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A declassified state department report says microwaves didn't cause "Havana Syndrome"

Dan Vergano
BuzzFeed
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 17:24 UTC
cockroach antenna
© BuzzFeed News; Getty Images
A declassified State Department report obtained by BuzzFeed News dismissed the theory that microwave weapons are behind the mysterious neurological injuries in diplomats worldwide.

Noises linked to mysterious injuries among US diplomats in Cuba were most likely caused by crickets — not microwave weapons — according to a declassified scientific review commissioned by the US State Department and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The State Department report was written by the JASON advisory group, an elite scientific board that has reviewed US national security concerns since the Cold War. It was completed in November of 2018, two years after dozens of US diplomats in Cuba and their families reported hearing buzzing noises and then experiencing puzzling neurological injuries, including pain, vertigo, and difficulty concentrating.

Comment: Perhaps crickets are the new 'swamp gas,' a metonym for government patronizing obfuscation. One has to separate out the sound recordings from the phenomenon itself, since not all cases involved sound. The fact is, something is making these people sick, and crickets doesn't even begin to explain things.

See also:

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Blue Planet

No, China's Belt & Road Initiative is not falling apart, this is just US propaganda, right on cue as Congress promised

Tom Fowdy
RT
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 09:08 UTC
US CHina talks
© Reuters/Frederic J. Brown
US-China talks • Anchorage, Alaska
A new 'study' has concluded that Beijing's huge worldwide investment programme is "losing momentum" as debts mount. But a closer inspection of the facts tells a different story.

Western mainstream media yesterday began posting in tandem a purported 'study' from which Reuters spun its own headline:
"China's Belt and Road plans losing momentum as opposition, debt mount - study"
The study, as noted in the report, was sponsored by the US government through the surrogate of its own international relief agency, USAID, and proceeded to present the usual cliches that China was maliciously saddling nations in "hidden debt," encouraging corruption and promulgating environmental damage in participating countries, and claimed that opposition to the investment programme was mounting.

The publication of this report coincidentally came in the same week as US officials commenced a tour of Latin America in order to counter China's mega investment there under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This follows a G7 pledge in July to launch a global infrastructure development, dubbed Build Back Better World (B3W), as a counterweight to Beijing's BRI.

Funny how all that is needed if BRI is failing as badly as the 'study' claims.

Comment: See also:

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Attention

Just as well a deal was struck on the budget... another shutdown might have made Americans realize they don't need their government

Helen Buyniski
RT
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 16:14 UTC
Demonstrators
© Getty Images/Sandy Huffaker
Demonstrators in a "Freedom Rally" against Stay-At-Home Directives in San Diego, California.
The US government has narrowly dodged a default on some of the prodigious debts it racked up 'saving' its citizens from Covid-19 - in the process preventing a shutdown that would expose just how woefully ineffective it really is.

Defaulting, after all, would present a serious danger to the current order, and not for reasons remotely related to ethics and morality, crime and punishment, winning wars, or whatever it is the government is supposed to promote and provide. The last time the government shut down in 2019, the world stubbornly refused to end - pizzas were still delivered, cars still started up, and Facebook still served up carefully curated selections of your friends' lives, minus all the difficult bits. Indeed, the average person was hardly affected at all - leaving some to wonder what exactly was the point of propping up the profoundly pricey establishment in Washington.
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Arrow Down

From Syria to Afghanistan, Pentagon really is 'chronically bad' at winning wars - and Matt Gaetz got them to admit it

Nebojsa Malic
RT
Wed, 29 Sep 2021 23:18 UTC
Kabul sign
© WANA/Reuters
Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan
It really took a Florida man to get the current Pentagon boss to admit inability to deal with the essential job of the military, and remind Americans that he was behind the failed scheme to arm the "moderate rebels" in Syria.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and Central Command head General Kenneth McKenzie proved much more adept at dodging questions from senators and congressmen over the past two days, than at fighting and winning wars abroad.

That is, until they ran into Trumpian firebrand Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). The ensuing five-minute skirmish in the halls of the House of Representatives on Wednesday was so explosive, even C-SPAN featured it on social networks.

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Dominoes

Putin and Erdogan take each other's measure

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00 UTC
Putin Erdogan
© AFP/Turkish Presidential Service/Mustafa Kamachi
Presidents Putin and Erdogan at SCO Summit Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
Everyone at the table noticed, and everyone across Eurasia also noticed it.

At the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe - where Iran was accepted as a full member and the prime topic of discussion was Afghanistan - Turkey was all but absent. As if it were no more than a minor, peripheral Eurasia player.

Turkey, though, happens to be an observer at the SCO - at the same level as Afghanistan.

That was not exactly a triumphal pre-entry for what, on Wednesday in Sochi, was the first face-to-face meeting between Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin since they met in March 2020 at the Kremlin.

They talked for a little under three hours. No press statements. No substantial leaks, except for a casual Covid chat relayed by the Kremlin pool.
Erdogan: "What's your antibody level?"
Putin: "15-16."
Erdogan: "It's too low."
Putin: "Our calculations are different. You should get Sputnik V to strengthen your immunity."
Erdogan: "I have received my third shot."
Well, at least they seem to be well protected. Another - apocryphal - exchange might have gone along these lines:
Erdogan: "I need more S-400s."
Putin: "Now, about those moderate rebels you are weaponizing in Idlib ... "
After all, these were the two issues at the center of discussion:
  • Erdogan's notorious zigzagging between NATO and a full commitment to what Russia defines as the Great Eurasian Partnership, and
  • What exactly he might be up to in Syria.
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Question

Will Germany succeed in detaching itself from the death grip of the Anglo-American Empire?

Cynthia Chung
Through a Glass Darkly
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:13 UTC
germany nato flag
© Pavlo Lys/Shutterstock
Author's note: Since the publishing of this article the German elections have taken place, the FDP and the Greens are considered kingmakers, and a three-party coalition has been discussed as a likely outcome. Within days, the first controversy has already erupted, with RT's German-language channels being deleted with Google's video platform saying the Russian state-backed broadcaster had breached its COVID-19 information policy. This has caused an escalation with talk that Russia will respond by banning Youtube, with Margarita Simonyan, RT's editor-in-chief, calling the ban a "real media war declared by the state of Germany to the state of Russia" in a tweet. This risks breaking out into an Iron Curtain 2.0, and those who may find themselves loudly decrying on either side, should be mindful of who benefitted from such a divide the first time around. Don't be a dunce and be fooled twice by the same old dog trick. For more details on the history I am referring to here refer to another paper of mine published by SCF. Regardless, there are groupings within Germany that do desire cooperation with Russia and China and it is this potential that is actually what is under attack presently. To be drawn into the soap box drama is to relive the same tragedy over and over again, nicely set up for you to make a scene, burn down bridges and embrace your utter destruction as you go down in a flurry of flames. What is the lesson here? Never forget your history.

As Pepe Escobar eloquently put it in his essay "Requiem for an Empire: A Prequel," the days of clueless cold warriors dreaming of a Germany-Japan axis, and Washington's opportunity to erect itself as Supreme World Paradigm saviour of the "free world," or the unilateral 1990s basking in the tawdry "end of history" celebrations while "toxic neocons, gestated in the inter-war period via the gnostic cabal of New York Trotskyism, plotted their power takeover."
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Telephone

Kim Jong-un offers to reopen inter-Korean hotlines, tells South to drop 'delusions' of provocations from Pyongyang


RT
Thu, 30 Sep 2021 09:43 UTC
Kim Jong-un
© Reuters/KCNA
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un speaking at the Supreme People's Assembly of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said he is willing to restore a hotline between the two Koreas, but he says Seoul must drop its "delusion" that its northern neighbor wants to cause it any harm or provoke.

North Korean state media KCNA reported on Thursday that Kim had expressed interest in reviving the severed telephone channels from October
"as part of the efforts for realizing the expectations and desire of the entire Korean nation to see the earlier recovery of the north-south relations ... and durable peace settling in the Korean peninsula."
Speaking at the Supreme People's Assembly, Kim remarked that inter-Korean relations "stand at a crossroads". According to him, ties must either take the course of advancing towards reconciliation and cooperation, or suffer national division "amid a vicious cycle of confrontation."

Comment: See also:

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Passport

Published without fanfare, the proposals that show vaccine passports ARE on the way in the UK

Kit Klarenberg
RT
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 08:03 UTC
Covid passport
© reuters/Dado Ruvic
After months of flip-flopping and contradictory statements, the British government has finally come clean and revealed the scenarios where Covid vaccine passports could become a reality in the months ahead.

Anyone by this point accustomed to the UK government's endless policy reversals and broken promises over the course of the pandemic will be entirely unsurprised to learn that officials have at long last very quietly revealed that "mandatory Covid certifications" - a circumlocutory, Orwellian euphemism for vaccine passports - are on the way.

It was only two-and-a-half weeks ago that Health Secretary Sajid Javid stated unequivocally that vaccine passports would not be necessary for attendees of crowded establishments and events, as "we shouldn't be doing things for the sake of it." Later that same day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reiterated the minister's declaration, stating he was determined to end all "necessary but intrusive measures" instituted during the pandemic, due to the UK's "vaccine defences."
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Laptop

Hunter Biden's biz associates' emails show he asked $2M retainer + 'success fees' to help unfreeze $30B Libyan assets while Dad was VP

Peter Belfiore
Daily Mail
Thu, 23 Sep 2021 13:47 UTC
al-Rahbani, HB, Sam Jauhari
© Unknown
Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani • Hunter Biden • Donor Sam Jauhari
Emails indicated they sought to hire Hunter Biden to help them free up billions in Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration
A pair of emails from business associates of Hunter Biden reveal he offered to help them unfreeze Libyan assets for a $2M retainer plus 'success fees', while they also discussed their misgivings over his drug and alcohol use.

The email exchanges were between mid-level Democratic donors Sam Jauhari and Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani, who in 2015 were both working on behalf of the new Libyan government to free up $30billion in state foreign assets. They had been frozen by the Obama administration under the deposed Muammar Gaddafi regime in 2011.

The emails are unrelated to those on his laptop, which outlined a number of his other business dealings. The computer was found at a repair shop in Delaware.

In the first email dated January 28, 2015 sent by Jauhari to al-Rahbani, and obtained by Business Insider, Jauhari discusses what he believes the younger Biden might bring to the table in their efforts.

He outlines the number of connections Hunter has, including his role as chairman of the UN World Food Program, and the relationship he has with then-Secretary of State John Kerry and his then-vice president father, which in turn could provide access to Obama's file on Libya.
'Since he travels with dad he is connected everywhere in Europe and Asia where M. Q. [Muammar Qaddafi] and LIA [Libya Investment Authority] had money frozen,' Jauhari writes, adding that Hunter has also said he has high level access in China, and that, 'he can help there.'
China at the time had been blocking the release of roughly $15billion in Qaddafi's assets that Obama ordered frozen amid a bid to increase its influence in Africa.

Comment: Sheikh Mohammed al-Rahbani was a donor to the Obama campaign and Sam Jauhari was a Hunter Biden business contact.

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Cult

When will we realize Bill Gates is dangerously insane?

Jeff Crouere
The Hayride
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 18:16 UTC
bill gates trust me

Bill Gates
This isn't an overreaction to Gates' latest foray into the news cycle. It's an observation based on a long pattern of statements and behavior by the founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men who has ever lived which, were any of us normal people guilty of them, would result in our being institutionalized.

Bill Gates is crazy. And he's dangerous, because he's willing to put untold sums of money toward making the insane things he believes a reality - and all of those insane things hurt people.

The most recent idiocy? Impossible Burgers for all the white people.

Comment: There is no end to Gates meddling. But is he just a (possibly unwitting) frontman for larger forces?

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