NYC Drag Marchers chant “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” https://t.co/ucK1qM4fv5 pic.twitter.com/OhBguhWwZY

— Timcast News (@TimcastNews) June 24, 2023

They have the same intention in all countries.

Says Caitlin Johnstone:

During the 2020 presidential race, Current Affairs’ Nathan J Robinson wrote the following about Biden’s pivotal role in manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion:

In 2003, Biden was “a senator bullish about the push to war [in Iraq] who helped sell the Bush administration’s pitch to the American public,” who “voted for — and helped advance — the Bush agenda.” He was the war’s “most crucial” senate supporter. Biden repeated the myth that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, saying that “these weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power.” The resulting war was one of the most deadly catastrophes in the history of U.S. foreign policy — the Iraqi death toll was in the hundreds of thousands or possibly even the millions, and 4,500 American troops died.

That Biden’s decomposing brain would find the word “Iraq” when reaching for the word which means “nation that has been illegally invaded by an evil government” is positively Freudian.

from Brill.com

The Maidan Massacre Trial and Investigation Revelations: Implications for the Ukraine-Russia War and Relations

Abstract

This study analyzes revelations from the trial and investigation in Ukraine concerning the mass killing that took place in Kyiv on 20 February 2014. This Maidan massacre of protesters and police led to the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and ultimately to the Russian annexation of Crimea, the civil war and Russian military interventions in Donbas, and the Ukraine-Russia and West-Russia conflicts which Russia escalated by illegally invading Ukraine in 2022. The absolute majority of wounded Maidan protesters, nearly 100 prosecution and defense witnesses, synchronized videos, and medical and ballistic examinations by government experts pointed unequivocally to the fact that the Maidan protesters were massacred by snipers located in Maidan-controlled buildings. To date, however, due to the political sensitivity of these findings and cover-up, no one has been convicted for this massacre. The article discusses the implications of these revelations for the Ukraine-Russia war and the future of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets; it is the rule’. –Voltaire

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.²John Adams at the Boston massacre trial

The massacre of protesters and police during the ‘Euromaidan’ mass protests on February 20, 2014, in Ukraine was a tipping point in the conflict in Ukraine and in the Ukraine-Russia and the West-Russia conflicts. This mass killing led to the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and launched spiral of conflict escalation which included the Russian annexation of Crimea and the civil war and Russian military interventions in Donbas. Russia escalated these conflicts on February 24, 2022, with its illegal invasion and the war with Ukraine, which has become a proxy war with the West.

The Maidan massacre is important not only because it is a crucial case of political violence, but also from the perspectives of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and conflict resolution. This study analyses the evidence revealed by the Maidan massacre trials and government investigation in Ukraine. The research question is as follows: what does the evidence made public by the trial and government investigation reveal about which party of the conflict was involved in this mass killing?

The dominant narrative in Ukraine and the West attributes the Maidan massacre of the protesters to the Yanukovych government and mostly ignores the killings of the police. With some exceptions, the Western and Ukrainian media also did not report the Maidan massacre trial and investigation revelations concerning snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings.

The official investigation by the Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine (GPU) charged the Berkut police with the massacre of the Maidan protesters on February 20 on the orders of President Viktor Yanukovych and his heads of the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The GPU arrested and charged two Berkut commanders and three members of this police unit with terrorism and the murder of 48 out of 49 killed Maidan protesters and attempted murder of 80 out of 157 wounded protesters on February 20 on Yanukovych’s orders. In 2019 the Prosecutor General of Ukraine announced that the investigation of the Maidan massacre had been completed.

Yanukovych along with his heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Internal Troops, and the Security Service of Ukraine, and Berkut commanders were then charged in absentia for ordering the Maidan massacre of the protesters, but no such orders were revealed. Yanukovych, his ministers, and Berkut commanders denied that they had ordered the massacre and stated that the protesters and the police were shot by Maidan snipers. However, they did not produce specific evidence in support of their claims.

In contrast to the dominant narrative in the Western media, a German television channel ARD presented evidence showing that snipers had been based in the Hotel Ukraina, and that the government investigation was manipulated.⁷ An investigative report by the BBC presented similar evidence, along with a confession by one of Maidan snipers who had shot at the police from the Music Conservatory.⁸ Subsequently, several other protesters from far-right-linked Maidan company admitted in the Ukrainian media and social media to shooting and killing the police.

In later interviews for the American, Italian, Israeli, Macedonian and Russian media seven Georgian self-admitted members of Maidan sniper groups testified that they and other sniper groups from Georgia and the Baltic States and the far-right-linked sniper group from Ukraine received orders, weapons, and payments from specific members of the Maidan leadership and former Georgian government leaders to shoot at both protesters and police in order to prevent a peace agreement from being signed by Yanukovych and Maidan leaders. They stated that snipers shot the police and protesters from the Music Conservatory and the Hotel Ukraina.⁹

The Prosecutor General Office of Ukraine, Maidan victims’ lawyers, self- styled ‘fact-checking’ websites, and, with rare exceptions, the Ukrainian media claimed that these Georgians were fakes or actors.¹⁰ To corroborate their testimonies, most of these Georgians provided their names, passport numbers and border stamps, copies of plane tickets, photos from the Georgian military, and a video of one of them in the Trade-Union building during the Odesa massacre. They stated that they had entered Ukraine during the “Euromaidan” with forged passports, using false names and were not stopped at the border. The head of the Georgian Legion de facto confirmed that one of these Georgians, whose identity and testimony were dismissed as fake because of spelling error in his Georgian Ministry of Defense id, served as an adviser in this ministry.¹¹

Despite of its central importance to the conflicts in Ukraine and the world, only a few academic studies have analyzed the Maidan massacre. Most studies found that the Maidan massacre was a ‘false flag operation’ organized and covertly conducted by elements of the Maidan leadership and the far right in order to win the asymmetric conflict during the ‘Euromaidan’ and seize power in Ukraine. Analysis of synchronized videos, eyewitnesses, and bullet holes and wound locations showed that both the police and the protesters had been shot at from Maidan-controlled buildings. These Maidan massacre studies were cited by over 100 other studies, overwhelmingly favorably.

Based on secondary sources, Serhiy Kudelia has argued that the violence was initiated by the far-right Maidan protesters, who killed and wounded many policemen and that the Berkut police then massacred unarmed protesters in turn.¹⁴ At least two other studies also found significant involvement of the far right in violence during the Maidan but did not examine the Maidan massacre specifically.¹⁵

Some studies attributed the massacre to the Berkut anti-riot police, or snipers from the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops. However, they did not research the massacre specifically and relied uncritically on claims made by the Maidan politicians and sympathetic Ukrainian and Western media concerning perpetrators and organizers of this massacre.¹⁶ Some studies relied on a 3D model reconstruction of the killings made by a New York architectural company.¹⁷ However, this model misrepresented the wound locations specified in the forensic reports and consequently the location of the shooters.¹⁸ The SITU Research head stated that “… eventually, there is a consensus that there was a third party acting,” “it is clear from forensic evidence that people were shot in the back,” and “somebody was shooting from rooftops.”

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On the same subject

Ukraine and the Collapse of the West

by Hans Vogel

Few could have guessed that when Russia decided to put an end to the massacre of Russians in the eastern part of the Ukraine, it would hasten the collapse of the West. Actually, we are talking about a process that began in the 1980s with the embrace of neoliberalism as the main ideology in the Anglosphere and the wider US Empire.

Hiding behind neutral facades, such as the WHO and WEF, billionaires masquerading as “philanthropists” are busy lining their pockets even more, while trying to force the rest of humanity into owning nothing, eating insects and submitting to medical experiments.

One can say a lot about neoliberalism, but the main point is that it destroys all normal human interaction and thus society. Neoliberalism’s proponents and adherents always seem to fail to grasp this. In other words, under neoliberalism, literally everything is given a monetary value, a price. When everything has a price, there remains nothing of value. In the Western manufacturing industry, it has led to the practice of engineering consumer products according to the principle of planned obsolescence. As a matter of fact, the entire economy in the West has been transformed into a system that can no longer function independently, that is, without tax cuts, special benefits and privileges, subsidies and exceptions, and good old-fashioned corruption.

Needless to say, this system has been yielding fabulous profits to banks and assorted financial businesses, most notably asset management companies such as Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, Carlyle and KKR, as well as a handful of individuals with the right attitude and the right connections. These people – the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and George Soros – are the modern equivalent of the “robber barons” of the US around 1900.

One might say the West has seen the full development of what more than a century ago the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding predicted in his book Financial Capitalism (1910). Foreseeing that a small moneyed elite would become very powerful, Hilferding wrote that they would make the state entirely subservient to them. Of course, he saw this happening in the US in his own days, but Hilferding predicted the phenomenon would extend over the entire world. Indeed, this is exactly what we see today. Hiding behind neutral facades, such as the WHO and WEF, billionaires masquerading as “philanthropists” are busy lining their pockets even more, while trying to force the rest of humanity into owning nothing, eating insects and submitting to medical experiments.

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Ep. 7 Irony Alert: the war for democracy enables dictatorship. pic.twitter.com/tk7aOZ4H6n

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 28, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives and tens of billions of dollars have been wasted; nuclear war is a strong possibility — and what is the point? How many people give a Stuff where the border between Russia and Ukraine is drawn? Russia has strong historical claims to the disputed territories, and most Ukrainians living in those terrorities (except the ruling class) would be economicially much better off.

Keep cash — cash is cool.

The Labour Government is planning to slash speed limits on state highways across New Zealand in their ongoing crusade to unnecessarily slow the country down. 

Instead of investing in our roads to make sure they’re safe to drive on, Labour is taking the easy way out once more with simple, blanket speed limit reductions that won’t actually make a meaningful difference. 

That won’t make the roads safer; it will only make your trips slower. 

Bi-partisan Petition on Change.org

from the Brownstone Institute

Scandalous incompetence. Profound stupidity. Astounding errors. This is how many analysts – including Dr. Vinay Prasad, Dr. Scott Atlas, and popular Substack commentator eugyppius – explain how leading public health experts could prescribe so many terrible pandemic response policies.

And it’s true: the so-called experts certainly have made themselves look foolish over the last three years: Public health leaders like Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci make false claims, or contradict themselves repeatedly, on subjects related to the pandemic response, while leading scientists, like Peter Hotez in the US and Christian Drosten in Germany, are equally susceptible to such flip-flops and lies. Then there are the internationally renowned medical researchers, like Eric Topol, who repeatedly commit obvious errors in interpreting Covid-related research studies. [ref]

All of these figures publicly and aggressively promoted anti-public health policies, including universal masking, social distancing, mass testing and quarantining of healthy people, lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

It seems like an open-and-shut case: Dumb policies, dumb people in charge of those policies. 

This might be true in a few individual cases of public health or medical leaders who really are incapable of understanding even high school level science. However, if we look at leading pandemic public health and medical experts as a group – a group consisting of the most powerful, widely published, and well-paid researchers and scientists in the world – that simple explanation sounds much less convincing. 

Even if you believe that most medical researchers are shills for pharmaceutical companies and that scientists rarely break new ground anymore, I think you’d be hard-pressed to claim that they lack basic analytical skills or a solid educational background in the areas they’ve studied. Most doctors and scientists with advanced degrees know how to analyze simple scientific documents and understand basic data. 

Additionally, those doctors and public health professionals who were deemed experts during the pandemic were also clever enough to have climbed the academic, scientific, and/or government ladders to the highest levels.

They might be unscrupulous, sycophantic, greedy, or power-mongering. You might think they make bad moral or ethical decisions. But it defies logic to say that every single one of them understands simple scientific data less than, say, someone like me or you. In fact, I find that to be a facile, superficial judgment that does not get to the root cause of their seemingly stupid, incompetent behavior.

Returning to some specific examples, I would argue that it is irrational to conclude, as Dr. Prasad did, that someone like Dr. Topol, Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has published over 1,300 peer-reviewed articles and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine [ref] cannot read research papers “at a high level.” And it is equally unlikely that Anthony Fauci, who managed to ascend and remain atop the highest scientific perch in the federal government for many decades, controlling billions of dollars in research grants [ref], was too dumb to know that masks don’t stop viruses.

There must, therefore, be a different reason why all the top pro-lockdown scientists and public health experts – in perfect lockstep – suddenly started (and continue to this day) to misread studies and advocate policies that they had claimed in the past were unnecessary, making themselves look like fools.

Public health experts were messengers for the biodefense response

The most crucial single fact to know and remember when trying to understand the craziness of Covid times is this:

The public health experts were not responsible for pandemic response policy. The military-intelligence-biodefense leadership was in charge.

In previous articles, I examined in great detail the government documents that show how standard tenets of public health pandemic management were abruptly and secretly thrown out during Covid. The most startling switch was the replacement of the public health agencies by the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security at the helm of pandemic policy and planning.

As part of the secret switch, all communications – defined in every previous pandemic planning document as the responsibility of the CDC – were taken over by the National Security Council under the auspices of the White House Task Force. The CDC was not even allowed to hold its own press conferences!

 As a Senate report from December 2022 notes:

From March through June 2020, CDC was not permitted to conduct public briefings, despite multiple requests by the agency and CDC media requests were “rarely cleared.” HHS stated that by early April 2020, “after several attempts to get approvals,” its Office of Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs “stopped asking” the White House “for a while.” (p. 8)

When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided. 

They were performing the role that the leaders of the national security/biodefense response gave them: to be the trusted public face that made people believe quarantine-until-vaccine was a legitimate public health response. 

Why did public health leaders go along with the biodefense agenda?

We have to imagine ourselves in the position of public health and medical experts at top government positions when the intelligence-military-biodefense network took over the pandemic response. 

What would you do if you were a government employee, or a scientist dependent on government grants, and you were told that the quarantine-until-vaccine policy was actually the only way to deal with this particular engineered potential bioweapon?

How would you behave if an unprecedented event in human history happened on your watch: an engineered virus designed as a potential bioweapon was spreading around the world, and the people who designed it told you that terrifying the entire population into locking down and waiting for a vaccine was the only way to stop it from killing many millions? 

More mundanely, if your position and power depended on going along with whatever the powers-that-be in the NSC and DHS told you to do – if your job and livelihood were on the line – would you go against the narrative and risk losing it all?

And, finally, in a more venal vain: what if you stood to gain a lot more money and/or power by advocating for policies that might not be the gold standard of public health, but that you told yourself could bring about major innovations (vaccines/countermeasures) that would save humanity from future pandemics?

We know how the most prominent Covid “experts” answered those questions. Not because they were dumb, but because they had a lot to lose and/or a lot to gain by going along with the biodefense narrative – and they were told millions would die if they failed to do so.

Why understanding the motives of public health leaders during Covid is so important

Paradoxically, deeming public health experts stupid and incompetent actually reinforces the consensus narrative: that lockdowns and vaccines were part of a public health plan. In this reading, the response may have been terrible, or it may have gone awry, but it was still just a stupid public health plan designed by incompetent public health leaders.

Such a conclusion leads to calls for misguided and necessarily ineffectual solutions: Even if we replaced every single HHS employee or defunded the HHS or even the WHO altogether, we would not solve the problem and would be poised to repeat the entire pandemic fiasco all over again.

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