The West is attempting to use the Ukraine conflict to portray Russia as a “rogue state” in the eyes of the world, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. He stressed that the strategy has not been successful.
“The US and its satellite states are waging an all-encompassing hybrid war that they have long been preparing for, and are using Ukrainian radical nationalists as a battering ram against us,” Lavrov said in a speech in the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma.
“They are not even trying to hide the goal of this war: it is not only to defeat our country on the battlefield and destroy our economy, but also to surround us with a ‘sanitary cordon’ and turn us into a type of a rogue state.”
The statement came the same day that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled proposals for a new sanctions package against Russia, including additional export bans and measures to prevent the bypassing of restrictions.
Lavrov said that the West’s efforts to isolate Russia have failed because Moscow continues to develop relations with partners in other areas of the globe. He added that nations that have refused to back the “unprecedented” sanctions make up the majority of the world’s population.
The countries of the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and South America “don’t want to live in accordance with the West-centric order,” the Russian minister stated. “So it makes perfect sense why three-quarters of the world’s countries have not joined the anti-Russian sanctions and have a reasonable view regarding the situation in Ukraine.”
China and India are among the major economies that have refused to impose restrictions on Moscow. Denis Alipov, Russia’s ambassador to New Delhi, said on Tuesday that sanctions “had an opposite effect” and facilitated more trade and closer cooperation between Russia and India.
Beijing, meanwhile, has accused the US of fueling the Ukraine conflict and trying to weaponize the world economy for its own benefit.
Clean product tanker rates soared last week after the European Union and G-7 nations targeted Russia’s petroleum sales. Restrictions on Russian crude exports began in early December. The sanctions have been a ploy by Western countries to limit Russian crude and crude product exports, though it’s definitely not working.
Sanctions have redirected Russian energy flows from Europe to Asia. The rejiggering of supply chains means Russia has to rely more on tankers. According to Bloomberg, this has led to a 400% surge in the daily rates for clean product tankers.
The latest data from the Baltic Exchange in London shows clean product tankers rates have reached $55,857 per day, surging 58% just last Thursday.
According to trading giant Trafigura, Russia relies on a “shadow fleet” of tankers to move crude and crude products. The trading firm said the fleet is about 600 ships.
Bloomberg said the surge in tanker rates has been “spurred in part by a bifurcation of the fleet with some tankers serving Moscow’s interests and others the international market. It highlights a possible flipside of aggressive measures aimed at limiting Russia’s petroleum revenues.”
“Russian volumes continue to flow at more or less the same rate and that takes up a lot of ships.”
“Ultimately, the spike shows demand is pretty good, and the fundamentals are strong,” Lars Bastian Ostereng, an analyst at Arctic Securities.
About 400 tankers, or 20% of the global fleet, recently “switched” from hauling fuels for traditional countries to carrying Russian petroleum products, Trafigura’s co-head of oil trading Ben Luckock said in a recent Bloomberg interview. That has reduced the number of tankers for traditional routes and is leading to the skyrocketing cost of freight.
Bloomberg pointed out that surging rates aren’t entirely because of the tanker “switch.” It’s also due to more crude flowing by water following Western sanctions on Russia. Much of those energy exports are now being sent to Asia.
“We see no indication that Russia will have to cut back its exports of crude or refined products,” said David Wech, chief economist of Vortexa, during a presentation late last week.
Furthermore, crude prices have edged over $86 a barrel following last Friday’s announcement that Russia will reduce crude oil production by 500,000 barrels per day. This is in response to Western price caps on purchasing Russian fuel.
In his first interview since publishing his bombshell story on the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh fleshed out the details of his explosive report exposing the role of the US Navy in blowing up critical German-Russian energy infrastructure.
American journalist Seymour Hersh is “taking heat” over his recent explosive report documenting how the US sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines, the legendary reporter revealed in a new interview.
In a wide-ranging discussion on the War Nerd podcast, Hersh called on US President Joe Biden to come clean to the American people about the Biden administration’s role in the attack. The journalist underscored that the US public is being misinformed about the proxy war in Ukraine en masse.
Last week, Hersh published a dizzying report detailing how US Navy divers planted C-4 charges on the Nord Stream pipelines during a NATO training exercise and then remotely detonated them with a Norwegian reconnaissance plan.
The veteran war journalist suggests media outlets are refusing to cover his new revelations because “they think that the story I wrote supports Russia” – which “it does,” he concedes.
But Hersh said that despite being “colossally bad” for the European economy and “inexcusable,” the American government’s intentional attack on the critical energy infrastructure of a US ally is not technically illegal under international law.
“The law on the sea is very interesting. There are treaties that go back to 1884, when we began to lay telegraph lines across the ocean, and if you inadvertently or deliberately ran across the line that was a real bad deal.”
But “there were mostly economic consequences” for those infractions, Hersh pointed out, noting there’s actually “no law on the books that says deliberately blowing up a pipeline is a crime.”
Such a crime “has never been considered,” Hersh said, but there are “certainly a lot of law about damages, if you damage a pipeline. And this is a pipeline that’s probably going to cost… — there’s a Swiss company that did an estimate — 1.5 billion to fix the pipelines.”
Asked if he’s ever covered anything like a government “blowing up your ally’s critical infrastructure,” Hersh replied that the Biden administration “didn’t see it that way.” Instead, Biden “saw that gas as a weapon, Hersh claimed, “because as long as Russia was selling that much gas they thought Russia would weaponize if… there was a war.”
In reality, Hersh said “the fear was: Biden wants this war.”
“Don’t ask me why presidents want war. I think it’s good for their ratings. I just don’t know.”
“But Biden was very big on showing the Russians that in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian bodies, soldiers, we’ll show ‘em – we can stand up to Russia,” the journalist explains.
Anti-Russian posturing is “good politically in America too,” Hersh added, noting that in the US, “we all, you know, we wake up everyday kicking Russia and Putin, our…”
“Our nemesis,” the host chimed in.
In the comprehensive interview, Hersh took aim at outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, who he said are only interested in burning his source for the Nord Stream story. According to his recent report, that anonymous figure had “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the pipeline attack.
“I think what the newspapers… think I should do” is “use his name and get him put in jail” – something which would end my career,” Hersh added, stating that under no circumstances would he ever give up a source. “Inside the community, I protect people.”
“I’m taking heat, I have a source, I’m taking heat – but that’s okay, that’s my job, right? But it’s their job to understand the business a little better.” And in terms of the conflict in Ukraine, mainstream Western outlets “don’t seem to have anybody inside,” Hersh said.
“The coverage of the Ukrainian war is, compared to what I’m hearing from my friends who have access to the information… it’s – the thinking is so dumb.”
“The war I know about isn’t the war you’re reading about,” Hersh said cryptically, pointing out that military operations against Russia were by no means going well. “No, of course not. Are you kidding?”
While he admitted Russian forces “made great misjudgments,” he acknowledged “they have a 350,000 man regular army that hasn’t gone in yet.”
One of the likely causes for those waves of misinformation may be what the host refers to as the “Bellingcats and the OSINT [open source intelligence] bros.”
Responding to their mention, Hersh doesn’t mince words: “No one cares about those people.”
The storied journalist seemingly suggested instead that Bellingcat, the self-professed ‘independent’ outlet upheld by much of the mainstream media, is actually a British intelligence operation:
“I mean, why don’t you think about their nexus to certain intelligence agencies in a certain country,” Hersh asked rhetorically. “You know, you get to know who’s who.”
“But there are legitimate people complaining” about his reporting as well, he added.
“It’s amazing to me how they fall in line, my colleagues,” the reporter expressed. “When I was at the New York Times, they didn’t do that.”
“I’m not sure they underestimate the American people,” Hersh said. “We’re ready to accept the fact that an American president did this.”
And “it’s not only accepting it,” the journalist added. “You have to hold the president to account.”
Of the mainstream Western outlets that covered the story, Hersh faced fierce pushback from most of them, which tended to emphasize White House and CIA denials of the Nord Stream allegations.
Reuters called his jaw-dropping exposé a “blog post,” and one headline from Insider described the report as a “claim by a discredited journalist” which the authors insist “is proving a gift to Putin.”
Hersh faced major attacks on his reputation in the wake of stories debunking now–discredited claims from Western governments about Syrian forces using sarin gas, and for his writings dismantling the official story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. As for the criticism, he says he’s “used to it.”
But this time, it “sort of stunned me because this was such an obvious story,” he said.
As Hersh noted in his story, top US officials – including Biden – repeatedly threatened to sabotage the pipeline in the event that Russian troops engaged Ukrainian forces.
Under Secretary for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland warned in January: “if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
“So what does that mean?” Hersh asked. “I don’t know what anybody’s thinking but I’Il tell you what that means: that’s called a threat.”
“A friend of mine put it this way: what you’ve done, [Seymour]… you’re an expert at deconstructing the obvious. What else was it? What else was it?”
“The Russians didn’t do it, [and] if the Russians didn’t do it, which country in NATO [did]?” he questioned.
“It’s just not even a hard story to understand – the president of the United States and the undersecretary of state both said they were going to do it and then they did it,” Hersh stated, adding: “they waited a long time but they cut off oil.”
“Literally within a month of the actual event,” Hersh noted, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “gave a speech in which he talked about stopping Russia from weaponizing oil and gas – ‘now is the time we can do it,’ he said.”
Meanwhile, the effect on the European economy is “devastating.”
As Hersh pointed out, Germany’s BASF, the largest chemical producer in the world, shut down nearly 100 plants and “has actually been talking to China about moving some facilities there.”
In terms of “the economic stuff, which hasn’t been reported nearly enough in the Western press here,” Hersh said, “this is called, I guess you could [say], shooting off your left foot.”
“For no reason whatsoever, yes, we shot ourselves in the foot. Yes, it’s stupid beyond belief. Yes.”
“I would think that it’s certainly, unquestionably, a wonderful degree of stupidity at the White House and on [the] part of the president. It’s just stupid – it’s just damn stupid.”
The journalist said it’s unlikely Biden will face scrutiny for his actions in many mainstream media outlets anytime soon, because “this White House,” Hersh said, has “the New York Times and the Washington Post and MSN and CNN fronting for them.”
And “the enemy is Fox News.”
But “the only reporter that has called me from any TV station – outside of somebody that’s running out of the kitchen of their mother’s house” was Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Hersh declined the request, but said Carlson has been “dead right” about the Nord Stream attack. “And I’ll tell you something else – Tucker’s been right about is the war in Ukraine.”
The reporter repeatedly emphasized his unwillingness to discuss his sourcing, explaining “the one thing government’s good at is tracking down people who talk.” But ultimately, he suggested the information could be coming from someone inside the US oil and gas industry, telling his interviewer: “there’s something called a pipeline industry.”
“There’s an industry [with] American companies involved. They build pipelines around the world. Are you listening to me? They know what happened,” Hersh said. “The last thing they want to do is end up in a goddamn newspaper story, but they know who did what.”
“Of course they know – they built the goddamn things!”
“I’m not talking necessarily about Nord Stream 1 or 2, but they build pipelines and they talk to divers, and they know what’s happening, they know who has the capability, and they know what they hear inside,” Hersh concluded.
In future, it will no longer be enough for the EU to censor and silence undesirable alternative media only in its own area of responsibility. The EU also wants to fight unwelcome opinions and competing media in the rest of the world.
To this end, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has announced that he intends to use alleged “disinformation experts” in EU offices around the world. Their task would be fighting Russian and Chinese spreaders of alleged “fake news”.
Borrell announced the deployment of official censors to this end: “All our delegations will be equipped with experts in countering disinformation in many parts of the world so that our voice is better heard.”
A particular thorn in the side of the EU is the Russian and Chinese media and their multipliers, for example on platforms such as Telegram.
More international solidarity with allies is also required here, said Borrell. “We need to address this issue politically at the highest level.” The EU and like-minded partners should create their own way of sharing data and analysis of foreign disinformation campaigns, but also work more with authorities around the world to ban competing voices.
Borrell did not give any specific information about what this should look like in the future and how the EU broadcasters should act against “fake news”. So far, the EU has not come up with anything other than censorship when it comes to unwanted competition but that could be difficult in foreign countries.
From the point of view of Borrell and the EU authorities there is no reason whatsoever to doubt the official narrative, and every expressed doubt will now be given a new label: “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference”, abbreviated FIMI.
The unelected preach ‘democracy’
The EU Commission is not a democratic structure, its members are appointed, not elected, and most of them lack any understanding of democracy. EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Josep Borrell could virtually serve as Exhibit A.
Not long ago, Ursula von der Leyen deleted her mobile phone communication with Pfizer about the purchase of millions of doses of a pharmaceutical preparation and while it raises the suspicion of corruption, this could be presented as FIMI simply because it was also reported by a Russian broadcaster.
Borrell’s grasp of the English language is at least as bad as that of Ursula von der Leyen’s. Yet both insist on proposing these far-reaching measures in English, no longer an EU language. Do they understand the subtleties of their proposal?
Ignoring facts
The Chinese state media, according to the EU report, “have reinforced selected pro-Kremlin conspiracy narratives, for example about alleged US military biorepositories in Ukraine”.
This is a clear example of how to dispose of truth or factual information as a criterion. These labs are not only found as budget items listed in the US defence budget (a document over which the Kremlin presumably exercises no control), but individual collaborations, such as the research projects of the Bernhard Nocht Institute or the Friedrich Löffler Institute with these Ukrainian labs, can also be found on their websites, as well as the financier of these projects, the German Ministry of Defence.
It must therefore be stated that these laboratories existed, that they were financed from the military budget and that the research was carried out on behalf of the military, and not only on behalf of the US. Nevertheless, the EU has declared the very existence of the labs to be a “conspiracy narrative”.
In connection with protests under the title #StopKillingDonbass, the EU report stated that it was “falsely claimed that the Armed Forces of Ukraine and ‘paramilitary units of neo-Nazis’ were committing atrocities against civilians, including children” while the Soros NGO Human Rights Watch recently actually admitted that Ukraine had distributed butterfly mines in Donetsk, an outlawed munition in residential areas.
According to their rationale, any “disinformation” accusation by FIMI does not have to take into account whether the statement is true, but only that it contradicts the EU narrative.
Therefore, the report noted: “The information disseminated by these networks does not have to be provably false or misleading to constitute a FIMI incident, which FIMI applies more broadly than the classic definition of disinformation.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was treated like a hero when visiting Brussels on February 9. Although he received endless adulation, his lobbying to EU leaders for further military support mostly fell on deaf ears despite making an impassioned, but disingenuous plea that Ukraine is defending Europe’s eastern borders.
Zelensky visited London and Paris on his second foreign trip since the war began almost a year ago and hoped to secure modern fighter jets and long-range missiles. He then brought his circus show to Brussels to address EU leaders and MEPs directly. Unsurprisingly, Zelensky received cheers and a standing ovation in the European Parliament, yet, made no progress in convincing Brussels to allow Ukraine an express membership into the EU.
“We are defending against the most anti-European force of the modern world — we are defending ourselves, we Ukrainians on the battlefield, along with you,” Zelensky told MEPs.
However, despite the contradictory rhetoric emanating from European leaders, they are also fully aware that Russia will never attack without provocation. It is for this reason that they can make a show for Zelensky in Brussels, but will never commit to the extent that Kiev demands.
Although French President Emmanuel Macron awarded Zelensky with the National Order of the Legion of Honour, he also made it clear that he would not supply fighter jets to Kiev in the near future. Even though Zelensky has forced the supply of fighter jets into discourse, European leaders, including Macron, are less than enthusiastic as they are fully aware it would take several years to train Ukrainian pilots to be competent enough with an unfamiliar fighter jet to have any chance against the Russian Air Force. In addition, they understand that Russia will respond appropriately too.
Ignoring this reality, European Parliamentary speaker Roberta Metsola, declared: “Ukraine is Europe and your nation’s future is in the European Union. States must consider, quickly, as a next step, providing long-range systems and the jets you need to protect the liberty too many have taken for granted.”
Unfortunately for the European Parliament, they wield very little influence on state policies and enforcing support for Ukraine. Rather, with Zelensky seen in Western European capitals begging for more weapons, the whole exercise is a tasteless theatre to discuss supposed value systems – values that tolerate rampant neo-Nazism in Ukraine.
In this way, Zelensky is nothing more than an actor in a show to present supposed European unity on Ukraine. The uncomfortable truth is that unity in the Western world is forced and mostly just exists at a political level. With support for Ukraine being mostly maintained by the political class, public dissatisfaction caused by economic difficulties from the sanctions against Russia is growing.
With dissatisfaction growing, Macron is desperately wanting the war to end and for a peace conference to be held – but on terms that do not correspond to the realities on the battlefield and with aims of making Russia the ultimate loser.
At the trilateral meeting held on February 8 in the Elysée Palace with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Zelensky, Macron presented a proposal for organising a peace conference but, as said, on terms where Russia is the ultimate loser. Macron sees Kiev’s ten-point plan as a “solid foundation on the way to a peace conference” despite confirmation that Kiev is categorically refusing to negotiate on Russia’s unification with Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson.
In addition, a peace conference can only occur if Washington and London agree to one since they are the real masters behind the war. Although Macron has grandiose illusions of becoming a second Charles de Gaulle to lead an “autonomous Europe,” his endless failed attempts to form a European Army and the cancellation of military contracts with Australia shows that he is far from the global and historic figure that he wants to be remembered as. It also demonstrates that Western power is still firmly in Anglo hands.
Rather, Macron’s initiative is media propaganda because the two most powerful states in the EU, France and Germany, want to legitimise themselves in the media as contributors to the peace process. It cannot be forgotten that France and Germany already mediated the signing of the Minsk Accords and that former German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the aforementioned agreements allowed the Ukrainian military to become stronger as it bought time.
Therefore, French and German mediation in the current crisis cannot be trusted, and for this reason it is unlikely that Moscow will ever entertain a peace conference under such ludicrous terms. It was French and German inaction in enforcing the Minsk Accords that led to the current conflict, and now that Russia has acted on the only option that was left available, Macron has the audacity to request a peace conference on the terms that Russia backs away from all the progress it made.
As this is unrealistic, the song and dance must continue, and Zelensky will continue playing the part. But in the end, the level of support that Zelensky wants is evidently not coming to fruition, and will likely remain this way, rendering his tour of Europe to be mostly useless.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Speaking to radio Kossuth, Peter Szijjarto commented on recent remarks by the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, who pushed for fighter jets and long-range weapons to be sent to Kiev. According to the minister, EU lawmakers’ decisions on Ukraine “have generally caused damage to Europe,” and further weapons deliveries will only worsen the hostilities.
He went on to blast the EU legislature, claiming that its “credibility is practically zero.” Szijjarto pointed to a recent graft scandal as proof that the EU parliament is “one of the most corrupt organizations in the world.”
He was referring to the recent arrest of the parliament’s former vice president, Eva Kaili, who has been charged with taking bribes from Qatar in exchange for illegally lobbying the interests of the Gulf state.
Szijjarto noted that in Western countries, war rhetoric sounds “incomparably louder than the rhetoric of peace,” while nations outside “the transatlantic bubble” tend to prefer peace to a deadly conflict.
The minister went on to question the West’s anti-Russia sanctions. He argued that they have failed to force Moscow to end the conflict, while Europe’s economy has “faced incredible difficulties,” and that “the tenth sanctions package will only be suitable for causing further damage to us Europeans, similar to the previous nine ones.”
Since the start of large-scale hostilities in Ukraine almost a year ago, Hungary, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, has been critical of Western sanctions against Moscow. It has also refused to support Kiev with weapons, or allow arms transfers across its border with Ukraine.
US officials are basically admitting that they were behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, which was perpetrated to prevent rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“The US decided that we [Russia] have been cooperating too well with Germany over the past 20 or 30 years; or rather, the Germans cooperated with us too well,” he said in an interview published on the Foreign Ministry’s website on Sunday.
The “powerful alliance” based on Russian energy resources and German technology “began to threaten the monopoly position of many American corporations,” Lavrov explained.
So, Washington decided to destroy this alliance between Moscow and Berlin, and did it “literally” by attacking the pipelines, which were built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany, he added.
“American officials are basically admitting that the explosions that occurred at Nord Stream 1 and 2 were their doing. They even speak about it with joy,” the foreign minister stated.
Lavrov was likely referring to a confession made by US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland during a Senate hearing in late January. “I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now… a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea,” she said at that time.
“The vileness of Western politicians is well known,” Lavrov continued, suggesting that “the plan, which is now being implemented through ‘inciting’ Ukraine against Russia and waging a war by the entire West against Russia by means of Ukraine, is to a large extent aimed at preventing a new rapprochement between Germany and Russia.”
The comments by Russia’s top diplomat come just days after iconic American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released a bombshell report, blaming Washington for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines last year.
According to an informed source who talked to Hersh, explosives were planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the guise of a NATO exercise. They were detonated in late September, rendering the key European energy infrastructure inoperable.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.” No one among high-ranking American officials has even commented on the accusations made by Hersh.
For months, the Russian authorities have been pointing to the fact that the only side to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the explosions.
The CDC’s information page on Covid-19 vaccines contains the following bullet points on “How mRNA COVID-19 vaccines work:”
First, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are given in the upper arm muscle or upper thigh, depending on the age of who is getting vaccinated.
After vaccination, the mRNA will enter the muscle cells. Once inside, they use the cells’ machinery to produce a harmless piece of what is called the spike protein…. After the protein piece is made, our cells break down the mRNA and remove it, leaving the body as waste.
Or, in other words, as we have long been told, “it” – the mRNA – “stays in the arm.” And then, after having instructed the muscle cells to produce the spike, is disposed of.
But look at the below picture from a recent presentation on mRNA vaccination at the European Parliament. The picture was posted on Twitter by Virginie Joron, a French member of the parliament. The speaker is no less an authority than Özlem Türeci, the Chief Medical Officer of BioNTech: the German biotech company that developed what has come to be known to most of the world as the “Pfizer” Covid-19 vaccine.
Have a closer look at Türeci’s slide, which tells a very different story than that which the CDC has been telling Americans for the last two years.
Far from “staying in the arm” and entering the muscle cells at the injection site, the injection site is only the point of departure for a journey that is supposed to take the mRNA rather to the lymph nodes. The subtitle of the slide is “Bringing mRNA to the right cells at the right places.” The deltoid is not the right place; the lymph nodes are.
Once in the lymph nodes, a specific sort of cell, the dendritic cells, is supposed to manufacture the spike protein: here colorfully described as the “wanted poster” that will help the immune system to identify the SARS-CoV-2 virus in case of subsequent exposure.
A passage from The Vaccine, the book that Türeci and her husband, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, wrote which journalist Joe Miller, explains why BioNTech’s platform specifically targets the lymph nodes:
What Ugur learnt was that the location to which a vaccine delivers its ‘wanted poster’ really mattered. The reason for this, the couple’s team in Mainz later realised, was that not all dendritic cells … were created equal. The ones that resided in lymph nodes – of which the spleen is the largest – were particularly adept at capturing mRNA and making sure the instructions it carried were acted upon. These kidney-bean shaped organs, found under our armpits, in our groins, and at several other outposts in the body, are the information hubs of the immune system. (p. 98)
Indeed, Sahin and Türeci were so determined to get their mRNA into the lymph nodes that they had an earlier mRNA construct injected directly into the patient’s lymph nodesin the groin (p. 104).
Needless to say, such an approach was not likely to obtain wide acceptance as a vaccine! This is why the couple, as explained in their book, needed to package the mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, in order to ensure that mRNA administered by way of an intramuscular injection would, nonetheless, be widely distributed around the body and thus reach the lymph nodes.
This is to say that the wide biodistribution of the mRNA that came to light after rollout was never a bug. It is a feature of BioNTech’s mRNA technology. Having elicited an immune response by way of injection into the groin, Sahin is even said to have wondered, “How substantial could the immune response be if a vaccine got into all lymphatic tissues around the body, and recruited all the resident DCs [dendritic cells] into action?” (p. 105)
So, why has the CDC been lying about this for the last two years and insisting that the mRNA “stays in the arm?” Well, the obvious answer is that the idea of the mRNA staying at the injection site is reassuring, since otherwise we could fear systemic adverse effects of precisely the sort that have emerged since rollout.
It is worth noting, moreover, that in developing its vaccine, as discussed in my earlier article here, BioNTech simply skipped the so-called safety pharmacology studies whose purpose is precisely to test a candidate vaccine for potential systemic adverse effects – and regulators, including the FDA, let the company do it.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe.Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.
A recent report has exposed that the Australian Senate committee is facing a serious legal setback in its attempt to blacklist Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), as the force cannot be designated as a foreign terrorist organization under the country’s criminal code.
According to the Australian Jewish News website, the Attorney General’s Department (AGD), which responded to the recommendation by the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Committee, told the panel that current legislation does not provide for a pathway to proscribing the IRGC.
“As an organ of a nation-state, the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps is not the kind of entity that is covered by the terrorist organization provisions in the Criminal Code,” the AGD said on Tuesday.
The Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) urged the Australian government to amend the criminal code to allow for the blacklisting of the IRGC.
“We … urge the Australian government to amend legislation to allow the IRGC to be proscribed here, as it is in other countries,” ZFA public affairs director Bren Carlill said.
However, other countries have also backed down on their initial proclamations to ban the official Iranian force.
The UK government has already stopped plans to blacklist Islamic Revolution Guards Corps as reports say Foreign Office fears that the move would block communications channels with Iran.
The UK Foreign Office’s about-face on proscribing the IRGC as a so-called “terrorist” entity comes despite its approval by the Home Office, The Times reported on February 2.
Citing sources in the government, the report said there are also concerns about how to blacklist the IRGC because, unlike other proscribed bodies, the Iranian force is an official government agency.
“Foreign Office officials have real concerns about proscription because they want to maintain access. The Home Office, and the government more broadly, supports the move. The IRGC should have been proscribed by now but the whole process is on ice,” a Whitehall source said.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on January 23 that the block could not list the IRGC as a “terrorist” entity without an EU court decision.
Speaking before a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Borrell said a court ruling with a “concrete legal condemnation” had to first be handed down before the bloc itself could apply any such designation.
“It is something that cannot be decided without a court, a court decision first. You cannot say I consider you a terrorist because I don’t like you,” Borrell told reporters, stressing that the court of an EU member state had to issue a concrete legal condemnation before the bloc could act.
A week earlier, the European Parliament adopted an amendment, calling on the EU and its member states to include the IRGC on their terror list. It also passed another resolution later, calling for more sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities and putting the IRGC on the EU terrorist list over alleged human rights violations during the recent riots.
The European Union, however, imposed sanctions against a number of Iranian individuals and entities for what it claimed to be a crackdown on the recent foreign-backed riots, which were triggered after the death of a young Iranian woman of Kurdish descent in Tehran in September.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that Zelensky and his entourage in Europe “were told at a summit by several leaders of the European Union that they were ready to supply Kiev with fighter jets to help fight the Russian invasion.”
“The issue of long-range weapons and fighter jets for Ukraine has been resolved,” said Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff. “Details to follow.”
The “taboo” of sending weapons that can reach hundreds of miles into Russia will soon be broken, according to Reuters, the “news agency” that collaborated with the CIA , writes Kurt Nimmo.
“Mr Zelensky received standing ovations before, during and after his speech to European lawmakers,” reports The Hindu. “He held up an EU flag after his speech and the whole legislature stood in gloomy silence as the Ukrainian national anthem and then the European anthem ‘Ode to Joy’ were played.”
More an ode to mass murder.
Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, said the “next step” is to provide “long-range systems” and fighter jets to the ultra-nationalists. Metsola said the “reaction” to Russian efforts to denazify and disarm the Kiev regime “must be proportionate to the threat, and the threat is existential.”
Metsola, who was elevated to President of the European Parliament by a secret vote of MEPs (not European citizens), is taking the war to the next level.
The EU encourages the ultra-nationalist regime in Kiev to continue its ethnic cleansing, torture, rape and other war crimes in the Donbas and wherever Ukrainians dare to speak Russian, attend an Orthodox church, celebrate Russian traditions or speak out against atrocities committed by neo-Nazi thugs.
The PDF document reveals in gruesome detail the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian state following the US government-orchestrated coup in Kiev that brought openly neo-Nazis to power.
From the data collected since the first report of the Foundation for Democracy Studies, it can be concluded that torture and inhumane treatment by the Security Forces of Ukraine (SBU), the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the National Guard and other formations within the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine, as well as by illegal armed groups, such as the Right Sector, have not only continued, but are actually increasing in size and becoming systematic.
According to the report,
The prisoners were electrocuted, and brutally beaten with various objects (iron bars, baseball bats, sticks, rifle butts, bayonet knives, rubber bats) for several days at a time.
Techniques widely used by the Ukrainian armed forces and security services include waterboarding, strangling with a “Banderist garrotte” and other types of strangulation.
In some cases, prisoners were sent to minefields for intimidation and run over with military vehicles, leading to their deaths.
Other methods of torture used by the Ukrainian armed and security forces include breaking bones, stabbing and cutting with a knife, branding with red-hot objects, and shooting various body parts with small arms.
The prisoners captured by the Ukrainian armed and security forces are held for days in freezing temperatures, without access to food or medical attention, and are often forced to swallow psychotropic substances that cause pain.
An absolute majority of prisoners are subjected to mock firing squads and threatened with the death and rape of their families.
Many of those martyred are not members of the Self-Defense Forces of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).
The Human Rights Convention “prohibits torture in absolute terms regardless of other circumstances,” and the state that commits these violations “is responsible for the actions of all its agencies, such as the police, security forces, other law enforcement officers, and all other organs of state that have an individual under their control, whether acting by order or of their own accord,” the authors write.
In other words, there is more than enough evidence to convict the Man in Green and his ultra-nationalist associates of serious war crimes. In addition, the US government and the EU are guilty of supporting and facilitating the above crimes. Add to that the owners and managers of the war propaganda corporate media.
The EU-US war crimes collaborators are busy preventing Russia from protecting civilians in Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Melitopol, Kherson and Crimea. We can say that they are war criminals and apologists for neo-Nazi terror.
The following video is utterly disgusting: a war criminal and his collaborator in mass murder, torture and rape make a kissing face for the camera.
In a saner and less cruel world, both of these sickening creatures would be on a tribunal similar to the one that sentenced to death Martin Bormann, Hermann Goering, Wilhelm Keitel, Julius Streicher, and other inveterate Nazis.
Eating bugs used to be the preserve of small children who knew no better. However, in our fast-changing world, what would have seemed outlandish only a few years ago is now on the menu.
Indeed, only last week, the European Union passed regulation 2023/5. It allows ‘partially defatted’ powder of the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) into the food chain for human consumption.
From this month, cricket powder can be added to the following: ‘multigrain bread and rolls, crackers and breadsticks, cereal bars, dry pre-mixes for baked products, biscuits, dry stuffed and non-stuffed pasta-based products, sauces, processed potato products, legume- and vegetable- based dishes, pizza, pasta-based products, whey powder, meat analogues, soups and soup concentrates or powders, maize flour-based snacks, beer-like beverages, chocolate confectionery, nuts and oilseeds, snacks other than chips, and meat preparations, intended for the general population’.
The regulation is effective inside the European Union and, unforgivably, Northern Ireland due to the treasonable eponymous protocol.
The first thing to note is that at a European Union level regulation can be passed without being ratified by any of the 27 national parliaments remaining in the benighted organisation.
Regulations are imposed (not debated) by the European Commission. In this case, the powdered bug was imposed into the food chain of around half a billion people without debate.
Of course there would have been some discussions but these would have taken place behind closed doors, between regulators, lobby groups, eco-warriors bent on stripping Man of his meat-eating habit, and bureaucrats ever ready to test the boundaries of their unaccountable power.
There was however no open debate in parliaments about whether full-fat or even partially defatted vermin powder is what the peoples of such a varied continent really want to find in their daily consumables.
That would have required a Directive, thereby granting every parliament the ability to discuss and pass laws applicable within their national territory on the issue of ‘Bugs on the Menu’.
Which elected government would have dared pass such a law? Few with any ambition to re-election.
As the European Union and its backers have found out over time: the less democracy, the less time is wasted. Best by-pass the ballot box and impose via regulation what cannot be passed by consent in parliaments or via referendum.
The new European Union regulation notes that there are risks to eating cricket powder. It might cause ‘cases of primary sensitisation’ and its scientific paper notes a risk of anaphylactic shock, defined by the National Cancer Institute as ‘a severe and sometimes life-threatening immune system reaction to an antigen‘.
Graciously, the European Commission does accept that you, as a consumer, ought to be told that you are eating powdered bugs so it recommends that products need to be ‘appropriately labelled’.
What does ‘appropriately’ mean in this case? European Union citizens will just have to find out in due course.
The European Commission has given a five-year monopoly to Cricket One, a group based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to procure the house cricket powder for the hapless EU consumer. (Investigative journalists, if they still exist, could have a field day looking into what led to such a deal, who invested and when.)
For those looking to the upside of our celebrated Brexit, here is one standout example of what it means to be sovereign.
Unless the law changes, and this will require parliamentary debates, we in the United Kingdom should be free, for a time, of the terrible suspicion that we are being fed powdered (even if defatted) crickets for the amusement of our elites.
That is what ‘taking back control’ means. Let’s have more of it.
Twitter has angered EU officials after it failed to submit complete reports on disinformation efforts as part of its commitment to the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.
“I am disappointed to see that Twitter’s report lags behind others and I expect a more serious commitment to their obligations,” wrote Vera Jourova, the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency.
The European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, who has contacted Twitter owner Elon Musk at least twice about the Code of Practice, said “it comes as no surprise that the degree of quality vary greatly according to the resources companies have allocated to this project,” but did not mention Twitter directly.
Twitter signed the code before Musk took over late last year, and committed to sending biannual reports.
“In some areas, Twitter is unable to provide granular data due to resource constraints and data limitations,” the company said in its report. “In other areas, there are issues that are not applicable to Twitter’s service.”
The code is voluntary. However, non-compliance could put Twitter in a bad position with the EU ahead of the September 1 deadline for full compliance with the EU’s new censorship law, the Digital Services Act.
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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