It’s now clear that around the Russian city of Grozny, a defense system intended to shoot down Zelensky/Blinken attack drones from Ukraine was activated when this civilian airliner was approaching — effectively a huge Stuff-up by the airline, the Russian commanders on the ground, or both.
Obviously, the airliner should not have been approaching when there was an anti-aircraft ‘iron dome’ type system in place that could have shot at it by mistake.
As there were Russian nationals on board it was not something the Russians would have wanted, and the Kremlin has announced a full investigation will take place. Of course, if Zelensky/Blinken hadn’t been firing drones into this part of Russia in the first place then an anti-aircraft missile system wouldn’t have been there.
The tycoon has slammed the Wikimedia Foundation for spending over $50 million on ‘Equity’ and ‘Safety and Inclusion’
Elon Musk has urged internet users to stop supporting Wikipedia over what he sees as disproportionate spending on promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
In a series of posts this week, the billionaire owner of Tesla, Space X and X vented his frustration over the online encyclopedia’s financial report, which showed that it spent more than $50 million of its total $177 million – or almost one-third of its 2023-2024 budget – on such goals as ‘Equity’ and ‘Safety and Inclusion’.
More than 90% of the platform’s funding comes from donations. Commenting on the report on Tuesday, Musk wrote on X: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.”
On Thursday, Musk suggested that Wikipedia “sucks” for spending $50 million on DEI.
DEI, a collection of business practices designed to promote workforce diversity, has faced criticism from conservatives who argue it enforces reverse discrimination against white people and undermines merit-based systems. In recent months, several major corporations, including Boeing, Ford Motor Company, Nissan and Walmart, have scaled back their DEI initiatives.
Wikipedia claims it is taking steps to address barriers to free knowledge caused by racial inequality, while also striving to close the gender gap and ensure equal representation of knowledge and people on the platform. It has also sought to “defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation” and other “external threats.”
Musk has had a long-running beef with the encyclopedia, which he has called “broken.”
In October, he argued that Wikipedia is overtly promoting a narrative labeling US President-elect Donald Trump – whom Musk endorsed – as a “fascist,” claiming that the website is “controlled by far-left activists.”
The same month, he offered $1 billion to Wikipedia if it renames itself ‘Dickipedia’ for at least a year, while accusing it of bias.
Last year, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, alleged that the platform is being used by US intelligence community as an instrument of “control” and to further the agenda of the Leftist establishment.
Wikipedia, however, insists that it adheres to a set of core principles, including providing information from a neutral point of view and in a verifiable and balanced manner.
It actually invited comments on its X (Twitter) page and following a deluge of negative ones, deleted the post.
It’s not the first time this Australian owned company has been called out for its Wokeism to gain favour with the Leftist establishment — and nothing more. Its worst action was refusing to sell petrol to the Freedom Convoy participants in February 2022, many of whom were Maori — so much for this fakery.
If you went by all the propaganda that the Biden regime and its compliant Leftist Legacy Media pumped out, at least during 2022, you would think that the capital of Zelenskyland would look like Gaza, Lebanon and Syria by now.
But it doesn’t. The (civilian) drone views by this Romanian couple show almost no damage. There are several burnt out military vehicles on display in the central square and at 13:10 minutes a lot of little Ukrainian flags in a big group — are these for all those press-ganged young men killed in Biden’s war?
Of course, Zelensky with the CIA (which the New York Times has admitted has 12 bases in the country) took a leaf out of the Hamas playbook and embedded military units and equipment in hospitals and schools in 2022 — and some were hit by Russian strikes. But with the shift in media attention to the Middle East since 7 October 2023 they seem to have stopped doing that.
There is a also quick look at the town of Bucha to the northwest where there was some intense fighting early in the conflict (a report has it that 73 civilians were killed in it before the Russians withdrew with the claim that Zelensky/the CIA staged a massacre with ‘bodies’ on the streets, see earlier posts on that event).
Overall, with no panhandlers, gangs, homeless, fentanyl zombies or cultural hate to be seen, Kiev actually looks better than many American cities do, particularly those run by the War (Democrat) Party.
Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring gets sentenced for War Crimes at Nurnberg in September 1946. The same should happen to warmongers Blinken, Biden and Starmer, among several others.
from Scott Ritter
“In my work with the defendants [at the Nuremberg Trails of Nazis after WW 2] I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
—Captain G. M. Gilbert, US Army psychologist, Author of Nuremburg Diary
In September 1995 I was working for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), charged with eliminating Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. I was the primary liaison between UNSCOM and Israeli intelligence at the time and would make frequent trips to Israel which could last between a few days and a few weeks. During one of these visits, I invited my wife Marina to join me over the weekend. Marina is a devout Georgian Orthodox Christian and was thrilled about the opportunity to see the Holy Land firsthand. We walked the “Via Delarosa” (the “sorrowful way”) in Jerusalem, tracing Jesus’ journey to his crucifixion. We dipped our feet in the River Jordan at the spot John was said to have baptized Jesus. We toured the Sea of Gallilee, visiting the various sites of Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Bible.
All these experiences resonated deeply with us both.
But it was the excursion my wife made to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, located on Mount Herzl, in western Jerusalem, that made the deepest impression. It was there that Marina came face to face with photographs of some of the child victims of the Holocaust. Marina had given birth to our twin daughters in February 1993, and at the time of her visit to Vad Vashem our girls were 2 and a half years old—the same age as some of the children in the photographs on display at the center. Marina saw our daughters in the eyes of these children, and immediately broke down and cried.
She was overcome with empathy.
In the summer of 1997, I found myself in Baghdad at the head of an inspection team whose purpose it was to confront the Iraqi government with its inconsistent and often contradictory information about the disposition of weapons of mass destruction-related materials in the summer of 1991. Armed with defector reports and satellite imagery, I had been able to find caches of unaccounted missile production equipment, and unravel the deceit of senior Iraqi officials that had served as the foundation of their narrative for more than six years running. My inspection team was not very popular among the inner circle of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. As a means of putting pressure on me and my team, the Iraqi government would air video clips of our inspection, accusing me and the other inspectors of working for the CIA, and blaming us for the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of western sanctions. This led to several death threats and at least one attempted assassination attempt on me and my team by disgruntled Iraqi civilians who took the accusations of the Iraqi government to heart.
Rather than back down or hide, my team and I took the opposite approach—we made our presence in Iraq as high-profile as possible, part of my “Alpha Dog” approach to inspecting, which had us figuratively “pissing on the walls” of Iraq in order to leave our mark, and to make sure the Iraqis knew who was in charge when it came to the implementation of our mandate.
Scott Ritter walks next to his UNSCOM Nissan Patrol vehicle at the UN Headquarters, Summer 1997
At night, when the inspections were finished, and while the “news” of our efforts were being broadcast on Iraqi television, my team and I would drive to the center of town in our ubiquitous white Nissan Patrol SUV’s, with the black “UN” letters painted on the sides and our tactical markings displayed on the roofs and hoods in grey duct tape (these were the team designations for each vehicle—A-1 for “Alpha One, ” etc. My vehicle was marked with a “W” for “Whiskey”). We would park on the side of the road next to whatever restaurant we had picked to dine in that night and walk in with all the cockiness of John Wayne and his cowboys (indeed, the head of the UN Humanitarian Mission in Iraq had recently called us “cowboys” in an interview he gave for Le Monde. We decided the title, meant to be an insult, fit us well).
One night, as we sat in a popular roast chicken establishment, the television started playing a “news special” which singled me out for attack. The inspectors and I watched the crowd as they watched the TV screen, where our photographs were displayed along with a running narrative of our many “crimes.” The mood in the restaurant darkened considerably, and someone recommended that we leave while the leaving was good.
“No,” I countered. “We paid for this meal, and we’re going to enjoy it. Fuck these people.”
I was in no mood for showing weakness. We had just spent a day parked outside the Iraqi intelligence headquarters, with our entry blocked by armed guards. At one point we were ushered inside the guardhouse while the police disarmed a man who had driven by with a loaded AK-47, intent on gunning me and the inspectors down.
No sooner than these words had left my mouth, I saw a woman rise from her seat at a table to our front. She was dressed in a black dress, with a black shawl covering her head. Someone at her table tried to pull her back to her seat, but she reprimanded them, and they let go of her arm. She turned and made her way toward my table, her eyes locked on mine.
“Boss,” one of the inspectors, a grizzled British soldier, said. “Incoming.”
“I got her,” I replied. I watched her closely as she drew near, my gaze fluctuating from her eyes and her hands, trying to ascertain her intent. I hadn’t reached a conclusion by the time she halted, standing over me as I sat there and wiped the chicken grease from my face with a napkin.
“You are Scott Ritter?,” she asked, her voice cracking with emotion.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, coming to my feet.
“And these are your men? Your inspectors?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I replied.
“I see you on television every day. They say it is you I should blame for the death of my children.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I stuttered, not knowing what else to say.
“They want me to hate you.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
She stared at me, tears welling in her eyes. Her hands were wrapped in her shawl, and suddenly one darted out. If it had been a knife, she would have been able to stab me. But it was just her hand, which she laid on my arm.
“You are doing your job,” she said. “I know this. I know in your heart you mean me no harm. I know in your heart that you did not want my child to die.”
Tears started trickling down her cheek.
“I know you are someone’s son. That all of you,” she said, gesturing to the hard men seated around the table, “have mothers who love you, as I loved my child.”
She looked up at me. “I will pray for your safety, so that you can finish your work, and that sanctions can be lifted, so other mothers do not lose their children to disease.”
She squeezed my arm, and turned away, heading back to her table, where she sat down and sank her head into the arms of the lady seated next to her, sobbing.
I looked down at my unfinished meal, no longer hungry.
“Let’s go,” I said, the anger and cockiness that had defined my earlier tone gone.
We left, each of us reaching into our pockets to leave as large a tip as possible, as if we all were trying to atone for our sins by buying forgiveness.
The crowd in the restaurant let us leave without incident.
As I sat in the Nissan Patrol, heading back to our headquarters building where I would finish the daily inspection report, I could still feel the grip of the lady on my arm where she had squeezed me.
I tried to figure out why she did what she did.
She had every right to hate us. I know that if I was to come face to face with the man responsible for the death of my children, the meeting would not be described as peaceful.
But she chose peace.
She did so in a very public manner, singling me out for the entire restaurant to see.
I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t stood up.
If she hadn’t confronted me.
What would the crowd have done? I had been caught in several public settings, including a restaurant, when the mood of the crowd soured. Things got real ugly, real fast.
But her intervention prevented that.
She intervened to protect us.
Because she was a mother.
And she knew we had mothers.
She had been overcome with empathy.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit the Donbas region of Russia, including the city of Lugansk. Once part of Ukraine, these territories were caught up in the turmoil that gripped Ukraine following the coming to power in Kiev of anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalists following the US-orchestrated Maidan revolt of February 2014. The Russian-speaking population of the Donbas revolted against the new Ukrainian nationalists, who sought to impose a sort of cultural genocide by banning the Russian language, religion, culture and history. The revolt that followed lasted nearly eight years, culminating in the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of four former Ukrainian regions, or oblasts, including the two—Donetsk and Lugansk—which together form the Donbas.
The memorial “To the children of the Lugansk Region,” Lugansk, Russia
While in Lugansk I was taken to a memorial dedicated to the children of Lugansk who perished in the fighting that has been raging since 2014. When the monument was installed, back in 2017, there were 33 angels depicted, one for each Lugansk child that had perished in the fighting. Since that time, 35 additional Lugansk children have perished, raising the total number killed to 68.
What struck me when visiting the memorial was how each child’s life resonated with the citizens of Lugansk, as if everyone in the city claimed the lost children as their own. I had witnessed this phenomenon before. Back in 2000, I visited Iraq for the purpose of filming a documentary on UNSCOM and the disarmament of Iraq. While there, I visited the site of the Martyr’s Place Elementary School where, on the morning of October 13, 1987, an Iranian SCUD missile strike killed 22 children and injured more than 160 others as they gathered in the school playground to start the day. At the entrance to the playground was a memorial depicting 22 bronze angels ascending to heaven.
At the time of my visit to Baghdad, some 13 years after the attack, the residents of the neighborhood surrounding the school were still emotional over the loss of life among the children. “They would be young adults today,” one elderly man said. “Just starting their lives.”
It is the loss of the children that hits a community hardest. Whether in Lugansk, Baghdad, or Ma’alot, a town in Israel where, in May 1974, Palestinian militants occupied the Netiv Meir elementary school, where they took some 115 persons hostage, 105 of whom were children. The Israeli military stormed the building, killing the three Palestinian gunmen as well as 31 hostages, 22 of whom were children. Israelis were still talking about Ma’alot when I visited in 1995, some 21 years later.
Some things cannot be forgotten.
And even though I was not a witness to any of these events, as a father of twin daughters I felt the pain of those who lost their little ones as if the lives lost were my own flesh and blood.
Because I had empathy.
If the lack of empathy is the principal characteristic of evil, then the ability to empathize must be the trademark of good.
This Christmas season finds the world engulfed in conflict, with tragedy playing out before our very eyes daily.
We wouldn’t be human if we start to become immune to the horror, our senses overwhelmed by the repetitive scenes of death and destruction that we are constantly confronted by. Being physically separated from violence, we have the option to tune out the unpleasant sights and sounds of human suffering.
After all, how many times can we see the torn, lifeless body of a child pulled from the rubble of Gaza and Beirut?
Or from the wreckage of homes in Ukraine and Russia?
Overdosing from senseless tragedy leads to the numbing of our soul, the hardening of our heart, the diminishment of our humanity.
But we must endure, for no other reason than to make sure that those young lives lost did not perish in vain.
We must learn and remember the names of those who have perished, not to serve as fuel for the furnace of hatred that drives one to seek revenge, but because we have a duty as humans to put ourselves in the shoes of those who have lost their loved ones in war, to feel their pain, to understand their loss, so that we know the importance of trying to bring the violence that took these lives to an end.
War is never the solution.
Peace is always the answer.
I often think back to my encounter with the Iraqi mother at the restaurant in Baghdad. It was an ugly time in my life, when I was overcome with a sense of duty that clouded my own humanity. I was so singularly focused on the task at hand—disarming Iraq—that I forgot that there was a human cost associated with my work and that of my inspectors.
I’ve told the story of this encounter a few times, but I always left out one part of the story, because the memory of it rips at my heart to this day.
After the lady squeezed my arm, and started to turn away, I reached out and laid my hand on her shoulder. She spun around and looked at me.
“What was your child’s name?” I asked.
Her eyes filled with tears, but she smiled slightly before answering. “Zaynab,” she said.
“Zaynab,” I repeated. “It’s a beautiful name.”
“She was a beautiful child,” the mother replied.
I don’t tell this part of the story because it takes away from the tough guy, Alpha Dog persona I had developed during that time.
Because when she turned and walked away, she left me standing alone, sobbing.
But we must confront these things.
Zaynab would have been in her late 20’s today, old enough to have found love, married, and began a family of her own.
But it wasn’t to be.
We must remember Zaynab, just as we must remember every child whose life was taken from this earth too soon.
We must empathize with those who have lost their loved ones because of the senseless wars fought by men.
We must make sure that the children who are alive today have the chance to grow up and raise families of their own.
Otherwise, we become the tools of evil, if not evil itself.
Tsiolkas is a hard-edged, powerful writer, but glowing at the heart of all the anger among these feuding families are sparks of understanding, resignation and even love … The novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration. –Washington Post
A novel for the ages
The Slap was published in 2008 and took the Australian literary world by storm. It won six local prizes and awards and became a world-wide best seller. A controversial and daring novel, “The Slap” uses the iconic scene of a suburban barbeque to examine identities and personal relationships in a multi-cultural society. –Committee for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize 2009
This is not a book for the faint-hearted. Christos Tsiolkas exposes the often unsavoury and intolerant underbelly of Melbourne suburbia where middle and working class families interact – socialising, drinking, smoking, swearing, arguing, taking drugs, having sex and committing violence. However, the highly convincing characters also have strong family loyalties and friendships, and support each other in times of need.
Based around an incident at a Melbourne party where Harry, the cousin of the host Hector, smacks the out of control three year old Hugo who is the son of Rosie — a friend of the host’s wife Aisha.
That’s the end of the barbeque and the adults who were there are split in their allegiances. The police become involved and the case goes to court, and friendships and relationships are sorely tested. The book is a superb analysis of a cross-section of Melbourne suburban life and social classes, and touches on a huge range of issues.
The text is smattered with four letter words, but their use is not gratuitous or over-used. It’s a bit of shock from page 1, but the foul language just seems to come naturally to these Aussie characters!
Characters tell the story
Eight of the people who were present at the barbecue are given about 70 pages to give their views and cover their background and life histories. It is a classic, highly appropriate stream of consciousness approach.
Readers get the warts and all treatment on all these folk, and their friends and families –
Harry who carried out the slap
Manolis – the patriarch of a Greek migrant family
his son and his Indian wife
Hugo’s Mum
one of her best friends
two teenagers who baby sit Hugo.
An absorbing read
The physical chastising of Hugo at the barbeque changes everyone’s life.
As the story unfolds, a wide range of Australian issues, settings and situations are featured which Kiwis can readily identify with –
racial and religious intolerance
domestic violence and bullying
the merits of private and public schools
teenage parties, sex and drug taking
adultery and infidelity
male bonding and female friendships
family gatherings and funerals
homosexuality and AIDS
tourism in Bali
conventions and pop concerts
a veterinary clinic and other work places
pubs and cafés.
Put together this is a riveting and entertaining read. The characterisation is excellent; the descriptions of landscapes, settings and situations superb, and the story flows along seamlessly as the secrets, lies, liaisons and betrayals are revealed.
Winning novelist Christos Tsiolkas.
Is this the great Australian novel of the early 21st century? Quite possibly. It deservedly won a number of prizes within the Commonwealth, and was long-listed for the Booker.
I first read it 12 year ago at an Air B&B in California and recently decided to give it another go. Second time around, I picked up detail and nuances I had missed before, and consequently my admiration for this first Tsiolkas novel has increased.
If you haven’t given it a go, you’ll find it hard to turn the light out if you’re reading in bed! I highly recommended it and you’ll find it in local Libraries.
Unstitching what happened to the New Zealand teachers who were sacked as a result of the NZ COVID-19 Public Health Response (Vaccinations) Order 2021 is proving a long and depressing task. But it is essential. This post continues the conversation about what went on behind the scenes when, on 15 November 2021, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins declared all teaching staff should be ‘vaccinated’.
Brief background to the NZ ‘No Jab, No Job’ mandates:
I’ve explained previously about how the NZ Government secretly worked with the biggest commercial companies behind the scenes during August and Sept 2021. The ‘pilot scheme’ took place over 6 weeks and involved analysing various coercive strategies, or ‘nudges’, in order to get the maximum numbers of Kiwi folk compliant with the experimental injections. The subsequent ‘staff consultation period’ then, was a sham…
A paper in The Lancet claimed 20 million lives were saved by the Covid shots. But two data sources (both in public view for years) show the shots were all downside risk.
I’ve been looking for these 20 million people and still haven’t found any. But what I did find is two more authoritative gold-standard sources that confirm that the shots did not reduce Covid mortality.
Previous evidence
In the past, I’ve cited: The US Nursing Home data as proof that the Covid shots didn’t reduce Covid death rates in nursing homes
The JAMA VA study as proof that Covid shots didn’t reduce the risk of hospitalization from Covid
The Cleveland Clinic study as proof that the Covid shots increased the risk of being infected with Covid
The lack of any success stories. I couldn’t find a single one.
The Covid shot failure anecdotes like Apple Valley Village where the all-cause death rate skyrocketed by 8x post shot (and the CFR went from 0% to over 30%) and Jay Bonnar.
Cases and deaths from OWID
We’ve always had the data proving the vaccines didn’t work. It was hiding in public view.
Yet despite the data availability, there wasn’t an epidemiologist in the world who would look at it!
CFR with OWID data = Deaths/Cases from 2 weeks earlier. The .012 level seen pre-vax rollout isn’t consistently breached until Omicron launches in 2022.The CFR doesn’t drop consistently below the pre-vaccine CFR (.012 in December 2020) until the Omicron variant emerges! That means the vaccines didn’t reduce the CFR which means they don’t prevent deaths. The shots basically had no impact.
Try this on your friends. Show them the plot above, hide the dates, and ask them, “When did the COVID shots roll out and dramatically reduce the CFR?”
In the UK, the Covid death / Covid hospitalization ratio didn’t change at all after the vaccines rolled out. Whoops!
Some people might argue that the CFR could vary with testing. So here’s another way to see if the vaccines worked: look at the deaths rate of patients hospitalized for Covid before vs. after the vaccines rolled out. Since we know from the VA study that Covid didn’t change the risk of hospitalization for the vaccinated, we can then use the differential death rate BEFORE shot rollout vs. after shot rollout to see if the shots made a difference in your risk of death from Covid.
Guess what? No difference! This was pointed more than 2 years ago, but few people noticed: There were spikes, but the risk of death didn’t go down like it was “supposed to” if the shots worked. The risk of Covid death didn’t go down at all. This is a huge red flag. Very few people noticed this post when Clare made it over 2 years ago. But I’m sure that now that I’ve brought it to people’s attention that it will be front page news about how the health authorities conned us into taking a deadly ‘vaccine’ that had no benefits.
Summary
The Covid shots didn’t save any lives. They were 100% downside risk. And despite the proof of that being in plain sight for years now that anyone could have easily verified, it is rare to hear an apology from anyone who was publicly pushing the shots.
