alanjjohnstone
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UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC there’s still “a chance” that an invasion by Russia could be stopped, but he added “I’m not optimistic”.
A related article of conspiracy theories
recent conspiratorial narratives about the Coronavirus pandemic use six rhetorical tools:
1) manipulating scientific evidence;
2) appealing to emotions;
3) referencing conspiracy theories unrelated to, for example, vaccination issues;
4) claiming that, for example, vaccines are unnatural practices;
5) invents negative benefit-risk ratio; and ultimately,
6) frames vaccination as an argument about freedom of choice.
Using those, the conspiratorial stories that are produced can be rather complex (fairy)-tales about secret identities, a mastermind, a covert plan, and about secret knowledge. Virtually, all conspiracy fantasies contain the classic story of an epic battle between Good and Evil. In Hollywood-style, they tell a simplistic hero vs. villain story. In the construction of such conspiracy fantasies, three elements can be found in nearly all conspiracy fantasies. Without those three elements, next to no conspiracy theory can be cooked up:
1) there needs to be an evil conspirator – the actor like Bill Gates during the Coronavirus pandemic, for example; next,
2) there also needs to be an evil plan – like the take-over of the world by big-pharma or the establishment of a Corona Dictatorship; and finally,
3) there needs to be an endeavor to maintain secrecy which means that most, if not all, actors of the Coronavirus pandemic (all universities, all medical doctors, all nurses, all health officials, the WHO, the CDC, numerous governments, the media, etc.) are all working together in the utmost secrecy to put their evil plan into reality.
The Iraq war game-plan replayed.
American intelligence resources would use British reports to support their allegations of the Iraq threat.
UK communiqué provided asserted how Russia might go about imposing a new government on Ukraine. British officials familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The British communiqué provided no evidence to back up its assertion that Russia was plotting to overthrow the Ukrainian government.
Anonymous officials within the U.S. government reviewed the intelligence gathered by anonymous British spies and concluded that the evidence is solid. That’s called independent corroboration.
Deadlock
Biden and NATO told Russia there will be no U.S. or NATO concessions on Moscow’s main demands to resolve the crisis over Ukraine.
“There is no change, there will be no change,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.
Confirming YMS comment
Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba’s said: “They are still missing some key military elements and systems to mount a big, full-scale offensive.”
The foreign minister added that Russia’s intention was to destabilise his country by “spreading panic, raising pressure on Ukraine‘s financial system and launching cyberattacks”.
Is the super-bubble about to burst?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/25/us-stock-markets-bubble-tech-results-investors
China’s ambitious low-carbon goals should not come at the expense of energy and food security or the “normal life” of ordinary people, President Xi Jinping said.
“Reducing emissions is not about reducing productivity, and it is not about not emitting at all,”
Here’s why UK teachers need a four-day week
$500 million military aid to Ukraine?
Democrats Are Rushing Through a Massive Ukraine Defense Bill
Listen to the science?
Paul Dorfman, former secretary of the U.K. government’s Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters; Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Bernard Laponche, former director-general of France’s energy management agency; and Wolfgang Renneberg, former head of the reactor safety, radiation protection, and nuclear waste at Germany’s environmental ministry.
“As key experts who have worked on the frontline of the nuclear issue, we consider it our collective responsibility to comment on the main issue: Whether nuclear could play a significant role as a strategy against climate change.”
“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction,” according to Dorfman, Jaczko, Laponche, and Renneberg. “The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe, or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm.”
https://www.powermag.com/blog/former-nuclear-leaders-say-no-to-new-reactors/
Similarly, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that “as of today, there are no grounds to believe” that Russia is preparing to invade imminently, noting that its troops have not formed what he called a battle group that could force its way through the border.
We told you so
Promises made at the Cop26 summit to prevent the climate emergency are at risk without urgent action, its president Alok Sharma is warning. Just three months after the landmark summit, there is a danger that the vital pledges made will “wither on the vine”, the cabinet minister will say.
“We will have mitigated no risks. Seized no opportunities. We will have fractured the trust built between nations. And 1.5 degrees will slip from our grasp.”
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/danger-climate-promises-made-cop26-105219043.html
ANONCRACY
She has been referred to previously. Barbara F. Walter — author of “How Civil Wars Start, and How to Stop Them” — served on an advisory panel for the Central Intelligence Agency, she helped CIA agents identify signs that a country is facing serious political instability and the potential for widespread conflict.
The modern-day Republican Party, Walter explained, is obsessed with White “identity” politics rather than “ideology,” and White Americans on the far right fear becoming a minority in the future.
America’s democracy is declining. They are being led, unaware, into a downward spiral of instability, in which extremists and opportunists spread fear — and then grab power by force.”
In an op-ed published by the Washington Post on January 24, she compares the political tensions in the U.S. to what she observed in other countries in the past.
“Anocracies are neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic,” Walter explains. “Their citizens enjoy some elements of democratic rule, e.g., elections, while other rights — e.g., due process or freedom of the press — suffer. In the last weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, the respected Center for Systemic Peace (CSP) calculated that, for the first time in more than two centuries, the United States no longer qualified as a democracy. It had, over the preceding five years, become an anocracy…Anocracy, not autocracy, is our most immediate threat,” Walter warns. “Anocracy is usually transitional — a repressive government allows reforms, or a democracy begins to unravel — and it is volatile. When a country moves into the anocracy zone, the risk of political violence reaches its peak; citizens feel uncertain about their government’s power and legitimacy. Compared with democracies, anocracies with more democratic than autocratic features are three times more likely to experience political instability or civil war.”
