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Bullseye

'What was the difference between Sweden and the rest of the West on Covid? We trusted the people to have common sense' - Sweden's MEP Peter Lundgren


RT
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 15:14 UTC
Lundgren
© Getty Images / Thierry MonasseSwedish Member of the European Parliament (European Conservatives and Reformists Group - Sverigedemokraterna) Peter Lundgren delivers a speech during a session of the European Parliament in the Paul-Henri Spaak building on January 20, 2021 in Brussels, Belgium.
As the world slowly recovers from the effects of the pandemic, Peter Lundgren, a Swedish MEP, talks exclusively with RT.com about how Sweden dealt with Covid-19 and why the country refused to lock down.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began in earnest in spring last year, nearly all Western countries locked down. The public were asked to stay home, not go to work or visit relatives, and to only leave their homes to do essential shopping. Workplaces, schools, non-essential shops, restaurants, and bars closed. In some countries, curfews were also imposed, and people could be arrested simply for going on to the streets. Western governments argued that they did this to keep citizens safe, even though they knew the lockdowns would have detrimental effects on their respective economies.

Comment: Despite Sweden's example, tyranny elsewhere, using coronavirus as it's cover, is worsening by the day: Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Echoes of Nazism - Governments' Vaccine Passports Spark Mass Disobedience



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Bad Guys

Best of the Web: Living in the Age of Covid: 'The Power of the Powerless'

Michael Rectenwald
Mises Institute
Wed, 18 Aug 2021 21:38 UTC
covid vaxxxx
A specter is haunting the world: the increasing prospect of a new totalitarianism under the extended covid response. Unlike the specter of communism, or the specter of "dissent" to communist dictatorship that Václav Havel ironically identified in his groundbreaking essay "The Power of the Powerless,"1 this specter originates from those in power and not from the revolutionary or the powerless.2 And rather than haunting only Europe or Eastern Europe, this specter casts its long shadow across the future of all humanity, such that one wonders how one might plan, if at all, for this future.

Mixed into this spectral fear are grave doubts promoted by some about the intentions of world leaders and a medical and technocratic elite apparently bent on new lockdowns, masking, and mandatory mass vaccinations.

Heterodoxies burgeon in the shadows. The mere mention of these heterodoxies will rank one among the heterodox. Nevertheless, I venture to name them. They include the belief that a mass eugenics program is underway and that the vaccination regime amounts to the greatest crime against humanity in world history. They include the belief that the entirety of the covid response has been nothing if not a means for increasing the power and control of the elite over the world population. And they include the more modest claim that "the science" being peddled by "the experts" has been hastily and erroneously construed and represents a grave series of errors, yet merely errors after all. Another claim is that the covid crisis, while real, has been opportunistically used by the ruling elite to further a preexisting agenda for resetting the world economic system and forever changing the shape of the social order (the Great Reset). These claims are not necessarily mutually exclusive and two or three may either be held simultaneously or all four juggled. That these and other heterodoxies are being rigorously suppressed, and that their messengers are either cancelled or vilified, or both, only lends them subterraneous force and adds to the overall anxiety, whether spoken or not. While I will not adjudicate all these claims, it is enough to say that their existence is part of the terror campaign that is the covid regime itself. It is as if the mendacity of the regime spontaneously generated them.
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Fire

Biden's State Dept halted a Trump-era 'crisis response' plan aimed at avoiding Bengazi-style evacuations just months before Taliban takeover

Raheem J. Kassam
The National Pulse
Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00 UTC
Biden
© Reuters/Kevin LamarqueUS President Joe Biden
Joe Biden's State Department moved to cancel a critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The "Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau" - which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas was paused by Antony Blinken's State Department earlier this year. Notification was officially signed just months before the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan.

"SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED," an official State Department document from the Biden State Department begins, before outlining the following move the [sic to] quash the Trump-era funding for the new bureau. The document is from the desk of Deputy Secretary of State Brian P. McKeon, confirmed in March by the United States Senate.
memo
© State DepartmentEvidence of the pause in the program by Biden's State Department

Comment: The devastating consequences resulting from knee-jerk policies and petty political thinking have proven once again the ineptitude of this administration to plan and handle crisis at home or abroad.

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Arrow Down

We failed Afghanistan, not the other way around

Matt Taibbi
taibbi.substack.com
Wed, 18 Aug 2021 00:00 UTC
cartoon
MSNBC rails against the "fantastically corrupt elite" on the ground that ruined the Afghan mission, but the real corruption was our own.

On MSNBC the other night, Rachel Maddow told a story about visiting Afghanistan a decade ago. She described being taken on a tour of a new neighborhood in Kabul of "narco-palaces," what she called, "big garish, gigantic, rococo, strange-looking places" that hadn't existed before the Americans arrived. This was said to be symbolic of the "fantastically corrupt elites" among the Afghan political class who put themselves into position to siphon off big chunks of the "billions of dollars per month" we sent into the country.

Noting that, "the U.S. effort and expenditure in that country did build some stuff, roads and waterways and schools," Maddow decried the fact that "so much of what we put in by the boatload was shoveled off by a fantastically corrupt elite." She showed video of Taliban conquerors lounging around in the tackily furnished homes of former Afghan officials in Kabul, pointing out that, "dictator chic is the same the world over." In a not-so-subtle dig at Donald Trump, she added, "And they really like gold fixtures."

From Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the pattern of American officials showering questionable political allies abroad with armfuls of cash is a long-established practice. However, the idea that this is the reason the "missions" fail in such places is just a continuation of the original propaganda lines that get us into these messes. It's a way of saying the subject populations are to blame for undermining our noble efforts, when the missions themselves are often preposterous and, moreover, the lion's share of the looting is usually done by our own marauding contracting community.

Comment: The bottom line: Collect, spend, repeat.


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Arrow Up

Russia won't deploy troops to Afghanistan, instead focusing on making 'peaceful' contact with Taliban, top Moscow officials reveal

Layla Guest
RT
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 10:57 UTC
taliban guy on phone
© AFPTaliban fighter and locals at Pul-e-Khumri, Baghlan province capitol • August 11, 2021
Russia has said it has no intention of deploying troops to Afghanistan or stepping up its military presence in the region in response to the Taliban's takeover of the country, instead focusing on opening up diplomatic channels.

The deputy head of the country's Foreign Ministry, Alexander Pankin, told journalists on Thursday that Moscow is not considering stepping up troop deployments through its military deals with neighboring nations. Tajikistan, which borders Afghanistan, is a member of the Russian-backed Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which binds former Soviet Republics to defend each other.

According to the diplomat, there is currently no need for members of the pact to resort to "escalating in order to demonstrate force" in response to potential instability in Central Asia. However, Pankin said, "radical measures" could be considered if, "God forbid, the need for them arises."

Comment: The West could take a huge lesson from the East (but it won't):
Russian President Vladimir Putin has spoken to the presidents of Iran and Tajikistan by phone. The leaders discussed the latest developments in Afghanistan, which has fallen into the hands of the Taliban in a sweeping takeover.

The situation in Afghanistan has been a "major focus" of the talks between Putin and Iran's president Ebrahim Raisi, the Kremlin said in a statement on Wednesday following the phone conversation between the two presidents. Both Russia and Iran expressed their readiness to contribute to peace and stability in Afghanistan, the statement added.

The Russian president's conversation with Tajikistan's leader, Emomali Rahmon, was also largely focused on the developments in Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover. The two leaders said it was important to focus on providing security for civilians and maintaining stability in the region. The two leaders agreed that the relevant agencies of both nations should maintain regular contacts as the situation unfolds.

There have been concerns that a burgeoning conflict in Afghanistan could destabilize the wider region. Last week, the armed forces of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia held massive drills on the former Soviet republics' border with Afghanistan as they practiced targeting enemy combatants and securing the border.

The swift capture of Kabul by the Taliban also sparked an exodus of senior government figures and foreign diplomatic personnel over the weekend. At the same time, hundreds of Afghan military personnel sought to cross into Uzbekistan onboard dozens of planes and helicopters that were forcibly landed by the Uzbek forces.

Afghanistan's ousted president, Ashraf Ghani, was among those who fled the country. Eventually, the exiled leader, whose whereabouts were unknown for several days, turned up in the UAE on Wednesday, where he was welcomed on "humanitarian grounds."

The Afghan embassy in Tajikistan has demanded that Interpol arrest Ghani as it accused him of "stealing" the Afghan treasury. However, in his first public speech since fleeing the country, the ousted former leader claimed he did not take the money with him.


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No Entry

Biden ignored Boris Johnson for 36 hours as Afghan chaos grew

Samuel Chamberlain
New York Post
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 11:42 UTC
Biden
© Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesUS President Joe Biden
President Joe Biden ignored British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's attempts to contact him for approximately 36 hours as the Taliban cemented its control over Afghanistan, a report said. Johnson tried to reach Biden on Monday morning, UK time, but wasn't able to get him on the phone until 10 p.m. Tuesday (5 p.m. Washington time), according to The Daily Telegraph.

The lengthy wait took place as desperate Afghans swarmed Kabul's international airport in the hope of catching evacuation flights out.

The White House had no immediate comment on the report, but on Tuesday afternoon, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the president had "not yet spoken with any other world leaders" about the Afghanistan catastrophe.
"Myself, Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken, several other senior members of the team have been engaged on a regular basis with foreign counterparts, and we intend to do so in the coming days."
Once Johnson got Biden on the phone, the Telegraph reported, the British PM urged the American president not to throw away "gains made in Afghanistan," an apparent response to Biden's insistence in remarks from the White House Monday that the US "mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building."
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Meteor

Arizona is 'bracing for impact' of Trump-driven election report

Zach Montellaro
Politico
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 07:15 UTC
Examining ballots
© Matt York/APContractors examine and recount Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 election
The controversial Arizona 2020 election review is almost over, but top officials in the state's largest county and secretary of state's office aren't waiting for the conclusions, launching a pair of preemptive strikes against a report that could land as soon as next week.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, released a prebuttal laying out all of her office's criticisms of the so-called election "audit." She detailed the pre- and post-election testing election equipment underwent in Maricopa County and called the state Senate-led effort "secretive and disorganized" that routinely discarded best practices of an actual audit. Hobbs' office wrote:
"All credible audits are characterized by controls, access, and transparency that allow for the processes and procedures to be replicated, if necessary. As this report has described, the review conducted by the Senate's contractors has consistently lacked all three of these factors."
And Stephen Richer, the Republican county recorder in Maricopa County, on Thursday issued a lengthy report of his own, in the form of an open letter to state Republicans, challenging the credentials of the reviewers and defending his own Republican bona fides, wrote:
"I will keep fighting for conservatism, and there are many things I would do for the Republican candidate for President, but I won't lie about the election, and I will not unjustifiably turn my back on the employees of the Board of Supervisors, Recorder's Office, and Elections Department — my colleagues and friends."
Since late April, contractors hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate have been reviewing all the ballots cast in Maricopa County, which President Joe Biden won en route to flipping the state, along with examining election equipment.

Comment: The amount of blowback pre-slamming the audit and its yet-to-be announced results, is revealing. How often do 'potential findings' solicit a 'prebuttal'?
The Arizona Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled that the leading contractor of Arizona's audit of the Maricopa County 2020 election results must turn over documents related to the effort.

American Oversight, a watchdog group, has been seeking documents regarding the county's recount and audit, which was initiated because former President Trump disputed the 2020 election results in battle ground states like Arizona. The watchdog group had been involved in a legal fight with Arizona's Senate over the public release of the documents.

The judges wrote on Thursday, according to The Arizona Republic:
"The Senate defendants, as officers and a public body under the (records law), have a duty to maintain and produce public records related to their official duties. This includes the public records created in connection with the audit of a separate governmental agency, authorized by the legislative branch of state government and performed by the Senate's agents."
The judges wrote in their decision that government contractors, such as Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, are still subject to Arizona Public Records laws, which Republicans had argued against.
"The requested records are no less public records simply because they are in the possession of a third party, Cyber Ninjas."
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge issued a similar decision, telling the Arizona Senate that it had to release the records by Aug. 31, the AP noted; however, the state Senate later appealed that decision. Senate President Karen Fann (R) said the Senate would appeal the Thursday decision, though she added that the Senate has nothing to hide. She stated:
"If this were to win, anybody that does business with a municipality, they would be subject to open records requests."
See also:

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Syringe

Ex-Facebook data scientist says Russia is not driving Covid-19 conspiracies online, warns Americans have themselves to blame


RT
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 09:44 UTC
Vaccine/Needle
© facebook/seoheronews.com/VAERS/KJN
Western commentators have chalked up sharp rises in online anti-vaccine sentiment and anger at Covid-19 rules to Russian bots. Now though, an internet whistleblower has said the reality is it's actually a homegrown phenomenon.

In an article for the UK's The Guardian on Wednesday, former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang said that the allegations had become a convenient way to blame Moscow, rather than face up to the worrying trends. According to her, the networking giant relentlessly focuses on whether posts are "authentic," and from actual users, or "inauthentic" and placed by those with ulterior motives. Zhang wrote:
"When I worked at Facebook, I spent two and a half years combating inauthentic behavior; I was responsible for Facebook taking down inauthentic campaigns by two national governments."
Ultimately, she quit the company and became a whistleblower after she claimed the Silicon Valley firm failed to take seriously her findings that it was effectively allowing major abuses of its policies to go ahead in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Latin America in order to prioritize issues in the West.
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Cardboard Box

Anti-war activists mock CNN as it cries over $1T worth of 'desperately needed' minerals left behind in Afghanistan


RT
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 15:55 UTC
Airport/trucks
© USAF/Senior Airman taylor Crul/ReutersUS Army soldiers patrol Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan
CNN has been hit with a wave of anti-war sentiment after publishing a curious piece highlighting the $1 trillion worth of minerals in Afghanistan being left behind that "the world desperately needs."

When the US finishes its exit from the country after 20 years, it will be leaving behind valuable, untapped mineral deposits worth a $1 trillion, according to US military officials and geologists in 2010.

Minerals such as iron, copper, gold and lithium are found in huge quantities there, and have remained mostly untouched due to the unstable state of the nation, something that doesn't look to be changing as the US continues its chaotic exit from the country amid a Taliban takeover. Rod Schoonover, a scientist and security expert who founded the Ecological Futures Group, told the outlet about the deposits:
"Afghanistan is certainly one of the regions richest in traditional precious metals, but also the metals [needed] for the emerging economy of the 21st century."

Comment: The cost of occupation far outweighs the cost of purchase and not only monetarily.

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X

Putin reportedly rejected Biden's request for bases near Afghanistan

Joel B. Pollak
Breitbart
Thu, 19 Aug 2021 19:27 UTC
putin
© Denis Balibouse / Pool / AFP / Getty
Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected a request by U.S. President Joe Biden to allow an American military presence in countries near Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Biden reportedly made the request at the two leaders' summit in Geneva, Switzerland, in June, hoping that Putin would allow the bases so that the U.S. could continue to carry out operations against terrorist groups. But the Russian leader, famously irritable at the U.S. presence in former Soviet territory, refused.

The Journal reported:
Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a June 16 summit meeting with President Biden, objected to any role for American forces in Central Asian countries, senior U.S. and Russian officials said, undercutting U.S. plans to act against new terrorist dangers after its Afghanistan withdrawal.

The previously unreported exchange between the U.S. and Russian leaders complicated Biden administration hopes of basing drones and other counterterrorism forces in countries bordering landlocked Afghanistan. That challenge has deepened with the collapse over the weekend of the Afghan government and armed forces.

The exchange also indicates that Moscow is more determined to try to maintain Central Asia as a sphere of influence than to expand cooperation with a new American president over the turmoil in Afghanistan, former and current U.S. officials said.
...
Without access to Central Asian nations, such as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan, the U.S. would need to rely on bases in Qatar, other Arab Gulf states and U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to fly aircraft to Afghanistan. Flight times from the Gulf states are so long that a U.S. drone might spend more than 60% of its mission flying to and from Afghanistan from the U.S. base at Al Udeid, Qatar, a former senior U.S. military official said. This would limit the time for conducting reconnaissance or carrying out strikes over the country.
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