Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
Israeli military vehicles surround ambulance in West Bank
Al Mayadeen
IOF announces start of military operation in Jenin, the occupied West Bank, as the Palestinian Resistance moves to confront invading forces.
The Israeli military has announced the start of a new military campaign in the West Bank city of Jenin, which it dubbed the “Iron Wall”.
Israeli media reported that the campaign was executed by order of the political echelon, following a Cabinet meeting last Friday, which added the West Bank to the goals of the ongoing war.
Israeli Security Minister Israel Katz said the military operation in Jenin was “prepared to protect settlers and settlement outposts in the area,” while an Israeli security source told Israeli media that “the operation in Jenin will be unprecedented in its size and scope.”
Israeli media further noted that the Israeli military, Shin Bet, and “Border Guards” began an operation meant to “foil terrorism” in Jenin, which will continue for the coming days, asserting that a large IOF force has advanced on Jenin from all directions after the Shin Bet disrupted internet communications throughout the Jenin Refugee Camp.
“Israel’s” Walla news website’s military analyst Amir Bohbot said the military operation in Jenin began with a UAV attack on infrastructure. He further said that the operation will continue for as long as needed, noting that the goal is to “secure the Israeli Army’s freedom of operation throughout the West Bank, and destroy and neutralize terrorist infrastructure and time bombs.”
A Presidential Pardon does not take effect unless the suspect accepts it. That according to a little known, 1915 ruling from the Supreme Court, once accepted, the pardon serves as an “imputation of guilt,” or what’s more commonly known as an admission. Because accepting the pardon is “essential to it’s validity,” I am demanding the Biden family, Dr. Fauci, Gen. Mark Milley, the members of the J6 Committee and everyone else Biden unsurprisingly pardoned declare their acceptance of the pardon publicly. Because, according to the Supreme Court, it would also serve as a declaration of guilt.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to officially withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), citing its failure to hold China accountable and its role in pushing radical globalist health agendas that undermine American sovereignty.
Trump’s executive order will halt all U.S. funding to the WHO, redirecting those resources to domestic health initiatives that prioritize American interests and values.
WHO has long pointed to its mishandling of global health crises, its cozy relationship with China, and its dangerous push for vaccine mandates and digital health passports.
Recall that the Biden regime publicly affirmed their commitment to a “legally-binding” accord back in 2023, which will give the World Health Organization (WHO) control over U.S. pandemic policies, though work remains in certain areas.
Once a health emergency is declared every signatory, including the United States, must submit to the authority of the WHO. This includes caving to them on treatments, lockdowns and vaccine mandates along with government surveillance.
Episode 2 begins by disputing Joe Biden’s claim that the concert attacked by Hamas militants was a “peace event” promoting improve understanding between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The Nova music festival was a Zionist event celebrating the Jewish Holiday Shemini Atzeret.
It then continues with the history of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) when the majority of Palestinians were driven from their homes farms by terrorist Zionist gangs (see The Octopus Game Part II – The Hidden History of Palestine), most fled to either the West Bank or Gaza, territories yet to be seized by Zionist terrorists.
When the UN recognized Israeli independence in1948, they also approved the West Bank and Gaza as Palestinian territory, with the West Bank to be administered by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. The majority of Arab states supported the UN decision to limit Palestine to the West Bank and Gaza (denying the millions of Palestinians displaced from their homes in Palestine’s interior the right to return).
Following the Shah’s overthrow in the 1979 Iranian revolution Iran would be an exception. They played an active role in building Palestinian resistance in Lebanon by sending Shia organizers to organize Lebanese Shia Muslims during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In response, the US persuaded Sadam Hussein (a CIA asset installed as Iraqi president in 1979) to declare war on Iran in 1980-1988.
Meanwhile arbitrary shooting of Palestinians by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) led to the First Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza and to the formation of Hamas in 1987. Unlike the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a secular leftist organization, Hamas was an Islamic organization committed to forming an Islamic state. To counter Hamas influence, on November 15, 1988 PLO leader Yasser Arafat declared the first Palestinian State consisting of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In doing so he, like the UN and the Oslo Accords, accepted defined boundaries allocating 78% of historic Palestine to Israel.
The immense unpopularity of this move led to a steady decline in PLO influence and and an increase in the influence of Islamic groups, such as Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah.
*The Oslo Accords are a pair of interim agreements between Israel and the PLO creating the Palestinian National Authority, tasked with conducting limited Palestinian self-governance over parts of the West Bank and Gaza and acknowledging the PLO as Israel’s partner in permanent-status negotiations about remaining issues around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It did not create a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu officially opposes the formation of a Palestinian state.
In Britain, it is now official Government policy to ignore the needs of the elderly. This policy is common throughout the world. Doctors and nurses are told to let old people die – and to withhold treatment which might save their lives. Hospital staff are told to deprive the elderly of food and water so that they die rather than take up hospital beds. Nursing home staff have even been given the right to sedate elderly patients without their knowledge. The only -ism that no one cares about is ageism.
But at what age are patients simply allowed to die? And how old is too old for patients to be resuscitated? At what point does society have the right to say `You’ve lived long enough, now you must die and make way for someone else’? And why should resuscitation be decided by age? It is possible to argue that it would make as much sense to decide according to wealth or beauty. But ageism is now officially accepted. Anyone over 60 is now officially old, though in a growing number of hospitals the cut off age for resuscitation is 55 or even 50.
We live in a politically correct world but the elderly don’t count – particularly if they are white and English. Report after report after report shows elderly patients being left in pain, in soiled bed clothes. Elderly patients in hospital are ignored by staff and left to starve to death, denied even water if they cannot get out of bed and fetch it themselves.
Old people are a burden which the Government cannot afford and so the politicians will continue to authorise whatever methods are necessary to ensure that the number of burdensome old people is kept to a minimum. The existence of an absurd branch of medicine called geriatrics is used as an excuse to shove old people into backwater wards and to provide them with second-rate medical treatment. In February 2011, an official report condemned the NHS for its `inhumane treatment of elderly patients’ and stated that NHS hospitals were `failing to meet even the most basic standards of care’ for the over-65s. It is no exaggeration to say that the NHS treats the elderly with contempt. (It used to be said that you can judge a civilisation by the way it treats its elderly.)
It was back in February 2005 that it was revealed that the Government had advised that hospital patients with little hope of recovery should be allowed to die because of the cost of keeping them alive. The Labour Government suggested that `old people’ be denied the right to food and water if they fell into a coma or couldn’t speak for themselves. So much for any hope for stroke victims. The Government suggested that the need to cut costs came before the need to preserve the lives of patients and decided it had the right to overturn a right-to-life ruling which had been made when a judge ordered that artificial nutrition and hydration should not be withdrawn unless the life of a patient could be described as `intolerable’. (The judge had added that when there was any doubt, preservation of life should take precedence.)
Of course, depriving the elderly of food and water is sometimes more a consequence of incompetence than official policy. When my mother was in hospital in Exeter she couldn’t feed herself but the staff didn’t feed her. If no relative could get to the hospital to feed her she didn’t eat. Drinks were put on her tray and then taken away untouched. `Not thirsty, today?’ an idiot would ask merrily.
Meanwhile, the Government pours money into subsidising the lives of the lazy and the work-shy. Healthy 30-year-olds sit around growing chip backsides and beer bellies, slumped in front of their high definition digital television sets watching their choice of State subsidised satellite television, opening the windows to let the heat out because it’s easier than turning down the central heating.
The elderly are classified as the `Unwanted Generation’: a political embarrassment. Elderly individuals facing blindness from age-related macular disease are denied drugs that might have prevented their blindness. The elderly are considered expensive, useless and expendable. The theory is that they don’t contribute and rarely vote and can, therefore, be disregarded. But those who believe this will be old sooner than they think. And the definition of ‘old’ is getting younger by the year.
Wars have taught us that people seem to be prepared to accept as normal all sorts of terrible things. But how unbelievably awful it is that doctors and nurses accept that the elderly (officially the over 60s) must be allowed to die because keeping them alive isn’t cost effective. The official attitude seems to be that old people don’t matter and don’t have rights simply because they are old. In mid August 2007, a Select Committee on Human Rights, comprised of MPs and peers, reported that 21% of hospitals and care homes failed to meet even minimum standards of dignity and privacy for older people. The Committee said it had uncovered evidence of neglect, abuse, discrimination and unfair treatment of frail, older people. (Their discovery came as no surprise to those of us who have been uncovering such abuse for decades.) How have we managed to forget that in the 1930s the Nazis deliberately starved and dehydrated elderly and vulnerable patients because they were regarded as a useless burden on society? That is exactly what we are doing today.
[…]
Ageism is, it seems, now endemic in health care. A reader wrote to tell me that when she visited her doctor complaining of painful knees her doctor told her, very abruptly, that her problem was that she was living too long. She was devastated. `It wasn’t said as a joke,’ she told me. `He meant it.’ In the months before he died my father repeatedly complained: `People treat me like a fool because I am old’. A 79-year-old reader told me: `If you are over 55 they want you dead because you’re too expensive alive.’
We now live in a world where it is considered acceptable for men and women to have to share a ward; where hospital bathrooms are so dirty that patients dare not use them; where dentists are so scarce and expensive that people have to resort to pulling their own bad teeth with the aid of a length of string tied to a doorknob. But it is the elderly who, above all others, are regarded as disposable and irrelevant. It is the elderly who have no rights. Sexism and racism are outlawed but ageism is not. Indeed, it seems clear that ageism is now a State sponsored prejudice. Violent, feral youths who are caught assaulting elderly law-abiding citizens are likely to be ‘punished’ with a fistful of vouchers entitling them to a handful of free CDs (the lyrics of which may well encourage more violence) but honest, elderly citizens who, cannot afford to pay their council tax bill will end up in prison.
[…]
Note
The above essay is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book entitled `Why and how doctors kill more people than cancer’. The book is available via the bookshop on http://www.vernoncoleman.com
The timing of his decision to lift the terror designation looks like mere nose-thumbing at Trump, though it may help Havana more than you think
President Joe Biden’s January 14 removal of sanctions imposed on Cuba during the first Trump administration could have been a major step toward restarting Barack Obama’s policy of engagement if Biden had done it in his first week as president instead of his last.
But done at the last minute, they are unlikely to have much impact. Two of the three will not even take effect until after Trump’s inauguration.
Senior members of Trump’s incoming foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for Latin AmericaMaurico Claver-Carone, have criticized Biden’s actions, noting that they can be quickly and easily reversed by the incoming administration.
“No one should be under any illusion in terms of a change in Cuba policy,” Waltz said.
Nevertheless, within hours of the White House’s announcement, the Cuban government announced that, in response to appeals from the Vatican, it would gradually release 553 prisoners, many of whom were involved in the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021. The deal was the culmination of three years of Vatican shuttle diplomacy.
Biden’s package includes three measures: (1) It rescinded Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 5, of June 16, 2017, the basic framework for Trump’s policy of regime change; (2) It suspends Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which gives U.S. citizens, including naturalized Cuban Americans, whose property was nationalized by Cuba’s revolutionary government the right to sue in U.S. Federal Court anyone making beneficial use of that property; and (3) It initiated removal of Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism.
Trump’s 2017 NSPM included several sanctions limiting travel to Cuba and, most importantly, prohibiting doing business with Cuban companies managed by the armed forces, including many of the hotels where U.S. visitors typically stayed. However, Biden’s recission of NSPM-5 does not reopen those hotels to U.S. visitors because another, separate, sanction imposed by Trump in 2020 prohibits U.S. visitors from staying in any hotel owned by the Cuban government. That prohibition remains in place.
A suspension of Title III of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act only takes effect 15 days after the president notifies Congress of his intention to suspend it, in this case, on January 29. President Trump could either lift the suspension, like he did in 2019, or simply wait six months at which time the suspension will expire automatically unless renewed.
In Congressional testimony on May 22, 2024, Secretary of State Tony Blinken admitted that there was no factual basis for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the reasons cited in the State Department’s annual report on terrorism were no longer valid. When the administration finally undertook a formal review of Cuba’s designation, it concluded— predictably—that Cuba should be removed from the list.
But Cuba’s removal does not take effect for 45 days, giving Congress and the Trump administration plenty of time to block it. The Republican majority in Congress can vote to nullify Biden’s action or Trump can simply put Cuba back on the list at his discretion — just as he did in January 2021.
Moreover, even if Biden’s measures survive long enough to take effect, no company, U.S. or foreign, is going to invest the time and resources necessary to take advantage of reduced sanctions when there is a better than even chance that President Trump will reverse them sooner or later, just as he reversed Obama’s in 2017.
So why would the Biden administration bother to take such ineffectual and probably ephemeral steps to reduce sanctions, and why would the Cuban government release more than five hundred prisoners in response?
Winning freedom for the prisoners was obviously the main motivation for Biden, but for years the administration was loathe to engage Cuba in negotiations to free them. However, after Bob Menendez’s departure from the Senate, the Democrats’ loss in November, and the ruby red hue of Florida politics, Biden no longer had any reason to subordinate Cuba policy to domestic politics.
Perhaps entreaties from both Congressional Democrats and the Vatican that Biden do something to alleviate the deepening humanitarian crisis on the island finally broke through. Or perhaps there was some guilty pleasure in complicating Trump’s forthcoming Cuba policy — poetic justice for Trump putting Cuba on the terrorism list as a parting shot just days before Biden’s inauguration in 2020.
Cuban officials were equally resistant to freeing the protestors, whose tough prison sentences served as a warning and deterrent against future protests. Yet they agreed, despite there being slim chance that Cuba will gain any economic relief from Biden’s measures. But even in the worst case — that Trump scuttles all of Biden’s measures immediately — Cuba would still reap some political benefit. By releasing so many political prisoners — the most since the 1970s — Havana addresses a major point of friction in its relations with the European Union, an important source of desperately needed humanitarian assistance.
Havana’s prisoner release demonstrates to the international community at large its willingness to compromise and desire to reduce conflict with Washington. It puts the United States government on record acknowledging that Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism. And it puts the Trump administration in the awkward position of having to choose between leaving the new measures in place or reneging on an agreement to release 553 people from jail.
President Biden’s four years in the White House were a colossal missed opportunity in U.S.-Cuban relations — four years in which domestic political aspirations overrode foreign policy interests, advancing neither. And the Cuban people paid the price as Washington stood idly by while their standard of living plummeted, partly as a result of sanctions Trump imposed and Biden left in place.
Barack Obama took bold action to normalize relations with Cuba. Donald Trump took bold action to destabilize it. Nothing about Joe Biden’s Cuba policy was bold, and it accomplished nothing. Cuba is poorer and less open today than it was four years ago, China’s and Russia’s influence there is greater, a million more Cuban migrants have fled to the United States, and Democrats are less politically popular than ever in Florida.
Alok Sharma, a Secretary of State in the previous UK government, has admitted that the Government knew, before they received regulatory approval, that people would be injured by the covid vaccines.
It was a lie to say that the vaccines were “safe” and it was unethical to coerce and mandate people into taking them. Worse still, it was pure evil to expose our nation’s children to this unnecessary and entirely avoidable risk of serious injury and death.
The Government anticipated a £1.7 billion bill for injuries caused by the coronavirus vaccine, the Covid Inquiry has heard …
Documents show that after initial conversations with Pfizer-BioNTech – which developed one of the mRNA jabs – the Government had estimated indemnity costs of between £75 billion and £300 billion.
The documents state: … “While the vaccines will be subject to regulatory approval, given the timeframe, the vaccines will not be able to benefit from the longer and more extensive clinical trials that would usually be the norm in any vaccine development.”
Interestingly, The Telegraph also notes that the UK government did not offer pharmaceuticals full indemnity as was the case in the USA:
Pharmaceutical companies developing the jabs initially asked for “statutory immunity”, which would have shielded them from any civil claims and which had been agreed by the US.
However, Lord Sharma said the Government had “pushed back” on offering full immunity to pharmaceutical companies, and eventually negotiated a lesser indemnity agreement, which they expected to cost £1.7 billion in a worst-case scenario.
Without considering the fraud committed by Pharmaceutical companies when they marketed their covid injections as “safe and effective,” it seems in the UK, the pharmaceutical companies are liable for civil claims.
In the case of fraudulent activities related to their products, pharmaceutical companies can be held criminally responsible. Fraudulent activities can include various forms of misconduct such as illegal promotion of drugs, failure to report safety data and manufacturing violations.
In the UK, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (“ECCTA”) introduced a new offence where companies may be held criminally liable if they did not have “reasonable prevention procedures” in place when a fraudulent act was committed by persons associated with them.
Joe Biden pardoned Tony Fauci, General Mark Milley, and the entire J6 Select Committee of liars in his final act as president.
They were all faithful servants to the Democrat machine. Now comes their reward.
Fauci’s policies destroyed millions of lives, bankrupted thousands of businesses, and unnecessarily killed millions around the world.
Liz Cheney, who is currently under investigation by the US House of Representatives, knowingly lied about January 6 and President Trump’s actions that day.
General Milley was one of the architects of the worst American foreign policy blunder in history. His response to his own ineptness was to focus on the woke military agenda. Milley also was making promises with China to warn them about any possible US attack. What a traitor.
Biden just pardoned these individuals – now we know they were all criminals.
Biden pardons for Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, the members of the Jan. 6 committee and the cops who testified before the committee because they are GUILTY OF CRIMES.
In December, Politico dropped an explosive report that Biden’s handlers were strongly considering issuing preemptive several current and former government officials who they believe will be in the incoming Trump administration’s crosshairs.
The outlet notes that the Regime has become even more panicked since Trump announced he was picking MAGA hero Kash Patel to drain the Deep State swamp and ensure those who persecuted Trump do not escape punishment.
The figures include Senator-elect Adam “Pencilneck” Schiff (D-CA), lying warmonger Liz Cheney, and COVID fraudster Anthony Fauci.
Today Biden pardoned Fauci, Milley, and liar Liz Cheney as a final act of defiance against the American people.
Read the statement below:
Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy.
Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.
In certain cases, some have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions, including General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, and the members and staff of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.
General Milley served our nation for more than 40 years, serving in multiple command and leadership posts and deploying to some of the most dangerous parts of the world to protect and defend democracy. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he guided our Armed Forces through complex global security threats and strengthened our existing alliances while forging new ones.
For more than half a century, Dr. Fauci served our country. He saved countless lives by managing the government’s response to pressing health crises, including HIV/AIDS, as well as the Ebola and Zika viruses. During his tenure as my Chief Medical Advisor, he helped the country tackle a once-in-a-century pandemic. The United States is safer and healthier because of him.
On January 6, 2021, American democracy was tested when a mob of insurrectionists attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn a fair and free election by force and violence. In light of the significance of that day, Congress established the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol to investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes of the insurrection. The Select Committee fulfilled this mission with integrity and a commitment to discovering the truth. Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions.
I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics. But these are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Baseless and politically motivated investigations wreak havoc on the lives, safety, and financial security of targeted individuals and their families. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong-and in fact have done the right thing-and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances.
That is why I am exercising my authority under the Constitution to pardon General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee. The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.
Satellite images of wildfires burning in Southern California By NBC Staff • Published January 11, 2025
Rpm Clutz
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes in Wall Street Journal End of a Climate Delusion. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Amid California’s fires, voters wake up from the dream that green pork is a solution.
CO2 emitted into the atmosphere is rapidly and, for all practical purposes, uniformly distributed around the planet.
I may be stating the obvious but it needs to be pointed out. Voters and even political leaders are surprisingly poorly informed on this point. Emissions cuts in Californiadon’t have any significant effect on California’s climate. They also have no global effect. California’s cuts are too small relative to the global whole; they also are largely illusory.
Emitting industries leave the state. They don’t stop emitting. If California imports Canadian hydro to charge its electric vehicles, consumers elsewhere have to burn more coal and gas. If Californians drive EVs, more gasoline is free to be burned by others, releasing more CO2 that influences climate change in California and everywhere else.
Green-energy subsidies do not reduce emissions. This will be news to millions of California voters. It contradicts a central tenet of state policy. It isn’t news to the actual enactors of these subsidies. A National Research Council study sponsored by congressional Democrats in 2008 concluded that such handouts were a “poor tool for reducing greenhouse gases” and called for carbon taxes instead.
Unfortunately, the incoming Obama administration quickly discovered it favored climate taxes only when Republicans were in charge. Backers would later engage in flagrant lying to promote Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, knowingly citing bogus predictions that its trillion-dollar spending profusion would reduce emissions.
A 2019 University of Oregon study had already revealed the empirical truth: Green energy doesn’t replace fossil fuels, it enables more energy consumption overall. That same year the EPA calculated that the potential emissions savings from subsidizing electric vehicles had been offset five times over by the pickup truck and SUV boom Team Obama facilitated to assure the success of its auto bailout.
American Association for the Advancement of Science study finds that of 1,500 “climate” policies announced around the world, a mere 63, or 4%, produce any reduction in emissions.
Last year, the premier journal Science put a nail in the question: 96% of policies supported worldwide as “reducing” emissions failed to do so, consisting mostly of handouts to green-energy interests.
And yet certain Journal readers still assail me with the epithet “denier.” They confuse my criticism of Democratic hypocrisy with my imagined views on climate science. As I’ve written back to many, “Don’t think politicians haven’t figured this out about you. That’s why they can give us unsustainable corporate welfare boondoggles and call it climate policy.”
A CNN moderator Saturday urged viewers to vote in an online poll on whether the California disaster should be blamed on climate change or poor leadership. Notice the non sequitur: as if climate change is an excuse for not acting against fire risk.
By all means, let politicians proclaim a “climate crisis” or any other rhetorical flourish if it helps mobilize support for public actions that actually serve a useful purpose. But a prerevolutionary situation has been building in California for two decades, starting with the Third World blackouts in late 2000 not because of any shortage of power but because of large helpings of political cowardice.
A decision in 2019 authorized yet more Third World blackouts instead of reasonably shielding utilities from lawsuit risk over fires their power lines might be accused of contributing to. One result, predictably, has been a proliferation of backyard generators, which increase fire risk.
Californians are stuck adapting in the ways left open to them. Since 2017, half a million have fled Los Angeles County.
Two social technologies might help but the state has been intent on denying itself their advantages. One is a functioning insurance market. If you can’t afford the insurance, you can’t afford the house. Get ready, instead, for a torrent of federal and state moneyto help residents, some of them wealthy, rebuild in high-risk fire zones.
The other is a functioning market in water. Five gallons to produce a walnut probably isn’t tenable under any realistic system of water pricing. If water were properly valued, municipalities would also rapidly discover the logic of building aquifers to capture seasonal runoff. A thousand things would change if water were priced to flow to its most highly valued uses.
Here’s another concept: Climate change can exist and yet be an insignificant variable.
In Southern California’s Mediterranean climate, anytime 100-mile-an-hour winds start blowing embers toward densely packed housing developments, a conflagration is certain. The only answer then is to have the manpower and resources ready to put fires out as quickly as they start.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, left, meets with Canadian Governor General Mary Simon in Ottawa on September 22, 2023. [Source: ctvnews.ca]
By Robin Philpot
A few days before Remembrance Day, November 11, 2024, the Government of Canada announced that it will not release that portion of a report produced by the Commission of Inquiry into War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission) that names 900 Canadians accused of war crimes committed on behalf of the Nazis.
Canada admitted these people and others after the Second World War, including many former members of the Waffen SS Galizien (Ukrainian).
We then learned that it was Global Affairs Canada which prevented Library and Archives Canada (LAC) from granting an access to information request to make these names public. According to the LAC spokesperson, the decision to keep the list sealed “was based on concerns regarding risk of harm to international relations.”
The Globe and Mail, which along with others filed the access to information request, explained the decision this way: “Global Affairs has repeatedly warned about Russian President Vladimir Putin using disinformation to justify his invasion of Ukraine.”
Remembrance Day? Or Suppression of Remembrance Day?
Should we remind Global Affairs Canada that during the Second World War, these 900 people were fighting for the Nazis, and therefore against our parents and grandparents! Do we have to inform them that 1.2 million Canadians fought against the Nazis, 45,000 of whom never returned?
McFarlane’s starting point is the double ovation the Canadian parliament granted former Waffen SS Galizien member Yaroslav Hunka in September 2023—a shining case of Canadian governmental amnesia.
But above all, it was the hearty applauding Chrystia Freeland, former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Canada and current Member of Parliament with the Liberal Party, whose grandfather, Mykhailo Chomiak, was a Nazi collaborator. Though Freeland cannot be held responsible for her grandfather’s crimes, she could at least recognize them and distance herself from them, which she has never done.
The author follows the journey of two families from the same region of Ukraine, then known as Galicia, who arrived in Canada in the wake of the Second World War.
On one hand, there is the family of Mykhailo Chomiak, who was the editor of the Ukrainian-language Nazi newspaper Krakivski Visti from 1940 to 1945. This newspaper, which had nothing to envy from Der Stürmer, promoted Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, the SS and, in particular, the Waffen SS Galizien (Ukrainian) and their murderous campaign against Jews, the “Judeo-Bolsheviks,” the Poles and all those they considered subhuman.
In parallel, McFarlane traces the journey of Montreal writer Ann Charney, born Ann Korsowar in Brody in 1940, a city northeast of Lviv in western Ukraine, and very close to the birthplace of the Chomiak family. Brody was a small town of about 24,000 people, 40% of whom (about 10,000) were Jews when Ann Charney was born.
Family Ties is divided into three parts. The first, entitled “Murder in Galicia,” covers the history of Galicia up to 1945 where Lviv (Lemberg, Lwow, Lvov—depending on the period) is the most important city. It was while traveling in the region for a book on another subject that the author developed this part of the story, with the help of, among others, members of the Chomiak family who had remained there after 1945.
The second part, “The Most Ukrainian of Countries,” focuses on Canadian citizens of Ukrainian origin, their deep political divisions, and their role in the politics of their country of origin and of Canada since 1945, again with the families of Mykhailo Chomiak and Ann Charney as a common thread.
The third part, “The Return of the True Believers,” concentrates mainly on the last ten years, showing in particular how the past, especially from the 1920s to the 1950s, has shaped today’s politics in both Ukraine and Canada. This part also includes a trip to Ukraine (to Lviv, Brody, and elsewhere) in 2022, after the war with Russia began.
The contrast between the two families’ stories is striking. Through his research, travels and interviews, the author allows us revisit the birth and development of the murderous fanaticism of the former, who chose to join Hitler’s hordes. He also has the reader grasp the terror suffered by millions of Jews, Poles, Russians, anti-fascist Ukrainians, and anyone who refused to adhere to the Nazi ideology.
For example, the author, who visited all the places inhabited by both, demonstrates how comfortable Chomiak lived from 1940 to 1945, especially in Krakow, the capital of the Nazi-occupation government of Poland. This comfort is illustrated in terms of the salary he was paid to edit the Nazi newspaper Krakivski Visti and the offices and equipment needed to do this work, which were confiscated from Jewish owners, but also his lodgings, seized from a Jewish family whose “filth” and “vermin” Chomiak complained about to his German employers.
In contrast, Ann Charney, her mother Dora, and her aunt Regina took refuge during the war in a barn loft a few kilometers from Brody. For two-and-a-half years, they could only rarely leave their hiding place, fearing death at the hands of German soldiers or Ukrainian collaborators, who were sometimes their neighbors from Brody. They were at the mercy of Manya, a Ukrainian woman who, in return for a few pieces of bread, extorted from them everything they had brought with them in terms of money or jewelry.
Liberated by the Red Army and in particular by a young soldier named Yuri in the summer of 1944, they could barely walk due to extreme hunger and atrophied muscles. Ann was four years old.
Peter McFarlane was inspired by Ann Charney’s memoir Dobryd (Brody) first published in 1973 (published in French in 1996) and compared by critics to that of Anne Frank. Unlike what she calls “the Holocaust industry” or “Holocaust porn,” Ann Charney, an award-winning Montreal writer and journalist, refuses to stoop so low. For her, that way of approaching these crimes dehumanizes the victims by making them objects, when there are verifiable facts and where ordinary humans attack other ordinary humans.
In Brody, the German army and the Ukrainian militias first rounded up all the Jews in a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Ukrainian collaborators, often residents of Brody themselves. Then came deportation, in particular to the first Nazi extermination center in Belzec, northwest of Lviv, which Heinrich Himmler established in early 1942.
Ann, her mother, her aunt and her cousin managed to escape the ghetto and take refuge in the barn in time to avoid the fate of the others. They were thus among the 88 survivors of Brody, out of a Jewish population of nearly 10,000 in 1939.
“So they exited our history”
The two visits that Peter McFarlane made to the Museum of History and Local Lore in Brody are the most revealing as to both what happened at that time and the current state of mind of many Ukrainians in that part of the country. McFarlane describes his arrival at the Brody Museum in 2022 as follows:
“The road to Brody was a memory lane for the SS Galizien….there is a roadside chapel surrounded by five hundred white crosses that Ukrainian SS veterans had erected in 1994 as a memory to their comrades who had fallen in the battle of Brody….”
Of the current exhibits, he adds:
“They were much the same as the previous year—still with the final room celebrating the Galizien division with photos and weapons and uniforms and maps from the battle of Brody. They had added a photo of Yaroslav Stetsko and included his declaration of independence of Ukraine ‘under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.’”
On his first visit to the Brody Museum, McFarlane had immediately noticed that there was no mention of the Jews of Brody, who had founded the town and who, in the 1880s, made up 80% of the population. He reminded the museum director of this fact, who acknowledged that it was true. The author then asked why the museum had no record of the presence of Jews. The director responded, “There were no more Jews after 1943, so they left our history,” waving his hand like a magician.
A damning portrait of Canada
The journey of these two families during and after the war and their arrival in Canada presents a damning portrait of Canada and of the leaders of the Ukrainian Canadian community, many of whom were also Nazi sympathizers and with whom the Canadian government worked at the time. The fact is that Canada rolled out the red carpet for thousands of Nazi collaborators, including Mykhailo Chomiak.
At the same time—and this makes the portrait all the more damning—Ottawa was subjecting real refugees from the Nazi war to a cruel obstacle course as they sought to immigrate to Canada. That was the case of Ann Charney and her family.
The criticism of Canadian policy does not stop there. In a clear, factual and hyperbole-free style, the author demonstrates how Canada has pursued, to this day, a policy of support for this fringe of Ukrainians who today openly and proudly herald and emulate fighters of the SS Galizien and who are very influential in the current government in Kyiv.
Family Ties is a remarkable book on a period of history—the Second World War, before and after—that continues to haunt us. It is also a powerful antidote to Canadian amnesia and especially to the attempts to rewrite the history of that war to justify the warmongering provocations of Washington, Ottawa, London, Paris and other NATO countries.
Israeli military vehicles surround ambulance in West Bank
The Most Revolutionary Act 