“Check out my DeSmog page here,” is what Tom Nelson writes in the ‘About’ section of his Substack publication, to link his profile on a publication called DeSmog. Calling itself “the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns”, DeSmog is a well-known platform to try and debunk – or smear – the so-called climate sceptics. The publication was founded in January 2006 by Canadian PR-expert James Hoggan. Hoggan has said that his interest in climate issues began in 2003 when he was invited to join the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organisation that unconditionally backs the theory of a man-made climate crisis. Interaction with pro-climate crisis scientists and political activists such as Al Gore led Hoggan to take the climate issues presented to him very seriously, and this led to the founding of DeSmog – “to raise awareness and help people become savvy about the global problem of climate change disinformation”.
Climate crisis PR and the ‘disinformation database’
Indirectly, the origin story itself shows that the purpose of the publication is not to provide unbiased scientific information on the arguments of all parties to the climate debate, but to present only one side of the science to the public so as to support the founders’ chosen and unchallengeable basic claim that humans are changing the climate and a catastrophe lies ahead. In essence, the website can also be seen as a PR-publication for one side, which ironically was acknowledged by Richard Littlemore, one of DeSmog‘s key authors back in the day, as early as 2009. In November 2009, emails from scientists on the computer server of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit were made public by a whistleblower or perhaps hackers. The whole affair became known as Climategate. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. In the midst of this scandal, DeSmog author Littlemore informed Michael Mann, author of the flawed ‘hockey stick’ graph of rising temperatures in the 20th century and a prominent climate scientist who played a major role in Climategate and mainstream climate science in general, that DeSmog‘s role in reporting on the issue was “all about PR here, not much about science”.
While such bias should make one sceptical of the publication, DeSmog is used by both the mainstream press and fact-checkers of all kinds as a source of essentially unchallengeable truth today. And despite the errors – which can happen with any of us – there is in fact a great deal of truth to be found there. For example, it factually describes that John F. Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, has said he does not believe there is a climate crisis. Similarly, it reviews the lives and work of many other scientists of the same calibre, and shows where and in what words they have denied a man-made climate crisis. But if everything is as said, what is the problem? The point is that the heading under which information about these renowned scientists and other ‘sceptics’ is listed to the public is called ‘Climate Disinformation Database’.
Nelson’s profile, which he refers to on his Substack, is also on the same database. Why is he giving a link to it? “It’s quoting what I have actually said. Somebody spent a lot of time on it, and I wouldn’t have spent that much time myself to write up this kind of ‘about me’ page. So it’s a pretty good ‘about me’ page and if people want to take a look at it, they can get a reference to my work over the last few years,” Nelson explains. DeSmog‘s Editor, for example, has read through all of his posts on social media platform X and highlighted the most important ones. It also outlines which prominent scientists he has interviewed on his climate podcast. And there’s also a section explaining that Nelson is the producer of Climate: The Movie, a recent documentary by British documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin, which critically examines the climate catastrophe claims. Nelson says he is not at all bothered by the coverage of his work alongside world-renowned scientists at such a ‘disinformation database’. “Whenever somebody in the climate cult talks about ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’, I replace that with ‘information’ and that’s what it is – it’s information,” he says.
How a woodpecker led to climate realism
Nelson is an electronic engineer with a Master’s degree and has worked in tech and software for many years. He became interested in climate issues in the second half of the 2000s, and this is linked to his hobby of birdwatching. In 2004, claims were made of the rediscovery in the United States of a species of bird that was declared extinct in the 1980s, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Nelson recalls it was reported on the radio and some people were moved to tears that a species thought to no longer exist had been rediscovered. It was also the subject of an in-depth, peer-reviewed paper by 17 authors published in a scientific journal. But when Nelson delved deeper, he discovered something he was not expecting to find – no evidence of the supposed rediscovery. According to him the whole story was based on a particularly blurry video and an even blurrier photo as evidence of the species’ rediscovery. “It was completely crazy. It was just groupthink. They didn’t see it and they never did get a picture of it. It was all a complete crock,” Nelson says.
Around the same time, a friend told him to take a similar look at the debate about climate and global warming. Until then, he hadn’t paid much attention to the issue and believed that if that’s what the scientists were saying, then humans were probably causing global warming with their CO2 emissions, and possibly a catastrophe would eventually follow. “When I looked at the evidence for myself I was surprised to find that there was nothing, no evidence that there’s a climate crisis,” he says. According to Nelson, anyone can search and look for themselves and see for themselves whether the heat is really too warm now, or were the heatwaves of the 1930s worse? Are polar bears really going extinct? Have yields dropped dramatically? Are droughts in the U.S. state of California worse than 200 years ago? Is the stormy weather becoming more frequent and storms more powerful? Are there really more wildfires?
“You don’t have to be a climatologist. You don’t have to have a degree. Just an ordinary person who can read data and use Google and look at graphs – you can check all these alarming things yourself,” he says. “It’s a complete crock. All of it. Every single bit of anything alarming you’ve heard about the climate and CO2 causing bad weather, it’s all a complete baloney. Not true and no evidence supports it,” Nelson says.
Since about 2006, he has been researching, publishing and arguing about climate issues on a daily basis. According to Nelson, the whole climate emergency is a scam for power and money. There is a lot of money in the energy transition movement, while all sorts of ‘climate restrictions’, be they carbon credits or nudges to change our diets from beef to insects, or possible travelling instructions, are part of this power play, he argues.
Podcast interview led to producing the film
Nelson started his climate podcast series in 2022, where he critically discusses climate science with renowned scientists and other researchers interested in the topic. One of his first guests was documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin. Nelson was already a fan of Durkin’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was released back in 2007. This film as well critically examined the climate catastrophe predictions.
Speaking about the film, Durkin said at one point that he could actually make a much more meaningful film now. This led to the plan to make a new film and Nelson joined the project as the producer. The new film was released in March this year. Nelson says all the credit for making the film goes to Durkin. “He did all the interviews. He wrote the script, he did the narration and I give him 100% of the credit, to him and his team, for producing such a great movie,” he says, adding that the film didn’t cost much to make financially. “Martin is very good at spending small amounts of money well, and it did not cost that much to make this movie. Largely travel and a lot of people volunteered their time,” Nelson says.
The declaration of a man-made climate crisis is criticised in the film by a number of respected scientists: the aforementioned Nobel Laureate in Physics Dr. Clauser, Professor Steven Koonin, who is the author of Unsettled and a former Provost and Vice-President of Caltech, Professor Richard Lindzen, who is a former Professor of Meteorology at Harvard and MIT, Princeton Physics Professor William Happer, Professor Nir Shaviv from Racah Institute of Physics in Israel, Professor Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph and several others.
Nelson points out that many people may even be surprised to learn that these scientists, who are also called ‘climate deniers’, do not actually say that the climate is not changing, but on the contrary, they say that the climate is changing all the time. It is simply a question of the cause of climate change, or in other words, of why the change is happening. The climate is a complex system, and we obviously do not even know all the drivers. But the world-renowned physicists Clauser, Koonin, Lindzen and other scientists who speak in the film are given the title of ‘climate deniers’ simply because they oppose, for example, the claim that climate change is caused solely or mainly by anthropogenic CO2.
Since people are constantly presented with CO2 as the main cause, it becomes ingrained in their consciousness, even though they may not have any idea how much of CO2 there actually is in the atmosphere. “People don’t know that it’s about 0.04%. They’re guessing numbers like 5% or more. People are worried that the atmosphere is going to fill with CO2. They think CO2 maybe looks like black gas, black soot or something,” Nelson notes, adding that this ignorance is kind of baffling.
There is no business model behind the film
Nelson points out that they didn’t make the climate film to make money. “We just want a lot of people to see it, because it’s just so important to fight back against this scam. It is kind of the fight of our lifetimes. Because if we let the bad guys win, they’re going to reduce our freedom. And it’s going to be a much worse world if we let them impose all this crazy stuff on us to try to prevent bad weather,” Nelson says. “And as I keep saying, we could spend $50 trillion. We could never have an internal combustion car again. Never eat any meat and go live in caves. And still, there would be no measurable weather or climate benefit ever,” Nelson says.
There has been a major media push to block the film. Facebook, for example, has declared it ‘misinformation’ on the basis of the opinions of fact-checking portals it funds, and these fact-checks also form the basis of what the mainstream press thinks. However, Nelson says that this has not significantly disrupted the distribution of the film, as it has been widely shared, including on platforms that do not engage in censorship – such as X or Rumble. “It’s going to be very hard for anyone to take it down just because it’s up everywhere now,” Nelson says, adding that it’s a little surprising that the film is still available on YouTube.
When will the climate crisis be over?
There are a number of factors, apart from the press and the attitude of the social media companies, that are hindering the spread of critical assessments of the climate crisis. For example, many young scientists, who are also critical of the issue, are reluctant to express their criticism publicly. “They don’t dare to speak out because they’re not going to get published then. They might lose their job. Their family might get some blowback,” Nelson says. If a researcher can no longer publish his or her work in the scientific press, it essentially puts a damper on his or her entire career. “It’s so much easier to just sit back and pretend it’s true,” Nelson says.
However, he believes that this is all changing as more and more people start to look critically at the whole issue. One of the reasons for this ‘awakening’, according to Nelson, is the Covid crisis – a fact that has been acknowledged to him by a number of people recently. “They say they found out that we were not being told the truth about Covid and that the Government and the press were lying to us. And then they started asking themselves, what else are they lying to us about?” he says.
The mainstream press, of course, is still in the business of avoiding these questions and all too often labelling them as misinformation, but Nelson notes that by now one might well be asking, what is the mainstream really? For example, Joe Rogan’s well-known podcast has 14.5 million followers, which makes publications like CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post look like dwarfs in comparison. For instance, CNN’s prime time ratings have dropped constantly and are now below 500,000. Rogan and other podcast producers with large audiences, however, are already ridiculing climate alarmism. What this means, according to Nelson, is that more and more people are becoming climate realists. Nelson ultimately believes that the whole climate catastrophe movement will crumble faster than we would think. “I think people are just going to stop talking about it. I think that’s how this is going to end. There’s not going to be a big revelation where people say, hey, we were wrong completely. Sorry about that. They’re just going to stop talking about it. That’s my prediction,” Nelson says.
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On-topic (current news): the US-EU-British-Canadian agreement to cut off certain Russian institutions from certain western-based banking facilities when they get enough “round tuits” may mean they know Russia is about to crash the sh*t out of the western financial system at a time that is likely to be soon and also of the Russian government’s choosing. The reason they look weak – by threatening to, er, do something when, er, when they get round to it – is because they ARE weak. If they were strong, they would already have done it.
“When you have to shoot, shoot – don’t talk.”
Sky News:
Ooh-er!
…planning to…
…as soon as next week…
…create a register…
…would (not “will”) unmask…
…potentially…
The “government” will surely need both “queen’s consent” and “prince’s consent” before it even tables this bill.
(Requesting such consent is the process by which the government checks with the said two members of the royal family if it wants to introduce a bill that might affect their financial interests. Note to journalists: don’t call members of the royal family “oligarchs”, okay? They’re selfless people-servers, and don’t forget the current monarch changed vehicle tyres in the army during WW2. And don’t say anything at the current time about Prince Michael of Kent whatsoever. In particular, don’t mention that he is Patron of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce.)
Should have been done years ago.
The Chief Constable of the Devon & Cornwall Police Service has STRIPPED ‘Prince’ Andrew (henceforth known as Hapsburg-Gotha) of a plaque in his honour from the foyer of Torquays main Police Service Station following a complaint from a member of the public about his alleged behaviour in America from another member of the public.
Daily Telegraph:
“How Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian-turned-leader, stepped up to the role he was born to play“.
Yeah, right. If only Philip Green had owned the rights to “Yes, Minister”, he could have put Paul Eddington in as prime minister for the Yes Minister Party.
Re Ukraine, (yes I know
) The problem for The West is that they are so far up their own ars*s they believe restrictions on banking/trade facilities available to punish Russia will bring them to their knees.
No they won’t.
‘Ukraine’ is not even a real place, just a word to define a geographical area similar to ‘Salisbury Plain’. An area that used to be within Russia’s sphere for the collection of taxes and soldiers which is now reverting to that status. (being reverted?).
The West’s ‘weak and feeble respons’* being the threat of restrictions when it should be (as you infer Star) “Shoot To Kill”.
(Not actually weak & feeble, just cowardly and feeble)
The West imagines Money (notional) and Finance (Digital) to be the end game of everything but, especially when in a War Crisis, what really matters are food and energy both of which (wheat and gas/oil) Russia is already self-sufficient.
The whole point of Putins’ Expansionism (apart from diverting attention from his declining domestic popularity as is usual) is to enhance and guarantee that self-sufficiency which is why he started off in Crimea (access to Black Sea oil) and is now taking back Ukrains’ wheat production.
None if this will necessarily mean success for Putin. Long-term war victory revolves around industrial production. Russias’ entire economy is no bigger than either South Korea or Italg; it is only half of the former USSR and depends far too much around primary productivity (food/energy) which turns out to be a two-edged sword for Russia.
rubbish.
Putin has stated categorically that he is in Ukraine for two reasons, and two alone. Either you don’t know, or lie by omission.
He wants to de-militarise and de-nazify Ukraine. When he’s done. He will retreat back to Russia.
Not my downtick btw.
My point is not “rubbish” but is open for debate.
From a Russian point of view a hostile (‘Nazified’ as you infer) Ukraine is a dagger to their heart when it should be an integrated friend.
Russias current borders are similar to when Lenin surrendered his country to the failing Keiserreich, only to be rescued when the Western Allies brought about that regimes downfall.
What does it matter what Putin says his War Aims are ? What he wants is power, as is usual; with a takeover of Ukraine he retains that power yet we in The West do nothing substantial against it.
(see map) Ukraine = most of the big white bit between the Black Sea and the Baltic or NATO/Russia but the top white third being Belarus which is an integrated friend of Mosscow/Russia while Putin already has control over the bottom third which should alsobe pinky-red.
Either you don’t know or lie by ommission.
Here we go, bit clumsy but it makes my point about a Putin takeover of The Ukraine.
Why would he retreat ?
Perhaps for the same reason that he retreated from Georgia a couple of years ago after engaging in a similar country-wide manoeuvre to prevent/halt ethnic cleansing against the South Ossetians there?
Don’t let us stop you going off to join the Ukrainian freedom fighters, but best pick up some Nazi regalia before you go, as that will get you in their good books. They will likely need all the help they can get and you could just make the difference.
Dailysceptic Management quote.
“Abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban”.
I have no idea why you brought Nazis’m into this debate but I regard it as “abuse”.
This is not a debate about Nazi/not Nazi; simply one persons’ power over another country, commonplace throughout history.
I think the reference was in connection with the publicly documented fact that a neo-nazi group/force ( banned from facebook for their views and actions ….. until a week ago … ) makes up a not insignificant part of Ukrainian military strength, at least on the ground and particularly in the Donbass region which is largely populated by ethnic Russian peoples who the neo-nazis have publicly expressed a desire to eliminate or remove from Ukraine.
PS. The neo-nazi group is called Azov. There’s at least one battalion of them, and Putin has expressly said that he wants to “de-nazify” the Ukraine before leaving. He initiated this special military operation in response to requests for military aid from the two newly formed republics of mostly ethnic Russian ( suffering from increasingly concentrated attacks, killings, etc ) under the official heading/justification, which has been used by the US in at least a few of its own military interventions … known as “the duty of responsibility”
Thank you for that, while take your point.
1. Being banned from Facebook means sod-all.
2. Expressing support for a group (not that that I did) that is also supported by extremeists does not make you an extremist.
3. The Soviet Union imposed ethnic Russians on all of its minorities as a matter of policy with the aim of suppressing separatism. Small wonder some wish to reverse the result.
BA is under cyberattack – it grounded all of its short-haul flights from Heathrow yesterday.
It attacked itself by outsourcing its IT work to cheapo labour in India.
Source?
Loads of UK outfits outsourced their IT/computerised Customer Service functions to cheap 3rd world companies (being employed by such firms counts as Middle Class and desirable in those countries).
It sometimes backfires and they have to bring that function back home.
One tiny example is the taxi firm I use. When Covid arrived it was decided that the in-house computerised call-centre facility they used was too small for the number of staff taking those calls and so the number of locals employed was reduced (much to the employers delight) and an Indian Telemarketing Angency was taken on to handle ‘excess’ calls.
Apart from the language barriers (mutual incomprehension) the total lack of “local knowledge” on the part of Telephone Agents based in India led directly to numerous false bookings which is not good for a customer hoping to catch a plane or attend an interview (or just ‘going down the pub’ come to that).
Solution》 rent a bigger local facility and for-hire those employees who had been ‘let-go’; not that all did return.
On the rare occasions that I still get put through to the Indian facility I politely hang up to recall in the hope of talking to someone who knows their way around our city and locale to some degree, though not as well as actual Taxi Drivers of course.
Roundup 1.
“The ghosts of Lockdown past . . . .everywhere. . . haunting . . . signers, stickers, instructions . . . ” won’t go away soon.
Daily Telegraph.
To be paid no more attention than for the fading 15 year old sticky labels on the entrance to every interior public space (including bus stop shelters with a rear and two nominal sides).
Is it still a legal obligation to display those instructions after all these years of auto-compliance by the public? Might as well display The Ten Commandments.
So I bit the bullet and coughed up £29.00 for 12 months internet access to D. Telegraph articles (not least via links from here at D Sceptic). Last time I bought a proper published edition was 2 years ago, £2.20 I think. It was full of Covid shite so I haven’t bothered since.
What about the blue ghosts aka discarded face masks?
Good subject for a confrontation but best started as a new thread
Next year they will do you for the full rate (£120/year or so) unless you threaten to leave. But enjoy that £29 one while you have it. Pity there is very little news in the Telegraph these days, last year all covid, now shifted to total Ukraine.
I have found that once you have had a subscription you can still access it all provided that you are signed in.
Just copy and paste any URL to archive.vn and forget that paywall…
Yes, they are already demanding more £.00 to access some of their app articles (by mainstream journos) which came as a surprise.
Big business and government get bitchy, police are confronted non-confrontationally, and how to vote Australian.
https://gregoryno6.wordpress.com/2022/02/27/covid-catfight-and-other-news/
The most common lockdown ghosts around here are the blue ghosts.
Something else the seals will choke on eventually.
In October 2020 I posted a similar, home-made close-up, photo of three such abandoned facemasks. As yours, set in brilliant sunshine on an embankment of yellow-brown oak leaves.
My post, entitled simply “Fall” (it was the start of Aurumn) with no accompanying text, proved quite popular as it was a novelty for the time.
Sadly I deleted the pic from my files.
Given the tens of millions such masks either sold or dished out F.O.C. (government offices) I have seen remarkable few such lazily discarded masks and those mostly as part of larger piles of rubbish.
Most that I’m seeing would appear to be lazily discarded, or perhaps not stuffed far enough into a pocket.
Image found online by the way, but a blue ghost is a blue ghost.
Only free of charge to some users. I am contributing to them all despite not using them (except in my workshop for dust).
I didn’t say “Without cost”, I clearly intended “F.O.C. to the end user”.
All the faceless, people, where do they all come from?…
Pantsdown’s modelling. Garbage programming using garbage non-data by an egomaniac with an abominable track record who knows that the more dire the garbage figures, the more prestige he gets.
Perfect reason to wreck the world.
They shoot traitors, don’t they?
Obviously not any more – Drakeford lives!
CDC: ‘”We want to give people a break from things like mask wearing when these metrics are better, and then have the ability to reach for them should things worsen. If and when we update our guidance, we will communicate that clearly and it will be based on the data and the science,” Walensky claimed.
You have been warned. Don’t sell your shares in the blue-plastic-trainer-facepants manufacturing companies.
As for the last sentence above- we know how to value that.
Ah the data and the science, not data and science, or real world evidence as it used to be called.
I have come to the conclusion that the refers to modelled science and model data, including the undefined political parameters.
I’m reeling again from red pill/eye-opening discoveries/revelations. I was shocked in March 2020 by the extent of govt lies, MSM propaganda, the censorship and smearing of esteemed/reputable scientists etc, big pharma influence/power, and WEF reset plans, vax mandates and vax passports, etc, etc etc … and I thought that was it …..
But now really getting that other perspective on the world, on its main powers, in which the US and its allies/satellites/gang members including the UK, are not only a massive blight on the world, violent enforcers of economic hegemony, a group of bullies, etc, but are also seen that way by many/most other countries in the world, because they *are* the worst gang in the schoolyard.
https://thesaker.is/playing-the-mighty-wurlitzer-vs-reality/
“And in the event that you are worried about China, they just posted this from their Russian embassy. They truly understand that this time it is Russia, but for the throw of a set of dice, it could have been China.
“Never forget who is the real threat to the world” …. “USA Bombing List: The Democracy World Tour”
Thank you, Daily Sceptic, and fellow commenters and their informative posts, links, etc, for supporting and encouraging my scepticism this last two years, the opening of my eyes, in the company of many like minds. It has been and continues to be a revelation.
Russia invades a neighbouring state and the West are the villains.
I’m outa here. Goodbye. it was nice knowing some of you, in the beginning.
The west are the villains because they/NATO and the US and their allies took down the democratically elected leader of the Ukraine in 2014 ( the Maidann events ) because he wouldn’t sign accords with the EU and NATO, and replaced him with a puppet president who basically does as he’s told, and one of the things he’s been doing is to break the Minsk agreements which the Ukraine had signed, which gave the Donbass region cultural autonomy and protection.
The Ukraine puppet govt has been erasing the ethnic Russian culture, languages and people ( 13,000+ deaths ) of the Donbass region for the last 8 years.
In addition NATO in getting Ukraine to join it is breaking the agreements that it signed with Russia not to extend its reach further east.
And the “west” has been pouring arms into the Ukraine for the last 6 months.
Putin has repeatedly attempted to solve the situation by diplomacy, talks, non-violent methods, but the puppet govt in the Ukraine, with the powers of NATO, the USA, etc encouraging it, has continued to accept US/NATO provided arms and to oppress and kill the ethnic minority of the Donbass.
PS. Annie, remember how the president of Belarus refused a huge loan and benefits from the IMF (?) because he’d have had to agree to their demands for covid regs and vaxx programmes. This is related/similar.
And yes, please don’t go. Would miss you and your posts very much.
Seconded.
I love in particular how western media is proclaiming the godliness of an actor turned puppet-president, who is indiscriminately issuing heavy weapons to the general population and instructing them to throw Molotov cocktails at an overwhelming well-trained army. Additionally they nestle artillery I’m the middle of dense tower blocks. Since when was using the civilian population as cannon-fodder a virtuous act?
I agree. Am not a lover of Putin but I have watched his most recent speech and it is more coherent than anything Biden or Johnson manage to say.
He is behaving very rationally as a Russian patriot.
The west has been stupid. This has been through trying to weaken Russia by advancing NATO, but ultimately it lacks the will to apply real force against a well equipped adversary who is able to push back. So, instead ministers post hash tags and make all sorts of useless threats.
That is not a coherent strategy and is ultimately the most dangerous approach: you fail to restrain Putin and end up looking weak. Who would choose to be an ally in such circumstances? You are egged on but then you get no support that matters when you need it.
Overall, our current political and governing class are fundamentally incompetent. The one thing they seem good at is creating internal propaganda and signaling virtue. Corporate media (as with Covid) have also just swallowed the official line, with the exception of GB News and some critical pieces in The Spectator.
Vladimir Putin in calling out NATO and the USA and receiving only name-calling in return just might feel emboldened and decide he’ll pick up a few more bits of real estate. Let’s see, the old favourite Poland perhaps?
Who or what’s going to stop him? Thick and stupid willy waving Bozo?
Biden will keep shouting way back in Washington but he’ll do duck all.
We could be in for a right ducking.
Don’t poke the bear.
Yeah , don’t poke the bear so that it can eat you unmolested….good luck with that.
Another Salmondesque useful idiot joins the club.
And that’s my understanding.
I also believe that Putin believes in Russia: its people, its history, its way of life. The US, the Five Eyes are hell bent on destroying everything good and decent about our countries and our peoples.
Great Britain, shortly to become a vassal state in some monstrous Orwellian behemoth that would make hell a viable alternative.
How many Labour camps are there in the Lake District?
Putin no more believes in Russia than Stalin or Lenin – the “people” are expendable .a commodity just like an AK 47 – something to be used against the “enemy”.
Many many British servicemen and Merchant Servicemen sacrificed their lives to ensure vital supplies to the Russian military thus enabling them to fight Hitler when their internal economy was……worse than second rate. Putin cares not one devalued rouble for that – his rigged elections should inform you exactly what he thinks of “its people”.
Staggered at the less than juvenile level of understanding of the threat Putin poses; you must all have gone to certain Universities in the Sixties and then joined the Public sector — if not , I have no explanation for your collective ignorance.
I’ll miss your posts
Oh no ! Please don’t go Annie.
Annie is not alone in being pretty disillusioned with some of the Ukraine postings here and on Reddit. I said my goodbyes on Reddit yesterday, may be following her on here as well.
Why not just ignore the posts, or engage with them and make your argument? Maybe there are sceptic forums where no-one posts off-topic and/or you agree with all of the posts, though I doubt it. Isn’t open debate healthy?
Yes whatever the wrongs of the Ukraine government these do not justify the wholesale invasion of the Ukraine
and you know this how? Ukrainian, Russian are you?
You know about the 10+ US-funded bioweapon labs dotted around the Ukrainian border….you know about the neo-Nazi goon squads that run the regions and terrorise their neighbours?
Their hand has been forced. Ukraine is a western client/puppet state which has been attacking ethnic Russians in the east for 8 years with western weaponry; if it joins NATO, that would mean (more) WMDs on Russia’s border. It’s existential for Russia. Not about gaining territory, so not a wholesale invasion, but about disarming and weakening Ukraine.
Exactly. Putin has had enough and said “no more.”
In the language of the schoolyard it’s:
Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
Come back on that when some of those responsible for the far more murderous illegal wars of aggression by the US and/or UK in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya have been meaningfully punished.
Justification is inherently subjective. The issue here is really explanation, which leads to the correct attribution of responsibility.
Otherwise you are merely playing some kind of moral gotcha, whereby the dominant world power (hint: it’s not Russia) can just keep pushing and pushing an enemy towards the abyss until that enemy responds in what they believe is the only effective way possible, and then screams: “there, see what an aggressor they are?”
educate yourself and then return
I am firmly with you – some folks here who are unreconstructed US haters are being extremely naive about Putin….very scary.
PS. RT is under constant DdOS attack such that can’t access it anymore, which is really annoying/frustrating and also a measure of just how massive the censorship and suppression of Russian news and information has become in the last 24 hours.
Amtrup – keep an eye on The Saker site I shared with you on Friday – he has daily updates
https://thesaker.is/
Thank you. Am doing so.
Without wishing to sound too Pollyanna-ish, there’s been a silver lining in all this. Many daily sceptics have been created.
I’m sure that people gravitated to Lockdown Sceptic in 2020 because they thought the lockdowns were crap, while holding all sorts of views (some relatively uncritical) on other subjects.
In March 2020 I found the climate change rhetoric annoying because I can tell propaganda when I can encounter it, but it was not much more than that to me. Now I read avidly and widely on the subject. In other words, I am more sceptical.
And, like so many, I was an innocent when it came to vaccines in general. I just didn’t know. Now RFK Jnr’s book is daily reading – it’s detailed and immensely thorough.
https://www.industryweek.com/technology-and-iiot/article/22026518/lithium-batteries-dirty-secret-manufacturing-them-leaves-massive-carbon-footprint
Thank you!
I agree. I was a full on Sceptic before I found DS, and thank God I did, but now my starting point for any official announcement is:
‘aye, aye, what’s this all about?’
My trust is SHOT.
Shame the Telegraph didn’t spot the fake pandemic at the beginning and stand against it
Good to see mainstream US politicians daring to speak up against vaccination, even if it is just against vaccinating kids. It’s a start. We have to demolish the extremist pro-vaxx thinking that is so dominant – vaxxes are just tools, evaluate each one on its merits.
Excellent broadcast here showing how power is being transferred from West to East, the deep relationship between Russia and China (both in the grip of Kissinger and the gang) and Israel, and the significance of the Belt and Road and Buntings Clover Leaf map.
111. Russia & China Embrace, The Pan Eurasian Super State Takes Shape
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHFIAmO16qk
Every Sunday paper has shrieking headlines about Ukraine. Words such as “freedom”, “innocent victims” and “lionhearted” are being used.
Well. I have three words to say. Canada. Australia. New Zealand.
Where the f….fishtank has the media been for the past two years? When Trudeau went full totalitarian against some Canadians, closing bank accounts, sending in mounted police, confiscating livelihoods; all because a group of truckers dared say no to him? When Aboriginal people in Australia were taken from their land, with allegations that some were forcibly injected with the magic vax? When New Zealand closed itself off completely, even to New Zealanders who couldn’t get back into their own country? When some bod in Australia ( cant recall which one) said he wanted unvaccinated people to have lonely and miserable lives?
Don’t forget the demonisation of people across the world generally; those who chose not to take a so called vaccine, how several countries have shut them out of life, fined them, coerced and bullied them, thrown them out of jobs and threatened them in all manner of ways.
Where were you lot of journalists then?
I have no brief for Putin. I feel desperately sorry for ordinary Ukrainians whose lives are being shattered. But when people all around the world are slowly waking up to what has gone on these past 2 years, how they have been manipulated, and how their freedoms have been taken away from them, this eastern European trouble could not have come at a better time. A huge distraction, which is working splendidly. No end of people are putting the Ukrainian flag on their social media; that’ll show Vladimir Putin what’s what, eh?
And I bet the vast majority of people cannot point out Ukraine on a map or tell you anything about it and its history.
Truly the wolves have an easy prey.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Great Post.
Bravo! I am Ukrainian., my parents told of the ways of the communist s. I am under no illusion much as it pains me to say that Ukrainians have been daft enough to believe all the b’s fed to them by Western backed media.
It is very complex to understand that Russia has been a historical enemy to Ukrainians yearning for their own autonomy for centuries.
Much is said about ww2 and the associated sacrifices made by all sides. Understand this please, then see how this situation deserves a much closer look. The Soviet propaganda dumped onto the rsfr states to eradicate non russian culture was huge and inhuman. This caused much hatred towards Russians. Russians on the other hand were fed propaganda that they were superior to other ethnic groups.
I am here to say this has been a long time coming and the west has certainly not helped. It should have stood by these nations when they wanted independence and not had an eye on oligarchs money enticing them otherwise.
The word nazi has connotations and deep historical significance, however it should be noted that it needs clarification here. What the west says is a nazi and what Putin says is a Nazi could be completely different.
We know nothing really of what’s going on save for msm ramping up a chosen narrative.
I pray that people use their god given common sense in Ukraine and Russia. There are things going on we are neither party to or remotely aware of.We need a peaceful outcome here. World Peace please.
The biggest forecasting failure was SAGE’s prediction of an initial peak in June (as stated in evidence from Cummings to parliament). The reality is that even a schoolboy plotting the growth in cases in the UK would have known it had to peak in April, because at the rate of growth (seen in the UK and every other country) by the end of April the entire population of the UK would be infected.
How on earth did SAGE predict June? It seems that they never bothered to look at what was actually happening, and instead just plugged the assumed R value (about 2.3) into their model and then (as usual) asserted it was right and predicting a peak in June.
The result was that sometime end of March beginning of April, the sht, hit the fan. That is what caused the panic, that is what led to the headless-chicken panicking and over-reaction, from which we are only just recovering.
If SAGE had correctly predicted April …yes there would have been panic … but back in February with two months to prepare. Instead, they finally admitted they were wrong, within days of the peak of infections.