NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022
Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February. The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.
While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.”
At the end of the first week of Russia’s military action in Ukraine, with no sanctions yet specific to Russia’s diesel fuel exports, the European diesel price was already at a thirty-year high. It had nothing to do with war. It had to do with the draconian global covid lockdowns since March 2020 and the simultaneous dis-investment by Wall Street and global financial firms in oil and gas companies, so-called Green Agenda or ESG. Almost on day one of Russian troop actions in Ukraine, two of the world’s largest oil companies, BP and Shell, both British, stopped deliveries of diesel fuel to Germany claiming fear of supply shortages. Russia supplied some 60 to 70% of all EU diesel before the Ukraine war.
In 2020 Russia was the world’s second largest exporter of diesel fuel behind USA, shipping more than 1 million barrels daily. Most of it, some 70%, went to the EU and Turkey. France was the largest importer, followed by Germany and UK. In France some 76% of all road vehicles—cars, trucks—use diesel. The EU diesel demand is far higher than in the US as most cars also use the more economical and efficient diesel fuel. In the first week of April the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proudly announced new sanctions against Russian energy that would begin with a ban on coal. The EU is the largest importer of Russian coal. Oil and gas she said would follow at a later date. That foolish move will merely boost costs of energy, already at record highs, for most of the EU, as it will force oil and gas prices far higher.
At the beginning of the Ukraine crisis global stocks of diesel fuel were already the lowest since 2008 as the covid lockdowns had done major damage to the demand-supply situation of oil and gas production. Now the stage is set for an unprecedented crisis in diesel. The consequences will be staggering for the world economy.
Diesel Moves World Trade
Diesel engines have the highest engine efficiency of conventional motors. They are based on the principle of compression developed in 1897 by Rudolf Diesel. Because of their greater efficiency and greater mileage per gallon, diesel fuels almost all freight truck motors. It fuels most all farm equipment from tractors to harvesting machines. It is widely used in the EU, almost 50% for auto fuel as it is far more fuel efficient than gasoline engines. It is used in most all heavy mining machines such as Caterpillar earth movers. It is used in construction equipment. Diesel engines have replaced steam engines on all non-electrified railroads in the world, especially freight trains. Diesel is used in some electric power generation and in most all heavy military vehicles.
A global shortage in diesel fuel, temporary or longer-term, is therefore a catastrophic event. Goods cannot be moved from container ports to inland destinations. Without diesel fuel trucks cannot deliver food to the supermarket, or anything else for that matter. The entire supply chain is frozen. And there is no possibility to substitute gasoline in a diesel engine without ruining the engine.
Until the ill-conceived global covid lockdowns of industry and transportation that began in March 2020, the demand and supply of diesel fuel was well balanced. The sudden lockdowns however collapsed diesel demand for truck transport, autos, construction, even farming. Unprofitable refineries were closed. Capacity declined. Now as world production returns to a semblance of pre-covid normal, diesel reserve stocks worldwide are dangerously low, especially in the EU which is the world’s largest diesel consumer, but also the USA.
Rationing?
At the start of this year world diesel stocks were already dangerously low and that drove prices sky-high. As of February, 2022 before impact of the Ukraine war, diesel and related stocks in the US were 21% below the pre-covid seasonal average. In the EU stocks were 8% or 35 million barrels below the pre-covid average level. In Singapore, the Asian hub stocks were 32% below normal. Combined all three regions’ diesel stocks were alarmingly low, some 110 million barrels below the same point last year.
Between January 2021 and January 2022 EU diesel fuel prices had almost doubled, and that, before the Ukraine sanctions. There were several reasons, but primary was the soaring price of crude oil and supply disruptions owing to global covid lockdowns and the subsequent resumption of world trade flows. To add to the problem, in early March the Chinese central government imposed a ban on its exports of diesel fuel, to “ensure energy security” amid Western sanctions on Russia. Add to that the recent Biden administration ban on imports of all Russian oil and gas, which in 2021 included an estimated 20% of all Russian heavy oil exports. At the same time the EU in its ever-ideological wisdom, is finalizing a ban on imports of Russian coal with bans on Russian crude oil, diesel fuel and gas reportedly to follow.
On April 4 average price per liter of diesel in Germany was €2.10. On December 27, 2021 it was €1.50, a rise of 40% in weeks. Following the unprecedented USA and EU sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine military campaign after February 24, more and more Western oil companies and oil traders are refusing to handle Russian crude oil or diesel fuel for fear of reprisals. This is certain to escalate so long as fighting in Ukraine continues.
The CEO of the Rotterdam-based Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trading company, warned on March 27 that rationing of diesel fuel in the coming months globally was increasingly likely. He noted, “Europe imports about half of its diesel from Russia and about half of its diesel from the Middle East. That systemic shortfall of diesel is there.”
On April 7, David McWilliams, a leading Irish economist formerly with the Irish national bank, sounded an alarming note. “Not only is oil going up, diesel is going up and there’s a real threat diesel will run out in Western Europe over the course of the next two or three weeks, or maybe before that… We import a significant amount of our diesel, it comes from two refineries in the UK where it’s first processed. Those refineries do not have any crude at the moment. So we are basically running the economy on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.” He added: ‘We have not just an oil crisis, we have an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen in 50 years.” According to him the reason diesel stocks are so low is that the EU countries found it far cheaper to outsource oil and diesel to Russia with its huge supply.
The situation in the USA is not better. For political reasons the true state of the diesel fuel crisis is reportedly being downplayed by the Biden administration and the EU. Inflation is already at 40 year highs in the US. What the unfolding global diesel fuel crisis will mean, barring a major turnaround, is a dramatic impact on all forms of truck and auto transportation, farming, mining and the like. It will spell catastrophe for an already failing world economy. Yet governments like the German “Ampel” (traffic light) coalition, with their insane Zero Carbon agenda, and their plans to phase out oil, coal and gas, or the Biden cabal, privately see the exploding energy prices as further argument to abandon hydrocarbons like oil for unreliable, costly wind and solar. The real industrial interconnected global economy is not like a game of lego toys. It is highly complex and finely tuned.That fine tuning is being systematically destroyed, and all evidence is that it is deliberate. Welcome to the Davos Great Reset eugenics agenda.
UK censorship bill will impact small, independent media outlets while giving large media outlets a pass
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 11, 2022
The UK government is currently pushing a sweeping online censorship bill, the Online Safety Bill, which will force tech giants to censor content based on the vague, subjective term “harm.”
One of the government’s main arguments when attempting to defend these controversial censorship requirements has been that “news content will be completely exempt from any regulation under the Bill.” However, the rules that govern these exemptions are written in a way that favors large media outlets and makes it difficult for small, independent outlets to qualify.
For starters, the state-funded media outlets the BBC and Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C) automatically qualify as “recognised news publishers” – the standard that determines whether a publisher is exempt from the bill’s regulations.
Other outlets need to either hold a license under the Broadcasting Act 1990 or 1996 or meet numerous conditions which include “publishing news-related material that is created by different persons,” having a registered office or business address in the UK, making the name and address of the outlet’s owner public, being subject to a standards code and editorial control, and having a complaints procedure.
Obtaining a license under the Broadcasting Act 1990 or 1996 creates additional costs for small outlets, such as the £2,500 ($3,300) license application fee and the minimum annual license fee of £1,000, ($1,320). It also gives Ofcom the power to decide which outlets can get a license.
The provision for news-related materials from non-license holders to be created by “different persons” also prevents individual journalists from qualifying as recognized news publishers. Furthermore, the requirement for non-license holders to make their name and address public shuts out anonymous or pseudonymous publishers from these recognized news publisher exemptions.
Additionally, these non-license holder conditions create additional compliance burdens which disproportionately impact smaller news outlets with fewer staff and resources.
The disproportionate impact this censorship bill has on small, independent media outlets is just one of the many areas of concern. The bill also includes proposals that will jail people whose posts cause “psychological harm” with “no reasonable excuse,” tasks Big Tech with deciding when something is “illegal” or “fraudulent,” and more.
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You can get a full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.
You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.
The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.
What’s Next for Federal Employee Shot Mandate
Liberty Counsel | April 8, 2022
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 yesterday to overturn the January injunction issued by a federal judge in Texas that blocked Joe Biden’s shot mandate that required all federal employees to receive the COVID shot or face termination.
Biden announced last September that more than 3.5 million federal workers were required to undergo vaccination, with no option to get regularly tested instead, unless they secured approved medical or religious exemptions.
Feds for Medical Freedom, which represents more than 700 border patrol agents, pilots, diplomats, firefighters, contractors, and other Americans, filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on December 21, 2021, seeking preliminary and permanent injunctive relief from “enforcing or implementing the Federal Employee Mandate and the Contractor Mandate.”
In Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown previously granted a preliminary injunction and wrote that the mandate would pose a substantial threat of irreparable harm over the “liberty interests of employees who must choose between violating a mandate of doubtful validity or consenting to an unwanted medical procedure that cannot be undone.”
Yesterday, the Court of Appeals said that Judge Brown did not have jurisdiction to block the mandate. The appeals court ruled that the parties failed to exhaust administrative remedies because they did not raise their claims through the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. Federal workers facing adverse actions may appeal to an entity called the Merit Systems Protection Board, which decides whether the worker was properly disciplined. If the worker prevails, the board can order an agency to reinstate the worker or undertake other measures. The Court of Appeals noted that federal employees can then appeal to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
This case did not raise the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which does not require the exhaustion of administrative remedies and which allows litigation in any federal court. Liberty Counsel’s case involving federal employees, Federal Civilian Contractor Employer v. Carnahan, does raise RFRA. RFRA provides a powerful remedy and protection for federal employees who object to the COVID shots based on their religious beliefs. In fact, the mandate itself acknowledges that federal employees may request a religious accommodation from the shots.
Now Feds for Medical Freedom can ask the full Court of Appeals to review the matter and also request the Supreme Court to intervene. The case is far from over.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “This court decision by no means ends the case for federal employees. The case has a long way to go. While the Court of Appeals dodged the legal issues of the federal employee mandate, federal employees have a clear right to religious accommodation under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The mandate even acknowledges the fact that federal employees have religious free exercise rights. Under the mandate, and in accordance with the federal law, employees have the right to religious accommodation from the COVID shots.”
Iran: Zionist Entity’s Naked Terrorism Root Cause of Unrest in Palestine
Al-Manar | April 9, 2022
Iran decried the “apartheid Zionist regime’s naked acts of terrorism” as the root cause of unrest across the occupied Palestinian territories.
In a statement released on Friday night, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh reacted to the recent developments in occupied Palestine.
“Racism, repression, carnage, incarceration, massive deprivation and daily humiliation of the oppressed Palestinian people and also the naked terror by the apartheid Zionist regime are the root causes of all tensions in the occupied territories,” the statement read, as cited by Tasnim news agency.
Khatibzadeh said the defenseless people of Palestine have a legitimate, clear and natural right to fight against the occupiers in response to the repeated Israeli crimes.
The Iranian spokesman also reaffirmed Islamic Republic’s support for the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people’s fight for freedom.
Khatibzadeh, meanwhile, urged all nations, governments and international bodies to move toward providing the Palestinian people with security “in line with the principle of legitimate defense against occupation and terrorist activities by the apartheid Zionist regime and to prevent the aggression and brutal crimes of Zionists in Palestine.”
The Hypocrisy of Medical Experts
By Vinay Prasad | April 3, 2022
On the one hand, there are many biomedical faculty who are passionately arguing why 2-4 year olds should be forced to wear cloth masks. (NY City is fighting this in the courts). Even though there is no randomized data, even though cloth masks failed in adults (let alone toddlers), even though it contradicts the WHO, even though it fails common sense, we must keep doing this!
On the other hand, doctors post pictures of them attending industry sponsored academic conferences. Getting drinks and partying. Packed in tight rooms. No masks. Praising each other for their work. Drenched in financial conflict of interest and pro-new and pro-costly bias.
How can both these things be true?
We are facing such a health emergency that we have to mask toddlers by force of law AND we can continue to enjoy entirely superfluous medical gatherings that risk viral spread.
Don’t say it’s vaccines.
Because the vaccinated, boosted 50 year old, elevated BMI doc with comorbidities has far higher risk than the healthy, unvax’d 4 year old.
Don’t say it’s about spreading the virus.
Both can spread the virus to others.
Don’t say it’s about the activities, importance.
The adult’s entirely excessive medical conference is less important than the child’s early education.
COVID-19 policy reveals the selfishness of adults, the indifference to kids, and the hypocrisy of medicine. It’s disgusting to witness and history will judge it poorly.
Obama suggests Big Tech algorithms need to be regulated over “misinformation” problem
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 8, 2022
Former US President Barack Obama railed against social media platforms for supposedly prompting “white supremacists, insurrectionists, misogynist behavior, bullying behavior,” accused these platforms of undermining democracy, and called for them to be regulated during Wednesday’s “Disinformation and Erosion of Democracy” conference.
At the conference, Obama described himself as “close to a First Amendment absolutist” who believes that you “deal with bad speech with good speech.”
“We don’t want to be policing… everything that’s said on the internet,” Obama added.
However, when it came to speech that Obama deems to be “misinformation” or “disinformation,” he didn’t propose more speech as a solution.
Instead, he framed the weaponization of “information, disinformation, misinformation” as one of the things that he’s “most concerned about” and something that he “underestimated the degree to which democracies were as vulnerable to.”
Obama also claimed that social media product design “monetizes anger, resentment, conflict, division, and, in some cases, makes people very vulnerable” and “can lead to violence.”
“If you are… a woman, if you are a person of color, if you are a trans person right now in certain parts of this country, what’s said matters,” Obama said. “What you now have is…these product designs that are… in a non-transparent way, that we don’t have much insight to, a series of editorial choices are essentially being made that undermine our democracy and oftentimes, when combined with any kind of ethnonationalism misogyny or racism, can be fatal.”
Additionally, the former President invoked the January 6 Capitol riot and complained that social media platforms “have some insight into what’s more likely to prompt white supremacists, insurrectionists, misogynist behavior, bullying behavior” but haven’t been forthcoming about their product designs.
Obama’s proposed solution to his complaints about misinformation and social media is to regulate social media algorithms and subject these platforms to federal inspections.
“I think it is reasonable for us as a society to have a debate and then put in place a combination of regulatory measures and industry norms that leave intact the opportunity for these platforms that make money but say to them that… there’s certain practices you engage in that… we don’t think are good for our society and we’re gonna discourage,” Obama said.
He continued by arguing that “a democracy can rightly expect” social media platforms to share their insights with the public and be subject to a level of scrutiny from federal inspectors that is similar to the safety standards and inspections imposed on producers of meat, cars, and toasters.
Interestingly, when Obama was asked to provide examples of misinformation and disinformation during the conference, his stance varied wildly depending on how these examples affected him.
He branded the first example that he provided, media speculation about his birthplace, as agenda-driven promotion of “a clearly false fact.”
Yet when he provided the second example, the media’s accusations that he’d shared false information and lied about the Affordable (sic) Care Act, Obama admitted that what he’d said was “technically” false but justified it by claiming that “the basic principle I’d laid out, I meant and was true.”
This isn’t the first time Obama has pushed for government oversight of Big Tech. In 2020, the former President called for regulations that curb “crazy lies and conspiracy theories.”
Russia responds to Human Rights council expulsion threat
Samizdat | April 7, 2022
The possible suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council threatens to destroy “the basement of current multilateral system,” First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy said ahead of Thursday’s vote by the organisation’s General Assembly (UNGA) on the matter.
Polyanskiy wrote on Telegram that this is a “premeditated tactical move” which, in his opinion, has nothing to do either Russia’s attack on Ukraine nor with alleged human rights violations by Moscow, as these claims “are far from being verified and proven.” However, he warned, the motion, if accepted, “risks devastating consequences for the UN System.”
“Russia plays an important ballancing role, its removal from HRC will deprive developing countries of a vocal and powerful defender. That’s why Western countries are keen to do it and strike the ballance [sic] in their favor,” the official explained.
In Polyanskiy’s words, the West is trying “to undermine UN institutions behind the smokescreen of punishing Russia.” “By doing so they risk to destroy the basement of current multilateral system which emerged after WW2 and has been saving the world from WW3,” he underlined.
He also pointed out to the fact that in 2018, during Donald Trump’s presidency, the US withdrew from the council and “consistently belittled its role.”
Therefore, Polyanskiy argues, Washington “can’t be considered a champion of the body.
“And knowing the bleak US human rights record and the shameful practice [of] blackmailing [the] ICC (International Criminal Court ) for trying to make US soldiers accountable for their heinous crimes abroad, Washington is the last one to be moralizing others on Human Rights,” he wrote.
Moscow’s diplomat expressed hope that during the upcoming “extremely hypocritical” show Russia’s colleagues from, what he called, the “remaining independent countries” would remember about all these facts.
The move to expel Russia from the council came shortly after Kiev published images of dead bodies in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, northwest of the capital and called them evidence of genocide perpetrated by Russian troops. Moscow denied the allegations and said the Ukrainian government was manipulating public opinion with staged scenes.
The resolution which was endorsed by Western nations before any independent investigation could take place, expresses “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights.”
To suspend a state from the UN Human Rights Council a two-thirds majority vote by the 193-member General Assembly is needed. Russia’s envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia during a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday called the suggestion to kick Russia out from the council “unbelievable” and expressed hope that “UN colleagues will not allow themselves to be manipulated and will not play along with Washington in its extremely dangerous undertaking.”
The Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, in his turn, said that the work of the council and UN institutions is “unthinkable without the participation of Russia.”
Moscow attacked its neighbor in late February, following Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements signed in 2014, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols had been designed to regularize the status of those regions within the Ukrainian state.
Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
The Online Safety Bill gives the UK government unprecedented power to determine “harmful” content
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 7, 2022
The UK’s latest attempt to clamp down on free speech online, the 225 page Online Safety Bill, will give sweeping new censorship powers to the UK’s Secretary of State and its communications regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), if passed.
It gives the UK Culture Secretary the power to decide on and designate “priority content that is harmful.”
Once the Secretary of State has designated this content, social media platforms and search engines that fall under the scope of the bill’s regulations have to “use proportionate systems and processes” to prevent children from encountering this priority content.
These platforms are also required to specify in their terms of service how they’ll tackle priority content that’s deemed to be “harmful to adults” and apply these measures consistently.
Additionally, the Culture Secretary gets the power to decide the user number and feature thresholds that determine whether a company falls under the scope of these requirements to remove and tackle priority content.
Collectively, these provisions give the Culture Secretary unprecedentedly broad powers to not only choose the types of speech that is allowed but to also set the rules around which platforms have to censor content.
Under the bill, Ofcom will be granted the power to issue harsh punishments to platforms that fail to meet the Secretary’s censorship demands.
These punishments include applying for court orders that restrict access to platforms in the UK and fining platforms up to £18 million ($23.78 million) or 10% of their revenue (whichever is higher).
In another authoritarian turn, if Ofcom decides that a platform is failing to comply with any aspect of the Online Safety Bill, it can also demand information from the platform via an “information notice” and require the platform to name a senior manager who can be fined or imprisoned for up to two years if they’re found guilty of failing to comply with the requirements.
The grounds that determine whether a senior manager is guilty are as broad and far-reaching as the rest of the bill. Ironically, they include being “reckless” as to whether the information they hand over is false and handing over encrypted information with the intention “to prevent OFCOM from understanding such information.”
These Ofcom powers to punish platforms and potentially jail senior managers create a strong incentive for platforms to fall in line with the Secretary of State’s censorship demands. However, Ofcom also has other powers under the Online Safety Bill that it can wield to directly or indirectly push platforms to censor.
Ofcom can require platforms to take further steps to remedy their “failure to comply” and these steps can include requiring the use of “proactive” content moderation, user profiling, or privacy-invasive behavior identification technology, incentivizing platforms to collect even more data on users.
Even if Ofcom doesn’t directly require platforms to take additional steps, the Online Safety Bill grants it other powers that can be used to make life difficult for platforms that aren’t deemed to be meeting the government’s censorship demands.
Following the playbook of the Chinese Communist Party censors, these powers include the ability to enter and inspect a platform’s premises without a warrant, perform audits, demand documents and interviews, and compel platforms to appoint a “skilled person” that has to provide Ofcom with reports about “relevant matters.”
In a nod to George Orwell’s idea of the Ministry of Truth, the Online Safety Bill requires Ofcom to set up an “advisory committee on disinformation and misinformation.”
This committee will advise Ofcom on “how providers of regulated services should deal with disinformation and misinformation” and how Ofcom can exercise its powers under the Communications Act “in relation to countering disinformation and misinformation on regulated services.”
Not only does the Online Safety Bill give unprecedented censorship powers to government departments that voters have no direct influence over but some of these powers can be exercised with limited Parliamentary scrutiny.
For example, the Secretary of State can lay regulations for harmful content for up to 28 days without any Parliamentary approval and the Secretary of State’s power to designate priority content that is harmful will be set out in secondary legislation that reportedly requires less scrutiny from Members of Parliament (MPs) than the main bill.
Additionally, the codes of practice issued by Ofcom are laid before Parliament but get approved by default after 40 days.
These increased state censorship powers are far from the only negative aspect of the Online Safety Bill. It also introduces new criminal “harmful communications” and “false communications” offenses, further empowers Big Tech, and more.
What They Got & What We Lost
By Todd Hayen PhD | OffGuardian | April 6, 2022
Stop the party, folks, it’s not over until the fat lady sings, and she is only taking a break.
I’ve written about this premature euphoria several times, warning that we really haven’t won a thing, not even one battle, until some heads roll. And there are no rolling heads to be seen. Not even a cursory fall guy having his career destroyed due to all the blame thrown his way.
I thought at first Fauci was going to get this honour with his mysterious disappearance as a precursor to his public fall from grace. But I was wrong. He is only off somewhere private to lick his wounds, assuming he even considers himself wounded, which I rather doubt.
No, we have won no battle, not even a skirmish. The enemy just backed off a bit. We woke up one morning and they were gone. The hill we were supposedly fighting for was ours.
Really? It doesn’t seem like both sides were fighting for the same hill.
So what happened? I know I am preaching to the choir here. I think most of us have a pretty good idea what happened. The Ukraine/Russia incident makes clear the conditioning that Covid has accomplished over the population of the world.
Suddenly all of the focus shifted, suddenly a new enemy was in sight, much like enemies of old—at least an enemy we could see. It was actually quite astounding how quickly all the profile photos on Facebook changed from “I Got Vaccinated!” to the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine.
As we stand on our deserted Covid hill, waving our own flag, and wanting the enemy to at least acknowledge how clever we were to see through their lies and subterfuge we wonder where everyone has gone. “Yea!!” we shout, “we’ve won!!”
No, we haven’t, and not only have we not won, we have lost—big time. Sorry to break it to you (and like I said, I think most readers of OG know this, maybe you can share this article with all those who don’t even know we were in a fight).
It is beyond the scope of this article to list all of the things they have won, and all of the things we have lost, but I will take a stab at the ones that stand out to me. First of all I think it is important to point out the things many of us think we have won—like the rescinding of mandated mask wearing as the first example.
Most states, provinces, and even whole countries have removed mask wearing in public as a “rule, law, or regulation” or whatever you want to call it. In Canada this is true as well. However, you still must wear a mask on public transit, in medical facilities, and quite a few other places. Why? That’s a “ha ha” question. There never has been a reason why, and there isn’t now. And even as this restriction has been “removed” many people are still wearing masks—everywhere.
I am not sure how it is in other parts of the world, but here in Canada there is quite a large percentage of people still wearing masks, even those walking outdoors, or riding alone in their cars. This is the first example of “what they got”—blind obedience to the cause, even when the cause has officially been announced as being no cause at all.
The fear was created; the high morality of “following the authority for the good of the people” has been established. A superstitious effect follows the fear—wear a mask the same way one wears a talisman to ward off evil spirits (although that is probably more effective). A blind obedient habit follows the bowing down to authority. Soon people won’t even know why they first started wearing them, it is just a thing you do, like shaking hands when you meet someone (which we no longer do).
Of course the normies will say “why not? Why is wearing a mask so difficult to do?” Need I explain why? When it is used as a form of compliance to authority, when wearing one obliterates one of the prime ways humans communicate and socialize, when it is actually medically dangerous to wear one, and when there is absolutely no reason to—then we should get rid of them as soon as we can and should never have worn them to begin with.
The powers that ought not to be have won a very effective form of blind compliance, ready to implement at full force again with a snap of a finger. Not only are people still wearing them, it will take no effort at all to get the majority of the world’s population to don them en masse again.
They have also won, and we have lost, a sense of unsubstantiated fear of our fellow humans.
Social distancing has forced us into an unconscious avoidance of other people. I have not seen much handshaking going on, or even hugging. People now avoid each other, and I doubt if most of these avoidances are even conscious. This has established a deep sense of fear and loss of trust, which again makes us all easily manipulated. It will only take small insertions in the culture through media to basically push us anywhere they want us pushed.
The breakdown of social psychology is clearly part of the agenda, and I believe they can indeed count that as a “win”—a big one. The implications of this sort of thing are unconscionable, and range from a general disconnect from human interaction to massive unrest, impatience, and lack of tolerance—more violence, road rage, disputes, and tribal dissonances, not to mention higher rates of depression, anxiety, drug use, and suicide.
If we think of Orwell’s 1984 as any sort of playbook for this agenda, we can see the foundations laid for many of the more atrocious aspects of Big Brother’s world. The idea of continuous war raging somewhere in the world is certainly in place along with the confusion of which side to be on at any given moment. The propaganda is relentless and leaves us all in a sticky syrupy mess. Hate is an all-powerful stimulator for extreme nationalism and compliance to a singular narrative.
During Covid we were trained to accept nothing but one clearly defined truth, different perspectives were not allowed, as anything with a different view was immediately labeled as “misinformation,” “fake,” and “dangerous.”
There are no “second opinions” anymore, either a source of information is in line with the mainstream, or it is simply degraded as insanity, moronic, or “anti science.” There is no grey—only black and white.
During Covid we learned, through a very conscious manipulation, that there was only one way to see truth, and that polarized thinking can apply to anything the narrative wishes to apply it to. First, “all about Covid and vaccines” now “all about Ukraine and Russia.” Two very different events in nearly every way, yet each with one mainstream view that we all must be in alignment with.
The ease of applying censorship to nearly any situation is a huge win for them. Any contrary opinion has been all but obliterated—if information is labeled “mis” by the mainstream it is blocked. Contrary ideas and opinions on social media are deleted, those who are brave enough to speak out lose their jobs and their reputations are ruined.
Once we start marching to this drum—that anything that challenges the main stream narrative is false, fake, misinformation, dangerous or “anti science”—we are quite literally walking into a totalitarian state. After Covid this sort of censorship will just be that much easier to implement, and it will be that much easier to just go along with it, or worse, advocate it.
In more subtle areas we see the foundation firmly set for other agenda items such as Central Bank Digital Currency and digital ID’s, obviously the way having been paved by the infamous “vaccine passport.” The ground they have acquired through the Covid manipulation is clear, and substantial.
Anything they wish for in the future has been normalized by the events of the past two years, any radical demand made in the future has had its path greased by these events such as travel restrictions, bank closures (as punishment for supporting any sort of protest against the main stream narrative), forced medical intervention with no substantial medical purpose or reason, restrictions on gathering, redefining words in order to fit the agenda, on and on and on.
Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you are willing to go, the “powers that ought not to be” could possibly have accomplished the initial stages of ridding the world of millions of “useless eaters” through the wholesale injection of god knows what into billions of bodies.
We may be seeing only the tiny tip of the iceberg with the thousands of deaths and injuries undoubtedly caused by the “vaccines”—probably effects the makers of the injections see as a minor annoyance when the major event could very well be the deaths of millions spread out over generations (or much less!)
If true, that’s a BIG win for them!—and an equally big loss for us. There is no turning this one around, no stopping it, as it has already been done and all we can do is sit and await the results.
So we have really won nothing, and we have lost an awful lot. In many regards what they have won is really just the beginnings of the foundation of what is yet to come. No one builds a nice foundation to a house without the intention of building the rest of the house that sits upon it. Even though a concrete slab isn’t usually much to look it, it has all the preparations built into it that allow a very complex structure to sit on it. The detail of that structure is yet to be built.
I am afraid it is going to be a very big and complex house and with its eventual erection the beautiful view we used to enjoy will be blocked—a view of freedom and creativity.
These two ingredients have always been necessary to ensure a future that all humans have the right to pursue—a future of life, liberty and happiness, all things surely worth fighting for. Stay on that hill; the battle has only just begun.
Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies.
UK censorship bill tasks Big Tech with deciding when something is “illegal” or “fraudulent”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 6, 2022
The UK’s current effort to censor online speech, the Online Safety Bill, will give the government broad powers to dictate content that the tech giants have to censor and empower the police to arrest people over what they post online.
While these new powers are chilling, they are at least still tied to the UK justice system which guarantees citizens the right to a fair trial and the right to appeal.
But some provisions in the Online Safety Bill skip the police and the courts entirely and instead require the tech giants, some of which are monopolies, to act as enforcers of speech.
The bill deputizes Big Tech to seek out and prevent their users from encountering “illegal” and “fraudulent” content without any oversight from the police or the courts. This gives these powerful tech platforms the freedom to brand something illegal or fraudulent without any of the checks and balances of the justice system.
The bill also gives these tech giants additional powers that aren’t granted to police and the courts, such as the power to set their own rules around how they’ll deal with harmful content. All they have to do is state how they’ll tackle harmful content in their terms of service and then apply these provisions in their terms consistently.
These Big Tech companies already censor millions of posts each year for supposedly being harmful. With their additional powers and the threats of punishment in the Online Safety Bill, the number of censored posts is likely to be even higher if the bill comes into force.
Although the Online Safety Bill does require platforms to give users the right to appeal content takedowns, these appeals are far more centralized than the right to appeal a UK judicial decision. Under the UK justice system, citizens have the right to appeal decisions and have them reviewed by independent judges. Under the Online Safety Bill, citizens have to appeal to the tech companies that took down their content.
By deputizing Big Tech, the Online Safety Bill also creates a dystopian censorship alliance between these powerful companies and the UK government. The government can dictate its censorship requirements directly to its Big Tech enforcers without the police gathering any evidence of an alleged offense and without prosecutors gaining a conviction in a court of law or even a court order.
These provisions that skip the police and the courts and give the tech giants new enforcement powers in the UK are just one of the many aspects of the Online Safety Bill that throttles UK citizens’ civil liberties. Other provisions in the bill take aim at privacy and give large media companies benefits that aren’t afforded to regular citizens.
You can get a full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.
You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.
The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.
Proposed UK law will jail people whose speech causes “psychological harm” with “no reasonable excuse”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 5, 2022
The UK’s Online Safety Bill, a sweeping online censorship law that’s currently making its way through Parliament, will force Big Tech platforms to censor some categories of content that the government has deemed to be “harmful” and will introduce new criminal offenses for posts that are deemed to cause “harm” without a “reasonable excuse.”
The bill gives the Secretary of State new powers to brand some content as harmful and platforms that fall under the scope of the bill’s regulations have to prevent children from encountering this content and allow adults to “increase their control over harmful content.”
Not only does the badly-written Online Safety Bill base most of its censorship requirements and these new criminal offenses on the vague term harm but it also ambiguously extends beyond the idea of physical harm to the realm of what it calls “psychological” harm.
As if the definitions are not far-reaching enough, it further demands that simply the “risk” or “potential” of harm is to be treated “in the same way as references to harm.”
The examples of harm that are listed in the bill are equally ambiguous – such as; when “individuals act in a way that results in harm to themselves or that increases the likelihood of harm to themselves.”
Another badly-worded and wide-ranging example includes; “where, as a result of the content, individuals do or say something to another individual that results in harm to that other individual or that increases the likelihood of such harm (including, but not limited to, where individuals act in such a way as a result of content that is related to that other individual’s characteristics or membership of a group).”
These unclear and far-reaching definitions not only trample over the free speech rights of the British public, but also make it impossible for platforms to determine how to comply with the bill. That’s because many posts could be considered harmful under such broad and flighty definitions, especially when combined with the postmodern idea that speech can be psychologically harmful and with increasing sections of the public that expect to be coddled.
Adding to the lack of clarity, just days before the final bill was published, the UK Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Secretary of State Nadine Dorries, one of the main proponents of the bill, has contradicted the bill’s own wording.
Dorries tried to defend the bill by saying those who fear that “the Government wants to ban legal content if it ‘upsets’ or ‘offends’ someone” have a “complete misunderstanding” of the bill.
Dorries even tried to argue that some of the bill’s provisions would actually reduce the risk of platforms being pressured into removing legal content by activists “who claim that controversial content causes them psychological harm.”
However, in the era of safe spaces, the vague definitions leave the notion of determining psychological harm open to wide interpretation, likely causing platforms to play it safe and over-censor speech to avoid facing the whims of whichever government is in power.
This lack of clarity around the definition of harm also extends beyond the censorship requirements in the bill. There are two new criminal offenses in the Online Safety Bill that reference this term – a “harmful communications offence” and a “false communications offence.”
The harmful communications offense defines harm as “psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress” and describes a harmful communication as intentionally sending a message to “cause harm to a likely audience,” – ominously adding; when there’s “no reasonable excuse.”
It comes with a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
The false communications offense describes a false communication as sending a message that contains “information that the person knows to be false” with the intention of causing “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” when there’s “no reasonable excuse.”
It comes with a maximum penalty of 51 weeks in prison.
The UK’s police forces are already internationally infamous for using another vague and subjective term, “hate,” to justify adding people’s podcasts and tweets to their register of over 120,000 “non-crime hate incidents.” And with these new criminal offenses outlined in the bill, the police would have the power to arrest and charge UK citizens who are accused of causing someone “psychological harm” with speech that would be legal if it was communicated offline.
The censorship requirements and new criminal offenses related to harmful content are some of the many threats to civil liberties posed by this Online Safety Bill. It also threatens privacy and gives larger media outlets special exemptions that aren’t afforded to regular UK citizens.
You can get the full overview of all the free speech and privacy threats posed by the Online Safety Bill here.
You can see a full copy of the full Online Safety Bill here.
The bill is currently making its way through Parliament and you can track its progress here.
Lockdowns were not just an untested public health measure. They were a new paradigm of governance.
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | April 4, 2022
From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.
While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them.
Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968, 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lockdown entire populations. And we did not do this because it does not work. In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.
These devastating economic consequences were not the only major societal shifts ushered in by lockdowns. Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?
What emerged during lockdowns was not just a novel and untested method of trying to control a pandemic by quarantining healthy people. If we view lockdowns outside of the immediate context in which they supposedly functioned in early 2020, their real meaning comes into focus.
Changes ushered during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment “in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play,” as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. This new paradigm began to emerge in the wake of September 11, 2001.
The basic features were already sketched back in 2013 in a book by Patrick Zilberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, called “Microbial Storms,” (Tempêtes microbiennes, Gallimard 2013). Zilberman’s description was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.
Already in 2005, for example, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu (avian influenza) would kill 2 to 50 million people. To prevent this impending disaster, WHO made recommendations that no nation prepared to accept at the time—including population-wide lockdowns. Based upon these trends, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.
Even earlier, in 2001, Richard Hatchett, who served as a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council, was already recommending obligatory confinement of the entire population. Dr. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an influential entity coordinating global vaccine investment in close collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry. CEPI is a brainchild of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Like many others, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war,” on the analogy to the war on terror. I confess that I took up the martial rhetoric early in the pandemic: in a March 2020 piece entitled, “Battlefield Promotions,” I issued a call to action encouraging medical students to stay involved in the covid fight after they had been sent home. While the piece had some merit, I now regret my deployment of this military metaphor, which was misguided.
A kind of overbearing medical terror was deemed necessary to deal with worst-case scenarios, whether for naturally occurring pandemics or biological weapons. Agamben summarizes the political characteristics of the emerging biosecurity paradigm:
1) measures were formulated based on possible risk in a hypothetical scenario, with data presented to promote behavior permitting management of an extreme situation; 2) “worst case” logic was adopted as a key element of political rationality; 3) a systematic organization of the entire body of citizens was required to reinforce adhesion to the institutions of government as much as possible. The intended result was a sort of super civic spirit, with imposed obligations presented as demonstrations of altruism. Under such control, citizens no longer have a right to health safety; instead, health is imposed on them as a legal obligation (biosecurity).
This is precisely the pandemic strategy we adopted in 2020. Lockdowns were formulated based on discredited worst-case-scenario modeling from the Imperial College London, which predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S.
As a consequence, the entire body of citizens, as a manifestation of civic spirit, gave up freedoms and rights that were not relinquished even by the citizens of London during the bombing of the city in World War II (London adopted curfews but never locked down). The imposition of health as a legal obligation was accepted with little resistance. Even now, for many citizens it seems not to matter that these impositions utterly failed to deliver the public health outcomes that were promised.
The full significance of what transpired over the last two years may have escaped our attention. Perhaps without realizing it, we just lived through the design and implementation of a new political paradigm—a system that was far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously done by Western nations.
Under this novel biomedical security model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy, nor the communist nations of the east, ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.
Social distancing became not just a public health practice but a political model and the new paradigm for social interactions, “with a digital matrix replacing human interaction, which by definition from now on will be regarded as fundamentally suspicious and politically ‘contagious’,” in Agamben’s words.
For the sake of health and human flourishing, this new normal should never be normalized.
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From the Archives
Sanctions, War and the Policy of Dual Containment
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH | March 17, 2008
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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