Nunes: House GOP must subpoena Big Tech Tyrants after Twitter Files revelations
Devin gets pretty spicy and says the FiB will “Rue the Day” they released that statement of “conspiracy theories” to harm the agency. We are not that stupid to believe that! He’s pissed which is unusual for him.
The interviewer John says “the Black Hats and White Hats are going to be clearly fighting now”
Hmm I hear these quotes quite a big lately.
Devin Nunes
December 26, 2022
4,941 Views
==The rise and fall of peer review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing==
Adam Mastroianni
Dec 13
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
Most of those folks didn’t even realize they were in an experiment. Many of them, including me, weren’t born when the experiment started. If we had noticed what was going on, maybe we would have demanded a basic level of scientific rigor. Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)….
Highly recommend this long article
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Marc Andreessen’s comments on this article. Article is stating why studies don’t work, similar to anons post this am
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1607272016293552129?s=20&t=HBais3ayZJKLKtCfOmrBlg
Marc’s posts
This looks like an anons meme
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1605779561299398657?s=20&t=HBais3ayZJKLKtCfOmrBlg
He’s a loser and knows it. Insinuating its Trump’s fault, he denied it days later. But its obvious. He will never be president
More
That all changed after World War II.Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.
Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected. You can still write to your friends about your findings, but hiring committees and grant agencies act as if the only science that exists is the stuff published in peer-reviewed journals. This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades.
The results are in. It failed.
A WHOLE LOTTA MONEY FOR NOTHIN’
Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.
Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.
It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning physics discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.
Of course, a lot of other stuff has changed since World War II. We did a terrible job running this experiment, so it’s all confounded. All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal. In this biz, we call this a total flop.
POSTMORTEM
What went wrong?
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.
In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time. If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.
(When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor’s words, “a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.”)
The invention of peer review may have even encouraged bad research. If you try to publish a paper showing that, say, watching puppy videos makes people donate more to charity, and Reviewer 2 says “I will only be impressed if this works for cat videos as well,” you are under extreme pressure to make a cat video study work. Maybe you fudge the numbers a bit, or toss out a few outliers, or test a bunch of cat videos until you find one that works and then you never mention the ones that didn’t. 🎶 Do a little fraud // get a paper published // get down tonight 🎶
PEER REVIEW, WE HARDLY TOOK YE SERIOUSLY
Here’s another way that we can test whether peer review worked: did it actually earn scientists' trust?
Scientists often say they take peer review very seriously. But people say lots of things they don’t mean, like “It’s great to e-meet you” and “I’ll never leave you, Adam.” If you look at what scientists actually do, it’s clear they don’t think peer review really matters.
First: if scientists cared a lot about peer review, when their papers got reviewed and rejected, they would listen to the feedback, do more experiments, rewrite the paper, etc. Instead, they usually just submit the same paper to another journal. This was one of the first things I learned as a young psychologist, when my undergrad advisor explained there is a “big stochastic element” in publishing (translation: “it’s random, dude”). If the first journal didn’t work out, we’d try the next one. Publishing is like winning the lottery, she told me, and the way to win is to keep stuffing the box with tickets. When very serious and successful scientists proclaim that your supposed system of scientific fact-checking is no better than chance, that’s pretty dismal.
Second: once a paper gets published, we shred the reviews. A few journals publish reviews; most don't. Nobody cares to find out what the reviewers said or how the authors edited their paper in response, which suggests that nobody thinks the reviews actually mattered in the first place.
And third: scientists take unreviewed work seriously without thinking twice. We read “preprints” and working papers and blog posts, none of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. We use data from Pew and Gallup and the government, also unreviewed. We go to conferences where people give talks about unvetted projects, and we do not turn to each other and say, “So interesting! I can’t wait for it to be peer reviewed so I can find out if it’s true.”
Instead, scientists tacitly agree that peer review adds nothing, and they make up their minds about scientific work by looking at the methods and results. Sometimes people say the quiet part loud, like Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner:
I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean.I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
CAN WE FIX IT? NO WE CAN'T
I used to think about all the ways we could improve peer review. Reviewers should look at the data! Journals should make sure that papers aren’t fraudulent!
It’s easy to imagine how things could be better—my friend Ethan and I wrote a whole paper on it—but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to make things better. My complaints about peer review were a bit like looking at the ~35,000 Americans who die in car crashes every year and saying “people shouldn’t crash their cars so much.” Okay, but how?
Lack of effort isn’t the problem: remember that our current system requires 15,000 years of labor every year, and it still does a really crappy job. Paying peer reviewers doesn’t seem to make them any better. Neither does training them. Maybe we can fix some things on the margins, but remember that right now we’re publishing papers that use capital T’s instead of error bars, so we’ve got a long, long way to go.
What if we made peer review way stricter? That might sound great, but it would make lots of other problems with peer review way worse.
For example, you used to be able to write a scientific paper with style. Now, in order to please reviewers, you have to write it like a legal contract. Papers used to begin like, “Help! A mysterious number is persecuting me,” and now they begin like, “Humans have been said, at various times and places, to exist, and even to have several qualities, or dimensions, or things that are true about them, but of course this needs further study (Smergdorf & Blugensnout, 1978; Stikkiwikket, 2002; von Fraud et al., 2018b)”.
This blows. And as a result, nobody actually reads these papers. Some of them are like 100 pages long with another 200 pages of supplemental information, and all of it is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately. Recently, a friend asked me when I last read a paper from beginning to end; I couldn’t remember, and neither could he. “Whenever someone tells me they loved my paper,” he said, “I say thank you, even though I know they didn’t read it.” Stricter peer review would mean even more boring papers, which means even fewer people would read them.
Making peer review harsher would also exacerbate the worst problem of all: just knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them makes you worse at thinking. It’s like being a teenager again: before you do anything, you ask yourself, “BUT WILL PEOPLE THINK I’M COOL?” When getting and keeping a job depends on producing popular ideas, you can get very good at thought-policing yourself into never entertaining anything weird or unpopular at all. That means we end up with fewer revolutionary ideas, and unless you think everything’s pretty much perfect right now, we need revolutionary ideas real bad.
On the off chance you do figure out a way to improve peer review without also making it worse, you can try convincing the nearly 30,000 scientific journals in existence to apply your magical method to the ~4.7 million articles they publish every year. Good luck!
PEER REVIEW IS WORSE THAN NOTHING; OR, WHY IT AIN’T ENOUGH TO SNIFF THE BEEF
Peer review doesn’t work and there’s probably no way to fix it. But a little bit of vetting is better than none at all, right?
I say: no way.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
I say: no way.
Imagine you discover that the Food and Drug Administration’s method of “inspecting” beef is just sending some guy (“Gary”) around to sniff the beef and say whether it smells okay or not, and the beef that passes the sniff test gets a sticker that says “INSPECTED BY THE FDA.” You’d be pretty angry. Yes, Gary may find a few batches of bad beef, but obviously he’s going to miss most of the dangerous meat. This extremely bad system is worse than nothing because it fools people into thinking they’re safe when they’re not.
That’s what our current system of peer review does, and it’s dangerous. That debunked theory about vaccines causing autism comes from a peer-reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and it stayed there for twelve years before it was retracted. How many kids haven’t gotten their shots because one rotten paper made it through peer review and got stamped with the scientific seal of approval?
If you want to sell a bottle of vitamin C pills in America, you have to include a disclaimer that says none of the claims on the bottle have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Maybe journals should stamp a similar statement on every paper: “NOBODY HAS REALLY CHECKED WHETHER THIS PAPER IS TRUE OR NOT. IT MIGHT BE MADE UP, FOR ALL WE KNOW.” That would at least give people the appropriate level of confidence.
SCIENCE MUST BE FREE
Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?
I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.
But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work. Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.
If you’ve got weak-link worries, I totally get it. If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.
Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat. Remember that it used to be obviously true that the Earth is the center of the universe, and if scientific journals had existed in Copernicus’ time, geocentrist reviewers would have rejected his paper and patted themselves on the back for preventing the spread of misinformation. Eugenics used to be hot stuff in science—do you think a bunch of racists would give the green light to a paper showing that Black people are just as smart as white people? Or any paper at all by a Black author? (And if you think that’s ancient history: this dynamic is still playing out today.) We still don’t understand basic truths about the universe, and many ideas we believe today will one day be debunked. Peer review, like every form of censorship, merely slows down truth.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
HOORAY WE FAILED
Nobody was in charge of our peer review experiment, which means nobody has the responsibility of saying when it’s over. Seeing no one else, I guess I’ll do it:
We’re done, everybody! Champagne all around! Great work, and congratulations. We tried peer review and it didn’t work.
Honesty, I’m so relieved. That system sucked! Waiting months just to hear that an editor didn’t think your paper deserved to be reviewed? Reading long walls of text from reviewers who for some reason thought your paper was the source of all evil in the universe? Spending a whole day emailing a journal begging them to let you use the word “years” instead of always abbreviating it to “y” for no reason (this literally happened to me)? We never have to do any of that ever again.
I know we all might be a little disappointed we wasted so much time, but there's no shame in a failed experiment. Yes, we should have taken peer review for a test run before we made it universal. But that’s okay—it seemed like a good idea at the time, and now we know it wasn’t. That’s science! It will always be important for scientists to comment on each other’s ideas, of course. It’s just this particular way of doing it that didn’t work.
What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it. I held nothing back—I even admitted that I forgot why I ran one of the studies. I put jokes in it because nobody could tell me not to. I uploaded all the materials, data, and code where everybody could see them. I figured I’d look like a total dummy and nobody would pay any attention, but at least I was having fun and doing what I thought was right.
Then, before I even told anyone about the paper, thousands of people found it, commented on it, and retweeted it.
Total strangers emailed me thoughtful reviews. Tenured professors sent me ideas. NPR asked for an interview. The paper now has more views than the last peer-reviewed paper I published, which was in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And I have a hunch far more people read this new paper all the way to the end, because the final few paragraphs got a lot of comments in particular. So I dunno, I guess that seems like a good way of doing it?
I don’t know what the future of science looks like. Maybe we’ll make interactive papers in the metaverse or we’ll download datasets into our heads or whisper our findings to each other on the dance floor of techno-raves. Whatever it is, it’ll be a lot better than what we’ve been doing for the past sixty years. And to get there, all we have to do is what we do best: experiment.
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Jesus Calls His First Disciples
5 One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret,[a] the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. 2 He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat.
4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”
5 Simon answered, “Master, we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”
6 When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. 7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.
8 When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” 9 For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken, 10 and so were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, Simon’s partners.
Then Jesus said to Simon, “Don’t be afraid; from now on you will fish for people.” 11 So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him.
Never give up and believe in the word of the master anons, its hard but not impossible! Faith is indomitable
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke 5&version=NIV
Luke Chapter 5
So we have fake doctor running the country, great! Its really Obama and Rice, this a shit show and they are getting away with it
Wouldn't be surprised if Trump was really the last president because “they” are trying to introduce the gov is now run by committee
There are “Gary’s” placed everywhere
That’s what our current system of peer review does, and it’s dangerous. That debunked theory about vaccines causing autism comes from a peer-reviewed paper in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, and it stayed there for twelve years before it was retracted. How many kids haven’t gotten their shots because one rotten paper made it through peer review and got stamped with the scientific seal of approval?
This guy is so wrong heretypical mindset
The real problem is researchers only live on grant money, so they lie cheat and steal to get more money and NIH could care less because our gov gives them billions to do tests on beagles… the whole system is corrupt.
Read the phallacy of Pasteur, presenting false science for Pharma companies in France. Bechamp was a brilliant scientist and he didn't push unnecessary pills and potions
The Dream & Lie of Louis Pasteur
by R. B. Pearson (originally Pasteur, Plagiarist, Imposter 1942)
Pasteur’s Treatment Causes Rabbis
Free book
http://whale.to/a/b/pearson.html
(I’ve read this book a couple of times, Pasteur was is a fraud for Pharma)
That it was widely known is indicated by the fact that the world-famous English nurse,Florence Nightingale, published an attack on the idea in 1860, over 17 years before Pasteur adopted it and claimed it as his own
She said of 'infection':
Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another.
Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves?
I was brought up to believe that smallpox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs) and that smallpox would not begin itself, any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog.
Since then I have seen with my own eyes and smelled with my own nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in closed rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been 'caught', but must have begun.
I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another. Now, dogs do not pass into cats.
I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever; and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.
Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical, if we looked upon disease in this light (for diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun-substantives):
True nursing ignores infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defence a true nurse either asks or needs.
Wise and humane management of the patient is the best safeguard against infection. The greater part of nursing consists of preserving cleanliness.
The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions."
Here you have Florence Nightingale, one of the most famous nurses in history, after life-long experience with infection, contagion and epidemics, challenging the germ theory 17 years before Pasteur put it forward as his own discovery! (See Ch.8, p.61).
She clearly understood it and its utter fallacy better before 1860 than Pasteur did, either in 1878 or later!
And, to see what a parasite Pasteur was on men who did things, let us digress and go back a few years, to the time when the study of germs was an outgrowth of the study of fermentation.
http://whale.to/a/b/pearson.html
I hesitate to post this, because the guy is an asshole, but its news
https://twitter.com/davereaboi/status/1607777382680739840?s=20&t=j756rio_oDcf7iYeShJi0w
Wasn’t Trump going after TVA for their enormous salaries and power?
https://twitter.com/Oilfield_Rando/status/1607426187164262404?s=20&t=j756rio_oDcf7iYeShJi0w
So assholes are justifying limiting free speech, because many more would have died!
I have no hope for the retards in society! God bless their souls and wishing they move to Canada or the EU with the system they endorse!
https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1607533156780982276?s=20&t=j756rio_oDcf7iYeShJi0w
BTW since when is it that people disagreeing with the proscribed narrative to program people to obey,become dissidents, like in a communist country?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1607744440470233090?s=20&t=j756rio_oDcf7iYeShJi0w
https://twitter.com/heyyoudvd/status/1606419388973944837?s=20&t=j756rio_oDcf7iYeShJi0w
27 Dec, 2022 16:16
Putin bans all oil sales to ‘price cap’ states
The move is in response to a Western coalition price-limit on Russia’s seaborne oil exports
President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree on retaliatory measures to the West’s price cap on Russian oil exports. The ratification on Tuesday is in response to the punitive measure taken by the EU, G7 countries, and Australia, which came into effect earlier this month.
The presidential decree bans the supply of oil and petroleum products from Russia to countries which apply a price cap in their contracts. It also prohibits deliveries if the contracts directly or indirectly specify the cap.
According to the decree, which was published on the government’s website, the ban on oil supplies in response to the price cap comes into effect on February 1, 2023 and is valid until July 1, 2023. The effective date of the ban on supplying petroleum products will be determined later by the government.
The president can grant special permission for the supply of oil and oil products prohibited by the price ceiling, according to the decree. The Russian Ministry of Energy will monitor compliance with the presidential order on retaliatory measures.
The $60-per-barrel price cap on Russian seaborne oil exports was introduced by the EU, G7 countries, and Australia on December 5. It bans Western companies from providing insurance and other services for Russian oil shipments unless the cargo is purchased at or below the set price.
The Kremlin vowed to respond to the measure in a way that would best serve Moscow’s interests, warning it would not trade with nations that support the price ceiling. Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said that Russian oil will still be in high demand despite the latest sanctions on the country’s exports. By imposing a price cap, Western countries will only trigger further energy inflation due to scarce supply, the minister said, adding that Russia views such types of non-market mechanisms as unacceptable.
(He already said multiple times je would do this, they never listen. Russia is not hurting as much as they think. Remember he had 8 years to plan this)
https://www.rt.com/business/569014-russia-putin-oil-price-response/
27 Dec, 2022 16:13
US adviser to Ukraine calls for banned munitions supplies
These weapons multiply the artillery shells by up to 10 times more lethal, US Army veteran Dan Rice told CNN
Dan Rice, an American adviser to the Ukrainian military, has called on Washington to authorize the delivery of cluster munitions to Kiev to increase its “base lethality” and “win the war” against Russia.
During an interview with CNN last week, Rice, who is officially the special adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine's Armed Forces, insisted that the US “really needs to”supply Kiev’s forces with cluster bombs.
They are like throwing “a flame thrower at a bunch of ants” and would “multiply the artillery shells by five to ten times more lethal,” he argued, according to a transcript posted by the channel.
“This is how you increase the base lethality and win the war. If we want to win it, we need to give them something like that,” he told the outlet, calling cluster bombs a “game changer.”
However, he noted that US President Joe Biden’s administration is not currently willing to supply such munitions to Ukraine, as it would anger Western European states that have signed a treaty banning these weapons.
“According to our own policy, we have concerns about the use of those kinds of munitions,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told journalists earlier this month.
The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) banning these types of weapons was signed by over 100 nations, including most EU member states. Russia, the US and Ukraine have not signed the Convention.
One of the main concerns related to cluster bombs is the large amount of unexploded munitions left behind after strikes which pose a threat to civilians. =•Rice, however, insists that Kiev forces would use these weapons responsibly and “clean up” after themselves “as soon as they liberate a town.==”
(sure, right, they love killing people)
Russia has repeatedly accused Kiev of using Soviet-made cluster bombs both before and after Moscow launched its military campaign against the country. In March, the Ukrainian army reportedly used a Tochka-U missile with a cluster payload to strike the center of Donetsk, leaving over 20 civilians dead and dozens injured.
In October, Russian officials accused Kiev’s forces of using a cluster munition for the US-made HIMARS rocket launcher to strike a river crossing in Kherson, which killed four civilians, including a journalist. Kiev has denied responsibility for the attacks.
The US is believed to be sitting on a stockpile of cluster munitions but has so far refrained from officially sending any of it to Ukraine. However, even though the export of such weapons has been banned by Congress, media outlets such as Politico have suggested that President Joe Biden and even his Secretary of State Antony Blinken could potentially override this ban.
https://www.rt.com/russia/569008-us-adviser-ukraine-cluster-munitions/
27 Dec, 2022 16:09
No more ‘business as usual’ with EU – Moscow
The bloc has done the US’ bidding at the expense of its own interests, the Russian FM has said
Relations between Moscow and Brussels are now at their “lowest point,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, told TASS in an interview published on Tuesday. The EU has declared a “hybrid war” on Moscow by unquestioningly following the US, the minister added.
The policies of Brussels have only hurt the interests and well-being of Europeans themselves, Lavrov said. He also accused Washington of barring EU nations from conducting dialogue on energy with Moscow, even though Russia’s supplies of fuel provided Europe with “unprecedented prosperity” for decades.
Following the launch of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, the EU began gradually reducing Russian energy imports through sanctions, which include a ban on EU imports of seaborne Russian oil, as well as a $60-per-barrel cap on Russian seaborne crude.
In late July, EU member states agreed on a plan to reduce their gas consumption by 15% over the coming months to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. These policies, coupled with the sanctions and the conflict in Ukraine, have led to an energy crunch in the EU, with gas prices climbing to record highs.
Russia will “no longer do ‘business as usual’”with partners such as these, Lavrov warned, adding that Moscow has no intention of “banging its head against a wall,” as it can find countries to work with beyond Europe.
Nevertheless, Moscow is prepared to cooperate with more pragmatic European leaders in the future, the foreign minister said. “If some nationally-oriented politicians emerge [in Europe] who understand all the benefits of equal and mutually beneficial partnership with Russia, I can assure you, there will be no issues on our side,” he said.
“We are realists. We will continue to work with those few Europeans that cherish friendship with Russia. We will not cooperate with Russophobes,” Lavrov added.
https://www.rt.com/russia/569007-eu-moscow-business-as-usual/
27 Dec, 2022 16:31
HomeGames & Culture
Iconic director speaks out on Kosovo standoff
Serbs put up barricades because they had no choice, says Emir Kusturica
The local Serbs who set up roadblocks in northern Kosovo are defending their very existence, and anyone with a sense of decency should support that, award-winning filmmaker Emir Kusturica said on Tuesday.
“Anyone with even a shred of compassion can’t give up on people who put up barricades to defend their right to exist,” Kusturica told the Belgrade daily Novosti. “If I could join them, I would. As I am banned from entering Kosovo, however, I can only stand with them through my words and deeds.”
He also noted that it was not comfort or arrogance that drove the people to that drastic step, but “great trouble” they were in.
Kusturica, 68, was commenting on the decision by ethnic Albanian authorities in Pristinato ban Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Churchfrom entering the breakaway province, amid the ongoing standoff with local Serbs.
Residents of several municipalities in the north of Kosovo put up roadblocks earlier this month, protesting the arrest of an ethnic Serb policeman and a heavy presence of ethnic Albanian police in their communities. Pristina demands the removal of the barricades, for the sake of “free movement of all citizens” and insists that its writ must apply everywhere in the province.
(Clinton) NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 and handed control of Kosovo to ethnic Albanian separatists, who declared independence in 2008 and have demanded recognition from Belgrade ever since. Serbia has refused, despite intense pressure from the US and EU.
The ethnic Albanian authorities have claimed Russia is behind the recent unrest, which Serbia called a “vicious lie.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has formally requested the return of up to 1,000 Serbian troops and police officers to Kosovo, as entitled by UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which also authorizes the NATO presence in the province. He said he was privately told by Western leaders that they do not intend to honor the resolution, or his request.
Kusturica is a renowned film director, actor, author and musician, who lives in western Serbia, in the traditional village of Drvengrad that he built as a film set in 2004. He has won multiple awards at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin film festivals since the 1980s, and received the Order of Friendship from Russia in 2016
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/569003-kosovo-barricades-serbs-kusturica/
A very bad penny
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1607516217203650562?s=20&t=EZKZ4mnvfe1d4YphTBvYvQ