Australia has a new nuclear lobby front group “REPLANET Australia”
Australia has a new little nuclear fake group. attempting to copy George Monbiot’s group in UK. Monbiot has at least some reaL environmental aims. I doubt that the Aussie attempt has any aim other than to lobby for the nuclear industry
The nuclear lobby is revving up its campaign, with submissions to the Senate to remove legal bans on nuclear activities
It is not too late to send submissions to the Senate to keep the ban on Nuclear power etc. I haven’t sent mine yet, but I sure am going to. And I urge everyone to do so.
The nuclear lobby has really revved up on this. They have set up a fake charity – probably specifically for this purpose , and are busy promoting the nuclear cause on social media. I heard it from a pro nuclear shill Tyrone D’Lisle – spokesman for Fake Dishonest Australian Greens https://nuclear.foe.org.au/fake-greens-group/
Ukraine: * Congress as War Prop * Christmas Truce
FRANCIS BOYLE, fboyle@illinois.edu
Boyle is a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. His books include Foundations of World Order (Duke University Press).
Following Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to Congress, Boyle said today: “As after 9/11 when Congress gave Bush the AUMF (which is scandalously still in effect), Congress now is acting as a rubber stamp for perpetual funding for war against Russia.” (See below.)
Boyle pointed to a host of legal and other major problems with the U.S. approach including: “The posture of Biden and the Congress plays directly into the Russian narrative: They are at war with NATO. This escalates the risks of nuclear war.
“This is fueled by absurd historical analogies with Churchill, FDR, and the Battle of the Bulge. This is manufacturing consent for war against Russia.
“The just-announced ‘Patriot missiles’ to Ukraine are not only defensive as many have claimed. They are a step to establishing a No Fly Zone over all of Ukraine including Crimea and Donbass as well as over parts of Western Russia itself. Existentially dangerous.”
Rev. GRAYLAN HAGLER, gshagler@verizon.net, @Graylanhagler
Hagler is pastor emeritus, Plymouth United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C. and a senior advisor to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, USA. He is one of 1000 religious leaders calling for a Christmas truce in Ukraine, see video.
The Wall Street Journal reports: “The spending bill unveiled Tuesday includes an additional $44.9 billion in aid to help Ukraine and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.” Spending so far totals $100 billion. Meanwhile, AP reports: “Millions to lose Medicaid coverage under Congress’ plan.” The Washington Post reports: “Handmade blankets for homeless crafted with ‘love’ come to Capitol Hill.”
How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia
In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.
But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.
The Grayzone, ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN AND MAX BLUMENTHAL·MARCH 4, 2022
While Western media deploys Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage to refute accusations of Nazi influence in Ukraine, the president has ceded to neo-Nazi forces and now depends on them as front line fighters.
Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away.
Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy.
With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters.
Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash.
Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen”, vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.
Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement.
By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament.
A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast.
This February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, US media embarked on a mission of its own: to deny the power of neo-Nazi paramilitaries over the country’s military and political sphere. As the US government-funded National Public Radio insisted, “Putin’s language [about denazification] is offensive and factually wrong.”
In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.
But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.
The president’s Jewishness as Western media PR device
Hours before President Putin’s February 24 speech declaring denazification as the goal of Russian operations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “asked how a people who lost eight million of its citizens fighting Nazis could support Nazism,” according to the BBC.
Raised in a non-religious Jewish family in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s, Zelensky has downplayed his heritage in the past. “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults,” he joked during a 2019 interview in which he declined to go into further detail about his religious background.
Today, as Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion, Zelensky is no longer ashamed to broadcast his Jewishness. “How could I be a Nazi?” he wondered aloud during a public address. For a US media engaged in an all-out information war against Russia, the president’s Jewish background has become an essential public relations tool.
A few examples of the US media’s deployment of Zelensky as a shield against allegations of rampant Nazism in Ukraine are below (see mash-up above [on original] for video ): ………………………………….
Behind the corporate media spin lies the complex and increasingly close relationship Zelensky’s administration has enjoyed with the neo-Nazi forces invested with key military and political posts by the Ukrainian state, and the power these open fascists have enjoyed since Washington installed a Western-aligned regime through a coup in 2014.
In fact, Zelensky’s top financial backer, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has been a key benefactor of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other extremists militias.
Backed by Zelensky’s top financier, neo-Nazi militants unleash a wave of intimidation
Incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion is considered the most ideologically zealous and militarily motivated unit fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
With Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel insignia on the uniforms of its fighters, who have been photographed with Nazi SS symbols on their helmets, Azov “is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology…[and] is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing US-based white supremacy organizations,” according to an FBI indictment of several US white nationalists that traveled to Kiev to train with Azov.
Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian energy baron of Jewish heritage, has been a top funder of Azov since it was formed in 2014. He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions, and has deployed them as a personal thug squad to protect his financial interests.
In 2019, Kolomoisky emerged as the top backer of Zelensky’s presidential bid. Though Zelensky made anti-corruption the signature issue of his campaign, the Pandora Papers exposed him and members of his inner circle stashing large payments from Kolomoisky in a shadowy web of offshore accounts.
When Zelensky took office in May 2019, the Azov Battalion maintained de facto control of the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol and its surrounding villages. As Open Democracy noted, “Azov has certainly established political control of the streets in Mariupol. To maintain this control, they have to react violently, even if not officially, to any public event which diverges sufficiently from their political agenda.”
Attacks by Azov in Mariupol have included assaults on “feminists and liberals” marching on International Women’s Day among other incidents……………………………
Zelensky failed to rein in neo-Nazis, wound up collaborating with them
Following his failed attempt to demobilize neo-Nazi militants in the town of Zolote in October 2019, Zelensky called the fighters to the table, telling reporters “I met with veterans yesterday. Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.”
A few seats away from the Jewish president was Yehven Karas, the leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.
During the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Ukraine’s elected president in 2014, C14 activists took over Kiev’s city hall and plastered its walls with neo-Nazi insignia before taking shelter in the Canadian embassy.
As the former youth wing of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, C14 appears to draw its name from the infamous 14 words of US neo-Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”………………………………………………..
Throughout 2019, Zelensky and his administration deepened their ties with ultra-nationalist elements across Ukraine…………………………………………………………
In November 2021, one of Ukraine’s most prominent ultra-nationalist militiamen, Dmytro Yarosh, announced that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yarosh is an avowed follower of the Nazi collaborator Bandera who led Right Sector from 2013 to 2015, vowing to lead the “de-Russification” of Ukraine…………………………………….
Ukrainian state-backed neo-Nazi leader flaunts influence on the eve of war with Russia
On February 5, 2022, only days before full-scale war with Russia erupted, Yevhen Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 delivered a stem-winding public address in Kiev intended to highlight the influence his organization and others like it enjoyed over Ukrainian politics………………………………….
“If we get killed…we died fighting a holy war”
…………………………………… With fighting underway, Azov’s National Corps gathered hundreds of ordinary civilians, including grandmothers and children, to train in public squares and warehouses from Kharviv to Kiev to Lviv.
On February 27, the official Twitter account of the National Guard of Ukraine posted video of “Azov Fighters” greasing their bullets with pig fat to humiliate Russian Muslim fighters from Chechnya.
…………………… Besides authorizing the release of hardcore criminals to join the battle against Russia, Zelensky has ordered all males of fighting age to remain in the country. Azov militants have proceeded to enforce the policy by brutalizing civilians attempting to flee from the fighting around Mariupol.
According to one Greek resident in Mariupol recently interviewed by a Greek news station, “When you try to leave you run the risk of running into a patrol of the Ukrainian fascists, the Azov Battalion,” he said, adding “they would kill me and are responsible for everything.”
Footage posted online appears to show uniformed members of a fascist Ukrainian militia in Mariupol violently pulling fleeing residents out of their vehicles at gunpoint.
Other video filmed at checkpoints around Mariupol showed Azov fighters shooting and killing civilians attempting to flee.
On March 1, Zelensky replaced the regional administrator of Odessa with Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the extreme right Aidar Battalion, which has been accused of an array of war crimes in the Donbass region.
Meanwhile, as a massive convoy of Russian armored vehicles bore down on Kiev, Yehven Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 posted a video on YouTube from inside a vehicle presumably transporting fighters.
“If we get killed, it’s fucking great because it means we died fighting a holy war,” Karas exclaimed. ”If we survive, it’s going to be even fucking better! That’s why I don’t see a downside to this, only upside!”
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
“Eva Bartlett: Western Silence As Ukraine Targets Civilians in Donbass”
Addressing the EIR Symposium, “Peace On Earth, Or Humanity’s Doom? The Case For Negotiations,” Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, who was granted the 2017 International Journalism Award by the Journalists’ Club of Mexico and has spent years doing on-the-ground reporting of wars in the Middle East, gave an eyewitness account of the ongoing genocide against the people of Donbass, where she has been reporting for the last year. Since 2014, she reported, 12,500 civilians have been killed by sniping and shelling with NATO weapons in both the Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic, with over 4,500 killed since mid-February of this year. Given that civilian areas are targeted, this shelling constitutes terrorism and war crimes.
“Eva Bartlett: Western Silence As Ukraine Targets Civilians in Donbass” — In Gaza
According to Bartlett, the Ukrainian military has also been saturating the Donbass with PFM-1 “petal” mines, insidious devices designed not to kill but to maim victims by blowing off their hands or feet. Children are particularly susceptible to these devices. She made the point that were Russia committing these crimes, it would be covered as a constant scandal by Western media. Bartlett ended her remarks by pointing to a flag of the Donetsk People’s Republic she proudly displays on the wall of her home, representing to her the resilience of a people shunned by most of the world and ridiculed as if their lives are meaningless. She expressed hope that the work she is doing will lead to Ukraine being held accountable for its war crimes and help allow people to speak openly about the fact that Ukraine is committing genocide.
Exposing the dishonest spiel that nuclear waste is “manageable”
Tom Smith, Chair, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, 2017-20.
Samanth Subramanian captures perfectly the vast scale and longevity of the
effort needed to clean up Sellafield (The long read, 15 December).
As Britain and other states with nuclear power industries grapple with how to
go about an effective, safe and economical nuclear clean-up, it might be
better to explain the challenges with less reliance on suggestions that in
its early days the nuclear industry never thought about decommissioning
(though the point has validity).
Instead, we need more honesty about the fact that nuclear power inescapably generates large quantities of hazardous human-made waste, the worst of which will remain hazardous probably beyond
Homo sapiens’ time on the planet.
The industry’s solution to this is a network of deep disposal facilities. But none have yet been created, their
cost is enormous and there is no certainty that they will perform the
long-term task required of them. These are considerations that sadly
receive little attention in current debates about the need for new
nuclear-generation capacity.
Coincidentally, you published a letter (14 December) suggesting that nuclear radiation is less dangerous than
emissions from a wood-burning stove, a curious comparison to make.
Wood-burning stoves are pollutants, no question, but they could never lead
to a Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chornobyl or Fukushima. Nor will
decommissioning them cost billions and take decades.
Guardian 22nd Dec 2022
December 23 Energy News — geoharvey
Opinion: ¶ “We Need More Honesty On Nuclear Power’s Long Legacy Of Hazardous Waste” • We need more honesty about the fact that nuclear power inescapably generates large quantities of human-made, hazardous, radioactive waste, the worst of which will probably remain hazardous beyond the time that Homo sapiens has on the planet. [The Guardian] Nuclear […]
December 23 Energy News — geoharvey
1.This month.
Zoom webinar – “Nuclear Winter: The Environmental Consequences of a Nuclear Exchange.”
April 7th at 11:30 am PST / 2:30 pm EST
Nuclear Winter: The Environmental Consequences of a Nuclear Exchange”
Join us for an informative webinar with renowned atmospheric scientist, Professor Brian Toon, as he discusses the environmental risks and global impacts of a nuclear war. Despite the potential damage caused by the blast from even small nuclear weapons, many countries continue to invest in and expand nuclear arsenals. Professor Toon will provide a scientific assessment of civilian fatalities, agricultural failures, climate concerns, and complications with food supply that would follow any international nuclear conflict. We need to plan how to prevent nuclear conflict and avoid catastrophe. Politicians and military planners must be made aware of global climate and agricultural complications that would ensue. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from, and engage in, this vital conversation
The Road to War brings a sharp focus to why it is not in Australia’s best interest to be dragged into a war with China which will almost inevitably go nuclear very quickly. The filmmaker has interviewed some of Australia’s senior foreign policy analysts who have vast experience behind them in analysing what really is going on here as the United States rattles its sabres with China. And sets us up to be its proxy, like the poor Ukranians have been fed into the Meatgrinder. So America can remain the Top Dog. The Road to War reveals how the United States through its spy base at Pine Gap and by stationing six nuclear capable B52 bombers in the Top End (without permission from the traditional owners) is making Australia a prime nuclear target if the current war of words suddenly melts down into full scale war.
The Road to War shows the implicit connection between Carbon emissions (the US military uses a whopping 70% of America’s annual petroleum to move its armies and vast War Machine around the globe to its 800+ military bases..but under a loophole wangled at Kyoto, the US military does not have to report its C02 annual emissions). The Road to War starts screening at selected cities and regional centres in March. See the trailer end for details.
Antinuclear 