Will the Bundeswehr special fund be increased to 300 billion euros?
Free West Media | January 25, 2023
In the spring of 2022, in response to the war in Ukraine, the German government launched the so-called “Bundeswehr special fund”. For the sum of 100 billion euros, the Bundeswehr was going to be modernized and decades of neglect in equipping the troops would be corrected.
But months later there is still nothing happening. It was only at the beginning of January that the Federal Ministry of Defense announced that eight procurement and modernization projects had now been launched, but it will take years for them to be implemented.
At the same time, it has long been apparent that the 100 billion euros set by the government will not be nearly enough. The current Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces, Eva Högl (SPD), is therefore going all out: She wants the “special fund” to be increased from 100 to 300 billion euros. With revealing openness, Högl also let the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) know what the money should be used for: not for the modernization of the Bundeswehr, but for even more support for Ukraine, and which “cannot be done without new production capacities”.
Högl is thus passing on the official NATO course unfiltered to German taxpayers. Only recently, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg emphasized that armaments production must increase “in order to replenish the Allies’ stocks and to ensure that we can continue to supply Ukraine for a long time”. The conflict “is consuming a tremendous amount of ammunition and devouring our stockpiles”.
German Leopard tanks to Ukraine
With its reserved position on the issue of German main battle tank deliveries to Ukraine, the German government under Chancellor Scholz has aroused the intense displeasure of its alleged NATO “partners”. In Washington, in particular, there is open indignation. According to one report, a meeting of the US Secretary of Defense at the Chancellery was “tense”.
During Lloyd Austin’s visit to Berlin and the US Air Force base in Ramstein on Thursday and Friday, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin tried in vain to persuade Germany to at least grant export permits for third countries. This was reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing an internal report from American government circles. According to the report, Austin got into a heated argument with Chancellor Wolfgang Schmidt during his visit to the Federal Chancellery.
The meeting came about because the new Defense Minister, Pistorius, was only sworn in on Thursday and the arms export decision is being made in the Chancellery and by Chancellor Olaf Scholz anyway. The meeting between Schmidt and Austin was “tense”. The media report was denied by government circles. “We cannot confirm the report – neither in tone nor in content,” said Reuters information from Berlin.
Reports that the German government would only be willing to supply Leopard tanks to Ukraine if the US in turn supplied Abrams main battle tanks, are said to have been the last straw.
According to the report, Austin received this information on the way to Berlin. The White House then intervened with unusual severity: US Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called the Chancellery and spoke to Scholz’s foreign policy advisor, Jens Plötner. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sullivan read the Germans the riot act – a formulation that describes a particularly harsh confrontation in diplomatic circles.
The American side confirmed that there could be no joint delivery of Abrams and Leopard main battle tanks, citing a “delay”. Austin pointed out that moving and operating the Abrams would be too costly and time consuming. In this context, the US Secretary of Defense also emphasized that the US had already delivered far more armaments than Germany, including explosive devices that could hit Crimea.
Pregnant Women Reject COVID-19 Vaccination
Post-Partum Hemorrhage Among Many Reasons to Decline Experimental Injection
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 18, 2023
Early in 2021 the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology accepted an undisclosed amount of money from the US government (HHS WH) as part of the COVID-19 Community Corps Program. From that point forward, ACOG broke with traditional practice on experimental and and novel therapies being contraindicated, and with federal dollars in hand, moved to a wholesale endorsement of COVID-19 vaccination with no assurances on short or long-term safety. Throughout the campaign, enthusiasm for vaccination was tepid among gravid women with <20% at any time having accepted a vaccine. However, the sharpest decline in rates of uptake occurred in the gravid and by summer of 2022, fewer than 2% were getting vaccinated.
There were no large scale randomized, placebo-controlled double blind clinical trials demonstrating safety in pregnant women. The non-randomized literature was prone to financial conflict-of-interest bias since the doctors and editors were likely affiliated with ACOG, and influenced by the government money and aspiration to promote mass vaccination. Thus, as a clinical scientist, my concern is only the neutral papers on safety were being written and published. A paper by Dick et al, caught my attention by reporting a nearly fourfold post-partum hemorrhage rate among those triple compared to double vaccinated. One could imagine how large the magnitude would have been compared to unvaccinated where hemostasis is not impaired.
Dick A, Rosenbloom JI, Karavani G, Gutman-Ido E, Lessans N, Chill HH. Safety of third SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (booster dose) during pregnancy. Am J Obstet Gynecol MFM. 2022 Jul;4(4):100637. doi: 10.1016/j.ajogmf.2022.100637. Epub 2022 Apr 7. PMID: 35398583; PMCID: PMC8988438.
In 2021, McCullough and Stricker published that because of the known dangerous mechanism of action of COVID-19 vaccination and the lack of any assurances on maternal-fetal safety, that all of the products are considered pregnancy category X which means they should not be used. This message got out to the community and rates of vaccination have progressively winnowed. As we sit here today, we should understand that ACOG and the OB/GYN community is compromised and thereby putting the maternal-fetal health of women at risk by promoting COVID-19 vaccination. Under no circumstances should a woman of childbearing potential or gravid should receive a COVID-19 vaccine. It is absolutely contraindicated.
McCullough PA Lack of Compelling Safety data for mRNA COVID Vaccines in Pregnant Women, 2021
Davos’ Damndest Delusion: FBI As Good Guys?
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | January 24, 2023
You can judge an audience by how much bullshit they accept from the podium. By that standard, the World Economic Forum attendees in Davos, Switzerland last week were either depraved or craven. Why else would FBI chief Christopher Wray not get hooted down for portraying his agency as “good guys?”
Why was the FBI boss even making an appearance at a conference chockful of political weasels, billionaires, and depraved activists like former Vice President Al Gore? Actually, Wray was part of a panel on national security that included luminaries such as Ukrainian Vice-Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who could have offered insights from her government’s perpetual failed war against pervasive corruption. Wray boasted that “the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think, made significant strides.”
A month before Wray’s appearance, Americans learned that “collaboration” meant the FBI massively censoring Twitter in recent years. As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, “As the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accounts.” The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) “a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’” — i.e., suppression. The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.”
The FBI condemned the TwitterFiles as “conspiracy theorists… feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” But Taibbi and his colleagues didn’t fabricate the emails the FBI sent to Twitter.
On that Davos panel last week, Wray dramatically placed both hands on his chest and declared, “The good guys are constrained by the rule of law and international norms. The bad guys aren’t.” But that self-evident truth is tricky to reconcile with the history of FBI surveillance crime sprees.
In October 2001, the Patriot Act gave the FBI a green light to cannibalize the nation’s email with its Carnivore email wiretapping system. Carnivore was contained in a black box that the FBI compelled Internet service providers to attach to their operating system. Though Carnivore might be authorized for a single person, Carnivore could automatically impound the email of all the customers using that service. The ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt observed, “Carnivore is roughly equivalent to a wiretap capable of accessing the contents of the conversations of all of the phone company’s customers, with the ‘assurance’ that the FBI will record only conversations of the specified target.”
The Patriot Act authorized life sentences in prison for computer hackers who maliciously spread viruses but federal agents were exempt from the law. The FBI created a special program to send emails to individuals to infect their computers with malware that enabled keystroke monitoring and automatic detection of all passwords. Norton, McAfee, and other computer security firms secretly agreed to leave a backdoor for the FBI to exploit with no warning to computer users. James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology observed, “In order for the government to seize your diary or read your letters, they have to knock on your door with a search warrant. But [FBI malware] would allow them to seize these without notice.” The FBI also developed malware permitting it to covertly turn on a computer’s camcorder “without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording,” as The Washington Post reported in 2013.
The Patriot Act made it far easier for FBI agents to snatch personal data via National Security Letters (NSLs). These subpoenas compel individuals, businesses, and other institutions to surrender confidential or proprietary information that the FBI claims is related to a national security investigation. NSLs enable the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” The Washington Post noted in 2005.
The number of NSLs increased by a hundredfold after 9/11. There is no judicial oversight of this power, and each FBI field office is entitled to dictate its own NSLs. Almost every NSL was accompanied by a gag order: Anyone who discloses that their data had been raided by the FBI could be sent to prison for five years.
By 2006, the FBI was issuing 50,000 NSLs a year. A single NSL can lasso thousands of people’s records, including all the clients of public libraries or book store customers. In 2007, an Inspector General report revealed that more than 10,000 NSLs may have violated federal law. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), declared that the IG report “confirms the American people’s worst fears about the Patriot Act.” Rather than arresting FBI agents who brazenly broke the law, FBI chief Robert Mueller created a new FBI Office of Integrity and Compliance.
But the FBI was just getting warmed up. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to outlaw political spying (such as the FBI had committed) on American citizens. FISA created a secret court to oversee federal surveillance of suspected foreign agents within the U.S., permitting a much more lenient standard for wiretaps than the Constitution permitted for American citizens.
FISA warrants authorize the FBI to “conduct, simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the U.S. person target’s home, workplace and vehicles. Similar breadth is accorded the FBI in physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and U.S. mails,” a court decision noted. People surveilled under FISA orders rarely learn the feds have been intruding unless they are arrested as a result. And the FISA court rubberstamps 99.9% of all FBI search warrant requests.
The FISA court “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013 after Edward Snowden leaked court decisions. The court rubber-stamped FBI requests that bizarrely claimed that the telephone records of all Americans were “relevant” to a terrorism investigation under the Patriot Act, thereby enabling N.S.A. data seizures later denounced by a federal judge as “almost Orwellian.” In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”
After the 2016 election, FBI officials devoted themselves to crippling Trump’s presidency with fabricated evidence on Russia collusion. Kevin Clinesmith, a top FBI lawyer, was convicted for falsifying evidence to secure a FISA warrant to unjustifiably target Trump campaign officials. A 2019 Inspector General report concluded that FBI officials made 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in its application to the FISA court to spy on former Trump advisor Carter Page. The FBI withheld details from the court that would have crippled the credibility of the warrant request.
In 2021, a FISA court report revealed that the FBI has conducted warrantless searches of a massive data trove compiled by the National Security Agency for “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. Even people who volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program were illegally tracked by the FBI. In 2019, an FBI agent conducted an unjustified database search “using the identifiers of about 16,000 people, even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” The New York Times reported. In 2021, the FBI carried out more than 3 million warrantless searches on U.S. persons, according to data revealed in early 2022.
Maybe FBI boss Wray believes that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable warrantless searches doesn’t apply to “good guys.” The audience in Switzerland might have cheered him for making that assertion. Has the World Economic Forum ever seen a government surveillance scheme that it didn’t like?
Instead of swallowing Wray’s piffle, Americans should heed former FBI chief James Comey. In 2015, Comey told a congressional committee: “You should not trust me…because you cannot trust people with power.” President Trump followed that advice and fired Comey two years later. But Comey’s point remains a better lodestar for judging the FBI than the hokum currently prevailing in the mainstream media, on Capitol Hill, or at scheming Swiss confabs.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales
By David Wojick | CFACT | January 23, 2023
The recent deaths of seven whales off New Jersey, mostly humpbacks, got a lot of attention. The federal NOAA Fisheries agency is responsible for whales. An outrageous statement by their spokesperson got me to do some research on humpback whale deaths.
The results are appalling. The evidence seems clear that offshore wind development is killing whales by the hundreds.
Here is the statement as reported in the press:
“NOAA said it has been studying what it calls “unusual mortality events” involving 174 humpback whales along the East Coast since January 2016. Agency spokesperson Lauren Gaches said that period pre-dates offshore wind preparation activities in the region.” Gaches is NOAA Fisheries press chief.
The “unusual mortality” data is astounding. Basically the humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016 and continued high thereafter. You can see it here:
But the claim that this huge jump in mortality predates offshore wind preparation activities is wildly false. In fact it coincides with the large scale onset of these activities. This strong correlation is strong evidence of causation, especially since no other possible cause has appeared.
To begin with, offshore lease sales really geared up 2015-16, with nine big sales off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. These sales must have generated a lot of activity, likely including potentially damaging sonar.
In fact 2016 also saw the beginning of what are called geotechnical and site characterization surveys. These surveys are actually licensed by NOAA Fisheries, under what are called Incidental Harassment Authorizations or IHA’s.
There is some seriously misleading jargon here. IHA’s are incidental to some other activity, in this case offshore wind development. They are not incidental to the whales. In fact the term “harassment” specifically includes injuring the whales. That is called “level A harassment”.
To date NOAA has issued an astounding 46 one-year IHA’s for offshore wind sites. Site characterization typically includes the protracted use of what I call “machine gun sonar”. This shipboard device emits an incredibly loud noise several times a second, often for hours at a time, as the ship slowly maps the sea floor.
Mapping often takes many days to complete. A blaster can log hundreds of miles surveying a 10-by-10 mile site. Each IHA is typically for an entire year.
Here is a list of the IHA’s issued to date and those applied for:
There are lots of ways this sonar blasting might cause whales to die. Simply fleeing the incredible noise could cause ship strikes or fish gear entanglements, the two leading causes of whale deaths. Or the whales could be deafened, increasing their chances of being struck by a ship later on. Direct bleeding injury, like getting their ears damaged, is another known risk, possibly leading to death from infection. So there can be a big time difference between blasting and death.
Note also that these deaths need not be in the immediate vicinity of the sonar blasting, so spatial correlation is unlikely. Humpbacks in particular are prodigious travelers. One group was tracked traveling 3,000 miles in just 28 days, over 100 miles a day on average. Another group routinely migrates 5,000 miles. Both are winter-summer migrations which can happen twice a year.
Thus a sonar blasting, site characterization in one place could easily lead to multiple whale deaths hundreds of miles away. If one of these blasters suddenly goes off near a group of whales they might go off in different directions, then slowly die.
The point is that the huge 2016 jump in annual humpback mortality coincides with the huge jump in NOAA Incidental Harassment Authorizations. It is that simple and surely NOAA Fisheries knows this.
Nor is this just about humpbacks. Some of the dead whales off New Jersey are endangered sperm whales. And of course there are the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, on the verge of extinction.
Even worse, the IHA’s are about to make a much bigger jump. There are eleven pending IHA applications and eight of these are for actually constructing 8 different monster wind “farms”.
Driving the hundreds of enormous monopiles that hold up the turbine towers and blades will be far louder than the sonic blasters approved to date, especially with eight sites going at once. These construction sites range from Virginia to Massachusetts, with a concentration off New Jersey and New York.
For more on this noise see my https://www.cfact.org/2022/07/26/threat-to-endangered-whales-gets-louder/
Clearly we need a moratorium on new Incidental Harassment Authorizations until the safety of the whales and other marine species can be assured. Hundreds of whales may have already been killed by offshore wind activities. The evidence is right there.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/
US ‘Not Prepared’ for War With China, Claims Think Tank Funded by Arms Industry
Sputnik – 24.01.2023
Surprise! One of the military-industrial complex’s favorite think tanks is once again calling to ramp up weapons production.
The US has so thoroughly depleted its military supply reserves that it’s “not adequately prepared” for a long-term war with China, a leading American military-industrial complex think tank claimed Monday.
A war games simulation conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reportedly found that the US would be likely to deplete its supply of long-range, precision-guided missiles in under a week of “protracted conventional war” against China in the Taiwan Strait.
The study claims the Biden administration’s insistence on sending over 8,500 Javelin missile systems and at least 1,600 Stinger missile systems to Ukraine means the US military’s inventory is now running low.
“The bottom line is the defense industrial base, in my judgment, is not prepared for the security environment that now exists,” CSIS Vice President Seth Jones claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“How do you effectively deter [China] if you don’t have sufficient stockpiles of the kinds of munitions you’re going to need for a China-Taiwan Strait kind of scenario?” Jones reportedly asked.
His assessment within the study was similarly glum.
“The main problem is that the US defense industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war,” the researcher complained.
Jones claims his conclusions are based on “publicly available data on weapons systems and munitions, including data compiled by the [Department of Defense]… interviews with dozens of officials from the DoD, Congress, the defense industry, and subject matter experts,” and “the results of war games and other analyses.”
It’s unclear just how independent their assessments are, however, given that CSIS rakes in millions a year from multinational corporations, including some of the world’s most notorious weapons suppliers – like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon.
‘Dishonest to the Point of Misinformation’: Federal Reserve Dragged for Odd Defense Spending Graph
By Fantine Gardinier – Sputnik – 23.01.2023
After the St. Louis Federal Reserve tweeted out a highly misleading line graph of several nations’ defense expenditures on Monday, users highlighted its ham-fisted and deceptive nature with both humor and facts.
The tweet linked to a January 3 article about the patterns of defense spending around the world in light of the conflict in Ukraine, highlighting the steady and rapid increase of China’s military budget since the early 1990s.
However, the graph accompanying it, which was included in the tweet, has been modified in an unconventional way: while the spending by five of the nations is measured on the Y-axis on the left side of the graph, as is traditionally the case, for the line representing the United States, the Fed used a bizarre separate Y-axis on the right side of the graph.
As a result, at a glance it seems China’s spending has rocketed far above every other nation’s, including the United States’, when in fact it remains barely one-third of the amount.
As replies poured in denouncing the Fed’s deception, a few users tweeted accurate versions of the graph, if the US’ line had been placed on the same Y-axis scale as the other five nations.
Others tore into the Fed in a more rhetorical way, or simply clowned on the absurdity of the graph.
“If a student made this graph for a statistics 101 class, the teacher would give them an F,” quipped journalist Ben Norton. “But because it involves Washington’s public enemy number one, Beijing, the ‘experts’ at the St. Louis Fed were awarded a Golden Star for service in the New Cold War.”
“Congrats on making the most misleading chart of 2023 so far!” said one user. “This is dishonest to the point of misinformation,” wrote another.
One person joked the situation was another example of “American exceptionalism.”
Someone even dropped an image of the cover of the 1954 book “How to Lie With Statistics” by former tobacco lobbyist Darrel Huff, with the message “I see you’ve read one of my favorite books.”
Some dropped other graphs that they felt better illustrated the drama of the difference between US defense spending and that of other nations.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending reached $2.1 trillion in 2021, with the US spending $804 billion of that by itself. By comparison, China spent $293 billion on its military that year. The US spent so much on its military, it spent more than the next nine countries combined, including China.
The most recent Pentagon budget, signed by US President Joe Biden last month, was a whopping $816.7 billion.
US renews waiver for gas field shared by Iran and UK
Press TV – January 24, 2023
The US government has renewed a sanctions waiver for the Rhum gas field in the UK North Sea in which Iran has a 50% stake.
Iran is heavily sanctioned by the United States, but Britain’s Serica Energy which owns another 50% of the field has repeatedly secured waivers to maintain production from the field.
In a statement, Serica said it had secured another waiver extension that ensures that all companies linked to the field can provide services and goods without fear of US penalties.
“We are grateful to the UK government and regulatory authorities who have supported us in this process,” Serica Chief Executive Mitch Flegg was quoted as saying.
Serica Energy is responsible for 5% of the gas produced in the UK which is currently in turmoil over runaway prices of energy in the wake of the Ukraine war.
The UK firm expects its net production to increase by between 50 and 80 percent this year and that level of production to continue into 2025.
This would mean that the company would be producing up to 40,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, reports said.
Rhum, a gas filed located 240 miles (390 km) northeast of Aberdeen in Scotland, is one of the largest on the UK Continental Shelf.
Iran owns half of the stakes at the gas field based on a deal signed before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The field is believed to be capable of producing more than five million cubic meters of natural gas.
Washington has imposed a series of harsh sanctions on Iran’s energy sector since 2018 when it pulled out of an international nuclear deal.
Pressure hardening
The Biden administration, however, is hardening its position. The Iraqi government is reportedly under immense pressure from Washington to stem the alleged flow of dollars into Iran.
In recent weeks, Iraq’s currency market has been wracked by turmoil after the US introduced tighter controls on international dollar transactions by commercial Iraqi banks in November.
Reports said the move was designed to curb the alleged siphoning of dollars to Iran and apply more pressure along with US sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic.
Iraqi MP Aqeel al-Fatlawi, however, said Washington was deliberately using the new regulations as a political weapon.
“Americans are using the dollar transfer rigid restrictions as warning messages to Prime Minister Sudani to stay tuned with the American interests. ‘Working against us could lead to bringing down your government’ – this is the American message,” the lawmaker said.
The price of consumer goods has increased and the Iraqi currency has taken a beating in the wake of the US restrictions.
And it has deepened anti-American sentiment among politicians in Iraq, which remains unstable nearly 20 years after a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
The US is also targeting Iran’s other major trade partners. On Monday, the Biden administration’s top Iran envoy said it will increase pressure on China to cease imports of Iranian oil.
China is the main destination of exports by Iran, and talks to dissuade Beijing from the purchases are “going to be intensified,” US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley told Bloomberg Television.
The US reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic and its petroleum exports in 2018 after pulling out of the nuclear agreement, with then president Donald Trump pledging that Washington was set to bring Iran’s oil exports down to zero.
That goal never realized, with Iranian sales continuing to reach the market despite the US “maximum pressure” to curb them.
“We have not lessened any of our sanctions against Iran and in particular regards to Iran’s sale of oil,” Malley said.
Iranian crude shipments have surged in recent months, including to China, the world’s biggest importer.
Malley said the US will “take steps that we need to take in order to stop the export of Iranian oil and deter countries from buying it”.
Israel, US start week of military drills involving thousands of troops, nuclear bombers
RT | January 23, 2023
The US and Israeli militaries began their largest-ever joint exercise on Monday, seeking to hone seamless coordination of their forces and prove a point to Iran about their readiness to fight a conflict in the Middle East even as Washington juggles rising tensions with Russia and China.
“I do think that this scale of the exercise is relevant to a whole range of scenarios, and Iran may draw certain inferences from that,” a senior US defense official told reporters. “It would not surprise me if Iran, you know, sees the scale and the nature of these activities and understands what the two of us are capable of doing.”
Dubbed Juniper Oak, the exercise will involve over 140 aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers and F-35 fighter jets, as well as 12 warships and about 7,500 troops, according to US Central Command (CENTCOM). It’s designed to improve the “interoperability” of both forces.
“What we think this exercise demonstrates is, we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” the unidentified defense official told NBC News. Despite the Pentagon’s growing focus on China and its efforts to help Ukraine defeat Russian forces, he added, “We still have the excess capacity to be able to flex to another high-priority area of responsibility and conduct an exercise on this scale.”
Juniper Oak is an all-domain exercise, meaning it will include naval, land, air, space and electronic-warfare drills. It will run from Monday through Friday in Israel and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The US will reportedly employ four HIMARS rocket launchers, laser-guided bombs and stealth cruise missiles. The event will culminate with the firing of 180,000 pounds of live munitions while simulating an electronic attack and suppressing enemy air defenses.
“This is a sign that we continue to have Israel’s back at a time when there’s lots of turbulence and instability across the region,” the defense official said. The source added, “If there’s a sense that Americans are distracted, or the Americans are going away from the Middle East, and therefore they have free rein for their malign activities, I think this will disabuse them.”
“I suspect Iran will take note of that, but not only Iran. China will take note of that, Russia will take note of that, other folks will take note of that.”
I just put the FAA in a “no win” situation. If there is not a PROPER investigation, heads should roll.
Susan Northrup is the current US Federal Air Surgeon, the first woman to hold this position.
By Steve Kirsch | January 21, 2023
I just had a nice chat with Federal Air Surgeon Dr. Susan E. Northrup. By the end, she no longer can say, “I didn’t know.” If she doesn’t act now, she should be prosecuted for jeopardizing pilot lives.
Executive summary
At 10:15am on Saturday Jan 21, 2023, I made a call to the private cell phone of the Federal Air Surgeon of the FAA Dr. Susan Northrup. The call lasted 2 minutes.
In the call, I referred to the news article where she basically said that she had seen no evidence that the COVID vaccines have incapacitated pilots.
At first I thought she was lying, but it turns out she was telling the truth. She’s seen no evidence because even though she admitted on the call that she knew about Bob Snow, nobody at the FAA ever bothered to call him. Ever!!! So they’ve never seen the evidence because they deliberately refused to look at the evidence!! Get it? That’s how science works.
So I asked Dr. Northrup if she was interested in speaking with pilots who have been disabled by the COVID vaccine. She indicated she was. After all, what could she say at that point? She had to say “yes.”
It’s troubling she hasn’t talked to Bob Snow. I have talked to Bob Snow. I interviewed him for my Rumble channel even though it isn’t my job to investigate these incidents. Check out my interview with Josh Yoder and my interview with Bob Snow.
In other words, I’ve done more to investigate this incident than the FAA.
Captain Snow narrowly averted crashing the plane, but she never talked to him to assess whether the vax might have been involved. Seriously?!?! I offered to put her in touch with Captain Snow and she accepted.
So I emailed her (using her official work email at the FAA) a list of pilots, their phone numbers. She now has the contact info for these pilots:
- Josh Yoder (head of US Freedom Flyers who is in touch with dozens of vaccine injured pilots)
- Bob Snow (American Airlines)
- Kevin Stillwagon (Delta Airlines)
- Cody Flint (4 doctors have determined he was incapacitated in flight due to the COVID vaccine)
- John C. Lamb (66 yr old commercial aviator with no previous heart problems. On Jan 6, his first class medical was deferred, due to 2nd AB block, Mobitz type 2. His wife had a heart attack 8 days after her Moderna shot. See this story for more details).
More importantly, in that email, I also invited her to host a public roundtable at the FAA inviting people on both sides of the “safe and effective” narrative so that the FAA could learn the truth. I just talked to Senator Ron Johnson and I can assure you that he’d be DELIGHTED to help her assemble a roundtable of doctors on both sides of the narrative to brief top FAA officials on the risks of these vaccines.
And I offered to publish her revised statement to the public so we can get the truth out that the vaccines are NOT safe and are disabling pilots.
Here’s the kicker. The corruption at the FAA runs deep. Did you know that nobody at the FAA has ever called Bob Snow? How can the FAA investigate this incident without ever even talking to the pilot?
Susan is going to have to reveal to the American public what exactly the FAA did to investigate the Bob Snow incident which happened on April 9, 2022. How is it that in 9 months nobody at the FAA (or from any other government organization) has reached out to Captain Snow? WTF? We need some transparency here on how these vaccine incidents are being investigated!
But Susan knew about Snow and she must have known that nobody reached out to call him. In other words, everyone knew they had a vaccine injured pilot and deliberately chose to NOT investigate. I have asked Susan for an explanation. If I don’t receive an explanation in 24 hours, I will call for her to resign.
I am calling for this since nobody in Congress is (other than Senator Johnson). None of them want to know. Heck, when I call members of Congress, they ignore me. Neither does the mainstream media. It appears that the responsibility for investigating these incidents falls on Steve Kirsch’s Substack (which has a full-time staff of just me) to hold these people accountable.
Susan is also going to have to talk about why there was a 300% increase in long-term disability claims filed at American Airlines (Jan – July 2022) and what investigation the FAA made into what was disabling those pilots.
We have a pilot shortage in America. What did Susan find when the FAA investigated why the disability claims skyrocketed? Or did they do nothing to investigate? If they didn’t do anything, why didn’t they? I’d like to know. The New York Times and CNN …. well, not so much.
Finally, did you know that Susan’s husband, John Hyle, is a pilot. John refused to take the COVID vaccine due to safety concerns. So it’s not just a few “anti-vaxxers” spreading “misinformation.” Susan clearly realizes that intelligent people she clearly respects have legitimate concerns that cause them to refuse to take the shot.
The narrative is falling apart.
We need public transparency on all of the things above. And we need it now before lives are lost.
We’ve had a couple of close calls. The FAA needs to be proactive about this, not REACTIVE after a crash happens.
The Game Is Over and They Have Lost
By Robert Blumen | Brownstone Institute | January 23, 2023
The Guardian on Jan 15, 2023 published the most perfect piece of new normal nostalgia that ever was or could be: Coronavirus: ‘People aren’t taking this seriously’: experts say US Covid surge is big risk by Melody Schreiber.
This piece may be studied as a Platonic Form. Nothing could more perfectly demonstrate the inability of the covid fear porn publishers to let go of the narrative. If the author didn’t have her own website, I would have attributed the piece to an instance of ChatGPT trained on every Guardian and New York Times article from the past three years.
The writer employs every single discredited covid trope at least once. I will list a few of the best, here. To cover them all I would have to quote the entire article and that would violate the Fair Use Doctrine. I have chosen a tabular form with a quote alongside the trope that it is derived from:
| Quote | Trope |
| “In the fourth year of the pandemic.” | We are still in a pandemic. It will never end. |
| “This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus.” | The current wave is the worst wave ever. |
| “Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays.” | Super-spreader events and family gatherings. |
| “The Omicron subvariants BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 as well as the quickly expanding XBB.1.5 make up the majority of cases.” | Just when you thought we were over it, a new variant has emerged. |
| “With XBB, there’s such a significant transmission advantage that exposure is really risky – it’s riskier now than it’s ever been” in terms of transmissibility, Sehgal said.” | The new variant is more dangerous than previous variants. |
| “And the more the virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to evolve, potentially picking up mutations that make it easier to overcome immunity.” | The variants only get worse over time, never more mild. |
| “the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.”“Williams is worried that hospitals are reaching maximum capacity.”“Health workers have experienced three years of burnout, disability and death, and some have needed to exit the workforce.” | The health care system is under pressure. It will probably collapse. People will be dying in the streets, unable to obtain care. |
| “Despite the high rates of Covid spread, hospitalizations have not yet reached previous peaks seen earlier in the pandemic, probably due to immunity … but that protection should not be taken for granted, he said, particularly because immunity wanes.” | Natural immunity does not protect you. Even if you are immune, you should still get all the vaccines and boosters. |
| “The severe cases we are seeing are probably at least somewhat avoidable, if folks make sure that they stay updated on vaccination, because that’s still the safest way to gain immunity.” | Vaccination stops the spread. |
| “You’re just fighting a lot of misinformation.” | Everything that you have read contrary to this narrative consists of lies by malevolent misinformation spreaders. |
| When Joe Biden declared the pandemic was “over” in September, he said, it probably stalled public enthusiasm for the new booster. | Happy talk about the end of covid is dangerous. |
| “While vaccines are very important…” | All roads lead to vaccination. |
| “In New Hampshire, nursing homes will not admit those that they feel that they cannot staff to care for, which I think is admirable, but the consequence of that is that the hospitals are jammed up,” he said. Hospitals that might release patients to care facilities for transitional or long-term care will see beds filled for longer.” | The elderly in care homes are at risk. |
| “The share for children under four roughly doubled in 2022.” | Children are at risk. |
| “As Ray put it: ‘When we could be wearing a mask, why aren’t we?’” | Masks work to prevent respiratory viral transmission. |
My favorite part of the piece is, “Yet because of poor messaging from officials, many people may not even realize the US is experiencing a surge.” I am one of those many people who did not know this. A surge of what? A normal seasonal flu that makes people feel a bit under the weather for a week? A bad cold-vid?
We can celebrate our return to the old normal when an outbreak of a seasonal virus is of concern to those who are infected or who care for a family member. All of society need not be thrust into a panic over such things. The more normal the world is, the more resources of those who are impacted will have to deal with their troubles. And the better will those who are not directly affected be able to support them.
As a software engineer I note with some amusement that the variant (or as I like to call them “scariant”) names now have two periods. In a software release version a version with double dot is used for a minor bug fix release, (e.g. 3.0.1). “Minor” means that the release is not important enough for users to upgrade immediately. Perhaps the same thinking should be applied to the way we handle the emergence of new viral variants.
When Biden said that the pandemic is over, followed by “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape,” that may have been his dementia inhibiting the filter that was supposed to kick in before he said something truthful. Biden only said the quiet part out loud: the public has put the panic phase in the rearview. Even Anthony Fauci made the incomprehensible statement that the pandemic isn’t over but we are out of the “pandemic phase.” Every statement like this is more toothpaste for the pandemic dead-enders to put back in the tube.
The article bemoans the low acceptance rate of the booster vaccinations. We are told that cases are avoidable if patients had sought additional injections. First thing: do we care about cases? Second thing: it is not true that the covid vaccines prevent infection. That could only be so if the failed claim of sterilizing immunity were valid.
Vaccine advocates have walked back the earlier claims that one or any number of shots would prevent the recipient from getting infected. It was let out late in 2022 that the clinical trials did not even test for the ability of the drugs to stop transmission. It’s hard to believe that anyone can still say that after so many multiply-vaccinated-and-boosted public figures have gotten covid.
My friend Kevin Duffy, a professional investor, after seeing the Guardian article, sent me this image. The graph shows the market psychology of a financial bubble and subsequent market crash. I have added the red oval highlighting where Kevin thinks we are now: in the denial phase, after the bubble has burst.
I am also reminded of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief that a patient or a loved one goes through when receiving a terminal diagnosis. The stage in her sequence is denial. The subsequent stages are anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The same could be said of all of these tropes: Does anyone believe them anymore? This is not news. It is a last-gasp attempt to squeeze more juice out of a dehydrated lemon. These messages were potent fear generators two years ago. But with each use, the charge becomes weaker.
The script has worn itself out. These tropes are now tired and ineffective. The fear-pushers seem unaware that the message has lost its effect, but do not have anything else to offer. The tell is not that they publish articles like this. It is how much these pieces show that they don’t know that the game is over and they have lost.
…There Likely Will Be Stranded Assets…
By Don Dears | Power For USA | January 17, 2023
If battery-powered vehicle (BEV) sales are not mandated by the government, and the market for BEVs is much smaller than now predicted, will the battery factories being built become stranded assets?
The earlier article resulted in comments questioning whether other applications would allow these factories to remain operational and profitable.
BEVs, the benchmark for Lithium-ion battery usage, permit rapid acceleration and quiet operation. However, each vehicle uses 1,000 or more pounds of batteries.
What are the other applications? And why would they grow?
Here are a few alternative applications, some of which were identified at the consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Portable Hand Tools
Portable hand tools, such as leaf blowers, powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE) are noisy, while those powered by batteries are quiet.
Hand tools, using an electric motor, such as saws, use wires to connect them to an electric outlet. Hand tools create noise, but a battery-powered hand tool is more convenient since it eliminates having to drag around an electric cord.
Batteries for hand tools weigh around one pound.
Small mobile equipment, e.g., lawn mowers and snow blowers
Battery powered lawn mowers cost more than gasoline powered mowers, and have a payback, according to Consumers Reports, of around ten years.
Snowblower’s cost, relative to gasoline powered blowers, are only slightly higher.
On average, batteries for lawnmowers and snowblowers weigh around 25 pounds depending on Ah (amp-hour) rating.
Large mobile equipment, e.g., construction excavators
Bucket trucks that use batteries to power the bucket arm can turn off the diesel engine, allowing work to be done quietly, without noise and exhaust fumes. This is especially beneficial in residential areas.
Excavators powered by batteries, as exhibited by John Deere at CES, can operate more quietly, allowing them to work at night in residential areas.
However, construction equipment, back hoes, etc., require charging stations at the construction site. John Deere also exhibited charging stations for construction sites, but having to connect charging stations to a power source at each construction site adds complexity and cost.
Batteries for construction equipment will weigh a few hundred pounds.
Boats and Yachts
Watercraft larger than a few feet in length, especially yachts, require considerable horsepower for propulsion. While the propulsion may use fossil fuels, the electrical system for on-board and housekeeping activities, such as radar and refrigeration, can be battery powered.
This reduces the noise level in the boat, especially when anchored or docked overnight.
Powering a large watercraft with batteries, rather than diesel engines, makes little sense since the size of the battery would approximate that of a BEV’s, increase weight unnecessarily, while raising concerns about fires. Gasoline and gasoline fumes are the major cause of boat fires and explosions, and a fire burns a boat to the waterline forcing the crew and passengers into the water waiting to be rescued. A battery fire would do the same.
Battery powered outboard motors for canoes and similar small craft have been available for years, and battery-powered outboards, rated around 3.5 HP, are available.
Brunswick exhibited yachts and electric outboard motors at CES.
Miscellaneous Applications
Golf Cart batteries probably weigh around 75 pounds, but the number of golf carts sold in the US is only around 80,000, so market is limited in size.
Bicycles
Bicycles powered by Lithium-ion batteries are becoming very popular. More e-bikes (880,000) than BEVs (608,000) were sold in the US in 2021. It’s forecast that over 1 million e-bikes will be sold in the US during 2023. Some are predicting that e-bike sales in Europe will outstrip the sale of automobiles in general.
An e-bike battery weighs approximately 10 pounds.
Typical e-Bike
Summary
What are the attributes mentioned above that are attributable to Lithium-ion batteries?
- Quiet operation
- Convenience
Products with limited growth potential:
- If BEVs are no longer mandated, it’s unlikely that battery-powered construction equipment will become popular.
- Yachts and boating appear to be a limited market.
- Golf carts seem to have a limited market.
- Lawn mowers are used routinely for a few months of the year while snowblowers are used intermittently in northern states.
Products with substantial growth potential:
- E-bikes have rapid growth and are used almost daily in many countries.
- Hand tools are a very large market with US sales of $21 million in 2021, or 140,000 tools at an average price of $150. With a battery weight of 1 pound for hand tools, the annual sales volume would have to be extremely large to match BEV battery usage.
- It would appear as though e-bikes have the greatest potential for volume usage of Lithium-ion batteries. With the weight of an e-bike battery of 10 pounds, 100 e-bikes must be sold to equal the sale of one BEV.
Putting this information in perspective:
- If 1,000,000 hand tools are sold in 2023, it would be the same as selling only 1,000 BEVs.
- If 1,000,000 e-bikes are sold in 2023, it would be the same as selling only 10,000 BEVs.
Conclusion
While new uses for Lithium-ion batteries may emerge, it would appear as though alternative battery applications won’t keep battery factories in the United States from becoming stranded assets if the BEV market is substantially smaller than forecast.
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From the Archives
Israel: Strategic Ally or Liability?
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
Blog Roll
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- Four in five new UK jobs taken by foreigners – report
- Here’s what Trump’s latest U-turn really means for Russia and Ukraine
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- Europe’s Energy Hypocrisy, Russian LNG Profits and US Dependence
- ICC ignored ‘very well-documented’ NATO crimes – ex-Libyan minister
- If Americans Knew
- Activists Abused By Israel Return to New Freedom Flotilla Mission
- 60 Minutes won’t tell the full truth about Israeli settler violence
- Nearly 50,000 women, girls killed or severely injured in Gaza since October 2023: UN Women
- ADL is working with AI companies to suppress alleged ‘antisemitism’
- Israeli occupation forces using social media surveillance unit to target hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank
- Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine
- Israeli Attacks Kill Five in Gaza, Including a four-year-old and a woman
- Air Force Major Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment Held in Solitary Confinement
- It’s a Genocide, I’m Into It’: Seinfeld Mocks Protest over Palestinian Children Killed
- Universities fire dozens amid pressure from Zionist billionaires
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
