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Heinous Choreography of Village Massacre as Zelensky Begs for More Weapons at EU Summit

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 8, 2023

The horrific missile strike on a Ukrainian village in which 52 people, including a young boy, were killed in a cafe was widely reported by Western media with strident condemnations of a Russian “war crime”.

All the American and European media reports relied solely on Ukrainian security sources for their immediate attribution of the massacre to Russian forces. It was claimed that a Russian Iskander missile hit the village of Hroza (Groza).

Russia did not make any comment on the specific accusations, simply repeating that its military does not deliberately target civilian centers.

The carnage on Thursday, October 5, occurred at the very same time that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was addressing a summit in Granada in Spain attended by European Union leaders. Zelensky referred to the missile strike in highly emotive language, condemning it as “Russian genocidal aggression”. EU leaders joined in the denunciation of Russia.

The BBC quoted Zelensky as saying the act “couldn’t even be called a beastly act – because it would be an insult to beasts”.

The purpose of Zelensky’s attendance in Granada was to make a renewed appeal for European NATO members to supply more air defence systems to Ukraine. It was reported that Spain pledged to send the U.S.-made HAWK system to Ukraine.

Zelensky also told European leaders that the political turmoil in the United States over the abrupt Congressional cutting off of financial aid to Ukraine was a “dangerous situation”.

The Biden White House referred to the missile strike on the village of Hroza as a reminder to U.S. lawmakers why continued military aid to Ukraine is essential.

As several Western media reports acknowledged, the targeted village with a population of around 300 did not have any military or tactical value. It is located around 17 miles (27 kms) from the front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces in the Kharkiv region.

The victims of the explosion were attending a funeral for a Ukrainian soldier. If Russia fired a missile it would have been for a depraved reason, as the Western media and politicians like Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were quick to allege.

On the other hand, cynical as it might seem, for the Kiev regime there was a big incentive to stealthily carry out the missile strike against its territory for the propaganda value of blaming Russia. The timing comes at a crucial moment when the Kiev regime is “freaking out” over the possible long-term cutting off of military aid by the U.S. and its NATO partners.

Such a false-flag provocation carried out by the Kiev regime has precedent, albeit not reported by the Western media.

Last month, on September 6, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Kiev with an additional $1 billion in military and financial aid. Hours before Blinken arrived, the city of Konstantinovka (Kostiantynivka) was hit by a missile killing 17 people. The city is located in territory under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).

That atrocity was similarly condemned as “Russian terrorism” by Ukrainian President Zelensky while he was hosting Blinken in the capital.

Like the attack on Hroza last week, the one on Konstantinovka was immediately blamed on Russia and reported widely as such by Western media.

It turned out, however, that the missile that hit Konstantinovka was not fired by Russian forces. A follow-up report by the New York Times on September 18 found that the warhead had been fired from AFU positions. The NY Times described it as an “errant missile” that slammed into a busy marketplace by mistake. Nevertheless, despite the evidence, the Kiev regime continues to blame Russia for the crime.

There is good reason to conclude that the missile atrocity on September 6 was not “an error” but rather was deliberately staged by the Kiev regime as a false-flag provocation to highlight the visit by the senior American diplomat, Antony Blinken, and the need for his weapons gifting.

For those who don’t rely on the Western media for their information, it is well-documented that the NeoNazi Kiev regime has a foul habit of staging massacres for propaganda. The Bucha massacre last March was one such macabre event. This was when several civilians were found executed, their bodies strewn on streets, supposedly after Russian forces retreated from the city. All Western media blamed the apparent executions on Russia and continue to do so. But the freshness of the corpses found days after Russian troops pulled out of Bucha proves that the killings were done by others, probably Kiev agents.

Another probable false flag was the missile strike on a railway station in the city of Kramatorsk on April 8, 2022, that killed 63 people. Again, Russia was roundly blamed and condemned by Western media and politicians taking their cue from Ukrainian official sources. In that incident, the missile was later identified as a Tochka-U not in regular use by Russian forces, but more likely used by the AFU.

The Kramatorsk atrocity came on the day that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was visiting Kiev, condemning it as “despicable” and vowing tens of billions more Euros in support for the Kiev regime.

The Ukraine war has become an obscene racket for profiteering by the U.S. and European military industries, their lobbyists and most of the Western politicians they have close sponsorship links to, like Blinken and Von der Leyen. It is also a money-spinner for the corrupt Kiev regime whose President Zelensky and other cronies have made up to $400 million in skimming off aid, as reported by Seymour Hersh citing Pentagon sources. This rampant corruption was why the Kiev regime sacked most of its defence officials last month in a desperate attempt to appear as if it were cleaning up the graft.

Western public fatigue and disgust with the war racket are growing and imperilling the continuation of the colossal scam. False-flag atrocities are a logical, heinous way to keep the racket on track.

October 8, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | | 1 Comment

Some Call It Conspiracy Theory – Part 2

BY IAIN DAVIS | OCTOBER 6, 2023

In Part 1 we contrasted the popular misconceptions about so-called “conspiracy theorists” with the well-grounded demographic research done on the individuals who, collectively, have had that pejorative label slapped on them.

The research reveals that there is no such thing as an identifiable group of people who can legitimately be called “conspiracy theorists.”

The research also finds no credible evidence that people branded “conspiracy theorists” are prone to hold extremist views or have underlying psychological problems or pose a threat to democracy. These claims are all canards levelled against anyone who questions the Establishment and the power it has amassed.

We noted that political scientist Joseph Uscinski, who is perhaps the foremost scientist in the field of “conspiracy theory” research, cited the work of philosopher Neil Levy as a “simple and consistent standard” by which academics could “demarcate between conspiracy theory and [real or “concrete”] conspiracy.”

Professor Levy’s “simple and consistent standard” was first outlined in his article “Radically Socialized Knowledge and Conspiracy Theories.” In it, he pointed out that “conspiracies are common features of social and political life, common enough that refusing to believe in their existence would leave us unable to understand the contours of our world.” Levy therefore proposed that academics need a way to differentiate between the rational acceptance of acknowledged conspiracies and the supposedly irrational claims made by people who suspect conspiracies that haven’t been officially approved for discussion.

Levy suggested that “[r]esponsible believers ought to accept explanations offered by properly constituted epistemic authorities.” As we explained in Part 1, he defined the epistemic authorities as:

[. . .] the distributed network of knowledge claim gatherers and testers that includes engineers and politics professors, security experts and journalists.

In his listing of “journalists” as epistemic authorities, Levy was almost certainly referring to journalists who work in the corporate-owned legacy media (LM), not to journalists in the independent media, who are frequently labelled conspiracy theorists.

Independent media is broadly defined as:

[. . .] news media that is free from influence by the government or other external sources like corporations or influential people.

Similarly, in Levy’s view, only the “right” scientists and engineers are “epistemic authorities.” For example, he categorically stated:

Few responsible intellectuals reject the explanation of 9/11 that cites the conspiratorial actions of a group of terrorists under the direction of Osama Bin Laden[.] [. . .] [M]ost of us have little doubt that it is true.

Dr. Leroy Hulsey, a now-retired professor and department head of structural engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, led a multi-year study in which he and his team of engineer PhDs examined the structural collapse of World Trade Centre 7 (WTC 7). The conclusions they arrived at in their peer-reviewed report thoroughly contradicted the official 9/11 narrative. It seems unlikely that Prof. Levy would consider Dr. Hulsey to be a responsible intellectual or one of the “epistemic authorities.”

In his article, Levy opined that allegedly irrational “conspiracy theorists” could be identified by virtue of the fact that they disagree with the properly constituted epistemic authorities. Therefore, he claimed, their arguments and any evidence they presented should be dismissed. He wrote:

[K]nowing that a proffered explanation conflicts with the official story (where, once again, the relevant authorities are epistemic) is enough for us rationally to reject the alternative.

But there is nothing “rational” about rejecting an explanation simply because it is offered by people with whom you disagree.

Presumably, like Levy, Uscinski would consider himself an “epistemic authority” in the field of conspiracy theory research. Thus, it is not surprising that, when he spoke of Levy’s “simple and consistent standard,” Uscinski concluded:

[P]roperly constituted epistemic authorities determine the existence of conspiracies. [. . .] If the proper authorities say something is a conspiracy, then it is true; if they say it is a conspiracy theory, then it is likely false.

That is to say, “official” narratives are considered true by default, and anything that calls them into question is, by default, a “conspiracy theory.” The term signifies to other intellectuals—to one’s fellow high-brow “epistemic authorities”—that evidence which potentially undermines official narratives is, by definition, false. This conclusion is, of course, a load of nonsensical, fallacious gibberish.

Unfortunately, the conspiracy theory label is so widely applied these days that it has stuck. The legacy media (LM), in particular, has successfully deployed it as a tool of propaganda. Simply by spouting the words “conspiracy theory,” the LM have convinced the public to ignore any and all evidence that questions power.

Here’s one such example. Following serious allegations of rape and sexual misconduct it brought against the comedian, author and political commentator Russell Brand, the LM immediately exploited the situation by criticising Brand’s opinions and everyone who shared them.

Rachel Schraer

The BBC published Rachel Schraer’s article Russell Brand: How the comedian built his YouTube audience on half-truths just four days after the allegations were first reported by, among others, the BBC.

The opening paragraph to the article reads:

The first time Russell Brand really dipped his toe into the water of conspiracy theories, in early 2021, the effect was swift [. . .]. It won him a new income stream and a fresh army of fans.

We are told that Brand discusses “conspiracy theories.” This is a coded social signal from Schraer and the BBC to their readers and audience that everything Brand says should be discounted without examination—including any evidence he may cite. This should be done for no other reason than Schraer and the BBC have labelled Brand a conspiracy theorist.

In addition, the BBC casts the people who share Brand’s views as conspiracy theorists who should be equally ignored.

Furthermore, the suggestion is made that Brand is peddling “conspiracy theories” as some sort of grift. According to Schraer, the idea that independent media, such as Brand’s “Stay Free” channels, can be directly funded by its audience without compulsion is “evidence” of his dubious motives. (Apparently the BBC is vehemently opposed to the free market of ideas.)

Schraer explained what got the Brand ball rolling:

The door to this new fan base might have creaked open when Brand first discussed “the Great Reset” — a vague set of proposals from an influential think tank to rebuild the global economy after Covid.

The lame evidence Schraer cited to support her contention that the Great Reset is just some “vague set of proposals” was another BBC article. Five journalists contributed to this piece, which was published in 2021 as part of the BBC’s “Reality Check” series.

Collectively, the five BBC Reality Check “journalists” exposed their own deceit in the second and third paragraphs:

Believers spin dark tales about an authoritarian socialist world government run by powerful capitalists and politicians — a secret cabal that is broadcasting its plan around the world.

Despite all the contradictions in the last sentence, thousands online have latched on to this latest reimagining of an old conspiracy theory [. . .].

The problem is that no one accused by the Reality Check team of being a “Great Reset” conspiracy theorist has ever alleged that the Great Reset plan was a “secret” or that the planners are a “secret” organization. The fact that the well-known World Economic Forum (WEF) has broadcast its plans around the world obviously excludes the possibility that the plans were “secret” or even that the planners were acting secretively.

The contradiction between the two aforementioned sentences was a fabrication of the BBC Reality Check journalists’ own making. It was seemingly inserted to support their subsequent allegation that those who criticised the WEF’s Great Reset were alluding to a “secret cabal.” In reality, the critics were openly pointing their fingers directly at the WEF and its partners. No suggestions of a “secret cabal” or “secret plans” were ever made.

The BBC’s evident intention was to impugn critics of the Great Reset by falsely claiming that their views were illogical, speculative assumptions and were therefore “conspiracy theories.” The BBC propagandists created this myth themselves in order to deliberately mislead their readers. This is the very definition of disinformation.

The Reality Check team then reported that the Great Reset initiative was launched by King—then Prince—Charles as a plan to remodel the global economy. They talked about the WEF’s undemocratic “power to lobby [. . .] for ideas which could potentially transform the global economy.” They added that the WEF and its Davos delegates have “huge influence on world events.” They even raised the point that there are legitimate concerns about the potential impact of digital technology—vigorously pushed in the Great Reset—”on civil liberties and jobs.”

In short, the BBC Reality Check team gave a reasonable account of the arguments put forward by those whom they then dismissed out of hand by labelling them “conspiracy theorists.” The BBC “journalists” performed this trick by making up a reported opinion about “secret cabal[s]” and then falsely ascribing it to Great Reset critics.

In order to deter their readers from any further examination of the Great Reset, the BBC’s alleged journalists claimed that the Great Reset itself was “light on specific detail.” This, again, was pure disinformation.

The same journalists had to admit the existence of a published book called The Great Reset. In it, co-authors Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret wrote:

[O]ur objective was to write a relatively concise and simple book to help the reader understand what’s coming in a multitude of domains. [. . .] The reference information appears at the end of the book and direct attributions have been minimized [in the text].

The references include links to WEF documents such as “COVID-19 Risks Outlook A Preliminary Mapping and Its Implications.” This is just one document that forms part of the WEF’s extensive alleged risk-mapping program. The mapping program, in turn, informs the WEF’s highly detailed Strategic Intelligence, which the WEF claims will enable it to “make sense of the complex forces driving transformational change across economies, industries, and global issues.”

There really isn’t any facet of economy, industry, or indeed any global issues or aspects of our lives for which the WEF doesn’t already have a detailed, self-serving, transformational plan. The BBC’s claim that the Great Reset lacks “specific detail” is absurd. The plan couldn’t be more detailed or specific.

Rachel Schraer’s subsequent claim—that the Great Reset represents a “vague set of proposals”—is complete nonsense based upon the BBC’s own propaganda. It is self-evident that both Schraer’s and Reality Check’s articles served as a defence of the WEF’s Great Reset.

We have still other good reasons to question Schraer’s judgment.

Dr Simon Goddek, a scientist who turned to journalism and has questioned the safety and efficacy of the COVID jabs—thereby excluding himself from Uscinski and Levy’s “epistemic authorities”—shared a black-humoured joke as a social media meme. It showed the ageing physical decline of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden. Goddek quipped, “[w]as it her shots, mRNA or Meth?”

This joke was subsequently picked up by BBC Verify propagandist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who re-shared it with the comment: “4 million views for this nonsense from a blue tick conspiracy theorist.” It was indeed “nonsense”—because it was a joke.

Yet when Schraer re-posted Sardrizadeh’s comment, she displayed a woeful lack of comprehension and no sense of humour. She added her own inane interpretation with this absurd headline:

Breaking: Conspiracy theory-peddlers blame the Passage of Time on Vaccines.

This may seem like a trivial matter. But it’s not. Like Marianna Spring, Rachel Schraer is another BBC specialist disinformation reporter. That Schraer apparently can’t tell the difference between a joke and “disinformation” certainly brings her alleged “specialism” into question.

To fully appreciate how the “conspiracy theory” label is deployed by the legacy media (LM), we can look at the recent video by journalist and broadcaster Andrew Neil, who is a former editor of the Sunday Times, an ex-BBC presenter, and the current chairman of the Spectator. When he left the BBC, Neil, was reported to have been “at the heart of the BBC’s political coverage for the best part of three decades.”

In a discussion with Sam Leith, the Spectator’s literary editor, about the Russell Brand allegations, Neil lamented that social media had enabled too many people—most of whom he considered to be stupid—to express their opinions. Based on this comment, we can contend that, if Neil is familiar with the work of Uscinski and Levy, he would probably consider himself a journalist member of the so-called “epistemic authorities.”

Neil spoke about the four-year investigation conducted by the legacy media that eventually produced the Brand allegations. He described it in glowing terms and noted that the independent media—which he called “the alternative media”—had neither the “resources nor the expertise to do” such an exhaustive investigation.

The Spectator YouTube channel that Neil heads has 304K subscribers. By comparison, Russell Brand has 6.6M YouTube subscribers. Consequently, his channel had considerably more resources than does the Spectator. However, following the alleged LM investigation of Brand, YouTube demonetised his account, so now Brand’s channel resources are flagging by comparison.

Unlike the independent media, which is almost entirely funded by reader and audience donations, the legacy media (LM) is funded by either corporate advertising or, in the case of the BBC, coercive license fees. UK print news media has been declining for years as people increasingly consume news online. In addition, state broadcasters, such as the BBC and Channel Four, are shedding UK viewers in their millions.

Nonetheless, as Neil observed, LM budgets are enormous compared to the shoestring income cobbled together by the independent media. That stark contrast hasn’t stopped the Establishment, which relies on the LM for its propaganda and owns most of it, from panicking.

Their panic explains the commissioning of the Cairncross Review—intended to provide some sort of rationale for propping up the LM.

Ironically, the Cairncross Review concluded that the LM needed “new sources of funding, removed from direct government control.” Of course, genuinely independent news media have already achieved new sources of funding by going directly to their audiences, some of whom value the independent viewpoint enough to support it financially.

Dame Cairncross (DBE, FRSE, FAcSS) apparently considered the independent media funding model to be rubbish. She ruled it out because, as she put it, “the stories people want to read may not always be the ones that they ought to read.” Instead, “the creation of a new Institute for Public Interest News” was needed, she determined. To ensure this new overseeing body would be “independent,” Dame Cairncross recommended that it “build strong partnerships with the BBC” and be funded by the UK government.

Her suggestion meant that, just like the independent media, the LM of the future would be funded by the public. The difference being that this would not be voluntary but achieved through enforced taxation. Through the new body she envisioned, instead of the public choosing which media outlets they want to support the “epistemic authorities” and the government would decide for them.

What Frances Cairncross ultimately recommended was state regulation of the internet as a means of protecting the LM from public opinion. These regulations would tell the people which media outlets they should “trust” and, hopefully, prevent them from supporting the “wrong” media.

Dame Cairncross’ review dovetailed perfectly with the progress of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) through parliament. In her Review, she wrote:

The government will want to consider these recommendations in the context of its parallel work on online harms, disinformation and digital competition, to determine whether the recommendations set out here should be pursued separately or as part of broader packages of measures. In particular, it is for government to determine how best to design and execute policy relating to the activities of the online platforms, including any regulatory oversight. This Review is neutral [. . . .]

Neutral?

The OSA has passed all UK parliamentary reading stages and should receive Royal Assent any day now. It has established Ofcom as the internet regulator. The purpose of the Act is supposedly to improve public safety online—especially child safety. But it is patently obvious that the real objective of the OSA is to stop people from sharing information on social media that the government wishes to prevent from being shared—the article you are reading, for example.

The OSA will limit the online reach of the independent media. Accomplishing this aim is of vital importance to the Establishment—all the more so because public interest in the LM’s online news reporting is also plummeting.

In addition, the OSA provides significant protection for each of the regulated media organisations that the state controls and categorises as a “recognised news publisher.” This means every legacy outlet plus favoured “independent” media outlets such as Bellingcat, which is also funded by the Establishment.

So, given its protective care and vast resources, what alleged “expertise” did the LM bring to its investigation of Russell Brand, do you suppose? For a full account of that claimed journalism, you can read this article. But perhaps I should warn you in advance that, while the allegations against Brand are very serious and should be investigated by the police, the LM “team” disappointingly didn’t present a shred of real evidence to support those reported allegations.

Worse, the LM evidently fabricated purported evidence to mislead its readers and viewing audience, thereby undermining the accounts of the potential victims.

Yet, according to our Andrew Neil over at the Spectator, for the legacy media to have expended its considerable resources over a period of four years to produce this voluminous research (which we can call hamfisted detritus) requires great “expertise.”

In the Spectator interview, Leith asked Neil for his opinion about the possibility that the LM had launched a coordinated attack on Brand. Here is how Neil replied:

There’s no virtue to it at all [,] and the people who are pushing this line, that there’s a kind of conspiracy to do him down, are the very people who believe in all sorts of conspiracies as well. That vaccinations put little microchips into our bodies, that the Bush administration was really behind 9/11, and all the other nonsense. Of course, naturally we live in a world run by lizard people. We all know who they are [the lizard people], the mainstream media knows who they are, we’re just too frightened to point out the lizards among us. They’re conspiracists on everything now.

It is possible, though hard to substantiate, that a tiny minority of people labelled as conspiracy theorists believe there are microchips in the COVID shots. While the advent of motes makes this claim at least feasible, the vast majority of people who questioned the jabs—and who were also labelled as conspiracy theorists by the “epistemic authorities”—were more concerned about the experimental status, the potential unknown risks and the questionable efficacy of the jabs, not to mention the absence of any completed trials.

Neil’s tiresome “lizards” refrain was based solely on the opinion of one prominent so-called “conspiracy theorist,” David Icke, whose extremely speculative hypothesis of the “Sumerian Anunnaki” was based upon his interpretation of a few Gnostic texts—the Nag Hammadi, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.—and the work of scholars such as Zecharia Sitchin.

No one who seriously questioned the COVID jabs, including tens of thousands of UK doctors and nurses, did so because they thought the royals were lizards. Nor, for that matter, did the structural engineers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks question the official account of 9/11 because they imagined that former US President Bush is a shape-shifting, pan-dimensional reptile.

Let us step back and ask: If Andrew Neil is, as he claims, the intellectual superior of anyone who suggests there may have been a coordinated LM attack on Brand, then why does he overlook the clear-as-day fact that the allegations against Brand were reported simultaneously by almost the entire legacy media on both sides of the Atlantic? Doesn’t such an absolute fact, such irrefutable evidence, point to at least the possibility of planned coordination?

And because that is the case, we are left with only one conclusion: Neil deliberately used a tried-and-true propaganda technique called the straw man argument. That is, he attributed preposterous beliefs to people he disagrees with in order to falsely “debunk,” with contrived ease, arguments they had never made. This technique is also called logical fallacy.

He then used a related technique termed “composition fallacy” to manipulatively claim that the opinion of one person whom he labels a conspiracy theorist (he is referring to Icke without naming him) represents the views of everyone he labels a conspiracy theorist. This is an extremely common LM tactic.

Did Neil say anything about the common suspicion of a possible coordinated attack on Brand? Yes, he did:

[Conspiracism] is a defence that is quite hard to deal with, because it is so ludicrous. It is a defence that doesn’t need facts. It is a culture in which Russell Brand lived and profited, or at least did until YouTube pulled the plug on his revenues. So that’s what they deal in, they don’t deal in the gathering of evidence. [. . .] All these conspiracy theorists can have their absurd opinions about what’s really going on here with Russell Brand, but to establish what’s going on, to produce the evidence, takes investigative journalism.

It is worth reiterating yet again that the investigation into the Brand allegations provided nothing but allegations. This does not mean that the allegations aren’t true. But the LM journalists have not provided anything approaching the “evidence” that Neil claims exists.

Notice that Neil used the word “ludicrous” to signal to his audience that the people he calls “conspiracy theorists” hold ludicrous beliefs. But think about it: His claim was based on his own ludicrous assertions and logical fallacies—not on any actual evidence.

So, if we are to take Neil at his word and “establish what’s going on,” then we need to look at the “evidence” in the hope of establishing some “facts.”

OK, let’s do that. It is a fact that, following publications of the allegations, the LM did not immediately set about finding further evidence to support the possible victims’ claims. Instead, the LM turned its attention to attacking the “conspiratorial” views of Brand and his followers.

Example #1. As soon as the allegations against Brand were published, the BBC wrote that he had “developed a cult following” and had “dabbled in conspiracy theories.” To those charges the BBC added the scintillating “fact” that Brand had built a following during the alleged COVID-19 pandemic because he “discussed conspiracy theories surrounding the disease.”

Example #2. Two days later, using the same alleged “cult” theme, the Metro published an article titled “From Covid denial to mainstream media hatred – Inside Russell Brand’s conspiracy-fuelled cult online following.”

Example #3. A couple of days after that, on the other side of the planet, Australia’s ABC News claimed that Brand’s followers respond to his “rants” simply because he is “controversial” and that his audience is comprised of “people chasing conspiracy theories.”

Example #4. Following the allegations against Brand, the UK government decided that it should express its opinion on a potential criminal investigation. No less than the Prime Minister’s office issued an official statement declaring that “these are very serious and concerning allegations.”

The examples are endless. We don’t have space to cite them all. How odd, then, for Andrew Neil to have claimed in his interview that no one “could give a monkey’s _ _ _ _” about Russell Brand. The “evidence” thoroughly contradicts Andrew Neil. It appears that the entire LM, from all four corners of the globe and the UK government, are very interested in the Russell Brand allegations.

The UK government’s publicised opinion was followed up by emailed letters from Dame Caroline Dinenage DBE MP to numerous social media and online news sites, including the Chinese-owned TikTok and the video hosting service Rumble, requesting that Brand be demonetised on those online platforms.

Caroline Dinenage is Baroness Lancaster of Kimbolton, a leading member of the Establishment and a member of the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Support Select Committee. It is no surprise that this very committee was instrumental in creating the Online Safety Act. Moreover, when the baroness was the Minister of State for Digital and Sport from February 2020 to September 2021, she had ministerial responsibility for guiding the passage of the Online Safety Bill toward becoming the Online Safety Act.

The common law concept of “innocent until proven guilty,” which Neil conceded was an important principle of UK liberal democracy, seems to mean practically nothing to Dinenage.

The notion is bandied about in some quarters of the LM that Dinenage was acting independently. That may be true. But why, then, did she use the official House of Commons letterhead for her correspondence?

As yet, there has been no official statement from the Culture, Media and Support Select Committee on the allegations against Brand. Reportedly, it has merely acknowledged that only “some” of the letters sent out under its name were approved. Considering that all the letters under its letterhead were shameful examples of rank authoritarianism, the fact that any of them were apparently approved indicates the dictatorial tendencies of the Select Committee as a whole.

What actual facts have been established?

First, it is a fact that the LM has exploited the allegations and has deployed the composition fallacy to discredit both Brand’s and his social media followers’ opinions.

Second, it is a fact that the allegations about Brand emerged at the same time that the Online Safety Bill passed its final reading stage. The Brand allegations grabbed all the headlines, leaving virtually no room for prominent coverage of the imminent UK censorship law by the LM. Thoroughly distracting the UK public.

Third, it is a fact that the purpose of the Online Safety Act is to shore up the dwindling reach of the LM and censor its independent media competition.

Fourth, it is a fact that Brand and his followers are considered part of the independent media, which the LM accuses of being conspiracy theorists.

Fifth, it is a fact that formative figures in the UK government have used the allegations published by the LM to attempt to limit the reach of someone who has millions of followers and whom they accuse of being a conspiracy theorist.

Sixth, it is a fact that limiting the reach of popular conspiracy theorists is exactly what the Online Safety Act is designed to achieve.

There is solid evidence supporting each of these facts. So, what did Andrew Neil, a presumed member of the “epistemic authorities,” make of the facts and supporting evidence that he insists he and the entire legacy media he champions hold so dear? In his Spectator interview, Neil had this to say:

I think because Russell Brand’s position, in terms of a variety of conspiracies, is very similar to their conspiracies, they regard him as he’s one of us. So, regardless of what he’s accused of, we need to rally behind him. We need to get behind him, they’re trying to pick us off. I mean, don’t forget, they’re conspiracy theorists so therefore they are paranoid. They’re not just paranoid, they do know most sensible people are against them. And I think it’s a kind of rallying defence to look after one of their own.

The Spectator interview was posted on the September 23rd, after the Dinenage letters and the LM reports we’ve just discussed were published. In other words, Neil had mounds of material at his fingertips, but he chose to discard all the evidence and ignore the numerous facts pointing to a possible political motive for the global legacy media’s and UK government’s pursuit of Brand. Instead, he simply cast all the evidence and facts aside and dove into his “conspiracy theory” accusations.

This is a classic case of how the “conspiracy theory” label is applied by people, such as Neil, who do not wish to acknowledge contradictory evidence or facts. The “conspiracy theory” charge enables Neil and his legacy media cohorts to create what they pretend are unquestionable narratives, which they expect their readership and viewership to “trust” on the flimsy basis of their laughable, self-aggrandising claim to be “epistemic authorities.” It should be noted that this is precisely what “the Science™” of conspiracism decrees.

When Sam Leith, Neil’s interviewer, pointed out that so-called conspiracy theorists cannot be categorised by any single political ideology, Neil didn’t pause to consider the implications of his underling’s accurate statement.

Rather, he embarked on an anecdotal reminiscence as if trying to justify his bizarre conspiracy theory view. Having dismissed all evidence to the contrary, he falsely asserted that conspiracy theory lies only on the extremes of politics and that the far left and the far right (conspiracy theorists) all believe essentially the same thing.

He opined that both alleged extremist wings, and therefore all of the conspiracy theorists he imagines, hate liberal democracy. His conclusion:

People like Russell Brand are no friends of liberal democracy and neither are his supporters.

As we discussed in Part 1, this is mindless proselytising. Entrenched Establishment elitists seriously expect us to accept that the people who most fiercely protect and seek to exercise our democratic right to question power are all extremist conspiracy theorists.

Neil apparently believes that liberal democracy is embodied by the public’s trust in the Establishment’s “epistemic authorities.” Consequently, in his evident view, anyone who challenges the “authorities” and their pronouncements and edicts is undermining liberal democracy. But what he is describing is actually the polity of a totalitarian fascist state—a complete inversion of liberal democracy and the principles it is supposedly based upon.

It is evident that, from Neil’s perspective, only stupid people—conspiracy theorists—question epistemic truth, as presumably defined by his narrow, authoritarian class. He views all such stupid people as unintelligent extremists who seek to destroy the social order he disingenuously calls liberal democracy.

Anyone who uses the “conspiracy theory” label does so, not because they value the evidence, the facts or the dialectic, but because they will not countenance any challenge to their worldview or any dissent from their claimed authority.

The “conspiracy theory” charge is an authoritarian propaganda construct, intentionally created to censor legitimate, fact-based opinion.

It is time we stand up to the “epistemic authorities” and reject their elitist, authoritarian pretence of intellectual superiority.

It is time to insist that all evidence is discussed, that all the facts are established and reported to the public.

It is time to reject the state propagandist’s “conspiracy theory” canard.

October 6, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

“Not About Nato” | “Never About NATO” | “Nothing to Do With NATO” | UKRAINE WAR

Matt Orfalea | October 2, 2023

We were told the Ukraine War is “Not About NATO,” was “Never About NATO”, and has “Nothing to do with NATO”. Until now…

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October 6, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 5 Comments

NATO-trained Ukrainian conscripts surrendering en masse

By Drago Bosnic | October 3, 2023

One of the many peculiarities of the special military operation (SMO) has been the rather small number of POWs (prisoners of war) on both sides (relative to the number of overall casualties). Reasons for this are manifold and include the way the conflict is being waged (the vast majority of casualties are the result of long-range strikes, primarily artillery and drones), widespread use of combat drugs, as well as the rabidly Russophobic propaganda that is being disseminated among the Kiev regime forces. This often results in instances of summary executions of Russian POWs by the Neo-Nazi junta troops or their unwillingness to surrender to the Russian military, as they are being fed propaganda that the Russians will treat them the same, even though evidence suggests otherwise.

However, it seems such trends are changing rapidly, particularly as the number of ideologically charged soldiers among the Kiev regime forces is going down due to the number of KIA/WIA/MIA (killed/wounded/missing in action). They have been increasingly replaced by forcibly conscripted regular Ukrainians who simply don’t see the conflict as their own. The fact that the commanding officers (COs) are effectively treating the soldiers as literal cannon fodder is also contributing to this, further resulting in low morale and even widespread insubordination. There were instances of Ukrainian soldiers even shooting their COs in order to avoid being sent into the meat grinder. Others are simply doing anything they can to leave the country and escape being sent to the frontlines.

In order to reduce the number of casualties on both sides, the Russian military has even set up special communication channels for Ukrainians willing to surrender. This has been giving results for several months already, particularly since the start of the much-touted counteroffensive of the Neo-Nazi junta troops. On October 2, the elite 1st Guards Tank Army of the Russian Battlegroup West captured two units composed of Ukrainian conscripts in the vicinity of Artyomovsk (previously known as Bakhmut) in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The units in question are the 77th Airmobile Brigade and the 56th Separate Motorized Brigade. Surprisingly, reports about the mass surrender of Ukrainian conscripts are also becoming more common in Western media, too.

Retired United States Army Colonel and former senior adviser at the Pentagon Douglas MacGregor has repeatedly reiterated that the number of surrendering Ukrainian conscripts keeps growing, particularly as the embattled Kiev regime is having trouble hiding the catastrophic losses in both manpower and equipment. According to both American and Ukrainian combat veterans, the NATO training they’ve been provided all these years has been proven detrimental to their fighting capabilities, resulting in higher casualties and lesser combat effectiveness. In fact, many Ukrainian soldiers have stated they’d be dead if they followed the much-touted NATO standards. Instead, they’re still largely relying on Soviet-era training, equipment and weapons, as these have been proven as much more effective.

Another reason for the high casualty ratio among the Neo-Nazi junta troops is the very limited training that Ukrainian conscripts have been given before being sent to the frontlines. The primary reason for this is the urgency of replacing previous losses, resulting in a vicious cycle that even the mainstream propaganda machine couldn’t ignore. Back in May, the Wall Street Journal reported that poor men from villages and small towns were sent to the frontlines after just two nights at a base. The report effectively admitted that the COs insisted that “conscripts learned on the battlefield to compensate for the almost total lack of training”. The overall result of this has been that conscript units now have up to 90% KIA/WIA/MIA, as reported by various local and global military sources.

Russian intelligence reports also indicate that Ukrainian conscript units are increasingly “trained” by the much-touted British Special Air Service (SAS), highly popularized in various shooter video games, particularly the Call of Duty series, a major NATO propaganda tool in recent years. The United Kingdom keeps insisting that their forces are supposedly not present in Ukraine, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak even denying the claims of his own cabinet’s Defense Secretary Grant Shapps that British advisors will officially be sent to train the Neo-Nazi junta troops. It’s important to note that high-ranking Russian military intelligence officials (both retired and active) have pointed out the high frequency of the usage of English among military personnel embedded within the Kiev regime forces.

Namely, this is particularly true when it comes to the areas where the abortive counteroffensive is (still) being conducted. Apart from American special forces, this reportedly also includes SAS operatives. And while the mainstream propaganda machine keeps ridiculing Moscow’s claims about the presence of NATO personnel in Ukraine (either as mercenaries or under the direct command of the belligerent alliance) and decrying them as supposed “conspiracy theories” and “Russian disinformation”, battlefield information suggests otherwise. This is also further reinforced by NATO’s standard counterintelligence practice of denying that certain weapons will be delivered and then stating they “might be” delivered only to then announce they will be sent to the Neo-Nazi junta when the process has already been completed.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

October 3, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | 1 Comment

Kremlin Denies Reports About Russia’s Alleged Missile Tests in Arctic

Sputnik – 03.10.2023

MOSCOW – Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday denied media reports alleging that Russia was planning to test a missile codenamed Burevestnik in the Arctic.

“No, I cannot [confirm this]. I do not know where the New York Times journalists got that idea from … Apparently, [they] need to take a closer look at the satellite images,” Peskov said when asked to comment on the allegations.

Peskov said that Russia remains committed to the international nuclear test ban regime, when asked to comment on remarks that the country should carry out a thermonuclear weapon test over Siberia to demonstrate its determination.

“This has never occurred in the past, so I don’t think that kind of discussion is possible now, from an official point of view,” the spokesman added.

Earlier this week, US media reported that satellite imagery suggested Russia was preparing or might have already carried out tests of the experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile in the Arctic.

October 3, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

British Defense Sec ‘Mad’ to Suggest ‘Catastrophic’ Military Mission to Ukraine

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 02.10.2023

The UK’s newly-appointed defense secretary was “mad” to suggest sending troops and ships to Ukraine, a military expert has said.

British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps told a newspaper over the weekend that UK soldiers could be sent to Ukraine to train conscripts to Volodymyr Zelenksy’s depleted army.

The defense secretary even hinted that Royal Navy ships could be sent to the Black Sea to escort Ukrainian merchant vessels following the breakdown of the grain export deal with Russia — in spite of Turkiye’s ban on military vessels of any other nation transiting the Bosphorpus straits to enter the land-bound sea.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak quickly slapped down Shapps in a TV interview on Sunday on the eve of his Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester, saying: “There are no British soldiers that will be sent to fight in the current conflict.”

Since 2022, the British Army has put tens of thousands of Ukrainian recruits through three-week crash courses on training grounds in the UK before they are sent to the frontlines.

Similarly, documents leaked from the US Department of Defense in April this year estimated that there were up to 50 SAS special forces operating covertly in Ukraine, but did not indicate what their mission might be.

Former British MP Matthew Gordon-Banks, a senior research fellow at the Armed Forces Defense Academy in Oxfordshire and Conservative partymate of Shapps, said Shapps’ comments to the media were a “complete PR disaster.”

“Shapps gave an interview, possibly over-stating his intentions as a new defense secretary ahead of a speech to the Conservative Party conference. The Telegraph wrote it up as a certainty,” Gordon-Banks told Sputnik. “I suspect it horrified the prime minister, security and intelligence sources and the wider government.”

The military expert said Shapps’ suggestion of sending British troops into the warzone was simply unthinkable.

“His idea was absolutely mad. Only this week, Russian leaders like [State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav] Volodin, [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov and [Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry] Medvedev have made it clear about how the conflict in Ukraine will end and what they would see as unnecessary escalation by NATO,” Gordon-Banks said.

He noted that the article had quickly been taken down from the newspaper’s website — possibly at the insistence of the intelligence services.

“Such a deployment would be catastrophic in both diplomatic and military terms,” Gordon-Banks warned.

In an article in the same newspaper on Sunday, Shapps’ predecessor at the Ministry of Defense Ben Wallace claimed Ukraine was winning its summer offensive — already written off by some US generals and even British state broadcaster the BBC — despite only capturing a handful of villages after four months of fighting.

He also urged Kiev to begin conscripting teenage boys into its army in an attempt to stop Russia from bringing overwhelming force to bear.

“The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40,” Wallace wrote. “I understand President Zelensky’s desire to preserve the young for the future, but the fact is that Russia is mobilizing the whole country by stealth,” he claimed.

The defense analyst said Kiev was already press-ganging youths to make up for the terrible casualties its army has suffered over the past year and a half.

“Ukraine has already lost three armies,” Gordon-Banks stressed. “They are now pulling 16- to 18-year-olds off the streets. 500,000 Ukrainians have already died fighting a senseless, unnecessary war and it is time for the West to move more quickly to end this conflict.”

October 2, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Media and Architects of Online Censorship Law Heap Pressure on Rumble After it Defends Principle of Neutrality

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023

Media outlets and architects of the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Bill, are increasing the pressure on neutral video sharing platform Rumble after it refused to bow down to the UK Parliament’s pressure to demonetize comedian Russell Brand.

The pressure to demonetize Brand came after anonymous sexual assault allegations were made against him. Brand has denied the allegations and has not been arrested, charged, or convicted of any of the allegations made against him.

Several companies, including YouTube, took action against Brand after the allegations surfaced, despite Brand having no content violations on YouTube. But Rumble stood up to the pressure and rejected the UK Parliament’s request to cut off Brand’s monetization, with CEO Chris Pavlovski noting that the allegations against Brand have “nothing to do with content on Rumble’s platform.”

Now, several media outlets and people who helped craft the UK’s online censorship law, the upcoming Online Safety Bill, are targeting Rumble’s stance.

Lord Allan of Hallam, a former Facebook executive who advised on the Online Safety Bill, branded Rumble a “crazy American platform” and expressed disdain at Rumble’s philosophy of allowing free expression.

He and internet law expert Professor Lorna Woods, an architect of the Online Safety Bill, also complained about Rumble’s refusal to bow down to pressure from UK officials and framed it as “grandstand[ing] before the press.”

The Times also took aim at Rumble by noting that under the Online Safety Bill, Rumble will have to “prevent children from seeing pornography… material that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders… violent content… material harmful to health, such as vaccine misinformation” and “take down material that is illegal, such as videos that incite violence or race hate.”

However, Bryn Harris, the Chief Legal Council for The Free Speech Union, pointed out that The Times’ article doesn’t actually provide examples of any of the alleged illegal or harmful to kids content on Rumble.

Additionally, the Associated Press piled in on Rumble after it stood up to the demands of UK officials by claiming that Rumble is a “haven for disinformation and extremism.”

This mounting pressure comes days after the UK passed the Online Safety Bill — one of the most sweeping censorship laws to ever be introduced in the UK. The controversial censorship and surveillance bill is set to come into law next month.

The censorship provisions in the Online Safety Bill can be aimed at both citizens who post speech that’s deemed to cause “harm” and companies that fail to censor this so-called harmful content. The harms in the bill extend beyond physical or direct harm and into the realms of “psychological” harm and “potential” harm. Certain types of “false” communications are also prohibited under the bill.

As UK officials heap pressure on Rumble, reports have revealed that several UK politicians have ties to the pro-censorship Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the UK politician that pressured Rumble to demonetize Brand received a donation in kind from Google.

September 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 2 Comments

She’s Doing it Again: Clinton Claims Russia Seeks to Meddle in 2024 Election

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 25.09.2023

Operation Crossfire Hurricane — the FBI’s attempt to discredit Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 — was found by a Congressional inquiry to be based on falsehoods. But Democrats and their sympathetic media continue to repeat the claims of ‘Russian interference’.

Failed presidential runner Hillary Clinton has repeated her discredited claims of Russian interference in US elections.

Clinton dusted off the 2016 ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory she used to explain her defeat by Donald Trump in an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki — the former White House press secretary renowned for her inability to answer journalist’s questions.

Psaki claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “interfered in our elections in the past” — directly contradicting the findings of special counsel John Durham’s inquiry that the claim was “uncorroborated” — and asked Clinton if she feared it would happen in 2024.

“I don’t think, despite all of the deniers, there is any doubt that he interfered in our election, or that he has interfered in many ways in the internal affairs of other countries, funding political parties, funding political candidates, buying off government officials in different places,” Clinton claimed.

Her tone became increasingly paranoid as she went on.

“He hates democracy. He particularly hates the West and he especially hates us,” Clinton ranted. “And he has determined that he can do two things simultaneously. He can try to continue to damage and divide us internally, and he’s quite good at it.”

The former secretary of state and senator, the wife of disgraced ex-president Bill Clinton, even believed that Putin had a personal grudge against her.

“Part of the reason he worked so hard against me is because he didn’t think that he wanted me in the White House,” Clinton complained. “Part of the challenge is to continue to explain to the American public that the kind of leader Putin is.”

She then reeled off a series of unproven allegations against the Russian president, including that he was responsible for the deaths of opposition figures and journalists — and interfered in the 2016 US elections to ensure she lost to Trump.

“I fear that the Russians will prove themselves to be quite adept at interfering, and if he has a chance, he’ll do it again,” Clinton concluded.

Durham’s report, finally released in June 2023, found that former Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director James Comey’s operation Crossfire Hurricane probe — oddly named after a Rolling Stones lyric — was founded on “raw, un-analyzed and uncorroborated” intelligence and should never have been launched.

It said the FBI was guilty of misconduct and was in need of reform, but did not lay individual blame on any of the numerous officials involved — from Comey to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two agents entwined in an extra-marital affair at the federal agency.

September 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

US government stopped me from interviewing Putin – Tucker Carlson

RT | September 24, 2023

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has alleged in a recent interview that unnamed figures in Washington obstructed his attempts to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin.

“I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the US government stopped me,” Carlson claimed in an interview with Swiss publication Die Weltwoche published on Thursday. He also explained that he felt let down by the lack of support for his situation that he says he received from US news media.

He said: “I don’t think there was anybody who said ‘wait a second. I may not like this guy but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says’.” The 54-year-old added: “You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me.”

The often-controversial media personality didn’t elaborate on the circumstances under which he says there was government intrusion into his plans to interview Putin but it appeared to suggest that it was the current Biden administration which was behind the meddling. Carlson also didn’t mention when the interview with the Russian leader was supposed to take place.

“I’m an American citizen,” Carlson told Die Weltwoche. “I’m a much more loyal American than, say, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, who didn’t even grow up in this country; she grew up in Canada. And they’re telling me what it is to be a loyal American?”

Carlson –previously Fox News’ biggest star– parted ways with the broadcaster in April shortly after the news network settled for $787.5 million a lawsuit with voting-machine company Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News had regularly discussed claims on some of its shows that Dominion’s machines were involved in ‘rigging’ the 2020 US presidential election.

Carlson’s show Tucker Carlson Tonight, during which he frequently discussed issues like gender, race, sexuality and ‘woke’ ideology, was specifically referenced in the Dominion lawsuit.

Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has broadcast abridged versions of his news show on X (formerly Twitter) which regularly draw tens of millions of views.

Meanwhile, Russia TV news channel Rossiya 24 has aired a teaser trailer for a weekend show it says is to be hosted by Carlson. The promo was first broadcast earlier this month and again on September 22 along with the words “at the weekend.” It adds that the “high-profile American presenter is moving to another level. Here.”

Rossiya 24 didn’t state when the show will debut or if it will be original content or translated versions of Carlson’s X broadcasts.

September 24, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | 1 Comment

The Reality Behind the Long Covid causing Damage to Multiple Organs Study

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | September 23, 2023

However hard Big Pharma is pushing the new Covid jabs, investors know the truth.

Even though we are getting closer to winter, a perfect time to sell Covid jabs, Moderna’s share price is down 44%.

And Pfizer’s is down 36%.

Clearly investors in the know realise that people just aren’t taking the Covid shots anymore.

So the sales team has been brought in to try and drum up business. All over the MSM news today are reports of a new study which claims to show that Long Covid can cause long-term damage to multiple organs.

The study, published in The Lancet is titled “Multiorgan MRI findings after hospitalisation with COVID-19 in the UK (C-MORE): a prospective, multicentre, observational cohort study”.

Read any MSM coverage of this study and you will be led to believe that a third of Long Covid patients sustained damage to multiple organs five months after infection. Lung injuries were almost 14 times higher among Long Covid patients, whilst brain and kidney injuries were three and two times higher respectively.

 

‘Study lead Dr Betty Raman said people who had more than two organs affected were “four times more likely to report severe and very severe mental and physical impairment”’.

Scary stuff, sign me up for my booster now.

But is the study all that it is made out to be?

First of all the declarations of interests page is over 1,600 words long with reference after reference to links with Big Pharma.

Secondly, and most importantly, the study is massively flawed. It recruited 2,710 participants and whittled these down to 259 who were discharged from hospital with PCR-confirmed or clinically diagnosed COVID-19 between March 1 2020 and Nov 1 2021.

This group was then compared with 52 non-Covid-19 controls from the community. The average age of the study group was 57 and the control group was 49. As the study says, “compared with non-COVID-19 controls, patients were older, living with more obesity and had more comorbidities”. 50% of the study group were obese compared with only 37% of the control group. 40% had smoked at some point in their lives compared with only 17% of the control group. I could continue with percentages of all the pre-existing comorbidities but I think you get the picture.

(For those who will ask the question, 40% of the control group were vaccinated at follow-up compared with 44% of the study group.)

So what do you think happens when you take an unhealthy, older group of people who have been in hospital with Covid and you compare them with a younger, healthier group of people from the community. You geniuses, you guessed it. You find that the unhealthier group are unhealthier.

Give the Big Pharma sales team a genius medal for that one and a sucker medal to the MSM who did the sales pitch for them.

But don’t take it from me, here is what Professor Francois Balloux, Director of the UCL Genetics Institute in London, has to say about the study:

Thus, my point is not that the conclusions of the study are necessarily false but that the control group is inadequate. I worry the study may have been published as is because it fits a particular narrative, and not necessarily because it is sound and robust.

By choosing a control group made of elderly, frail, terminally ill patients, it might be possible to demonstrate that Covid actually repairs organ damage, which would obviously be an absurd conclusion, and which should rightly be called out. Yet, here we are …

September 23, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

The climate scaremongers: Shoddy dams to blame for Libyan floods, not global warming

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 22, 2023

I sometimes think there is a competition among the MSM to see who can publish the most absurd climate change stories.

Last week Sky News’s Tom Clarke, who calls himself ‘Science and Technology Editor’, claimed that climate change had ‘set the stage’ for the Libyan floods, and that the disaster highlighted the ‘injustice of climate change’ which affects poorer countries most.

The floods and resulting deaths had nothing at all to do with climate change, and were instead caused by the collapse of two dams built by a Yugoslav company in the 1970s and which had had no maintenance for the last 20 years. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Clarke failed to provide any evidence that the heavy rainfall which triggered the dam failures was in any way unprecedented or made worse by climate change. But facts don’t seem to matter any more to Sky News.

A quick check of the history books would have told Clarke that much worse floods have occurred in North Africa in the past. The Great Tunisian Flood in 1969, for instance, was on a completely different level. The death toll was 540, and nine out of 13 provinces were affected, as well as parts of neighbouring Algeria. Fifteen inches of rain, five times the annual amount, fell on the Tunisian city of Gabès in just 24 hours and intermittent heavy rain continued for 38 days.

Four years later, two more major floods hit Tunisia, killing more than 100. The first, in March, led to a major rescue effort by the US Sixth Fleet. The New York Times reported:

‘The Government has not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage to crops, livestock and property, but it is estimated that there have been 86 killed, plus 33 missing, 53,000 people left without shelter and 6,000 houses destroyed or damaged. About 10,000 cattle have been lost.’

British Pathé films of the 1969 and 1973 floods can be viewed here and here. 

It is utterly shameful for Tom Clarke to ignore the fact that catastrophic floods have always occurred in North Africa, abandon any pretence at objective analysis, and instead promote his own warped political agenda.

The harsh reality is that poor countries are always impacted more by natural disasters. That is why we should allow them to develop their economies in order to make them more resilient. Blocking their access to cheap fossil fuel energy will make matters worse, not better.

The Telegraph’s Gates-funded nonsense

The Telegraph went one better publishing an even more ridiculous article last week with the headline ‘The world has experienced its hottest ever three-month period – what comes next?’ 

Neither of the co-authors appears to have any expertise in climate matters. Harriet Barber is described by the Telegraph as specialising in human rights, violence against women and the refugee crisis, while Verity Bowman’s LinkedIn page says she is a ‘Foreign news reporter for the Telegraph’.

The article droned on about droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods, as if they never used to happen in the past. The commenters, who evidently understand these matters better than the young writers, almost to a man pointed out the absurdities in the article and left no doubt what they thought of it!

It turns out that the article was ‘partly’ funded by Bill Gates’s Global Health Security initiative, as the link at the bottom of the page confirms. 

According to that link:

The area of global health security is broad and includes topics such as:

•    Covid 19 and other pandemic threats

•    the spread of other communicable diseases like Ebola and Zika as well as a wide range of rare diseases

•    the dramatic impact of ‘non-communicable diseases’ including obesity, heart disease and diabetes

•    the rise antibiotic resistance and new superbugs

•    the growing threat of bio-terrorism

•    social and political instability sown by war and natural disasters including climate change

In short, the Telegraph has prostituted itself for Bill Gates’s millions.

Although it insists that ‘this support comes without strings and The Telegraph retains full editorial control over all the content published’, there is no way the paper would have published such ill-researched, manifestly fake news in the past when it could still rightly lay claim to being a serious newspaper.

What extreme weather looked like 70 years ago

Why are the media so desperate to push the UN’s climate agenda?

Nearly all press and TV coverage obediently parrots the same tired lies emanating from the UN and the rest of the manmade climate change establishment. The above Telegraph piece, for instance, quoted UN secretary general António Guterres’s latest alarmist pronouncement: ‘Climate breakdown has begun’.

There is never any attempt at balance, nor any challenge to such absurd statements. And this is in spite of the fact that both history and the actual data show that extreme weather was every bit as bad in the past.

For example, let’s go back 70 years. January 31, 1953, is a night that will long be remembered in the folklore of Britain and the Low Countries. It was the occasion of the Great North Sea Flood, when a wall of water surged from the North Sea, over-topping sea defences and leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. 

The storm sank the Stranraer to Larne ferry Princess Victoria before heading around the north of Scotland and into the North Sea. It claimed more than 500 lives on the east coast of Britain, plus maybe 2,000 in the Low Countries. It was the worst natural disaster to hit Britain in living memory.

A few months later, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation took place in the middle of what was called the worst June weather of the century. Three weeks later, more stormy weather brought severe flooding in Britain.

Further afield, major flooding occurred at various times of the year in several parts of the US, including Oregon, California, Louisiana, Iowa and Montana. Japan was badly hit by two devastating floods, each killing more than 700 people.

While some parts of the US were inundated in 1953, others were in the middle of exceptional droughts. From 1950 to 1957, for instance, Texas experienced the most severe drought in recorded history. Most of the Midwest and Great Plains were similarly affected.

1953 was a devastating year for typhoons in the Western Pacific, with seven ‘super typhoons’ claiming at least 430 lives. It was also one of the deadliest years for tornadoes in the US, killing 519. There were five F5 tornadoes during 1953, the third highest total on record for these most powerful of all tornadoes. Meanwhile, wildfires in the US burned 9,976,000 acres, four times this year’s total so far. You can see more details here.

In those days weather disasters occurred with little or no media coverage – unlike today when we are bombarded with 24/7 footage. There was nothing special about 1953 either. You could go back to pretty much any year in the last 100 and find a similar tale of disaster, death and destruction. There is no evidence that our weather nowadays is any worse than it used to be.

Which brings us back to the question of why are the media trying so hard to cover this up?

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Iran’s top medical association blasts The Lancet for ‘spreading disinformation’

The Cradle | September 21, 2023

The president of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Iran, Dr. Alireza Marandi, on 18 September issued an open letter blasting renowned UK medical journal The Lancet for publishing “completely false information” about Iran’s healthcare system and the circumstances that led to the death of Mahsa Amini one year ago.

“We are very disappointed to see the republishing of completely false information about the Islamic Republic of Iran, especially regarding doctors and the health service delivery system, in a publication that is known as a scientific magazine,” Marandi writes in a letter addressed to The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief, Professor Richard Horton.

Marandi says the article, published on the one-year anniversary of Amini’s death, “does not have any scientific documentation” and accuses the UK publication of getting involved in “material and political interests [by] writing such false reports.”

The article in question, penned by Horton, claims Amini “died in Kasra Hospital … after being arrested, tortured, and beaten” by the Gasht-e-Ershad, or Guidance Patrol, for the alleged improper wearing of the mandatory hijab.

“She was 22 years old and her murder, for that is what it was, triggered unprecedented nationwide protests,” Horton continues, alleging the mobilizations “continue in more muted forms to this day.”

Horton’s accusations are a word-for-word repetition of claims made by western governments, news agencies, and US-funded “human rights” groups since last year. These have, for the most part, ignored visual evidence that shows Amini calmly speaking with an officer before suddenly collapsing in the waiting room of a police station, as well as an autopsy report that concluded her death was caused by severe cerebral hypoxia aggravated by a pre-existing condition.

Nonetheless, eyewitnesses of her detention alleged she had been mistreated.

“As I wrote to you in the previous letter, if the accusations mentioned in that article were supposed to be based on science, they would at least been quoted from sources that are not so utterly hostile to our people and country,” Dr. Marandi writes in his letter to Horton, taking aim at several anti-government Iranian activists cited by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet.

“I wish you had for once exposed the enormous support of Western countries and the US for Saddam Hussein, who committed unique and historical crimes with chemical weapons against our people, including Iranian and Iraqi Kurds residing relatively close to where Mahsa Amini lived. All carried out amidst the deadly silence of western-dominated scientific and international bodies,” the letter continues.

The article by The Lancet last week came as part of a renewed anti-Iran campaign led by western media outlets and governments, which included new economic sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, some of which targeted news organizations.

Recent US efforts to spark unrest that could force regime change in Iran date back to the so-called “Green Revolution” in 2009.

September 21, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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