This is a headline in the Guardian. They are covering a TV interview with Nigel Farage, leader of the ‘Reform’ party: Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war I am interested, a mainstream political candidate saying that Russia was provoked into the Ukraine war. What did he say? What did the interviewer say? How does the paper comment: On why Putin invaded Ukraine, Farage said: “I stood up in the European parliament in 2014 and I said: ‘There will be a war in Ukraine.’ Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of Nato and the European Union ..read more

This post follows on from my two recent posts on the origins of Covid. One of these posts discussed the scientific findings, which, based on some DNA data from the Wuhan market, which had suddenly been located in a database, three years after the event, associated racoon DNA, human DNA and a Sars-Cov-2 genetic signature at a location in the market. [1] The racoon thesis was reported by a pro-natural origin French researcher Florence Débarre who “discovered” genetic sequences in a genetic database in 2023. [2] The data (assuming it was what it purported to be) did not demonstrate causality. It ..read more

This post follows from my post about Fauci’s appearances before a House of Congress hearing into the pandemic. In that article I noted that Dr Fauci is a master of deflection. His position on lab leak v. natural origin for Sars-Cov-2 is currently “I have an open mind”. At the same time he has pointed towards some papers or articles which assert that Sars-Cov-2 cannot have come from the work which his agency NIAID had funded at the Wuhan lab. He has also pointed towards the more general claim that the virus cannot have been artificially engineered. This was from May 2020: If you look at the ev ..read more

1) Two perspectives on the case of Israel being add to a UN list of states which harm children in war Israel has finally been added to a UN list of countries which harm children in armed conflict. Al-Jazeera reports an episode when the Israeli ambassador to the UN recorded the phone call in which he was informed about this and posted his words about Israeli having “the most moral army in the world” on social media: Earlier today, the Chef de Cabinet of the United Nations secretary-general, Courtney Rattray, gave Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan a courtesy call to inform Israel that ..read more

To surrender to bullies, to bow to dictators, is simply unthinkable,” Biden said. “If we do, Ukraine will be subjugated and it will not end there, Ukraine’s neighbours will be threatened, all of Europe will be threatened. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/06/d-day-anniversary-biden That is President Biden at the Normandy commemorations. Rishi Sunak has promised the UK’s largest ever military support package for Ukraine as he warned that Vladimir Putin would “not stop at the Polish border” if Russia won the war. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/22/rishi-su ..read more

It is astounding the way that the media – journalists and their ‘experts’ – are discussing the next steps in the Ukraine fiasco. The next steps could be fatal but there seems to be little awareness of this or if there is, do they care?. The context is pretty simple. In February 2022 Putin launched an operation in Ukraine. The idea was to take Donbas and to try to force regime change in Kiev to install a regime which would drop anti-Russia policies, in particular Ukraine joining NATO. The West reacted with sanctions and by supplying arms to Ukraine. My guess is that the US initially expected Ru ..read more

I still haven’t quite understood why the liberal media is deadset on killing off the most likely (by a long way) hypothesis for the origins of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Until some US intelligence agencies put their weight behind the lab leak theory the liberal media was callling it a “conspiracy theory”. Somewhat amusingly, they just stopped using the term when US intelligence indicated it was being taken very seriously; no corrections, no apologies for misleading their readers. They just moved on as if they hadn’t been, essentially, lying for many months. Predictably enough, after a couple of mon ..read more

Trump has been found guilty of a felony relating to business records, in New York. The charges and verdict depend on some legal acrobatics. A misdemeanour charge of false business records was elevated to a felony on the basis that it was done to commit another crime – election fraud. But; it was only election fraud if the business records were falsified. The charges were ‘bootstrapped’ in an unusual way. (I am not a legal expert with knowledge of precedent so I can’t say if absolutely unique). I would imagine that the idea of the law which makes falsifying business records a felony if done in ..read more

We recently reviewed Richard Sakwa’s book, The Lost Peace – How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War. The central theme of this book is that the West, the US in particular, has substituted its own version of world governance for the UN system. This system prioritises US liberalism and the US led global economy. The US system, the liberal international world order, was always a sub-order within the totality of the UN system, but since the end of the Cold War it has come to displace the actual UN system, with its respect for international law and institutions, and the sovereignty of nati ..read more

Western media propaganda seems to work on a drip drip basis. A continual leakage of distorted lines builds up the false world. Each drip may be quite small; the effect is in the totality. (Incidentally, this means that no one individual is really responsible). A couple of examples: 1) This Guardian article is titled If Putin wins in Ukraine, the British economy will be in the firing line. It is by the Guardian’s Economics Editor. Strangely for an economics editor it is a call for the West to seize the Russian Central Bank assets (all of them) held in Europe – presumably to give to Ukraine to b ..read more