has chosen to side with the enemy of the people, to suppress the truth and to distort the news. Ignore their wretched website. If you care about the truth, and about the lives of those around you, then you must fight to see the BBC abolished. The BBC today seems to me to be all about money and power – and oppressing and deceiving the licence fee payers. The BBC, seems to me to specialise in disinformation.
Meanwhile, ask the BBC why they won’t organise the debate I’ve suggested. And avoid paying the BBC licence fee – legally, of course. Share this video with everyone you know wherever in the world they may live. Warn them about the BBC – in my view it is the world’s most scurrilous, most dishonourable media organisation.
Vernon Coleman’s bestselling medical books include `Coleman’s Laws’, `Bodypower’ and `How to stop your doctor killing you’. These are all available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
Copyright Vernon Coleman February 12th 2021
The CDC’s double mask mannequin ‘study’ is lunacy dressed up as science
A new “public health” low
By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | February 10, 2021
The CDC has released a new “study” by the government health institution that claims to support the thesis that double-masking — or further sealing your mask in order to make it more difficult to breathe — will work to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
The “study,” which occurred in January, was nothing more than a handful of experiments on mannequins in a contained environment. Here are some photos from the CDC “study” that was published today:
No human beings were involved in this study. And yes, it was that simple. The CDC sprayed aerosols at mannequins and slapped a science™ label on their experiments.
There are endless amounts of clear, immediate, obvious issues with this “study” that causes a rational-minded person to send it to the dumpster.
First and foremost, it is not a completed study at all. These are mere experiments conducted on mannequins, not humans. A proper study on the efficacy of masks needs to be a randomized controlled trial involving human beings in their normal settings — such as the Danish mask study that showed there is no evidence that masks do anything to prevent COVID-19 — and not mannequins in a laboratory.
Second, as you can see on the double masked mannequin, the lifeless object is barely able to “see” over its double mask.
Third, these masks are very tightly sealed and secured to the face of the mannequins. It is not exactly rocket science to “discover” that it is more difficult to breathe in particles from outside of a contained environment when you fully seal something over your face.
However, this is unsustainable, as it would make breathing in oxygen (which, you know, is a thing that humans need to do) very difficult, and cause severe discomfort for regular use. Mannequins don’t have to worry about breathing or seeing, but humans do.
There are so many more potential variables and side effects involving mask-wearing, and how human behavior cannot be replicated through mannequin experiments. For more on this, check out the feed of cognitive scientist Mark Changhizi on Twitter @MarkChanghizi.
When you read the fine print of the “study,” even the CDC seems to acknowledge the aforementioned paradoxes in the following paragraph of their report:
“Finally, although use of double masking or knotting and tucking are two of many options that can optimize fit and enhance mask performance for source control and for wearer protection, double masking might impede breathing or obstruct peripheral vision for some wearers, and knotting and tucking can change the shape of the mask such that it no longer covers fully both the nose and the mouth of persons with larger faces.”
The CDC concludes its remarks by stating:
“Continued innovative efforts to improve the fit of cloth and medical procedure masks to enhance their performance merit attention.”
Not exactly much of a bombshell, but that’s not how the media and Big Tech interpreted it in order to advance their agenda.
The absurd CDC mannequin study has already been promoted by countless legacy media publications and propped up by social media sites as if it’s the gospel.
Twitter has promoted the “mask study” to #1 in its curated list, claiming, without evidence, that the CDC has “confirmed” the efficacy of double mask wearing.
Hi @TwitterSupport I’d like to report @Twitter for spreading misinformation 
February 10th 2021
77 Retweets277 Likes
There is no real, functional experiment-based science behind single-masking, so it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the “public health experts,” media stenographers, and power drunk politicians are now promoting double-masking as the “new science” to “stop the spread” of COVID-19.
MSM’s narrative about the murderous Capitol mob has collapsed, but don’t let that stop a political lynching
By Tony Cox | RT | February 13, 2021
As their dishonest narrative collapses around them, mainstream media outlets and Democrat politicians are trying to hold together their latest bid to destroy Donald Trump, but some of the lies are getting too big to shrug off.
I’m reminded of the media-speak popularized during the Trump era – lightly used words or phrases that became ubiquitous in the talking points, like “violating norms” – especially the term “debunked.” In the eyes of MSM and their controllers, Trump was a president who needed to be debunked thousands of times. Whether it was about the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, the animal-like savagery of MS-13 gang-bangers or the fact that Haiti is “a s**thole”, any Trump claim had to be debunked, false or not.
When an obnoxious loudmouth constantly blurts out things that lift the skirt on the ruling class’ treachery, his voice must be discredited. And even if just part of his story can be attacked, the rest will be forgotten. It’s like a Jenga game where all the pieces automatically fall down when one is removed.
But the same standard doesn’t apply to the media’s own story lines. No matter how many times MSM and establishment politicians are exposed as liars — from the MLK bust in the Oval Office to the Russia collusion hoax — the people are supposed to keep believing the gist of their arguments. The Jenga tower can be levitating with entire floors missing, but the con artists insist that it’s still standing.
We’re seeing it again in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial. Giant holes have been blown in the MSM-DNC narrative about the January 6 “insurrection” at the US Capitol, but that’s not supposed to matter. For instance, when lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) got caught lying on Wednesday about the content of an alleged telephone call between Trump and a Republican senator during the Capitol riot, he admitted that his claim was false and shrugged it off. “This is much ado about nothing because it’s not critical in any way to our case,” he said.
Never mind that the point was apparently considered important enough to submit as evidence. Raskin was essentially allowed to wriggle out as if he said, “The fact that we’re lying about this doesn’t reflect whatsoever on the veracity of anything else we’re telling you.”
A far bigger and more central piece of the impeachment Jenga tower shouldn’t be sloughed off so easily. In fact, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick is so central to the narrative that his cremated remains were displayed in honor at the Capitol Rotunda to remind everyone of the viciousness of the alleged Trump domestic-terrorism army.
The tale of the brutal Trump mob is always punctuated with the fact that five people were “killed” during the riot, er, “white-supremacist insurrection.” One of those people was Ashli Babbitt, one of the rioters, who was fatally shot by a law enforcement officer. Three others were election-fraud protesters who died from health crises – a heart attack, a stroke and an unidentified medical emergency – during the January 6 demonstration and riot.
The talking heads who wish Trump supporters dead in every other case are counting Trump supporters in the death toll from an incident perpetrated primarily by Trump supporters. It’s as if they’re leading a story on a hostage crisis by saying that 30 people were killed without mentioning that 25 of those were hostage takers, including 22 who died of food poisoning.
Therefore, it’s easy to see why Sicknick is so important to the story. He’s the one alleged victim who wasn’t on Team Trump that day. MSM and Democrat politicians told us over and over that the officer died from being bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher, even though Capitol Police’s official statement was only that he “passed away due to injuries sustained while on duty.”
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Anderson “CIA” Cooper and other MSM hosts ignored the Sicknick family’s request to not make the officer’s death a political issue. They portrayed it as a murder without any such determination by investigators. No one has been arrested in connection with Sicknick’s death, and no murder case has been built so far.
But the Sicknick story has crumbled in recent days with the revelation that medical examiners didn’t find any indication that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma. Investigators are reportedly considering a theory that Sicknick became ill after coming in contact with a chemical irritant, such as pepper spray, that was deployed in the crowd.
The vast majority of Americans haven’t heard about this gigantic wrinkle in the Sicknick story because the media, predictably, hasn’t blasted out corrections of their false reporting. They’ve adopted more careful storytelling about the officer’s death, with the fire-extinguisher bit missing.
Also obscured is the wrinkle that Sicknick communicated with his family after the riot. Ken Sicknick reportedly said his brother sent him a text hours after the riot, saying, “I got pepper-sprayed twice,” and that he was in good shape. The next day, the family was informed that Sicknick was in critical condition, on a ventilator.
Without issuing a correction on any of its false stories with the fire-extinguisher tale, CNN reported the fact that Sicknick died of something other than blunt force trauma. In its first article acknowledging that reality, the network immediately transitioned from the Sicknick investigation to background about other officers being injured by rioters. It was like saying, “our central claim wasn’t true, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Trump mob was vicious.”
Daily Dot writer Mikael Thalen argued the propagandists’ case, saying mainstream outlets didn’t lie to fit a narrative. There was just a “communication breakdown” between sources and reporters. He conceded that the facts of Sicknick’s death are important, but concluded that those details have no bearing on the fact that “thousands of people, egged on by the most powerful man in the world, attempted to violently overthrow the democratic process.”
It’s the Jamie Raskin response all over again. Never mind the falsehoods that we’ve been telling you. None of that stuff we said over and over had anything to do with our central point that Trump incited an insurrection. And don’t let the fact that we’ve been telling you falsehoods cause you to question our credibility. The house of cards, the Jenga tower, still stands strong.
But how many pieces have to be debunked before we can call the project debunked?
By Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
Study: Mass Hysteria & Poor Public Policies Link During Lockdown
Principia Scientific | February 13, 2021
A new study shows that ‘lockdown’ mass hysteria over COVID19, generated via the media and politicians, has worsened the outcomes for policy decisions causing avoidable and unnecessary additional public health costs.
The new study, ‘COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria’, written by Philipp Bagus et al., was published February 3, 2021 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. [1]
The paper’s conclusion is reproduced below:
Conclusion: Mass hysteria can have enormous public health costs in terms of psychological stress, anxiety, and even physical symptoms. To these costs must be added indirect adverse health effects from alcoholism, suicides, or damage from deferred treatment and delayed recognition of illness. Policy failures in mass hysteria can lead to economic decline and poverty, which in turn negatively impacts public health and life expectancy.
Studies of mass hysteria have mostly focused on outbreaks in localized settings of schools or businesses. However, in the digital age of global mass and social media, the possibility of global mass hysteria exists, a phenomenon that has not yet been studied. Our study of the political economy of mass hysteria draws on the well-established psycho-logical phenomenon of mass hysteria and applies it to a new and innovative context of global mass hysteria for which no literature exists yet. More specifically, we analyzed how the political system can influence the likelihood and spread of mass hysteria in a digitized and globalized world based on economic principles. We discussed how the state and its size increase the likelihood of mass hysteria by comparing an idealized minimal state with an idealized welfare state, addressing a previously completely unexplored research question. Our findings are highly relevant and important because the policy failures induced by mass hysteria are potentially catastrophic for public health.
We found that the size and power of the state contributes positively to the likelihood and extensions of mass hysteria. The more centralized and the more power a state has, the higher the probability and extension of mass hysteria. In a minimal state, there exist self-correcting mechanisms that limit collective hysteria. The enforcement of private property rights limits the harm inflicted by those that succumb to the hysteria. The state (thanks to a fuzzy public sector and its soft power [123,124]), by contrast, amplifies and exacerbates mass panics, potentially causing important havoc. What are temporarily, locally limited, isolated outbreaks of mass hysteria, the state may convert into a global mass hysteria for an extended period of time. Recent development in information technology and, particularly, the use of social media, as well as a decline of religion, have made societies more prone to the development of mass hysteria [125,126,127]. Unfortunately, once a mass hysteria takes hold of the government, the amount of damage the hysteria can inflict to life and liberty surges as the state’s respect for private property and basic human rights is limited. The violation of basic human rights in the form of curfews, lockdowns, and coercive closure of business has been amply illustrated during the COVID-19 crisis. Naturally, the COVID-19 example is indicative rather than representative and its lessons cannot be generalized. During the COVID-19 crisis, several authors have argued that from a public health point of view, these invasive interventions such as lockdowns have been unnecessary [128,129,130,131] and, indeed, detrimental to overall public health [132,133]. In fact, prior scientific research on disease mitigation measures during a possible influenza pandemic had warned against such invasive interventions and recommended a more normal social functioning [134]. Moreover, in reaction to past pandemics such as the Asian flu of 1957–1958, there were no lockdowns [135], and research before 2020 had opposed lockdowns [136]. From this perspective, the lockdowns have been a policy error. We have shown that these policy errors may well have been produced by a collective hysteria. To which extent there has been a mass hysteria during the COVID-19 crisis is open for future research. In order to prevent the repetition of policy errors similar to those during the COVID-19 crisis, one should be aware of the political economy of mass hysteria developed in this article and the role of the state in fostering mass hysteria. Public health is likely to be affected negatively by state interventions during a mass hysteria due to policy errors.
[1] Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18 (4), 1376; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18041376
Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms
By Edward Curtin | February 13, 2021
“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.
With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.
Just today The New York Times had this headline: Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims. Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.
This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.
Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.
First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.
Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says, ‘’They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’” Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.
In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.
I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.
To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.
In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.
Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.
That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.
But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.
They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.
As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, “There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.” It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.
Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.
The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.
To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.
This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.
There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.
To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now they need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.
Media Consider Trump Guilty by Accusation, Case Closed
By Stephen Lendman | February 12, 2021
Establishment fourth estate practitioners in the US and West transformed the term media into a four-letter word.
They find new ways to disgrace themselves daily, probing for new lows and finding them.
Trump’s sham Senate trial is a current example among many others, a travesty of justice.
There’s nothing remotely legitimate about impeaching and trying him for inciting insurrection.
The January 6 Capitol Hill false flag was staged by US dark forces in cahoots with undemocratic Dems to further vilify and frame him for what he had nothing to do with.
No respectable publisher would touch Big Media hate-mongering rubbish masquerading as news, information, and analysis.
The self-styled newspaper of record NYT is the worst offender.
On all things Trump, truth and full disclosure was banned in favor endless mass deception hateful enough to make some despots blush.
It doesn’t rise to the level of poor fiction. Yet it’s featured daily in multiple propaganda pieces.
Mindless of facts, it wants Trump vilified and convicted for invented reasons that took center stage on the Senate floor.
WaPo editors demanded Trump’s conviction, saying:
“The House impeachment managers’ presentation before the Senate has crystallized in graphic and compelling detail the horror of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — and Mr. Trump’s deep responsibility for it (sic).”
No credible evidence supports the above mass deception. Yet much of the nation is riveted on a stream of orchestrated fake news.
Remarks from Trump like “stop the steal” had nothing to do with inciting insurrection.
His legal team’s legitimate efforts to expose and reverse election rigging was mocked.
Perhaps the most brazen election fraud in US history was supported by Big Media, all the while pretending the illegitimate process was the other way around, knowing otherwise.
Trump was right saying “(i)f you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Passivity in the face of state-sponsored law-breaking assures worse to come.
WaPo long ago abandoned truth-telling journalism for deep state approved propaganda.
On all issues mattering most, including Trump’s politicized show trial, everything WaPo publishes is unfit to print.
Virtually across the board, Big Media want Trump hung out to dry for invented reasons while ignoring legitimate ones. Some examples:
WSJ : “(Dems) Argue Trump ‘Inflamed and Incited’ Capitol Riot (sic)”
Dems and supportive media lied.
Reuters : “Graphic riot videos not enough to convict Trump, some Republican senators say”
Instead of reporting that Trump had nothing to do with storming Capitol Hill, Reuters and other Big Media pretend otherwise — to their shame.
AP News : “Trump trial video shows vast scope, danger of Capitol riot”
No “riot” occurred. Trump and supporters were uninvolved with what happened on January 6 — an orchestrated false flag rally.
Fox News quoted unindicted war criminal, perjurer, serial liar Hillary, saying if Trump is acquitted, it’s “because the jury includes his co-conspirators (sic).”
Anti-Trump CNN expressed fury over Trump’s likely acquittal.
ABC News: “Majority of Americans say Trump should be convicted, barred from holding federal office”
Most Americans are brainwashed by Big Media, their minds filled with mass deception mush.
CBS News rubbish: “Trump’s tweets” show guilt.
Love, hate or otherwise reject them, Trump’s tweets exercise his constitutional right of free expression — eroding en route to disappearing altogether.
Chicago Tribune : “(Dem) impeachment of Trump puts his 74 million voters on trial (sic)”
LA Times : “Senate Republicans are as much on trial as Trump (sic).”
USA Today : “Trump Senate impeachment trial forces hard choices on Republicans and (Dems) alike (sic)”
National Pentagon Radio (NPR): “Impeachment Managers To Focus On Insurrection Damage”
Undemocratic Dems and complicit dark forces bear full responsibility for lawless actions ahead of and following events on Capitol Hill.
What’s going on in the Senate chamber is an attempted political lynching with no legitimacy.
Instead of exposing and denouncing it, Big Media share guilt for supporting what no one should tolerate.
The Tycoon Plot
By ISRAEL SHAMIR • Unz Review • February 11, 2021
Millionaires want to make money. Billionaires want to make history. We may add that multi-billionaires take it further; they want mankind to adapt to their needs and wishes. As for people who control trillions, why, they care about our wishes as much as we care about ants while sweeping the garden. We do not apply ant-killer until anthills encroach on our flowerbeds; but we do not hesitate if we deem it necessary. Mankind came across many megalomaniacs; some of them had a lot of power. Genghis Khan was one. However, they were always territorially limited. Mighty Genghis could send tremors all the way to Rome, but the English and French didn’t have to care about the rising Mongol empire. New super-tycoons have no such limitations. Globalisation has allowed them to think outside the box. Their moves had been long anticipated by cinema, the world of dreams. As dreams allow a psychologist to ponder man’s desires and fears, cinematography offers insights into the collective ego of mankind. What did we fear in the relatively free Seventies?
A classic villain of 1970s and 80s was the evil tycoon. James Bond took on some of them. Meet Hugo Drax of the Moonraker, or Karl Stromberg of The Spy Who Loved Me; these guys were willing to destroy mankind to replace it with a better version. Stromberg planned to trigger a global nuclear war and survive it underwater. Drax intended to poison mankind with his deadly gas and repopulate the world with his new chosen ones. Another one was de Wynter, the super-villain of The Avengers, played by Sean Connery. He controlled the world weather, and could kill us all off by hurricanes and tsunamis.
Before the tycoons, when the Cold war raged, a villain was a KGB agent or a Chinese operative. As détente calmed relations between the blocks, the agents went out of fashion; later, the fantastic villains of Marvel came into a vogue. The evil tycoons were uncomfortably close to the real thing; and they moved from the cinematic world into our reality.
The world we live in is the world formed by evil tycoons. They are the modern Demiurges, the evil creators of the Gnostics, an early sect that confronted the Church. Like the Demiurges, they are practically omnipotent; stronger than the State. The government needs lot of permissions and authorisations to spend a penny. If a penny had been misspent, the dark word ‘corruption’ will sound. ‘Corruption’ is a silly concept; by applying it, the oligarchs eliminated state competition, for they can pay whatever they want to whomever they wish. The State must observe intricate arcane rules, while the tycoons have no such limits. As a result, they shape our minds and lives, making the State a poor legitimate king among powerful and wealthy barons.
The Corona crisis is a result of their activity. Now, a group of WHO scientists completed its four weeks inspection tour of Wuhan trying to find out how the virus found its way to humans; some of them think (as President Trump did) the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab. Matt Ridley of The Daily Telegraph concluded his piece analysing their findings: “A growing number of top experts [he provides the list] say that a lab leak remains a plausible scientific hypothesis to be investigated”. It is rather unlikely, said the WHO, but other explanations (pangolins etc) also border on the improbable. The Chinese are understandably upset. Hua Chunying, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Affairs ministry (the Chinese counterpart for the State Department’s Ned Price) rejected the idea saying, “The United States should open the biological lab at Fort Detrick, and invite WHO experts to conduct origin-tracing in the United States”. The Guardian report said she promoted “a conspiracy theory that it came from a US army lab”; while Ms Hua accused the US of spreading “conspiracy theories and lies” tracing the source to Wuhan. Whatever we say is a fact-based result of diligent research; whatever you say is a conspiracy theory – both the US and China representatives subscribe to this mantra.
Our own Ron Unz made an excellent analysis of these accusations and counter-accusations in his April 2020 piece. He noted that the virus attack in Wuhan took place at the worst possible time and place for the Chinese; therefore, an incidental release (or intentional release by the Chinese) is extremely unlikely. Ron Unz suggested that it was an American biowarfare attack upon China. Didn’t American people suffer from the disease? Yes, the US government is “grotesquely and manifestly incompetent” and they were likely to expect “a massive coronavirus outbreak in China would never spread back to America”.
Perhaps, but a better explanation is that some evil tycoon(s) played the part of Karl Stromberg who intended to nuke both Moscow and New York causing war and world-wide devastation, as in the James Bond movie. It could be somebody like Bill Gates, who is a major investor in Wuhan Lab. A fact-checking site with its weasel language admitted that the Lab “has received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but Bill Gates can hardly be called a “partner” in the laboratory.” Sure, not a partner. Just an investor, and that is more important than a partner. And he is not the only one; other multi-billionaires also are involved in bioresearch, in vaccine manufacturing, in Big Pharma. “Glaxo, BlackRock, and Bill Gates are all partners, but not owners of Pfizer”, says another fact-checker. “In 2015, Anthony Fauci did issue a USD 3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but not to “create the coronavirus” – the fact-checking site adds. Well, you could not possibly expect Fauci to word the grant in such a straightforward way, could you?
Perhaps it is too formidable a job even for an evil tycoon like Gates. A plot of several evil tycoons is more likely. Together, they could try to change the world and mankind to suit them.
The evil tycoons could poison China on their New Year holiday and take this uppity state down a ring or two. They could import the virus into the US to undermine and remove Trump whom they hated. (He was certain to win the elections but for Corona.) They could poison Europe to weaken it and make it more docile and obedient to their demands – and to buy their assets on the cheap. Corona and lockdown did not harm them for they are normally withdrawn from the bustle of the common man’s life.
The billionaires control the media; that much we know, and the part media has played in the Corona crisis was enormous. The media coverage of the crisis has a huge hidden cost. Try to publish information you consider important on the front page of a newspaper. It will cost you a lot. Still, all newspapers belonging to the Billionaires’ Media block beginning with the New York Times and ending with Haaretz gave at least a third of its front page to Corona news each day. The sheer cost of this advertising runs into billions. Will we ever know who paid for it?
Steven Soderbergh’s (2011) film Contagion predicted many features of the Covid-19, notably the origin of the virus. In the film, the disease originates from bats in China and is spread through markets where contaminated pork meat is sold. How could Soderbergh (or his script writer Scott Z. Burns) possibly know eight years before the event that the contagion should originate in the Chinese bats? Who told him? Wouldn’t you expect he knew something? Burns was instructed by WHO experts, the CNN site explains. Isn’t it interesting that the same Bill Gates is a major donor of WHO? Is it entirely impossible that already in 2011 Gates’ people began to leak some details of the future virus through their own WHO to Hollywood?
The tycoons could force a weak state to follow their instructions. Scientists do obey orders: otherwise, no grants, no positions. In April 2020, the German scientists were ordered, “to instill the fear of Corona”. And they did it, as we learned this week, producing numbers of dead on demand.
It seems that tycoons gained most from the Corona Crisis. Their assets grew by trillions, while the assets of the middle classes decreased by the same amount. More importantly, all states suffered from the crisis; they took loans and credit, they were responsible for their citizens’ health, while billionaires just had fun and enjoyed it. For this reason, I tend to dismiss the case against states, be it the US or China, while (some) billionaires appear the only possible villains.
These billionaires are able to influence people much better that the state. Consider Pierre Omidyar. Besides being the owner of eBay, he is the force behind hundreds of NGOs. His organisations form the ‘progressive’ agenda and train the foot soldiers of the Green Deal. Roslyn Fuller of Spiked-online checked the plethora of NGOs he employs.
She says his NGOs and charities are “engaged in ‘social engineering’ – that is, using their resources to artificially change the structure of society to how they think it should be. If successful this would amount to an extreme circumvention of democracy, utilising money not just to win elections, but to substitute paid or subsidised content for actual support, and thereby flip an entire political culture on to a different track by amplifying some voices and drowning out others.”
He is just one of the Masters of Discourse, next to the infamous George Soros. Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon are even more powerful. The billionaires have immense clout and they decide what we can and can’t say and write. Just last week Amazon banned my Cabbala of Power, a book that was sold by them for some ten years. The estimable The Unz Review is banned on Facebook and shadow-banned on Google. Twitter switched-off President Trump, showing who is the real boss of the United States. Probably almost all movements described as ‘leftists’ nowadays are engineered by the tycoons like Omidyar or Soros. True left had been left for dead on the battlefield of ideas.
The tycoons are directly involved in the Corona Crisis, because its results are good for them. And it means they have us where they want to have us, and they won’t let us out. We are cancelled until we regain the government and cancel them.
SAGE, as British Corona management team rather presumptuously named itself (it included the ridiculous figure of Neil Ferguson, he of the millions of predicted deaths), already declared that lockdowns will be a part of British life for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine. The Guardian, the Voice of the Oligarchs, gently pooh-poohed them, for it is not good to declare what must happen right away. Let people have some hope, so they run to vaccinate themselves, and then only afterwards can we reveal that, sorry, it does not help, you still have to don a mask and observe social distance and, yes, suffer lockdowns. “It’s much easier to follow the rules if we think of them as temporary.”
The plotters’ plans aren’t secret; they were described by Klaus Schwab in his book The Great Reset. Schwab is not a great thinker, being merely a weak scientist with just a few publications, and not a good or even decent writer. He had to collaborate with a journalist Thierry Malleret to produce the book. He is just a voice for the tycoons. But the question is, will he/they get what they want?
My preliminary answer is No. We recently had an important event, Davos-2021, the online gathering of tycoons and their intellectual henchmen. For the first time in many years, they invited Vladimir Putin. Chairman Xi gave the first talk. The idea was to demonstrate that Russia and China agree to their plans. I was very worried, I must admit, and the Chinese leader’s speech didn’t calm me (as opposed to our friend Pepe Escobar who celebrated his appearance). Yes, Xi said China will proceed at its own speed and by its own route but towards the same goals. Sustainable, inclusive, all the dog-whistle words were there. I expected an even worse talk by Putin. For years he has wanted to be invited and co-opted by the Western decision-makers, and here was a great opportunity to jump on their bandwagon.
Putin surprised me. He flatly refused the offer of Schwab and his ilk. He condemned the manner of recent pre-Covid growth, for all the growth went into a few deep pockets. Moreover, he noted that digital tycoons are dangerous for the world. In his own words, “Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, are de facto competing with states. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests”.
The tycoons were probably amazed. In 2007 in Munich, they laughed at him. Max Boot, a Russian Jewish émigré, called Putin, “The louse that roared” and added, “in Putin’s sinister and absurd rhetoric, you can hear an empire dying”. Mad Max didn’t know yet which empire is dying.
Putin was supposed to be softened up by pro-Navalny demos on January 23 (The Davos talk was on January 27), but he was not. Quite the reverse. The Russian President does not like to be pushed. The demo on January 31 was met with force; those detained were sentenced to heavy (by Russian standards) fines. Three European diplomats were expelled from Russia for joining the demonstration. Josep Borrell, a Spanish diplomat and a representative of the EU, went to Moscow and was harshly treated. In the concluding press-conference, the Russian minister for foreign affairs Sergey Lavrov told the press that Russia does not (repeat, not) consider the EU to be a “reliable partner”. The expulsions were carried out at the same time. In addition, Putin warned the West that ‘sanctions’ (acts of economic warfare) could cause Russia to use direct military force. It was probably the first such warning since 1968.
At the same time, Russia practically ended corona restrictions. Bars and restaurants have been opened for night revellers; sport events have returned; schools are open; in some parts of Russia, the masks became “recommended” instead of “compulsory”. Russians are now allowed to travel and return freely from many countries. The Russians have easy access for their vaccine Sputnik-V that was deemed by The Lancet the best of all existing Corona vaccines. It is a coup comparable to the first Sputnik launched in 1957, the Western experts said. Thus Russia has derailed the Grand Reset.
This development had caused a huge shift in consciousness in Russia. If until now (since 1970, at least) the Russian educated classes tended to feel inferior to the West, the prosperous lands of the free, then this has now changed. One of the leading Russian theatre directors, Constantine Bogomolov declared that the West is undone. The West’s compulsory political correctness, its culture-cancelling, its kneeling and boot-licking of BLM, its cult of transgenders, its fear of ‘harassment’ and sex, its obligatory smile, its wokeness, its fear of death (and of life!), are comparable to the behaviour of Alex, the victim of Clockwork Orange therapy, said Bogomolov.
The young man [Alex] does not just get rid of aggression – he is sick of music, he cannot see a naked woman, sex disgusts him. And in response to the blow, he licks the boot of the striker. The modern West is such a criminal who has undergone chemical castration and lobotomy. Hence this false smile of goodwill and all-acceptance, frozen on the face of a Western person. This is not the smile of Culture. It is a smile of degeneration.
He concludes:
The West tells us: Russia is at the tail of progress.
Wrong.
Just by chance, we have found ourselves at the tail of a runaway train, rushing headlong into [Hieronymus] Bosch’s hell, where we will be greeted by smiling multicultural, gender-neutral devils.
We should uncouple our carriage off the train, make a sign of cross and start rebuilding our good old Europe, the Europe we dreamed of. The Europe they have lost.
Take notice of his call to ‘make the sign of the cross’. In the West, the churches are barred, service had been discontinued. The Anglican Church is on the verge of dying, with its Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating BLM, removing statues from the churches, accepting every SAGE edict locking the churches up. Meanwhile Russian churches are all open and worshippers are pouring into their cathedrals every feast and Sunday.
Russian boys and girls are flirting with each other, fearless of MeToo and harassment charges. Russian cafes are open. Whoever wants, can get a jab against Covid, or ignore it.
For the first time in many years, Russia shows the way for the West. This is good. Perhaps, the West, after a long-needed correction, will be able to overtake Russia again. Though Russia showed the way of socialism to Europe, the best results of socialism were achieved elsewhere, in the North of Europe. Good old Europe (and the US, its overseas offshoot) are still able to repeat this feat and get rid of the plotting tycoons and their preaching of compulsory love. At this occasion, perhaps banning all tycoons is a good idea. In the better world before their rise, there were no multi-billionaires. History is not over; we are entering the most interesting part of it. Be of good cheer!
Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net
Kivalina: A Case Study of How Media & Politics Mangle Objective Climate Science!
The town of Kivalina bordered by the Chukchi Sea to the left and a lagoon to the right. The lagoon side experiences the most erosion.
By Jim Steele | Watts Up With That? | February 9, 2021
What appears to be more failed alarmist predictions, the BBC’s 2013 headlines read Alaskan Village Set to Disappear Under Water in A Decade. “Gone, forever. Remembered – if at all – as the birthplace of America’s first climate change refugees. ” (see Willis on “first refugees”) The assumed cause? “Temperature records show the Arctic region of Alaska is warming twice as fast as the rest of the United States. Retreating ice, slowly rising sea levels and increased coastal erosion have left three Inuit settlements facing imminent destruction.” Similarly, in 2017 Huffington Post wrote, “It is disappearing. Fast. As one of the most apparent and shocking examples of coastal erosion, Kivalina could be uninhabitable by 2025, all thanks to climate change.” The Guardian and Mother Jones wrote, “31 Alaskan communities face “imminent” existential threats from coastline erosion, flooding and other consequences of temperatures that are rising twice as quickly in the state as the global average.” Sadly, media outlets and politicians ignored the objective science, but the truth is still out there.
The real problem for Alaska’s native communities has been past governments’ mis-guided attempts to enforce “permanence” in an everchanging landscape. The “settlements facing imminent destruction” are not places native people had freely chosen to settle. With their survival on the line, indigenous people were intimately aware of Alaska’s everchanging environments long before the theory of CO2‑induced‑climate‑change would be proposed. And so, they chose to be semi-nomadic. Kivalina was a good seasonal hunting camp, but never hosted a permanent settlement. Nonetheless the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) made it permanent in 1905.
As reported by REVEAL, “The Inupiaq used to spend summers in tents along Kivalina’s beach. When winter set in, they’d move inland to hunt caribou for food. They were semi-nomadic but in 1905 the federal government built a school on the island. Parents were threatened with jail time or losing their kids all together if they didn’t send them to school.” Just 6 years after its creation, Kivalina’s schoolteacher Clinton Replogle warned in 1911, Kivalina should be relocated due to flooding from ocean storms.
Consider the way most barrier islands get formed. Kivalina island was formed from a loosely consolidated sand bar and maintained by ample sediments supplied by local rivers. Ocean waves push eroded sand and gravel back towards the coast where it accumulates into a sand bar in shallow waters. On the sand bar’s landward side, river currents erode the sand, maintaining a lagoon and the islands’ narrow width. Islands are then formed where miles-long sand bars are cut into pieces by coastal rivers seeking an outlet to the ocean. The Singauk Entrance (see below) is where the Wulik River flows past Kivalina into the Chukchi Sea and it exemplifies the island’s unstable dynamics. Some years Singauk Entrance is blocked by sand piled up by winter storm waves, but then re-opened later by river erosion. As Tribal Administrator Millie Hawley recently stated, Kivalina was always eroding. We’re on a small spit of land that has diminished in size over the last century.”
Barrier island formation also requires a shallow‑sloping ocean floor that minimizes the irretrievable loss of sand that might wash away into the deeper ocean. However, such shallow ocean floors also amplify wave heights of approaching storms. A barrier island’s ultimate height is determined by the amount of sediments dropped from a storm’s overtopping waves. Kivalina’s highest point is a mere 13 feet, and decades ago the high tide mark came within 1 to 2 feet of the town. But the storms of late summer and ice‑free fall can bring waves 10 feet or higher. No wonder the threat of storm surge flooding was so clear to Clinton Replogle. Indeed, geological surveys have now revealed flooding from waves that had overtopped Kivalina happened at least twice between1905 and 1990.
The island’s sands don’t hold fresh water. So, the town’s water tank must be fed by a 3-mile-long fire hose stretching from the Wulik River. Kivalina’s sewage system consists of individual “honey-buckets” emptied by each resident into two specified “bunkers”. Poor sanitation and overcrowding have always been a problem, causing an extremely high instance of communicable diseases in the City of Kivalina has. In 2021 it suffered a large outbreak of COVID.
With negatives outweighing positives and an annual threat of destruction by storm surge, Inupiaq residents initiated a study in 1994 to relocate, despite a decade of few large storms. Using photographs dating back to 1952, the study surprisingly found no conclusive proof of any erosion occurring on the ocean-side of the island. However, the study did reveal substantial erosion on Kivalina’s lagoon side by the Wulik and Kivalina Rivers. Still the researchers warned, “Although there is very limited information available, it is our opinion that it is only a matter of time until the right combination of natural events occur which will result in over-topping of the City. When this occurs, the wave action will result in damage to the structures and if ice is associated with the storm surge the consequences could be disastrous.”
Still Kivalina’s population grew from 188 to over 400 since 1970. Despite residents voting 5 times to relocate to safety in the past 3 decades, an airplane runway that brings needed supplies and a medical clinic operated by the non-profit Maniilaq Association remained an attraction. Additionally, funding for relocation was scant with an economy based primarily on subsistence harvesting of seals, walrus, whale, salmon, and caribou. Furthermore, state and federal governments offered little support. So, when government reports began blaming global warming, in 2011 the residents opted to file a lawsuit against the major oil companies arguing “Kivalina must be relocated due to global warming” and sought funds to cover an estimated cost of $95 million to $400 million. Although their lawsuit failed, Kivalina’s “David vs Goliath” lawsuit was championed by proponents of catastrophic climate change and opponents of Big Oil, thrusting previously little‑cared‑about Kivalina into the limelight as an icon of the “climate crisis”.
Ignored has been the forcing of the Inupiaq into a permanent settlement on a dynamically changing barrier island. That was the real problem. Similarly, the Bureau of Indian Affairs reprogrammed the seasonally migrating Yupik into residents of a permanent community. Worse, the BIA chose a Ninglick River location in the Yukon Delta to build their school and create the permanent village of Newtok. But river deltas are notoriously unstable (as New Orleans has painfully realized throughout its 300‑year existence). Newtok’s school was built in 1958, but the BIA’s environmental ignorance was again quickly exposed. By the 1980s the US Army Corp of Engineers was spending over a million dollars trying to prevent natural river erosion from destroying Newtok. Just 26 years after its creation, Newtok residents commissioned its first study for re-locating. Costs of Newtok’s ongoing relocation will exceed $100 million. Nonetheless, it’s remained easier to blame climate change, natural or human caused, to cover for the government’s badly conceived “forced permanence”.
In 2005 the Guardian was hyping the United Nation’s outrageous failed prediction there would be “50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade” and the plight of Kivalina was an opportunity to put a face on those imaginary “climate refugees”. If you tell a big lie often enough, the naïve will uncritically believe it. So like-minded media outlets formed “Climate Desk” to push more alarmism (affiliates are shown below). By 2019, the Guardian again amplified the climate hype telling their journalists to no longer refer to weather events as global warming or climate change. Instead, they should weaponize harsh weather as a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”. Now an unholy alliance (between “if it bleeds it leads” media outlets, scientists from the “chicken little school of thought”, and politicians who use every crisis to gain political control) repeats daily that we are all threatened by an “existential climate crisis.” But for those of us who study the actual science, there is an army of objective climate scientists providing evidence that makes us doubt such climate fearmongering.
Climate Desk major affiliates
In 2013, Climate Desk’s Weather Channel wrote The Sea is Slowly Swallowing Alaskan Towns stating” the cost of climate change is becoming a painful reality for towns in coastal Alaska, as rising sea levels overtake acres and acres of once-dry land. The threat appears immediate in Kivalina.” But objective science shows otherwise. As determined in the peer-reviewed paper Arctic Ocean Sea Level Record from the Complete Radar Altimetry Era: 1991–2018 , sea level across the Arctic varies because winds remove water from one region and pile it up in another. Along the Siberian-Russian coasts and the southern Chukchi Sea bordering Kivalina (green arrow), sea level has not risen, despite sea level strongly rising along the Beaufort Sea (red).
From Rose (2019) Arctic Ocean Sea Level Record from the Complete Radar Altimetry Era: 1991–2018
The government’s US Climate Tool Kit-Relocating Kivalina claimed a climate crisis writing, ”temperatures in the Arctic are rising at more than twice the rate of the global average, resulting in violent ocean storms, flooding, and erosion beneath the homes of Kivalina—impacts that have been traumatic to the barrier island’s Alaskan Inupiaq community.” But they didn’t inform the public of all the science involved. For example, many permanent homes, built on permafrost, were sinking into the ground because heating their homes also melted the foundational permafrost below.
Furthermore, it’s summer winds that push warmer Pacific waters through the Bering Strait and initiates sea ice melt and the warming in the frozen Chukchi Sea. During the last few decades, the amount of warm Pacific water passing through the Bering Strait has nearly doubled, melting more sea ice and expanding open waters. Nearly half of that intruding ocean heat gets released to the atmosphere, raising air temperatures. Although more open waters have also enhanced photosynthesis and increased Arctic marine food web by 30%, bewilderingly, the associated rise in temperature is trumpeted as a crisis. It’ true expanding open waters absorb more sunlight, and this feedback raises temperatures even higher, dubbed “Arctic Amplification”. It has indeed raised Arctic air temperatures twice as fast as those in the US lower 48 states. But that rise is misleadingly increasing the global average temperature and has been incorrectly blamed on CO2. But most climate models now agree, it is intruding warm Pacific water pushing through the Bering Strait that forces Arctic Amplification.
Studies show the greatest Chukchi sea ice loss is associated with the 3 major pathways of the intruding warm water. The warmest pathway hugs the coast of western Alaska, affecting Kivalina as illustrated below by Itoh (2015). Importantly, it’s the volume of Bering Strait throughflow that determines the extent of annual open waters, and that throughflow volume is modulated by natural variations in atmospheric circulation. Using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s general circulation model, researchers determined inflows of warm water through the Bering Strait are controlled primarily by wind stress, with shifting winds explaining 90% or more of the changes. Other factors (precipitation, radiative fluxes [solar or greenhouse], water vapor, and air temperature) had negligible influence. Unfortunately, increased thinning and loss of sea ice has shortened the Inupiaq’s season for hunting seals and whales, forcing them to hunt and fish elsewhere.
The three major paths and temperatures of warmer Pacific water flowing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic. From Itoh 2015
The 2020 scientific study, Mechanisms Driving the Interannual Variability of the Bering Strait Throughflow detailed the causes of those changing winds. On the Arctic Ocean side of the Bering Strait, when the Beaufort High pressure system is stronger, winds transport ocean water offshore and lower sea level along the coast which allows greater Bering Strait throughflow. On the Pacific side of the strait, when the semi‑permanent Aleutian Low‑pressure system is located over the Aleutian Basin, winds pile up water along the eastern Bering Sea shelf. The resulting higher sea level pushes more warm water through the Bering Strait. Conversely, when the Aleutian Low shifts southward over the Gulf of Alaska northeasterly winds prevail, lowering sea level and weakening Bering Strait throughflow. Significantly, the Aleutian Low is affected by natural El Nino events and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Several studies have shown that a switch to the negative PDO phase also causes the Aleutian Low to pump more warm air from the south into Alaska.
Changing winds and warm water inflows will increase open waters in the Chukchi Sea even during colder climates. Marine geologists examining Chukchi sediments have determined that over the past millennia, an ice‑free Chukchi Sea happened independently of global climate, with ice‑free conditions happening even during the recent Little Ice Age. Based on our current state of scientific knowledge, the changing conditions in the Arctic are best explained by naturally oscillating winds and ocean currents.
In 2015 the Obama/Biden administration sent U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to Kivalina who, without apologizing for Kivalina’s forced settlement, vowed to work on solutions for the climate‑threatened village. Repeating the Climate Desk “climate refugee” trope Jewell grandstanded her empathy, “Hundreds of villagers in Kivalina face the terrible prospect of losing their land and homes to rising sea levels and coastal erosion, threatening their personal safety and putting them at risk of becoming climate change refugees within a decade”. But it was little more than political posturing.
Kivalina and Newtok don’t exemplify climate crises. Kivalina and Newtok are iconic examples of how the media and governments have ignored the injustices suffered by native peoples, then use their troubles only when it promotes their crises agenda. Kivalina and Newtok are clear examples of government inappropriateness that forced “permanence” on a native culture well adapted to an everchanging natural environment; an environment where regional climates are always changing. I suggest defunding the BIA for its horrible decisions and use the BIA’s 1.9‑billion‑dollar annual budget to safely relocate the people of Kivalina, Newtok and others to a place of their choosing.
Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and a member of the CO2 Coalition
The Kent Covid-19 Variant Has Mutated… Into The Bristol Variant!
By Richie Allen | February 10, 2021
My great friend Jeananne Crowley said to me on the phone this morning, “You were right about the variants Richie, when you were jesting last year about the Daddy Long-Legs variant!” I was right. For a change it must be said. I shoot at a lot of targets on the radio show but my aim is, shall we say, a little erratic. As I write this, a SKY News reporter is ramping up the fear-porn on location in Bristol. There’s another variant! The Kent Covid strain has allegedly mutated again, into another potentially dangerous strain and it’s been discovered in Bristol!
Cue thousands of surge-testing kits and hundreds of volunteers rushing to Bristol, to demand that perfectly healthy Bristolians swab themselves and return the samples. Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van Tam told the BBC this morning that there are thousands of covid-19 mutations now. UK prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons this lunchtime, that there will be new covid variant jabs for us all in the Autumn. Surprise surprise. These goons are nothing if not predictable.
Yes I saw this coming. I wasn’t alone. Covid-19, if it exists, is harmless to the vast majority of us. 99.7 per cent survival rate, average age of someone dying is 82 blah blah blah. Old news. The government knew last year that they were on shaky ground, so they came up with the concept of Long Covid. They spun wild yarns about Covid toes. They said that stuttering was a covid symptom as was hearing voices. Look it up. The public lapped it up.
It was inevitable that they would eventually warn us of new and potentially deadly mutations that would require new vaccines and keeping us in lockdown cycles. It’s a zero-sum game. Today there’s a new and potentially more transmissible Bristol variant. Tomorrow it might be one found in Poland, Edinburgh the day after. I can’t get near these liars. They’ll never speak to me. UK broadcasters nod along and sound worried. “This is concerning Professor” they say, “when will you know how deadly this new strain is?” It’s a game of softball.
If I was presenting BBC News At One today, this nightmare would be over in a matter of minutes. And as for Johnson, Hancock, Whitty, Vallance and that moron Van Tam? They would be running for their lives.
Richie Allen is the host of The Richie Allen Radio show, Europe’s most listened to independent radio show and is a passionate supporter of free speech. He lives in Salford with the future Mrs Allen and their two dogs.
US poised for Russia sanctions as Washington claims ‘millions’ support jailed Navalny, hope for regime change
RT | February 9, 2021
America’s top diplomat says the US is mulling how to best penalize Russia over the alleged poisoning of opposition figure Alexey Navalny, but he simultaneously claims Washington is not seeking to influence the situation.
Speaking to CNN on Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told viewers “it seems apparent that a chemical weapon was used to try to kill Mr Navalny.”
“That violates the chemical weapons convention and other obligations that Russia has,” he said. “We’re looking at the situation very carefully and when we have the results we’ll look at that in the appropriate way.”
Blinken added that “the fact that Russia feels compelled – that Mr Putin feels compelled – to try to silence one voice, speaks volumes about how important that voice is and how it is representative of so many millions of Russians who want to be heard and who are fed up with the corruption and the kleptocracy.”
Thousands took to the streets of cities across the country to demonstrate for the release of the jailed anti-corruption campaigner over the past fortnight. However, further rallies that had been expected were called off amid lower numbers and an insistence from organizers that the movement should “end on a high note.” Unexpectedly, on Tuesday, Navalny associate Leonid Volkov, who is based in Lithuania, announced a new form of protest for the coming days, asking people to shine flashlights in their neighborhood gardens.
Research published last week found that only one in 20 of 1,600 Russians surveyed came up with Navalny’s name as a political figure that they trust. The fieldwork was conducted by the Levada Center, which is registered as a ‘foreign agent’ by the Ministry of Justice over links to funding from abroad.
While former President Donald Trump was said to have been ambivalent about international blocs like NATO and organizations like the UN, analysts have said that Biden’s team is far more preoccupied with seeing the US play a leading role in them. Blinken appeared to confirm that view, claiming that “the world doesn’t organize itself. If we’re not in there every day helping to do some of that organizing – to write the rules and shape the norms that sort of govern the ways that countries relate to each other, then either someone else is going to do it in our place or maybe, just as bad, nobody does it and then you have chaos.”
However, while he expressed hope that the momentum from previous protests would have a profound effect on the country, Blinken denied that the US was stoking tensions. “I think the Russian government would make a mistake in attributing to outside actors, whether it is the United States, European partners or others, responsibility for what is happening,” he said. “This is fundamentally about Russia, about Russia’s future and hopefully about a more democratic system going forward.”
Navalny was educated in the US and was appointed to Yale University’s World Fellow’s program, set up to “create a global network of emerging leaders.” This has led some in the country to suggest that he is more closely aligned to Western governments than many other domestic opposition figures.
Moscow has expressed cynicism over the nature of the US’ interest in the Navalny case. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last week that Washington didn’t need a genuine reason for sanctions. “They will always find one or make one up,” she said.
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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
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- German Science Blog Accuses PIK Climate Institute Of Hallucinating Climate Tipping Points
- Devastating Assessment Of Comirnaty Vaccine By Former Senior Pfizer Europe Toxicologist
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- Former Pfizer Toxicologist Dr. Helmut Sterz Tells Bundestag Hearing Pfizer Vaccine Should Have Never Been Approved
- Energy Expert: Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout Was A “500 Billion Euro Mistake”
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