Refuse A Vaccine? You’re Likely To Be Visited By A “Persuader”
By Richie Allen | February 5, 2021
Vaccine Minister Nadhim Zahawi said yesterday, that folks who haven’t taken up the offer of a vaccine, could get a knock on the door from council staff to “persuade” them to have it. He told MPs that he wanted to use local authority’s to find those who had refused the jab and determine what might then convince them. If that sounds sinister, it’s because it is. Very.
Zahawi went on to say that the NHS was already trying to “identify to individual level the people that we need to reach” to ensure that all over-70s had a chance to be vaccinated by February 15th. During a phone-in last Thursday, The Richie Allen Show spoke to 79 year old Ron, who said that he had received a phone call inviting him to come and be jabbed. When he politely said “no thanks”, he was told that he would be put on “the decline list.” Now that’s creepy. Why the need for a decline list unless you planned to use it to sanction those who have refused the vaccine? What might sanctions look like?
Zahawi’s comments came on the same day that Conservative MP Mark Harper, a member of The Covid Recovery Group, said that health care workers who refused the jab should not be allowed to work with vulnerable people. You are undoubtedly going to hear more of this in the days and weeks to come. “No Jab, No Job” is a catchphrase that rolls off the tongue. It’s everywhere now. And according to The Times this morning:
British officials have started work on a “vaccine passport” as Greece prepares to waive quarantine rules for tourists who can prove that they have been inoculated against coronavirus. A certification system is being planned, The Times has learnt. The Foreign Office, Department for Transport and Department of Health and Social Care are working on options for travellers to countries that may demand it as a condition of entry.
The gloves are off now and things are moving very quickly. We’re at peak lockdown fatigue. People have had enough and are beyond desperate to return to some semblance of a normal life. The government is dangling the vaccines and the health passports. It’s classic carrot and stick. No amount of money on earth could persuade me to have one of their vaccines. I’ll take my pleasure where I can find it and look forward to the knock on the door from “the persuaders.” That’ll be fun.
Richie Allen is the host of The Richie Allen Radio show, Europe’s most listened to independent radio show and is a passionate supporter of free speech.
Refuse bids from those ‘involved in Israeli war crimes’, legal groups tell UK rail construction company
MEMO | February 5, 2021
A new legal brief has deemed it legal for the company building the UK’s new high-speed railway, HS2 Ltd, to exclude firms “involved in Israeli war crimes” from its tender process.
Drafted by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights and the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), the legal brief states that the rail project is “legally entitled” to reject Spanish manufacturer Construcciones Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF)’s bid, on the grounds of “grave professional misconduct” and breaches of international law.
In 2019, CAF and the Israeli infrastructure company Saphir was chosen by Israel’s finance ministry to expand the settlement railway project, known as the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR).
CAF and Saphir won the $2 billion contract to extend the railway to more illegal Israeli settlements, particularly in occupied East Jerusalem.
Under international law, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are occupied territories and all Jewish settlements there are illegal.
CAF is one of five companies which have issued bids to secure a £2.75 billion ($3.76 billion) contract to supply high-speed trains to the HS2 rail project.
ELSC, an NGO based in Amsterdam which defends and empowers the Palestine solidarity movement in Europe through legal means, said companies “involved in war crimes should have no standing in public tenders.”
“HS2 Ltd has the legal right and a moral obligation to exclude CAF from the tender procedure,” said the group’s Programme Director Giovanni Fassina.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) national committee’s Europe campaigns co-ordinator, Alys Samson Estape, added: “The JLR project is part of the ongoing process of entrenchment of Israel’s apartheid, illegal settlement enterprise and theft of Palestinian land in and around occupied East Jerusalem.”
JLR is so blatantly illegal that other multinationals which had participated in the initial stages of bidding for the project, including Alstom, Siemens, Systra, Bombardier and Macquarie, withdrew from the call for tenders, leaving just two consortiums bidding.
“Public institutions, including the UK government, should exclude CAF from its public tenders due to its violations of international law until it stops profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation.”
Palestine Solidarity Campaign Director, Ben Jamal, explained: “All public contract authorities must discharge their responsibilities to cease complicity in ongoing violations of international law.”
“This means HS2 Ltd must exclude CAF, and any other company violating Palestinian human rights, from the bid to provide rolling stock.”
Bellingcat’s New Book ‘Whitewashes’ Manipulation of OPCW Report On Alleged Douma Attack
By Mohamed Elmaazi – Sputnik – 05.02.2021
A determination from the OPCW, that civilians in Douma, Syria were killed by chlorine gas canisters dropped from the sky, was undermined after internal documents revealed manipulation of the conclusions made by the expert team of inspectors who actually visited the site in question.
UK-based firm Bellingcat has come under heavy criticism for leaving out key information from it’s new book, regarding the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblower leaks in relation to the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria.
“The book [We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People] excludes key evidence, shown in [my Twitter] thread, that has emerged from both OPCW sources and leaked documents regarding how attempts were made to manipulate the Douma investigation and the scientific flaws in the final report”, Dr Piers Robinson of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies explained in response to a request for comment.Robinson laid out a detailed twitter thread accusing Bellingcat, which is credibly suspected of being linked to Western intelligence agencies, of whitewashing “fraudulent conduct within the OPCW” and engaging in an exercise in “deception though omission”.
The omissions from Bellingcat’s book mean that readers could be forgiven for never knowing that the controversy surrounding the OPCW report began when a member of the Fact Finding Mission to Douma discovered that their original interim report, agreed by the inspection team, was modified to make it look like chemical attack had occurred despite their conclusions to the contrary.
Bellingcat’s book also apparently omits reference to a panel discussion, with the former head of the OPCW, organised by the Courage Foundation, an organisation that supports whistleblowers.
Robinson outlines in his thread that the Courage Foundation panel “learned that an engineering study, sidelined by OPCW management, indicated that the damage seen [on a] chlorine cylinder and roof were not consistent with each other”.
Additionally, the panel learned that “a toxicology report by NATO chemical warfare experts had been suppressed come the final OPCW report”. This toxicology report “concluded that observed symptoms [of certain victims] were not consistent with chlorine gas poisoning them where they were found”
The omissions in the book continued, with Bellingcat being accused of ignoring support for the OPCW whistleblowers from Jose Bustani, the organisation’s former chief.
In doing so, Bellingcat “instead reinforces the attempt by OPCW senior management to smear some of its most experienced inspectors using a ‘leak investigation’ to spread lies and disinformation”, Robinson argues in his thread.
“The primary issue here is that Bellingcat are not properly independent of either western governments or indeed of elements within the OPCW itself”, Robinson told Sputnik. “They are clearly partial and yet Bloomsbury publishers has allowed this to be obscured and, predictably, for Bellingcat to present a manifestly partial description of the OPCW controversy”, he concluded.
In April 2018, allegations emerged of a chemical attack in the rebel-controlled area of Douma. The US, Britain and the EU accused the Syrian government of carrying out the attacks, and one week later launched strikes against the country, before any investigation was able to be completed. A team of experts from the OPCW ultimately conducted an onsite inspection of the site, 14 days after the alleged chemical attack, though the final report which concluded that chlorine canisters were likely dropped from the air, has since been marred in controversy.
The Syrian state and their Russian government supporters have always maintained that the alleged attack was staged by rebel forces in control of the region.
Britain’s ban on China’s global television network is a hostile and misguided move that will lead to retaliation from Beijing
By Tom Fowdy | RT | February 4, 2021
The UK communications regulator Ofcom has revoked the license of China Global Television Network (CGTN), banning it from broadcasting in the country. The channel, which was due to set up its new European headquarters in London, is accused of being editorially controlled by the country’s ruling Communist Party and thus violating broadcasting rules.
The UK has overplayed its hand with this vindictive action that demonstrates it is intent on following America’s anti-China foreign policy. When the strikeback comes, it will be more than just the BBC in Beijing’s crosshairs.
Just minutes after the Ofcom ban came through, China’s Foreign Ministry has asked the BBC to “apologise” for a report concerning Covid-19. This is a sign of things to come. In fact, it mirrors the same pattern of events from a year ago when Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, announced restrictions on Chinese media operating in the United States. This resulted in China expelling American journalists after having asked the Wall Street Journal to apologize for its coverage. The move, however, is clearly a political one, and undoubtedly a huge provocation in UK-China ties, and one which is bound to have enormous consequences, especially for the BBC’s content and coverage within China itself. The announcement comes conspicuously just a week after Beijing had declared non-recognition of UK British National Overseas (BNO) passports over controversy surrounding a migration plan for Hong Kongers.
And here’s what Britain doesn’t seem to realize. Whilst it is true that the media environment within China is tightly controlled, reciprocity matters nonetheless. The BBC is still operating and broadcasting in China, even if its reports are subject to some censorship. As a result, it is almost guaranteed that Beijing will take some form of reciprocal action, and given the BBC’s incredibly politicised coverage of China of late, it seems untenable that they wouldn’t.
Pompeo last year launched an assault on Chinese media operating in the United States. He implemented visa restrictions, demanded they reduce their numbers and made them register as diplomatic overseas missions. What even he didn’t do, however, despite his fanatical approach to Beijing, was kick them out completely or deny them a presence in America. He understood at the very least that freedom of speech was a staple of American values and that irrespective of differences between political systems, how a country’s media was treated was a medium of diplomacy. Therefore reciprocity, the idea of “tit for tat,” matters. Pompeo knew if he pushed too hard, American journalism within China, already walking on eggshells, would be finished altogether.
Not surprisingly, China retaliated. However, its diplomatic style was indirect, as opposed to explicit. Not long after Pompeo’s announcement, Beijing took issue with the Wall Street Journal, over a headline describing the country as “the sick man of Asia,” which it deemed to be derogatory, and demanded the publication apologise. The Journal did not, and so Beijing expelled a number of its reporters as punishment.
The timing of this UK-Sino row is not a coincidence. Beijing is already frustrated with the BBC behind the scenes, but because of diplomatic considerations chose to do nothing about it. As the above illustrates, a nation cannot simply expel journalists without justification – even China knows this. To do so is to violate a norm. History is already repeating itself.
However, Beijing is increasingly unhappy with the BBC. The broadcaster has been persistent in driving forwards the narrative on issues such as Xinjiang, including commissioning a report on allegations of forced labour which led to US sanctions against the cotton sector, and then yesterday producing a graphic set of interviews whereby Chinese authorities were accused of systematic sexual abuse of the Uyghur minority. For the sake of its relationship with London, Beijing has to date acted with restraint.
However, because the UK has acted first, China now has a political casus belli to take retaliatory actions targeting journalists who consistently broadcast unfavourable or misrepresentative stories about its internal affairs. The BBC is unquestionably on the top of that list, and Beijing’s demand for an apology from it shows what lies ahead.
Inevitably, the BBC will refuse and insist that its coverage is accurate and impartial, as it always does. Thus, like what happened with the Wall Street Journal a year ago, Beijing will close the doors on them in some way, reciprocating Britain’s action in banning CGTN. This may involve expelling a correspondent or removing the BBC’s right to appear on Chinese television altogether.
It is likely to go a lot wider than tit-for-tat media strikes. This sets UK-China relations on a collision course, affirming a growing view in Beijing that the UK is now a hostile country, intent on following America’s anti-China foreign policy. This will inevitably involve China subjecting Britain to the same harsh treatment it has meted out to Australia and Canada, involving sanctions on goods and the like.
Given that there were other options before banning, the UK has definitely overplayed its hand with this. Even Pompeo, of all people, knew better than to ban CGTN completely.
Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.
UK COVID Conundrum: The Mysterious Case Of Disappearing Flu
By Banson Wilcot PhD | Principia Scientific | January 27, 2021
At the end of 2020 many statisticians, doctors and independent scientists noticed something amiss about this extraordinary year. The Office of National Statistics, Public Health England shows that the numbers for death from influenza and those from Covid-19 are askew.
Despite the media and government pandemic presentations, we need to step back and consider the larger picture.
Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest for the trees, but perhaps we have succumbed to seeing a single tree and ignoring the rest of the forest.
Is the fact that one virus has suddenly been given a name, Covid-19, (with wildly hyped media coverage) taken our focus off the overall reality of the annual flu season group of viruses? Has one name and media hype highjacked our lives?
With the 2019–2020 flu season, there have been a number of reports of Covid-19 illnesses in the UK and USA well before the end of 2019. Just today there was a report of Covid-19 illnesses in China as early as August, 2019. [1A]
Until the introduction of the PCR test for Covid-19 in late February, Covid-19 cases and deaths did not exist. This gives the impression that the virus appeared just then, while it was undoubtedly present much earlier as part of the flu season, from numerous anecdotal reports. Various reports indicate symptoms typical of Covid-19 in the U.S. as early as November–December, 2019 and likely even earlier.
With growing attention given to the virus and the increasing availability of PCR testing, we started receiving regular accounts of the number “cases” of the virus. Stepping back a bit and looking at general numbers and ignoring the contentious PCR accuracy regarding positive and negative cases, we see an overall pattern that is very similar to past flu seasons. Cases of flu-like illness generally start in October/November and last until March or April in the UK [1].
The observation can be made that this fairly well describes the 2019–2020 flu season, including Covid-19. The 2019–2020 Covid-19 death numbers appear as a spike because there was no PCR test until about the middle of the flu season, giving the impression that Covid-19 physically appeared late in the season. No, the test appeared late in the season. Despite the testing results, the UK government actually declared the pandemic over in March, but then, oddly, imposed a lockdown a week or two later.
The government declaration of the pandemic’s end can be considered innocently valid and devoid of politics. The advent of lockdowns and more could then be considered political. [So often, when an event occurs, the first observations prove to be the most honest, while the spin and changes come later.]
Much confusion has been generated by different accounting systems regarding illnesses and deaths. There are disparities in the cause of death, whether with the virus or without, and with an over reliance on the PCR test. In addition, many Covid-19 cases were diagnosed solely from symptoms, ignoring the fact that such symptoms are often seen during the flu season.
The observation that some people lose their sense of smell and taste with Covid-19 clearly ignores that these effects occur in every flu season, but now people are told that this is diagnostic for Covid-19. [Dogs are animals and can have spots, but all spotted animals are not dogs.]
We have always taken these symptoms in stride and happily waited until our senses returned. Suddenly, these symptoms are unique and diagnostic of Covid-19. It simply defies reality. If they suddenly reported that you could get a flesh-eating disease from a hang-nail, we would suddenly start considering every incipient hang-nail as a life-threatening event, when, in fact, they are not.
No careful lines have been defined to tell whether deaths have been due to a single virus, multiple viruses, comorbidities (conditions already burdening an individual’s health), or a virus with complications, such as pneumonia. Bacterial pneumonia often has a chance to take hold when one’s lungs are compromised by a flu-type illness. [Note that subsequent pneumonia is not a comorbidity.] Curiously deaths from influenza in the US have recently dropped to about zero; more on this below. [2]
Making our understanding of illness and death in the UK and other regions more difficult are the inclusion of diagnoses determined solely by the PCR test and others solely by symptoms. It is very clear that the traditional symptoms of cold and influenza broadly overlap those of Covid-19, thus making definitive diagnoses very difficult. Add to this the purported rate of false positives from the PCR test (now +97% according to the WHO) [3] and accounting of nonlethal “cases” becomes what they call “problematic.”
To really eliminate the many possible confusions and conditions that can be placed on death rates and possible death causes, it is useful to step back and look at the overall death rate, from all causes, for a country or state. The focus here is on the UK, but the US also provides some guidance. [4]
First, the concept of a pandemic needs to be addressed. A pandemic is the movement of a disease, bacterial or viral, that moves around the world and has a higher than normal damaging effect. Until recently this was described as a higher than normal mortality. The definition has been changed at WHO’s website such that the flu season is now a pandemic despite death rates being within a normal range. [5] (It is also curious that the definition of herd immunity originally included the benefits of natural and vaccinated immunity, but the definition now only includes vaccinated immunity. Very curious.)
Flu season viruses move around the world every year, largely deriving from farms in Southeast Asia where flu-type viruses are exchanged and hybridized between fish, pigs, and chickens and eventually transmitted to farmers, thus starting the next round of viruses for the annual newly-defined “pandemic.” From teaching Environmental Science, I learned that there has been an effort to break this chain of virus evolution by encouraging farmers to specialize in only one major livestock, thus decreasing viral exchanges between these species. This virus hybridization (mixing) is the source of the H#N# marker recombinations that vaccine labs try to detect early for each new flu season and then attempt to offer appropriate vaccines.
The flu season in the tropics is actually all year round and, because of the humidity, virus transmission is low but constant. However, in the more temperate regions, transmission blossoms when Fall arrives and people start spending more time indoors, in a relatively closed environment, and closer to each other.
It is a bit counter intuitive that humidity (which goes with warm temperatures) decreases transmission rates. It is a good deal in the tropics, sunlight on clear days kills viruses and humidity is always on the job. Small water droplets containing virus, from speaking, coughing, sneezing, and even breathing, tend to gain weight under humid conditions and fall to the ground more quickly than under dry conditions.
Flu season in the Southern hemisphere appears to mirror the Northern hemisphere, but flu viruses are likely introduced to the south by air travel during their summer and, thus, possibly starts and dilutes their six-month later flu season over a longer period.
For all of this, it is very difficult to see the forest for the tree (Covid-19, highlighted by the PCR test), but one statistic that sums up and ignores all the various causes of death and various biases in categories is the overall death rate of a country or state [4], such as the UK, which is a well-defined population with good reporting capabilities. [6]
There are some interesting aspects to death rates. Again, from Env. Sci. teaching, when a heat wave hits a city, as happened in Paris a number of years ago, the death rate rises as people succumb to the physiological burden of heat. However, after the heat wave is gone, the death rate tends to dip below normal for a time. This indicates that the heat wave took people who were already very frail and likely to die in the near future, in a couple of weeks or months, the old “one foot in the grave,” which is not an inaccurate description in many cases..
With cold snaps, there is also a spike in the death rate, but after it is over, there is no dip in the death rate, as it goes back to normal. This is because cold does not discriminate and kills all ages. Heat tends to impose a physiological burden on those already heavily burdened, but cold is a much simpler core temperature problem that is a critical problem for all ages.
That said, is there anything we can learn by comparing the death rates from the last year of “the Covid” and previous years? Focusing mainly on the UK as a single, well-defined population and putting aside all reporting bias and possible cause of death confusions, what do the overall death rates tell us?
It has been speculated, not unreasonably, that many more people died from Covid-19 at home, fearful, unwilling, unable to go to hospital, and thus not counted in the Covid death total. However, overall deaths in the UK in the last year would also include those who died at home. Overall deaths effectively eliminates all biased death factors and includes deaths not immediately reported.
The excess total deaths for the UK show a well-defined peak in the 2nd quarter of 2020, from mid-March to mid-May. Looking at the age break-down, it is clear that those over 45 and particularly over 65 were most susceptible to whatever virus or viruses of the flu season were making people ill. The rest of the year showed a low (normal) death rate that was low until Fall, when the new flu season arrived, which showed then a broader peak more similar to a flu season. [1]
It is a realism that every year more people have aged or developed infirmities that make them susceptible to a flu-like illness and/or complications. The fact that there is an annual peak does not indicate unusual illness or mortality; it’s the flu season that we have had for many years.
We need to resist the temptation to think that we are seeing something new in our world. By the same token, with a focus on flu-type infections and the elderly, it is easy to conclude just from the effective hyping of such deaths that many people are dying.
Elderly with complications die from complications all year round, just more in the flu season and this is very usual. It is curious that suddenly the public has been sensitized to the elderly death rate, as if it was a new thing. Suddenly, a virus is singling out the elderly, while, in fact, the elderly are always at risk, while the risk to other age groups varies from season to season.
It is also clear that the overall death rate in 2020 was exceeded by the five years of 1999-2003. [2] I need to define the death rate here, as it is based on the deaths per thousand people, which eliminates the fact that populations were lower in earlier years. It’s a given that larger population might have a higher death total from a given disease, but not a higher death rate. Diseases work on the susceptible individuals of a population and, thus, it is a proportion of the population that becomes ill or dies. [6]
That said, how does the death rate in the UK for 2020 compare to previous years? It is clear that the death rate in the UK for 2020 was not exceptional compared to previous years [4]. How can that be? If you have Covid-19 as well as influenza killing people, what is going on? An observation has been made that, for some mysterious reason, influenza, as of April in the US, dropped to zero and continues at zero in the latest flu season. [6]
In light of the apparent missing influenza, claims have been made that masking, distancing, and lockdowns were completely effective against influenza, but then there is no talk about its failure in stopping Covid-19, which is a virus of the same size and transmission mode.
Then, we are told that Covid is still around because people are not masking and such properly, which means influenza should also still be around in the US. Since these are infectious viruses, how can these restrictions be effective against one virus and not the other? It does not make sense.
It is also easy to find that US states with strict mandates have the same rates of PCR-positive cases as those who do not. The conjecture can be made that influenza cases are largely reported as Covid-19, based either on a positive PCR test result or on symptoms alone.
In the US, it is clear that there has been a monetary incentive for diagnosing the [Covid] disease and encouraging hospitalizations. The cessation of other medical procedures and tests during this period clearly is going to lead to increased overall deaths. The fact that there appears to be no excess of deaths despite this, indicates that the C-19 virus itself was not as lethal as they claim.
Overall, the death rate in the UK is not out of line with the normal death rates from other years and clearly not close to the highest in the last 22 years. [1] It is difficult to consider influenza deaths when there appears to be a bias toward categorizing influenza and other causes as Covid-19 deaths.
Every year and, for that matter, all year long, there is a population of health-critical individuals who may be overwhelmed by a flu-like illness and open to pneumonia complications. The questionable Covid-19 PCR test appears to be keeping the presence of Covid-19 alive, possibly detecting viruses of the current flu season.
The WHO is now admitting that that this test can be 97% false positives or more, with higher processing cycle numbers. [3] The argument could be made that we have an epidemic of testing.
A little exploration of the Office of National Statistics, Public Health England shows that the numbers for death from influenza and those from Covid-19 are askew. [7] They show 4649 cases mentioning influenza and only 380 with influenza only. This means 92% of these cases had other complicating conditions. However, the same week they report 6057 cases mentioning Covid-19 and 5387 mentioned only Covid-19, with 89% being Covid-19 only.
This defies logic. What happened to pneumonia? It is well-known that flu-like illnesses open one up to pneumonia but, according to the above numbers, 89% of deaths from this virus were ONLY from this virus. That does not correlate with the many reports of illnesses with complications and does not at all correlate with the US CDC’s report that only 6% of their Covid-19 related deaths were from Covid-19 only, which means 94% had comorbidities or complications, such as pneumonia.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of UK statistics. [8] However, the CDC is not that far off from the UK’s own death numbers, showing a small fraction of defined Covid-19 deaths, showing 13,844 deaths from Covid and 50,000 with Covid. [9]
One could ask what happened to influenza. There appears to be a strong tendency to list illnesses as Covid-19 to make the situation appear more dire and possibly more profitable. In the US, there is a financial incentive to diagnose Covid-19 and encourage hospitalizations.
A sad fact is that unethical medical personnel can talk people into feeling sicker than they really are, particularly when they are primed by fears of a deadly virus. From multiple points of view, looking at the lack of a proper virus isolation and description, the highly variable Covid-19 symptoms, and the fact that a variety of viruses comprise the flu season, I believe that this undescribed virus is most likely not present anymore, but there is no way to show that it is or not because the only “evidence” is the poorly designed PCR test. It is very hard to prove a negative.
[1A] “More evidence of ‘suspicious activity’ at the Wuhan Institute of Virology emerges”
[https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6225724386001]
[1] Euromomo, Graphs and Maps
[https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/]
[2] “REPORT: Surge in COVID Coincides w/ Suspiciously Mild Flu Season”
[https://headlineusa.com/surge-covid-suspicious-flu-season/]
[3] “COVID-19: A Very Different Truth“
[https://thenaturaldoctor.org/article/covid-19-a-very-different-truth/
[4] “Beware Those Excess COVID-19 Death Analyses”
<https://principia-scientific.com/beware-those-excess-covid-19-death-analyses/>
[5] “WHO exposed: How health body changed pandemic criteria to push agenda”
[6] “Neither US Nor UK Have ANY Excess Deaths From COVID19” [
[https://principia-scientific.com/?s=neither]
[7] Weekly deaths for January 1–8, 2021
[8] “How Many Americans Has Covid-19 Really Killed?”
[https://principia-scientific.com/?s=How+Many+Americans+Has+Covid-19+Really+Killed%3F]
[9] “Breaking: UK Govt’s OWN NUMBERS Expose Their COVID19 Fraud!”
[https://principia-scientific.com/breaking-uk-govts-own-numbers-exposes-their-covid19-fraud/]
About the author: Banson Wilcot PhD holds degrees in Marine Biology and Biochemistry, with a focus on dermatology and lipid biochemistry, and taught university courses for 12 years. Dr. Wilcot has been professionally editing and critiquing foreign-source research papers for publication and grant applications for 16 years (1000+ items). Being a generalist, he has edited papers ranging from coal-fire dynamics, nanotechnology, material science, electrochemistry, all areas of biochemistry and molecular biology, and organic applications as well as oceanography/marine biology and many marine research topics.
Navalny will remain the West’s darling, but not Russia’s
By Johanna Ross | February 4, 2021
In case you missed it, Russian blogger/politician/investigative journalist Alexei Navalny was sentenced on Tuesday in a Moscow court to 2 years 8 months in prison for breaking the terms of a suspended sentence.
The western media is, of course, outraged. The leaders of the US, UK and France have all joined in unison to demand his release. Michael McFaul continues with his Navalny/Mandela comparisons on Twitter until we finally accept it. He’s clearly following the old adage of ‘if you say something often enough, it becomes the truth’.
What seemed like overnight, Alexei Navalny has gone from being an obscure opposition activist to the saviour of Russia and the human race itself (or as the western media would have us believe). Opposition journalists, of whom several are not even based in Russia, but prefer to egg-on their activist colleagues from the safety of the US and Europe, have been tweeting their profanities and scolding the Russian authorities for not immediately releasing their media darling.
While the western world has become caught up in the drama of this ‘one man against the world story’, few are able to scratch beneath the surface, to see past the golden gates of ‘Putin’s palace’ and the condemned man kissing his wife goodbye in the airport as he meets his fate. Navalny is an expert in PR, something which his opponents are only just catching up with.
Alexei Navalny has quite deliberately set about becoming a political martyr. His very existence depends on the mythology surrounding his plight. His existence, his financial support (which I shall touch on later) depends on him being a ‘victim’ of the Russian state. He has to continue his anti-Putin programme to sustain himself and his family. For what other job/career does he have? No other would pay as well.
How many of those protestors who responded to his ‘call to arms’ in January and ventured out into the bitter cold to demonstrate, could actually name any of his policies? Could they even say what he stood for? Navalny himself isn’t sure. He has flipped and flopped between right-wing nationalism and left-wing policies for the last two decades. The only consistent policy is he wants to bring down Putin and replace him (if you can call that a policy).
As renowned academic Anatol Lieven has noted, we have to put aside the emotion in this case and deal primarily with the facts. Navalny has played with our emotions as much as possible; emphasising the romantic attachment to his wife with footage of him signing love hearts on the glass box in the courtroom; and performing the role of the underdog in the case to the letter. But over the last few months, the world, including the Kremlin, has been dancing to his tune, not the other way around.
In Germany Navalny was treated like a diplomat, escorted around by the security services, visited by Chancellor Merkel. He decided when he would arrive back to Russia, and knew he would be arrested. The release of his ‘Putin’s Palace’ video, which he clearly worked on in collaboration with German intelligence while he stayed there, was perfectly timed to be published just after his arrest, and it was hoped this would trigger mass protests, which in turn would pressurise the authorities to let him go. Protests certainly took place, but much to his supporters’ dismay, the authorities had no plans to override the law and release him.
And it’s worth here touching on that infamous palace video – which we now know, thanks to a video produced by ‘Mash’ – to be a complete misrepresentation of the truth. There are no golden gates. There is no baroque furniture. The ‘palace’ at the moment is a concrete shell, and there is no direct evidence linking it to the Russian President – instead it has been claimed by businessman Arkady Rotenberg as an aparthotel complex. That in itself is offensive, that Navalny would have the Russian people believe that there is a luxurious ‘dvorets’ on their doorstep, photoshopping the whole building to dupe people into buying his ‘golden toilet brush’ story. It shows extreme contempt for the general public he is addressing.
Indeed, Navalny would have us believe that he is acting on behalf of the Russian people. From his prison cell, he is demanding people go out on the streets in the middle of the Russian winter, during a pandemic, to take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, for which they are likely to be arrested, and as is often the case during such mass protests, injured. Is this thinking about the Russian people? Of course not. Navalny is thinking about Navalny.
Returning to the subject of who finances him, there have been suspicions for some time as to the extent to which he is being subsidised by western governments. Then, earlier this week, an explosive FSB video was released detailing a conversation between Navalny’s ally Vladimir Ashurkov and a British embassy official back in 2012. Unbelievably candid, Ashurkov asks the diplomat for ‘millions of dollars a year’ to help Navalny with his campaign, reminding him that foreign businesses have ‘billions at stake’. Literally asking a foreign power to meddle in the affairs of a sovereign state with a view to toppling the current government. If that doesn’t constitute treason, I don’t know what does.
For his part, we know that Ashurkov, who remains the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, has links to UK intelligence operations. Granted political asylum in the UK in 2015 after being wanted on embezzlement charges in Russia, Ashurkov was named in the documents of the Integrity Initiative – the UK’s covert anti-Russia propaganda campaign funded by the Foreign Office – leaked back in 2019. All this simply confirms the Kremlin’s assertions that Navalny is being aided and abetted by countries that have declared Russia their sworn enemy.
The western involvement in and support for Navalny’s campaign vastly reduces his chances of being taken seriously in Russia. For the vast majority of Russians he is the anti-hero, not Russia’s saviour as he is being portrayed in the West. Therefore while he may remain the West’s darling, he won’t be Russia’s.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Foreign Office maintains deafening silence on Chagos Islands despite UN ruling
Press TV – February 2, 2021
Five days after a legal body of the United Nations dismissed British claims of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, the Foreign Office continues to avoid meaningful engagement the issue.
The United Nation’s International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ruled on January 28 that Mauritius has sole sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, thus delivering a fatal blow to the UK’s weak legal position.
The UN body’s judgment follows a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in February 2019 that the UK must end its occupation, which in turn triggered a vote to that effect in the UN General Assembly in May 2019.
Despite the gravity of the situation, the British Foreign Office has hitherto released just a single terse statement on the issue, essentially reaffirming the UK’s recalcitrant attitude.
“The UK has no doubt as to our sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814. Mauritius has never held sovereignty over the BIOT and the UK does not recognize its claim”.
That curt statement, and the subsequent silence, underscores the UK’s resolve to flout international law and maintain a stranglehold over the occupied Chagos Islands.
But despite London’s oft-stated determination to hold onto the Chagos Islands indefinitely, there will inevitably be concerted legal push back by the international community, the state of Mauritius and even by individual aggrieved Chagos islanders.
On the issue of Chagos islanders – who were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the UK in the mid-1960s – the long-delayed issue of compensation by the British government is finally attracting attention.
According to the Observer (January 31), less than £12,000 of a £40 million fund set up to compensate Chagos islanders for the loss of their homeland has actually been given to those islanders living in Britain.
The fund was reportedly set up four years ago and yet the Foreign Office has distributed less than one percent in direct support to Chagos islanders who have lost homes and livelihoods as a result of the 55-year British occupation.
According to the Observer, which claims to have seen internal documents, the “English council” tasked with allocating the money has “abandoned the work” and “returned the funds” to the Foreign Office.
The FCO’s mistreatment of Chagos islanders over a 55-year period has even elicited criticism from some sections of the ruling Tories, a party committed to keeping occupied territories around the world.
The Tory MP Henry Smith, whose Crawley constituency is home to the majority of Chagossians living in the UK, has described the process of extracting compensation money from the Foreign office as “tortuous”.
“While there’s some uncertainty among the Chagos community about engaging with the UK government over these funds, it’s outrageous that next to none of this funding has actually been utilized. The fact that this sort of funding hasn’t been deployed is another failure of Foreign Office promises over half a century to the Chagossian community”, Smith said.
It remains to be seen if class action undertaken by the Chagossian community – coupled with pressure from the UN and the broader international system – will produce a shift in the UK’s position in the mid to long term.
Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding: intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB
RT | February 1, 2021
Surveillance footage, recorded in the early 2010s, appears to show a close associate of Alexey Navalny seeking cash and intelligence from an alleged British spy and suggesting his anti-corruption work may benefit firms in London.
The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.
The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.
Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.
“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said.
The FBK’s stated goal is to expose alleged cases of corruption in Russia. While it is essentially a type of journalistic organisation, its work is ultimately tied to Navalny’s aims of gaining political power. Ashurkov outlined the organization’s activities as “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with the elite and explain to them that we are reasonable people and we are not going to demolish everything and take away their assets.”
At the time of the meeting, Vladimir Putin had just returned to the Kremlin, and was taking a tougher line on foreign meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs. His predecessor, Dmitry Medvedev, had been more liberal and Western-leaning and Putin’s comeback was greeted negatively in the US and Britain.
In addition to explaining the FBK’s financial needs, Ashurkov said it could use information provided by the British government, particularly the Serious Fraud Office, for its exposés. The agency “has access to a lot of information that would not be available to us, from British sources” on certain Russian people. He named businessmen Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, who both have assets in United Kingdom, as examples.
Other UK government agencies could have helped as well, the activist suggested, while London, in general, was “already taking a tougher stance towards Russia.”
The FBK’s activities would have benefited British business too, the activist said. “We will release a report on VTB bank [a major financial institution in Russia] in association with Henry Jackson society [a neo-conservative lobby group with an avowed anti-Russian agenda] in London,” he said. Allegations of corruption involving one of the largest Russian banks would “make the case that it represents a threat to European financial markets and their integrity because it is a significant player in Europe.”
“And they make it more difficult for British firms like Lloyds or RBS or other big banks like Barclays to compete.”
The British diplomat did not commit to helping FBK during the conversation, citing the Russian legislation on foreign agents that was primed to come into force in November 2012. But he suggested turning to Transparency International for grants. Ashurkov said he doubted working with Transparency “would be effective.”
Ashurkov is currently residing in the UK, having left Russia in 2014. In his home country, he is wanted on allegations of committing fraud to finance Navalny’s 2013 campaign for the office of the mayor of Moscow.
He was one of the witnesses invited by the British Parliament for its 2018 inquiry into alleged corruption in Russia. His name was also listed in the leaked documents of the Integrity Initiative, an apparent British state-run clandestine information warfare operation linking public figures to coordinate them in supporting London’s preferred narratives and political goals.
The year the tape was allegedly filmed is incidentally the same as when a British government official finally acknowledged that an infamous fake rock espionage incident in Russia was genuine. The scandal broke in 2006 and involved British diplomats using a WiFi device disguised as a rock to collect intelligence from sources in Russia.
“The spy rock was embarrassing,” Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, told the BBC at the time, adding that Moscow made its allegations public for political reasons. The purpose, the broadcaster suggested, was to justify the passage of the foreign agents law.
RT has reached out to Mr Ford, Mr Ashurkov, as well as the UK Foreign Office and UK Embassy in Moscow for their comment on the story, but has yet to hear back from any of them.
UK Climate Assembly was undemocratic
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 29, 2021
Ben Pile lifts the lid on the undemocratic Climate Assembly:
London, 29 January: The UK Climate Assembly, which claimed to have delivered a mandate for a green revolution, could not have delivered a mandate of any kind, according to a new analysis published by the Global Warming Policy Forum.
According to the report’s author, Ben Pile, the Assembly was set up to deliver a preordained result:
It was in no way a democratic process. Almost everyone involved with convening the assembly, and almost everyone who spoke to it, was involved with environmental campaigning to some extent. Most can be linked to a small group of wealthy environmental funders.”
Pile says that the Assembly was actually set up because the public were unpersuaded of the case for radical action.
Politicians agreed the net zero target without debate and at best lukewarm public support. The Assembly was an attempt to provide a justification for strong policy measures, but it is ridiculous to suggest that a project like this could deliver some sort of a mandate. The assembly was an attempt to sidestep the democratic process.”
The UK Climate Assembly: Manufacturing Mandates can be downloaded here
https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/
Ben’s conclusion sums it up nicely:
Particularly intriguing is Ben’s exposure of the flagrant bias of the speakers and organisers. I have already highlighted the fact that the four Expert Leads, who organised the assembly, are all part of the climate mafia. Ben goes further:
This is really quite disgraceful, and is the sort of thing that would have been at home in the USSR.
“I do everything my TV tells me to do” – That’s why we’re hurtling towards the Great Reset
THE DAILY EXPOSE • JANUARY 18, 2021
If the current pandemic of dictatorial tyranny sweeping across the world has taught us anything, it is that the majority of humanity has been so well trained to obey authority that it is now incapable of free thought and afraid to ask questions. Never before have we seen such docile conformance to words echoing from the speakers of a television screen as when the Prime Minister of the UK announced in March 2020 that he had “one simple instruction” for the British people… ”You must stay at home”. But Mr Johnson spoke through the ‘telescreen’, and the nation listened.
Within an instant the UK economy came to a halt, without question, all because a man, in a suit, on the TV said it should. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed their doors to customers and staff. Schools and nurseries closed their doors to children, which in turn lead to parents being unable to work because they could not find care for their children. Unless of course the man, in a suit on the TV told them that there job was deemed essential, in which case it was fine to send their children to school and go out to work.
“Three weeks” was what the man, in a suit, on the TV said the country needed “to flatten the curve,”. But three weeks turned into five weeks, which turned into eight weeks, which turned into fourteen weeks. I wonder how many would have complied for so long with an instruction given to them by a man, in a suit, on the TV if it had not been for another man, in a suit, on the TV promising to subsidize up to eighty percent of their wages for sitting at home and not working?
Sounds great doesn’t it, sitting at home and still being paid. The people so eager to accept this scheme most likely didn’t realise that A) it was not the man, in a suit, on the TV paying these wages, it was in fact the British taxpayer. B) They would have to pay this money back in the future via higher taxes, and C) that’s only if they still had a job to pay those taxes as the only purpose of this scheme was to delay everyone’s unemployment to ensure that they complied. It was never about making sure you were going to be okay and have a job to go back to, it was about making sure you were complicit in the destruction of the job market as we know it, in order to bring in the new age of AI.
We bet the authorities could not believe their luck at how easy it was to get the vast majority of every man and woman in the land to obey an instruction that was emitted via the telescreen, and boy have they made the most of it ever since.
On the 3rd April 2020, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, told the British public via the ‘telescreen’ that he had spoke with a colleague in Hong Kong who had carried out an evidence review for the World Health Organisation and stated they “were of the same mind that there is no evidence that the general wearing of face masks by the public affects the spread of a disease in our society, what matters right now is social distancing. In terms of the hard evidence, we do not recommend face masks for general wearing by the public.”
Yet fast forward four months and the Government enforced the wearing of face coverings in all indoor public settings. However we did not instantly see a swarm of face nappy clad folk outdoors for over a week, and why was that? Because the man, in a suit, on the TV said this would not come into force for another week. That week came and went and on the day of enforcement there was not a smile to be seen. But what does that say about the majority of the British public and their acquiescence to authority. Not wearing a face covering because they genuinely thought it would work in the “fight against the virus”, but wearing it because a man, in a suit, on the TV said they would be subject to a £200 fine if they refused to do so. We know this to be true because they would have worn the face covering from the moment it was announced they were required otherwise.
Fast forward another few months and we were told by Professor Jonathan Van Tam, again via the ‘telescreen’ that he did not think there would “come a moment when we can have a big party and throw our masks and hand sanitiser and say ‘that’s it, it’s behind us’ like the end of the war? No I don’t.” Insisting that the wearing of face masks “may persist for many years and that may be a good thing”.
The contractions on the wearing of face masks alone should have been enough for the British public to wake up and question why they were partaking in the destruction of the world as they knew it, unknowingly bringing in a “new normal” and a chance for the globalists to fast forward their “great reset” agenda. But disappointingly it has yet to be the case.
Instead we are now stuck in a cycle of stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, repeat. Whenever a man, in a suit, on the TV appears on the British public’s ‘telescreen’s’ they stand to attention and hang on every word that echoes from the speaker. We don’t hold much hope that this will change anytime soon, instead we are stuck firmly on the road to the ‘Great Reset’ and we’re hurtling towards it at a few hundred miles per hour.
They do everything their TV tells them to do…but do you?
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Israel’s recurring use of terror on civilians
By Bob Finch | January 26, 2009
Insanely disproportionate use of violence against unarmed civilians… continue
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