Willful Ignorance...,

Note: Reasonable people believe that thimerosol and aluminum adjuvants alike are neurotoxic. Much the same way we believe that atrazine causes gender dysmorphia. I was chewing this cud on my way to CT last week, and again on the way back from NYC yesterday afternoon, lamenting the fact that the airline no longer gives away peanuts as a snack due to the congenitally weak fail tails who cannot abide exposure to peanuts. Either these genetically underprivileged feebs let us all down because weakness, or, they were exposed to something early in life which rendered them dysfunctional.

BigThink  |  Do you have an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the reams of research showing them to be safe? What about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or how about that CEO who claims their business is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its supply chain for exploitation of the environment or the impoverished?

Each is an example of what psychologists call willful ignorance — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge: We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.

“Examples [of] willful ignorance abound in everyday life,” Linh Vu, a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam, said. “We wanted to know just how prevalent and how harmful willful ignorance is, as well as why people engage in it.”

To find out, Vu and a team of researchers performed the first meta-analysis on the current empirical evidence of willful ignorance, and it was published in the Psychological Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association. They compared the results of 22 studies with a total of more than 6,000 participants. Here’s what they found. 

Moral wiggle room

The classic experiment for studying willful ignorance is known as the moral wiggle room task. It was designed by Jason Dana, an associate professor of marketing and management at Yale. Participants are randomly assigned the role of decision-maker or recipient. The decision-maker is given a choice: They can take either a $5 or $6 payout. If they take the $5 payout, the recipient will receive $5 as well. If they take the $6 payout, the recipient will receive $1.

When provided with this information by a researcher, the majority of decision-makers act altruistically. They sacrifice the slightly larger payout for themselves to give the recipient more money. On average, only about a quarter of decision-makers act selfishly. But this full-information condition is simply the control. The experiment really begins when the researchers become less forthcoming.

In the experimental condition, the decision-makers can still choose between the $5 or $6 payouts, but this time they are not told what the recipient will receive. There’s a 50-50 chance the recipient will receive $5 or $1. Importantly, the decision-makers can ask the researchers what payout the recipient will receive, and they can do so at no cost to themselves. In other words, while the decision-makers start out blind to the consequences of their actions, they don’t have to stay that way if they don’t want to.

 

 

On Huntergate - DOJ OIG Horowitz Tells Sen. Ron Johnson "Investigate Deez Nutz!!!!"

DailyMail |  The FBI deliberately dragged its feet on the Hunter Biden investigation and told agents not to look into the Hunter Biden laptop, according to new whistleblowers who spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson.  

Johnson, R-Wisc., sent a letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Tuesday bringing forth the new whistleblower claims. 

'Recently, my office heard from individuals with knowledge of the FBI’s apparent corruption,' Johnson said. 

'After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, "you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop" and that the FBI is "not going to change the outcome of the election again,"' Johnson wrote to Horowitz. 

Johnson is demanding Horowitz look into the FBI's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop. 

'While I understand your hesitation to investigate a matter that may be related to an ongoing investigation, it is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,' Johnson said. 

'I hope you understand that the longer your office stands on the sidelines and delays investigating the FBI’s actions, the harder it will be for you to uncover the truth and hold individuals accountable for wrongdoing.' 

Horowitz told Johnson in February 2021 that the OIG would not investigate the FBI's handling of the laptop so as not to interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation into Hunter Biden's tax affairs.  

The new claims come after whistleblower allegations emerged in July that in the lead-up to the 2020 election the FBI labeled the laptop as 'disinformation.'  

In October 2020, one month before the election, 'an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed' by Timothy Thibault, a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who fielded the whistleblower complaints, claimed in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Thibault shut down the investigation despite evidence that some of the details were true, according to that whistleblower.  

 'Allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation,' Grassley wrote.

Any Lie, Any Action Is Ethical Pursuant To The Destruction Of Trump...,

americanmind |  A week after the invasion and nine-hour occupation of former President Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida, it is becoming clearer every day that there was no plausible legal reason for it.

It may have been, as has been widely alleged, a fishing expedition to try to find something useful for Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 kangaroo court inquiry into the “insurrection,” but if so, this was a desperation play, and since no such objective was specified in the warrant nor presumably mentioned in the affidavit supporting the warrant, such a fishing expedition is not legal, though on recent precedent, legal relevance is the last criterion this regime would take into account.

These are, if not the identical authors, certainly kindred spirits in the law enforcement bureaucracy of those who inflicted upon the much-wronged and disserved people of the United States the Trump-Russia collusion fraud, the whitewash of Hillary Clinton’s destruction of 33,000 subpoenaed emails and reckless and illegal use of a home server for confidential official information, the two spurious impeachments, and the scandalous mishandling of the Biden family’s financial shenanigans, and many other triumphs of malice and incompetence.

The burden of the deluge of semi-official leaks pipelined through the docile Trump-hating media last week gradually back-pedaled from the lofty insinuations of those elusive “high crimes and misdemeanors” equivalent to treason, to an archival dispute of the kind that all departing presidents have. The climb-down spiked briefly with the absurdity of misuse of nuclear military information in contravention of the Espionage Act, and wound up the week as a toothless, general-purpose, normal legal precaution. The normal Democrat practice in this kind of perversion of the prosecutorial apparatus is to rely upon the docile and rabidly partisan national political media to transmit a Niagara of dishonest official leaks. The New York Times, usually reliable as an administration source, has revealed that President Biden pressured the attorney general to prosecute Trump. The best he could do, apparently, was this burlesque of due process, with a feeble and belated acknowledgment that he had approved the invasion and that, of course, the fact of an investigation in progress prevented him from saying anything about it.

In this case, the spigots of leaks shut down after a few days, and in an agile act of improvisation, the anti-Trump media has taken to accusing the former president and his followers of inciting disrespect for the justice system and betraying a sense of unease at having Trump’s papers and conduct closely examined, thus inciting the inference that he must have been guilty of something. This is the familiar reasoning of people so possessed by hate that they wish to charge somebody with something, and in failing to find any useful evidence, they cite the absence of the evidence as illustrative of the fiendish cunning of the targeted person, in hiding or destroying the evidence.

This was the basis of the late Christopher Hitchens’ accusation against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger of being responsible for the death of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. And it was the essence of journeyman historian Michael Beschloss’ comments that while it was true that what was being done to President Trump was unprecedented, that was only because Trump was so obviously more criminally dishonest in his behavior than any previous American president, and so there was no need to elaborate upon it.

The fact that there is no evidence against Trump of having done anything illegal, despite years of obsessive and frequently illegal official persecution of him to unearth such evidence, merely confirms the satanic depths of his wickedness. Next we will have historian-for-hire John Meacham give us another chorus about Joe Biden’s resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt (who in four terms as he led the country out of the Great Depression and to the brink of victory in World War II never had one day of a negative public approval rating).     

The Wall Street Journal, which has been quite professional and even-handed in its treatment of Donald Trump as a politician, warned on the weekend that it would damage his credibility if he objected to the publication of the warrant for the intrusion at his house. They need not have worried: Trump was happy to have it made public and the shoe was now on the other foot, as the Justice Department is reduced to lame excuses for not releasing the affidavit on the basis of which the judge-shopped, professedly Trump-hating, magistrate to whom the affidavit was submitted, authorized the intrusion.

Legally, it need now hardly be pointed out that the execution of the search warrant at Trump’s home was an outrage. Justice should have proceeded by subpoena, and cannot explain why it waited for 19 months since Trump left office, during which Trump claims he cooperated entirely with it, to take this step. Even if there was some dispute on the matter of the subpoena, one hardly needs to launch a major raid to handle the disposition of such a non-urgent matter. Since a president can declassify anything he wants, the regime’s media apologists are reduced to claiming he must have declassified some things incorrectly.

C'mon Man! Biden White House ORCHESTRATED Criminal Fishing Expedition Against Trump

justthenews |  Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump's estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president's claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump's Florida home.

By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor's claims to executive privilege, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.

The machinations are summarized in several memos and emails exchanged between the various agencies in spring 2022, months before the FBI took the added unprecedented step of raiding Trump's Florida compound with a court-issued search warrant.

The most complete summary was contained in a lengthy letter dated May 10 that acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall sent Trump's lawyers summarizing the White House's involvement.

"On April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel's Office — affirming a request from the Department of Justice supported by an FBI letterhead memorandum — formally transmitted a request that NARA provide the FBI access to the 15 boxes for its review within seven days, with the possibility that the FBI might request copies of specific documents following its review of the boxes," Wall wrote Trump defense attorney Evan Corcoran.

That letter revealed Biden empowered the National Archives and Records Administration to waive any claims to executive privilege that Trump might assert to block DOJ from gaining access to the documents.

"The Counsel to the President has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, regarding whether or not I should uphold the former President's purported 'protective assertion of executive privilege,'" Wall wrote. "... I have therefore decided not to honor the former President's 'protective' claim of privilege."

Bureaucrats Not Accountable To Politicians Not Accountable To Constituents...,

townhall |  As the FBI raided President Trump's Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, the White House was unaware that any federal law enforcement activity was afoot — or at least that's what unnamed sources were spinning to mainstream outlets Monday evening. 

According to one of those infamous "source familiar" people who runs their mouth without any accountability, senior White House officials found out about the FBI's raid on Trump's "Southern White House" like the rest of us and had no prior notice. The New York Times described the White House's discovery of the raid, reporting "Aides to President Biden said they were stunned by the development and learned of it from Twitter." Stunned. How convenient.

Suffice it to say, that claim or explanation isn't going to fly with a lot of Americans. The principal law enforcement agency of the federal government, the definition of executive power, decided to raid the home of the former president, and the White House didn't know anything about it until people started tweeting? 

That sounds like either the White House is lying or the FBI was shielding the White House from prior knowledge of the raid/scavenger hunt in Palm Beach — neither of which is a terribly good image for the FBI and Biden administration to be putting forward. 

What's more, if the White House really didn't know anything about the plans to raid Mar-A-Lago, who is overseeing the FBI and providing accountability for any of its other actions? 

Whether the Democrats and mainstream media cheering this on are excited by the idea that 1) the FBI is going rogue wherever it wants and returning to some of its J. Edgar Hoover roots or 2) thrilled that a Democrat administration is using federal law enforcement to target political adversaries is anyone's guess. Vespa had a great writeup of their giddiness here.

In the days ahead, there are sure to be calls for the White House, DOJ, and FBI to clarify how the raid came to be, who knew about it, and what its aim was. Certainly Karine Jean-Pierre isn’t looking forward to her next White House press briefing.

 

Western Lies About The War In Ukraine

sonar21  |  If you want to know how the war is going in Ukraine, you only needed to take note of one piece of “news” today–Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called his Russian counterpart:

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with his Russian counterpart for the first time since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Pentagon announced on Friday.

The call lasted approximately an hour and was at the request of Austin, who used the first call between the two in 84 days to urge Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to implement an “immediate ceasefire,” according to a brief readout of the call. The two last spoke on February 18, a week before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.

CNN

If Russia was losing or completely stuck in Ukraine, one would expect that Sergei Shoigu would be the guy calling Austin and begging for mercy. Well, that is not what happened. It was Austin that placed the call, apparently unconcerned about his recent public call to weaken Russia. Why would Austin urge Shoigu to implement an “immediate ceasefire” if Russia was getting its ass kicked? Russia getting whipped by Ukraine is exactly what Austin has called for. Remember?

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. . .”

If Russia is on the ropes, why call off the beating? You call off the fight when its your guy getting pummeled. The Russian offensive in the Donbass has ramped up significantly in the last week and it is carving up entrenched Ukrainian units with no hope of being reinforced or rescued by a counter-offensive.

The situation in Mariupol is returning to normal and Russia controls the city. The Russians are restoring electrical and water services and providing food to the population.

Ukrainian counter-attack reaches Russian border and threatens to break Donbas supply line.

LIE–The Ukrainians have not reached the Russian border and at least one Russian Battalion Tactical Group has crossed the Severs Donetsk river and are expanding their position south toward Kharkiv. But this is a sideshow. The area is isolated and there is only one significant road running from Kharkiv to Belgorod in Russia.

DOUBLE LIE–There is zero threat to the “DONBAS SUPPLY LINE.” Those lines are south and east of Kharkiv. Just look at the map–the Donbas with the city of Luhansk is prominently displayed. Kharkiv is 230 miles northwest of Luhansk.

The map does get two things right–the Russia has taken Avdiivka and has surrounded Ukrainian troops at Severodonetsk. It is because of the progress Russia is making in the Donetsk that Lloyd Austin called Sergei Shoigu to beg for some mercy. I suspect that General Shoigu told Austin, идите стучите по песку (which is Russian for “go pound sand.”)

One more observation regarding the supposed defeat of the Russians north of Kharkiv on the border of Russia. The people writing on this cannot even get their facts straight about the size of a Russian Battalion Tactical Group aka BTG. Here are three different “experts” with their numbers:

Each Russian Battalion (BTG) tactical group has around 700-900 soldiers (Justin Bronk)

According to the DOD on 18 April there are almost a dozen BTGs in Mariupol. As each BTG has about 200 infantry, then 11 x 200 gives us 2,200 infantry. (Christopher Lawrence, Dupuy Institute)

A Russian battalion tactical group consists of about 1,000 troops. (Associated Press)

The western media has been crowing about the mighty Ukrainians wiping out a Russian BTG. Yet no photos of Russian medical units recovering the dead and wounded from the battle site have been published on Ukrainian or Russian sites. But let us assume the claim is true–the Ukrainians reportedly ambushed and defeated one BTG. It is meaningless as far as the progress of the Russian war effort is concerned. If the Russians were concerned about the battle over a pontoon bridge they would have deployed fixed wing and rotary wing support aircraft armed with rockets and delivered an artillery barrage on the attacking Ukrainians. That apparently did not happen either.

 

Why Are The ADL And The SPLC Conspicuously AWOL On Public Support For Azov Nazism?

Chants of support for the controversial Azov Battalion break out at a pro Ukraine rally in lower Manhattan

Attendees chant “Azov” pic.twitter.com/fFguwpRa82

— Elad Eliahu (@elaadeliahu) April 23, 2022

mtracey |  Two advocacy organizations in particular devoted huge amounts of resources to documenting the purported rise of Nazism during this period. If you read an article over the past several years which purported to announce that Nazism, “white nationalism,” and similar tendencies were ascendant, there’s a good chance the basis for the article’s claims was sourced either to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “Neo-Nazi Groups Explode Under Trump,” read one representative Daily Beast headline from 2018, citing a report produced by the SPLC. In denouncing Trump for having “flirted with the deepest racists and Nazis,” Charles Blow of the New York Times cited a report from the ADL which claimed that “anti-semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017.” And 2017, as Blow shrewdly reasoned, “was of course the first year of the Trump administration.” The methodology of such “reports” is hardly ever scrutinized with any degree of precision; organizations like the SPLC and ADL are largely just assumed by journalists to possess unchallengeable empirical authority. On the rare occasions when someone in the media does think to dig deeper into the genesis of these groups’ oddly precise statistical figures, doubts as to their veracity sometimes arise.

After having spent such enormous effort warning Americans that their country was being overwhelmed by Nazis, you’d have thought it would be a no-brainer for these groups to spring immediately into action last month and sound the alarms again. Because another “incident” took place that was right up their alley: an honest-to-god pro-Nazi rally. In the middle of New York City. Thanks to footage captured by journalist Elad Eliahu, we know that on April 23 in Downtown Manhattan, a group of rally-goers gathered to chant — with total, uninhibited exuberance — “Azov! Azov! Azov!”

Eliahu told me the rally was organized by a group called “Razom for Ukraine,” which has held regular protest actions in the city since the war began, including to demand a No Fly Zone. But on this occasion, they were focused on rapturous praise for “Azov.”

In case you still need a primer on what “Azov” refers to, you may want to consult The Nation magazine, which has been unique among US left-liberal media over the last several years in still allowing a modicum of countervailing thought. And so The Nation is one of the vanishingly few outlets that continues to plainly describe Azov — i.e., the Battalion of the Ukraine military currently fighting in the war — as an “outright Neo-Nazi group.”

The bluntness of The Nation’s description stands in stark contrast to what the vast majority of US media consumers have recently been told about said group. Elsewhere, Americans are being instructed to actively root for the righteous battlefield victory of Azov — particularly in the city of Mariupol, where the fighters have been under sustained siege by Russia. It’s easy for the untrained eye to miss, but US journalists — including the top Ukraine war correspondent for TIME magazine — have taken to characterizing these Azov fighters merely as Mariupol’s brave “defenders.” Which is a term that coincidentally obscures the fighters’ ideological composition. Thanks to most US and “Western” media coverage, this foreign battalion comprised of “outright Nazis” has become primarily known as valorous warriors for “democracy.” 

Tune into NPR or the BBC, and you will similarly hear the “defenders” euphemism used in reports about Mariupol. Naturally, this is also the preferred nomenclature of the “Kyiv Independent,” the newly-formed English-language media outlet whose sudden emergence owes to an emergency infusion of funds late last year from the European Union’s equivalent of the National Endowment for Democracy. Relentlessly touted by “Western” media as an authoritative source for news-on-the-ground from Ukraine, the outlet has also enjoyed massive algorithmic amplification by Twitter — with it seldom ever noted that their chief “defense reporter” publicly proclaimed himself a “brother in arms” with Azov.

Despite his public admission of affiliation with what most reasonable observers used to uncontroversially classify as a Neo-Nazi regiment, millions of Americans have been fed a regular supply of “journalism” from this person, Illia Ponomarenko, who appears to function as Azov’s main English-speaking PR operative. But he’s far from alone: a whole roster of newly-minted social media stars regularly heap praise on Azov fighters for “sacrificing their lives for democracy.” By sheer coincidence, these superstars also frequently tend to be affiliated with US-based think tanks funded by the weapons-manufacturing industry.

Do you think if NPR or BBC listeners were clearly informed that the “defenders” of Mariupol were in fact “outright Neo-Nazis,” they might have a slightly different reaction to the news segments extolling their bravery? Especially if they can recall earlier NPR or BBC segments, such as those which warned listeners to be petrified of Trump-backed “Nazis” taking over the US? Alas, we can only speculate.

Now, one might reasonably ask: isn’t this whole “Nazi” angle a bit overblown? After all, in the US, that label gets blithely slapped onto anyone who’s slightly more right-wing than Mitt Romney. And it’s not an unfair point. The elasticity of the term “Nazi” has become so preposterous, and it was deployed so indiscriminately during the era of Trump, that one could be forgiven for having an urge to immediately eye-roll whenever they hear it uttered. 

Here’s the point, though: in a prior political context, the purported existence of Nazis was supposed to prompt an earnest outpouring of shock, horror, and counter-Nazi mobilization. But in the current political context, the existence of Nazis is supposed to be carefully ignored — in service what is now the superseding imperative, namely to “Stand with Ukraine.”

 

Nazis? What Nazis? Oh THESE Nazis..., We Don't See No Stinking Nazis!

thenation  |  The DC establishment’s standard defense of Kiev is to point out that Ukraine’s far right has a smaller percentage of seats in the parliament than their counterparts in places like France. That’s a spurious argument: What Ukraine’s far right lacks in polls numbers, it makes up for with things Marine Le Pen could only dream of—paramilitary units and free rein on the streets.

Post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine. Andriy Biletsky, the gang’s leader who became Azov’s commander, once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Biletsky is now a deputy in Ukraine’s parliament.

In the fall of 2014, Azov—which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations—was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard.

While the group officially denies any neo-Nazi connections, Azov’s nature has been confirmed by multiple Western outlets: The New York Times called the battalion “openly neo-Nazi,” while USA Today, The Daily Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members’ proclivity for swastikas, salutes, and other Nazi symbols, and individual fighters have also acknowledged being neo-Nazis.

In January 2018, Azov rolled out its National Druzhina street patrol unit whose members swore personal fealty to Biletsky and pledged to “restore Ukrainian order” to the streets. The Druzhina quickly distinguished itself by carrying out pogroms against the Roma and LGBT organizations and storming a municipal council. Earlier this year, Kiev announced the neo-Nazi unit will be monitoring polls in next month’s presidential election.

In 2017, Congressman Ro Khanna led the effort to ban Azov from receiving U.S. arms and training. But the damage has already been done: The research group Bellingcat proved that Azov had already received access to American grenade launchers, while a Daily Beast investigation showed that US trainers are unable to prevent aid from reaching white supremacists. And Azov itself had proudly posted a video of the unit welcoming NATO representatives.

 

Illusion Warfare Report

 -Join me as i LARP my way onto the Hollywood movie set we know as Ukraine.

Will the matrix allow me to peak behind the curtains of a manufactured and manipulated world staged event?

The Journey begins…
On the 3/3 I took a flight from Luton, England to Krakow, Poland.

Via Poland seemed the easiest way into the Ukraine.

Note: all the 33’s.

Evan tho unvaxxed, I entered Poland with ease on the condition I left within 24 hours.

So I wasted no time, and took a train from Krakow to Przemysl.

The only sign of WAR was the name of the cafe’

Lights, Camera….ACTION!!!

Przemysl Train Station (the Refugee movie set)

A well planned stage managed route ensures the Ukrainians arriving are bottled necked and compressed into the ticket hall so the media can create the illusion of ‘hell on Earth’.

Visual effects are key!

Outside the Refugee train station, police vehicles leave the lights flashing.

Every 20 minutes, the sirens turn on and vehicle does a loop around the block.

Stage Management …

The ‘Video Village’ of Przemysl.
Here we find the director and producer of the refugee movie.

All staged photos need good lighting.

I am unable to find a hostel or hotel,
full of refugees you ask?

No! All the hotels in this town are taken up by the press

Whilst these scumbags sleep in luxury, poor Ukrainians are left to sleep at the railway station.

The Burden Of Proof Is ALWAYS On The One Making The Claim...,

caitlinjohnstone |  Well you’ll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we’ve been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret.

“The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead,” AP reports. “Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, said the U.S. had rapidly linked Tuesday’s attacks to Russian military intelligence officers.”

“Technical information analysis shows the GRU was almost certainly involved in disruptive DDoS attacks,” adds a statement from the UK Foreign Office.

No evidence for this claim has been provided beyond the assertive tone with which American and British officials have uttered it, but that likely won’t stop arguments from western narrative managers that this “attack” justifies immediate economic sanctions.

You’ve probably also heard by now that President Biden announced at a press briefing that Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine and violently topple Kyiv “in the coming days,” citing only “intelligence”.

“What reason do you believe he’s considering that option at all?” a reporter asked Biden after his speech.

“We have a significant intelligence capability, thank you very much,” the president answered, and made his exit.

As we were reminded earlier this month in an interesting exchange between State Department spinmeister Ned Price and AP’s Matt Lee, US officials firmly believe that simply placing assertions next to the word “intelligence” should be considered rock solid proof that those assertions are true, and the press are expected to play along with this.

And indeed, a large percentage of the political/media class is responding to Biden’s unevidenced claim that Putin has decided to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Ukraine as though that invasion is actually happening.

 

Russia Is In Total Control Of The Narrative And The Timeline

consortiumnews  |  “I am here today,” Blinken said, trying to remove himself from Powell, “not to start a war, but to prevent one.”

But like Powell, Blinken produced no evidence at all to the U.N. to back up his assertion that Russia is “preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days,” even though he could have. Rather than produce fake evidence, as Powell had, he just produced nothing at all.

Blinken only had words, blithely accusing Russia of seeking “to manufacture a pretext” for an invasion of Ukraine, whether by fabricating a terrorist bombing inside Russia; (a jab at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been accused of false-flag attacks of Moscow apartment buildings to generate support for the Second Chechen War in 1999); the discovery of a mass grave; staging a drone strike against civilians or the use of chemical weapons.

After such a “false flag,” Russian would call for a military response “to defend Russian citizens or ethnic Russians in Ukraine” and would then invade Ukraine, Blinken said.

In the past, when the U.S. took to the floor of the U.N. Security Council to hurl accusations of malfeasance at Russia, American diplomats would present incontrovertible intelligence to back up its claims.

This was done in October 1962, when Adlai Stevenson showed the world U-2 photographs proving the Russians had deployed missiles in Cuba. Again, in September 1983, Jeane Kirkpatrick played audio tapes of intercepted communications which proved Russian military aircraft shot down Korean Airlines flight 007.

Blinken brought no such proof. His was just a verbal assurance that this was not a repeat of Colin Powell’s performance. This time, the U.S. should just be trusted to tell the truth.

Before Brandon Became A Senile Bag Of Botox He Was Widely Considered A Moron...,

NYTimes |  President Biden said on Friday that the United States has intelligence showing that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made a final decision to reject diplomatic overtures and invade Ukraine, in what Mr. Biden said would be a “catastrophic and needless war of choice” in Eastern Europe.

Speaking from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Mr. Biden said “we have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days,” adding that “we believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million innocent people.”

Asked whether he thinks that Mr. Putin is still wavering about whether to invade, Mr. Biden said, “I’m convinced he’s made the decision.” Later, he added that his impression of Mr. Putin’s intentions is based on “a significant intelligence capability.”

Still, Mr. Biden implored Russia to “choose diplomacy.”

“It is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table,” Mr. Biden said, referring to planned talks between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday. “If Russia takes military action before that date, it will be clear that they have slammed the door shut on diplomacy.”

In the hours before Mr. Biden’s late afternoon remarks, Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine called for mass evacuations in two contested regions of the country, claiming, with little evidence, that Ukraine’s military was about to launch a large-scale attack there, an assertion that appeared intended to provoke Russian military intervention.

The ominous messaging of the rebels in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk was loudly echoed by Moscow, raising fears that Russia was setting the stage for an imminent invasion that could ignite the biggest conflict in Europe in decades.

The call by the Russian-backed separatists for evacuations came as they blamed Ukraine for an array of provocations, including shelling along the front lines between Ukraine and the separatist forces, and an explosion involving an empty car that pro-Moscow news outlets said belonged to the head of the region’s security services.

Mr. Biden, who had just concluded a video call with a dozen Western leaders, rejected the claims as lies intended by Mr. Putin to inflame the situation on the ground and provide a pretext for war — something the United States and other European leaders had been warning about for weeks.

He cited the bombing of a Ukrainian kindergarten as a Russia-backed provocation. And he pointed to Russian separatist accusations that Ukraine was planning to launch a major offensive attack as evidence of Russian efforts to justify military action with misinformation.

“There is simply no evidence to these assertions, and it defies basic logic to believe the Ukrainians would choose this moment, with well over 150,000 troops arrayed on its borders, to escalate a yearlong conflict,” Mr. Biden said.

The president’s comments are the clearest indications of just how close the world may be to the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. He took the highly unusual course of specifically predicting the time frame and parameters of the invasion, despite the risks that he could be proved wrong.

Cain't B'lee Matt Lee Kwestined Ned Price Like This....,

WaPo  |  Moscow is considering filming a fake attack against Russian territory or Russian-speaking people by Ukrainian forces as a pretext to invade its neighbor, the Biden administration said Thursday, warning that the resulting propaganda footage could include “graphic scenes of a staged false explosion with corpses.”

Russia has already recruited the people who would be involved in the fabricated attack video, and Russian intelligence is intimately involved in the effort, a senior Biden administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration.

“We believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment at the hands of Ukraine or the West, even to the point where some of this equipment would be made to look like it was Western-supplied,” Defense Department press secretary John Kirby said Thursday during a briefing at the Pentagon.

The Russian disinformation effort would be “right out of their playbook,” Kirby said, noting that most activity of that nature is approved at the highest levels of the Russian government. Kirby said the Biden administration felt it was important, upon learning of such plans, “to call it out.”

The allegations by the Biden administration were met with pushback due to the lack of specificity and evidence. At a briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked repeatedly if the United States would provide evidence supporting the alleged Russian plot. He declined to do so, citing the need to protect intelligence sources and methods.

When asked about the level of confidence Washington has in the information, Price said that “this is derived from intelligence in which we have confidence … otherwise we would not be making it public in the way we are.” He said the United States does not know if the Russians will use the alleged video but that the U.S. disclosure was designed to prevent it from happening.

Cain't B'lee Ayesha Rascoe Kwestined Jen Psaki Like This...,

realclearpolitics  |  According to President Biden this morning, the latest leader of the "Islamic State" group detonated a bomb killing his wife and family during a U.S. special forces raid near the Syria-Turkey border last night that resulted in his death. At least 13 other people died according to local sources and members of an apparently unrelated Syrian family on the lower floor of the building were injured.

NPR White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe asked during an Air Force One press gaggle on Thursday if we were going to see any evidence of that claim. 

OTHER QUESTION: With regard to the civilian casualties in Syria, is the administration saying that they were caused entirely by the bomb detonating, or by crossfire from the one lieutenant engaging with U.S. forces? Give us some clarity on that.

JEN PSAKI: Obviously these events just happened overnight. So I'm going to let the Department of Defense do a final assessment, which I'm certain they will provide additional detail on once it is finalized.

AYESHA RASCOE, NPR: Jen, will there be any, like evidence or, like, release to support the idea -- I know the U.S. has put out a statement that they [ISIS leader or his associates] detonated the bomb themselves. But will the U.S. provide any evidence? Because there may be people who are skeptical of the events that took place and what happened to the civilians.

JEN PSAKI: Skeptical of the U.S. military's assessment when they went and took out an ISIS terror-- a leader of ISIS, that they are not providing accurate information? And ISIS is providing accurate information?

AYESHA ROSCOE: Well, not ISIS, but I mean. The U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians, I mean that is a fact.

JEN PSAKI: Well, as you know, there is an extensive process that the Department of Defense undergoes. The president made clear from the beginning at every point in this process that doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties was his priority and his preference.

I just reconfirmed and I think our national security colleague who did a briefing this morning also reiterated that the individual who was the target detonated himself, killing his entire family. Given, these events just happened less than 24 hours ago, we're going to give them time to make a final assessment and they will provide every detail they can. 

Today I Learned That Anti-Semitism Is A Threat To Democracy Itself

pbs  |  Israel on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish an upcoming report accusing it of apartheid, saying the conclusions of the London-based international human rights group are “false, biased and antisemitic.”

Amnesty is expected to join the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem in accusing Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state and because of its treatment of its own Arab minority.

Israel dismissed the other reports as biased, but is adopting a much more adversarial stance this time around. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has said Israel expects intensified efforts this year to brand it as an apartheid state in international bodies and hopes to head them off.

In a statement issued Monday, he said Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts,” and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.”

“Israel isn’t perfect, but we are a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism, with a free press and a strong and independent judicial system,” Lapid said.

Amnesty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Amnesty’s report “denies the state of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people.”

One Little Town, Three Thousand People, Two Starkly Different Realities...,

AP |  The newspaper hit the front porches of the wind-scarred prairie town on a Thursday afternoon: Coronavirus numbers were spiking in the farming communities of western Minnesota.

“Covid-19 cases straining rural clinics, hospitals, staff,” read the front-page headline. Vaccinate to protect yourselves, health officials urged.

But ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the truth. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. And some will go further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19 vaccinations.

One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.

It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old home -- can live in different worlds. 

In one house is Reed Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the Monitor-News. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front page. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19.

He’s not the most popular man in the county. Lots of people disagree with his politics. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Sometimes, he grudgingly worries about his safety.

While his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight. But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken sides. 

Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated.

“There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. “There is just the truth.”

But whose truth?

His neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.

He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know that I’m doing their funerals.”

He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.”

Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.

“You’re lying to people,” he says. “You flat-out lie about things.”

 

 

 

Denmark Puts The Lie To Official Vaxnated vs. UnVaxnated Infection And Illness Myths

 

statensseruminstitut  |  Denmark is now >80% Omikron with skyhigh case numbers, but public/media is strikingly calm.

From the 3-times weekly Omikron report: (posted Mon Wed Fri at https://covid19.ssi.dk/virusvarianter/omikron in Danish & English)

Table 4: Other variants (=delta) and omikron in over 12y olds vs. vaccination status:

Delta vs. Omikron (n = 90k cases & 41k cases since Nov 22nd = 1st Danish Omikron case)

No Jab (unvaxxed): 24 vs. 9%
1 Jab: 3 vs. 2%
2 Jabs 63 vs. 72%
3 Jabs (boostered) 11 vs. 18%

Unvaxxed to vaccinated cases
– delta : 24% to 76%
– omikron 9% to 91%

Danish vax rate for population >12y is around 81% (i.e. 19% unvaxxed)

= for delta vaxnated are slightly underrepresented (i.e. neo-vaccinoid seems to protect against infection/ being a transmitter by a small amount)

= for omikron the vaxnated are over-represented vs. their population percentage.
– is it the age-skew?
– are the vaxnated more risk-taking?
– does the neovaccinoid make one more susceptible to infection?
– are unvaxxed avoiding getting tested (counter intuative as it would give 7months valid green pass)

Who knows, but any claim to blame the unvaxxed for the transmission numbers has no basis in Danish data (Denmark having highest daily per-capita testing in the world = free PCR tests).

From the same report regarding hospitalizations (Table 5)
– omikron hospitalized number is still rising
– but omikron patients in ICU remains under 5 & has been there the last 2-3 weeks without change)
– table 6: 99.2% of omikron cases have not required hospitalisation (skewing young, but nonetheless, Danish has free health care, so no disincentives to treatment)

Crazy Narratives Make For Crazy PissAnts...,

off-guardian |  Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?

You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.

There’s probably some truth to that.

But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.

In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.

Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.

If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.

But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?

…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.

Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.

You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

According To WHO "No Country Can Boost Its Way Out Of The Pandemic"

VoA  |  The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned on Wednesday that blanket COVID-19 vaccine booster programs will not bring a definite end to the global pandemic, but prolong it, as poorer countries struggle to vaccinate their populations because of unequal access to immunizations.

While U.S. health officials urge citizens over the age of 16 to receive their booster shots in response to the spread of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, many countries have still not administered initial doses of the COVID vaccine to the majority of citizens.

Wealthy nations largely regard booster shot programs as the answer to the rapid spread of the coronavirus’s latest variant, but, during a media briefing on Wednesday, Tedros stated that doing so would achieve the opposite effect.

“Blanket booster programs are likely to prolong the pandemic, rather than ending it, by diverting supply to countries that already have high levels of vaccination coverage, giving the virus more opportunity to spread and mutate,” he said.

According to the Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center, there are now more than 276 million coronavirus infections worldwide and 5.3 million deaths. The United States leads with more than 51 million confirmed cases and 810,000 deaths.

Tedros stressed that vaccine inequality will allow the pandemic to continue. Countries with low access to initial doses of the vaccine will become breeding grounds for mutant variants of the virus.

For instance, health experts warned that the omicron strain was linked to vaccine inequality, according to NBC News. This strain of the infection is thought to have emerged from a South African HIV patient, where only 26% of the population are fully vaccinated.

Low inoculation rates in countries such as South Africa present ideal circumstances for the infection to spread and significantly mutate. People with compromised immune systems are more vulnerable to the virus, as it can live in these hosts for a long time.

If inequalities in vaccine access continue, mutant strains may continue to emerge.

Tedros pointed to the situation among WHO member states, only half of which have vaccinated 40% of their populations by the end of this year, due to “distortions in global supply.”

The director-general stated that enough vaccines were administered across the world and that had they been distributed equitably, a targeted vaccination rate of 40% could have been achieved in every country by September.

“No country can boost its way out of the pandemic,” Tedros said.

Why Is The CDC Overcounting And Exagerating Vaccination Numbers?

axios |  The U.S. government has overcounted the number of Americans who are at least partly vaccinated against the coronavirus, Bloomberg reports.

Why it matters: Millions more people than initially thought are unprotected as coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths are rising across the country.

The big picture: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was revised last weekend for the number of people 65 and older who have received at least one shot, according to Bloomberg.

• The CDC lowered the percentage vaccinated from 99.9%, where it had been for weeks, to 95%, without changing the raw shot totals.
• The agency has not returned Axios' request for comment.

What it means: The change in data indicates that the U.S. has counted too many shots as first doses when they are instead second doses or booster shots.

By the numbers: CDC data indicated that 240 million people — or about 72.5% of the population — had at least one shot and that 203 million — 61.3% — were fully vaccinated.

• But state and local officials reported that it was improbable for there to be such a huge disparity in vaccination numbers, Bloomberg reports.

The state of play: Three states — Illinois, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — found enough over-counting of first shots to indicate millions of unvaccinated people had mistakenly been counted as having received a dose.

• Pennsylvania had one of the biggest gaps identified, according to Bloomberg, where the CDC's estimates of first doses for people 65 and older exceeded state estimates by about 850,000.
• Illinois had more than 500,000 completely unvaccinated people ages 12 and up than initially thought. But the audit also found 730,000 people who were fully vaccinated and hadn’t been counted.

What they're saying: James Garrow, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, which has worked with the state to blend data sets for a more accurate view of vaccination trends, said "we don’t have any faith in the numbers on the CDC website, and we never refer to them."