2 Minutes of “Experts” Being WRONG About the COVID Vaccine
To those who still repeat the Big Pharma lie that “Nobody Ever Said The Vaccine Would Stop The Transmission Of Covid Virus”
Here are many people saying it!
By Ron Paul | August 28, 2023
Just four and a half months since President Biden declared an end to the Covid “emergency,” the media is suddenly full of stories about the return of Covid. This time a new “variant” is being rolled out and the media, in collusion with big Pharma and the fear-industrial complex, are churning out stories about how forced masking is making a comeback.
Also, the “unvaccinated” are again to be denied basic human rights in the name of fighting a virus that the vaccine demonstrably does not protect against.
In short, they are desperately trying to revive the tyranny, insanity, and utter irrationality of the two-year Covid scare. And they are pretending none of us remembers how they destroyed society with their lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. They are hoping that none of us will remember the suicides, lost jobs, broken marriages, increased alcoholism and drug abuse, and the rest of what went along with the world’s experiment with global lockdown.
Even Fauci himself is back – like a moth drawn to the light of publicity. Despite all the scientific evidence that the lockdowns were a disaster, that they did far more harm than good, Fauci has re-emerged with his trademark arrogance and claimed that they were the right thing to do and should be done again if that’s what it takes to force people to take the vaccine. A vaccine that does not work.
They won’t even allow us to mention the spike in all-around mortality or the millions who may have been vaccine-injured the first time around. They want us to think that 20-year-old world-class athletes have always just dropped dead of heart attacks out of the blue. It’s all normal! Don’t question it! What are you, some kind of conspiracy theorist? Are you a science-denier?
Yes, look for a renewal of all those old hollow phrases used to attack those of us who can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. Their slogans are meant to silence any debate. The same “experts” like Fauci who claimed “I am the science” are back and they shamelessly demand to silence us again.
The big question is… why? Why are they doing this and how do they think they can get away with it a second time? One reason they believe they can get away with it again is that no one has ever been punished for what they did the first time. The Federal Government made sure that the pharmaceutical companies would not be liable for vaccine damages.
The public figures who openly became monsters, demanding the unvaccinated be drummed out of society and maybe even off the face of the earth have not been shamed or shunned. Politicians who displayed cowardice and worse have not been voted out of office for their treachery.
Why are they coming back around for another round of Covid tyranny? Fear is a weapon to gain control. Last time around they generated fear to radically change how America voted. Suddenly everyone was mailed ballots. How closely were they checked? No one knew and no one dared ask. The people who did ask about the election are now facing jail terms.
They want us to shut up while they do it again. Will we?
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 28, 2023
In very post-2016 fashion, The Washington Post last week published an article implying democracy might require curbs on freedom of speech. This unsettling approach suggests concerns around “misinformation” on social networks supersede freedom of speech, a move that has elicited intense debate and, rightly so; criticism.
In what appears to be a shift in public discourse towards further censorship, the widely-read Washington Post article critiqued Elon Musk’s reinstatement of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform, X, previously known as Twitter.
The article suggested that the proliferation of what it calls “political misinformation” disturbs democracy, sparking concern amongst proponents of free speech.
The perspective is reflected in the reporting by The Washington Post journalists Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison. However, their piece lacks critical analysis of the ambiguity surrounding the term “misinformation” and fails to address the consequential question of how to moderate content in situations where politicians’ statements are arguably false or misleading.
The article’s glaring omission of any mention of the First Amendment – a core pillar of American democracy fostering media freedoms – also raised eyebrows amidst media and legal circles.
The Washington Post reporters worryingly suggest the retreat of social media companies from combating online falsehoods could impact the 2024 presidential election. They fault Musk, along with Facebook and YouTube, for taking a step back from reining in what they call misleading claims and conspiracy theories.
Nix and Ellison also critique X for permitting Tucker Carlson’s President Trump interview, which they deem as a platform for Trump to reiterate his allegations about the 2020 election. They contend that social media should only host political content if its accuracy can be proven, posing an unrealistic expectation that conceals underlying issues of censorship under the pretext of curbing “misleading” or “hateful” speech.
Analysis of the data so far shows the trial was underpowered, poorly designed and incomplete
BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | AUGUST 24, 2023
In January 2021, in the absence of any human data in pregnancy, the CDC stated on its website that mRNA vaccines were “unlikely to pose a specific risk for people who are pregnant.”
Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky backed it up with a full-throated endorsement of covid-19 vaccination in pregnancy.
“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.
“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby,” she added.
Behind the scenes however, Pfizer was scrambling to conduct a clinical trial of its vaccine in pregnant women.
By February 2022, Pfizer revealed it still did “not yet have a complete data set.” Its statement read:
“The environment changed during 2021 and by September 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended by applicable recommending bodies (e.g., ACIP in the U.S.) for pregnant women in all participating/planned countries, and as a result the enrollment rate declined significantly.”
This month, Pfizer finally posted some trial results on clinicaltrials.gov.
The data do not appear in a peer-reviewed journal or a pre-print, nor has it been submitted to the FDA for evaluation.
I spoke with experts who have analysed the data with a fine-tooth comb and made some alarming observations.
Pfizer originally planned to recruit 4000 healthy women aged 18 or older who were 24 to 34 weeks pregnant. Half would be randomised to the vaccine and the other half to a saline placebo.
The efficacy and safety of the vaccine would be determined by assessing covid-19 cases, antibody responses, and adverse events.
Peculiarly, Pfizer planned to vaccinate all the mothers in the placebo group, one month after giving birth to their babies.
Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management said that vaccinating mothers in the placebo group during the assessment period would introduce a new variable into the experiment and “corrupt” the data.
“We now know that mRNA from the vaccine is detected in the breast milk, so those babies born from mothers who were all vaccinated after giving birth, are also potentially exposed to mRNA through breastfeeding,” explained Levi.
“This corrupts the comparison of the two groups of babies because you don’t have a true control group anymore,” he added.
Less than 10% of the originally planned 4000 study participants ended up in the trial.
“Only 348 women were recruited – 174 in each arm – meaning that the trial was never going to have the statistical power, particularly when analysing potential harms,” said Levi.
Notably, study protocols indicate that Pfizer was given the green light as early as May 2021 by drug regulators to scale back the trial and reduce the sample size.
“To me, the wording in the protocol suggests that the FDA or another regulator basically gave Pfizer permission to do less,” remarked Levi.
“It’s not surprising though. The vaccine had already been recommended for pregnant women and many have taken it, so there is no upside to completing a trial that may detect signals of potential harms. It can only create problems for them, right?” he added.
Given that pregnant women were being vaccinated with a product that had not undergone rigorous safety testing in pregnancy, the FDA was asked if and why it allowed Pfizer to scale back the trial.
The FDA replied, “As a general matter, FDA does not comment on interactions it may or may not be having with sponsors about their clinical trials.”
Angela Spelsberg, an epidemiologist and medical director at the Comprehensive Cancer Center Aachen in Germany agreed that the integrity of the study had been compromised.
“There are just not enough babies in this trial to detect rare or very rare adverse events. We learned from studies in animals that lipid nanoparticles in the vaccine can deposit in many organs including the ovaries, so we must be extremely cautious about the potential negative impacts of the vaccine on reproductive health,” said Spelsberg.
“The scientific community urgently needs access to the pregnancy study data on the patient level for transparency and independent scrutiny of vaccine safety and efficacy because regulatory oversight is failing,” she added.
The small sample size may have been the result of the strict selection process.
Pfizer recruited participants with an impeccable pregnancy history, and most were in their third trimester (27-34 weeks gestation), a stage when the baby’s major development has already occurred.
“It appears that they cherry picked the mothers to get the best results,” said Levi. “We have no idea what impact this vaccine has on the early stages of development of an embryo or foetus, because all the women had advanced pregnancies when they were recruited.”
Spelsberg agreed.
“The first trimester is particularly vulnerable to adverse reproductive health outcomes,” she said.
“Based on only weak observational evidence, regulators have reassured the public that the vaccines are safe throughout pregnancy. However, we don’t have reliable evidence on the vaccine’s impact on miscarriages, malformation, foetal deaths, and maternal health risks because they excluded pregnant women from pivotal trials,” added Spelsberg.
Levi also noticed that “only partial data” were published.
“It doesn’t include any important metrics such as covid infections or antibody levels and its says we must wait until July 2024 for those results. It’s disturbing to say the least,” said Levi.
Also missing from the dataset was a full account of birth outcomes. Of the 348 women in the trial, Pfizer only reported on the birth of 335 live babies.
Of the 13 pregnancies unaccounted for, Pfizer reported one foetal death (stillbirth) in the vaccine group and the outcome of the other 12 pregnancies remains unknown.
“This is unacceptable,” said Levi. “Failing to report the outcome of 12 pregnancies could mask a potentially concerning signal of the vaccine in pregnancy. What happened to the babies, did they all die? Were their mothers vaccinated or unvaccinated?”
Finally, there were quite a few babies that were lost to follow-up in the trial.
“Twenty-nine babies in the placebo arm didn’t get to the end of the 6-month surveillance period, versus 15 babies in the vaccine arm. That’s almost double. Again, this is concerning and requires a detailed and transparent explanation,” said Levi.
Overall, both Levi and Spelsberg say the delays and failure to disclose vital data are unacceptable.
“Pfizer took a year to publish the data. When they finally did, it is incomplete. And we are expected to wait until July 2024 for the next batch of results, while authorities continue to recommend the vaccine in pregnant women,” said Levi.
“We still don’t have solid scientific evidence whether this vaccine is safe for pregnant women and their babies,” said Spelsberg. “It’s a tragedy and a scandal that vaccine use has been recommended, even mandated to women before, during and after pregnancy.”
Questions were put to Pfizer, but the company did not respond by the deadline.
Moderna is also conducting a clinical trial of its mRNA vaccine in pregnancy, but no data are available.

By Patrick MacFarlane | What They’re Not Tellin’ You | August 28, 2023
In April, Tucker Carlson, the most popular show host in American news media, was unceremoniously fired from Fox News.
He has since taken to the platform “X,” formerly Twitter, to continue publishing his own program.
Last week, during the first Republican primary debates, Tucker posted an exclusive (softball) interview with former President Donald Trump.
The episode received 260 million “impressions” within the first day.
Although an “impression” on Twitter only counts as an appearance in someone’s feed, if only one-tenth of those impressions equated to one view, the viewership would still be 23 million people. In comparison, Tucker’s Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, averaged 3.25 million viewers in March 2023.
The exclusive interview with Trump was a master stroke by both figures. It allowed Donald Trump to get his message across in a long format without actually muddying himself on the debate stage. Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy played, in effect, the role of Trump’s stand-in, but still won the debate in his own right.
Tucker walked away with incredible numbers, even if not as spectacular as the 230 million impressions would suggest.
Yesterday, RT reported that Tucker Carlson has “strongly” requested a meeting with Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to publish as an episode of his new program.
With all these developments, an attempt to decode the former Fox News host’s real role in the media landscape is akin to cracking a modern-day enigma.
Many laud Tucker as a rogue voice, fighting the establishment, using a microphone as a holy scepter.
It cannot be denied that on some critical issues like opposing escalation over Ukraine, Tucker Carlson’s voice is vitally important. But, Tucker Carlson has his own interests, and a background that does not suggest he is some populist hero, or an antiwar dove (of critical importance, he certainly is not on China).
That said, it would be immensely valuable for the West to see an intimate and honest one-on-one interview between Vladimir Putin and Western news media—one that was not intent on painting Putin as the new Hitler.
Maybe Tucker Carlson, though imperfect, is the figure best positioned to do it?
When America’s Commander-in-Chief, Joe Biden, still has not spoken with Putin since the February 2022 invasion, its puzzling that the job defaults to the United States’ most popular current events news host.
Exactly what does that mean—and what will come of it?
By Chris Menahan | Information Liberation | August 27, 2023
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran away from his proposal to cut aid to Israel by 2028 on Saturday, instead promising that he would provide endless US aid to Israel “until Israel told us they were ready for it” to be cut off.
“To be clear, we would never cut off aid to Israel unless Israel told us they were ready for it,” Ramaswamy told an Israeli news outlet in an interview he shared to his own Twitter page.
“The US-Israel relationship will be stronger by the end of my first term than it has ever been in US history and than it ever will be under any of those other administrations if anybody else is elected,” he said.
The idea Israel would ever ask the US to stop giving them billions of US taxpayer dollars for free is just comical. As I noted earlier this week, Israel regularly uses the billions we give them to buy US treasuries — effectively lending us back our own aid money and charging us interest. The US Treasury’s latest numbers showed Israel is currently holding $46 billion in US treasuries.
Ramaswamy also pledged that he wants to expand the Abraham Accords — a scam worked out by the Israel lobby which consists of bribing Arab kings to normalize relations with Israel by offering them billions of US taxpayer dollars and high-tech weaponry which can be used to oppress their own populations — with the “Abraham Accords 2.0.”
He said his “2.0” plan would bring “Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar [and] Indonesia” into the pact (aka bribery scheme).
“The other area where I think the US-Israel partnership is critical is staying strong with respect to making sure Iran never ever ever becomes a nuclear power — even has basic nuclear capabilities — we will never allow that to happen on our watch,” Ramaswamy said.
Fellow GOP presidential contender Nimrata “Nikki Haley” Randhawa called Ramaswamy out during the debate on Wednesday for wanting “to go and defund Israel.”
“You want to cut the aid off!” Randhawa said. “Let me tell you, it’s not that Israel needs America, America needs Israel!”
It only took Ramaswamy three days to not only abandon but completely reverse his “America First” policy.
RT | August 28, 2023
American multinational conglomerate 3M has agreed to pay more than $5.5 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, claiming that it supplied defective combat earplugs to the US military, people familiar with the deal told Bloomberg.
According to the agreement, the company will be paying the money out over a five-year period, the agency reported on Sunday. 3M’s board is yet to sign off on the settlement, it added.
When approached on the issue by Bloomberg, a representative of 3M said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
3M faces more than 300,000 lawsuits from US troops, consolidated in a multi-district litigation, claiming that the earplugs that the company’s subsidiary Aearo Technologies provided to the military between 2003 and 2015 were defective, and failed to protect their users from hearing loss and tinnitus.
Current and former servicemen alleged that the company knew its earplugs were faulty, but did not inform the military about the problem, while making no steps to fix the product.
The earplugs, designed to protect the hearing of troops during training and combat, were standard issue for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3M failed 10 out of 16 early trials over the plugs, and has been told to pay over $250 million in damages to more than a dozen plaintiffs.
Bloomberg noted that the reported settlement would allow the company to avoid a much larger liability, which it estimated at up to $9.5 billion.
“Sounds like 3M negotiated a pretty good deal for itself, given this litigation has been weighing on them for the better part of a decade,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the agency.
3M had earlier sought bankruptcy for Aearo Technologies in an attempt to shield itself from the lawsuits over earplugs. However, this June, a judge ruled that the firm’s financial troubles were not harsh enough to initiate the procedure.
The same month, 3M announced that it had reached a $10.3 billion settlement with a host of US public water systems to resolve water pollution claims tied to so-called “forever chemicals” or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) used in the company’s products.

Des Moines, Iowa, USA – August 12, 2023: Former South Carolina Governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley greets supporters at the Iowa State Fair political soapbox in Des Moines, Iowa.
By Ted Galen Carpenter | The Libertarian Institute | August 28, 2023
After the initial debate among GOP presidential aspirants, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is clearly the darling of the hawks who have given us debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Indeed, the laudatory assessments of her debate performance among conservatives in the pro-war news media seemed to be a sophisticated, highly coordinated propaganda campaign.
The key feature that Haley and her cheerleaders have in common is an unwillingness to consider any alternatives to the policies that have brought America and the world so much grief. Congenitally hawkish New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that he had previously considered Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), but that he now had concluded that Haley was the best candidate to thwart not only Donald Trump but broader undesirable trends in the Republican Party.
He left little doubt that those trends mainly involved foreign policy. “Haley dismantled [Vivek] Ramaswamy on foreign policy. It was not only her contemptuous put-down: ‘You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.’” Brooks was especially pleased because, “She took on the whole America First ethos that sounds good as a one-liner but that doesn’t work when you’re governing a superpower. Gesturing to Ramaswamy, she said, ‘He wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel. You don’t do that to friends.’” In other words, Haley loyally mouthed the interventionist cliches that Brooks and other neocons refuse to question.
Brooks’ colleague at the Times, David French, was even more enthusiastic about Haley’s debate performance and at least as vitriolic toward Ramaswamy. “When Nikki Haley mustered all her experience and knowledge as America’s former ambassador to the U.N. and all the moral clarity of traditional American resistance to Russian tyranny, she decimated Vivek Ramaswamy’s populist isolationism. She won on style and substance and reminded voters why she was once considered a Republican rising star.”
The always reliable pro-war Wall Street Journal editorial board tried to embrace Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence with roughly equal fervor. “Pence often seemed like the adult in the room, especially on foreign policy. He and Nikki Haley pounded Mr. Ramaswamy for his willingness to withdraw support for Ukraine.” Ms. Haley “made the moral case against Vladimir Putin’s depredations.” Being an “adult” in the Journal’s view apparently requires ignoring evidence of Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism as well as dismissing the risks of confronting a major power having 6,000 nuclear weapons over a country with minimal strategic or economic importance to the United States.
Haley’s actual level of foreign policy maturity can be judged by another of her simplistic comments about the Ukraine conflict. “The American president needs to have more clarity, they [presidential candidates] need to know the difference between right and wrong. They need to know the difference between good and evil.” She criticized Ramaswamy and another skeptic of continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for lack of such moral clarity and then added a cheap shot; “This guy [Putin] is a murderer and you are choosing a murderer.”
Fox News highlighted Clinton administration adviser Mark Penn’s favorable assessment of Haley. Penn contended that Haley’s debate performance was impressive and that she was clearly the best choice to be Secretary of State in an incoming Republican administration. Penn’s comment highlighted the continuing bipartisan nature of the pro-interventionist foreign policy blob.
Haley would be a reliable front woman for the war machine in nearly every respect. She favors a rabidly hostile policy toward Russia along with an equally unthinking posture of support for Ukraine. Indeed, she criticizes President Joe Biden for being “far too slow and weak in helping Ukraine.” That is a strange and troubling comment, given that the United States has given Kiev more than $130 billion in assistance.
But that is not the only arena in which Haley’s virulent hawkish orientation emerges. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, she even criticized Donald Trump for being insufficiently hostile to China. “We must act now to keep the peace and prevent war,” she said. “And we need a leader that will rally our people to meet this threat on every single front… Communist China is an enemy. It is the most dangerous foreign threat we’ve faced since the Second World War.”
As if simultaneously pursuing confrontational military policies against Russia and China were not enough, she also embraces utterly uncompromising policies toward both Iran and North Korea. Haley even favors putting U.S. Special Forces into Mexico to battle the drug cartels. “When it comes to the cartels, the Mexican president said yesterday we don’t want the U.S. to do anything. Well, you know what? You tell the Mexican president, either you do it or we do it. But we are not going to let all of this lawlessness continue to happen.”
What comes through clearly from both her rhetoric and policy positions is that Nikki Haley has no sense of the limits of U.S. power or the dangers inherent in America’s strategic overextension. A lengthy list of conflicts and tensions around the world all seem to be existential moral struggles requiring maximum U.S. engagement in her world view. Her approach invokes images from World War II and the worst years of the Cold War. It is a thoroughly obsolete and ahistorical approach.
Haley and her pro-war fan club epitomize a dangerously faulty perspective regarding U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, it is apparent that they have learned nothing from the spectacular failure of their recommendations in the post-Cold War era. Instead, they insist on doubling down on that blundering strategy, and dismissing any alternatives with the silly allegation that they amount to isolationism. To her hawkish supporters, Nikki Haley is a thoughtful, mature leader, but her casual recklessness likely would be a catastrophe for America and the world.
By Drago Bosnic | August 28, 2023
From the “Ghost of Kiev” and “the last stand of the Snake Island defenders” to pickle jar air defenses and the “Goat of Kiev”, there have been many mindless anti-Russian tropes aiming to present the Russians as supposedly “inferior” or at the very least “incompetent”. And yet, such claims were just laughably obvious propaganda that serves as an IQ test of sorts. In terms of actual impact, it was all largely inconsequential. However, the real issue is when these tropes become anything but a laughing matter. For instance, on August 5, Michael John Cirillo (now pretending to be a “woman” named Sarah Ashton-Cirillo), an American-born spokesperson for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, boastfully proclaimed that the Russians are “most definitely not human”.
Ever since this glorified crossdresser characterized an entire nation as “subhuman” (although it’s unclear who exactly mandated “her” to issue such proclamations), it seems this has effectively become the state policy of some Western countries. It now seems that disagreeing with Cirillo’s racist rant is a “crime” of sorts and that the witch-hunt for the “perpetrator” is a must. Namely, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, one of the most prominent European directors, “dared” to publicly state that “Russian lives matter also!” in an Instagram post. However, he didn’t stop there. To add “insult to injury”, he also criticized the Danish government for the delivery of US-made F-16 fighter jets to the Kiev regime forces.
Von Trier made the post almost a week ago, on August 22, but the “backlash” persists. The mainstream propaganda machine is engaged in an unrelenting witch-hunt, while the Neo-Nazi junta is “demanding” a retraction of the statement and most likely an official “apology”. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)”. Although F-16 fighter jets are hardly “one of the scariest killing machines of our time”, they certainly have killed a lot of people in countless US/NATO illegal invasions around the world, making Von Trier’s statement rather adequate.
Still, as the pressure isn’t subsiding in the slightest, Lars von Trier was forced to “clarify” his reasoning in a follow-up post, where he stated that he supports the Kiev regime “with every beat of [his] heart”. He further added that “[he] was just stating the obvious: that all lives in this world matter! A forgotten phrase it seems, from a time when pacifism was a virtue”. Von Trier obviously didn’t get the memo that pacifism is “only a virtue” when you’re fighting “humans”. And since Russians have been “disqualified” as such, hatred and hostility towards them is “perfectly fine”. Still, the Danish filmmaker stood his ground, so he’s now accused of “hatred” (!?) and for somehow being “sympathetic to the Russian side” in the Ukrainian conflict.
Von Trier’s example is very telling. Not only is it acceptable to spew poisonous hatred at an entire nation, but it’s even “desirable” at this point. Worse yet, any attempt to present the Russian people as human is simply unacceptable in the political West. According to this “logic”, the Russians are “disqualified from life” for the sole reason of being Russian. For well over a year and a half, both individual Russians and whole teams have been banned from various sports, including paralympic competitors. This mindless hatred also extends to Russian restaurants, tea rooms, churches, trees, cats, etc. In addition, Russia’s world-class culture (including its music, operas, literature, etc.) is still being banned in Western countries.
Von Trier should probably be sent to a reeducation camp, preferably run by former high-ranking NATO general and the current Czech President Petr Pavel. He’s (in)famous for his intention to place the Russians currently living in Western countries in “Japanese-style camps”. Had Von Trier stated something like that, he would’ve received no backlash. On the contrary, he would’ve been hailed as the “hero of pacifism”. The more absurd and hateful one is towards the Russian people, the more popular and “humane” he or she is in the political West. It’s the new “chic” that “should” be followed by everyone else. Unfortunately for the belligerent power pole, the (actual) world is doing exactly the opposite. Perhaps this is the main reason why Josep Borrell characterized it as “the jungle”.
It would seem the (actual) world simply doesn’t understand this highly peculiar form of “pacifism” that applies only to those who unequivocally adhere to the “rules-based world order“. The so-called “fence sitters” are just not “civilized enough” to understand it. However, fortunately for the rest of us who are “not blessed” with living in “the garden”, our “jungle” is expanding, so we get to live our “not human” lives together.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
RT | August 27, 2023
Ukraine relies on Western intelligence and satellite surveillance to guide its drones toward targets within Russia, The Economist reported on Sunday. The report backs up Moscow’s claims that the West is complicit in these “terrorist” strikes.
Russia’s extensive air defense and electronic warfare capacity mean that Ukrainian drone operators often need outside help to hit targets deep inside Russia, The Economist reported, citing anonymous sources within Ukraine’s multiple drone programs. This assistance includes “intelligence (often from Western partners) about radars, electronic warfare, and air-defense assets,” the report stated.
Feedback on the success of a strike is compiled from satellites, the report noted. Ukraine has only a single surveillance satellite, meaning that any imagery collected in between its 15 daily orbits is likely provided by Western satellites.
While Ukraine often attempts to hit military targets within Russia, many of its strikes are focused on civilian infrastructure and residential areas. In the most recent incident, a small drone slammed into an apartment block in the city of Kursk, shattering windows but leaving nobody injured. Successive waves of drone attacks have targeted Moscow’s central business district in recent weeks, and although the strikes on the capital have not killed anyone, an attack on the border region of Belgorod earlier this week left three people dead.
Moscow has previously accused Ukraine’s Western backers of complicity in these “terrorist strikes.” Speaking after a small drone hit the Kremlin in May, government spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated: “We know very well that decisions about such actions, about such terrorist attacks, are made not in Kiev but in Washington.” Moscow has also accused British and American special forces of assisting Kiev’s recent missile attacks on the Crimean Bridge.
According to Peskov, Moscow views the attacks as “acts of desperation,” carried out to compensate for Ukraine’s failures on the battlefield. The strikes are viewed similarly in the West, the New York Times reported on Friday. Citing US officials, the newspaper said that the drone operations are intended “to bolster the morale of Ukraine’s population and troops,” and show that Kiev “can strike back” amid its failing counteroffensive.
Brownstone Institute | August 26, 2023
Last year, it seemed that masks were gone for good. US District Judge Kathryn Kimball held that Biden’s national mask mandate on airplanes was “illegal.” Airlines and airports immediately revoked their mask requirements. Flight attendants sang in celebration, passengers cheered, and companies welcomed the change in policy.
While Americans rejoiced, the Biden Administration worked behind the scenes to ensure that it could reimplement mask mandates at any time, in any place, for any reason.
The humiliation exercise never had a scientific basis. Existing air filtration systems made the threat of viral transmission on aircraft negligible. Studies found that there was “no direct evidence” of Covid-19 being transmitted aboard aircraft.
Despite the data, President Biden issued nationwide mask mandates in his first hours in office. His administration appealed Judge Kimball’s decision last April. “Our focus here was seeing what power we had to preserve,” explained White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
The case was dismissed as moot because the court found, “there is not a grain of evidence that the CDC has any plans to promulgate an identical mandate.”
Recent news suggests that prediction may have been wrong. The Covid regime appears to be revamping for a resurgence of mandates and potential lockdowns. CNN ran a headline Wednesday urging readers to “break out the masks against Covid.” The federal government has entered into Covid-related contracts with consultants and medical equipment providers to enforce “safety protocols” beginning in the next two months.
The return of Covid hysteria begs the question: what “power” did Jen Psaki and the White House want to preserve? Their legal briefs appealing Judge Kimball’s decision offer clues.
In court, the Biden Administration argued that mask mandates should be permissible even if there is no evidence to support them. Further, government lawyers wrote that these mandates should be permissible to any extent that bureaucrats deem necessary, even if the risk of Covid is nonexistent.
That is not hyperbole. Opponents of the mandates argued that the government should have “controlled trials” to provide evidence of efficacy and potential negative side effects before implementing universal masking.
The Biden Administration responded that the government did not need to provide any evidence or rational basis for its orders. Instead, “the CDC’s determination that there was good cause” should be sufficient. Government edicts should not be subject to judicial scrutiny, according to the government’s brief.
Further, there should be no limit to that authority, according to the Biden Administration. “It was equally permissible for the CDC,” the brief argued, “to make the masking requirement applicable to all passengers… regardless of whether there is any indication that the plane is diseased or dirtied.”
It’s not difficult to discern what we might call the Biden Doctrine of administrative rule-making. It means that the agencies can order whatever they want, whether or not there is any plausible basis in law or whether or not there is any rational basis for it at all. It is a doctrine of bureaucratic supremacy.
SCF | August 25, 2023
The Strategic Culture Foundation’s online journal was this week hit by a massive cyberattack. The assault resulted in the forum being shut down on its regular internet site. Readers who normally access the journal were informed that the site was no longer available.
The online journal has safely migrated to strategic-culture.su and, in addition, we continue to post articles via SCF’s Telegram channel in order to exercise our inalienable right to freedom of speech.
The SCF online journal has been up to now accessed via the “.org” domain. The domain is operated by an organization called Public Interest Registry (PIC) based in the United States. PIC proclaims to be a “trusted” non-profit company “dedicated to the integrity of the internet” and free speech.
The outrageous action to obliterate SCF is a sign of the sinister times. There can be little doubt that the sabotage was carried out by state agencies: those of the United States and its NATO allies. This should not be seen as some kind of petty hacking by cyber vandals, but rather as cyber-warfare at the state level.
This is not the first time that this journal has been subjected to cyberattack. In recent years, SCF’s publishing business has been forced offline on several occasions by malicious attacks. The latest incident this week seems to have been the most serious endeavor to eliminate our publishing forum.
For over 12 years, Strategic Culture Foundation has been publishing articles by authors from all over the world. The forum has earned widespread acclaim for providing a diverse range of intelligent commentary and analysis on international politics. It has gained respect among many readers from a worldwide audience for its open-minded perspectives on geopolitics. In particular, we have provided in-depth critical reporting and analysis of how the United States government and its Western allies have systematically abused international law and the United Nations Charter in their unlawful pursuit of strategic interests in various parts of the globe, from Asia to Africa, and from the Middle East to Latin America.
As the United States and its NATO partners have become increasingly reckless and lawless over recent years in their imperialist depredations, the SCF forum has likewise becstraome increasingly critical. Consequently, the attacks on our journal have apparently intensified.
The U.S. State Department three years ago smeared our journal as a Kremlin propaganda outlet. The U.S. authorities have vilified writers for SCF as “Kremlin agents” even though our writers are based in different parts of the world and have nothing to do with the Russian government.
Subsequently, all our American-based authors were approached in person by U.S. state security agents knocking on their doors and threatened with prosecution and massive financial penalties if they did not stop publishing articles with SCF. All of our former American colleagues were compelled to break off what had been fruitful relations of intellectual exchange.
None of this unprecedented harassment prevented us from continuing to exercise our right to free speech and critical thinking.
However, since the U.S.-led NATO proxy war against Russia escalated with armed conflict in Ukraine 18 months ago, the SCF site has come under intensifying cyberattack.
This proves that Washington and its Western allies are indeed waging a determined proxy war. As the old adage goes: the first casualty of war is the truth.
We have provided trenchant commentary and analysis on the conflict in Ukraine. Our writers have exposed the bigger picture of geopolitical motives behind the confrontation including: NATO’s decades-long expansionism, the desire by Washington to maintain its global hegemony, the U.S. strategic need to exert control over its European vassals, Washington’s objective to displace Russia as an energy provider to Europe, the paramount importance of militarism to Western capitalism, and the imperative objective for the West to thwart the emergence of a multipolar world as advocated by Russia, China and many other nations associating with the BRICS and the Global South.
As the stakes grow higher for Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine so too has the West’s desperation to shut down all critical voices that undermine the West’s bogus posturing as a “defender of democracy”.
Russia-based media have been heavily censored by the United States and European Union. It has become increasingly difficult for an international audience to access Russian media and, more significantly, any media that publishes critical voices and thinking about Western policies.
The internet domains controlled by U.S. companies have shut down many American and European-based alternative media simply on the grounds that such alternative media provide an intelligent and informed critical analysis of the policies of Western governments. Sometimes the censorship is not so overt, conducted by algorithms that relegate accessibility for readers.
Critical thinking and truth-telling are intolerable for liars and despots, which the Western regimes are increasingly devolving into, absolutely discarding their pretensions of virtue, democracy, legality and integrity. The charade of “Western liberal democracy” is increasingly threadbare as Western states become ever more warmongering, authoritarian, dictatorships of economic austerity and elitist, unaccountable rule. In a word, fascist. The Western powers’ full-on association with the Nazi regime in Ukraine is entirely consistent with their own political degeneration.
In the case of SCF, the West’s censorship has degenerated to the level of outright sabotage of our forum.
Here it is appropriate to pay special tribute to Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks. He has paid for his truth-telling about the crimes of the U.S. empire and its vassals with the loss of his personal freedom, incarcerated for years in solitary confinement in a British dungeon on wholly fabricated spying allegations.
At such a perilous time in history when all-out war between nuclear powers is a dreadful danger, the world’s public needs more than ever open access to information and understanding of what are the causes of conflict. Western corporate media have increasingly shown themselves to be nothing but propaganda tools that promote risible pro-war narratives, such as the West “defending Ukraine from Russian aggression”. The Western media are misleading the public with false propaganda that distorts and conceals the real causes of conflict. Thus, making all-out catastrophic war a real danger.
Nevertheless, despite this propaganda onslaught and execrable dereliction of journalistic duty, the international public and the Western public, in particular, have shown an admirably healthy resistance and skepticism towards the Western media and their so-called governments. What is becoming more apparent is the toxic propaganda and the hypocrisy of Western governments and their servile media. This public resistance is fatally undermining the authority of Washington and its NATO allies.
This is reflected in growing public awareness and criticism around the world but in particular in the United States and across Europe leveled at the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. People are increasingly critical of how the Western powers are reprehensibly fueling the war with endless weapons while the Western public’s own social and economic needs are unconscionably neglected.
So-called leaders like America’s Joe Biden are ridiculed as decrepit clowns while European non-entities like Germany’s Olaf Scholz and France’s Emmanuel Macron are routinely booed in public.
Strategic Culture Foundation has empowered Western public knowledge and critical thinking through its open forum of intelligent and independent articles.
That is why it has become essential, from the point of view of the Western regimes, to shut us down with a vengeance. This, in turn, only exposes all the more the hypocrisy of Western states who claim to respect free speech and democracy.
It needs to be more widely appreciated what is going on at this time. The Western states, under the sway of ruling elites and corporate propaganda services, are at war. Not just against Russia, China and other dissenting nations. They are at war against their own public who are growing increasingly discontented and angered by the despotism that is the real, inherent condition of Western rulers and their bankrupt capitalist system.
Truth may be an early casualty of war. But that casualty can be repaired with more supportive truth and time. What might be said to be the last casualty of war are liars and their despotism.
And they can’t be repaired – when the damage to their deception is finally done.