Austria and Hungary won’t fuel the war

Austria and Hungary have refused demands to send weapons to Ukraine.

The two countries should have never parted ways from their Austro-Hungarian identity, and the other members of that union should have remained put too. The Czech and Slovak Republics, once members of that monarchy, are now among the most militant supporters of Ukraine. They forget that some of the territories that Russia (then the Soviet Union) received as reparations after the two World Wars used to belong to them.

There used to be talk of a Trans-Danubian Federation. It would include what used to be the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Royalty removed, individual parts of the new commonwealth would be republican and democratic in character. This union would have withstood Adolf Hitler’s onslaught and, later, Iosiph Stalin’s subjugation, with ease.

History does not believe in “what-ifs.” Central Europe today is what it is. Instead of the Trans-Danubian Federation they have created a rather loose group known as Visegrád Four (V4 for short). It is named after a castle town in Pest County, Hungary, where it was born in 1991.

The alliance used to consist of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. After Czechoslovakia split into two independent states, the V3 became V4.

The V4 have become quite disjointed: the Poles occasionally fight European Union’s instructions, Hungary defies them quite openly, while the Czechs and Slovaks are too enthusiastic for their own good about orders emanating from Brussels.

In fact, Czech Republic’s President-elect, General Petr Pavel, suggested within days of his election that Ukraine ought to become a NATO member. Whether his words endeared him to Czech citizenry as such remains unknown. They pleased the White House, NATO’s head office and the current Czech government, as militant an anti-Russian collection of illiterates as ever broke bread.

Both Austria and Hungary are EU members. Austria hasn’t joined NATO. She decided not to parrot Sweden and Finland’s decision to rid themselves of neutral status that (on paper, at least) guarantees their countries a certain level of safety and security. Hungary, on the other hand, while a NATO member, demands that the organisation respect its members’ independence. She told the EU the same.

Twisted views

As American economist Martin Armstrong put it recently, the Ukraine conflict formally started as a Russian attack, but, in fact, it is a war between the so-called West and Russia. Viewing it in more detail, it is a war between the U.S.A. and Russia, which the Americans lead by West European proxy on one side, and the Ukrainians on the other.

And, as usually happens, the war is driven by differing economic interests much more than by reasons of differing ideologies.

It has become obvious that should the Ukrainian conflict spread, a nuclear war would become inevitable. Not many will remain to assess whom to blame.

In this age of lightning-speed information, control of news and opinion has become perhaps more important than who has faster missiles and mightier nuclear warheads attached to them.

As Armstrong notices, we’re getting too close to World War III, and the fight for control over information becomes even more important.

Here’s the current state of affairs in the West (not much is known about what’s going on in Russia): anyone who tells anything unkind about Ukraine is suddenly a “Putin Supporter.”

Armstrong wrote that he had dealt with every country surrounding Ukraine including Ukraine. All of their neighbours say the same thing – beware Ukrainians.

To quote Armstrong verbatim: “Ukraine is filled with Nazis and their hatred for Russians knows no limit. NATO troops are already there without a formal declaration of war. If they die in battle, Ukrainians choppy off their heads and hands so they cannot be identified which would expose NATO’s involvement.”

A brief glimpse in the past

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the world on February 23, 2022 that Ukraine would arm herself with nuclear weapons.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the Russian people that night and launched the invasion the very next day.

This whole tragedy was preceded by two agreements negotiated and signed in the Belarus capital, Minsk, in 2014 and 2015. They were supposed to prepare conditions for the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Lugansk) to vote on their own autonomy (or independence). Then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel would now admit that these agreements were a sham only to buy time for Ukraine to build an army to start World War III.

Meanwhile, Ukraine had lost about 50 per cent of her army. Supporters of Ukraine’s side began claiming this was disinformation, Russian propaganda. The head of the EU repeated this classified Ukrainian information, to Zelensky’s shock. Ursula von der Leyen would be forced by Zelensky’s office to remove her statement from the official record.

Speaking of propaganda, that same Zelensky told U.S. Congress that his propaganda machine defeated Russia and had won the minds of the West.

The cat was out of the bag: this is really a war to destroy Russia.

NATO countries now compete among themselves who would waste more on weapons supplies for Ukraine. Interestingly, the $40 billion the U.S. pledged recently equals about two-thirds of Russia’s official amount of $69 billion budgeted for the military.

Yes, it is not necessary to believe such figures completely, especially if and when they come from Russia, but even so, the flow of Western weapons into Ukraine remains staggering. Yes, staggering, indeed, but with one proviso: only about 30 per cent of them reach the battlefield. Of that, at least three quarters are destroyed by the Russians before joining action. Of the 70 per cent, at least two-thirds disappear before even making Ukraine, sold to destinations unknown (not officially, that is), while the rest falls victim to Russia’s firepower while waiting to be unloaded.

Yet, the weapons merchants get paid by the governments that had made the solemn promises on behalf of their taxpayers, and, when the merchandise is resold, they get paid again.

On January 17, 1961, as he was about to leave the White House after his two terms as U.S. President, John Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower spoke of the mortal dangers that he described as “military-industrial complex.”

The great old warrior knew.

Here’s the link to his speech. Click it, and learn, so as to never be fooled again.

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Ink-stained wretches reach new low

Journalism has sunk to the level of lawyering in public perception.

Some call journalists presstitutes now, putting them below prostitution, even. Others protest, arguing that prostitution is an honest trade, morality be damned. A customer pays a hooker the price previously agreed upon, and receives services previously agreed upon. Where’s the crookedness of it? they ask.

Lawyers got their reputation mostly because they defend all kinds of rogues. Many outside observers do not realise that that’s their job. Lawyers do not necessarily admire their clients. Everyone is entitled to qualified defence in courts of law. That’s what lawyers have been trained to do.

Journalists are lucky that William Shakespeare wasn’t aware of their existence.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers, said Dick the butcher. Not many would remember him. More people remember that this sentence appeared originally in the Bard’s Henry the Sixth cycle of plays. And even more people subscribe to it even today.

Lawyers have gone to the back burner these days. We live in the Age of Information. Those who are supposed to be providing it to us are not doing their job as they should. Thus many on all sides of the political spectrum, and each is certain of the correctness of her/his view.

And rightly so.

Many experts have been trying to find an explanation for this sad state of affairs. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Lab is one of them.

Nieman what?

Founded in February 1938 through a $1.4 million bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of Lucius W. Nieman, founder of The Milwaukee Journal, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is viewed as the primary journalism institution at Massachusetts Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Benton wrote a 2831-word-long study of a report that had originated in Great Britain. Titled This report sees journalistic “bias” less as partisanship and more as relying on too-comfortable habits, its subhead explains: “The first step is to accept that broad impartiality brings a stronger obligation to look.”

Here’s the summary, in one sentence or less: general population’s views have changed from not trusting the media to distrusting them.

Outrageous or true?

Benton is quoting statements such as: “George Soros pays reporters to write fake news!” or: “No reporter can tell the truth without getting fired by their corporate masters!”

Not trying to put somebody else’s (mine) words into Joshua Benton’s word processor, but he seems to reject outright those statements that dismiss today’s journalism.

He does have a valid point: not many have come forward with solid proof of today’s journalism’s wickedness beyond any reasonable doubt.

Nobody in their right mind can dismiss Benson’s considered view that making such claims also equals ignoring a matter of nuance. Not many would ask questions such as: who was in the room when that particular story was pitched? Or: what were the underlying assumptions that shaped it, and what drove those assumptions? Or: what perspectives weren’t considered important enough to seek out, or understand, or publish?

Except: all of that debate is acceptable for rainy afternoons between tea time and supper.

In practical terms, such discussions assume that journalism is rocket science. Here’s a revelation to end all revelations: it is NOT.

There exist two kinds of people involved in the trade that I had been practising (professionally, and on both sides of the Big Pond) longer than six decades. The two groups are reporters and journalists.

The difference is perfectly straightforward and quite easy to grasp: reporters simply report on events and people in them. Journalists are of the (mistaken) view that they are the events and people in them.

Take a few minutes to watch your favourite 6 o’clock news broadcast. The anchor says that this or that is happening here or there. S/he throws it (the story, in TV jargon) over to the station’s person-on-the-spot. The person-on-the-spot, glaring at the camera and making sure not a hair is out of place, tells us what s/he knows about the story, meeting less than more the demand for the five Ws (who, what, where, why and how). The story is, say, about a major five-bell fire. Instead of having the camera roam, snapping pictures from all angles available, and the person-on-the-spot asking questions of those in the know and sharing the narration off-screen, what we see is that person’s brand new coat, or newly styled coiffure. Once the person-on-the-spot signs off, the anchor comes back to tell us what we’d just seen.

This is not reporting. Reporting on TV would be showing viewers the event in its fullness, adding necessary information off-screen.

Another rule stipulates that there are two kinds of reporters. Some become reporters because they are curious. Others become sort of curious because it’s in a reporter’s job description.

Curiousness can’t be taught. No J-school, including the Nieman, can do it.

Artificial curiousness begets empty questions and an easy surrender to whatever ideology of the day.

Most of the audiences, be they readers, listeners or viewers, see through such differences almost immediately. Often, they are not aware of the fact, but figuring them out they did.

Important points?

Joshua Benton quotes (and analyses) a report that studies (what a title!) Review of the Impartiality of BBC Coverage of Taxation, Public Spending, Government Borrowing and Debt.

Two points that seem to be more funny than important.

First: the report that exonerates the BBC was written by – yes, you guessed perfectly right – the BBC.

Here’s a quote that reveals it all, straight from the BBC’s own mouth:

“The BBC Board commissioned review finds that there is widespread appreciation for BBC coverage of tax, public spending, government borrowing and debt with plenty to applaud, but identifies a range of concerns that could put impartiality at risk. “The Board has thanked the authors and responded in full.

The work was led by seasoned economics experts and broadcasters Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, who created BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme.

“The independent review spoke to over 100 people inside and outside the BBC and reviewed 11,000 pieces of relevant BBC online, TV and radio content, focussing closely on 1000. It considered social media posts and commissioned bespoke audience research.”

Here’s what the BBC Board felt fit to publish about the report’s authors (verbatim quote, again): “Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot co-created BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme, and co-authored The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through A World Of Numbers, about numbers and how to interpret them.”

Bespoke indeed.

The other funny point: to examine the relationship between the BBC and His Britannic Majesty’s government, my respected colleague Joshua Benton could have saved a lot of time. Just looking up and watching about four-and-a-half minutes’ worth of BBC’s classic, Yes Minister, named The BBC Cannot Give In To Government Pressure. That would have given him a lot of the replies he had been looking for. It could have changed the outcome of his original story, but, on the other hand, it would have added a few laughs to otherwise dreary days.

Benton examines the issue of biases.

It is an important issue that not many would want to acknowledge. Benton, to his honour, does. (You can read his story by clicking on the link at the spot where it was mentioned first, a few paragraphs above, or here.)

Here’s the issue: find a reporter (or editor) who claims to be totally lacking of bias, and you’ve found a bloody liar.

Even deciding which story of the many happening and available is important enough to deserve publication is based on bias. Deciding on the story’s structure (what will its leading paragraphs be?), writing its headline and deciding on its placement, involves some form of bias or other.

All a reporter (or editor) can do is try. Whether s/he succeeds is another matter.

How do we know?

Any reporter who announces that s/he had never had a single word taken out of her or his copy due to censorship, now known under several names (woke or cancel culture or political correctness) is either a bloody liar or, as bad or worse, has never written a word worth reading.

Their copy is so insipid as to bore even the censors to dreamless sleep.

Censors? What do you mean? We have no censors!

Oh yes, we do.

Some exist under such innocuous names as movie and television industries’ rating boards, others sit on editorial boards or are outright owners of either individual publications or their chains. And, alas, long gone are the invisible firewalls between editorial and advertising.

That claim about George Soros (see above) is correct: his Open Societies (and several other fronts) do own a number of major publications through intricate channels put up in order to make his involvement less visible and, thus, less outrageous.

And yes, George Soros does have an agenda, and he makes no secret of it.

But the question of bias goes deeper.

Not so long ago, most newspapers (then the only sources of news for most people) used to be known as organs of their political parties. Their bias was open for everyone to see, and readers could choose for themselves whose news and opinions they wanted to be aware of. On occasion, readers won’t believe weather reports unless and until they saw them in their newspaper of choice.

Times have changed, radio, film, television and, eventually, new media have started competing for readers’, listeners’ and viewers’ interest, each claiming they were the true purveyors of fact without bias.

Facts betray them. Until and unless they admit that they are human, their users will continue turning away from them in disgust, looking for other sources, finding many of them wanting, too. Too many will start ignoring news, which is precisely one of the goals set by the authors of the so-called Great Reset. Ignorance is bliss.

Lunacy a.k.a. electrical vehicles

Are electric vehicles but a fad based on ideological short-sightedness?

Are they the future of transportation?

Those supporting the idea call them EVs for short. They just love using abbreviations, it helps them avoid too many spelling errors.

The transportation industry dismisses them with a disdainful shrug.

Yet, the government of Canada plan to introduce yet another mandate: by the end of this decade, more than a half of the cars sold and used in the country will have to be driven using electricity. Try to buy or fix a car running on gasoline or diesel in 2030: you’ll be out of luck.

Why? They plan to save whatever they think there is to be saved of the planet.

Or not.

A few questions, both theoretical and practical, need to be answered. Some of the answers may become impossible to obtain.

Straightforward reply

Rutter’s, an American company that is known for its gas and convenience stores, plans to build 50 more such locations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Delaware, adding them to their 84 locations already in full swing.

One common denominator: none of the new sites will feature much in the way of helping EVs. Many of their locations feature video gaming terminals.

Plug-ins for electric vehicles? You’re kidding, right?

Rutter’s aren’t alone: others, such as Texas-based Buc-ee’s, are in similar planning stages, except, instead of gaming parlours, they are going to have brisket sandwiches on offer.

And, of course, gasoline.

To put matters into proper perspective: Epoch Times asked the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) for more data, went on to do the math and found that convenience stores sell an estimated 80 per cent of the motor fuels purchased by consumers in the United States.

That same publication checked with Pennsylvania-based companies such as Wawa and Sheetz, as well as with Wisconsin-based Kwik Trip, and they all are firm in their decision to give the powers-that-be the coldest shoulder they can ever imagine.

Same playlist

Canada’s Justin Trudeau only echoes America’s President Joe Biden who imagines that electric vehicles must make up 50 per cent of all vehicles sold in the United States by 2030.

Many a U.S. or Canadian jurisdiction have been chasing the proverbial pies in the skies by creating studies to figure out how to replace the gas tax with mileage-based user fees and plans for building charging station infrastructure.

Some of these jurisdictions have already made it known that they will ban outright the sale of all new gas-powered cars by 2035.

Simply put: they are ignoring reality.

This is not the first time in human history something like that is happening, and the outcomes have been tragic.

Socialist and communist planners have been telling the rest of the world that they were going to order the wind and rain around at their fiat, and they never succeeded. They preferred ideology to real people’s needs and wishes.

And they never did their math.

The Anderson Economic Group, based in Chicago, did.

Running an electric vehicle costs more than your usual gas-guzzler, Anderson’s analytical comparisons of figures collected from both industries found.

Gas-powered vehicles saved their drivers about 31 cents per each 100 miles (160 km) when compared to lugging around in an EV.

The difference in costs increases when EV drivers choose to recharge their batteries at commercial stations rather than at home. Of course, to be able to use the cheaper route, you have to install the proper equipment at home, not the cheapest expense, either.

If you happen to be in an accident while behind a Tesla Model Y, don’t expect insurance companies to reimburse you for repairs: they prefer sending these vehicles to salvage auctions. One reason: fixing them is too costly.

Running out of power?

First of all, to recharge your EV, count on twiddling your thumbs for about eight hours (two hours to top it off).

Seriously put, where does it leave EV drivers while their precious toys are sucking more power from the grid? Thumb-twiddling, more often than not, is not a realistic option. Should they be recharging using commercial stations, what will they be doing while waiting for their EV to become mobile again?

Say, their neighbourhood recharging station is located in their friendly neighbourhood mall, one that features a convenience store that happens to have plug-on on their premises. How many people live just across the street from such a recharging spot? And what about the majority who live a few kilometres (or miles, your choice) away?

And now imagine more cars than one needing the recharge. After all, if you care to cast a glimpse at today’s gas stations, how many of them have but one car by the pump at any given time?

One analysis looked at 2,000 EVs needing recharge within one half of a day. This is not too extreme, given North American governments’ thirst for replacing today’s vehicles with their chimeric visions. Such a station would have to have 600 chargers running at 50 Watt each. They would cost a measly $24 million (U.S.) in today’s prices (remember: we are living in an inflation-starved economy), and they would take 30 mega Watt from the grid. That’s enough to power 20,000 homes filled with careless people who don’t give a hoot about economy and have all their lights and electrical devices running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Here’s another excerpt from an expert analysis: Before an owner can sell an EV, the car will require a new battery. That sends the price rocketing over internal combustion cars. Here’s how: an American car’s lifespan on the road is a mere dozen years, on average. That will see a 12-year-old EV on its third battery. The original owner must have spent some $30,000 on a 12-year-old Tesla.

Besides, batteries that exist today don’t like Canadian winters.

The prediction for the future doesn’t show much improvement.

And yet, Canada’s government is perfectly willing to spend $99 billion that it doesn’t have, anyhow, to push through their plan that all vehicles sold in Canada be electric by 2035, or else.

Government’s own Environment and Climate Change Canada has established beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that zero-emission cars generally are more expensive than gas- or diesel-powered equivalents, and the all-around price increase “could lead to a reduction in the quantity of vehicles purchased.”

That would mean jobs lost to ideology that has nothing to do with reality.

Strange timing

Why is it all happening now?

Here’s the explanation: populations around the world are quite scared of the recent fake events, starting with the hoax named as pandemic, the cruellest hoax since the invention of organised religion (not faith, that something else, it’s organised religion we’re talking about here), through the permanently increasing possibility of an Armageddon of a nuclear war starting in the battle fields of Ukraine, all that linked to the ideology of a Great Reset that would see seven eights of this planet’s population perish one way or another.

If and when someone comes up with a slogan, quickly changed into a policy and developed into a mandate, saying that this is what would save us all, Gloria be, hallelujah, people, disoriented enough, would embrace it, no matter how evil it is.

It takes hard work to see through today’s politicians’ shenanigans.

If we let them continue, we’ll have nobody else but ourselves to blame.

Caught with their pants down

Here’s the fact about conspiracy theories: they have shelf lives. Today, it’s anywhere between six weeks and six months long.

Once they reach that best-before designation, they turn out to be facts.

Kim Iversen, an accomplished (and very independent) American journalist known for her integrity and courage, decided to do what our colleagues in the mainstream media would never dare do: she took 10 of the top controversial stories of 2022 that mainstream media (and politicians) called conspiracy theories, and compared them to real facts as they emerged before (and after) the year was over.

Ms. Iversen, whose Your Time With Kim Iversen radio show would become one of the first and very few women in national syndication, had enough courage to leave radio. She started her own show on YouTube, The Kim Iversen Show in 2019, to much acclaim. A couple of years later, she started guest co-hosting The Hill’s Rising.

In a rare moment of sincerity, The New York Times called this show a “popular establishment-bashing web series.”

This show, that many call simply Rising, is a daily news and opinion web series produced by a Washington, D.C. political newspaper, named The Hill. It is available freely on The Hill’s website as well as on YouTube.

With the acquaintance process behind us, let’s dig in.

Here’s the list

10. The mainstream media echoed the politicians: the Freedom Convoy truckers were just a bunch of misogynist, fascist, far-out extremely right-wing terrorists, Trump-loving white supremacists.

Except: the major protests happened in Canada where people can’t vote for Trump no matter what. A woman who ended up in jail was their chief organiser. People from all sides of political spectrum took part. They wanted to have a democratic debate with government that had been arbitrarily imposing pandemic-related mandates left, right and centre. And many of them were not white at all.

9. Mainstream media used to be critical of Ukraine’s real Nazi problem. U.S. Congress blocked financing for Ukrainian forces in 2015, with the infamous Azov Battalion singled out in particular.

What a swift turn of events: the same guys wearing swastikas and spouting praise for Adolf Hitler and his Second World War Ukrainian collaborators are now national heroes, patriotic Ukrainians, deserving of all the praise, respect, love, money and weapons they can get.

8. Many social media users were claiming these platforms were snitching on them. Whoever doubted the so-called official narrative would no longer be free to express themselves. These people detected government paws in the censorship they were encountering. They were also saying that they not only felt but can also prove that the FBI were following them through social media.

Whatever one may think of Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter has made sure that files that confirm that these suspicions were true are now in the open. No longer suspicions of conspiracy but confirmed facts.

7. The good old anti-Trump accusations of colluding with Russia in the 2016 Presidential election, and that his tax returns would prove he was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet.

Now that President Donald J. Trump’s tax returns were released, the eager public find that the result was as boring as boring can get.

Here, if I may, I’ll add my own few cents’ worth: Russia would have preferred Hillary Clinton for U.S. President in 2016 and on. As several well-informed Russian sources told me, the lady, should she be voted into the Oval Office, would be much easier to blackmail (легче шантажировать). How? They pointed out to her questionable sale of American nuclear interests to a Russian government-held company, they were aware of Ms. Clinton’s highly irregular e-mail activities. They knew much more than they would let on about the Clinton Foundation, etc.

6. The Hunter Biden laptop story. The official story read like a cheap thriller created in the worst depths of Hollywood script writers’ offices: Russians hacked into the computer, planted incriminating files, dropped the machine at a computer repair shop, convinced the shop owner to nose around and then share the contents with New York’s former Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who was obviously yet another Russian puppet. If the mainstream media only refused to report on it. They got aggressive enough to try to intimidate anyone who dared question the official story of Hunter Biden, a squeaky-clean do-gooder. The story was supressed just before the election.

Now we know that the story was real. Turns out it wasn’t Russian disinformation at all, after all. The computer’s contents revealed not only the seediness of Hunter Biden’s personal life. His Papa Joe was involved in some of his son’s shady business dealings, in China and in Ukraine, too.

5. Many used to predict that all those would-be health-related mandates are changing the formerly free society into a nanny state. Conspiracy theorists, the officialdom and their parroting mainstream mass media yelled in feigned horror.

Now, even the mainstream media are forced to admit that unprecedented levels of surveillance upon innocent citizens have become norm. Some call it new normal. This new technology is now being used routinely to monitor individuals who have been innocent all their lives. People who officials have decided were suspicious for one reason or another are spied on as matter of routine.

4. A number of scientists who still believe in doubting and questioning everything (de omnibus dubitandum est), used to warn that the so-called Covid-19 can cause mutations, and that vaccines act like antibiotics: using them too frequently makes them perfectly (and frightfully) useless. Overused and imperfect, they allow germs to mutate in dangerous ways. Heavily censored, this idea became taboo for social media. Why? Because it’s quack. Two years ago, asking this question would bring the questioner into disrespect, to be ostracised by all and sundry.

It has become open to debate, slowly but distinctly, but not much within the public domain, not yet, anyway. Solid numbers show that people who had been jabbed several times develop all kinds of mutations. The cat was out of the bag because the cases were too many, and nobody could justify the silence that was going on.

3. The theory of a deadly leak from a Chinese military-owned lab in Wuhan was to be laughed at. An infected bat did it, if you want to know. Thus the official story.

Ms. Iversen knows whereof she spoke here: in April of 2020, a video of hers was removed because she dared mention the lab-leak theory. Adding insult to injury, Ms. Iversen’s story then was quoting heads of state other than the U.S. She’d get into hot waters again a few months later for reporting that America’s evil doctor, Anthony Fauci, was funding the so-called gain-of-function research, using American taxpayers’ money to commit what many now call crime against humanity.

2. The official story held that the new vaccine will make sure you won’t catch the infection. You won’t end up in bed or in the mortuary if you submit to the jab. Those who wouldn’t buy this official story would be ridiculed and ostracised as if they were society’s enemies No. 1. The list of injustices is almost endless: from strained friendships to lost jobs. Name a tragedy, and you’ll find victims in the list of repercussions bestowed on those who insisted on their freedoms.

Those who pushed the vaccines were wrong. Not only in judging the vaccines themselves, but about the impacts of their usage (or non-usage) on the community. Many young people, including highly trained athletes, have developed serious health issues, an incredible percentage of them fatal. It was those who claimed how wonderful those vaccines (and enforced mandates to use them) were, who would end up being the conspiracy-clan and a bunch of fear-mongers.

1. And here’s the conspiracy that started it all: Ms. Iversen goes back all the way to John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination.

Newly discovered documents indicate that using the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorists” in this context have been a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) invention. It was designed to brush off those who didn’t believe in the lone gunman theory. While the term could have existed before that awful November day in Dallas, it would become a slur, courtesy the CIA.

The view that questions that lone gunman theory (and Lee Harvey Oswald’s links to the Soviet KGB) has been getting more traction lately. That’s what documents tend to do.

Final points

Ms. Iversen, with her usual sarcasm, insists that those of us the officialdom calls conspiracy theorists should wear it as a badge of honour, and any comment describing this or that statement or view as conspiracy theory ought to be known as spoiler alert.

Those smeared as conspiracy theorists are, more often than not, truth-tellers, people inquisitive enough to look for the truth, do their own research, and share the results with the world.

Thank you, Ms. Kim Iversen.

Nazi-style German court decides against Holocaust survivor

Dr. Josef Mengele, your criminal mind is alive and well in Germany even though 78 years have passed since your country’s defeat in the Second World War.

Wherever you are, if you’re still alive, Dr. Mengele, you can freely return to Germany and feel perfectly safe.

Dr. Josef Mengele was the infamous German physician in charge of cruel experiments conducted on defenceless inmates in the Auschwitz death camp.

Now, a German court want to put a celebrated Jewish composer and Holocaust survivor in a psychiatric institution and force her to take the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine.

Inna Zhvanetskaya, 85, a Ukrainian-born Jew, survived the Holocaust.

She now lives the Southern Germany city of Stuttgart.

A German court ordered her to be admitted into a psychiatric institution where she will be forcefully injected with the COVID-19 vaccine twice.

This must feel like cruel and unusual punishment on two levels: Zhvanetskaya must be recalling not only the Nazi cruelty but, also, the Soviet Union’s demand that all those who question the system must be put into closed psychiatric wards for treatment: only the insane don’t appreciate the beauty of communism.

The German court was cynical enough to put the expression that forced vaccination will be “for her own good” into its order as a valid reason.

Zhvanetskaya is not alone in comparing today’s Germany to her Nazi predecessor: Vera Sharav, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and medical activist, has dedicated her life to advocating for the rights of medical research subjects. Her views don’t differ much from those of Zhvanetskaya.

In order to make their decision look and sound reasonable, the German court has officially appointed a professional guardian for Zhvanetskaya.

The court order stated (without proof or medical certification) that Zhvanetskaya has been diagnosed with several mental illnesses, including dementia, delusional disorder, narcissistic “grandeur self-image” and egocentrism. Zhvanetskaya suffers from heart disease and severe obesity, the court said.

Zhvanetskaya’s own physicians and lawyers counter that she is of sound mind and that the court decision runs against her wishes.

Scheduled to be taken to a psychiatric institution for her forced COVID-19 vaccination on Jan. 11, Zhvanetskaya disappeared before authorities could arrest her. She has been transferred to an undisclosed location by friendly local activists who wanted to prevent her arrest, local media report.

Zhvanetskaya told a local Report 24 media outlet in a video that “Music is my life, and if they take away music from me then they take my life.”

Zhvanetskaya does not appear to be extremely overweight, contrary to the court’s claim that she was severely obese, Report 24 journalist Will Huber wrote.

Mascha Orel, the co-founder of We For Humanity, a humanitarian organization assisting Holocaust survivors and their descendants, has spoken with Zhvanetskaya and any of the diagnoses alleged by the court order make no sense to her.

“I talked to her on the phone for an hour,” said Orel. “She is vulnerable, frightened and has lived in this [mental] state for about two years, as her legal guardian has apparently tried to institutionalise her several times… She drew an unequivocal comparison: ‘It’s like when dad was at the front and mom had to flee with me and my brother.’ ”

A number of civil society professionals, including lawyers and doctors, have come to Zhvanetskaya’s defence.

“This decision is a gigantic judicial scandal,” according to Beate Bahner, a German attorney and expert on medical law.

Zhvanetskaya’s legal counsel, Holger Fischer, has appealed the court order, but not with complete success: a district court in Stuttgart granted his urgent application to suspend the compulsory vaccination order on Jan. 12.

That doesn’t mean much: a suspension can be suspended any time a higher court wishes to show they are the boss. Which is why Zhvanetskaya remains in hiding for as long as it takes, as the court could still decide to proceed with enforced institutionalisation.

Fake alphabet, Canada’s new gift to the world

Idiocy is contagious. Especially when couched in ideological slogans and presented as science.

New Zealand government’s officials have listed a number of seemingly innocent names parents are no longer permitted to call their children, lest they offend someone.

Offend? Whom?

Someone. Anyone.

Canada went a few steps further.

On one hand, Canada’s Supreme Court agreed a few years ago that the country’s indigenous population’s territorial claims can be based on unwritten legends transferred from one generation to the next by word of mouth.

Considering the strict laws and rules about written documentation in Canada’s real estate deals, this decision used to seem worse than atrocious. It dealt with huge territories. Combined, the indigenous peoples were demanding much more than 100 per cent of the land available in any of Canada’s holdings. Only those courageous enough to risk ostracism within their communities dared mention this minor discrepancy of major proportions.

Yet, it was peanuts compared to the clinical moronism that has been sweeping Canada’s officialdom under its waves more recently.

It started with officials making speeches. The obligatory formula forces them to declare that they know they are talking at this-or-that indigenous territory. If they did their homework, they would have known that what has developed from being called Indians into today’s convoluted mish-mash of naming protocols has been a collection of nomadic tribes. The area where they had been living at any given moment would be their home only until they depleted whatever sources had been available upon their arrival. If the greener pastures they’d intended to move to were occupied by another tribe, the battle would be ruthless: to the last foe alive.

They didn’t exchange declarations of war in writing. They couldn’t. They had no alphabet.

That’s where today’s so-called scientists stepped in: those poor Indian lads have no alphabet! Why don’t we create one for them?

Ancient symbols

Armed with all kinds of government grants, these so-called scientists went into it with gusto. They used their estimations of the ancient Greek alphabet, with some Cyrillic thrown in for good measure. They’d spice the goulash with exclamation and question marks to show how well they understood the individual Indian languages’ sounds.

Unfortunately, this would lead to a number of different issues.

First and foremost, literate Indians have become used to reading and writing using the normal Latin script, and the artificial typeface didn’t mean anything to them.

So far as the illiterate Indians were concerned, they didn’t give a hoot either way.

There are some Indians who seem to like being singled out by using the new script. They would face an insurmountable problem when trying to register their new-borns using it: modern computer equipment, including printers, has had problems with it, and government officials wouldn’t accept such names as a result.

A minor aside: the word Indians is used advisedly. Christopher Columbus called the first people he’d met on the new continent thus, hoping he managed to get all the way through to India. He didn’t, but the origin of the population he encountered and named this way seems to have to come to the Americas from India, anyhow. And nobody knows whether theirs was the first population inhabiting the Americas. They could be, and, then again, they not necessarily were. End of minor aside.

This would spark a wave of protests. Mostly by white people.

To complicate matters, several communities have decided to mark highway entrances and individual streets using the new mumbo-jumbo on top, with the original name listed below.

Fore Ucluelet!

If you stop at the corner of Otter Street and Peninsula Road in Vancouver Island’s Ucluelet, you’ll find the District of Ucluelet’s new bilingual Nuu-chah-nulth / English street signs.

As Alberni Valley News quoted the municipality’s statement, “Ucluelet is pleased to take this small step on the path to reconciliation by updating public signage to include the West Barkley dialect of Nuučaan̓uɫ – an opportunity to celebrate and preserve the language.

“Within the District of Ucluelet are neighbouring and interwoven communities located on the traditional territory (ḥaaḥuułi) of the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ (Ucluelet First Nation). The District’s long-standing relationship with the Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ is built upon mutual respect and many individual, personal ties.”

Of course, not all Nuu-chah-nulth words translate to English words. Only familiar nouns survive translation. Only about half of the existing street names in Ucluelet are nouns.

Still, the entire idea of a new script has shown that not all is gold that glitters.

According to off-the-record information (not a word even hinting whence they’re coming), Indians themselves have thrown a major-size monkey wrench into the idea. An unidentified Canadian university department of linguistics applied for and received a major government grant to start teaching Indians from all over Canada their new alphabet.
A couple of years since receiving the money and issuing the call offering free education, the academics are still waiting for the first sign of interest from the hugely anticipated crowd of indigenous students, never mind an application.

Whether they are still being paid for twirling their thumbs is not as important as is the fact that the entire idea of artificial typeface is perfect nonsense designed to divide people.

This is where the world is being led to, and this is what must stop. Now. Before it’s too late.

Children’s names: bureaucrats’ new paradise

What the heck is wrong with the antipodes? First, Australia goes stir-crazy about the so-called plandemic (that’s not a typo), and now, New Zealand bans new-borns’ names that their parents love and the government hate.

Many a decade ago, two Czech-Jewish parents, horrified of stories emanating from Adolf Hitler’s Germany, sent their baby to England, into the care of the boy’s aunt.

The parents never made it out on time and died the horrible deaths the Nazis had in store for them.

Once the war was over and he was almost grown up, the boy returned to his native country. He studied electrical engineering, got his degrees from the Czech Technical University (České Vysoké Učení Technické – ČVUT), went to work and found a girl.

They got married and their first-born was a girl. The guy and his wife agreed to name their daughter Golda. Not after the Israeli politician, Gold Meir, but after the auntie that brought the now quite successful electrical engineer up.

They wrote the name in the official papers and soon got an official birth certificate with the name Golda typed neatly in, no questions asked.

A few weeks later, they got a phone call: the name Golda wasn’t in the list of names recommended officially. So what, the new father asked, so it’s not recommended. Is it banned?

Not really, came a highly embarrassed reply, but still …

If we had a boy and decided to call him Adolf because a relative of that name helped us when times were tough, would that be a problem, too? asked the new Dad, hanging up.

Official forgery

Some time later, a registered envelope arrived. It contained a new birth certificate, carrying the same birth record number as the original one, with one minor change of major proportions: the girl’s name was changed into Zlata, a precise translation from the original Golda.

The engineer went to see a lawyer, and the lawyer suggested: “Why don’t you sue them?”

The “them” stood for the Ministry of Interior, the government department overseeing all things police. The lawsuit called the new document “forgery committed by officials thus far unidentified,” adding that engineer now had two valid birth certificates, and, once his daughter grows up to be 15 and be eligible for an official identity card, she would be able to get two such documents, keep one and sell the other to a “Western intelligence service.”

The new father did as the lawyer suggested, and the legal beagle also told him what to anticipate and how to react.

It all developed as the lawyer had said it would: a couple of days later, an angry-looking guy in a black leather coat banged on the door: “So, you want to sue us, eh?” he yelled when the engineer answered.

Before the engineer could even reply, the police officer continued at the top of his lungs: “Do you think that your position is guaranteed, or that you’re going to remain free to saunter around unpunished for such provocations? We’ll see about that!” and more words to that effect.

Instructed by his lawyer, the engineer only put a sentence in when the cop was catching his breath to continue: “Excuse me, sir, but you please speak in this direction so that my microphone records your words precisely to their last detail?”

The secret police officer turned around, slammed the door and left.

Both the new Dad (with his family) and the lawyer (with HIS family) found it expedient to defect, the former to Israel, the latter to the U.S.

Compared to New Zealanders who would wish to call their children however they wished, the two Czechs had it easy.

Here’s why: the antipodes have first of all published a list of the most popular baby names chosen in 2022. So far so good.

They also published names most often chosen by parents that end up not being permitted by the authorities.

Don’t you dare call your new son King. It’s an automatic no-no, topping the list. Stubborn parents tried to use it nine times, and their record is 0 – 9.

Saint went down to defeat eight times, followed by Royal (seven), Messiah (four), Prince or Princess (seven), Sovereign (three), Sire (two).

Names like Duke, Empres, General, Justice, Major, Queen, Rogue, Royale, Saynt and Soulijah also made the list of banned monikers.

Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages Jeff Montgomery offered an overwhelming explanation for this craziness: New Zealand’s special guidelines are supposed to make sure children’s names “don’t cause offence, are a reasonable length and don’t represent an official title or rank.”

Swear words, official titles, numeric characters and symbols must not become children’s names, either, and a name 70 characters long won’t make it, too.

A new level of idiocy

The New Zealand official manual for morons in high places isn’t much when compared to an Ecuadorean guy’s attempt to circumvent his country’s approach to deciding who should care for children when their parents’ union goes bust.

No matter how much a mother abuses her children, the father is out of luck so far as child care goes 10 times out of 10.

Salinas Ramos hasn’t seen his two daughters in five months. He claims that they live in an abusive environment with their mother, and, apparently, he can prove it.

No dice. Until he figured a trick: he had his gender changed officially in a bid to win custody of his children from a legal system that he says “punishes” fathers.

As could be expected, transgender activists went ballistic.

Rene Salinas Ramos doesn’t seek a medical transition into a woman.

According to the La Voz del Tomebamba newspaper, Salinas Ramos used his country’s law that has allowed Ecuadorians to change their gender since 2015.

Transgender politicians and activists’ protests say Salinas Ramos was not following “the spirit of the law.”

While claiming they understand the poor Dad’s situation, they still maintain that he’s “taking advantage of other people for parental authority.”

Not so, thus Salinas Ramos: his actions “are not against anyone in particular, but against the system.”

Legally speaking, he’s now a lady, and a man making such a change provides “the greatest proof of love that he can give to his daughters.”

It says here that Salinas Ramos has exposed the current state of political correctness for one of the cruellest crimes that can happen to innocent people, such as Salinas Ramos’s two daughters.

Attacking Brasilian protests: governments cover their backsides

How do we know when our elected representatives lie?

When we see their lips moving in speech.

Here’s one typical example. In a joint statement by President Joe Biden, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Brasil, issued on Monday, January 9, 2023, the three representatives decided to complain on matters that are none of their business. Here’s how they went about it (verbatim): Canada, Mexico, and the United States condemn the January 8 attacks on Brasil’s democracy and on the peaceful transfer of power. We stand with Brasil as it safeguards its democratic institutions. Our governments support the free will of the people of Brasil. We look forward to working with President Lula on delivering for our countries, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond.

End of verbatim quote.

Let’s forget about the unclarified statement, such as: We look forward to working with President Lula on delivering for our countries, the Western Hemisphere, and beyond.

Like: delivering what?

The really important question: what does it mean? Nothing more than that Jair Messias Bolsonaro, Brasilian Presidency incumbent, claims to have won this year’s election over his opponent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known mononymously as Lula, saying that the result was rigged. The Brasilians, who had seen through all this, would have none of such charades, and they have risen up.

Unlike the peaceful Canadian truckers, the Brasilians showed little inhibition in stating the obvious. They took to the streets and the situation has quickly turned into one of violent confrontation.

Who’s done it?

It’s not known yet to what degree the violence was arranged and organised by the leftist unionist forces that had been supporting the alleged electoral victor. It’s also quite obvious we won’t learn the details of whence the smoking gun had been armed and where it was aimed at any time soon.

An interesting parallel: when then-U.S. President Donald J. Trump expressed views contrary to the World Economic Forum’s ideologies, one of the shadowest figures this world has seen, George Soros, went on record as saying (publicly, to boot) that Trump’s presidency was a momentary aberration that would end soon.

The rest is history. Now, a couple of years after the deed, proof has been emerging that not everything went by the books, both in the Presidential election of 2020, and the midterms of 2022. To overturn the results would be unprecedented, and U.S. Supreme Court have already indicated that this wouldn’t happen. Not on their watch, anyway.

As American economist Martin Armstrong points out, there can be no doubt that the Brasilian elections were rigged. The World Economic Forum and their consortium had targeted Bolsonaro. They had to remove Bolsonaro at all costs and now we will witness the price for those corrupt elections, Armstrong posits, and the violence that is happening now is likely to escalate into March.

Not that Brasil is alone. It takes a strong government that steadfastly stands up for their people to stand up to and withstand the worldwide attempts to rig elections while making sure that the crime is untraceable. It’s called plausible deniability, and often it’s not even so plausible.

As Armstrong points out, governments no long represent ALL the people. They push one group violently against another. This same process is undermining both the United States, Canada as well as Europe, the economist adds, explaining that this leftist agenda is destroying our civilisation and this is right on schedule – 34 years from the collapse of communism.

“It is now our turn for this abuse of government to divide the people and the nation and ONLY will lead to civil war,” Armstrong concludes.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) saw enough of Bolsonaro in 2019 to decide that he, too, was an aberration, just like Trump had been. It’s enough to see this rare footage (published by Armstrong), showing Bolsonaro at a WEF gathering in Davos.

The events in Brasil have turned violent: the new administration have been using force against their own people, and the people have been answering in kind.

Bolsonaro condemned the “pillaging and invasion of public buildings” after hundreds stormed Brasilian institutions.

He rejected what he called Lula’s “baseless” accusations that he had incited the unrest. In fact, Bolsonaro called for his supporters to calm down and protest peacefully. Unfortunately, how they can achieve that when the new administration uses flagrant violence against peaceful protest remains a dark secret.

Politicians who comment on the situation from their cosy palaces around Latin America are united in condemning the violence, which would be fine if they added the new Brasilian administration in their criticisms, also.

First-class hypocrisy

U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan condemned the protests happening in Brasil’s capital, Brasilia.

With President Joe Biden’s own Presidency questioned and questionable, Sullivan had the gall to tweet that “The United States condemns any effort to undermine democracy in Brasil. President Biden is following the situation closely and our support for Brasil’s democratic institutions is unwavering.”

Biden himself called the situation “outrageous.”

He had to: what if his own people decided that the Georgetown and Beltway crowd that had anointed him in office had no business in rigging elections and had risen up in protest, too?

Canadian Constitution, unlike our neighbours’ similar document, calls for good government, without ever specifying what it meant. What if Canadians decided it was time to stop being the most polite nation in the world, and kicked the current government out? Remember, our current Prime Minister called very peaceful groups of protesting truckers all kinds of names, including terrorists. He went on to use his own rhetoric to impose a law that has been reserved for times of real danger, not for events that quite properly challenge government-of-the-day’s policies.

Yes, that’s one of the three guys who had signed the statement mentioned above.

When does standing up for what many agree are their basic rights become illegal behaviour?

Nature forbid that current governments’ behaviour leads to civil wars.

Optimism isn’t à propos: today’s governments are throwing the word democracy left, right and centre, abusing it all the while.

The good old Roman politician, Cicero, put it best: Quo usque tandem abutere patientia nostra?

How much longer will they get away with abusing their employers’ patience?

Romeo and Juliet sue studio that made them famous

The battle between the house of Montague and the house of Capulet in Italy’s Verona ended in the deaths of two young lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet.

Their love story, immortalised by William Shakespeare, ended tragically. One of the most accomplished film versions of the play, made by Franco Zeffirelli in 1968, faces a similar ending in a lawsuit demanding more than half a billion American greenbacks for the film’s two main stars.

Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting (Juliet and Romeo in that movie classic) are now suing Paramount, the company that produced Zeffirelli’s masterpiece. They claim sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and fraud over a nude scene that they say they were misled into performing.

Of course, they can’t sue the good old Zeffirelli himself: he died in 2019, aged 96, and who knows if he’d ever had been able to put together the half a billion they are now demanding.

What happened?

Zeffirelli, the oldsters say, told them that there would be no nudity in the film, and that they would wear flesh-coloured undergarments in the famous bedroom scene.

But, as the scene was about to be recorded on film, Hussey and Whiting say in the lawsuit, he begged them to perform in the nude with body makeup, “or the picture would fail.”

Hussey, 15 at the time, and Whiting, 16, now say that Zeffirelli showed them where the camera would be positioned. Also, they claim, the director told them no nudity would be photographed or released in the film.

He lied, the lawsuit says, Whiting and Hussey were in fact filmed nude without their knowledge.

“What they were told and what went on were two different things,” said Tony Marinozzi, who is a business manager for both actors. “They trusted Franco. At 16, as actors, they took his lead that he would not violate that trust they had. Franco was their friend, and frankly, at 16, what do they do?” he asked rhetorically, adding: “There are no options. There was no #MeToo.”

Marinozzi was right on the #MeToo account: it started in 2006, took down a number of people, mostly male, ruining their lives and careers on alleged victims’ say-so that they could not deny (how do you defend a negative?) and it seems to have fizzled out to a huge degree.

Hussey and Whiting claim to have suffered mental anguish and emotional distress during the 55 years since the film’s release. They also blame the late Zeffirelli, and, by extension, Paramount that they have also lost out on job opportunities. Despite their breakout performances, Hussey and Whiting had only very limited acting careers after Romeo and Juliet.

Whether that had anything to do with the undeniable fact that they were simply unable to turn in such great performances as they had under Zeffirelli’s guidance and on Shakespeare’s text, remains a mystery, just as it so tragically and regularly does in the world of arts.

Solomon Gresen, the actors’ attorney, has been quoted as saying that “Nude images of minors are unlawful and shouldn’t be exhibited.

“These were very young naive children in the ‘60s who had no understanding of what was about to hit them. All of a sudden they were famous at a level they never expected, and in addition they were violated in a way they didn’t know how to deal with.”

Gresen has come up with your typical psychobabble that takes great care to ignore the context of the times.

The lawsuit relies in part on a California law that temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for older claims of child sexual abuse. The courts saw an influx of complaints against the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Church, among other organisations, in the days leading up to the Dec. 31 deadline.

Except, history of their own recollections is somehow not too kind to the two former kids.

So, which is it?

A mere five years ago, Hussey defended the nude scene.

“Nobody my age had done that before,” she told Variety in a 2018 interview, adding that Zeffirelli shot it tastefully. “It was needed for the film.”

America was more Victorian in the 1960s than Queen Victoria’s England, Hussey told Fox News in 2018.

“I think because it was done very tastefully,” she told Fox News in that 2018 interview.

“And in Europe, it was very different. In America, it was very taboo,” she added.

“But in Europe, a lot of the films had nudity. Nobody really thought much of it.

“But it was just the fact that I was 16 that got a lot of publicity…

“The large crew we worked with was whittled down to only the very basic people,” Hussey explained, “a handful of people. It was done later in the day when it wasn’t busy. It was a closed set…

“If you see it, the reality is these two young kids married against their parents’ wishes and have this one night together and then they die… And it wasn’t really banned in any country… And we shot it at the very end of the film. So by that time… we’ve all become a big family… It wasn’t that big of a deal. And Leonard wasn’t shy at all! In the middle of shooting, I just completely forgot I didn’t have clothes on.”

Paramount has been silent when asked about the lawsuit.

Obviously, the studio will keep its rhetoric for the courtroom, should the case ever get there. They would only need to pull out the two interviews mentioned above, and look for some other such material and demand to know: what has happened since 2018? Did you start missing headlines?

Lawyers can be cruel.

Hussey made one statement in that 2018 Fox News interview that makes this lawsuit look and sound really incomprehensible. “If you don’t forgive people,” she said, “you carry a lot of pain and hurt. You don’t forgive to forget. You forgive for your well-being.”

Which begs this question: who is it who really needs that half a billion bucks?

America, a forgotten poor relative

The United States of America is on its way to become a third-world country, one that begs the richer nations for help, and when it gets it, it squanders it almost immediately. How? Thanks to unthinkable corruption within its top 10,000.

As a result, not much help has been forthcoming the last couple of years. On the contrary, the former superpower has been demoted to sitting on the side-lines of this world’s development.

It’s not funny, however, and it is dangerous: cornered beasts kick around the most.

U.S. Foreign Secretary Antony J. Blinken’s Christmas was ruined when he was told that Germany, Russia and China negotiated about settling the Ukrainian conflict without even sharing the news they were talking with Washington, D.C.

Blinken called his Beijing counterpart Wang Yi, demanding to know how the Chinese could dare in the first place, and what did they talk about.

Wang Yi told him to go and fly a kite: the People’s Republic is a sovereign state, America’s biggest creditor, and she can talk to anybody any time she wishes and about whatever she wishes to. On a sarcastically more conciliatory note, the Chinese politician suggested Blinken could apply for more information to German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. Germany, after all, is a member of NATO, making her America’s official ally.

Except: the appropriate powers-that-be, aware that Ms. Baerbock was an American agent within German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s circles, made sure she would only know that such talks have been taking place and that France took part, as well.

What happened looks and sounds like a political thriller Hollywood wouldn’t be capable of dreaming up: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier met his Chancellor Scholz in a way that would make James Bond proud. Within minutes after that meeting Steinmeier telephoned his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Details are, of course, secret but, strangely enough, during that conversation, Russia’s Security Council deputy-chairman, Dmitri Medvedev, changed his holiday plans, sped to one of Moscow’s airports and took off on an officially unannounced trip to China.

Medvedev, de-facto President Vladimir Putin’s vice-president, carried a highly confidential folder from Putin for Xi Jinping’s eyes only.

The entire plan is simple: several European powers, mighty disappointed with the fate America seems to be planning for them, and not really happy with the impacts sanctions aimed at Russia for her role in the Ukrainian conflict cause to their own countries, decided to fight back.

What gives?

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel let herself be heard not so long ago that the protocols of Minsk (2014 and 2015), stipulating the peaceful solutions to the Donbass and Lugansk regions’ situations, were just a ploy. The idea was to give Kiev time to get ready for a forthcoming war with Russia.

These protocols were based on the so-called Steinmeier formula. It said, for the record, that all parties in the conflict, and the European Union (EU), would be duty-bound to hold elections in the areas that had been rebelling against Ukraine running their matters. If the European Security and Defence Agency officials supervising the elections agree that the vote was fair and they had no issues, the mostly-Russian regions would be guaranteed a high level of independence within Ukraine. Not only that: the result would make Ukraine a free confederation of regions, and the central government in Kiev wouldn’t be allowed to collect taxes in those two rebellious regions.

What’s the charade? How come Merkel claims the two Minsk documents weren’t worth the paper they’d been written on, and her own country’s own President continues conducting secret negotiations based precisely on those documents?

Sources in Germany claim it was diversionary tactic. The plan was to keep the current negotiations secret. They undermine America, first and foremost, and they also put a knife to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s throat.

Remember, the former TV clown was ready not so long ago to settle directly with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Just as the news trickled from Kiev that both sides were close to announcing the where and when of the two Presidents’ meeting, British then-PM Boris Johnson arrived to Kiev, unannounced, to tell Zelensky to lay off of any talks with Russia, peace talks first of all.

Zelensky obeyed but the fact the news of Johnson’s trip was leaked even before he made it from the Kiev airport to Zelensky’s official palatial residence, cost Johnson his keys to 10 Downing Street.

What’s behind it all?

The U.S., getting weaker by the day, both economically and politically, needs resources to take on China. America needs Russia and Europe to lose their economic strength and ability to compete with the U.S. And she needs to get all she can get from Europe (and Russia) to be able to control China as her strongest enemy.

Remember: the U.S. owes China more than it owns itself. Should China call the loans, America will be in default right then and there. China won’t do it, not right now, in any case, but the sword of Damocles hangs over America’s head nevertheless.

According to information released by China’s Foreign Ministry, Xi Jinping and Steinmeier agreed on a formula for growing and expanded cooperation between the two countries, including cooperation on issues that concern the world (but not necessarily the two countries themselves).

China’s Foreign Ministry also informed the world about Medvedev’s visit, using his title as chairman of the United Russia Party to describe him, rather than as vice-chairman of Russia’s Security Council.

Xi Jingpin told Medvedev that China is willing and ready to cooperate with Russia in what he described as a new era of a more fair-minded global rule.

That would be a direct slap in America’s face.

It wouldn’t stop there: according to news from Beijing, President Xi Jingpin stressed the question of Ukraine in talks with both Steinmeier and Medvedev.

From the records of the talks, the Chinese President told Steinmeier China keeps being ready to support peace negotiations, while telling Medvedev his country remains being ready to support active peace negotiations.

It’s the word “active” that makes all the difference.

This assault on America’s feelings has been going on since last November’s visit by German Chancellor Scholz in Beijing.

Several high-ranking government ministers in Germany have started attacking American exports of fuel commodities into Europe, saying this was abuse of the energy crisis the Americans themselves had caused.

EU has put together a price cap on fuel imports from Russia, only to be told that Russia doesn’t give a hoot about them: this is our price, take it or leave it, we have other customers to sell it to, too.

Put simply: America is no longer calling the shots. China, Russia and Germany (in that order) are, with France joining the club and Italy saying she had enough of both the EU and the U.S.

America used to be the beacon of freedom and progress.

It’s not so much of a surprise she is fading: all great powers have their ups and downs. It’s how irrevocable her failure has become that shocks, and how fast it was.

What should the world learn first? Cantonese? Mandarin? Russian? Or German?

For heaven’s sake, not THAT!