COP27 climate change summit: World leaders urged to act as report reveals 768 million are underfed
COP27 climate change summit: World leaders urged to act as report reveals
768 million are underfed. Institute for Economic and Peace says ‘existing
ecological challenges will only be amplified by climate change’ and
millions of vulnerable people are being failed by current efforts to tackle
it.
World leaders facing the threat of a global recession must not scrimp
on support for poorer nations with hundreds of millions of people at
increased risk of catastrophic ecological disasters, a leading think-tank
has warned. Threats posed by water scarcity, food stress, and natural
disasters mean that the number of undernourished people worldwide rose to
768 million last year, according to a report by the Institute for Economics
and Peace.
The think-tank’s Ecological Threat Report says that
“existing ecological challenges will only be amplified by climate
change” and millions of vulnerable people are being failed by current
efforts to tackle it. The report’s authors say negotiators at the UN
COP27 climate change conference, which starts in Egypt on 6 November, must
commit to finding a way to address these risks “quickly” or risk a
catastrophe.
iNews 23rd Oct 2022
Least Developed Countries want ‘concrete action’ from rich nations at COP27 Climate Summit
COP27: From loss and damage to updated NDCs, dividing lines are taking
shape. Least Developed Countries Group says it wants to see ‘concrete
action’ from richer nations to provide more finance to help the most
vulnerable people manage the loss and damage caused by climate change. The
world’s most climate vulnerable nations have confirmed that securing
dedicated ‘loss and damage’ funding is their top priority for next month’s
COP27 Climate Summit in Egypt.
Business Green 24th Oct 2022
Insect apocalypse looms as world warms
Insect apocalypse looms as world warms
A major new study says there’s mounting evidence the world’s insect populations are in rapid decline and it’s cause for profound concern.
This week’s nuclear news.
Some bits of good news : Good News On The 2022 Climate Action Front.
Undersea Cable to Funnel 3 Gigawatts of Solar Energy From Egypt to Power Millions of European Households
CLIMATE. Nuclear is on the front-line of climate change – and not in a good way – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJh_QheDN3E. Nuclear is Not a Climate Solution – Dr. Arjun Makhijani. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM-jMvUuLE4 Noisy support for an obvious failure.
Doomsday Greenland glacier on the brink as scientist sounds alarm. Least Developed Countries want ‘concrete action’ from rich nations at COP27 Climate Summit . COP27 climate change summit: World leaders urged to act as report reveals 768 million are underfed.
CIVIL LIBERTIES. Political Solution for Assange: Jennifer Robinson at the National Press Club. Group of 7 condemn Russian kidnapping of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant leadership. Russian language should become extinct in Ukraine – security chief.
ECONOMICS. The Economics Of European Nuclear Power Don’t Add Up. American companies might make highly enriched uranium fuel for small nuclear reactors, except that there seems to be no market for them.
‘A nuclear waste dump and seaside resort don’t go well together’. What is Regulatory Asset Base and how will it affect future energy charges for Scots? Energy bills in Scotland set to rise to finance England’s nuclear power plants.
EMPLOYMENT. Strikes at French nuclear plants – what’s at stake?
ENERGY. How European countries are cutting power consumption. Renewable energy brings record savings to Europe. America’s new nuclear power industry has a Russian problem. France’s Nuclear Reactors Malfunction as Energy Crisis Bites.
ENVIRONMENT. An Elementary School Near a Nuclear Dump Site Is Teeming With Radioactivity. Marshall Islanders unwilling to sign economic agreement with USA – want redress first of their harmful nuclear legacy. The Nuclear Site That Can’t Be Cleaned Up.
ETHICS and RELIGION. Archbishop renews call for dialogue on ridding world of nuclear weapons.
HEALTH. Inhabitants of French Polynesian atolls call for support and compensation for the health and environmental harm from nuclear testing. NFLA urges UK government to distribute iodine tablets to help prepare for nuclear threat. How Iodine Tablets Block Some Nuclear Radiation. How Iodine Pills Can—and Can’t—Help Against Radiation.
HUMAN RIGHTS. UN Human Rights Council Presses US to Address Nuclear Legacy on the Marshall Islands.
LEGAL. Whistleblower’ says legal battle with nuclear site owners ‘almost broke me’.
MEDIA. The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine.
OPPOSITION TO NUCLEAR. Nuclear Free Local Authorities urge the UK’s new Chancellor to scrap plan to invest in the Sizewell nuclear white elephant. Golden Rule sails for peace to Burlington.
POLITICS. Off the hook: UK government absolves nuclear operators from accident liability. Rishi Sunak’s Richmond constituency is one of the potential locations for a small nuclear reactor factory. Germany will still end nuclear power by April 2023. Kishida’s nuclear policy rekindles battle in small Japanese town.
POLITICS INTERNATIONAL and DIPLOMACY. The Ukraine war: the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. US billionaire proposes peace plan for Ukraine and Russia. Elon Musk supports Russia keeping Crimea—because he’s worried about nuclear escalation and World War III. The Profoundly Stupid Narrative That Nuclear Brinkmanship Is Safety And De-Escalation Is Danger. How diplomacy averted nuclear war 60 years ago.
Russia is funding its war on Ukraine by selling $billions of uranium to Europe’s nuclear industry– no sanctions on that! USA’s planned small nuclear reactors will need special uranium fuel – from Russia!
Russia says U.S. blocked its participation in nuclear conference. The West Has Failed: North Korea Is a Nuclear State. Biden’s diplomatic nuclear faux pas regarding Pakistan.
PUBLIC OPINION. The Generational Divide Over Nuclear Power.
SAFETY. Moscow says it now runs Europe’s largest nuclear plant, causing chaos and confusion. IAEA chief hopes to return to Ukraine ‘soon‘ over nuclear plant talks,
A European scramble for nuclear energy is hampered by risks of terrorist and cyber attacks, as well as the wastes problem. Damage to feedwater pumps delays the operation of Finland’s massive new Olkiluoto nuclear reactor. U.S. Nuclear Reactors Among The Oldest In The World . M5.0 quake shakes Japan’s Fukushima, no damage reported.
SECRETS and LIES.
Scandalous conflicts of interest in Australia’s advice from USA on nuclear submarines.
Elon Musk – arguably the world’s biggest conman and egoist. How the pro-Ukraine “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” (NAFO) troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.
SPACE: EXPLORATION, WEAPONS. New Zealand MP says Rocket Lab launches could betray country’s anti-nuclear stance.
WAR and CONFLICT. NOWHERE TO HIDE -How a nuclear war would kill you — and almost everyone else. “Present Danger: Nuclear Power Plants in War” Zelensky denies ordering attack on Crimean Bridge. Terror on Crimea Bridge and Russia unleashing shock’n awe. Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine.
SCOTT RITTER: Nuclear High Noon in Europe. Rehearsal for ‘Armageddon’ Underway as NATO and Russia Hold Nuclear Exercises. US rehearses dropping nuclear bombs in Europe. NATO Chief Raises Nuclear War Fever. Would the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine lead to all-out nuclear war? US could directly intervene in Ukraine – ex-CIA chief Petraeus.
WEAPONS and WEAPONS SALES. International mayors’ group calls for nuclear abolition at Hiroshima conference
Political Solution for Assange: Jennifer Robinson at the National Press Club
The teeth in Robinson’s address lay in the urgency of political action. Assange is suffering a form of legal and bureaucratic assassination, his life gradually quashed by briefs, reviews, bureaucrats and protocols. “This case needs an urgent political solution. Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”
https://theaimn.com/a-political-solution-for-assange-jennifer-robinson-at-the-national-press-club/ October 23, 2022, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark
It was telling. Of the mainstream Australian press gallery, only David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age turned up to listen to Jennifer Robinson, lawyer extraordinaire who has spent years representing Julian Assange. Since 2019, that representation has taken an even more urgent note: to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from being extradited to the United States, where he faces 18 charges, 17 confected from the archaic Espionage Act of 1917.
In addressing the Australian National Press Club, Robinson’s address, titled “Julian Assange, Free Speech and Democracy,” was a grand recapitulation of the political case against the WikiLeaks founder. Followers of this ever darkening situation would not have found anything new. The shock, rather, was how ignorant many remain about the chapters in this scandalous episode of persecution.
Robinson’s address noted those blackening statements from media organisations and governments that Assange was paranoid and could leave the Ecuadorian embassy, his abode for seven years, at his own leisure. Many were subsequently “surprised when Julian was served with a US extradition request.” But this was exactly what WikiLeaks had been warning about for some ten years.
In the Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he has resided for 3.5 years, Assange’s health has declined further. “Then last year, during a stressful court appeal hearing, Julian had a mini stroke.” His ailing state did not convince a venal prosecution, tasked with “deriding the medical evidence of Julian’s severe depression and suicidal ideation.”
The matter of health plays into the issue of lengthy proceedings. Should the High Court not grant leave to hear an appeal against the June decision by Home Secretary Priti Patel to order his extradition, processes through the UK Supreme Court and possibly the European Court of Human Rights could be activated.
The latter appeal, should it be required, would depend on the government of the day keeping Britain within the court’s jurisdiction. “If our appeal fails, Julian will be extradited to the US – where his prison conditions will be at the whim of intelligence agencies which plotted to kill him.” An unfair trial would follow, and any legal process citing the First Amendment culminating in a hearing before the US Supreme Court would take years.
The teeth in Robinson’s address lay in the urgency of political action. Assange is suffering a form of legal and bureaucratic assassination, his life gradually quashed by briefs, reviews, bureaucrats and protocols. “This case needs an urgent political solution. Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”
Acknowledging that her reference to the political avenue was unusual for a lawyer, Robinson noted how the language of due process and the rule of law had become ghoulish caricatures in what amounts to a form of punishment. The law has been fashioned in an abusive way that sees a person being prosecuted for journalism in a hideously pioneering way. Despite the UK-US Extradition Treaty’s prohibition of extradition for political offences, the US prosecution was making much of the Espionage Act. “Espionage,” stated Robinson, “is a political offence.”
The list of abuses in the prosecution is biblically lengthy. Robinson gave her audience a summary of them: the fabrication of evidence via the Icelandic informant and convicted embezzler and paedophile Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson; the deliberate distortion of facts; the unlawful surveillance of Assange and his legal team and matters of medical treatment; “and the seizure of legally privileged material.”
Much ignorance about Assange and the implications of his persecution is no doubt willed. Robinson’s reference to Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, was apt. Here was a man initially sceptical about the torture complaint made by Assange and his team. He had been convinced by the libel against the publisher’s reputation. “But in 2019, he agreed to read our complaint. And what he read shocked him and forced him to confront his own prejudice.”
Melzer would subsequently observe that, in the course of two decades working “with victims of war, violence and political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”
The concern these days among the press darlings is not press freedoms closer to home, whether they be in Australia itself, or among its allies. The egregious misconduct by Russian forces in the Ukraine War or China’s human rights record in Xinjiang are what counts. Villainy lies elsewhere.
The obscene conduct by US authorities, whose officials contemplated abducting and murdering a publisher, is an inconvenient smudge of history best ignored for consumers of news down under. The Albanese government, which has continued to extol the glory of the AUKUS security pact and swoon at prospects of a globalised NATO, has shelved any “political solution” regarding Assange, at least in any public context. The US-Australian alliance is a shrine to worship at with reverential delusion, rather than question with informed scepticism. The WikiLeaks founder did, after all, spoil the party.
On a cheerier note, those listening to Robinson’s address reflected a healthy political awareness about the tribulations facing a fellow Australian citizen. The federal member for the seat of Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, was present, as were Senators Peter Whish Wilson and David Shoebridge. As Ryan subsequently tweeted, “An Australian punished by foreign states for acts of journalism? Time for our government to act.”
Others were those who have been or continue to be targets of the national security state. The long-suffering figure and target of the Australian security establishment, Bernard Collaery, put in an appearance, as did David McBride, who awaits trial for having exposed alleged atrocities of Australian special service personnel in Afghanistan.
Such individuals have made vital, oxygenating contributions to democratic accountability, of which WikiLeaks stands proud. But any journalism that, as Robinson puts it, subjects “power to scrutiny, and holding it accountable,” is bound to incite the fury of the national security state. Regarding Assange, will that fury win out?
American companies might make fuel for small nuclear reactors, except that there seems to be no market for them.
Russia’s Uranium Dominance Threatens America’s Next-Gen Nuclear Plans, By Tsvetana Paraskova – Oct 23, 2022, 10:00 AM CDT
- The United States has ambitious plans for its nuclear power industry.
- Russia’s stranglehold on the uranium market threatens to delay progress in nextgen nuclear power projects.
- U.S. companies are scrambling to develop the domestic uranium supply chain needed to fuel nuclear power ambitions.
……………………..
there is one major hurdle to the construction of most advanced reactors under development in the United States—the uranium type of fuel on which those reactors are designed to run is currently sold commercially by only one company in the world. And that company is a subsidiary of Russia’s ROSATOM, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation.
The federal government and U.S. companies developing advanced nuclear reactors—including Bill Gates’ TerraPower—recognize the urgent need to eliminate reliance on a Russian state corporation for nuclear fuel for America’s next-generation nuclear reactors.
The association Uranium Producers of America noted during a Senate committee hearing after the Russian invasion of Ukraine that “almost none of the fuel needed to power America’s nuclear fleet today comes from domestic producers, while U.S. nuclear utilities purchase nearly half of the of the uranium they consume from state-owned entities (SEO) in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.”
“We estimate that there is more than $1 billion in annual U.S. dollar purchases of nuclear fuel flowing to ROSATOM,” said Scott Melbye, president of the association and Executive Vice President at Uranium Energy Corp.
ROSATOM is not under Western sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of the Russian state firm’s importance in the supply chain of the global nuclear power industry. But the U.S. firms developing the next generation of more efficient, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly nuclear reactors don’t want to do business with Russia anymore.
Hence, the need for a commercially viable and stable domestic supply chain of the fuel for those advanced reactors—HALEU, or high assay low enriched uranium. ……………………………………….
the U.S. government faces the “chicken and egg” dilemma in HALEU supply, Matt Bowen, Research Scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA, and Paul M. Dabbar, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the same center, wrote in a paper in May this year/
“Existing enrichment companies, such as Urenco, Orano, GLE, and Centrus, could make HALEU, but these companies would likely be hesitant to invest too much in building HALEU infrastructure and completing NRC licensing without being confident there will in fact be a profitable market for the product,” they say.
The West Has Failed: North Korea Is a Nuclear State
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-west-has-failed-north-korea-is-a-nuclear-state/2022/10/23/e1511926-531e-11ed-ac8b-08bbfab1c5a5_story.html Analysis by Gearoid Reidy | Bloomberg, October 24, 2022,
The world might not want to hear it, but Kim Jong Un might be right.
“There will never be such a thing as our abandonment of the nuclear weapons or denuclearization,” Kim declared last month. “The position of our state as a nuclear nation has become irreversible.”
Decades of pursuing the “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula has failed. After North Korea last month declared itself a nuclear weapons state, it’s time for the US and its allies to accept this reality — and learn to live with it. That’s the first step to reducing the risk of accidental confrontation that could lead to all-out nuclear war.
The idea is reaching the mainstream. Jeffrey Lewis, a leading nuclear weapons expert, has called on Washington to “contemplate the unthinkable” and accept North Korea’s nuclear statehood, citing the increasing risks of a flashpoint as South Korea and Japan talk up first-strike capability.
Washington should think “about the return we’re seeing on our stubborn continued insistence on denuclearization as the desired near-term end-state,” agrees Ankit Panda, a senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have a far more acute interest on the Korean peninsula, which is averting the use of nuclear weapons by North Korea.”
A rethink is needed. For one thing, the US administration has already shown an admirable willingness to abandon the failed policies of previous administrations. From ending the war in Afghanistan, casting off decades of naive Democratic party China policy or de-escalating the War on Drugs with a reform of cannabis policy, President Joe Biden has discarded ideas he previously promoted.
And to describe the goal of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula as a bust would be generous. Beyond condemning millions to poverty after 30 years, the US has little to show for its punishing economic sanctions. Pyongyang has built itself a formidable arsenal: enough fissile material for dozens of nuclear bombs, and a demonstrated capacity for its missiles to hit US bases in Guam or the American mainland itself. More nuclear tests are feared soon, which would be the first in five years. Kim said last month he won’t budge even after 100 years of sanctions.
Absent a very dangerous policy of regime change, Kim is going to remain in charge, and in any event doesn’t have a way to climb down from nuclear weapons. The window for military action against North Korea closed during the Clinton administration, when the US considered a preemptive strike. It chose negotiation instead, which Pyongyang used as cover to speed development of its nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea’s new nuclear doctrine, unveiled in September, has further upped the ante, pledging automatic nuclear strikes on its enemies if its command-and-control leadership is threatened. Such a doctrine is a “logical reaction” to South Korea talking up its ability to deal a fatal blow to the North’s leadership, Panda says.
Indeed, far from the stereotype of the crazy North Korean leader, Kim is being perfectly logical in seeking to keep his regime in one piece. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put that in stark relief. Ukraine famously agreed to give up the nuclear weapons on its territory (though they were not under its control) after the fall of the Soviet Union, in exchange for security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia. Time has shown how valuable those assurances were. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Al Qaddafi are other examples of leaders who abandoned their nuclear pursuits, only to meet gruesome ends.
Kim could not be sure of any guarantee that Washington might give in return for denuclearization — especially when it’s US policy that has been most inconsistent. Flipping between dovish Democratic and hawkish Republican positions on Pyongyang (or in the case of Donald Trump’s administration, between “fire and fury” and love letters in the space of a few years) has resulted in head-snappingly inconsistent carrot-and-stick approaches.
Meanwhile, through a cycle of bait-and-switch negotiations and threats, Kim has managed to keep the US and South Korea distracted enough to complete his nuclear state. He’s on his fourth South Korean leader and third American president. He’s less than half Biden’s age; time is on his side, assuming he can avoid the heart problems that felled his father and grandfather.
Of course, there are significant risks. Pyongyang has proven not to be a trustworthy negotiating partner. Being seen to reward its obstinacy might embolden rogue regimes elsewhere. Even a tacit acceptance of North Korea’s position could also lead to another bout of proliferation. The South Korean public is already roundly in favor of also possessing nuclear weapons. Japan is understandably far more opposed but how might it react surrounded by four nuclear-armed states?
But doggedly pursuing a failed policy that has only become more unrealistic over the years isn’t getting the US and its allies anywhere — and the risk of accidental confrontation is only running higher
Zelensky denies ordering attack on Crimean Bridge
https://www.rt.com/russia/565053-zelensky-crimea-bridge-attack/–-22 Oct 22
Officials in Kiev have taken credit for the blast, with the postal service even issuing a commemorative stamp
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has denied “ordering” the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, earlier this month. The president made the remarks during an interview with the Canadian broadcaster CTV, aired on Wednesday.
Asked to comment on the “spectacular attack” on the bridge, as the broadcaster put it, Zelensky said Kiev was not involved.
lensky said Kiev was not involved.
“We definitely did not order that, as far as I know,” he told the reporters.
The bridge was hit by a massive explosion on October 8, which severely damaged its road traffic section and killed three civilians, as well as setting a passing freight train on fire. Several top Ukrainian officials openly celebrated the attack, while the country’s postal service issued a stamp commemorating the blast, just hours after it happened.
Moscow has directly blamed Kiev for the incident, branding the explosion a “terrorist attack.” Russian law enforcement claims to have established how the bomb, which was disguised as construction materials, made it to the bridge from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa, via multiple transit countries.
Russian investigators believe the plot was hatched by Ukrainian military intelligence. Moscow has identified 12 individuals as suspected accomplices in the plot and has arrested eight of them, the FSB said.
The list of people in custody includes five Russians and three foreign nationals, who hold passports of Ukraine and Armenia. A spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence told the media that the FSB was a “fake structure,” and that the report was unworthy of comment.
Days after the attack, Moscow ramped up its aerial bombing campaign against Ukraine, targeting its critical infrastructure with cruise missiles and suicide drones. Kiev reported on Tuesday that 23 people were killed and over 100 injured in the barrage.
Nuclear is on the front-line of climate change – and not in a good way.
Presentation at the SGR Responsible Science conference, 19.10.2022, by Dr.
Paul Dorfman (University of Sussex). Climate models have run hot. As
knowledge of enhanced climate sensitivity and polar ice melt-rate evolves,
it has become clear that sea-level rise is significantly faster than
previously thought, resulting in more frequent and destructive storms,
storm surge, severe precipitation, and flooding. With rare extreme events
today becoming the norm in the future, existing risk mitigation measures
become increasingly obsolete. The corollary to this analysis is that
present and planned UK coastal nuclear installations will be at significant
risk. In other words, nuclear’s lower-carbon electricity USP sits in the
context of the much larger picture – that UK coastal nuclear will be one
of the first, and most significant, casualties to ramping climate impact.
Put simply, UK nuclear is quite literally on the front-line of climate
change – and not in a good way. UK civil nuclear infrastructure is
profoundly unprepared for climate impact and there is a very high
probability that reactors and their associated high-level spent fuel stores
will become unfit for purpose, and much sooner than expected.
Scientists for Global Responsibility 20th Oct 2022
Noisy support for an obvious failure — Beyond Nuclear International
One impact of this continuing official nuclear support is that climate action is being diminished and slowed. As a paper in Nature Energy (which one of us co-authored) showed in 2020, in worldwide data over the past three decades, the scales of national nuclear programmes do not tend to correlate with generally lower carbon emissions. The building of renewables does.
worldwide substantive picture that shows nuclear power overwhelmingly to be slower, less effective and more expensive at tackling climate disruption than are renewable and storage alternatives.
As nuclear power sinks, its supporters crow louder. Why do media and governments insist on nuclear for climate?
Noisy support for an obvious failure — Beyond Nuclear International
By Andrew Stirling and Phil Johnstone, 23 Oct 22
At Edinburgh’s Haymarket station, on the route used by COP26 delegates hopping across to Glasgow last November, a large poster displayed a vista from the head of Loch Shiel. In the foreground, a monument to the Jacobite rebellion towers from the spot where Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard. From there, the water sweeps back to a rugged line of hills.
This is one of Scotland’s most iconic views, famous for both its history and its role in the Harry Potter films.
On the poster, written in the sky above the loch are the words: “Keep nature natural: more nuclear power means more wild spaces like these.” At the bottom is a hashtag – #NetZeroNeedsNuclear – with no further mention of who might be behind this advert.
But it’s not hard to find a website for this group, which claims to be run by “a team of young, international volunteers made up of engineers, scientists and communicators”, all with the engagingly smiley profile pictures to be expected from citizen activists.
Only when you scroll to the end do you see these activities are ‘sponsored’ by nuclear companies EDF and Urenco. At the bottom, it is explained that Nuclear Needs Net Zero is part of the Young Generation Network (YGN) – “young members of the Nuclear Institute (NI), which is the professional body and learned society for the UK nuclear sector”. The website asserts that the Nuclear4Climate campaign – described as “grassroots” both on the site and in a presentation to an International Atomic Agency conference in 2019 – is in fact “coordinated via regional and national nuclear associations and technical societies”……………………………………………
Of course, all this is par for the course in the creative world of PR. But there are more substantive grounds why nuclear advocates might wish to avoid too much public scrutiny at the moment. One reality, which can be agreed on from all sides, is that this is by far the worst period in the 70-year history of this ageing industry. So how come it is benefitting from growing and noisy support in mainstream and social media? Why are easily refuted arguments still being deployed to justify new nuclear power alongside renewables in the energy supply mix? And why has the media seized so enthusiastically on a few prominent converts to the nuclear cause?
Nuclear loses out to renewables
At current prices, atomic energy now costs around three times as much as wind or solar power. And that’s before you consider the full expense of waste management, elaborate security, anti-proliferation measures or periodic accidents. For more than a decade, nuclear has been plagued by escalating costs, expanding build times and crashing orders. Trends in recent years are all steeply in the wrong direction.
So the rising clamour of advocacy seems to be in inverse proportion to performance. Whatever view one takes, nuclear power is in a worse position than it’s ever been compared with low-carbon alternatives – and a position that is rapidly declining further.
In fact, despite misleading suggestions to the contrary by senior figures, background government data has for decades shown that the massive scale of viable UK renewable resources is clearly adequate for all foreseeable needs. Even with storage and flexibility costs included, renewables are available far more rapidly and cost-effectively than nuclear power.
So, for all the breakdancing, it really is a conundrum why persistently bullish government and industry claims on nuclear power remain so seriously under-challenged in the wider debate. It is becoming ever more clear that nuclear plans are diverting attention, money and resources that could be far more effective if used in other ways.
One impact of this continuing official nuclear support is that climate action is being diminished and slowed. As a paper in Nature Energy (which one of us co-authored) showed in 2020, in worldwide data over the past three decades, the scales of national nuclear programmes do not tend to correlate with generally lower carbon emissions. The building of renewables does.
In fact, this study found “a negative association between the scales of national nuclear and renewables attachments. This suggests nuclear and renewables… tend to crowd each other out.”
The issues are, of course, complex. But this finding supports what the dire performance picture also predicts: that nuclear power diverts resources and attention away from more effective strategies, increasing costs to consumers and taxpayers. So it is even odder that loud voices continue to make naïve calls to ‘do everything’ – that nuclear must on principle be considered ‘part of the mix’ – as if expense, development time, limited resources and diverse preferable alternatives are not all crucial issues.
Despite the urgency of the climate emergency, there is strangely little discussion about this evidence that nuclear power may be impeding progress with options that clearly work better.
The media loves nuclear power
In fact, the British media has developed a habit of doggedly repeating claims by the nuclear industry that are, at best, somewhat wishful thinking.
One would not guess from all the noise about ‘small modular reactors’ (SMR), for instance, that the record of new nuclear designs has consistently been one of delayed schedules and escalating prices. One might easily miss that efforts at nuclear cost reduction have always depended more on scaling up than scaling down. And new SMR programmes do not even claim to address pressing current carbon targets. With debate persistently dominated by naively optimistic projections, it is oddly neglected that these familiar claims and sources have all repeatedly been falsified in the past.
Likewise, UK media debate remains unquestioningly locked into sentimental attachments to old ideas of ‘base load’ nuclear power – a notion now recognised by the electricity industry to be outdated. Far from being an automatic advantage, the inflexibly steady ‘base load’ output of a typical nuclear power reactor can present growing difficulties in a modern dynamic electricity system. It often seems to be forgotten that frequent unplanned nuclear closures pose their own kinds of intermittency risks, made worse by the massive unit sizes of nuclear reactors……………………………………
It is against this substantive background that the persistent intensity of UK government support for nuclear power is so odd – and the rising clamour of UK pro-nuclear PR and media articles so striking. Nor is it just the media. Among campaigners, it is strange, given resolute government nuclear commitments, that even some of the previously most critical voices (like Friends of the Earth), seem to be growing strangely quieter…………………………………………………………………………………..
What remains more interesting is why parts of the press should so often and loudly repeat this ‘repentant critic’ trope in aid of such a struggling industry.
One more recent example is that of Zion Lights, whose billing in the Daily Mail as “the former XR [Extinction Rebellion] communications head” has been countered by that organisation. Lights’ shift of position – leaving the Extinction Rebellion to campaign in favour of nuclear power – was featured between June and September 2020 in City AM, the Daily Mail (twice) and the Daily Telegraph, as well as in an article on the BBC News website. Then, in a second round of attention in October, the story was again covered by the Mail, with Lights also featuring in The Sun, this time with a spin (since debunked) targeting wind power…………………..
What is even more notable about this specific instance of a general syndrome is that Lights – the individual at the heart of this story – has (to her credit) made no effort to conceal that she was employed for a period by a high-profile industry-supporting public relations outfit with a long track record of unashamed advocacy of nuclear power – the US Environmental Progress organisation……………
A lack of voices for renewables
The implications here go beyond any individual. What is strange is that media attention is so strong on these kinds of arguments, while counter-commentary is so relatively quiet. After all, whilst not infallible, environmental concerns about nuclear power have over the years generally been broadly vindicated……………………………….
Nor are these odd patterns restricted to traditional media. Social media also seems susceptible. At the same time as Lights’ oddly prominent personal journey was garnering so much unquestioning news attention, other striking developments were under way on Twitter. Here, the Friends of Nuclear Energy set up shop in December 2019, the UK Pro Nuclear Power group (UKPNPG) in April 2020, and Mums for Nuclear UK in July 2020.
In an especially intriguing example, Greens For Nuclear Energy has been active on Twitter since May 2019, spending considerable effort promoting nuclear power and attempting to change the position of the Green Party. Then Liberal Democrats for nuclear power (LDs4nuclear) set up on Twitter in October 2020. In taking up our invitation to respond to core questions raised in this article, GreensForNuclearEnergy pointed to its website, on which it emphatically urges “no compromise to combat climate change”.
This Green Party case is particularly noteworthy, since it is (strangely given underlying patterns of public concern on nuclear issues), the only organised political force in England collectively offering a consistently sceptical position about nuclear power in Parliament. With the longstanding Green grounding on this issue so strong over a half-century, it is especially strange that this development should come at a time when – at least for the Greens – the argument is more over than it has ever been.
What remains particularly striking about all the instances we cite is that none engage substantively with the real-world performance of nuclear power as it is. Despite vivid rhetorics around needs for ‘science-based’ policy – and occasionally colourful fear-mongering about intermittency ‘putting the lights out’ – none of these prolific voices address (let alone refute) the worldwide substantive picture that shows nuclear power overwhelmingly to be slower, less effective and more expensive at tackling climate disruption than are renewable and storage alternatives.
UK government policy
Despite the surface commitment, we see this trend in UK government energy policy too. Dig into more specialist civil service policy papers and you find spiralling prices and little in the way of an energy-related case for nuclear power. But – in a remarkable departure from the normally diligent attention to costs – the most recent energy white paper ignored all that boring economic detail. Official UK nuclear attachments are treated as an unquestionable given.
If a persuasive explanation is sought for this persistent intensity of UK government support for nuclear power, then the real picture seems clear behind the distractions. Official UK defence documentation, many unanswered national and international media reports, brief admissions to Parliament and explicit statements in other nuclear-armed countries all make it pretty clear that the reasons are actually more military than civilian.
So, it might be understood why deep-rooted nuclear interests are seeking to hide these inconvenient facts behind pretty pictures of the West Highlands. But why is the media so keen to help, squirrelling realities away from view behind tales of repentant environmentalists? Why is so much new noise building up behind nuclear power in formerly critical political parties, just when the case has grown weaker than ever?
Profound issues are raised here, not only concerning the cost and speed of climate action, but about the independence and professionalism of the UK media and the health of British democracy as a whole. Whichever opinion we each take on nuclear issues – and whatever the undoubted uncertainties and ambiguities – we should all care very deeply about this.
Andy Stirling is Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. Dr. Phil Johnstone is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex.
Would the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine lead to all-out nuclear war?
The idea of using a single tactical nuclear weapon is starting to be dangerously downplayed as maybe not all that bad, thus normalizing something that should instead be outlawed. Just hide in your basement for a few days while the radiation dissipates and it’ll be OK.
“tactical” is a term that covers a whole panoply of so-called “short range” weapons armed with a nuclear warhead. Such weapons can be launched from the ground, air, or sea, and even from a truck bed. A single weapon has a typical explosive yield of between 10 and 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons. So that’s not exactly small.
Our fears would vanish if nuclear weapons did too
Edging toward Armageddon? — Beyond Nuclear International By Linda Pentz Gunter, 23 Oct 22, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/10/23/edging-toward-armageddon/
As we mark 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, it’s truly horrifying to realize that our present times are considered to be the closest to nuclear war we have been since those 13 terrifying days in 1962.
What saved us then was cooler heads prevailing, as our stories last week described. But can we be assured that those with the power to press the proverbial button — whether at the pinnacle of leadership or lower down the chain of command — will act with similar sense and restraint?
With Kennedy and Khrushchev in command, there was a willingness on both sides to pull back from the brink, not only rhetorically, but through meaningful actions. Khrushchev removed his nuclear missiles from Cuba while the US publicly declared it would not invade the island. Privately, the US also agreed to dismantle its ballistic missiles stationed in Turkey.
And, as we have seen over the years — and in last week’s article by Angelo Baracca — sometimes it takes a person of more humble position to restore rationality and act with restraint. These near-misses ought to have put the halt on nuclear weapons development many decades ago
Instead, that most obvious of lessons was never learned: that nuclear weapons serve only one purpose; the mutual destruction of all of us. Instead, the nuclear arms race escalated to obscene heights and there are still at least 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, leaving us perpetually on the edge of Armageddon.
And it was that word, “Armageddon,” that current US President Joe Biden used recently when he said at a Democratic gathering, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Kennedy had met Khrushchev prior to the 1962 standoff and Biden described Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as “a guy I know fairly well”. But so far, that familiarity hasn’t relieved the current atomic tensions around Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the news is full of alarm bells, warning that yes, Putin might just be mad enough to push the nuclear button and take us all down with him.
Pundits have cautioned that we are “not there yet,” which should not be taken as comfort. It should be taken as an opportunity to ensure that we never, ever get there. And it’s certainly not encouraging that Russia’s new top commander of the war in Ukraine. General Sergei Surovikin, is nicknamed “General Armageddon” for his command of Russia’s Syria bombardments. But, in the meantime, when we talk about Russia “using” nuclear weapons, what could happen?
Russia could use a single tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, although “tactical” is a term that covers a whole panoply of so-called “short range” weapons armed with a nuclear warhead. Such weapons can be launched from the ground, air, or sea, and even from a truck bed. A single weapon has a typical explosive yield of between 10 and 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons. So that’s not exactly small.
The idea of using a single tactical nuclear weapon is starting to be dangerously downplayed as maybe not all that bad, thus normalizing something that should instead be outlawed. Just hide in your basement for a few days while the radiation dissipates and it’ll be OK.
But it’s that kind of thinking that prompted Biden to use the word “Armageddon” in the first place. “I don’t think there is any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden said.
Because of course it wouldn’t be OK at all. Even after the radiation levels drop, the soil and water, and therefore food sources, would be contaminated. Essential infrastructure would be destroyed. There would be countless fatalities and many sick and dying. To use any nuclear weapon would be an abomination.
The White House has also said it would deliver what it described as a “decisive response”, should Russia use nuclear weapons. Again, it’s unclear what this means. Would the US reply with a nuclear attack of its own?
But what all of this does prove is that the possession of nuclear weapons isn’t deterring anything. What we are most frightened of right now is the possibility that Russia will use nuclear weapons and the US and/or NATO might retaliate.
Those fears would vanish if nuclear weapons did too.
That is why continuing to push for signatures and ratifications of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is so important, because it’s the one treaty that spells out the immorality of nuclear weapons and the devastating humanitarian impacts that would result even from their so-called limited use.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.
Group of 7 condemn Russian kidnapping of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant leadership
The Group of Seven industrialised nations condemned Russia’s kidnapping
of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant leadership and called for the
immediate return of full control of the facility to Ukraine.
Guardian 23rd Oct 2022
The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine
how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?
As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine.
the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war.
Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-us-government-sees-silicon-valley Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 22
The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”
Bloomberg reports:
Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.
US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.
The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.
“Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”
“Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”
“If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.
Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?
Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:
This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.
None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.
It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.
Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.
How the pro-Ukraine “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” (NAFO) troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/20/ukraine-nafo-troll-war-criminals/ ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN, OCTOBER 20, 2022
Celebrated in mainstream US media for its anti-Russian trolling, the Twitter operation known as NAFO was founded by a Polish antisemite to raise money for a militia that has hosted war criminals, white nationalists and wanted murderers.
Whether they know it or not, anyone who has checked Twitter for recent coverage of the Ukraine proxy war has likely encountered at least one of the thousands of trolls that comprise NAFO, or the “North Atlantic Fellas Organization.” Thanks to the efforts of NAFO and its “fellas,” any journalist or prominent figure critical of Ukraine or NATO on Twitter is likely to receive hundreds of replies accusing them of being paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin (or even performing fellatio on him) from accounts with Shiba Inu dog avatars.
Since its inception several months ago, NAFO has earned gushing praise from the Washington Post, which hailed it for “show[ing] that the tables could be turned on Russia, when it came to trolling.” The arms industry-funded, Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), meanwhile, hosted an online panel highlighting NAFO as an instrumental weapon in the Russia-Ukraine infowars.
One NAFO founder explained that he chose the Georgian Legion as a funding recipient precisely because of the unit’s reputation as a band of “mercenaries and criminals” that was willing to carry out barbarous acts which could cause foreign governments to shy away from supporting it. Another NAFO founder has praised the Georgian Legion’s leader for “killing Russians since the ’90s.”
Among the Georgian Legion’s most notorious members are US fugitive and murderer Craig Lang, as well as Paul Gray, an American whose past involvement in several neo-Nazi organizations was never mentioned during the friendly primetime interviews he was granted by Fox News and its local affiliates.
While providing a financial feeding tube to a militia that revels in its own atrocities, NAFO continues to attract effusive support from mainstream US journalists and think tankers who portray the operation as little more than a grassroots expression of online solidarity with Ukraine.
Obsessively online interventionists find meaning and purpose as “fellas”
Read more: How the pro-Ukraine “North Atlantic Fellas Organization” (NAFO) troll operation crowd-funds war criminals.Employing cartoon memes of the Shiba Inu dog breed, NAFO’s postmodern aesthetic, irreverent style and dedication to viciously trolling any critic of the Ukraine proxy war has garnered the adulation of Western media and interventionist government officials alike.
To outsiders, the lingo that flows through internal NAFO chats might seem unintelligible: “fellas” refers to members; “nafoarticle5” is a call to action that urges “fellas” to dog-pile on a particular social media post; “vatnik” serves as a pejorative for Russians and virtually anyone critical of the US-backed proxy war. Phrases such as “NAFO expansion is non-negotiable” and sarcastic claims that they are funded by the CIA (which they simultaneously claim “doesn’t exist”) are also ubiquitous.
Behind the anonymously named Twitter accounts of NAFO members lies a base of extremely online, mostly male civilians seeking a sense of purpose and community. Some participants have tattooed Shiba Inu avatars onto their bodies while others have published photos of their newborn babies in the arms of an adult sporting a NAFO shirt.
One member of the troll operation tweeted a photo of an elaborate NAFO tattoo emblazoned on his arm, but has since deleted it.
In public, NAFO leaders market the image of a charity-focused community of do-gooders, however, many posts by its fellas reflect the kind of psychologically deranged outbursts familiar to young adult men who spend endless hours ranting on a messaging platform built for gamers……………
While US corporate media have declared that within NAFO “there is no command structure,” effectively releasing the group’s founders from accountability for the fellas’ behavior, this reporter found all the hallmarks of an organizational hierarchy. The group’s Discord server is run by founders, assigned administrators, moderators, and “forgers” who make memes used for harassing people on social media. “Verified fellas” are granted access to otherwise locked channels, while regular “fellas” are assigned more mundane roles.
“It’s preferred that people who are not heavily involved in the day to day do not speak on behalf of NAFO or what NAFO is to the press,” one administrator wrote in the server’s announcement’s channel.
Inside NAFO’s social media crowdfunding nexus
There are three ways to obtain a NAFO avatar and become a verified “fella.” The first is to make a donation to the Georgian National Legion through an email address attached to PayPal and belonging to Taras Reshetylo, a field commander of the Georgian Legion. Another way to join is by donating to an organization called “Protect Ukraine Defenders,” or a merchandise purchase from a website called Saint Javelin. Saint Javelin’s logo depicts the Virgin Mary bearing a US-manufactured Javelin missile.
Though distinct from NAFO at its foundation, Saint Javelin sold merchandise for the organization and recently incorporated NAFO into its brand. For months, all of Saint Javelin’s proceeds from NAFO merchandise went directly to the Georgian Legion, according to its website. Like NAFO, Saint Javelin estimates that it has raised huge sums for the war — more than a million dollars.
Besides fundraising for the Georgian Legion, Saint Javelin passes on proceeds to United24, an initiative launched by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.” It also channels money to the Ukrainian World Congress, an organization which has defended the legacy of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, branding him “the undisputed symbol of Ukraine’s lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.”
Saint Javelin’s partnership with Zelensky’s United24 aims to help raise funds to build an “army of drones.”
The Saint Javelin website was launched by a former journalist named Christian Borys whose employment history spans NATO state-funded outlets including Canada’s CBC and Britain’s BBC. Borys has also authored articles for the US government-sponsored outlet Radio Free Europe.
One of Borys’ most notorious journalistic escapades consisted of a night of bar-hopping in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he patronized an antisemitic restaurant and returned with a review for Vice News portraying it as one of the city’s many weird and wonderful haunts.
The restaurant converts anti-Jewish tropes into a marketing gimmick; its waiters dress as Orthodox Jews who haggle with patrons over the prices of menu items. “If you play your cards right [it’s] ridiculously cheap,” Borys gushed in his review.
Noting that Lviv “was home to around 220,000 Jewish people,” Borys wrote that “the population now only hovers around 1,100,” Strangely though, he neglected to explain how the genocidal rampage of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped violently extinguish the local Jewish population. He merely stated that the restaurant “pays homage [to the local Jewish population] in a weird way.”
The Ukrainian ethnic-owned restaurant contains a terrace that overlooks the ruins of “one of the most important synagogues in Eastern Europe.”
In the same 2015 article, Borys described going to a bar where “you’re served by little people,” visiting another that forces you to recite ultra-nationalist slogans before entering, and emptying an AK-47 clip in a target depicting Putin’s face at a local shooting range.
On Twitter, Borys erupted with glee when a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was spotted wearing a Saint Javelin patch. He seemed equally thrilled when his former employer published photographs from an unstated source of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Olekseii Reznikov handing President Zelensky a Saint Javelin t-shirt.
In the NAFO Discord chat, Borys suggested paying protesters to hold NAFO demonstrations outside Russian embassies.
A retired Marine and amateur conflict pundit named Matt Moores claimed to have established the relationship between NAFO and Borys after co-founding the former organization. On October 7, NAFO was incorporated into the Saint Javelin brand, with the latter becoming the former’s parent company, according to a post by a NAFO administrator in the Discord server’s announcement channel.
The third organization for which NAFO fundraises, Protect Ukraine Defenders, was launched by a well-connected functionary of the Brussels-based intelligentsia named Ievgen Vorobiov. Vorobiov started as an intern for the European Union state-funded Centre for European Policy Studies think tank, then moved on to gigs at the Polish government-founded Polish Institute of International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine. Before founding Protect Ukraine Defenders, Vorobiov spent nearly four years at the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine.
An anchor for amplifying pro-proxy war Twitter accounts
While Twitter has responded to NATO state pressure to suppress accounts associated with Russian state media, and has banned numerous other users for simply questioning the official Western version of events in Ukraine, organizations connected with NAFO have seen explosive growth since the Ukraine proxy war began. Saint Javelin, for its part, has received verification from Twitter and amassed nearly 70,000 followers since launching an account this February.
A NAFO founder who operates under the pseudonym “Kama Kamilia” had less than 200 Twitter followers in April 2022; today they broadcast to an audience of over 22,000. NAFO co-founder Christian Borys had less than 5,500 followers in February 2022 and now boasts more than 36,000. Similarly, Matt Moores’ Twitter account grew by more than 16,000 followers since January.
“Kama Kamilia” has explicitly linked the Georgian Legion’s follower count to the popularity of his NAFO organization: “I think they had 4,000 followers when we started [now] they have… more than 20,000.” As of early October, that number is more than 110,000
Yet NAFO’s beltway boosters often gloss over its role as a fundraising machine for the Georgian Legion, a US-backed Ukrainian fighting group that stands accused of gruesome battlefield atrocities. Several former members of the Legion have produced first-hand testimony documenting its perpetration of war crimes, including the torture and execution of POWs and civilians.
One NAFO founder explained that he chose the Georgian Legion as a funding recipient precisely because of the unit’s reputation as a band of “mercenaries and criminals” that was willing to carry out barbarous acts which could cause foreign governments to shy away from supporting it. Another NAFO founder has praised the Georgian Legion’s leader for “killing Russians since the ’90s.”
Among the Georgian Legion’s most notorious members are US fugitive and murderer Craig Lang, as well as Paul Gray, an American whose past involvement in several neo-Nazi organizations was never mentioned during the friendly primetime interviews he was granted by Fox News and its local affiliates.
While providing a financial feeding tube to a militia that revels in its own atrocities, NAFO continues to attract effusive support from mainstream US journalists and think tankers who portray the operation as little more than a grassroots expression of online solidarity with Ukraine.
Obsessively online interventionists find meaning and purpose as “fellas”
Employing cartoon memes of the Shiba Inu dog breed, NAFO’s postmodern aesthetic, irreverent style and dedication to viciously trolling any critic of the Ukraine proxy war has garnered the adulation of Western media and interventionist government officials alike.
To outsiders, the lingo that flows through internal NAFO chats might seem unintelligible: “fellas” refers to members; “nafoarticle5” is a call to action that urges “fellas” to dog-pile on a particular social media post; “vatnik” serves as a pejorative for Russians and virtually anyone critical of the US-backed proxy war. Phrases such as “NAFO expansion is non-negotiable” and sarcastic claims that they are funded by the CIA (which they simultaneously claim “doesn’t exist”) are also ubiquitous.
Behind the anonymously named Twitter accounts of NAFO members lies a base of extremely online, mostly male civilians seeking a sense of purpose and community. Some participants have tattooed Shiba Inu avatars onto their bodies while others have published photos of their newborn babies in the arms of an adult sporting a NAFO shirt.
One member of the troll operation tweeted a photo of an elaborate NAFO tattoo emblazoned on his arm, but has since deleted it.
In public, NAFO leaders market the image of a charity-focused community of do-gooders, however, many posts by its fellas reflect the kind of psychologically deranged outbursts familiar to young adult men who spend endless hours ranting on a messaging platform built for gamers. In mid-October, for example, an administrator complained that she was forced to ban two members of the NAFO Discord for publicly plotting the murder of a third member of the community.
While US corporate media have declared that within NAFO “there is no command structure,” effectively releasing the group’s founders from accountability for the fellas’ behavior, this reporter found all the hallmarks of an organizational hierarchy. The group’s Discord server is run by founders, assigned administrators, moderators, and “forgers” who make memes used for harassing people on social media. “Verified fellas” are granted access to otherwise locked channels, while regular “fellas” are assigned more mundane roles.
“It’s preferred that people who are not heavily involved in the day to day do not speak on behalf of NAFO or what NAFO is to the press,” one administrator wrote in the server’s announcement’s channel.
Inside NAFO’s social media crowdfunding nexus
There are three ways to obtain a NAFO avatar and become a verified “fella.” The first is to make a donation to the Georgian National Legion through an email address attached to PayPal and belonging to Taras Reshetylo, a field commander of the Georgian Legion. Another way to join is by donating to an organization called “Protect Ukraine Defenders,” or a merchandise purchase from a website called Saint Javelin. Saint Javelin’s logo depicts the Virgin Mary bearing a US-manufactured Javelin missile.
Though distinct from NAFO at its foundation, Saint Javelin sold merchandise for the organization and recently incorporated NAFO into its brand. For months, all of Saint Javelin’s proceeds from NAFO merchandise went directly to the Georgian Legion, according to its website. Like NAFO, Saint Javelin estimates that it has raised huge sums for the war — more than a million dollars.
Besides fundraising for the Georgian Legion, Saint Javelin passes on proceeds to United24, an initiative launched by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky “as the main venue for collecting charitable donations in support of Ukraine.” It also channels money to the Ukrainian World Congress, an organization which has defended the legacy of World War Two-era Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera, branding him “the undisputed symbol of Ukraine’s lengthy and tragic struggle for independence.”
Saint Javelin’s partnership with Zelensky’s United24 aims to help raise funds to build an “army of drones.”
The Saint Javelin website was launched by a former journalist named Christian Borys whose employment history spans NATO state-funded outlets including Canada’s CBC and Britain’s BBC. Borys has also authored articles for the US government-sponsored outlet Radio Free Europe.
One of Borys’ most notorious journalistic escapades consisted of a night of bar-hopping in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, where he patronized an antisemitic restaurant and returned with a review for Vice News portraying it as one of the city’s many weird and wonderful haunts.
The restaurant converts anti-Jewish tropes into a marketing gimmick; its waiters dress as Orthodox Jews who haggle with patrons over the prices of menu items. “If you play your cards right [it’s] ridiculously cheap,” Borys gushed in his review.
Noting that Lviv “was home to around 220,000 Jewish people,” Borys wrote that “the population now only hovers around 1,100,” Strangely though, he neglected to explain how the genocidal rampage of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped violently extinguish the local Jewish population. He merely stated that the restaurant “pays homage [to the local Jewish population] in a weird way.”
The Ukrainian ethnic-owned restaurant contains a terrace that overlooks the ruins of “one of the most important synagogues in Eastern Europe.”
In the same 2015 article, Borys described going to a bar where “you’re served by little people,” visiting another that forces you to recite ultra-nationalist slogans before entering, and emptying an AK-47 clip in a target depicting Putin’s face at a local shooting range.
VICE News publishes a “supplied” photograph of President Zelensky being handed a Saint Javelin t-shirt by the country’s Minister of Defense
On Twitter, Borys erupted with glee when a member of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was spotted wearing a Saint Javelin patch. He seemed equally thrilled when his former employer published photographs from an unstated source of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Olekseii Reznikov handing President Zelensky a Saint Javelin t-shirt.
In the NAFO Discord chat, Borys suggested paying protesters to hold NAFO demonstrations outside Russian embassies.
A retired Marine and amateur conflict pundit named Matt Moores claimed to have established the relationship between NAFO and Borys after co-founding the former organization. On October 7, NAFO was incorporated into the Saint Javelin brand, with the latter becoming the former’s parent company, according to a post by a NAFO administrator in the Discord server’s announcement channel.
The third organization for which NAFO fundraises, Protect Ukraine Defenders, was launched by a well-connected functionary of the Brussels-based intelligentsia named Ievgen Vorobiov. Vorobiov started as an intern for the European Union state-funded Centre for European Policy Studies think tank, then moved on to gigs at the Polish government-founded Polish Institute of International Affairs and Foreign Policy magazine. Before founding Protect Ukraine Defenders, Vorobiov spent nearly four years at the European Union Advisory Mission in Ukraine.
An anchor for amplifying pro-proxy war Twitter accounts
While Twitter has responded to NATO state pressure to suppress accounts associated with Russian state media, and has banned numerous other users for simply questioning the official Western version of events in Ukraine, organizations connected with NAFO have seen explosive growth since the Ukraine proxy war began. Saint Javelin, for its part, has received verification from Twitter and amassed nearly 70,000 followers since launching an account this February.
A NAFO founder who operates under the pseudonym “Kama Kamilia” had less than 200 Twitter followers in April 2022; today they broadcast to an audience of over 22,000. NAFO co-founder Christian Borys had less than 5,500 followers in February 2022 and now boasts more than 36,000. Similarly, Matt Moores’ Twitter account grew by more than 16,000 followers since January.
“Kama Kamilia” has explicitly linked the Georgian Legion’s follower count to the popularity of his NAFO organization: “I think they had 4,000 followers when we started [now] they have… more than 20,000.” As of early October, that number is more than 110,000.
In September, the Discord tech company granted NAFO “partnered” status, meaning it now serves as a corporate “role model” and is considered one of “the best servers out there.” Yet it is composed of just over 3,000 members, raising questions about the tens of thousands of new followers NAFO has suddenly accumulated on Twitter.
NAFO’s expansion has also driven the growth of hundreds, if not thousands, of otherwise insignificant Twitter accounts which have participated in online harassment and used the group to push crowdfunding efforts.
One NAFO-stylized account which the Georgian Legion follows and at least one administrator of the NAFO Discord boasted that they were able to purchase gear for a Ukrainian soldier named “Igor.” In the photographs attached to the Tweet, Igor can be seen wearing a Nazi Sonnenrad patch.
The war crimes of the Georgian Legion
Behind the goofy Shibu Ina avatars and rambunctious chat sessions lies a mission that defines NAFO: to raise as much money as possible for the Georgian National Legion. One administrator of the official NAFO discord put it succinctly: “NAFO has always been about supporting the Georgian Legion first and foremost.”
Another administrator stated on July 2 of this year that “$43,000 (USD) has been raised by the fellas for the Georgian Legion.” Three months later, a NAFO member estimated the figure to be “likely totaling over $1 million,” a metric of the explosive growth of the group. “It is the most organic movement I’ve been involved with,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
While NAFO fundraises for several allied organizations, supporters are most frequently directed to donate to the Georgian Legion. Matt Moores, the US Marine veteran who co-founded NAFO and describes himself as “very online,” has explained in interviews that NAFO “started as a fundraiser really.”
“Beyond the memes, beyond the jokes, beyond the humor, there is a real component of it with, you know, fundraising. These little cartoon dog avatars that they have, each one of them is made by a volunteer, a fella forger, in our community and these little small donations have raised close to $300,000 so far,” Moores explained.
With an existing Twitter following, Moores reached out to someone who posts online under the Kama Kamilia in May. It was then that NAFO was born.
“I was looking and saw that someone was posting these little cartoon dogs and using them to, you know, mock and to belittle these, you know, propaganda statements and the supposed achievements of the Russian military and just trying to throw these little jabs wherever you could get them in,” Moores said. “One day someone asked Kamil ‘how do I get one of these?’ And he said ‘if you send $20 or whatever it is to the Georgian Legion we’ll make you one of these.’ So from there it has really gotten quite out of hand.”
Little is known about the NAFO co-founder “Kama Kamilia,” as corporate media outlets hyping them as a pro-Ukraine influencer extraordinaire have refused to disclose his real name. However, this reporter and researcher Moss Robeson have determined that he is Kamil Dyszewski, a 29-year-old Polish national and failed criminologist-turned-video game reviewer living somewhere near London.
The NAFO founder has posted a number of antisemitic memes, including some mocking Jewish victims of the Holocaust, seemingly glorifying Adolf Hitler, and calling for the deportation of President Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to Tel Aviv.
“I just stumbled my way through life, now into this. What fuels it for me is the absolute hatred and vitriol I have towards the Russians,” Dyszewski has said. “I just found a way which we could expedite the process of getting them [the Russian government] removed.”
Dyszewski explained that he chose the Georgian Legion to be the recipients of the funds he raised because he believed their reputation as “mercenaries and criminals” would preclude them from receiving support from foreign governments.
The fighting group, which was incorporated into the official Ukrainian military, is led by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a Georgian-born veteran of several conflicts against Russia who swore to execute Russian POWs, an act which constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
“We will not take Russian soldiers… we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,” Mamulashvili has said. “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner.”
Mamulashvili’s comment came in response to a viral video which depicted one of his fighters casually executing wounded Russian POW’s.
Mamulashvili is a key suspect in the massacre by snipers of 49 protesters in Maidan square in 2014, a likely false flag attack designed to intensify opposition to the elected government of Ukraine. At the same time, he has been awarded the National Hero of Ukraine recognition, the highest national title in the country.
In a March 2022 interview with this reporter, Henry Hoeft, an American veteran named who volunteered with the Georgian National Legion, described witnessing war crimes committed by members of his unit. According to Hoeft, two men “blew a checkpoint” after members of the Georgian Legion accused them of being Russian spies. His fellow soldiers “shot their car up [and] black-bagged them.”
Georgian Legion fighters then “fucking slit their throats in the basement of the fucking building,” Hoeft recalled. “We don’t even know if they were actually spies or just people who ran a checkpoint.”
Another former American volunteer in Ukraine known only by the alias Benjamin Velcro described witnessing fellow Georgian Legion volunteers torture and execute a captured teen whom he estimated was “about 18.”
Velcro remarked, “We’d been told to take no prisoners.”
The Georgian Legion veteran continued: “We made a lesson to him. We fucking cut his achilles heels and made him swim across the Severdonetsk river and he drowned. Or he was shot. We were all taking kind of like practice shots at him to see how well our shot was as he swam without achilles heels… either way he’s dead,” Velcro said.
“Of course those fucking Georgian Legion guys did that stuff because they’re Georgians and they’re retards,” Velcro remarked.
The Georgian Legion has hosted two other notorious US foreign fighters profiled by The Grayzone: Craig Lang and Paul Gray. Lang was a member of the group before he returned to the United States, where he is wanted for robbed and murdering a married couple to finance his return trip to Ukraine. The Federal Bureau of Investigations has obtained video showing Lang participating in war crimes in eastern Ukraine, including “beating and drowning a girl after a fellow fighter injected her with adrenaline so that she would not lose consciousness as she was drowned.”
Gray, who is still active with the Georgian Legion, has been involved with multiple US-based neo-Nazi organizations, including Atomwaffen, which is listed as a terrorist organization by several countries. On its Twitter account, the Georgian Legion promoted a Fox News appearance by Gray. Similarly, Mamulashvili has posted Lang’s photograph on his Facebook page.
The Georgian Legion boss, Mamulashvili, has enjoyed close ties to Washington throughout years of low-intensity conflict in the eastern Ukraine, junketing to Capitol Hill for meetings with lawmakers with seats on foreign affairs committees in the House and Senate.
Though NAFO co-founder Moores speaks only infrequently about the Georgian Legion, he makes no secret of his support for the outfit: “Anywho, how about those Georgians,” he has written on Discord. “Boy they sure do kill Russians good, I’ll tell you what.” Similarly, Moores has praised the warlord Mamulashvili, marveling that “this dude has been killing Russians since the 90s.”
On Twitter, Moores posts under the handle “@iAmTheWarax,” where he has discussed Mamulashvili’s surprised reaction to the fact that “cartoon dogs” were raising thousands of dollars for his legion.
Moores, a former banker who joined the Marine Corps to “pursue his childhood dream” of becoming a tank operator, was first deployed to Libya in 2011, where the US and NATO overthrew and murdered the country’s longtime leader, Muammar Gaddafi, instantly transforming a once prosperous African country into a despotic hellhole. Moores has described his experience in Afghanistan, a country occupied, destabilized, and abandoned by the US military, as “based.”
For his part, Kamil Dyszewski – or Kama Kamilia as he is known online – has promoted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and celebrated the Ukrainian government’s October 8 suicide bombing attack on the Kerch bridge, retweeting several posts from fellow NAFO members that photoshopped Shiba Inu dogs into the scene of the attack. In the Discord server, Dyszewski wrote, “I need Russia to apologize for its audacity to exist. It can do so by ceasing to exist.”
The Grayzone has closely reviewed NAFO’s Discord server and gained access to channels accessible only to verified members. As the second part of this two part investigation will show, the server is a cesspool of hatred, with fellas delighting in videos of wounded and dying Russians and cracking gay jokes at their expense. Prominent journalists can also be found in the chats colluding with NAFO leaders on how to spin their coverage of the troll farm and cultivate support from DC power-brokers.
Russian language should become extinct in Ukraine – security chief
According to the 2001 census, approximately 14.3 million Ukrainians (29% of the population) speak Russian as their first language. Some other estimates put that number even higher.
The language is particularly widespread in the eastern and southern regions of the country.
Rt.com 21 Oct 22,
The language is part of Moscow’s propaganda, Defence Council boss claims
The Russian language should be eradicated in Ukraine as it is allegedly being used as a tool by Moscow to wield influence on Ukrainians, one of the country’s key security officials has claimed.
The Russian language is nothing but an “element of enemy propaganda and brainwashing of our people,” Alexey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said on the ‘Big Lviv Talks’ show on Friday.
The official also spoke in favor of Ukrainians learning English instead. ………
The senior official went on to criticize pundits and experts who speak Russian while appearing on Ukrainian TV.
According to the 2001 census, approximately 14.3 million Ukrainians (29% of the population) speak Russian as their first language. Some other estimates put that number even higher.
The language is particularly widespread in the eastern and southern regions of the country. Ever since the Maidan coup back in 2014, Moscow has been consistently accusing the Ukrainian government of systematically discriminating against Russian-speakers.
The perceived violations of the linguistic minority’s rights were also cited by the secessionist movements in the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions, parts of which went on to become the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, respectively. ………………………. more https://www.rt.com/russia/565118-ukrainian-official-russian-language-eradication—
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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