Canadian journalist outs himself as Canadian, Ukrainian intelligence collaborator
By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · September 3, 2024
Canada’s National Post is refusing to comment after one of its columnists revealed himself to be a collaborator with Western-aligned intelligence agencies. A Canadian activist is now threatening to sue the paper after the confessed spy smeared him in a front page article.
Adam Zivo, a columnist who covered the war in Ukraine for Canada’s National Post newspaper, has outed himself as an operative of Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence. The admission came as Zivo publicly leapt to the defense of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in response to a wave of online mockery directed towards a post by the spy agency which asked readers, “Has a stranger ever tried to inflate your ego?,” before warning them that such flattery “could be elicitation.”
“People are dunking on this tweet but this actually happened to me in Odesa in early 2023 with a guy who seemed to be a Chinese spy,” Zivo volunteered. “I ended up organizing a small sting operation with two Ukrainian intelligence officers to figure out what his deal was,” he declared.
In a subsequent post, Zivo expanded on his repeated attempts to entrap a man he had encountered in Odessa, and whom he claimed was a Chinese intelligence agent. “I met the Chinese man and his wife at a restaurant while wearing a wire,” while “SBU officers watched us from a car parked outside, which had tinted windows,” Zivo stated.
He told Canada’s PressProgress that following his meeting with the supposed Chinese agent, “I drafted a detailed report which I quickly provided to the National Post, CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] and the Ukrainian government. After the recorded dinner, I produced transcripts and a follow-up report which was also shared with these stakeholders.”
The National Post has so far refused to comment on the revelation. As PressProgress reported, “National Post Editor-in-Chief Rob Roberts and Managing Editor Carson Jerema did not respond to several requests for comment.”
In response to questions to that publication, Zivo insisted he kept his bosses at the National Post updated about his intelligence activities.
“I informed them of what was occurring and that I was working with local authorities to address my safety concerns,” Zivo said, though he reportedly insisted later that he “did not run this by my editors for a sign off,” because, since he was a “freelancer, not a staff writer,” he did not “need permission.”
According to Zivo, his working relationship with Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence services began in late 2022. None of his articles published in the National Post have disclosed his ties to foreign or domestic spy agencies.
Since then, Zivo has zealously advocated for rapid deliveries of heavy weapons to Ukraine. He has also used his column as a platform for denigrating those he deemed an impediment to the war effort – including both the Canadian military and the nation of Germany, which he accused of “reckless greed and a callous disregard for eastern European lives” for initially declining to send tanks to Ukraine.
Among Zivo’s targets was Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian lawyer who narrowly lost the Canadian Green Party’s 2020 leadership election. In early 2023, Zivo made Lascaris the subject of a front-page report entitled, “Former Green party leadership candidate goes to Moscow to whitewash war.” In the column, Zivo accused Lascaris of “pro-Putin sympathies,” “seemingly endorsing pro-Kremlin propaganda,” and “uncritically and reflexively taking Russia’s side.”
Zivo also rang up the co-leader of Canada’s Green Party, Jonathan Pednault, to solicit criticism of Lascaris. In a parenthetical, Zivo stated that he had helped facilitate a solidarity tour of Kiev for Pednault, and “introduced him to some contacts for his trip, such as local Jewish and LGBTQ leaders.”
While hinting at his ties to the Ukrainian government, Zivo neglected once again to disclose his role as an intelligence collaborator.
“No corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story”
Following Zivo’s unmasking as a Ukrainian intelligence collaborator, Lascaris took to social media to argue the reporter-turned-spook “perpetrated a fraud by concealing from me and the public his spying activities,” then proceeded to write an “article about me [which] falsely insinuated that I was working in the service of the Russian government.”
“The supreme irony here is that it was Zivo – not me – who was acting as a government agent,” Lascaris explained.
In comments to The Grayzone, Lascaris remarked that “Zivo has also violated the journalistic values of transparency and integrity because he secured an interview with me on false pretences, and when the National Post published Zivo’s many articles about the Ukraine war, neither Zivo nor the Post disclosed to the public that Zivo was a spy.”
Zivo has previously described himself as a “journalist,” “content vendor,” “filmmaker,” “activist” and – apparently ironically – as a “geopolitical analyst via an ecosystem of NATO-affiliated NGOs.”
Lascaris dismissed these labels as window dressing. “There’s now little doubt that Zivo wears only one hat: he is a shill for the Western military industrial complex,” he said.
“There are probably many more ‘journalists’ like Zivo in the Western corporate media. What is unusual about Zivo is that he bragged publicly about being a spy for Western intelligence agencies,” Lascaris added.
It is unknown whether other intelligence operatives are employed by the National Post, or its parent company, Postmedia News, which is owned by a pro-Trump hedge fund in the US known as Chatham Asset Management.
Describing Postmedia as “fanatically pro-Israel,” Lascaris accused the company’s newspapers of “attacking me for the past eight years,” noting that the hit pieces “started around the time that I became a prominent advocate for Palestinian human rights in Canada.”
But for Lascaris, deploying an actual spy to imply he was acting as a Kremlin asset was a step too far. He now says he is considering legal action against the National Post and its parent company, Postmedia News, which is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher.
“Because Zivo misled me… I sent a letter to the National Post’s editor-in-chief in which I threatened to sue the Post for fraud,” Lascaris explained, adding: “I’m awaiting the editor’s response.”
A handful of Canadian journalists have condemned Zivo on an individual basis, with the President of the Canadian Association of Journalists, Brent Jolly, describing Zivo’s intelligence activities as “problematic” and “ethically murky.” Jolly told PressProgress : “I don’t think we can go around and just have people one minute working for CSIS and the next writing a story about what an amazing job CSIS is doing.”
Sonya Fatah, the Associate Chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, described Zivo’s actions as a major breach of journalistic ethics, stating: “I imagine most newsrooms would be horrified.”
But so far, Canadian mainstream media has done its best to ignore Zivo’s disturbing double game.
“As far as I know, no corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story,” Lascaris said. “Although I am well known to the corporate media, no Canadian corporate media outlet has sought comment from me about this scandal.”
But outside the Western media bubble, Lascaris said he suspects that Zivo’s activities will have dangerous repercussions.
“It’s almost certain that Zivo’s admission will heighten Russian suspicions about Western corporate journalists. And it’s not just Russia. China and other states targeted by Western government belligerence are sure to take these revelations into account in their dealings with Western journalists,” according to Lascaris.
“Zivo said that his employer knew about his activities. As far as I know, Postmedia has not denied this, nor has it taken any action against Zivo. The logical inference to draw is that Canada’s largest newspaper publisher believes that Zivo did nothing wrong.”
Zivo’s admission that he worked with intelligence services “will only heighten the belief in Russia, China and elsewhere that Western media have been coopted by, and have become tools of, hostile Western governments” Lascaris emphasized.
“In essence, the National Post’s response to this scandal will inevitably make it harder for Western journalists to do their jobs in the non-Western world.”
NATO’s Destruction of Ukraine Under the Guise of “Helping”
Propaganda & Proxy Wars
By Glenn Diesen | September 17, 2024
In a recent public event, the heads of the CIA and the MI6 assessed developments in the Ukraine War. The head of the MI6 applauded the invasion of Kursk for having changed the “narrative” of the war, while the head of the CIA also outlined the objective to “put a dent” in the Kremlin’s narrative about the development of the war. There can be no doubt that the invasion of Kursk was an utter disaster for Ukraine and NATO. However, controlling the narrative is imperative as the Western public will support financing the war if they believe they are helping Ukraine and the war can be won.
During the 20-year-long NATO occupation of Afghanistan, public support was also maintained by constructing a narrative of progress and helping the people of Afghanistan. Every week the Western public was reassured by the media that the war effort in Afghanistan was making great progress, until NATO fled in a great hurry as people fell off planes. Much like how the Pentagon Papers exposed the deceit of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan Papers exposed how the war was an unmitigated disaster. Yet, in both instances, a rosy picture was presented by the media.
A leaked CIA report outlined how they could increase public support for NATO’s occupation of Afghanistan by selling it to the public as helping women. The report revealed that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban”, and framing NATO’s occupation as a crusade for women’s rights could “overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe towards the ISAF mission”.[1] NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg even co-authored an article with Hollywood star Angelina Jolie with the title: “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”.[2] Appealing to the best in human nature to mobilise public support for doing the worst in human nature is a good description of war propaganda.
Selling the Ukraine War
The Ukraine War is sold to the public as being merely selfless “help” from NATO for Ukraine to defend itself against an expansionist Russia, motivated solely by territorial acquisition and restoring the Soviet Union. Framing the war as a simple struggle between good and evil is why NATO cannot negotiate or even pursue basic diplomacy, and peace depends on good defeating evil. In what is close to a copyright infringement of “war is peace” in George Orwell’s 1984, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserts that “weapons are the way to peace”.
In political propaganda, it is common to frame a war through a concept that everyone agrees with, such as the need to “help” Ukraine. We all want to help Ukraine preserve its sovereignty, territory and the lives of its citizens. However, instead of discussing what would help Ukraine, such concepts are given a fixed meaning to shut down debates. Any argument can then be framed as either being pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. However, what is bad for Russia is not automatically good for Ukraine. Yet, people who can be taught to speak in clichés can be taught to think in clichés. Commentary on NATO policies toward Russia is similarly framed as being pro-Western or pro-Russian, which circumvents an actual discussion about whether these policies are in the West’s interests or not.
Concepts such as “helping Ukraine” can then be filled with any content that often contradicts what “helping” entails, but corresponds with proxy war. When we unpack what NATO frames as “helping Ukraine”, we find that it rarely has the support from the majority of Ukrainians and it almost always ends up with disastrous consequences. So how does NATO “help Ukraine”?
NATO Expansion
NATO dismisses any accusations of an expansionist agenda by presenting itself as a passive actor that merely responds to Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. This narrative conceals the reality that every poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrates that only approximately 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO. When NATO promised future membership to Ukraine in 2008, 43 percent of Ukrainians considered NATO a threat to Ukraine and merely 15 percent associated NATO with protection.[3] Forty-six percent of Ukrainians answered it was more important to have close relations with Russia, while only 10 percent of Ukrainians supported close relations with the US over Russia.[4] In 2011, a NATO document acknowledged: “The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20%”.[5]
Even after Russia seized Crimea in response to the Western-backed coup in 2014, only a small minority of Ukrainians wanted integration with NATO (10.3% in the South and 13.1% in the East).[6] Nonetheless, Ukraine was still pulled toward NATO even though CIA Director Burns had warned already back in 2008 that it would likely trigger a civil war in Ukraine and “Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face”.[7] In December 2020, former British ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne similarly warned that attempting to push Ukraine into NATO “was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it. Moreover, any poll in Ukraine showed that two thirds of the Ukrainian public did not want NATO membership”.[8] If the Ukrainians did not want NATO membership and we knew it would trigger a war, why was it “pro-Ukrainian”?
Regime Change in Kiev
In February 2014, NATO countries toppled the government in Ukraine under the guise of supporting a “democratic revolution”. Yanukovich had been elected in what the OSCE had recognised to be a free and fair election, and there was no evidence that Yanukovich would not have stepped down if he had lost in the next election. The Maidan protests did not enjoy democratic majority support from the Ukrainians and even fewer supported a coup.[9] British Foreign Minister William Hague deceived the public by claiming that the toppling of President Yanukovich had been done in compliance with the constitution, contrary to the clear rules in the Ukrainian constitution that specified procedures for removing the head of state.[10] A phone call leaked two weeks before the coup, exposed how Washington was planning the coup and hand-picked the new government that would be installed.[11] NATO supported the toppling of the democratically elected government that attempted to bridge a divided society, and replaced it with a divisive pro-NATO/anti-Russian government. Yet criticise the Western-backed coup in Kiev and you will be branded to be “anti-Ukrainian” and “pro-Russian”. In contrast, the people who set Ukraine on a path to destruction against their will claim to “stand with Ukraine”.
Asserting Administrative Control over Ukraine
On the first day after the coup, the head of Ukraine’s intelligence services in the new government that the US had hand-picked, called the CIA and MI6 to start a partnership for a covert war against Russia.[12] This partnership was a key reason why Russia decided to intervene militarily eight years later in February 2022.[13] The Washington Post reported: “the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow”.[14] The US then also strengthened the far-right fascist groups in Ukraine as they functioned as a veto power on any efforts to seek peace with Russia.
Several Westerners took key positions in the Ukrainian government. In 2014, Natalie Jaresko took the position of Finance Minister of Ukraine and received Ukrainian citizenship on the same day as she took the job. Jaresko was a former US State Department official and former Economic Section Chief of the US Embassy in Ukraine. She transitioned from representing American interests in Ukraine, to representing Ukraine. The general prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, complained that since 2014, “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were made in agreement with the United States”. According to Shokin, Washington’s behaviour indicated that they “believed that Ukraine was their fiefdom”.[15] Biden would later take credit for having fired Ukraine’s General Prosecutor, who had opened an investigation into the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Three months after the coup in February 2014, Hunter Biden and a close family friend of US Secretary of State, John Kerry, became board members of Burisma.[16]
After Russia invaded in February 2022, the US further strengthened its grip over Ukraine. In 2023, an American transgender who argued that Russians are not human beings became the new spokesperson for Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces. As Ukraine’s situation became more precarious and dependence on the West increased, Kiev largely outsourced the post-war reconstruction process to BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to manage the Ukraine Development Fund. The US asserting administrative control over the Ukrainian government was depicted as helping Ukraine with democratic governance and fighting corruption.
De-Russifying Ukraine
Decoupling Ukraine from Russia was a key objective to permanently place Ukraine in NATO’s orbit. The US-orchestrated Orange Revolution in 2004 installed the Yushchenko government that distanced itself from Russia and pursued NATO membership, however, the public eventually reversed this trajectory by electing Yanukovich. At the end of Yushchenko’s presidential term, Newsweek labelled Yushchenko the world’s most unpopular leader with a 2.7 percent approval rating.[17]
US support for the de-Russification of Ukrainian society entailed purging the political opposition, arresting the main opposition leader, banning independent media, banning the Orthodox Church, and purging the Russian language and culture. The first decree by the new Ukrainian Parliament in 2014 was a call to repeal Russian as a regional language. By 2024, Ukraine even had language inspectors to counter the spread of the Russian language.[18] The BBC reported that after the coup, Kiev’s city council was covered with large neo-Nazi banners, the American confederate flag, and portraits of the fascist ally of Hitler, Stepan Bandera.[19] A new nationalist identity was supported based on the far-right in which street names with the shared Russian or Soviet history were replaced with fascists who collaborated with Hitler. To de-Russify a country that lived in the same state as Russia for centuries and shared language, culture and faith, could not possibly coexist with democracy, stability or basic human rights. Such policies caused a deep rift in the social cohesion of the country and caused misery for millions of Ukrainians who became second-rate citizens in their own country.
Yet, these developments could be supported under the guise of “helping Ukraine” to decouple from Russia as a condition for asserting its distinctive identity and sovereignty.
The War Against Donbas
After the coup in 2014, people in Donbas rejected the new government in Kiev that had seized power with the support of the West, as predicted by CIA Director Burns. The first instinct of the new authorities and their backers in Washington was to send the military to destroy the uprising. Yet, the Ukrainian army was weak and regular soldiers were not comfortable with turning their guns on their own population. This problem was overcome by recruiting fascist militias in Western Ukraine, such as Azov, who were happy to kill. Yevhan Karas, the leader of the fascist group C14, informed his audience that the West did not give weapons to help Ukrainians but did so because “we have started a war” that was fulfilling the goals of the West. The nationalists were supported by the West due to their resilience: “because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting”.[20]
Kiev launched an “anti-terrorist operation” against Donbas, which killed more than 14.000 Ukrainians. Ignoring all evidence about the involvement of local Ukrainians in the uprising, the Western media largely denied any agency as all fighting was done by “pro-Russian” militias or Russians themselves. Thus, the war against Ukrainians in Donbas could be sold to the Western public as helping Ukraine fight Russian influence.
Sabotaging the Minsk-2 Peace Agreement
The fighting between Kiev and Donbas came to an end with the Minsk-2 peace agreement. Both Poroshenko and Zelensky attempted to implement the Minsk-2 agreement before being opposed by the US-backed far-right.
The BBC reported in August 2015 that a clear majority of 265 MPs out of 450 had supported the first reading of the decentralisation bill to grant more autonomy to Donbas. This sparked a violent veto by the far right, it then reported: ‘Protesters led by the populist Radical Party and the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party—who oppose any concession to the Russian-backed separatists’ clashed with riots police that resulted in the death of a national guard member and over 100 injured.[21] Poroshenko subsequently began to abandon his efforts to implement the Minsk-2 agreement.
Zelensky was therefore able to win a landslide election victory with 73% of the votes in 2019. He won over the Ukrainian public by running on a platform of peace by promising to implement the Minsk agreement to ensure peace After Zelensky became president, he was threatened by the US-backed far right and a protest was arranged in Kiev in which approximately 10,000 people rallied against President Zelensky’s plan to end the war, which was denounced as “capitulation”.[22] After failing to assert control over the far-right groups in the military, Zelensky had to align himself closer with the nationalists and thus rejected peace with Donbas.[23]
The US assisted its government in Ukraine to ignore the UN-approved Minsk-2 peace agreement by building an increasingly powerful Ukrainian army and tying it closer to NATO. Germany and France had negotiated the Minsk-2 peace agreement in 2015, although they later revealed this had been a deceit. Angela Merkel argued in an interview with both Bild and Spiegel that the Minsk Agreement enabled her to buy time for Ukraine to build itself into a powerful and well-fortified country.[24] When her French counterpart, former president François Hollande, was asked about Merkel’s statement that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was merely intended to buy time, he confirmed: “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point” and added that the conflict with Russia would be resolved on the battlefield: “There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground”.[25] Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, later argued that the West’s sabotage of the Minsk agreement was “a breach of international law… it turns out that we are the ones who do not comply with international agreements”.[26]
NATO countries had confirmed for 7 years that the Minsk-2 peace agreement was the only path to a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, while concurrently sabotaging the only path to peace. This path to war was done against the overwhelming will of the Ukrainian population, as evidenced by their consistent voting for a peace platform. Why should NATO efforts to overturn the result of the Ukrainian elections to sabotage the peace agreement be considered “pro-Ukrainian” or “helping Ukraine”?
Refusing Russia’s Demand for Security Guarantees in 2021
Russia demanded in 2021 security guarantees to mitigate the threats from NATO’s growing footprint in Ukraine, otherwise, the escalating threat would be resolved by military means. President Biden warned Ukraine that Russia was preparing its military for an invasion, yet he did not want to offer any security guarantees to prevent an invasion.
Kurt Volker, the former US Ambassador to NATO and former US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations from 2017 to 2019, even argued that Biden should not make any agreements with Putin as “the best possible outcome is not one of modest agreements and a commitment to ‘predictability,’ but one of a lack of agreements altogether. Success is confrontation”.[27] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also acknowledged that halting NATO expansion was required to prevent an invasion: “President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [it] was a pre-condition for not invad[ing] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that”.[28] Under a fierce security competition in which Russia feared for its security, “helping Ukraine” would certainly have involved mitigating some of Russia’s security concerns.
Sabotaging the Istanbul Peace Negotiations in 2022
After the Minsk agreement had been sabotaged for 7 years and no security guarantees were forthcoming, Russia decided in February 2022 to use military force to impose a political settlement. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Zelensky confirmed “Today we heard from Moscow that they still want to talk. They want to talk about Ukraine’s neutral status… We are not afraid to talk about neutral status”.[29] On the third day after the invasion, Moscow and Kiev announced they would hold peace talks “without preconditions” in Belarus.[30] Zelensky even suggested later a “collective security agreement” to ensure that the security concerns of both Russia and Ukraine would be met.[31]
The US had other objectives. On the first day after the Russian invasion, Washington rejected peace without preconditions as Russia first had to withdraw all its forces from Ukraine.[32] Washington even suggested that it would not support Ukraine’s effort to resolve the conflict through a compromise as “this is a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine”.[33] In March 2022, Zelensky argued in an interview with the Economist that “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[34]
According to the leader of Zelensky’s political party and Zelensky’s advisor, Russia and Ukraine were close to an agreement. Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Chalyi, who participated in peace talks with Russia, confirms Putin “tried everything” to reach a peace agreement and they were able “to find a very real compromise”.[35]
Retired German General Harald Kujat, the former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, argued that NATO provoked the war and that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace negotiations as “the West was not ready for an end to the war”.[36] The Turkish mediators confirmed: “I had the impression that there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.[37] The Israeli mediators reached the same conclusion as former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett recognised “both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but the West “blocked” the peace agreement as a “decision by the West to keep striking Putin” rather than pursuing peace.[38]
After interviews with American and British leaders, Niall Ferguson reported in Bloomberg that a decision had been made for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[39] Over the next two and a half years, numerous American political and military leaders expressed their support for the war as it was a great opportunity to weaken Russia as a strategic rival without using and losing American troops. The decision to fight Russia with Ukrainians was nonetheless framed consistently in the media as “helping Ukraine”.
Keeping Ukraine in the War
As Zelensky had argued in March 2022, some of its Western partners preferred “long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[40] The Americans were pressuring Ukraine to launch the disastrous counter-offensive of 2023, as a “senior Ukrainian military official recalled, the Americans were nagging about a delayed start”.[41] The New York Times reported that “American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive”.[42]
However, despite the disastrous casualties among the Ukrainians and the failure of the counter-offensive, the Washington Post could report that “for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance”.[43] As Ukraine continues to bleed dry in the war of attrition, there are more and more videos on Ukrainian Telegram channels of more aggressive “recruitment” tactics that involve grabbing Ukrainians off the street and throwing them into vans. Yet, the discussions in NATO countries revolve around lowering the conscription age in Ukraine or deporting Ukrainian refugees that can be used to refill the trenches.
If these were our own soldiers dying in the hundreds of thousands, would we not have begun negotiations a long time ago? The incoming EU foreign policy chief has rejected any diplomacy with Russia as Putin is a “war criminal”, while also punishing EU member states such as Hungary for attempting to restore diplomacy and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. NATO could help Ukraine by using the promise to end expansion as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia. Instead, NATO continues to threaten further expansion after the war, which makes any peace agreement impossible. When Ukraine begins to collapse, the US and NATO will likely call for a ceasefire to freeze the frontlines to yet again buy some time to rebuild its Ukrainian army and fight another day.
As we reflect on NATO’s policies toward Ukraine, can we conclude that they have been in the interest of Ukraine or had the support of the Ukrainians? Has it been in the interest of the West? The ability to ask critical questions is prevented by presenting all policies as being either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, in which dissent is effectively criminalised. It is a common phenomenon that when political leaders create propaganda, they often end up deceiving themselves.
…..
– The text includes excerpts from my book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order” https://www.claritypress.com/product/the-ukraine-war-the-eurasian-world-order/
[1] WIKILEAKS – – CIA Red Cell Special Memorandum; Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission-Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough, March 11, 2010
[2] Why Nato must defend women’s rights | Jens Stoltenberg and Angelina Jolie | The Guardian
[3] J. Ray and N. Esipova, ‘Ukrainians Likely Support Move Away From NATO’, Gallup, 2 April 2010.
[4] C. English, ‘Ukrainians See More Value in Ties With Russia Than U.S.’, Gallup, 15 February 2008.
[5] 2011 – 172 CDSDG 11 E REV1 – UKRAINE – MALAN REPORT | NATO PA (nato-pa.int).
[6] GALLUP® CORP Template (usagm.gov)
[7] W.J. Burns, ‘Nyet means nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines’, Wikileaks, 1 February 2008.
[8] R. Lyne, ‘The UC Interview Series: Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gryazin’, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020.
[9] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s revolution and the far right, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[10] D. Morrison, ‘How William Hague Deceived the House of Commons on Ukraine’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2014.
[11] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call’, BBC, 7 February 2014.
[12] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[13] The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[14] G. Miller and I. Khurshudyan, ‘Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia’, The Washington Post’, 23 October 2023.
[15] M.M. Abrahms, ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’, Newsweek, 8 August 2023.
[16] P. Sonne and J. Grimaldi, ‘Biden’s Son, Kerry Family Friend Join Ukrainian Gas Producer’s Board’, The Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2014.
[17] O. Matthews, ‘Viktor Yushchenko’s Star Has Fallen’, Newsweek, 13 March 2009.
[18] Language inspectors to start working in Frankivsk | УНН (unn.ua)
[19] BBC, ‘Ukraine’s Revolution and the Far Right’, BBC, 7 March 2014.
[20] A. Rubenstein and M. Blumenthal, ‘How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia’, The Grayzone, 4 March 2022.
[21] BBC, ‘Ukraine crisis: Deadly anti-autonomy protest outside parliament’, BBC, 31 August 2015.
[22] A. Korniienko, ‘Thousands rally in Kyiv against Zelensky’s plan to end war with Russia’, Kyiv Post, 6 October 2019.
[23] J. Melanovski, ‘Ukrainian President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right’, WSWS, 30 April 2021.
[24] A. Osang, ‘You’re Done with Power Politics’, Spiegel, 1 December 2022.
[25] T. Prouvost ‘Hollande: ‘There will only be a way out of the conflict when Russia fails on the ground’’, The Kyiv Independent, 28 December 2022.
[26] Emma, ‘Russland will verhandeln!’ [Russia wants to negotiate!], Emma, 4 March 2023.
[27] K. Volker, ‘What Does a Successful Biden-Putin Summit Look Like? Not What You Think’, CEPA, 2 June 2021.
[28] J. Stoltenberg, ‘Opening remarks’, NATO, 7 September 2023.
[29] V. Zelensky, ‘Address by the President to Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks’, President of Ukraine: Official website, 25 February 2022.
[30] S. Raskin and L. Brown, ‘Ukraine and Russia to meet for peace talks ‘without preconditions,’ Zelensky says’, New York Post, 27 February 2022.
[31] M. Hirsh, ‘Hints of a Ukraine-Russia Deal?’, Foreign Policy, 8 March 2022.
[32] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 25 February 2022.
[33] US Department of State, ‘Department Press Briefing’, US Department of State, 21 March 2022.
[34] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[35] Breaking the Stalemate to Find Peace: The Russia-Ukraine War – A Geneva Security Debate (youtube.com)
[36] J. Helmer, ‘Whr. Gen. Kujat: Ukraine War is Lost, Germany Now Faces an Angry Russia… Alone’, Veterans Today, 25 January 2023.
[37] R. Semonsen, ‘Former Israeli PM: West Blocked Russo-Ukraine Peace Deal’, The European Conservative, 7 February 2023.
[38] N. Bennett, ‘Bennett speaks out’, YouTube Channel of Naftali Bennett, 4 February 2023.
[39] N. Ferguson, ‘Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the U.S.’, Bloomberg, 22 March 2022.
[40] The Economist. ‘Volodymyr Zelensky on why Ukraine must defeat Putin’ The Economist, 27 March 2022.
[41] ‘Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine’, The Washington Post, 4 December 2023.
[42] ‘Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say’, The New York Times, 18 August 2023.
[43] D. Ignatius, ‘The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t’, The Washington Post, 18 July 2023.
Would Be Assassin is a Media Darling
Ryan Wesley Routh, former roofer from N. Carolina and implacable foe of Trump and Putin, has often been approvingly quoted by MSM
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | September 16, 2024
While we often hear that middle-aged southern white men pose a grave threat to American democracy and public safety, Ryan Wesley Routh—a former roofer from North Carolina who looks and sounds like a dumb cracker —has, in recent years, been a model of anti-Trump and anti-Putin sentiment. Also notable is the fact that in 2002, he was charged with the felony possession of a fully automatic firearm.
The following is a collection of statements he has made to various MSM outlets over the last couple of years.
“It’s a pretty big yard, but the front bank is completely full,” Ryan Routh, an American volunteer who started the memorial last year, said. “There may be 10,000 at this point. ‘Flags of the fallen’ is what I’ve been calling it.”
Routh, a former construction worker who lives in Hawaii, is one of the thousands of foreigners who, after seeing news reports about the invasion, travelled into Ukraine in early 2022 to volunteer as fighters or medics.
“Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers,” said Ryan Routh, head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine, a private organization which helps foreigners seeking to assist the war effort connect with military units and aid groups. “I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”
The New York Times article backs up the Russian Defense Ministry’s information regarding the countries which are actively trying to recruit mercenaries to join the fight in Ukraine. It wrote about Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from North Carolina who spent several months in Ukraine last year and is now seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. He plans to move them to Ukraine from Pakistan and Iran – in some cases, illegally. Nevertheless, dozens of people have apparently expressed an interest.
With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest. “We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.
The man behind the wall of banners, Ryan Routh, told CNA that he posted the flags to pay tribute to the nations that have citizens fighting in Ukraine’s foreign legion, the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine. Routh said there have been no protests about the presence of the Taiwan flag so far, but even if China is dissatisfied, “I can order another 1,000, they can’t touch my flags.”
Routh, 56, originally hails from Hawaii, but most recently worked in the construction industry in North Carolina and has no military background. He came to Kyiv more than two months ago to show his support for Ukraine and wanted to join the foreign legion.
However, due to his age, he was unable to do so, and he is instead currently assisting the legion in recruiting volunteers for the Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie units in Kharkiv. Thus far, Routh has assisted in recruiting 70 volunteers to join the fight against Russia.
Routh began posting flags on the wall of a sandbagged monument in Kyiv’s Independence Square. He told the news agency that he included Taiwan’s flag because he had met at least five Taiwanese volunteers serving in the legion over the past two months and learned about Taiwan’s contribution to Ukraine’s war effort.
According to Routh, he has yet to receive any protests from China about the presence of the Taiwan flag. He said that any pressure that would come from China would be “nothing” compared to the daily assault by Russian forces on every soldier who supports Ukraine.
He said that he will continue to stay in Kyiv and encourage more people to fight against Russia. European countries deliver truckloads of food, medical supplies, and military equipment, but Ukraine may need three to four times more support, estimated Routh.
The volunteer pointed out that there are only 50 national flags on the stone wall, meaning that there are over 100 countries that do not have a single soldier that has volunteered to fight for Ukraine, “This is unacceptable.” He emphasized the war between Russia and Ukraine is a battle of good versus evil.
Routh asserted that at this critical moment, all countries should give their soldiers unpaid leave and provide air tickets to fly to Ukraine to participate in the war to prevent Russia from starting another war. “We should be united and share success and failure, which is what these flags stand for,” said Routh.
Thus, Routh has become a seemingly improbable face and voice of prevailing Democrat Party sentiment and foreign policy orthodoxy.
British Labour’s raw deal for working people
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 12, 2024
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide election in July with the slogan “a new deal for working people”.
Already the electioneering can be seen as a sham. This week, the Labour government won a majority vote in the House of Commons to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners. Around 10 million senior citizens will no longer receive a financial grant to help them pay soaring energy bills and keep their houses warm this winter.
The energy crisis for households in Britain and across Europe is a result of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the cutting off of Russia’s abundant gas and oil supplies to the continent. The Biden administration ordered the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. That was in September 2022. The best way to end the energy crisis for European households would be to stop the war, make peace, and return to normal relations. But the new Labour government is having none of that common sense. It is eagerly fueling the proxy war as much as the Conservatives before it, and what’s more now making the poor of Britain pay for the warmongering.
Prime Minister Starmer told angry unions and workers that he would make no apology for the winter fuel payment cut. His ministers are claiming they have “no choice” but to repair a “£22 billion blackhole” in public finances gutted by the predecessor Conservatives.
Starmer’s Labour is warning that more “tough choices” are coming in the coming weeks, meaning that working people and low-income families are going to face more economic austerity. So much for a democratic change from the hated Tories and the supposed “new deal for workers”.
The warped priorities of this government (as with the previous one) can be seen from the promises to boost spending on Britain’s military. Starmer has vowed to uphold a commitment to increase Britain’s “defense” budget from £54.2 bn (€64 bn, $74.7 bn) a year to £57.1 bn. That represents a 4.5 percent increase.
Under Starmer, Britain will continue to donate billions of public money to the Kiev regime.
This week, while the Labour government was voting to cut winter welfare for pensioners, the British foreign minister David Lammy traveled to Kiev alongside the U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, where they assured the Ukrainian regime that they would deliver more weapons, hinting at ending restrictions on long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russia.
Meanwhile, Britain’s defense minister John Healey will be in Ramstein, Germany, this week to meet with other military chiefs of the so-called Ukraine Contact Group. Healey, who calls himself “Mr Ukraine”, is to unveil another British military aid package of multi-role missiles worth £162 million. Healey is very much a deep-state figure inside the Labour government. This means a continuity in foreign policy despite the name change in Downing Street.
To date, since the eruption of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022, Britain has doled out £12.5 bn (€14.7 bn) in military aid to the Kiev regime, including the training of up to 45,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Britain is the third-biggest military aid donor to Ukraine after the United States and Germany.
Starmer’s new Labour government is showing itself every bit as committed to funding the proxy war against Russia as its Conservative predecessor was.
Just three days after the general election on July 4, the new defense minister, John Healey, made his first overseas visit to Ukraine on July 7. Healey vowed to continue Britain’s support.
So while the Labour government claims that it has “no choice” but to slash public spending at home, it unquestioningly keeps spending on militarism at home and abroad.
This is a matter of political choice. If a Labour government were to genuinely prioritize the needs of working people, it could find the finances easily by cutting Britain’s excessive military budget and the largesse it bestows on a NeoNazi regime and the reckless proxy war against Russia that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.
The insulting deception of Labour’s “new deal” means that Starmer’s government will require close shepherding, just in case it wobbles from the inevitable public backlash.
The vote this week to axe winter fuel payments to elderly citizens has sparked fury among the wider population. The anger will grow as more austerity measures against citizens kick in and while the proxy war in Ukraine continues to receive endless support with British public money.
It seems no coincidence that this week Britain’s Starmer is to visit the White House. The visit by Blinken to London and thence to Kiev alongside his British counterpart, as well as the Ramstein meeting for UK defense chief Healey, all suggest that a close eye is being kept on Downing Street to ensure that it does not get any notions about “serving the people”.
To that end too, it seems significant that the former Conservative defense minister Ben Wallace has taken to whipping up public fears of Russia.
Wallace wrote a recent oped in the Daily Telegraph in which he claimed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “will soon turn his war machine on Britain”.
The article was reported in several other British media outlets. The same fear-mongering has been echoed by the new head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir Roly Walker, who warned that the United Kingdom could be in an all-out war with Russia in the next three years.
Wallace, who is a cipher for Britain’s deep state, claimed that “Britain is in Putin’s cross-hairs”. He added: “Make no mistake, Putin is coming for us… we must be prepared for the inevitable.”
The hysteria from Britain’s ruling class is of course cringe-making. These claims about Russia’s malign intent and comparing Putin with Hitler are completely bereft of any historical facts, such as NATO expansionism and the weaponizing of a Nazi-adulating regime in Ukraine to provoke Russia.
Russian leaders have repeatedly said they have no intention of attacking any NATO nations. They say their involvement in Ukraine is a special operation to neutralize NATO threats to Russia’s national security.
Sooner or later, the British and Western public are going to demand accountability from their governments on why such huge finances are being ladled into promoting a highly dangerous conflict with Russia.
Britain’s Labour government is vulnerable to a public backlash because of its blatant duplicity.
That would explain the close attention from Washington to London’s policy, ensuring Starmer keeps toeing the line of NATO’s hostility to Moscow. British deep state assets like Ben Wallace also need to keep writing scare stories to frighten the public away from common sense criticism of London’s deranged warmongering and betrayal of working people.
‘Israel’s’ Bloody Negotiations Strategy in Gaza
By Jamal Kanj | Al Mayadeen | September 12, 2024
Fifty-two years ago, almost to the day, on September 8, 1972, I survived the first of many air and sea raids on my refugee camp in northern Lebanon. I was less than two hundred yards from the area across the river where a group of us young kids met every day, between 4 and 5 p.m., to play in the large field, swim in the river, or the Mediterranean Sea.
At first, I heard what sounded like a humming plane. Before I could even turn my head to look up at the sky, I was startled by the booming sound of low-flying fighter jets passing overhead, dropping massive rockets onto the open field. The first bomb exploded in the northwest area of the field, creating a massive fireball—a black column of smoke intertwined with a glowing red blaze. The shockwave threw me off my bike. Soot filled the air and fragments rained down like strafing bullets all around me.
In less than 15 minutes, the once grassy green play area of approximately 20 acres was transformed into a lunar landscape, pocked with craters. One pit was so large and deep that groundwater filled the hole.
If the Israeli air raid had occurred just five or ten minutes later, I would have been in the middle of the field, playing with other 14-year-old kids. My friend Barakat, who was already there and likely had been eagerly anticipating my arrival, was killed. The raid left many unexploded devices and time-delayed bombs, making it difficult to recover his body until the next day. Our neighbor Mahdi was also killed, buried under the plowed soil. Years later, his skeleton was discovered when the area was being graded.
I’m reminded of this today, September 10, 2024, as I watch footage of the huge crater left behind by an American-made 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb. The bombs were dropped in the middle of the night on 20 tents housing displaced civilians in an Israeli-designated “safe area” in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.
Early in the morning, the Israeli army issued its disinformation boilerplate communiqué, declaring the raid was a “precise strike” on senior resistance members. But videos from the crater, where tents lay buried under the sand, suggest that “Israel” targeted civilians in a supposed safe area.
Reading about the “precise strike” on a BBC site took me back 52 years. Almost three hours after the raid on my camp, I remember my father and our neighbors gathering around the radio to listen to the 7 p.m. BBC Arabic news. I still recall how they stopped breathing, their eyes wide, mouths agape, as the BBC quoted an Israeli army spokesman claiming “Israel” had targeted a military base in Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
While I don’t remember the exact number of the killed and injured that afternoon, I know for certain that 100 percent were civilians—mostly young boys and girls, with at least one elderly man among them. I felt then as helpless as many of those who were sleeping on September 10 in their “safe” tents, unable to tell their story to the world. The photos left behind by the US-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs, however, expose “Israel’s” lies and the complicity of the managed Western media.
It is utterly despicable that the lecterns at the White House and the State Department have become platforms to market such lies, emboldening “Israel’s” intransigence and whitewashing its genocide. Especially egregious is the disinformation spread by White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who blamed the Palestinians as “the main obstacle” to a ceasefire. This brazen lie comes less than a week after the leak of a document pointing to new conditions that were added in late July by Benjamin Netanyahu to Joe Biden’s proposal from May 27, which torpedoed the ceasefire agreement.
After the Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions in late July, “Israel” intensified its systematic campaign of bombing displaced civilians in safe areas, including 16 UN schools converted into mass shelters. Unable to compel a ceasefire on its terms, “Israel” is using these attacks on designated safe areas as part of its bloody negotiation strategy to exert pressure by inflicting maximum suffering on civilians through murder and starvation.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to supply “Israel” with the means to commit these war crimes, while using the White House platform to spread disinformation, making “Israel’s” “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Destroying Bridges
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | September 6, 2024
The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article titled “Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say,” written by Coral Davenport. Multiple lines of evidence and examples not only refute this claim as false but expose the sheer absurdity of the claim.
These sorts of absurdly false claims have been tried before, for instance, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, MN in 2007. An article in 2007 by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters exposed the claim as false:
A former member of the Clinton administration, and current Senior Fellow at the virtual Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis last week.
I kid you not.
Writing at Climate Progress, the global warming blog of CAP, Joseph Romm – who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from 1995 though 1998 – stated in a piece amazingly entitled “Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?“
Unsurprisingly, the actual cause had nothing to do with climate change at all but rather an engineering failure that used undersized gusset plates that were too thin for the load of the bridge:
The investigation revealed that photos from a June 2003 inspection of the bridge showed gusset-plate bowing. On November 13, 2008, the NTSB released the findings of its investigation. The primary cause of the collapse was the undersized gusset plates, at 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick. Contributing to that design or construction error was the fact that 2 inches (51 mm) of concrete had been added to the road surface over the years, increasing the static load by 20%. Another factor was the extraordinary weight of construction equipment and material resting on the bridge just above its weakest point at the time of the collapse. That load was estimated at 578,000 pounds (262 tonnes), consisting of sand, water, and vehicles.
So, human error and extra weight, not climate change, was determined to be the cause of the bridge’s failure.
Fast forward to the present. The NYT’s article makes similar claims:
Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.
“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.
As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered. But bridges face particular risks.
Really? The bridges in question weren’t engineered to handle daily temperature swings? A natural event that happens daily across seasons? That sounds like poor planning. Besides the absurdity of that claim, there are two further contradictory points to consider.
First, in the United States, we’ve seen far worse sustained heatwaves before, such as in the 1930s when the July 1936 heatwave hit America’s Midwest, where some places experienced up to 14 days of above 100°F temperatures. This is evidenced by the graph in Figure 1, provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Figure 1. This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index, from 1895 to 2020 contiguous 48 states. Environmental Protection Agency.
In the many reports of the heatwaves in the 1930’s, there is no mention of bridge collapse, which suggests that the linkage to “extreme heat aided by climate change” claim is false. Otherwise, such temperatures in the 1930s would have resulted in collapsed bridges. However, there simply are none from that period reportedly linked to heat.
Secondly, the article says “As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered.” But this isn’t true either. The claim NYT uses is about the global temperature, not the U.S. temperature. As seen in Figure 2 below showing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), widely considered to be the most accurate source of surface temperature data, July 2024 was not “the hottest in recorded history.” For example, maximum U.S. temperature was higher in 2012 and 2005 than in July 2024.
Figure 2: NOAA – USCRN Maximum Temperature
Diving deeper into the NYT article, the Times attributes the failure of a railroad bridge connecting Iowa and South Dakota during floods to climate change. Flooding in the rivers and streams across and bordering Iowa and South Dakota have been common for as long as records of such event have been kept back into the mid-1800s. And railroad bridge collapses have happened repeatedly in the United States and around the world, well before climate change ever became an issue. Since data show no increase in the number or severity of flood events across the United States, in general, or in Iowa and South Dakota, in particular, there is no evidence climate change played any role in that particular railroad bridge collapse.
The next claim is that the concrete buckled and broke on a bridge in Lewiston, Maine which NYT blamed on “recent fluctuation in temperature and rain.”
Looking at the weather in Lewiston, ME when the event occurred shows that although high and low temperatures were higher than the normal average for late June, the fluctuations the NYT was so concerned about were less extreme than normal, about a 15 degree change from high to low in June 2024 rather than the historic daily average of about 20 degrees. (See figure 3, below).
Figure 3: Normal average daily fluctuations in temperatures throughout the year for Lewiston Maine. Source: Google
The high temperature for the third week of June was 95℉, above the normal maximum for the date, but it was well below the historic high temperature for the city of 99℉ recorded in 1911, 113 years of global warming ago. Lewiston’s 2024 June high was also 10 degrees lower than the high temperature record for the state as a whole of 105℉ set in North Bridgton, ME, just thirty miles away from Lewiston, also from 1911, when that temperature was hit twice.
Because temperatures in Lewiston didn’t fluctuate wildly and were also not record setting, it is implausible for the bridge’s concrete cracking and buckling to have anything at all to do with climate change. It was likely a result of poor construction or, even more likely, poor maintenance, a problem for many bridges and overpasses in Maine and the U.S. as a whole, combined with increased traffic and load, due to significant population growth in the city and the region, using the bridge.
Literally, it takes two minutes of work on Google search to find this data. Apparently, NYT reporter Coral Davenport couldn’t be troubled to seek out the facts. Or perhaps, she just doesn’t know how. This sort of slapdash reporting containing speculative claims rather than simple facts seems like something out of the old TV series The Twilight Zone.
If such an episode aired today, my suggested title would be “Bogus Maximus.” This story was pure science fiction.
Trump’s Grand-Jury Indictments Don’t Mean Squat
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 10, 2024
A recent Los Angeles Times column by Times’s columnist Jackie Calmes entitled “Should a Five-Time Loser with Grand Juries Be President?” displays a woeful lack of understanding regarding grand-jury indictments.
Calmes’s article, of course, is about Donald Trump and argues that the five grand-jury indictments against Trump are a good reason for rejecting his candidacy for president. Adding authority to her argument, Calmes quotes former Justice Department official and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann: “For those counting, FIVE separate grand juries (scores of citizens) have now found probable cause that Trump committed multiple felonies.”
As a former prosecutor, Weissmann should know that grand juries are usually nothing more than rubber stamps for whatever prosecutors want. As Sol Wachtler, chief justice of New York’s Supreme Court, put it, “Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
Grand juries are normally composed of good, little, patriotic, deferential citizens who look upon prosecutors and judges, especially at the federal level, as gods. When a federal prosecutor enters the grand-jury room armed with a bit of evidence and an indictment, the grand jurors are going to do what he wants them to do.
Keep in mind, after all, that there is no judge in the grand-jury room. There is also no defense attorney representing the person they want indicted. There is no one to challenge or rule out incompetent evidence. The prosecutor can use hearsay evidence, illegally acquired evidence, or even evidence acquired by torture. The grand jury is not going to challenge him on the evidence he is presenting to them. They are simply going to grant his request for an indictment.
Calmes makes a big deal over the fact that a grand-jury indictment is based on “probable cause.” Big deal. What she apparently doesn’t realize is that “probable cause” can be based on hearsay or other evidence that is not admissible at a trial. That makes the indictment worthless in terms of whether the accused is actually guilty of what the indictment charges him with.
The fact is that a grand-jury indictment is nothing more than an accusation. In a court of law, it doesn’t constitute any evidence whatsoever. In terms of determining whether a person is guilty of a crime, an indictment is worthless.
Whatever reasons people might have for rejecting Trump’s quest to be president again, those grand-jury indictments against him are a ludicrous one. Calmes, Weissmann, and the Los Angeles Times should know better than to make such a ridiculous argument for rejecting Donald Trump’s candidacy.
Now It Is the White House that Is Smearing Tucker Carlson
By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | September 8, 2024
NY Times, CNN, and WH Press Secretary Bates are Smearing Tucker Carlson as a Hitler apologist in an Attempt to Shut Him Down.
Tucker interviewed Darryl Cooper whose view of World War II appears to be based in the 50-year research of historian David Irving. It is not the official view established by court historians. Consequently, the “White House condemns Tucker Carlson’s ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview as ‘disgusting and sadistic insult.’”
In his well researched books, World War II historian David Irving reported that whereas he found evidence that Jews were murdered in the hundreds of thousands, he cannot find evidence of an organized Holocaust. He said that from all the documents he could find and force out of sealed archives, the crimes against the Jews resulted from decisions unrelated to an organized plan of extermination. No historian has ever found a Nazi plan for Jewish extermination. Such a massive undertaking as a Holocaust could not be undertaken without a bureaucratic organization and an organized plan, but there is no evidence of any such organization and plan. Hitler repeatedly said that the Jewish question would be settled after the war. He spoke of relocating Jews to Madagascar. Later with the initial success of his invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler spoke of relocating Jews to the eastern part of the Soviet Union that he would leave to Stalin.
Reporting Irving’s findings does not make Irving or me or anyone an anti-semite or holocaust denier. Irving simply reported what he found, and I merely reported what Irving found. It sounds like that is what Darryl Cooper is doing on Carlson’s program. Ron Unz, himself a Jew, has raised his own questions about Holocaust evidence in the Unz Review. Western civilization works by raising questions, not by imposing dogmas.
If all research results are denounced by those who don’t like the findings, how is truth established? It seems to me that Jews hurt their case by shouting down with name-calling and threats against reputations and careers every time they hear something that they don’t like or that doesn’t fit the narrative. If the Holocaust story is accurate, it will stand on its own feet without name-calling and enemies lists.
The indoctrinated notion of the unparalleled evil of Nazi Germany rests more on war propaganda than in fact. Irving’s books, Churchill’s War and Hitler’s War are the most researched and most honest books about the war. On the basis of an honest rendition of the record, Churchill comes across as a worse war criminal than Hitler. Read the two books, and make your own decision. Why rely on ancient war propaganda?
The widespread view that Hitler started World War II and intended to conquer the world is total ignorance kept alive by court historians. World War II was started by the British and French when they declared war on Germany. What Hitler was doing in Poland was the same as Putin is doing in Ukraine. What Putin is doing is protecting Russian people, who found themselves included in a foreign country by the political decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution and slaughter by Ukrainians.
In Poland Hitler was protecting German people, who were stuck into Poland by decisions made by others than themselves, from persecution, dispossession, and death by the Polish. Hitler’s protection of German people was no business of the British any more than Putin’s protection of Russians is any business of the US.
No one has answered David Irving’s findings. They just call him names. That tells you where the stronger case resides.
I am not a WW II historian and neither is Tucker Carlson, but we both wonder why views are suppressed if they can be factually disproved.
The propagandistic way in which WW II has been presented for 83 years has had major harmful effects on countries, their populations, foreign affairs and world history. Those who bring balance to the story should be celebrated, not demonized.
If you will notice, during the 21st century in every country in the Western world what can be discussed or even mentioned has been massively narrowed. We have reached the point where almost anything said or written is hate speech, racist, misogynist, a threat to democracy, offensive, insensitive, anti-semitic, or Russian propaganda. The great writings in the English language, such as Shakespeare, cannot be read in schools because they violate strictures that have been imposed on language. Bigots now dictate our use of language. Official narratives dictate our understanding of history and current events. A world is being created for us in which facts and truth are objectionable.
Why the Continued Silence on Evan Gershkovich?
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 4, 2024
It has now been more than a month since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was released from Russian custody. Gershkovich had been incarcerated for more than a year on charges of being a spy for the U.S. government, a charge fiercely denied by both the Journal and the U.S. government.
Throughout the ordeal, Journal officials and U.S. officials failed to disclose Gershkovich’s side of the story. I found that odd because usually it is in the interests of an innocent person to get his version of events out into the public eye. Given that the Journal and U.S. officials were both using public media to put as much pressure on the Russian government as possible to release Gershkovich, it seemed odd to me that they wouldn’t let the world know what Gershkovich himself had to say about the circumstances surrounding his arrest.
As I wrote in my July 22, 2024, article “Why the U.S. Secrecy on Evan Gershkovich?” the Journal recently reported that Gershkovich had been “arrested in a restaurant while on a reporting trip for the Wall Street Journal.”
Is that it? Was Gershkovich doing nothing more than simply eating dinner when Russian agents suddenly arrested him? If so, why not just say that? Or was he dining with someone? If the latter, with whom was he dining? How did the dinner get arranged? Who selected the restaurant? Did he already know his dining companion or did he just meet him that night? Was the dinner purely social or did it pertain to his reporting? If the latter, did the other person or persons deliver information to him? If so, what was that information?
Whatever the reasons were for not disclosing the events surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest, it seems to me that those reasons have now evaporated given that Gershkovich is now back in the United States. Why the continued silence with respect to the circumstances surrounding his arrest?
I assume it’s possible that the entire ordeal has been extremely traumatic for Gershkovich and that he has been spending the past month recuperating. Nonetheless, that certainly wouldn’t prevent the Journal and U.S. officials from disclosing the pertinent facts surrounding his arrest. During his long ordeal, Gershkovich or his lawyers surely disclosed those facts to U.S. diplomatic officials in Russia or to Journal officials or U.S. officials here in the United States. Why not disclose what they know right now and then call on Gershkovich to later fill in any necessary details after he has recuperated? Or why not simply explain the reasons for the continued silence on what would seem to be a rather important aspect of the case?
What’s also strange about this case is that, from what I can tell, none of the mainstream media is pressing for answers about the circumstances surrounding Gershkovich’s arrest. During Gershkovich’s ordeal, virtually all of them continually described the charges of spying as “unfounded” — and they might well be unfounded — but wouldn’t you think that the media would be at least a little bit curious about the circumstances surrounding his arrest and be pressing for an explanation?
Fake news now at peak as Kamala faces CNN “interview”
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 4, 2024
Wherever you look, it feels like we are being bombarded now with an unprecedented level of fake news. One reason may well be how the installed governments by western elites – military industrial complex and banking – are getting very skittish indeed about a shake up of world order in November when the airhead Kamala Harris takes on Donald Trump in the presidential elections. This new trend of installing a useful idiot into power has been around for decades across Africa and Asia where the U.S. and before that the UK installed their own despots to serve their own needs, so we shouldn’t be so shocked by someone like Harris having the landscape prepared for her.
To call Harris a ‘lightweight’ is understating her political verve. She has none of the conventional talents that politicians require like public speaking, or engaging with media, let alone having any ideas of her own which might make it one day to policy. For most Americans the choice in November is between Harris, who is essentially Biden 2.0 or Trump. Not exactly a tough call many might say since RFK endorsed Trump who traditionally he has not been a fan of; it’s as though he’s saying to Americans, “anything but Kamala. Do the maths”.
Media is of course playing a huge and certainly tawdry role in pushing her which is not generally noted by most Americans. For weeks she has ignored or avoided all serendipitous contact with journalists which surely must be orders from the elite who are controlling her. And there is good reason for this as the internet is awash with her talking gibberish. Or dancing.
Talking mumbo jumbo won’t help her at the polls against Trump who revels at the microphone and is not afraid to go head to head with journalists and unscripted interviews, despite him whining about how unfair the set-up is.
What he is alluding to is that left-wing media in America like CNN fake the news and as we saw recently almost certainly gave Kamala a print out of the questions she was going to face with her recent CNN interview where she was joined by her running mate just in case she did something which broadcast journalists call ‘goldfishing’ – an on-screen facial contortion where the lips and cheeks move, but nothing comes out of the mouth. In Kamala’s case, goldfishing might not be as bad as actually speaking, as she has shown us that there is not much between the ears. She is not overburdened with what many academics have of knowing too much and not being able to communicate in short sound bites. Harris doesn’t really know anything at all except a few talking points from Biden’s days. Her own people will be happy with the staged interview as they can at least counter op-ed writers who claim she is so lame that she avoids all press. Thanks CNN. Great jaaaabbbb.
Harris is seen as the most suitable candidate to further the causes of America’s military industrial complex whose six main companies cannot slow production down, unless they make job layoffs. The insatiable hunger of this machine is responsible for the lion’s share of U.S. foreign policy and Biden gave his cronies their one hundred Christmas’s when he created the Ukraine war and more recently Gaza. In Gaza the false reporting from western media is as repulsive as the images of children who have lost their entire brains and whose heads look like theatrical floppy props, which has become the day to day norm now when Israel bombs schools. Does anyone in the west in either camp still believe this is a “war” against Hamas fighters? With the recent invasion of West Bank and the rise of settlers stealing land there, surely the real story of Netanyahu’s campaign is there for all to see in plain light: ethnic cleansing on a grand scale to wipe Palestinians off the face of “Israel”. And still we read western journalists and op-ed writers parroting the line about ‘two state solutions’ and what the EU says, etc etc. By the time the chairs are arranged and the mineral water is put on the tables, there will not be a Palestinian left to even represent his or her own state. Everyone knows the two-state solution is a massive parody of diplo gibberish a bit like Kamala’s few media stints which are still good for a laugh today. And it’s an identical story in Ukraine. No western journalists can report on the true story of Ukrainian losses in Kursk and how the operation has blown up in Zelensky’s face. The omission of reporting key facts and data is just as bad as making up your stories, if not worse.
No, Evie Magazine, Climate Change is Not Causing Anxiety
By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | August 19, 2024
Evie Magazine, a conservative-leaning women’s publication, recently posted an article titled “Climate Change Anxiety Is A Cause For The Decline In The Birth Rate,” in which the author claims that human-caused global warming is leading to climate anxiety which misdirects its wrath at larger families. This is mostly false. Climate change is not producing anxiety so much as false and misleading alarmist media coverage is, but it is true that blaming large families for bad weather is equally wrong.
The article begins with writer Carolyn Ferguson claiming that “last year was the hottest year on record for the world,” and that the United States is somehow warming faster than the rest of the world, and that “many are feeling the effects of global warming this year.” This is false.
The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet. It should be obvious that every place on earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world. Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different timeframes, using different datasets and methods, whatever timeframe is most optimal to show the most warming. This makes these comparisons basically worthless.
The fact for the United States is that the record of high temperature anomalies, that is, extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high temperature events since the best records begin in 2005. (See figure below)
According to longer term data, heatwaves in the U.S. today are less frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s, as seen below:
Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has actually declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.
Even looking at proxy data globally which give an idea of ancient temperatures do not indicate we are in a period that can be described as “the hottest on record.” Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1000 to 2500 years ago, respectively. Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
The majority of the abnormal warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but was simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September. A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe. This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.
This is not to say an average warming has not occurred over the past hundred-plus years, but it is not unprecedented nor is it alarming.
The Evie post proceeds to claim that aggression rises amid higher temperatures, writing “one of the most often overlooked corollaries is a rise in communal anger and aggression.”
The “heat makes people crazy” idea has been floated several times over the years, but even the article the Evie post links to admits that it’s likely heat is not the main factor in most of the studies that found aggression. The social sciences and psychology experiments are rifle with uncontrollable variables. Without attempting to conduct any studies, the plain fact that places like Florida and Mexico, the Bahamas, and other hot tropical locales are popular relaxation destinations seems to throw cold water on the hypothesis. Why would anyone go someplace that makes them angrier or more aggressive for vacation?
Discomfort can be aggravating, certainly, but it’s not just higher temperatures alone. Ferguson then gets to the claim that mental health professionals are “seeing more patients come in with symptoms of climate change anxiety, which is supposedly the root of many activists’ anger when it comes to large families.”
Climate Realism has written extensively about how misleading the climate anxiety diagnosis is, here, here, and here, for examples, often shifting the blame from the true culprits. Something like “climate anxiety” does exist – but it is a media-driven phenomenon because of the constant drumbeat of impending doom, not from actual lived experience of warming. Constant media coverage telling people that we are hurtling towards “global boiling,” that every weather extreme is because of you and your neighbor’s use of gasoline, including from typically conservative publications like Evie Magazine, is what is causing anxiety in people.
While Evie is right that climate activists should not turn their ire on big, traditional families, they are wrong that climate anxiety is a legitimate phenomenon.
As Ferguson correctly concludes in her piece, if someone decides not to have kids, “that’s their prerogative, but they should know this decision will likely have little impact on saving our planet.”
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Three Reasons Macron is a Hypocrite when it Comes to Venezuela
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | January 29, 2019
Paris – French President Emmanuel Macron recently voiced support for protesters in Venezuela as his own country has been ground to a halt by protests every weekend.
There is an overused saying that “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” While these few words may be cliche there is definitely one man that they can be applied to after this weekend: Emmanuel Macron.
Even though the French President is into the third month of protests against his government, he has decided to weigh in on the legitimacy of another country’s government and his latest outrageous statements just highlight the hypocrisy of Macron and Western leaders in general. … continue
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