Blowing in the wind
Climate Discussion Nexus | January 6, 2021
Supposedly the very active Atlantic hurricane season in 2020 was more proof that global warming is upon us. As you will recall, when there was a long hiatus in major hurricanes making landfall in the United States the theory was fine-tuned to say warming decreases hurricanes. But then a string of hurricanes hit and the theory switched back. Except for one small thing: last year was actually a quiet one for… um… hurricanes.
As Paul Homewood writes on his Not A Lot of People Know That blog, or mostly shows in pictures worth thousands of words, the total number of hurricanes recorded by early September 2020 with wind speed over 64 knots was 42 and the number with wind speed over 96 was 18. And while neither number is unprecedented, they are certainly toward the low end of the range from 1980 on. Just as the U.S. saw fewer tornadoes than usual last year. (And for that matter wildfires are down not up over the past few decades; stand by for news that warming reduces wildfires and it’s bad.)
At least 11 years since 1980 saw 60 or more hurricanes recorded globally with wind speed over 64 knots, and at least that many saw 30 or more with wind speed over 96 knots. The period from 1990 to 1998 seems to have been especially bad, if one regards hurricanes as in some way “bad”. (Yes, we realize you don’t want one hitting your home town. But ecosystems are complicated things and it may well be that a healthy planet is one that sees periodic destructive wind storms. Again beware the alarmist trope that all effects of warming are bad and all bad things are effects of warming.)
The overall pattern is, you will not be surprised to hear, complicated. There seems to be a downward trend from the mid-1980s at least until 2014, with a bit of a bump in 2016 and another in 2019.
Some alarmists solved that problem the old-fashioned way, namely by ignoring it. Thus in his lyrical pro-lockdown piece in the Guardian (see below) their global environment editor Jonathan Watts raved about how “2020 saw record smoke plumes from bushfires in Australia, a freakishly protracted heatwave in Siberia, the most tropical storms ever registered in the Atlantic, devastating blazes in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, the highest flood levels recorded in east Africa, unusually devastating cyclones and typhoons in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the hottest northern hemisphere summer in history, and temperature records in the Antarctic and the Arctic, where winter ice formation was delayed for longer than in any season in the satellite era.” But we predict a more subtle approach.
The consensus view will be that warming decreases hurricanes except when it increases them. And which way the switch is thrown at any given point will depend not on trends, careful measurement or rigorous analysis of causation but basically on whatever seems to be happening right now.
The Guardian can try rewriting the history of White Helmets’ James Le Mesurier, but the truth is there for all to see
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | October 30, 2020
A fetishistic Guardian article seeks to rehabilitate the life and death of the former British soldier turned ‘humanitarian’, but cannot explain away his lavish lifestyle, missing money, and all the other financial irregularities.
On the morning of November 11, 2019, James Le Mesurier, founder of Syria’s controversial White Helmets, was found dead in Istanbul. Since then, the Western establishment has struggled to get its story straight on the man, his professional history, the group he founded, and how he died.
The latest example of mainstream media narrative management in the ever-mysterious case came in the Guardian on October 27, in the form of a 6,000-word hagiography of Le Mesurier, authored by its veteran Middle East reporter Martin Chulov.
Many at this point will be familiar with the idolatrous portait it paints of its subject – a heroic humanitarian committed to benevolent causes who saved untold lives, tragically driven to suicide by a “disinformation campaign led by Russian and Syrian officials and peddled by pro-Assad bloggers, alt-right media figures and self-described anti-imperialists.” Nonetheless, it marks the first time the significant controversy surrounding his financial dealings has ever been explored, let alone mentioned, by a British news outlet.
In July this year, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published a long-read of its own, explosively revealing how, three days prior to his death, Le Mesurier ‘confessed’ via email to the White Helmets’ many international donors, who’d funded the group to the tune of hundreds of millions over the years, that he’d committed fraud.
The disclosure was prompted by an internal audit by a Dutch accountant of the finances of Mayday, the foundation started by Le Mesurier to find, train, and support the White Helmets. The audit found, among other things, that he had been paying himself and his wife, long-time UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) operative Emma Winberg, “excessive” salaries and supplementing the totals with unjustifiably vast cash bonuses; that his employment of his wife represented a potential conflict of interest; and that he might be guilty of tax evasion.
While claiming this malfeasance wasn’t intentional, Le Mesurier took full and sole responsibility, and expressed fears that further investigation could expose yet more “mistakes and internal failures.”
Monetary misconduct
Damning stuff indeed, but De Volkskrant’s seismic disclosures have been curiously ignored by all other Western media outlets until now. The Guardian’s article deals with the damning revelations, both directly and indirectly – Le Mesurier, whom Chulov knew personally, and with whom he clearly maintained an intense affinity, is acquitted on all charges. Indeed, the White Helmets founder is said to have simply “unravelled under the weight of claims that would later prove to be false.”
The author is at pains throughout to frame “disinformation” as fundamental to Le Mesurier’s untimely demise, in terms of causing him immense “stress,” which led to him “disintegrating” mentally, damaging his reputation and that of the White Helmets in the eyes of world opinion, and, in turn, stoking erroneous suspicions in donor countries that he and his company were engaged in various improper activities.
The question of how a battle-hardened military veteran could be so deleteriously impacted mentally and emotionally by “attacks on Russian television and social media,” particularly if they were entirely without substance, is unasked and unanswered.
There’s little doubt Le Mesurier wasn’t in a good state during his final weeks. It’s been widely reported he was taking sleeping pills and psychiatric medication. Less well amplified were Turkish news reports alleging he and his wife had “fought violently” while dining out together the day before his death.
Chulov alleges “a distressed Le Mesurier” told friends just before he died that claims of Mayday’s monetary misconduct “seemed to come from nowhere.” In fact, questions about what purpose the vast sums donated to the company were put to, and where they all ultimately ended up, had long circulated.
While his article states that donor countries maintained their support for the White Helmets “despite the disinformation surrounding the group’s work,” this isn’t true. In September 2018, the Dutch government ended its backing, after a damning Ministry of Foreign Affairs report outlined serious concerns about Mayday’s financial practices, including an almost total lack of oversight over, and even awareness of, how its money entered Syria, and precisely whose pockets it eventually lined.
However, Chulov feels confident dismissing any and all suggestions of embezzlement, for he’s in possession of a report by forensic auditors Grant Thornton, conducted at the request of Mayday’s donors, which concluded there was “no evidence of misappropriation of funds” by Le Mesurier and Winberg.
Except that he isn’t, because it hasn’t been made public, at donors’ express request. Instead, he relies on the claims of a nameless “source familiar” with the report – which could conceivably, of course, be Winberg herself.
Excessive salaries plus bonuses
It’s clear Grant Thornton’s report isn’t an unalloyed clean bill of health, either – the auditors found “significant gaps in the administrative organization and internal control environment of Mayday” and “identified significant cash transactions that have not been (fully) recorded in the cash books and/or general ledger.”
Moreover, due to Mayday’s “informal” working environment, many key discussions took place “orally and over WhatsApp,” meaning auditors “had to reconstruct a number of financial events and are unable to provide certainty in those cases.”
Chulov is quick to dismiss the significance of these failings as nothing more than “shoddy” bookkeeping, contending “auditors found nothing to support the far more serious allegations made” against Le Mesurier – despite apparently not having actually read the report himself.
Likewise, he concedes Mayday’s executive salaries had been “higher than industry standards”, although his anonymous source familiar with the report is on hand to reassure him, and readers, “they were not off-the-scale high.” In 2017, Le Mesurier informed the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was paying himself a salary of €24,000 per month, before bonuses – several orders of magnitude higher than the designated salary ceiling at other Dutch government-funded enterprises. And considerably more than the $150 a day the White Helmet rescuers on the ground received.
References to Le Mesurier founding three separate companies named ‘Mayday Rescue’ – Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai, Mayday Search and Rescue Training and Consultancy Services Ltd in Turkey, and Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation in the Netherlands – are predictably absent from the Guardian’s article.
Accounts aren’t publicly available for any of them – the Dutch entity, while not registered as a charitable organisation, is characterised as being ‘without commercial enterprise’, so doesn’t have to file accounts at all. Dutch ‘stichtings’, or foundations, are openly advertised by Dutch law firms as ideal ways for wealthy individuals and corporations to minimize tax liabilities and distribute funds internationally.
The company nonetheless complied with governance and transparency requirements, appointing a Secretary and Treasurer. As such, the UK government could plausibly claim that Mayday Rescue, to which London funneled £43 million between 2015 and 2018, was, to the best of its knowledge, fully above board.
Tax havens and tangled webs
Except the £43 million actually went to Mayday Rescue FZ-LLC in Dubai – something only begrudgingly admitted by the FCO in March 2019, in response to a Freedom of Information request, after much heel-dragging and obfuscation.
Dubai is a notorious tax haven, and FZ-LLCs – Free Zone Limited Liability Companies – aren’t subject to any taxes on dividends, so they can be used to easily and opaquely repatriate profits. The entities are required to maintain accounting records, which can be inspected by authorities, but aren’t required to file accounts of any kind.
It may be significant that one of Stichting Mayday Rescue Foundation’s three directors, alongside Le Mesurier and Winberg, was a British Army veteran, Rupert Davis, who, in April 2016, founded the company Chameleon Global. Dissolved in October 2020, it was categorised as dormant – that is, non-operational – for the duration of its existence. Le Mesurier also founded other companies, with indeterminate connections to his assorted Mayday entities. For instance, in April 2017 he established Sisu Global BV in the Netherlands. It has never filed accounts, in breach of Dutch law. Le Mesurier resigned in November 2018, but Winberg apparently remains a director.
In January 2019, Le Mesurier registered My Zahara Limited as a dormant company in northern England, at an address belonging to a company formation agent specializing in, among other things, compliance with money laundering regulations, suggesting he intended to use the firm to repatriate money from his overseas firms.
Davis was also, until April 2019, connected to Sisu Global BV, a company in the Netherlands founded by Le Mesurier in April 2017. It has never filed accounts, in breach of Dutch law. Le Mesurier himself resigned from it in November 2018. Winberg apparently remains a director.
Chulov also, again predictably, dismisses as “disinformation” allegations that the White Helmets were “created by governments determined to remove Assad from power”; that Le Mesurier was “an agent of western intelligence, using a rescue organisation as a Trojan horse for regime change”; and that the organization was in any way affiliated to violent extremist groups.
What are matters of public record, however, is that the White Helmets were funded by the very governments avowedly committed to ‘regime change’ in Syria via covert and overt means; that Le Mesurier’s professional history included spells as a military intelligence operative; and that the group has openly collaborated with the Al-Nusra Front, among other jihadist elements, and engaged in violent activity.
In a June 2015 speech discussing his founding of the White Helmets, Le Mesurier cited a market research agency study which found that, in fragile environments, security forces garner low levels of public trust while first responders have the highest as a key motivating factor in his decision to establish a “humanitarian aid group.”
Untold millions for propaganda
That the White Helmets’ benevolent image was very carefully constructed and promoted by a government attempting to achieve ‘regime change’ is amply underlined by FCO documents leaked by hacktivist collective Anonymous.
The documents reveal that ARK, a firm founded by FCO veteran Alistair Harris where Le Mesurier worked between 2011 and 2014, played a pivotal role in promoting the White Helmets, developing“an internationally focused communications campaign to raise global awareness” of the group to “keep Syria in the news.”
Along the way, ARK, among many other endeavors, produced a documentary on the White Helmets, and ran its various social media accounts, among them the Facebook page for Idlib City Council, at one time mooted as a potential interim government to replace Bashar Assad. When Al-Nusra took the city, the White Helmets were filmed celebrating the ‘victory’ with the group’s fighters in its main square.
ARK profited to the tune of untold millions of pounds from these and other information-warfare efforts. The same illicit file tranche also reveals InCoStrat, founded by none other than Emma Winberg, also reaped large bounties for manipulating public perceptions about Syria, within and without the country. In one file, the firm boasted of surreptitiously “initiating events to create media effect” and of “using media to create events.”
One example of the former strategy saw InCoStrat produce mock Syrian currency, in three denominations, imploring Syrians to “be on the right side of history.” It was intended to ensure that international opinion remained arrayed against Assad, at a time “media attention has shifted almost exclusively towards ISIS and some influential voices are calling for co-operation with the Syrian regime to combat ISIS.”
The file states: “The notes are due to be smuggled into regime-held parts of Syria once formal clearance has been authorized by HMG officials … We will engage the international media to create a story around the event … The message to the regime [is] covert but active resistance continues.”
Another document indicates that Winberg’s InCoStrat also established Basma – “a media platform providing human interest stories and campaigns that support [UK government] policy objectives” – and engaged in propaganda operations in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, training and maintaining a network of journalists who were “instrumental in reporting on events in Basra.”
On the subject of propaganda, establishment efforts to rehabilitate Le Mesurier are scheduled to continue apace in future.
Starting on November 9, the BBC will transmit a 15-part radio documentary on Mayday Rescue. Over the summer, Chloe Hadjimatheou, a reporter on the project, approached a number of journalists and researchers who’d publicly raised questions about the White Helmets, asking if they wished to contribute to the program.
Several of the individuals targeted subsequently published their correspondence with Hadjimatheou, showing that the program’s preordained agenda and objectives couldn’t be more blatant.
What is clear is that any suggestion Le Mesurier was a British intelligence operative surreptitiously attempting to foster regime change in Syria, or that the White Helmets weren’t an entirely benevolent, independent humanitarian organization will be rubbished, and all voices critical of the group will be smeared as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian and Syrian governments.
By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow Kit on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
Election reporting
IRRUSIANALITY | September 14, 2020
Leaders of Russia’s ruling United Russia party were in a good mood on Sunday night as the results of the country’s local elections streamed in. ‘You have received the votes of the people, who trust you’, party chairman (and former Prime Minister and President) Dmitry Medvedev told candidates. ‘All our [gubernatorial] candidates … will win in the first round … and likewise in the regional and municipal parliaments United Russia will form a majority in every region without exception’, added party general secretary Andrei Turchak.
Turchak wasn’t exactly right about the results, but not far off. United Russia has reason to be happy. Its candidates for governor were elected with thumping majorities, even in Irkutsk, where it had been predicted it might lose. And in city and regional elections, the party was consistently top, generally getting around 45% of the vote, some 30% or so above its nearest competitors, the Communists and LDPR.
And yet, that’s not what you’d think if you went by the stories in the Western media today, which focused almost entirely on miniscule gains by supporters of opposition activist Alexei Navalny. ‘Russia opposition makes gains in local elections,’ ran the headline on the BBC website. ‘Navalny allies win council seats as Putin’s party claims victory’, said that in the Guardian. ‘Alexei Navalny’s allies claim council wins in Russia local elections’, shouts Deutsche Welle. And so on. You’d imagine that the elections were indicators of some significant shift in the political tide.
So what were these great gains? Navalny-backed candidates won 2 seats in the city of Tomsk, and 5 in Novosibirsk. That’s it. A grand total of 7 council seats. To be fair, it’s 7 more than they’ve ever had before, and so in that respect, it’s progress. But it’s hardly a significant result in the grander scheme of things. Across the country, United Russia governors were being elected with shares of the vote of 70 or so percent. Is ‘Opposition makes gains’ really the appropriate way of reporting the results? Methinks not, but it’s an interesting insight into the mentality of the Western press corps.
Navalny Novichok Poisoning: The (Very Unlikely) Story So Far
“Maybe the Russians failed on purpose because they want to scare us”
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | September 2, 2020
For those of you who haven’t been following the news – Russian politician (or “opposition figure”, as he is universally referred to in the Western press) Alexei Navalny was taken ill two weeks ago. It is now being reported he was “poisoned” with “novichok”.
Here’s a quick rundown of the official story as it currently stands (bearing in mind that, as with most “official stories” it will likely be subject to instant, contradictory and retroactive changes in the coming weeks):
- Alexei Navalny has never held any elected office, his political party doesn’t have a single MP in the Duma, and he polls at roughly 2% support with the Russian people.
- Despite this, and in the middle of an alleged “pandemic”, Vladimir Putin deems the man a threat and orders him killed.
- The State apparatus responsible for unnecessary and seemingly arbitrary acts of political murder decide to use novichok to poison him.
- This decision is taken in spite of the facts that a) Novichok totally and utterly failed to work in their alleged murder of the Skripals and b) It has already been widely publicly associated with Russia.
- Rather unsurprisingly, the novichok which didn’t kill its alleged target last time, doesn’t kill its alleged target this time either.
- Compounding their poor decision making, the Russians not only perform an emergency landing and take Navalny straight to a hospital for medical care.
- Despite Navalny being helpless and comatose in a Russian hospital, the powerful state-backed assassination team make no further attempts on his life.
- In fact, seemingly determined to under no circumstances successfully kill their intended victim, the Russian government, allow him to leave the country and get medical help from one of the countries which previously accused them of using novichok.
- To absolutely no one’s surprise, the Germans claim to have detected novichok in Navalny’s system.
- Vladimir Putin and the Russian government are immediately blamed for the attempted murder.
If all this seems unlikely to you, don’t worry Luke Harding is here to explain it all.
He doesn’t have any evidence, of course. Instead we get sentences like this one [our emphasis]:
Over the past decade Moscow has produced and stockpiled small quantities, western intelligence agencies believe.
However, never let it be said that Luke isn’t aware of the contradictions in his story:
One other unresolved question is why Moscow granted permission for Navalny to be treated abroad, knowing that sooner or later the novichok inside his body would be detected.
But he has an answer for this:
The logical conclusion: Moscow wants the world to know.
You see, Putin wants everyone to know he did it, so he’s making it obvious. And the Kremlin’s denials are being done with “a wink and smile”. This must be some new meaning of the word “logical” I wasn’t previously aware of.
One wonders what the Russians would have done if the novichok had worked as intended, and killed Navalny before he could get to a hospital.
They couldn’t send him to Berlin then, so who announces the novichok was there? Do they do it themselves?
Oh well, at least now people will have something to talk about that isn’t the rapidly crumbling Covid narrative.
Fatal polar bear attack in Svalbard unfairly blamed on lack of sea ice
By Susan Crockford | Polar Bear Science | August 28, 2020
A fatal polar bear attack in Svalbard, in the early hours of 28 August 2020 just outside the main town of Longyearbyen, is being unreasonably blamed on lack of sea ice. Details of the attack show it was made by a three year old male: such subadult bears are historically responsible for most attacks on people and they are known to be especially dangerous. It looks to me like someone should have seen this tragedy coming and stepped in to prevent it.
I will update this story as more information comes in but see below for the details known so far.
The attack
Camping site across from the airport in Longyearbyen. IcePeople
Details of the attack, from the CBC (28 August 2020), my bold:
A polar bear attacked a camping site Friday in Norway’s remote Svalbard Islands, killing a 38-year-old Dutch man before being shot and killed by onlookers, authorities on the Arctic island said.
Johan Jacobus Kootte was in his tent when it was attacked by the bear that killed him, deputy governor Soelvi Elvedah said. He was an employee of the Longyearbyen Camping site, where the attack occurred, the newspaper Svalbardposten said.
Kootte was rushed to the hospital in Longyearbyen where he was declared dead, Elvedah said.
The attack occurred just before 4 a.m. local time and was being investigated. No one else was injured, but six people — three Germans, one Italian, one Norwegian and one Finn — were hospitalized for shock, authorities said.
The polar bear was found dead in a parking lot by the nearby airport after being shot by onlookers, the governor’s office said in a statement posted on its website.
And from Icepeople (28 August 2020):
There have been at least four polar bears seen near Longyearbyen during the past week.
The bear that killed Kootte is a three-year-old male that was chased away from Hiorthhamn, a cabin across the bay from Longyearbyen, earlier this week, the governor announced Friday evening.
It is also the son of a female bear that was tranquilize [sic], along with her newest cub, and flown by helicopter to the northern part of Isfjorden after also making multiple visits the same location. The mother bear may be the same one that has made annual visits to the area in late summer and early fall, often with cubs, as part of her annual migration.
No other people at the campsite, who were all staying in tents, were physically injured by the polar bear, according to the governor. But six people were taken to the hospital in Longyearbyen and are being cared for by health personnel and city crisis managers.
An autopsy of the bear at a facility used by the governor is scheduled today. Because the fatality of a person was involved, the governor is requesting no photos of the bear be published by the media at this time.
The people at the campsite will be interviewed throughout the day as part of the investigation. The governor is asking people to avoid the area.
The campsite, typically open through early- to mid-September, was closed during the first half of the summer due to the COVID-19 crisis. While it is staffed during that period, and a building with kitchen and other facilities available, the campsite’s policy states guests are responsible for their own safety.
Although the campsite’s website states no bears have been at the site since the service building opened in 1985, a bear visited the designated bird sanctuary on the opposite side of the entrance road literally meters away (see YouTube video of visit at right) on July 29, 2011, only days after a fatal bear attack at a camp site about 40 kilometers away that was the most recent involving a person’s death in Svalbard.
Campsite policy states guests are not allowed to have loaded firearms there.
…
Nearly 40 comments were posted on the governor’s Facebook page during the hours following the attack, many of them expressing sympathy for the bear as well as the victim and other people there. At the top of those considered “most relevant,” Arek Stryjski, an experienced marine expeditioner in Svalbard, responded to someone upset about the lack of flare-alarm system by noting the risks it might pose in an area where large numbers of people might be present nearby.
“The camping in Longyearbyen is 500 meters from the airport terminal, (and) 100 meters from the parking and bus station,” he wrote. “Putting any flare alarms there will be dangerous for humans. It is miracle someone had loaded gun and more people where not hurt. What if it had attacked people who were leaving airport building?”
Van Dijk told Svalbardposten an electric fence was scheduled to be built around the campsite this year, and supplies arrived in March, but it was delayed when the COVID-19 crisis resulted in the shutdown of all visitors to Svalbard that same month.
“I was going to set up a three-wire electric fence with 200 poles around the entire campsite,” she told the newspaper.
So, there was no protection at the camp site from polar bears. And not only was the bear who perpetrated the attack a young bear who had never been on his own before but authorities knew he was out there, having been abruptly separated from his mother just two days before. Who could possibly not have seen a disaster coming? Sadly, the victim of the attack was sleeping in a tent on an exposed shoreline without an electric fence or a gun: he didn’t have a chance.
The Guardian (28 August 2020) offered this bit of additional insight (my bold):
“According to the local paper Svalbardposten, researchers at the local university field centre, Unis, avoid spending the night in tents near the shoreline – where the campsite is located – because of a recent increase in the presence of polar bears. “
Yet the BBC made this claim in their story on the incident (28 August 2020) about what unidentified ‘experts’ say about polar bears in Svalbard (my bold):
“Experts say polar bears’ hunting grounds have diminished as the Arctic ice sheet melts because of climate change, forcing them into populated areas as they try to find food.“
At least the writers at IcePeople talked to an actual polar bear specialist and included this quote from Norwegian researcher Jon Aars (my bold), who seems to be commenting on the fact that there were bears around in the first place:
Jon Aars, a polar bear expert with the Norwegian Polar Institute who frequently conducts research and advises the governor on polar bear incidents near settlements, told NRK the most recent incident most likely is part of a long-term trend of increasing bear activity near settlements due to vanishing sea ice elsewhere keeping them from tradition hunting sources.
“At this time of year, polar bears have extra challenges in obtaining food,” he said. “It has been a long time since there has been ice in the main hunting area, so there is less access to seals. So, the polar bear spends more time on land to find alternative food.”
I challenge this statement, given the details of this attack: “It has been a long time since there has been ice in the main hunting area.” As I show below, there was ice in the area only a few weeks ago and most bears should have been in excellent condition (bears easily traverse the short overland distance from the east coast of Spitzbergen to the area around Longyearbyen on the west coast).
No mention from Aars about the inherent danger from young bears, the separation of this particular young bear from his mother, or about the higher than average ice levels around Svalbard this year in particular – see my comments below.
Sea ice Svalbard this year
Far from having ‘low’ sea ice, Svalbard ice conditions have been heavier since last fall than they have been in decades. In March this year, Svalbard had more polar bear habitat than it did two decades ago at the same date. By early April, the ice was the highest it had been since 1988 and by the end of April, Svalbard still had the 6th-7th highest ice extent since record began in the late 1960s. There was also exceptionally thick first year ice to the north.
In other words, Svalbard polar bears have had better sea ice conditions leading into the summer season than they have had in decades. And by early July (see below), there was still ice off the east coast of Spitzbergen… Full article
The Miracle of Salisbury
By Craig Murray | June 16, 2020
It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation – as propagandists have done for millennia.
This particular piece of script from Episode 2 of The Salisbury Poisonings deserves an induction in the Propaganda Hall of Fame:
Porton Down Man: I’ve got the reports from the Bailey house
Public Health Woman: Tell me, how many hits?
Porton Down Man: It was found in almost every room of the house. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedrooms. It was even on the light switches. We found it in the family car too. But his wife and children haven’t been affected. I like to think of myself as a man of science, but the only word for that is a miracle.
Well, it certainly would be a miracle that the family lived for a week in the house without touching a light switch. But miracle is not really the “only word for that”. Nonsense is a good word. Bullshit is a ruder version. Lie is entirely appropriate in these circumstances.
Because that was not the only miracle on display. We were told specifically that the Skripals had trailed novichok all over Zizzis and the Bishops Mill pub, leaving multiple deadly deposits, dozens of them in total, which miraculously nobody had touched. We were told that Detective Bailey was found to have left multiple deadly deposits of novichok on everything he touched in a busy police station, but over several days before it was closed down nobody had touched any of them, which must be an even bigger miracle than the Baileys’ home.
Perhaps even more amazingly, as the Skripals spread novichok all over the restaurant and the pub, nobody who served them had been harmed, nobody who took their payment. The man who went through Sergei’s wallet to learn his identity from his credit cards was not poisoned. The people giving first aid were not poisoned. The ducks Sergei fed were not poisoned. The little boy he fed the ducks with was not poisoned. So many miracles. If God were not an Englishman, Salisbury would have been in real trouble, evidently.
The conclusion of episode two showed Charlie Rowley fishing out the perfume bottle from the charity bin at least two months in the timeline before this really happened, thus neatly sidestepping one of the most glaring impossibilities in the entire official story. I think we can forgive the BBC that lie – there are only so many instances of divine intervention in the story the public can be expected to buy in one episode.
It is fascinating to see that the construction of this edifice of lies was a joint venture between the BBC and the security services’ house journal, the Guardian. Not only is all round pro-war propagandist “Colonel” Hamish De Bretton Gordon credited as Military Advisor, but Guardian journalists Caroline Bannock and Steven Morris are credited as Script Consultants, which I presume means they fed in the raw lies for the scriptwriters to shape into miracles.
Now here is an interesting ethical point for readers of the Guardian. The Guardian published in the last fortnight two articles by Morris and Bannock that purported to be reporting on the production of the drama and its authenticity, without revealing to the readers that these full time Guardian journalists were in fact a part of the BBC project. That is unethical and unprofessional in a number of quite startling ways. But then it is the Guardian.
[Full disclosure. I shared a flat with Caroline at university. She was an honest person in those days.]
Again, rather than pepper this article with links, I urge you to read this comprehensive article, which contains plenty of links and remains entirely unanswered.
The Anti Slavery Mural is Back, Hopefully Forever.
By Gilad Atzmon | June 13, 2020
Hip Hop legend Ice Cube came under fire last week for posting an anti- racist image on Twitter in support of Black Lives Matter. The image was widely panned as ‘anti-Semitic’ by those who work hard to conceal images of slavery, oppression and abuse as soon as they gather that a member of their ethnic group may be complicit in such immoralities.
Following the killing of George Floyd, Ice Cube uploaded an image of a group of bankers sitting around a game board that rests on the bowed, naked backs of black slaves. “All we have to do is stand up and their little game is over” is the accompanying text.
This anti slavery image isn’t new. It first appeared as a mural by artist Mear One in London’s East End back in 2012 when it sparked a controversy. Some local Jews were offended and, of course, the local Labour council of the London borough of Tower Hamlets was quick to react. It called in the police and reportedly gave the owner of the property 28 days to remove it.
Jeremy Corbyn, supposedly an ‘anti racist’ initially voiced support for the mural and the artist behind it. Later, following pressure from Jewish groups, Corbyn reversed himself and apologized. The Guardian, once a respected Left leaning paper was also quick to cry foul and located the anti racist mural within the Elders of Zion-Nazi propaganda spectrum. Even the ultra Left Morning Star turned against the pro black/anti capitalist art “Bad Art and Bad Politics” is how our most dedicated ‘socialist’ paper referred to Mear One’s mural.
At the time Artist Mear One stated, loud and clear, that his “mural is about class and privilege… The banker group is made up of Jewish and white Anglos. For some reason they are saying I am anti-Semitic. This I am most definitely not… What I am against is class.”
It was also revealed at the time that out of the six bankers figures depicted in the mural (Lord Rothschild, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Aleister Crowley, Andrew Carnegie and Paul Warburg) – only two (Rothschild and Warburg) were Jewish. But none of that helped, our socialists, progressives and ‘Left’ icons left the black slaves to rot under the monopoly game board and stood firmly against Mear One’s art just because two of the bankers he depicted were Jewish.
What I want to understand today is how it is possible that the Labour council of Tower Hamlets, the ‘anti racist’ Jeremy Corbyn, the presumably multicultural ‘progressive’ Guardian, the ultra left Morning Star, or shall we say the entire Left/progressive spectrum all fell into the same trap, they turned their backs on Blacks and slavery and committed to the defence of the most horrendous abusive bankers known to man just because two of them were gifted (artistically) with a well endowed nose. One may wonder whether White Privilege is a valid notion as it becomes clear that Hooked Nose is by far the ultimate privilege. It literally allows for total impunity. You even get away with slavery, at least in the ‘Left’ realm.
Time to admit it publicly – in the face of Jewish sensitivities, the Left seems to collapse. Its solidarity with oppressed minorities evaporates. Indeed, if there is one thing the Left is really good at, it is betraying its core supporters. The Left has repeatedly betrayed the working class. Instead it adopted Identitarian politics that were set to break the working class into biologically oriented fragments (defined by skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, etc.). The Left even betrayed its own ideology dismantling its own philosophy of class politics that initially united us regardless of our gender, race or ethnicity. Embracing biologically oriented identification is, in practice, an adoption of Hitlerian ideology. Corbyn had been anti- banker, but he has often been very forgiving towards Jewish financiers such as the Rothschilds and George Soros. “Really important video which spells out the vile and destructive nature of antisemitic conspiracy theories,” is how Corbyn, as a Labour leader, described a horrendous video that presented the Rothschilds and George Soros as mere victims. Rothschild according to the video wasn’t even that rich.
Really important video which spells out the vile and destructive nature of antisemitic conspiracy theories. pic.twitter.com/Nm9xc8j7Vc
— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) March 1, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
For the Left, I am sorry to say it, the Blacks are solidarity pets. So are the Palestinians and other oppressed groups and minorities. I am afraid that this shameful divisive parade is not going to stop anytime soon. But Black community leaders have started to wake up.
Yesterday, members of African American Council were BOOED as they told protesters in Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone’ that they had ‘hijacked’ the Black Lives Matter movement by pushing other causes.
And there is some good news in this mural saga: 1. By now we know that art, like books, can be physically burned, it can be erased from walls, removed from exhibition: but beauty like the truth unveils itself against all odds. Mear One’s mural is with us forever and so is the memory of Corbyn/Guardian/Morning Star betrayal of the Blacks and their history.
2. Despite horrendous harassment from Jewish pressure bodies, the American Hip Hop star stood firm. Unlike Corbyn, Ice Cube answered his critics tweeting “what If I was just pro-Black?… I’ve been telling my truth.” I have always wondered why Corbyn didn’t answer his critics: ‘what if I were pro Palestinian rather than anti Jewish?’ The brainless veteran Labour leader couldn’t even figure this out.
Our world would look far better if our politicians in general and Left ones in particular had been just slightly more committed to truth. It would help if they had as much guts in their entire bodies as artists like Ice Cube have between their toes.
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Covid-19 & Depopulation Policy
By Dr. Kevin Barrett | AFP | January 16, 2021
What exactly is the New World Order (NWO)? Readers of this newspaper know that George H.W. Bush announced its advent on Sept. 11, 1991—exactly 10 years before the mother of all false flags. NWO researchers suspect that behind this nebulous yet ominous phrase lurks a plan for global governance by a handful of billionaire bankers and their hired guns.
In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins famously exposed the NWO’s main weapon: international usury. The banksters drown the world in exponentially increasing debt that is designed to be unpayable. When the victims start to default, the banksters threaten them with economic and military devastation. The victims are forced to hand over real resources—oil and gas, forests, farmlands, minerals, water, and future productivity—in return for “restructuring” payments of exponential interest on imaginary money that was created out of nothing, backed by nothing.
So what is the purpose of the New World Order? Obviously the NWO’s architects intend to consolidate more and more power in their own hands. Is that power an end in itself? Of course. But the NWO’s secretive accumulation of ever-increasing power since World War II may be driven in part by a perceived emergency: global overpopulation and resource depletion.
That is the thesis of Kevin Galalae, author of Killing Us Softly: The Global Depopulation Policy. … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves, their government, and their marvelous “family values”. Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the US drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies (ODE) are depraved enough to use. The US government speaks sternly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives), as opposed to the likes of American “precision” cruise missiles. This is indeed a shaky semantic leg to stand on, given the well-known extremely extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from American “smart” bombs, in almost all of the bombings listed below.
Moreover, Washington does not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons the US has regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate. … continue
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