Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians and injured nineteen, including one who suffered a serious gunshot wound to the head, in the Old City of Nablus, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank on Sunday at dawn.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has confirmed that the soldiers killed Abboud Sobeh, 29, and Mohammad al-Azizi, 22, in the al-Yasmina neighborhood in Nablus’s Old City.
The PRCS added that the soldiers shot nineteen other Palestinians, including ten who were shot with live fire, among them one who was shot in the head and is in critical condition.
The incidents took place after undercover Israeli soldiers infiltrated Nablus before many armored military vehicles invaded it from several directions, resulting in exchanges of fire between the invading soldiers and Palestinian resistance fighters.
The soldiers surrounded a home where several Palestinian resistance fighters were located and exchanged fire with them for several hours before the army fired a few missiles at the property, killing the two young men, while the five others managed to escape unharmed.
The missiles caused excessive damage to the home and several surrounding homes, buildings, and mangled cars parked on the sides of the street.
The soldiers withdrew from Nablus a few hours after killing the two Palestinians and wounding twelve, leaving massive destruction to homes and buildings.
Nablus Abu Rudeina, the spokesperson of the Palestinian President, denounced the invasion, the killing of the two Palestinians, and the injuring of the twelve and said that Israel is only interested in escalation and more violence.
The US and its allies spent 78 days bombing the now-dissolved nation of Yugoslavia in 1999, contaminating the Balkans with at least 15 tons of depleted uranium munitions. In the United States, troops who have been exposed to DU are eligible for generous disability benefits. Nothing of the kind has been offered to the people of Yugoslavia.
Medical testing of a Serbian soldier and civilian who came under fire during the 1999 NATO bombings has found that the level of radioactive uranium in their bloodstreams is “hundreds of times” above the norm, Serbian attorney Srdan Aleksic has told Sputnik.
Aleksic, who has spent several years filing lawsuits to try to ensure compensation for the victims of the DU bombings, said the testing was carried out in Turin, Italy, and that his legal team is now awaiting an official translation of the results into Serbian.
“So I will not delve into the medical details. But the results are frightening, not only for southern Serbia, Kosovo and Metohija and the ground-based security zone between them, where our first plaintiff served for 200 days,” Aleksic said.
“The second analysis was taken from a woman in Belgrade… Her results are a little better. We will file a lawsuit on the basis of the results,” he added. Serbian media indicated that the woman was exposed to DU after finding herself near the bombed out Ministry of Defense building in the Yugoslav capital in 1999.
Turin-based forensic scientist Dr. Rita Celli, a DU analysis expert who assisted multiple Italian legal cases seeking compensation for Italian troops who fell ill or died following their exposure to the deadly substance, characterized the pair of Serbians’ test results as “dramatic.”
She indicated that the levels of uranium-238 found in their tissue was as much as 500 times above normal, and that such high levels of DU contamination have not been established in any other civilians or military personnel that she knows of.
Celli’s approach involves blood testing and biopsies, and a search for aluminum, barium, antimony, lead, molybdenum, and other metals.
“All of the detected metals contain traces of U-238, which comes from the shells used by NATO during the bombing of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, and especially Kosovo and Metohija. Its effects have almost certainly also affected surrounding countries, such as Albania and Macedonia,” Celli told Serbian outlet Vecherne Novosti in an article published Saturday.
Under normal conditions, Celli said, the maximum amount of aluminum in a liter of blood is 3.3 micrograms. But in Italian and Serbian troops suffering from DU contamination, it runs from 500, 2,000, or even 3,000 micrograms. Among civilians, the safe level of uranium is 0.0053 units per liter of blood, while among those who have been contaminated, it can reach up to 10 micrograms.
Aleksic is working with Italian lawyer Andel Fiore Tartaglia, who has spent decades fighting for compensation for DU exposure suffered by Italian troops and their families, including among those who served in Kosovo during NATO’s ground-based occupation of the breakaway Serbian territory. In 2021, the lawyers filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Belgrade to demand that NATO provide financial [compendsation] for Serbian victims of the DU bombings.
Hearings in the case are expected to begin in October, but NATO has already preemptively declared that the bloc has “full immunity” from prosecution under Serbian jurisdiction on the basis of agreements signed in 2005 and 2006.
Aleksic told Sputnik Serbia earlier this year that the immunity claims are rubbish, since such immunity can’t be applied retroactively – i.e. to the 78-days which NATO spent bombing the country between March and June of 1999.
Tartaglia similarly told Vecherne Novosti in its Saturday article that “there is no immunity for war crimes and the principle of retroactivity does not apply.”
In 2000, a Belgrade court found former US General Wesley Clark and NATO chief Javier Solana guilty of war crimes for the 1999 bombings. However, the ruling was overturned in 2001 following the color revolutionary overthrow of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his detention at The Hague, where he died in custody in 2006.
Serbia suffers from one of the highest cancer rates in Europe, with close to 60,000 oncology diagnoses made each year, and cancers among children as much as two-and-a-half times above the European average. In the decades since the 1999 bombings, local doctors and scientists have also recorded an alarming rise in infertility, autoimmune diseases, and mental disorders.
The NATO war machine has used DU munitions in many of its campaigns since the end of the Cold War, sowing up to 2,300 tons of DU across Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion, and using the weapons in Afghanistan and Syria on a smaller scale. Military drills and accidents involving US aircraft are also said to have contaminated parts of Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, and Remscheid, Germany.
As many as 20 nations, including Russia, France, Japan, China, South Korea, and South Africa are confirmed or suspected of having depleted uranium tank shells, armor piercing bullets, and air-dropped projectiles in their arsenals, but the United States and Britain are the only two countries confirmed to have used the substance in combat. DU’s potential for use as a weapon was first discovered in the 1970s, and it has been integrated into projectiles – particularly anti-tank rounds, due to its incredible density, comparatively low aerodynamic drag, and ability to penetrate deeper into targets than conventional shells.
The Korean War that began in 1950 is technically ongoing because only an armistice was signed in 1953, rather than a peace treaty. American warmongers argue the United States must spend $8 billion a year to keep 30,000 troops there at a dozen bases until the war ends. This is only because the United States refuses to even discuss an end to the war because it will lose control of South Korea’s military if American Generals leave. In addition, part of the justification for the Pentagon’s massive annual budget is to defend South Korea, and those who profit off the perpetual American presence spend millions of dollars each year to lobby American congressmen to keep their racket going. The South Korean military is five times stronger than the North Korean military, and there are no Russian or Chinese soldiers based in North Korea. South Korea has twice the population and forty times the GDP of decrepit North Korea and has fortified its mountainous border. American troops are not needed there but powerful interests protect the status quo. Withdrawing just half the American troops would save the United States over three billion dollars a year and may allow a formal peace treaty to be signed.
“Thirty-five House Republicans are ‘gravely concerned’ about formally ending the Korean War”; David Choi; Stars and Stripes; December 9, 2021; https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia…
In 2021, HART published a review of the evidence for asymptomatic transmission.
The concept of asymptomatic transmission formed the foundation for the belief that lockdown was necessary and might work and for mask wearing and amplified the atmosphere of fear with the idea that anyone could be a threat.
Key points from that article include the fact that:
Presymptomatic people account for only 7% of spread in an outbreak
People who are immune and healthy can test positive but, because of how testing has been calibrated, this is not evidence of either disease or infectiousness
The medical literature contained multiple meta analyses where evidence from the same handful of poorly designed studies had been recycled to create the illusion of a body of evidence
The only three instances of people becoming ill having allegedly been infected by someone who never developed symptoms were two cases of a “mild cough for one day” and one baby with a runny nose.
At the time it was possible to conclude that the global evidence of transmission from people who never had symptoms amounted to only three people with very mild symptoms, calling into question the idea that there should be any concern around the apparently healthy.
In the last year there have been two reports which have increased knowledge in this area. The first was a study of thoroughly tested marine recruits and the second was a carefully reported outbreak in Japan. Both studies failed to provide answers to critical questions – the key question being whether someone who tested positive after contact with a never symptomatic individual, ever developed symptoms themselves. This question has been repeatedly omitted from such studies of asymptomatic spread.
Marine study
Although this study got a lot of traction, it is ultimately the story of five young people with mild cold symptoms and the ubiquitous nature of viruses. Before the advent of molecular biology this would hardly be newsworthy! A total of 1,847 trainee marines were included in the study. The thrust of the study was in tracking different genomic sequences detected from swabbing people within platoons. The results were not clear at all about who had symptoms. In fact the failure to report on symptoms is a glaring weakness in the claim that they are diagnosing anything meaningful.
The marines were made to isolate for two weeks, before arriving at the training camp and then quarantined for a further two weeks (but in shared rooms) with constant mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing, daily temperature and symptom monitoring, banning of electronic devices, and repeated testing. They claim they diagnosed 46 asymptomatic positives. The PCR results were strong positives in the few marines with symptoms (a median Ct value of 22-23) but were weak in the asymptomatic (a median Ct value of 25-27 meaning there was 100 times less viral RNA present). A third of them had too little material present to carry out successful sequencing at all. For those that did, there was a pattern of clustering of genome sequences within platoons. Unsurprisingly, if there was virus in the air shared by the platoon then it would be detectable in the respiratory tracts of those people breathing that air.
The paper never reports on whether there was any instance of a person sharing a room with an asymptomatic positive person and becoming symptomatic. As a paper which set out to investigate the problem of asymptomatic positives, the failure to mention symptoms suggests either that spread with resulting symptoms did not happen or that the scientists involved were incompentent.
A paper demonstrating that asymptomatic people may be contaminated with enough virus that others in their platoon test positive, asymptomatically is of no clinical interest. If no-one developed symptoms due to exposure to someone who was asymptomatic then there was no meaningful asymptomatic spread. Every morning the marines had temperature checks and symptom checks and yet none of the symptomatic positive marines were detected this way. Nevertheless the claim is made that a total of five of these young people did develop symptoms during the week before a positive test result.
Japanese study
The Japanese study reported on an outbreak in Japan in January 2020. The outbreak began in Tokyo at a party attended by someone from Wuhan showed 36 people who tested positive over a period of 48 days. 25 of the supposedly infected did not spread it to anyone. Despite this being the entirety of covid in Japan at the time they failed to trace one link in the chain who was the source of a small outbreak in a remote part of Kanagawa, a coastal town south of Tokyo. The authors assume that there must have been a person from the Tokyo outbreak who was responsible for this infection as they seem unable to think beyond person to person spread as the only possible mechanism of spread.
The article makes a big point of the fact that a woman in her 80s died. The woman in question had pneumonia and had been ill from January before dying on 13th February. The diagnosis was made post mortem and the ministry of health tried to impress upon people that it was not clear that the virus had been the cause of her death.
Why is there still confusion on this issue?
The evidence that supports the belief in asymptomatic transmission appears to come from a combination of two factors:
Positive test results in the absence of symptoms (without evidence of transmission of disease)
The fact people become infected without a traceable source
The former is explainable through poor testing and a failure to acknowledge immunity. PCR testing has been set up to detect 3 or 4 virus particles per sample where 5,000 particles would be needed to indicate someone with infectious potential. Detecting virus in the air in someone’s respiratory tract is of no consequence if they have immunity and will never become an infection risk or develop symptoms themselves. Even where relatively large amounts of virus have been detected on testing, in the absence of evidence of transmission that results in a person with more than fleeting mild symptoms, this is also of no consequence.
The fact people become infected when there is no discernable source can be attributed to long distant aerosol transmission. Despite WHO officially acknowledging this mode of transmission there seems to be continuing total denial of the implications of that from most authorities. In Australia, the Delta wave began with a tourist from Sri Lanka who was quarantined after landing. During his stay in quarantine a total of 44 genetically similar cases were identified in the Melbourne community. Rather than acknowledge airborne spread, James Merlino, the acting premier of Victoria, said transmission had occurred due to “being in the same place, at the same time, for mere moments.”
Conclusion
Our ability to test and detect minute, irrelevant quantities of virus has created an utterly distorted view of reality. A test which when positive does not demonstrate pre-symptomatic infection, infectiousness or disease is of no use to anyone and should be replaced. The myth that apparently healthy people are a potential threat to others needs to be quashed for good so that people can stop treating each other primarily as potential vectors of disease.
I’ve been looking again at Covid’s origins and the start of the pandemic. Last time I wrote on it I argued that Italy brought in China-style lockdowns on March 8th and 10th 2020 mainly as a result of panic owing to the leap in the death rate, with it being clear from the hospital situation there were many more deaths to come. I still believe that that was the immediate trigger for imposing lockdowns at the time. However, I now recognise that that is far from the full story. What it leaves out is the backdrop of who was pushing for lockdowns throughout the preceding two months, and why.
Two key pieces of data have emerged in the last few months that help to bring the picture into clearer focus. The first is that with the arrival of Omicron the Chinese have continued fanatically to pursue lockdowns, crippling their economy as they do it. To my mind, this is convincing evidence that the Chinese are sincere about their belief in the radical new disease management strategy they inaugurated on January 23rd 2020 in Wuhan. I initially (in 2020) thought it may be an elaborate ruse to convince the world to do something monumentally and pointlessly self-destructive. But it appears they really do think lockdowns are highly effective and the right way to fight a disease like COVID-19. I’m aware some suggest it could just be a cunning strategy to strengthen the grip of the ruling party on the population, but all the evidence indicates to me that they actually are trying to fight the disease in this way.
If this is accepted then one of the key pieces of the puzzle snaps into place: the global Covid narrative has, both behind closed doors and in front of them, been driven in part by the Chinese Government’s commitment to its extreme suppression strategy and its desire for other countries to adopt it as well. It’s been suggested this derives from a sense of national pride and seeking vindication of their efforts and ideas, and is part of a wider aim of achieving global Chinese cultural supremacy, which sounds plausible to me.
The second key piece of data are emails sent by White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, which reveal that behind closed doors as late as February 26th 2020, Dr. Fauci was still, as he had been consistently up to that point, advising people not to panic. But as of February 27th his approach suddenly changed and, from that moment on, he began consistently pushing restrictions.
On February 26th he wrote to CBS News that Americans should not yield to fear:
You cannot avoid having infections since you cannot shut off the country from the rest of the world… Do not let the fear of the unknown… distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day… do not yield to unreasonable fear.
But by the next day he was writing to actress Morgan Fairchild that the American public should prepare for pandemic restrictions:
It would be great if you could tweet to your many Twitter followers that although the current risk of coronavirus to the American public is low, the fact that there is community spread of virus in a number of countries besides China… poses a risk that we may progress to a global pandemic of COVID-19… And so for that reason, the American public should not be frightened, but should be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools, etc. There is nothing to be done right now since there are so few cases in this country and these cases are being properly isolated, and so go about your daily business. However, be aware that behavioural adjustments may need to be made if a pandemic occurs.
Interestingly, February 27th was also the day the media narrative in the U.S. shifted, with the New York Times leading the way with its first alarmist piece, by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, and also an alarmist podcast with science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., which quoted directly from China a 2% mortality rate for the virus.
The context for this shift was a WHO press briefing on February 24th by Bruce Aylward, who had just concluded a WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19 and told the world that lockdown worked and “you have to do this. If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.”
The timing obviously suggests the events are connected, but crucially it also implies that Fauci and those around him were not part of the behind-the-scenes decision of Aylward to throw the WHO’s weight behind the Chinese approach. This leaves, then, the question of why Fauci & Co flipped from their previous position of playing down the threat from the virus and not supporting extreme Chinese-style interventions to going all in with the panic.
The picture being painted here is of at least two ‘conspiracies’ going on – the Chinese one, seeking to push lockdowns as part of Chinese vindication and cultural supremacy, and the Fauci & Co one, the potential motives for which are discussed below. I am pretty confident these are not the same ‘conspiracy’, as I assume that Fauci and Co are not motivated by vindicating China and advancing its cultural supremacy (I’ve seen no evidence this should be the case).
A further element to throw into the mix is that the first Western lockdown occurred three days before the Aylward WHO briefing, on February 21st 2020, in a region of 50,000 people in Lombardy. Oddly, it seems to have been an isolated local initiative in response to the first identified ‘cases’ led by the regional health chief Giulio Gallera, with no clear links to the WHO or any other known lockdown protagonists. It would be interesting to ask Mr. Gallera why he decided to follow such a radical course of action that day.
Italy locked down on March 8th and 10th, a response it seems to the climbing death rate, and most of the rest of the world followed in the ensuing two weeks. The U.S. Government was persuaded by Deborah Birx and others to back lockdowns on March 16th. On March 12th-14th, U.K. Government ministers and officials did a media round promoting the idea of aiming for herd immunity and keeping calm and carrying on. However, that strategy soon collapsed in the face of shifting public opinion and alarmist models from scientists like Imperial’s Neil Ferguson. After March 23rd, Sweden was the only holdout among Western Governments.
Such a mess of uncoordinated action confirms to my mind a picture of different groups driven by different motives and agendas which sometimes overlap, catalysed by groupthink and hysteria, rather than any grand behind-the-scenes conspiracy involving all in a coordinated fashion.
The Chinese Communist Party is a crucial actor, of course. It invented lockdowns and since then has persistently pushed them to the rest of the world, including through an all too willing WHO. However, that doesn’t mean that all who promote panic and lockdowns do so because they are in thrall to China or doing its bidding.
So what was the deal with Fauci & Co – why did they oppose panic and lockdowns until February 27th, then flip to become among their most eager and high-powered proponents?
Fauci’s emails show that, starting at the end of January and into February 2020, he organised a series of secretive video conferences and phone calls because he and his associates suspected the virus may have been genetically modified and leaked from a lab. Yet despite these suspicions, on February 19th the group wrote a letter to the Lancet denouncing the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”. The organiser of the letter was Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, one of Fauci’s associates who it later turned out had been funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of exactly the kind that was suspected as being responsible for creating COVID-19. Biologist Nick Patterson notes a grant application from EcoHealth Alliance to DARPA (the research agency of the U.S. Department of Defence), of which he says, “as far as I can make out, the plan here was for WIV to collect live virus, ship it to the USA, have U.S. scientists genetically modify the virus, and then ship modified virus… back to China”.
In light of information like this and Fauci and Co’s preoccupation during February 2020 with the origin of the virus, culminating in their cynical effort to suppress the claims of lab leak and genetic modification, I surmise that their major motivation was to cover themselves for the possibility that they and their research fields would be held responsible for the virus. Initially this took the form of suppressing the lab leak theory while also playing down the threat from the virus, which they would have been keen to be as uneventful as possible. But why then the flip to panic mode after February 27th? Did the WHO backing lockdowns on February 24th change the equation, so it was no longer deemed viable or good cover to oppose the new approach? The path of least resistance in other words. A related question is whether they were genuinely persuaded that the measures would be effective or if they retained an unspoken scepticism. If they did retain any scepticism there’s been precious little sign of it since March 2020.
Overall, I see no indication of a grand plan from the earliest days in which all are working from a common script to a common goal. Instead, I see various groups with their own agendas, interests and fears. It’s clear that, following Aylward’s team’s visit, China managed to capture the WHO and bring it on board with championing lockdowns. However, the motives of everyone besides China are largely opaque. Why did Aylward become China’s biggest fan – was he threatened or bribed or just duped and naïve? Why exactly did Lombardy regional health chief Giulio Gallera respond to the first cases in his region by imposing a Chinese-style lockdown even before the WHO had backed them? Why did Fauci flip on February 27th? What about curious figures like Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, highlighted by Michael Senger, who despite being a known China critic, was a major alarmist influence within the White House from the get-go, drawing on mysterious ‘contacts in China’ to call for panic and restrictions as early as January?
What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus? We can largely see now who did what and when. What’s mainly missing is the why.
In a rare interview recorded some 20 years ago and aired this week, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the resistance movement rejected American offers of money and support that were made in exchange for its elimination from the Arab-Israeli conflict equation.
Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen channel is airing a five-part documentary series dubbed “40 and Beyond” about Hezbollah. The series comes on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Hezbollah as well as the 30th anniversary of the election of Nasrallah as the head of the movement. The episodes include an unseen interview of Nasrallah with Ghassan Ben Jeddou, current CEO of al-Mayadeen.
In the third episode of the series, Nasrallah says the United States made several offers to Hezbollah after the liberation of southern Lebanon and western Bekaa in 2000, aiming at neutralizing the movement and eliminating it from the Arab-Israeli conflict equation.
The United States was trying to convince Hezbollah that Shebaa farms were not worth a conflict and that the issue could be resolved through dialogue, Nasrallah said.
According to the top resistance figure, what the United States was offering in exchange for the movement’s neutralization included working out a solution about the issue of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons, recognizing Hezbollah’s political role and its inclusion of Hezbollah into the government, providing the resistance with a significant financial aid to rebuild the liberated areas, and removing Hezbollah from the so-called terror list.
Washington was also asking the Lebanese movement to abandon its military and financial support for the Palestinian Intifada, said Nasrallah.
These offers, he said, were strongly rejected by Hezbollah because the movement sought to help the Palestinians and considered Israel a permanent threat to Lebanon’s security.
American authorities repeated the same offers after 9/11 following its declaring of war against organizations it recognizes as terrorists, added the resistance leader.
Hezbollah was established following the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon. Since then, the popular resistance group has grown into a powerful military force.
The resistance group fought off two Israeli wars against Lebanon in 2000 and 2006, forcing a humiliating retreat upon the regime’s military in both wars. The movement has vowed to resolutely defend Lebanon in case of another Israeli war.
In an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language al-Alam news network in early January 2022, Nasrallah also pointed to the offer by the United States to turn its back on Palestine and end confrontation with the occupying regime.
“Previously, they (the Americans) sent us a delegation on behalf of Dick Cheney to negotiate a halt in our support for Palestine and attacks against Israel. In return, they said that they would pay us billions of dollars and even allow us to have our weapons, an offer which we naturally opposed,” he said.
Lebanon and the occupying entity are technically at war since the latter has kept the Arab country’s Shebaa Farms under occupation since 1967.
“We do not recognize the existence of Israel. This is the land of Palestine,” Nasrallah said.
Western nations have faced skyrocketing energy prices, creeping inflation, and plummeting growth amid their attempt to “punish” Russia into submission for Moscow’s military op in Ukraine. According to the Russian president, the sanctions’ outcome hasn’t at all been “what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on.”
The current sanctions war against Russia by the European Union and the United States bears striking parallels to Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated early 1800s attempt to institute a blockade against Great Britain, which ultimately culminated in the French Empire’s economic ruin, French economist Olivier de Maison Rouge believes.
In a recent op-ed in Le Figaro, de Maison Rouge pointed out that the EU’s sanctions on Russia in response to the “military aggression on its eastern flank” have so far only led to the appreciation of the Russian ruble, and a stark and unpleasant realization of just how much Europe depends on Russian natural resources for its well-being.
The present situation is not unique, and has a historical parallel in the 19th century, the economist, who teaches at the Paris-based ILERI School of International Relations, and the School of Economic Warfare, explained.
“Take for example the European blockade declared against England by Napoleon I. Although English industry initially faltered, it was ultimately able to forge new commercial partnerships with its vast empire, enabling it to reach the height of its glory, on land and at sea, in the 19th century,” de Maison Rouge wrote.
In a Napoleonic decree penned in November 1806, the British Isles were declared to be in a state of blockade, with all trade prohibited, and all letters or packages with English addresses, or to Englishmen, or written in the English language, banned from being sent at France’s post offices and seized.
A year later, de Maison Rouge recalled, in the decree of Milan of December 17, 1807, Napoleon “ordered any boat anchored in a British port, whatever its nationality, to be considered flying the British flag and therefore confiscated by the customs administration. The direct consequence of this policy for France was the disruption of supplies.”
The professor noted that with each of Napoleon’s European conquests, the restrictions on trade with Britain were extended, with the emperor envisioning a ban on “all British goods from Lisbon to Saint Petersburg.”
With the Treaty of Tilsit of July 1807, Russia and Prussia joined the blockade, and between 1807 and 1810, Sweden and Portugal were also made to join the embargo (Russia would exit from this arrangement in 1810 when the tsar began allowing neutral ships to land at Russian ports, culminating in the French invasion of 1812).
Britain’s response to the restrictions, de Maison Rouge wrote, included its own embargo on the young American republic’s trade with continental Europe, thus disrupting France’s access to the riches of the New World. At the same time, the blockade led to a virtual drying up of major ports in France, Holland, Germany, and Italy.
“England, for its part…was able to forge new commercial relations, particularly with Canada, and then with the United States and Latin America,” the economist noted. In the meantime, in the French-occupied nations, local merchants, sometimes aided by corrupt French officials, were able to organize smuggling routes, “partially wiping out the effects of the blockade” and ultimately forcing French customs to start granting import and export licenses in 1809 to certain shipping companies and for certain goods.
“The Emperor’s wish was to collapse the English economy by cutting off its commercial outlets, and incoming flows of raw materials for the supply of manufactured goods (cereals, weapons, ammunition, cotton, wool, etc.). Indeed, it is estimated that England’s exports fell by 20 percent between 1808 and 1810.”
However, in time, “the effects of the blockade proved counterproductive, because goods like machine tools ran out, while [lost] sales of European goods outside Europe were never compensated. While England knew how to forge an economy turned toward other markets (in particular in Latin America)…and established its maritime power against the continent, creating new outlets which would make its fortune in the 19th century, France, centered on the continent alone, was not able to find alternatives beyond its domestic markets,” de Maison Rouge explained.
In the end, “despite temporary economic crises (in 1808 and 1810) England ultimately emerged strengthened from this ordeal, subsequently enlarging its empire and its clientele and becoming the dominant nation of the 19th century,” the economist concluded.
In recent weeks, Western officials, academics, and media have expressed fears that the West’s push to “punish” Russia for its military operation in Ukraine has backfired on the European Union, shaping up to be the region’s most severe inflationary and energy crisis since the 1970s Arab oil embargo and stagflationary crisis. The US, which had far weaker trade ties to Russia before the escalation of the crisis, has also been affected, with the White House blaming spiking inflation and gasoline prices on Russia and calling the problems “Putin’s price hike.”
Last week, Romanian Deputy Prime Minister Hunor Kelemen warned that as the Ukraine crisis shows no signs of letting up, European countries “will all pay the price” for the restrictions slapped on Russia during the coming winter. “This will be a harsh winter, and possibly the harshest winter in the past 40, 50 or 60 years, and, unfortunately, for the whole of Europe”, he said.
Earlier this month, Putin suggested that the West had already lost its “sanctions war” against Russia, and sparked the start of the “radical breakdown of the American-style world order.” Admitting that sanctions have created some difficulties for the Russian economy, the Russian president stressed that their outcome nevertheless hasn’t at all been “what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on.”
REINER FUELLMICH INTERVIEWING SONIA ELIJAH CIC SESSION 113 – MYCELIUM 15/07/2022
SONIA ELIJAH ON PFIZER VACCINE SAFETY REPORT
Sonia Elijah – Investigative Journalist and Broadcasterat trialsitenews.com , Has a background in Economics and was a former BBC researcher. Her analysis of the Pfizer Covid vaccine safety report, received worldwide attention.
The Corona Committee was founded on the initiative of attorney and economist Viviane Fischer and attorney Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. It is conducting a review of evidence on the Corona crisis and measures.
“The climate crisis is a public health crisis”, that is a tweet by Hillary Clinton’s official twitter account yesterday afternoon.
The tweet included a link to a news story claiming that Spain and Portugal had seen over a thousand people had die in the past week, due to the heatwave (they’ve since amended that number to over 2000).
I don’t want to get into the maths of it, but across two countries totalling around 58 million people, 2000 in a week is not very many at all.
And, as I have pointed out, in a post-Covid world we can’t really be sure what “died due to the heat” even means.
But we’re not here to fact-check yet more figures or definitions. The point of this article is to highlight the message behind the tweet, and it’s not a new one. It’s all about taking the powers the states have acquired through “covid”, and then applying them to “climate change”
Maybe that means “climate lockdowns”, or “climate passports”, or rationing fuel or banning travel… but whatever terms or phrases they eventually use, it’s definitely some authoritarian fantasy made flesh.
That’s the target, and it has been from the beginning.
Since the earliest days of the “pandemic” there have been consistent (and ludicrous) attempts to try and associate “Covid” and “climate” in the public mind.
They started by directly linking the two, and to this day try and make out that climate change will cause more zoonotic pandemics. But that never really hit home.
The more consistent and pervasive messaging has been an effort to rebrand “climate change”, not as an environmental problem but as a “public health” problem.
This messaging first appeared in March 2020, when the pandemic was less than three months old the British Medical Journal published a paper titled “The WHO should declare climate change a public health emergency”, which argued that global warming was far more dangerous than a simple virus, and should be treated just as seriously.
Nobody really listened. In the two years since they’ve tried to bring it back over and over again, but it never lands.
Just weeks into lockdown we were already being told that lockdowns were healing the planet, and journalists were asking “if we can do this for covid, why not climate?”
There’s a new push in the works, and the thinking behind it is clear.
After decades of propaganda that saw “global warming” become “climate change” become “global heating” and eventually “climate emergency”, people simply are not scared of it.
Maybe it’s subconscious knowledge that it’s a propaganda campaign, maybe it’s the literal 60 years of failed prophecies, but whichever it is people are not scared, not like they were of Covid anyway.
The powers-that-be have pretty much admitted this themselves, there’s a revealing Sky News article about it from just a couple of days ago, headlined:
Why is it so hard to get people to care about climate change?”
We saw, during Covid, the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team published a memo which said people were not scared enough of Covid, and the messaging needed to change in order to scare people into compliance:
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.
That same thinking holds with climate change. They want it to be the new covid, but to get there they need people to feel “an increased level of personal threat”.
That means hitting the dangers of climate change hard. It means fudging death numbers and manufacturing alarming statistics. And it means peppering those headlines with influential figures – like Hillary Clinton – calling climate change a “public health crisis”
Once upon a time, news that a top-level COBRA meeting was held at Downing Street – in the midst of a government re-shuffle – would stir a flicker of alarm or excitement (depending on one’s temperament). Now, when COBRA meetings are called due to a spike in positive tests for a strain of flu, we know that the government is more interested in showing it is responding rather than actually responding or indeed having anything worth responding to.
The reason for the cabinet-level emergency meeting was the arrival of summer. You might have thought that aides could have briefed senior government figures privately on a brief period of warm-to-hot weather that some years occurs over July and August in the British Isles. No doubt the aides had been watching weather maps on television news which have been showing the country seared scarlet, despite the fact that the temperature has been as expected. The establishment, which has been both pushing the idea of a climate crisis and has come to believe its own alarmism, takes the normal heatwaves as evidence of a climate emergency. To be fair, if you consume mainstream television news and radio – plus factual programmes – at high levels, your residual belief in climate emergency will have reached near unbreakable levels.
The Met Office – an arm of the scientific-governmental-media complex – has issued amber and red alerts for sunny days last week. Even GBNews has been running a chyron of dire warnings advising against unnecessary travel. The gleeful doomsayers of the mainstream media have been playing up the dangers of hot weather, adding obligatory comments about anthropogenic global warming. Some exaggerate for tactical effect – to scare people into new types of behaviour – while others simply follow the herd, led by untested assumptions and a climate of fear.
COVID hysteria is not as potent a tool of control and fear as it once was. News reports of a rise in positive tests (caused due to COVID becoming an endemic, mild infection) – which were notably not accompanied by data suggesting increased deaths – generated only a brief uptick in mask-wearing by the “doing their part” crowd. There will be another push to impose a COVID lockdown this winter, but the government, NGOs and international bodies wanting to use lockdown as a tool for restricting the freedom and independence of people are looking for extra excuses. Marburg virus and Monkey Pox have both been pitched as potential reasons to restrict freedom but seem to have been met with muted responses.
So, while authorities worldwide tinker with their systems of control, climate emergency looks like a viable route. It has already been used to promote green policies, lower vehicle emissions, stringent insulation regulations, phasing out of gas boilers. The aim is to restrict means of private travel, monitor energy consumption and use digital identities and social-credit systems to micromanage people, using all-pervading systems to instil fear and obedience. It seems likely that air-quality readings may be used to restrict non-electric vehicle use in cities. Expect this winter to see more “stay at home” advisory notices due to cold weather – essentially for any days with road ice – but a big push next summer for not only advisory notices but action. This may include local or national government imposing fines on businesses which “irresponsibly” remain open during hot weather, as well as more vehicle restrictions.
The government and its medical-environmental partners use fear and coddling to direct a compliant population away from free choice and towards authoritarianism. The exaggerated heat warnings have been a feature of British mainstream news and activist press releases for many years, mainly as a means of reinforcing the necessity of environmental measures. However, the government and its partners have seen how compliant and fearful the population is and are ready to use weather as a tool for population suppression via the means of lockdown.
Be watchful and notice how the mass-media, establishment science, giant corporations and government work together to knit ever tighter the control of the managerial elite in order to remove your ability to judge risk for yourself, travel independently and run your businesses.
In a recent TikTok video, the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggested using a “raft” of “space bubbles” about “the size of Brazil” to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
“MIT scientists say ‘space bubbles’ could help reverse climate change by reflecting the Sun’s heat away from Earth,” the video begins. “Scientists say cutting out just 1.8% of the Sun’s rays would fully reverse global warming.”
The WEF cautions its young audience, though, assuring them this is future tech and that the “task of decarbonizing life on Earth” is no less urgent an issue.
“The bubbles would be manufactured in space by robots. They would form a ‘raft’ about the size of Brazil. This would be placed at a Lagrange point,” the WEF continues. “That is, a point in space where the Sun and Earth’s gravity balance each other out. This would keep the raft fixed in position.”
“This kind of large-scale physical solution to climate change is called geoengineering,” the WEF explains.
“Several such ideas have been proposed, from spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere to churning up tiny bubbles on the ocean’s surface, all with the aim of reflecting solar radiation back into space.”
The WEF adds that the MIT researchers say it “might be too risky,” though, and have “unintended consequences for the biosphere.”
You think?
Everyone’s favourite pandemic expert Bill Gates has also recommended playing God and blotting out the Sun in the past, positing the aforementioned polluting our atmosphere with chemical aerosols option.
Indeed, Bill Gates ran 300 stratospheric balloon tests in 2019 to see if it was possible to launch devices capable of spraying sun-reflecting particles into the stratosphere, which alarmed many opposed to geoengineering, to say the least.
Besides the obvious concerns over destroying ecosystems around the world, many were critical merely of undertaking the tests, saying that it could only lead to the real implementation of such a plan.
“There is no merit in this test except to enable the next step. You can’t test the trigger of a bomb and say, ‘This can’t possibly do any harm,’” said WhatNext director Nicklas Hällström.
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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