Covid Vaccines Are Killing One in Every 800 Over-60s and Should Be Withdrawn Immediately, Says Leading Vaccine Scientist

  The vaccines are now more dangerous than the virus based on statistics!

Via the Daily Sceptic

Covid vaccine boosters in older people are killing one person for every 800 doses administered and should be withdrawn from use immediately, a leading vaccine scientist has said.

Dr. Theo Schetters, a vaccinologist based in the Netherlands who has played a leading role in the development of a number of vaccines, has analysed the official data from the Dutch Government and found a very close correlation between when fourth vaccine doses were administered in the country and the number of excess deaths, as shown in the chart below. Importantly, in the Netherlands the booster rollout in different regions was staggered over a number of weeks allowing an analysis by region, which confirms the effect.

Dr. Schetters, who is a recipient of the Medal of Honour of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Montpellier in France, told Dr. Robert Malone, an inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, that medical doctors are currently seeing “all sorts of symptoms that they do not know what it is” and that “in the Netherlands now it’s very clear that there is a good correlation between the number of vaccinations that are given to people and the number of people that die within a week after that”. It is essential to look at all-cause mortality, he said, as the vaccine “potentially affects all organs”.

So it potentially affects all organs. And that’s what the medical doctors now see, they see all sorts of symptoms that they do not know what it is. And because the adverse effects are so not just single one adverse effect, but can be anything, they surface very difficult to a statistical level. And that’s why we do analysis on all cause mortality, because say, okay, and if we do not know what is exactly related to vaccination, of course, the coagulation problems, myocarditis, we know that, but there are many more things happening at the moment. And so that’s why we look at all cause mortality, and in the Netherlands now it’s very clear that there is a good correlation between the number of vaccinations that are given to people and the number of people that die within a week after that. So let’s say in this week we gave 10,000 vaccinations. Then in this week, we have something like 125 excess in death in that week.

The correlation is striking, he said, to the extent that if you have more vaccines in a week then you also have more excess deaths, and if you have fewer vaccines in a week, you have fewer deaths. Dr. Schetters says he has written to the Director of the Institute of Health in the Netherlands to alert him to the findings.

So what we’ve done is we have written a registered letter to the director of our Institute of Health and presenting the results and expressing my concerns. And just with the question, from a precautionary point of view, please reconsider vaccination strategy because I think this is a real warning. And so it’s not that everybody dies. Actually I do a rough calculation, it’s one in 800

During the interview, Dr. Malone explained that his own organisation, consisting of 17,000 medical practitioners and scientists, has released a statement that the vaccines should be withdrawn as they are no longer justified on a risk-benefit ratio, a statement with which Dr. Schetters agreed. Dr. Malone said:

I stand as the President of the International Association of Physicians and Medical Scientists. So we’re 17,000 that are only physicians and medical scientists, all verified, no nurses, not because we don’t like nurses, but it has to do with the positioning with the press and messaging. So that’s the basis for our organisation.

Months ago, we came out with a press conference in a clear unequivocal statement that one can find at www.globalcovidsummit.org, where we made a clear, unambiguous statement. In our opinion, as an organisation, these vaccines should be withdrawn. They are no longer justified on a risk-benefit ratio. And as the person who is responsible for the genesis of this technology, I’m often criticised. Didn’t I realise what I was doing? And there’s no way for me to have known that the normal standards for regulatory development and testing and clinical would be circumvented.

But I stand as someone who has intimate, detailed knowledge of the technology and its risks and benefits, the nature of the formulations, the role of the pseudouridine, all of those things.

It’s my opinion and that of the organisation that I represent, that the data are now sufficiently clear that, in our opinion, the ongoing campaign for vaccination is no longer warranted.

Dr. Schetters’ analysis is in line with the observations we have been making on the Daily Sceptic in recent weeks as we have been following what appears to be a correlation between the spring fourth dose booster rollout among over-75s in England and a wave of now over 11,000 non-Covid excess deaths that are currently unexplained (see the charts below).

The latest official data from the Office for National Statistics, released on Tuesday, show there have been 11,370 excess non-Covid deaths registered in England and Wales in the 13 weeks since April 23rd. If all of these were a result of the spring boosters (of which 4,182,483 have been delivered up to July 22nd) it would be a rate of one every 368 doses. That figure is an upper bound, of course, as not all the additional deaths will be due to the boosters, but it shows the U.K. data are broadly in line with the Netherlands data. Note that a higher vaccine injury rate would be expected in the U.K. where the fourth doses are only being given to the over-75s, as the rate increases with age.

In the week ending July 22nd, the most recent week for which data are available, 10,978 deaths were registered in England and Wales, which is 1,680 (18.1%) above the five-year average for the week. Of these, 745 mentioned COVID-19 on the death certificate as a contributory cause and 463 mentioned COVID-19 as underlying cause, leaving 1,217 deaths from a different underlying cause. Note that this was the week of the brief but intense heatwave (with recorded temperatures topping 40°C for the first time in some areas), so some of these will be heatwave deaths, as will many of the additional Covid deaths (being people who happened to have Covid at the time).

Deaths by date of occurrence rose dramatically in the most recent week, which might be assumed to be connected with the heatwave of July 18-19th. However, the data by date of occurrence show the spike occurring in the week ending July 15th, too soon for the heatwave. One explanation for this may be that the ONS uses a ‘statistical model’ to calculate death occurrences for recent weeks and this model may not cope well with unpredictable phenomena like heatwaves. If so, we should see adjustments in the next few reports as more real data become available. Note that the cause of the spike in non-Covid excess deaths during June remains unclear.

Here is the cumulative curve of excess non-Covid deaths by date of registration along with the cumulative total of spring boosters.

As noted in previous weeks, the cause of the deaths appears to be largely related to diseases of the heart and blood vessels (cause of death data for July are now available here). Cancer deaths are, perhaps surprisingly given the withdrawal of healthcare access during the pandemic, broadly at normal levels, suggesting there is something other than lack of access to healthcare going on. The continued high level of excess deaths is unexpected as, following the 142,000 excess deaths of the last two and a half years, we would have anticipated a period of lower than average deaths.

The Government ought to be urgently investigating what lies behind the more than 11,000 additional deaths in three months. However, as we saw last week, it has shown no interest in doing so. When Esther McVey MP, Chair of the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), submitted a written question asking the Cabinet Office what steps it was taking “to investigate the higher than expected rate of deaths of 12.2% above the five-year average”, it simply referred the matter to the U.K. Statistics Authority, which merely said it will continue to publish the relevant statistics.

Perhaps Dr. Schetters’ intervention in the Netherlands will start to wake up those in Government who have their heads planted firmly in the sand.

Congress Is Not Allowed To Know About TOP SECRET Gain Of Function Research Committee

 The truth is slowly coming out but who cares now? Too late?

Via: Summit News:

Appearing on Fox News to discuss the first ever Senate hearing on gain of function research, Rand Paul revealed that there is a committee that is supposed to oversee such experimentation with potentially lethal viruses, but that it is above the oversight of Congress.

Paul noted that according to scientists who testified on Capitol Hill yesterday, “the committee that is supposed to review these viruses is secret.”

“We don’t know the names. We don’t know that they ever meet, and we don’t have any records of their meetings,” the Senator reiterated, adding “It’s top-secret. Congress is not allowed to know. So whether the committee actually exists, we’re uncertain.”

“We do know that they’ve met three times and there are thousands of gain-of-function research proposals. They’ve only met three times, they’ve only reviewed three projects,” Paul continued.

Three scientists testified during the hearing, they were Dr. Richard Ebright, laboratory director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, Kevin Esvelt, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and Dr. Steven Quay, CEO of Atossa Therapeutics Inc.

“The three scientists agreed that this was dangerous research. Two of the three absolutely said it was gain-of-function. The third said it was dangerous research and should have gone before a committee,” Paul asserted.

The Senator added that “When Dr. Fauci said, ‘Oh, we’ve reviewed this and the experts have looked at this, and said it’s not gain-of-function,’ even that wasn’t true. There was a committee that was formed after 2017 to look at this dangerous research. They didn’t look at this research at all because they never reviewed it. So no one reviewed this to say it wasn’t gain-of-function research. They didn’t review it, period.”

“So we learned a lot of things, but I think we reconfirmed that Dr. Fauci is not being honest with us,” Paul urged, adding “Yes, the NIH funded gain-of-function research. Yes, it was dangerous. And yes, nobody looked over this. Nobody reviewed the research. Yes, a million people died. And there still seems to be a significant lack of curiosity on the part of Democrats.”

Median and mean Wealth of OECD countries in 2021 (resources-1)

  From now on, whenever available, I will publish significant data and statistics on this blog. 

 In the following table, you will find the Mean and Median Wealth of OECD countries in 2021. The interest of the data is that it gives a good idea of wealth distribution in different countries which can be calculated as the Gini Index in percent.

Escobar: How A Missile In Kabul Connects To A Speaker In Taipei

  Stunning analysis by Pepe Escobar. No war over Taiwan but the Rubicon has been crossed. "Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations."

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

Washington’s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda’s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.

This is the way the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of ‘historic’ Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.

All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US ‘intel’ played every trick in the book – and outside the book – to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.

Another disposable asset

Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore – and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy ‘victory’ – the remixed Obama ‘Osama bin Laden moment’ that won’t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush’s GWOT has long metastasized into the “rules-based,” actually “economic sanctions-based” international order.

Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking “SPAR19” – the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.

No “Pearl Harbor moment”

Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a “missile on a Kabul balcony” moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a “Pearl Harbor moment.” That’s simply not the Chinese way.

The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.

That’s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.

What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report. Here are the two key points:

Point 1: “China will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.”

That’s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.

Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is “non-agreement capable,” and there’s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and/or rule of law in international relations.

Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: “The Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner… China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.”

Chess, not checkers

The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi’s reaction to the fact on the ground – and in the skies – in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the “provocation by American reactionaries” and the “uncivilized campaign of the imperialists.”

This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face – something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.

So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic – not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China’s time will come.

For now, what’s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.

The price of collateral damage

The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million in cash as ‘humanitarian aid’ soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.

So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.

The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace – taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.

A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American withdrawal debacle last August, but could always be revived.

No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI – historically very close to the Taliban – gave to Washington on a silver platter.

Dodgy dealings

Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.

Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.

The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri’s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the “terrorist” (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.

And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden’s National Security Advisor  Jake Sullivan in Washington – allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.

Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the “offer you can’t refuse” – and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.

Sun Tzu deploys his six blades

Following Speaker Pelosi’s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.

The first stage is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.

The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry – so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.

Chinese CATL, the world’s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.

So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.

The War on Eurasia

For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+/SCO/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.

The Speaker’s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the “war on terror” cycle and its metastasis into the “war on Eurasia” era.

It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That’s all there is to know about the ‘strategic’ capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.

 

UN Secretary-General Blames Global Economic Crisis On Ukraine War

  The real question today is: How to navigate a world of disinformation, propaganda and lies to keep some kind of sanity?

 The unfortunate answer is: You can't!

  The reasons are complex, mostly because we are social animals and are consequently influenced by the people surrounding us, as well as society more broadly. It is in the end very hard to be right alone.

 This is of course well known by now and people molding public opinion use and abuse this privilege by injecting their "truths" in the public debate, reverberating these truths with compliant Media channels, isolating "conspiracy" ideas and censoring the few dissenting opinions that gets through. 

 Earlier this century, there was a risk with the advent of the Internet that the system would "break" and that inconvenient facts would emerge without control. 

 The first counter-fire was 9/11, aiming to control the public discourse with a radical anti-terror policy. Who could openly support "terrorists"? And so, quickly independent countries where labeled "terrorist"; Sadam in Iraq, Kadaffi in Libya, Assad in Syria. The list would have gone on if the Russians had not said stop!

 Then came Covid-19. With the virus, controlled narratives where accompanied by coercive measures. European governments were not certain that it was feasible until if was tested on a small scale early on in Italy without much fuss. The rest is history. Counterproductive lockdowns, useless mask mandates, endless restrictions which to some extent are still ongoing more than two years later and may never be rescinded. 

 And finally, perpetual war, 1984-like, where the enemy is ruthlessly demonized and the war engineered to go on permanently. Anybody in his right mind knows that Ukraine does not stand a snowball chance in hell against Russia and that the right course would be to negotiate and find a compromise. But it doesn't take much wit to understand that such a war has nothing to do with "winning" and everything to do with population control in the West. Energy rationing? Russia! Inflation? Russia! Food shortages? Russia! Now if the potential consequences were not so dramatic, China would be a much more worthy adversary... 

 But control, even absolute, is not enough, you also need to mold the world into something new, more to your liking... like the agenda 2030, but without completely crashing the system. 

 That won't be an easy task. Freedoms have to be extinguished, rationing must become permanent, hatred must be directed away from those who profit and toward an external, permanent enemy,   

 Most importantly, those who implement such a system must not realize that they too eventually will become victim of the social order they are helping implement. 

 This is why, most politicians these days are either global fanatics like Macron in France or Trudeau in Canada, or imbeciles like Biden or Kamala Harris. Their job has nothing left to do with deciding anything, just public relations and image management like Ukraine's Zelensky, a professional actor with Twitter-long statements and haranguing: "Hasta la vista, baby!" 

 But like an impotent vaccine on a bad virus, the message needs permanent boosting less the people forget what is the cause of their plight and who should be the focus of their loathing. 

 Understand this and you will get the gist of the message from Antonio Guterres. He doesn't even need to mention Russia. In fact he can't as Secretary general of the UN: Appearances must be preserved! But don't forget: Your misery has nothing to do with 50 years of incompetence and greed but is entirely caused by an insignificant war, thousand of kilometers away in a plain that you didn't know existed until February 2022. 

 But wait, What are we doing to mitigate this "treat"? Well, nothing of course, but this is not the subject. "Russia must stop the war!"

UN Secretary-General Blames Global Economic Crisis On Ukraine War

NATO governments and globalist institutions have put on a good show acting as if they hate Putin and the Russian advance in Ukraine, but the reality is that the war acts as an all encompassing distraction from the greater agenda at hand.  It offers globalist organizations, western politicians and central banks a perfect scapegoat for the ongoing economic instability caused by THEIR policies.  

As anyone that follows alternative economic knows, the stagflationary crisis that is escalating today was triggered well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Price inflation was hitting 40 year highs in December of 2021, months before the war started.  Gas prices were skyrocketing long before sanctions on Russia were ever implemented, climbing from an average of $2.20 per gallon in November of 2020 to $5 per gallon in June of 2022.  That's more than a 100% increase in less than two years and most of it occurred before Ukraine was an issue.  

What really caused stagflation?  It's a process initiated by central bank stimulus that the alternative media has been warning about for many years.  The real culprits are central bankers and the politicians that align with them.  The world has been awash in fiat money as a means to prolong economic corrections that should have been allowed to run their course a long time ago.  Instead, bankers sought to artificially prop up the system and funnel money into “too big to fail” corporations along with the too big to fail stock markets.  Now, of course, things are changing.  

The inevitable Catch-22 dynamic has come into play – Central banks can continue to print and keep interest rates near zero, but inflation will rapidly expand, making all their efforts pointless as rising costs lead to plummeting demand.  Or, they can stop all stimulus and hike interest rates to stall the inflationary disaster, but still collapse markets, employment numbers and consumer demand.  The bottom line is that there is no path to a soft landing; it simply doesn't exist.   

The covid pandemic was really the straw that broke the camel's back – Not because of the virus, but because of the RESPONSE to the virus.  The authoritarian lockdowns and the subsequent covid stimulus packages poured gasoline on the economic fire.  With over $6 trillion of helicopter money pumped into the US system in a single year, the system that was on the verge of implosion is now fully crashing.  Time is running out.   

All blame has been initially directed at Joe Biden, and though he has played a large part in the disaster, it's not really his crisis.  The central banks created this avalanche since 2008 and now we are finally seeing the poisonous fruits of their labors.  Presidents come and go, but central bank policy does not change unless the bankers want it to.

With the Ukraine war (and now a potential war between China and Taiwan), the banks and political elites must be jumping for joy.  All eyes were increasingly falling on them but now they have some very well timed distractions to blame all the world's economic ills.  

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is milking the Ukraine crisis for all it's worth in his latest engagement with the world press.  Stating that:

“We are doing all we can to reduce suffering and save lives in Ukraine and the region, through our humanitarian operations... But the war is also having a huge and multi-dimensional impact far beyond Ukraine, through a threefold crisis of access to food, energy and finance.”  

In other words, he seeks to continue the false narrative that the economic crisis is all Russia's fault.  He then move's on the the secondary narrative that “Big Oil” is also partially to blame:

“...It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities and at a massive cost to the climate...I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet.”

In this statement we find multiple lies.  First, oil companies are seeing larger profits because of the stronger dollar in international trade.  As the Fed increases interest rates the dollar index climbs against foreign currencies, and because the dollar is the global petrocurrency this means that oil companies will be raking in more dollars which accumulate more wealth through foreign exchange.  This is not a situation which will last long, but for now, anything that sells in dollars is going to create considerable profits.  

Secondly, say what you want about the oil companies, but they didn't create the energy crisis.  Inflation was caused by central banks and NATO sanctions against Russia are doing the rest.  There is a distinct communist tone to the UN Sec-Gen's speech and a clear attempt to disparage capitalism and profits when these things have absolutely nothing to do with the overall threat.    

Third, it's hard not to notice the clear carbon control agenda within the UN's rhetoric and their attempt to exploit the energy crisis as a means to push their climate dictatorship goals for 2030.  They want a 55% reduction in fossil fuels and carbon emissions in less than 8 years.  The large bulk of Antonio Guterres press conference focused on Green New Deal propaganda.  Globalists are constantly seeking to exploit the energy crisis as an excuse to push carbon restrictions and renewables, which actually make the energy crisis far worse.  

The extreme economic calamity that would be created by climate change policies cannot be understated.  Millions of people will die if the UN gets what it wants.  That said, if there is already an economic calamity in play because of stagflation and supply chain disruptions, they figure they can force climate controls into place and no one will notice.  

If regional wars in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere erupt and continue for the next 8 years, then the public could be led to believe that the economic disaster was indeed caused by foreign wars and “evil nationalism” rather than globalist policies and central bank money printing.  They are already planting the propaganda today in preparation for the next decade of events.  The last thing the elites want is for the populace to aim their anger at at them.  

Furthermore, large scale chaos calls for large scale solutions.  If you want to change the world rapidly while erasing generations of traditions, heritage, principles, laws and freedoms, then you have to break the old system and get people to beg for a new one.   People have to believe it was their idea to change everything, that way they don't rebel in the future.  

The UN is playing a game of inoculation; planting misinformation today in advance of disasters they know will happen tomorrow. 

Pelosi in Taiwan....

  Just as provoking Russia was not the right way to protect Ukraine independence, provoking China can bring nothing positive for Taiwan. 

 Here's the best article, by far, I found on this subject. 

 As such the trip was both insignificant and ominous...

by Simon Black via Sovereign Man

In March of 421 BC, after years of escalating conflict, Athens and Sparta finally decided to bury the hatchet and coexist peacefully together in the Mediterranean.

The two powers had been at odds for decades. Athens had ballooned into a regional empire, and Sparta itself was a rising power.

The two sides came to blows on multiple occasions. And even when they agreed to keep the peace in 421 BC, tensions were still high. All it took was one idiot to screw it up.

His name was Alcibiades, a Greek politician of noble birth. Alcibiades was pretty infamous in Athens; he was known for being corrupt, deceitful, disloyal, arrogant, and short-tempered.

I’m serious. There are numerous accounts from ancient historians who wrote in excruciating detail about what a terrible person Alcibiades was. Plutarch tells us, for example, about a time that Alcibiades cheated in a wrestling match by biting his opponent (to no one’s surprise) and how he mutilated his own dog.

Even poor Socrates tried, and failed, to teach Alcibiades about ethics and morality.

But despite his horrendous reputation, Alcibiades still managed to catapult himself into positions of high power… and to remain there… primarily due to his political cunning.

In fact Alcibiades was essentially the Speaker of the Athenian Assembly, with the power to dictate the day’s agenda and influence the outcome of votes.

Alcibiades was so powerful that, during the summer of 418 BC, he decided (without any approval from the government) to pay a visit to the Peloponnese in southern Greece– territory that was claimed by Sparta.

There was absolutely zero upside in Alcibiades doing this. It was just a big circus act for him to show off his power and prestige. He didn’t care if Sparta would be outraged, or if his actions had consequences for Athens. All that mattered to Alcibiades was that people were talking about him.

Naturally his actions did have consequences.

Smaller city-states in the Peloponnese were emboldened by Alcibiades’ trip to the region, so they forged a fledgling alliance and attempted to seize a strategic settlement located at Sparta’s southern border.

With their border security threatened, Sparta sent an army to push away the invaders; the resulting battle was a massive victory for Sparta and a huge embarrassment for Athens. But Alcibiades blamed one of his political opponents for the defeat, so he never took the fall for his own mistake.

The conflict quickly escalated further, and soon Athens and Sparta were once again in a full-blown war with each other– one that Athens would ultimately lose to its rival.

I’m writing this, of course, at a time when US Speaker Nancy Pelosi has just touched down in Taiwan.

Pelosi is an idiot, but she’s not stupid. She knows there are consequences. The Chinese have made it very clear that they do not want Pelosi going to Taiwan. Tensions are already high between the US and China, and this trip certainly won’t help.

Now, obviously it’s not up to China to dictate US policy or actions. But like Alcibiades’ trip to the Peloponnese in 418 BC, there is absolutely zero benefit in Pelosi going to Taiwan.

The US economy is in a tailspin. Parents can’t find baby formula for their infants. Inflation is raging. People are suffering.

What exactly does this woman hope to achieve? Will her visit to Taiwan somehow make inflation miraculously retreat? Will baby formula suddenly appear on the shelves?

Of course not. So if there’s no benefit for Americans, then why go at all?

On the flip side, the trip does present a number of risks. China doesn’t want to look weak, and whatever retaliatory action they take probably won’t be positive for the US.

China’s initial response has been predictably swift. They’ve already kicked off live-fire military exercises, i.e. real weapons and munitions, and have essentially encircled Taiwan by sea. Apparently these military exercises will include missile tests off Taiwan’s east coast.

The US, meanwhile, has positioned at least two naval vessels and several fighter jets close to Taiwan’s east coast, increasing the potential for conflict, or even just an accident.

Hopefully nothing catastrophic happens. But, again, what exactly is the point of this trip? It’s all risk and no reward… just so that Pelosi can showboat in front of the cameras before her retirement next year.

You’d think that someone with decades of political experience– an ‘expert’ in international diplomacy– would understand such a simple reality, and then rationally choose the course of action which will benefit her country the most. But that’s a laughable proposition.

Pelosi has a multi-decade track record of deceit, disloyalty, cowardice, and arrogance. She’s even despised by prominent members of her own party.

Ironically, the only reason Pelosi even has a job is because a mere 73,815 voters in the San Francisco Bay area chose to send her to Congress. That’s a tiny fraction of the US population in a tiny corner of the country.

Seriously, more people voted to elect the mayor of Denver, Colorado than voted for Nancy Pelosi. Yet somehow Pelosi has enormous power and influence in global politics.

Something is clearly wrong with this system that produces such bizarre, lopsided outcomes from serially corrupt and incompetent candidates.

Pelosi is just one of countless examples– a #mefirst, self-centered hypocrite who has become the modern day Alcibiades. And she’ll most likely go down in history with a similar reputation as he did.

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A Critique of the BBC Documentary: Unvaccinated

  With this interesting article, you won't learn much about Covid-19 that you did not already know but it is conversely extremely well documented to understand how propaganda works.

 Propaganda is de facto not a haphazard process but a well built articulation of different elements: Arguments without counter arguments, ideas without explanation (follow the science), character assassination to weaken one side of the debate, silence or outright cut of good points which do not fit the narrative...

 The truth is that all this is not new. These techniques have been honed over half a century of trial and error since the second World War, on radio first, television later, and more recently the Internet. The good thing is that we understand much better how it works. The bad thing is that it is far more sophisticated and potent than it used to be. The ugly one is that it is more and more used for nefarious purposes. 

A Critique of the BBC Documentary: Unvaccinated

By Nicholas Creed republished via The Daily Bell

I watched it so you don’t have to, although should you choose to, it can be watched on Odysee.com here.

This author’s mind has been blown.

The narrator introduces the documentary as “an eye opening investigation led by Professor Hannah Fry.” Well, it certainly was eye opening, it made me want to gouge my eyes out. Incredibly uncomfortable viewing.

Let’s get into it.

It starts off with a montage of a few of the (unjected) participants and summarises their concerns or ‘hesitancy’.

Chanelle is pregnant, worried about how the injection could affect her unborn child.

 

Naomi is worried about future fertility issues if she were to take the COVID-19 experimental gene therapy injection.

 

 

Mark is for freedom of choice over coercion.

 

 

Luca is immediately portrayed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and they hone in on his concerns over 5G and microchips being in the jabby-jabs. It’s a twisted attempt to discredit him and tar him with the tiresome ‘conspiracy theorist’ brush.

Fry wants to get to the heart of the issue (I think that is myocarditis, isn’t it?).

Vicky proudly didn't follow restrictions during lockdowns etc, she is a “normal person who doesn’t want to take part in a trial.”

Vicky, I salute you.

A psychologist named Clarissa (I think) is brought in to tell Fry that the ‘vax hesitancy’ is about a crisis of confidence. Advises Fry to find the root cause of the so called hesitancy. She bleats that if one person changes their mind it can have a positive viral effect. Yay!

Fry smugly declares they have conducted the largest ever survey in the UK on vax hesitancy with a study sample of a mere 2,500 humans, with 600 unjected. Biased much? Is this total sample size even representative for the UK with an estimated population of 68,623,948 humans?

Fry cites the main concern of the unjected being the adverse reaction of blood clots. Apparently 50% of those surveyed cited this.

She then tells the group that 1 in 10 people who take the gene therapy will experience headaches, and segues into ‘a study from the US’ (source??) whereby 76% of participants experienced adverse reactions / symptoms, as a placebo effect, because of their expectation to receive such an effect, even though they did not receive the medication.

Hmmmm.

We have our first strawman argument on placebo groups and psycho-somatic symptoms being generated from some non-cited study in the US.

The pregnant lady Chanelle wants more information, camera pans to Fry whose face lights up with a beaming smile.

Fry:

I am not trying to trick you, not trying to catch you out. Let’s see the gold standard evidence.

Ah, that old chestnut.

 

Nazarin Veronica spends her free time doing outreach to warn people of the dangers of the COVID-19 injections. What a wonderful Woman.

 

Nazarin cites the recent Pfizer report with 9 pages of data on adverse reactions. Fry says it's terrifying but moves on to her next strawman argument as a coincidence theorist.

The adverse reaction could take place afterwards coincidentally. Just imagine, a doctor answers the phone (when he’s about to inject a child with the jab), then the little boy has a fit, but he didn’t even get jabbed.

Wait, what?

Fry:

There are indeed some rare side effects such as Anaphylaxis, Myocarditis, and blood clots. Blood clots linked to AstraZeneca. Bells palsy & Guillain-Barre syndrome flagged as potential rare side effects. There are only 29 more cases per million.

 

We move onto Ethan who is fearful of side effects. He wants to be a Father one day.

Fry brings on a GP called Dr. Aurora, who says that all research done shows no impact on fertility in male or female patients. Interestingly, she speaks very quickly and mumbled, as if to betray her inner belief and knowledge of what is true.

The doctor then flips the script and tells young Ethan that it is in fact COVID that can cause infertility. Sources? Data? Trust the science™.

*I have reams of information to counter all these bold pronouncements. I will link to a previous article where I covered this in detail, as well as further recommended reading at the end of this piece.

---

 

The focus here is to review the documentary and call things out as bizarrely, propagandised, and gas-lit as they are. I will link to a few sources as necessary throughout.

Naomi is brought on for a one-to-one with Fry. Naomi had long COVID, and is still suffering the after effects.

GP Dr. Aurora says there have been reports of irregularities in menstrual cycles following Women having the COVID-19 injection. Again she speaks very fast and mumbles this part. Then her speech pattern slows down with emphatically clear pronunciation, to tell Naomi that this side effect is temporary; everything will be fine by the second or third menstrual cycle.

Would it not have been opportune and honourable to the hippocratic oath, to responsibly explain why the menstrual cycle irregularities happen in the first place as a common side effect after taking the injection??

Fry confidently states that Ethan & Naomi are open to Dr. Aurora's advice…

Nazarin explains how her friend had a stroke and three suspected heart attacks shortly after taking the injection. Nazarin shows Fry a video on her phone of her friend having a seizure.

Fry, seemingly devoid of empathy and switching into narrative protectionism mode, casually asks Nazarin:

How can you be sure that was the vax?

Nazarin replies that her friend had been healthy then days later she began experiencing seizures & paralysis, and she is so young, this is not possible (that it was unrelated to the injection).

Nazarin:

You know in your heart, that’s what caused it.

Fry looks to the left, pauses, thinking, says there is not enough evidence to say so, bites her nails…

 

Fry:

We know the vaxeeens aren't without risk, but I want to help the group to think about the chance of side effects versus the disease itself. As humans we are most affected by stories. We need to step outside of our emotional engagement with topics.

Interesting. I recall how the UK Government’s SAGE team wrote in black and white how to manipulate people through their emotions during the early part of the scamdemic.

Fry focuses on Myocarditis. Tells the group the (incidence rate) numbers post-injection, recommends them to “anchor your mind, visualise”….Then we move onto jelly bean roulette. This is an actual game she makes the participants play. Treating them like infants.

 

The master jellybean represents the risk of you getting Myocarditis if you have the injection. Round one of the joyful little game had a higher chance of them ‘getting’ Myocarditis, but Fry says that:

Round two is a much more attractive proposition!

Cue Fry swings a few sackfuls of jellybeans onto the table. She adds 33,000 beans to convey the correct level of risk (being 1 in 33,000).

You are playing a game of jellybean roulette!

Nazarin points out that other jelly beans could be (representing) other side effects. Fry interjects that Myocarditis is the most common severe side effect. Oh. That serves as a strange yet perhaps unintentionally stated fact. Oops. Contradicted her goals and objectives of the documentary much?

*Nazarin is consistently talked over and interrupted when she is calmly presenting facts on adverse reactions; allegedly a lot of her talking points were edited out by the BBC. More on that later.

Fry says the most at risk are 18-29 yr olds! Apparently only 1 in 33,000.

Fry tells Nazarin that she is tapped into stories of people negatively affected / vax injured, due to the communities she is surrounded by. Very distasteful and dismissive of Fry.

Vicky walks out of the room and says the jellybean roulette game is insulting, people are dying and injured, this is not a serious debate.

Vicky, I concur.

Fry acknowledges vax deaths mostly linked to AstraZeneca blood clots. *Note this is the second time that Fry has openly called out and demonised the AZ injection…almost seems perceptible at driving the great unwashed towards the mRNA poison instead?

Nah, that would be conspiratorial thinking, wouldn’t it?

Fry announces that up to may 2021, the number of blood clots were in the 10s not 100s (check MHRA, links at bottom of article for truth).

---

 

The group is taken to meet scientists who trialed and tested the injections.

Fry tells the camera how it is frustrating that Vicky and Nazarin won't join as they are “too committed to their beliefs, getting in the way of others in the group wanting to ask questions and find out more information.”

Those damn pesky anti-vaxxers!

Luca is ridculed questioned by Fry on his belief that there could be a microchip in the vax. Fry says 5% adults believe this. Luca cites himself being banned from Facebook. Luca thinks the vax is for depopulation.

Mike Yeadon and Reiner Fuellmich of the corona investigative committe would certainly agree with Luca on the depopulation agenda.

They arrive to see the scientists and Fry asks Luca to wear a mask upon entering the building; he says and that he’s exempt. Well done Luca.

 

Professor Finn on far right.

 

A masked Professor Finn says the vax is very good at stopping you from getting seriously ill, not good at stopping you passing it on.

They look at samples with antibody colour changes comparing injected / unjected (but no mention of antibody dependent enhancement or immune imprinting).

Ethan wants to know the risk of someone who has had COVID twice compared to someone who has been vaxd.

Prof. Finn stutters:

Um, we think that the immunity you get is more consistent and usually stronger if you've had the vax than if you’ve had the infection. We find that people who have had the vax and get infected have a strong immune response.

Alas, no mention of natural immunity.

 

Sat outside on the grass, Professor Finn is now unmasked. COVID theatre is situational specific, don’t you know?

Prof. Finn:

The way (the trials were done) was not by missing out any steps we normally do.

Okay Finny, let me pause you there.

The clinical trials are still ongoing. Although several countries issued "emergency use authorization" allowing these companies to begin distributing these vaccines to the public, the stage III trials of the vaccines are ongoing, with several of the planned "endpoints" for the data not being collected for 24 months after injection.

As a result, as even the UK's own "Information for UK Healthcare Professionals" pamphlet regarding Pfizer's vaccine points out:

Animal reproductive toxicity studies have not been completed.

 

Ethan asks what is in the vax. Prof. Fin doesn’t answer the question, just says they “got the code from china to make the spike protein”…

Prof. Fin says Moderna made a fortune knocking out the vax batches, calls it a bonanza, but proudly says that:

Capitalism is the way we want to go!

Oh my days, I could not make this stuff up.

*Update - revelation that Professor Finn works at Bristol University the Pfizer vaccine control center for excellence.

No conflict of interest at all there then?

Now we go to the St. George's vaccine institute in London. Chanelle wishes to find out how the injection affects fertility.

Prof. Khalil assuredly states:

What we know for sure is the vax does not cause miscarriage.

Did she really say that on camera?!

The most recent new information that has come to light on how the injections affect pregnant mothers-to-be and their fetuses, is detailed in an analysis of the United State’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting system (VAERS), by Dr. James Thorp - covered by the Epoch Times here.

Extract from aforementioned Epoch Times article.

Back to the documentary.

The Professor goes on:

We know it does not cause still-birth, we have good safety data. The vax is useful for you and your baby, could reduce risk of stillbirth by 15%.

I don’t think the Professor and I are looking at the same data here…

*Update - Professor Khalil has been revealed to be the Principal Investigator of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in pregnancy trial:

So much for all these “independent experts” then.

Fry asks Nazarin & Vicky about why they did not come to the vax institute. Nazarin cites that she's done her research on both sides and is well informed.

Fry patronises Vicky and tells her that she gets the impression that Vicky is very 'passionate' about what's happened (to the countless vax-injured and deceased).

When Vicky asks Fry if this is an approved vax, Fry evades the question, mumbles about scientists running different versions of different vaccines. Fry references phase 4 trials are normal after a jab rollout.

Fry brings up a fake NHS vaccine checklist someone made for distribution with warnings about adverse reactions built into the checklist. She says it is all a hoax.

Then we’re taken through a few more surveys…

 

 The UK public’s perception of the COVID vax development process.

We also learn from Fry that 30% of the surveyed respondents have little trust in the mainstream media, including Sky, ITV, and the BBC.

Nice.

The survey sample size is 1,894 (664 unjected) in relation to COVID perceptions.

 

 Meet Will Moy.

Will Moy from Full Fact meets the group. Fry cites social media posts being taken down. Moy brings out a ridiculously irrelevant fact check of golf reducing chance of early death.

The next fact check is about the Ukraine / Russia conflict being a hoax. This is a weird segue.

Fry wants to talk about Ukraine to Luca and basically intimidate and mock him about his social media posts. Nazarin intervenes and is clearly angered, stating how irrelevant this is, rightly points out that the topic of focus here is the COVID-19 injection.

Nazarin says she wants an equal discussion about both sides of the story. Will Moy blew my mind with this little gem:

Let's be careful about ‘equal’, there is very good evidence that the vaccines are (*drum roll please*) SAFE AND EFFECTIVE"

When the topic of free speech crops up, Moy ‘profoundly’ says:

In a world where you believe in free speech, telling someone they are wrong when they are wrong, is the right response.

 

Those fact checkers are like patron saints, unsung heroes I tell thee.

In closing, all the participants are asked by Fry if they would now take the injection, and they all say NO!

Nazarin is a beautiful human being and her response is measured, thought provoking and compassionate:

It is unethical to risk young people’s lives to protect those of older people, it is not moral.

Indeed.

When in the history of humanity have we ever before sacrificed the health of our children on the altar of the ‘greater good’, in order to protect the elderly and the vulnerable?

It is the opinion of this author that the countless lies and omissions of the truth throughout this documentary have sealed the fate of the BBC.

Roll on Nuremberg 2.0 trials.

Nazarin has since been tweeting about her experience filming the documentary and the posts are rather illuminating.

Theater Opening in the Balkans.

  The Balkans may look like a sideshow but it's not as we learned 100 years ago.

  Superpowers just do not declare wars on each others. They realize the danger and do their best to mitigate the risk. So if you want to generate a war, you need to proceed methodically. Very much like a fire! inflame some straw in a corner, add some twigs above, let simmer for a while and when it's red enough throw in the big logs.

Theater Opening

Guest Post by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

If you’re Chinese or Russian, and you watch videos of the top three “most powerful” people in the US, Biden, Kamala and Pelosi, what do you think? You think all three are incoherent and should not be anywhere near any decisive, let alone nuclear, lever.

If you’re anybody anywhere, and you look at the top three “most powerful” people in the world, Xi, Putin and Biden, what do you think? You think two of them have got it together (nothing to do with you liking them or not), and one can’t even read coherently from a teleprompter.

Nowhere near half of Americans understand these two things to be true, but probably some 90% of Chinese and Russians do, as well as a vast majority of people in other non-US/NATO/EU countries.

Another threesome: Sergei Lavrov (Russia), Tony Blinken (US) and Liz Truss (UK) are all foreign ministers (or Secretaries of State, give the beast a name). Who would you trust to represent your own interests best in the field of diplomacy? It’s not even a question, is it? If the US or UK had a Lavrov, he would be their man (he would most likely decline). But they don’t. The US has a nobody (they have lots of those!) in the role, and the UK has someone with zero qualifications who dreams of getting the top job.

The world outside of the G7 or G20 (give the wheel a spin) sees this happening. Is it any wonder they clamor to be part of BRICS? The “collective west” is fast finishing off itself, and yes, you’re right, that is a dangerous moment. It’s also why it very much looks like the “collective west” is trying to open a second theater of war in Europe. One that looks a lot like the one they opened in Ukraine. And the EU, to its utter shame, does nothing to prevent this from happening – on its “own” soil!.

I know, there’s Crazy Nancy on her way to Taipei as well as we speak, we’ll get to that yet. Imagine: you’re 80-odd years old, and you want your legacy to be WWIII. Not your grandchildren, but live nukes. Just imagine that.

Kosovo’s unilateral secession from Serbia was recognized by the “main Western powers” in 2008. But not China, Russia, or the UN!. Not too long after Bill Clinton’s NATO bombed the heebeejeebees out of former Yugoslavia in 1990. Just because they could. Today, the US -and NATO- try to use a tiny sliver of former Yugoslavia to ignite a major fire in Europe, a second fire besides Ukraine.

Kosovo is the size of half a postage stamp, only two US states are smaller, Rhode Island and Delaware. 1.8 million people live there, it’s like one NYC borough. But you can use the historic hatred to rekindle the flames. Right, Blinken? Well, turns out there are still some Serbs living in Kosovo, because that’s where they grew up.

The brilliant Kosovo PM now has the fantastic idea to start a fight with these Serbs, over the fact that their cars have Serb license plates and they themselves have Serb IDs, a whole 14(!) years later. Yeah, that’s worth a fight, obviously.

So America’s “top diplomat” Blinken invited Kosovo president Osmani and PM Albin Kurti to DC last week.

 

 

 

 

I’ll let some people other than me explain this to you. First, political analyst Alexandar Pavic:

In Kosovo As In Ukraine, The Same Western ‘Invisible Hand’ Foments Conflict

In addition to the conflict in Ukraine, Europe is now faced with the prospect of renewed conflict in Kosovo, Serbia’s breakaway province (officially named Kosovo and Metohija according to the Serbian constitution). Kosovo’s unilateral secession was recognized by the main Western powers in 2008. This came nine years after NATO’s attack on Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, after which NATO forces occupied the province and helped install an ethnic Albanian-led government dominated by former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army terrorist organization.

The current crisis was triggered by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, who initially wanted to force the majority Serb population in the north of the region to accept Kosovan license plates and ID papers starting from August 1, and to ban entry to the province or issue temporary papers to travelers with Serbian-issued plates and documents.

Kurti attempted a similar stunt in September 2021, triggering a crisis where local Serbs in northern Kosovo organized roadblocks and Kosovo police reportedly beat up and intimidated Serb civilians, while the authorities in Belgrade put the Serbian military on high alert and ordered overflights by fighter planes over the administrative border between Serbia proper and Kosovo. The EU eventually brokered a temporary agreement, pending a final deal that was supposed to have been reached by April 2022, under EU auspices. However, nothing has come of that.

From Kosovo to Ukraine, it seems there’s a pattern regarding agreements in which Western powers have a hand. Since the start of this year’s special military operation in Ukraine, Russian officials have repeated time and again that the West had never pressed Kiev to fulfill its part of the 2015 Minsk 2 peace agreement, intended to end Kiev’s standoff with the Donbass republics. Recently, former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko openly admitted that Ukraine never intended to fulfill the agreement but was merely buying time until it could build up an army capable of overrunning Donbass.

The situation with Kosovo is not much different. The EU brokered an agreement between Pristina and Belgrade in April 2013, the so-called Brussels Agreement, by which Serbia was supposed to dismantle its “parallel” police and judicial structures in Kosovo and convince the Kosovo Serbs to accept integration into the Kosovo police and legal system, without recognizing the territory’s independence. And the Belgrade authorities did this, despite a large public outcry over the move.

 

However, there was a second part to the agreement, by which Pristina was obligated to form an Association of Serb Municipalities, with substantial local powers and ties to Serbia proper. The Albanian part of the Brussels Agreement has not been fulfilled to the present day. Or, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic noted on July 31, that 3,390 days have passed since the Brussels Agreement was signed, and still no sign of the Association.

As in the case of Ukraine, the collective West has put absolutely zero pressure on the side it supports to fulfill its part of a signed international agreement. And again, as in the case of Ukraine, this has encouraged Pristina to take an increasingly belligerent stance, which may very well lead to a more serious conflict.

There’s an additional ingredient to the Kosovo mix, thanks to the Ukraine conflict. Namely, the Serbs – both in Serbia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina – stand practically alone among European peoples in refusing to join Western sanctions against Russia, and in consistently demonstrating open support for Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. As a result, the government in Belgrade has been under constant, increasing pressure by the main Western capitals, as well as the EU and NATO, to change its policy and join the West’s collective economic suicide.

Since Belgrade has proven to be a tough nut for the West to diplomatically crack when it comes to opposing Russia, it’s not at all far-fetched to imagine that the Kosovo Albanians just might be seen by the West as a useful tool by which to additionally turn the screws on Belgrade. In the same cynical way in which the unfortunate Ukrainians are being used to pressure and weaken Russia.

 

 

 

Next, from RT, about Richard Grenell. No love lost on my part about him, but he did negotiate a bunch of peace deals, and knows the territory much better than Blinken.

Trump’s Kosovo Envoy Slams US Over Crisis

Richard Grenell, who negotiated a Kosovo-Serbia deal under the Trump administration after a turn in charge of the US intelligence community, blamed the “reckless” prime minister in Pristina for the renewed tensions with Belgrade on Sunday and slammed the State Department for enabling him. “What’s happening in the Balkans isn’t Russia. Whoever says this to you is trying to manipulate you,” Grenell tweeted on Sunday evening. “This is about Albin Kurti trying once again to give it [to] Serbia. He is living in the past.”

“The people of Kosovo want peace and jobs, Albin. Stop picking fights,” Grenell added. Serbian military was placed on high alert and local Serbs put up roadblocks earlier in the day, after Kosovo police showed up at two administrative crossings with Serbia, intending to enforce Kurti’s decision to confiscate Serbian license plates and documents. This would have effectively cut off the remaining Serbs living in the north of the breakaway province.

According to Grenell, this was all about Kurti “making unilateral moves to reject Serbian IDs and license plates inside Kosovo,” which he called “unnecessary.” Describing the PM a “far left radical and experienced fascist,” Grenell further called his actions “foolish” and “reckless,” and urged Serbian leaders to “not take the bait.” “Even the Albanians know Kurti is the problem,”Grenell tweeted. He also blamed Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who met with Kurti and Kosovo president Vjosa Osmani earlier in the week.

US President Joe Biden has “ignored the Balkans,” the envoy added, pointing out that he had negotiated multiple agreements between Kosovo and Serbia under President Donald Trump, trying to overcome the conflict through economic cooperation. Grenell also accused the EU of orchestrating war crimes charges against Kosovo President Hashim Thaci to punish him for working with Trump – resulting in Kurti and Osmani taking power.

And then Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

Why Are Serbia And Kosovo On The Brink Of War Again?

Tensions between Belgrade and Pristina occur regularly, as a result of the fact that the Kosovo issue has not been resolved since 1999, when the province de facto gained independence after the US-led NATO campaign against the former Yugoslavia. However, this time there is a risk of more or less routine friction escalating into a dangerous conflict, because the context has changed dramatically.

The problem of Kosovo was solved at the end of the twentieth century in strict accordance with the then dominant approach, and in the seeming absence of an alternative. Disputes in most of Europe (ie. outside the former USSR) were settled according to the EU’s ideas of fairness, and where they could not be worked out amicably, pressure was exerted on those who rebelled, up to the use of military force (primarily American, as always).

[..] it was the EU that regulated the processes taking place locally, and, in general, this setup was taken for granted. Moreover, other powers which have been traditionally active and important in the Balkans – Russia and Turkey – indicated their presence (sometimes quite clearly), but did not pretend to have a decisive voice in the way things were arranged. This framework also defined the room to maneuver for the countries of the region, including those who were most loudly dissatisfied, like Serbia.

Now two main circumstances have changed. First, the EU is in such a vulnerable state that it is not ready to take full responsibility for the extremely complex political situation in its immediate periphery. It cannot promise membership, and more precisely – even if such a pledge were made, it doesn’t guarantee anything.

The EU’s management of the central Balkan problems – in Bosnia and Kosovo – has not led to the desired outcome over the past quarter of a century. Thus, it’s all the less likely that it will work out now. Because the second circumstance is that Russia and the West (the EU plus the US and NATO) are in a state of acute confrontation.

As a result, there is no reason to expect Moscow’s assistance in resolving the situation (be it Kosovo or Bosnia). Right now, the West’s favorite practice of “selective interaction” (we work together with Russia where we need it, we refuse to engage on other issues) can no longer be applied. There will be no cooperation: Russia and the West will be on opposite sides of the barricades everywhere, no matter the issue at hand. We are in a systemic cold war. And this reality can greatly influence what will happen in the Balkans.

The question is to what extent regional actors have retained their passion for showdown, revenge or expansion. There are suspicions that this zeal has been exhausted and emasculated. But if it still burns, then external forces will enter the fray this time, supporting opposing sides.

Blinken et al, which very much includes his EU counterparts, see the past struggles in the Balkans as something they can reignite at their convenience today. The initial boundaries are simple. Russia will come to the aid of Serbia. Kosovo will appeal to Albania. And then to NATO. So the idea is you got this hot cauldron, with 5-6-15 nations, and NATO can do whatever it wants in there.

But NATO has no chance in Ukraine, and it doesn’t have one in Kosovo. But it can ship billions worth of weapons in there by Raytheon. Problem I see with this genius plan is that Russia saw it coming from lightyears away. And that is the same issue as the difference between Lavrov and Blinken: they may have the same job title, but there’s no comparison.

Europe Has Lost The Energy War

  The coming months will be extremely painful for Europe since what the continent could not understand with negotiations will have to be learned the hard way through direct experience.

 The not-so-green "green energy" policies of Europe are mostly nonsense which will dramatically impoverish most countries since you will have to pay twice or more for everything. Once to get it the green way, with solar panels and wind turbines made in China, then a second time for a back-up when there is no sun or wind (think of a cold snowy day in Germany in January), with coal, oil or gas from Russia.  

 You can of course import industrial products from outside China and energy from outside Russia, it will just cost you more, rendering your economy even weaker in the process. The pain will be almost imperceptible in Norway which has ample oil and gas resources to pay for renewables and unbearable for Greece which has nothing. Everyone else will be somewhere in-between.

 This by itself would be a harbinger of thought times ahead. Now, add a proxy war over Ukraine with Russia and over Taiwan with China and you have a true recipe for disaster. What we think of who's right and who's wrong has no importance whatsoever. What counts in the end is not that Carthage was right, it is that Rome won the Punic wars. Europe spent four centuries teaching the hard lesson of might makes right to the world, it is now on the verge of learning it back! 

 The ancient Chinese were right: Progress is cyclic, not linear!

Authored by Thomas Fazi via UnHerd.com,

After a decade of financial austerity, is Europe now on the brink of a new age of energy austerity? The city of Hanover has recently introduced strict energy-saving rules that include cutting off the hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms, banning mobile air conditioners, fan heaters or radiators, switching off public fountains, and stopping illuminating major buildings such as the town hall at night.

Meanwhile, several countries across Europe are considering dimming or switching off public lights, and even adopting “energy curfews”, with early closures for businesses and public offices. And more drastic measures are under consideration — including gas rationing for energy-intensive industries such as steel and agriculture.

These measures are part of an EU-wide Gas Demand Reduction Plan, ominously titled Save Gas for a Safe Winter, to reduce gas use in Europe by 15% until next spring. Among the proposals is a provision that officials in Brussels impose fines for non-compliance if they decide the crisis is escalating dangerously.

All of this comes amid growing fears that dwindling Russian gas supplies may plunge Europe into an energy crisis this winter. Overall, Russian gas exports to the EU are at about a third of last year’s levels, falling steadily since the invasion of Ukraine. While several European countries have been reducing their Russian gas imports, Russia itself has been reducing gas flows to Europe through Nord Stream 1, the continent’s biggest pipeline, citing mainly technical issues. Just the other day, citing equipment repair, Russia announced yet another reduction in the amount of natural gas flowing through Nord Stream 1, which is now operating at only 20% capacity.

This has caused natural gas spot prices to surge to levels not seen since early March; they are now almost 10 times higher than they were two years ago. In most countries, electricity prices have risen accordingly. Soaring energy prices are already fuelling record inflation — currently close to 9% and rising in the EU — squeezing people’s spending power, plunging thousands into poverty, and placing a huge burden on industry.

This is especially true for Germany, which is almost entirely dependent on Russian gas imports. Indeed, the country’s industrial production has been contracting for over three months. Astonishingly, 16% of industrial German companies have reduced production or partially stopped their activities due to rising energy prices. This helps explain why last month Germany became the first country to escalate its warning over gas supplies to the “alert level”.

The combined effect of rising prices, lagging demand (both internally and abroad, as China goes back into lockdown) and falling production and investment is already causing economic growth on the continent to grind to a halt. While institutions such as the European Commission and the IMF, despite significant downward revisions, still predict real GDP in the EU to be around 2.5% this year, several analysts consider even these far-from-rosy predictions to be overly optimistic. Carsten Brzeski, Chief Eurozone Economist at ING bank, for example, foresees a recession at the end of the year as high prices sap purchasing power.

To make matters worse, the ECB’s recent decision to raise interest rates will do little or nothing to curb inflation caused by supply-side factors, but will almost certainly further depress economic activity, making it harder for states to mobilise resources needed to cushion the effects of the energy crisis. And as for the ECB’s recently launched Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI), aimed at helping countries in financial distress, it may only be activated for those countries judged to be “fiscally sustainable” (a questionable concept in itself), even though the current polycrisis is inevitably bound to put a strain on the public finances of European countries.

Furthermore, even though the EU has sensibly — for once! — proposed to keep the EU’s fiscal rules suspended for another year, several countries, led by Germany, have announced their intention to embrace austerity once again. “For Germany, it’s clear: we will not make use of the general escape clause,” said the German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, arguing that the priority now had to be fighting inflation. “We will return to the debt brake. We have to stop the addiction to ever more indebtedness.” For this, he added, “we have to get out of our expansionary fiscal policies, and out of the debts, so that the central bank has the space to fight inflation with its means”.

In other words, Germany seems intent on once again plunging the continent even deeper into recession through utterly self-defeating austerity, just as it did in the wake of the financial crisis. Europe is already heading for a stagflationary scenario — a situation where high inflation is associated with low or negative growth. Austerity would simply make a bad situation even worse.

If things are bad now, however, it goes without saying that a further decrease in Russian gas flows, which still account for 40% of the EU’s gas imports — not to mention a full stop — would have utterly catastrophic consequences, especially if that were to happen during the winter, when demand for gas it at its highest. Energy, after all, is literally the lifeblood of the economy. It’s what keeps our houses lit and warm (or cool), and our cars, industries, supermarkets and electronic gadgets running. Without it, civilisation literally comes to a halt.

This is why if Europe’s energy supplies are unable to meet demand, the consequences would be almost unimaginable: factories would be forced to close, workers would be laid off, and households forced to restrict electricity and heating use to certain hours. It would be nothing short of societal meltdown. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recently admitted that shortages of natural gas this winter “could spark popular uprisings”. Think riots, looting, martial law, possibly even toppled governments.

In an attempt to stave off this doomsday scenario, the EU has adopted a regulation providing that underground gas storage on member states’ territory must be filled to at least 80% of their capacity by the end of October (it’s currently at 67%). That, however, depends on stable flows in the following months. Moreover, even if the 80% target is reached, that still wouldn’t be enough to get countries through the whole winter without continuous supplies of more gas. While at current capacity, the EU would have just enough gas to get to the end of November (assuming an October 1 start to winter).

Moreover, storage levels and storage capacity vary greatly in the EU. Some countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria and Croatia, would run out by December even at full capacity (while others are lagging seriously behind in filling the tanks up). Germany remains the most exposed. Despite having by far the largest storage tanks in Europe, its demand for gas is equally large and its tanks only hold 108 days of consumption — full tanks would run dry on February 16 and they are currently only 67% full, which would be emptied in December if Russia turned off the gas tomorrow.

Overall, it’s highly unlikely that Europe would survive a full cut-off of Russian gas. While some countries have successfully managed to partially replace Russian gas imports with alternative, albeit more expensive, sources of gas — such as liquefied natural gas, or LNG — others, first and foremost Germany, remain heavily dependent on Russian imports.

So ultimately we have little choice but to hope in Putin’s good will if we want to make it through the winter. Yet Russia’s leader is not the only one to blame for our current predicament. If today we find ourselves on the brink of disaster, and already facing massive economic hardship, the responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of European leaders. Put to one side the fact that waging “total economic and financial war” on a nuclear-armed regional power that shares more than 2,000 kilometres of borders with Europe could hardly be considered a sensible move, it was glaringly obvious that cutting off Europe-Russia economic relations was going to hurt the former much more than the latter, given Europe’s dependency on Russian gas. Indeed, European leaders indirectly admitted this when they excluded Russian oil and gas exports from the sanctions regime. There’s something pathologically infantile about the behaviour of European leaders: they enjoy strutting around on the world stage and making grandiose speeches about “democracy standing up to autocracy”, and yet they don’t seem to be cognisant of the real-world consequences of their words.

The question of Russian supplies is a perfect case in point. At the start of the conflict, the EU, which before the war got some 40% of its gas from Russia, announced its intention to reduce those gas imports by two-thirds by the end of the year and phase out Russian gas entirely by 2027. Indeed, for the past six months European leaders have been boasting about weaning themselves off it in order to “hit Putin where it hurts the most”. And yet today they moan about inflation and rising prices — what did they think would happen? — and were gripped by panic and moral outrage when Gazprom announced that it would be slashing its gas flows to Europe.

Is Russia weaponising the flow of gas in its tug of war with Europe? Of course it is. But Europeans started this game. Or perhaps they thought they could engage in a unilateral energy war with Russia, at their own pace and conditions (which is why they excluded Russian oil and gas exports from the sanctions regime), without the other side firing some shots back at them. To make matters even more grotesque, not only has the “gas war” not weakened Russia — it appears to have actually strengthened it, by helping Russia massively increase its inflow of foreign reserves on the back of rising energy prices.

For all the barbarity of Putin’s war, the livelihoods of millions of Europeans have already been sacrificed on the altar of the gross incompetence of European leaders. And the livelihoods of millions more are at risk. They’re right about one thing, though: the future of Europe depends on the struggle between democracy and autocracy — between us, the people, and them, the autocrats.