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TODAY. Rafael Grossi – suffering a sort of “Schizophrenia” about nuclear so-called “safety?

No wonder that the poor guy is looking anxious lately.

It must have been kinda fun for Rafael Grossi, being Director General of IAEA, from 2019 to 2022, running around the world, promoting the nuclear industry and the safety of nuclear power plants.

He’s still got that task, but it’s probably not any fun any more.

The shit has hit the fan. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is, as Grossi is forced to admit, facing “a dangerous situation”. Sitting in a war zone, run by exhausted Ukrainian workers, under control of Russia troops, repeatedly attackedby shelling, now with its essential cooling water threatened – the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is in danger. That means that the region is in danger, Ukraine is in danger, the whole of Europe is in danger.

Grossi got to this top job at a “good” time. Everyone was forgetting the series of nuclear accidents large and small. Chernobyl, which radioactively poisoned large swathes of Europe, was over, wasn’t it? The fun time of midwiving a “nuclear renaissance’ was on – “nuclear to save the climate – blah blah”

Poor Rafael – his contradictory job is impossible – to persuade the world that nuclear power is oh so safe, while at the same time warning the world of its deadly peril.

June 15, 2023 Posted by | Christina's notes | 8 Comments

The Voltaire Network on the collapse of Kiev. Ukraine -its past, and now

The collapse of Kiev, Thierry Meyssan, 14 June 23, Translation, Roger Lagassé

1 The fate of arms has decided. The moment of truth has spoken. The Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed miserably. NATO’s considerable armaments were useless. The battlefield is littered with corpses. All for nothing. The territories that joined the Russian Federation by referendum will remain Russian.

This “checkmate” not only marks the end of Ukraine as we have known it, but of Western domination that had staked its future on its lies.
The multipolar world may be born this summer at several international summits. A new way of thinking in which might no longer makes right.

This article was written on June 10. At that time, the only information available came from Russia and allied headquarters. Ukraine had imposed a total embargo on its counter-offensive. We should therefore have waited before publishing this text. However, we felt that if Ukraine had been able to break through Russia’s first line of defense, even if it hadn’t managed to get into the breach, it would have let us know. We are therefore publishing this analysis.

In six days, from June 4 to 10, 2023, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive and suffered a terrible defeat.

During the summer, Russian forces built two defense lines in the part of Novorossia they liberated and in the Donbass. They prevent the passage of all armored vehicles.

Ukrainian forces have chosen a dozen points of attack to retake “enemy-occupied” territory. Their armored vehicles were unable to get through the first line of Russian defenses and piled up in front of it, where they were destroyed one by one by Russian artillery and suicide drones.

At the same time, the Russian army targeted missiles at command centers and arsenals inside Ukrainian territory and destroyed them.

The Ukrainian air defense system was destroyed by hypersonic missiles as soon as it was installed. In its absence, the Ukrainians were unable to carry out the maneuvers planned by Nato.

Russia did not use any of its new weapons, apart from its NATO weapons jamming system and some of its hypersonic missiles.

The border is now a long graveyard of tanks and men. Airports are full of smoking Mig-29 and F-16 wrecks.

The staffs of the United States, the Atlantic Alliance and Ukraine are passing the buck for this historic disaster. Hundreds of thousands of human lives and 500 billion dollars have been wasted for nothing. Western weapons, which shook the world in the 90s, are now worthless compared to the Russian arsenal of today. Strength has changed sides.

Two conclusions can already be drawn:

DO NOT CONFUSE THE UKRAINIAN ARMY WITH THE “INTEGRAL NATIONALISTS”

While there is no longer a Ukrainian army capable of high-intensity warfare, there are still the forces of the “integral nationalists” (sometimes called “Banderists” or “Ukrainian-Nazis”). But they are only trained for low-intensity warfare. Its leaders went to fight in Chechnya in the late 90s on behalf of the CIA and NATO secret services, and sometimes in Syria in the 2020s. They are trained in targeted assassinations, sabotage and civilian massacres. Nothing more.

They succeeded
1. In sabotaging the Russian-German-French-Dutch Nord Stream gas pipeline, plunging Germany and then the European Union into recession on September 26, 2022.
2. In sabotaging the Kerch Strait bridge (known as the “Crimean Bridge”), on October 8, 2022.
3. In attacking the Kremlin with drones, May 3, 2023
4. In using drones to attack the Ivan Kurs, the intelligence vessel defending the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in the Black Sea, on May 26, 2023.
5. In sabotaging the Kakhovka dam to split Novorossia in two, on June 6, 2023.
6. In sabotaging the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline to destroy the Russian mineral fertilizer industry, on June 7, 2023.

Just as in the two World Wars and the Cold War, they proved their terrorist capabilities, but played no decisive role on the battlefield.

Now more than ever, we need to distinguish between Ukrainians who thought they were defending their people, and the “integral nationalists” [1], who don’t care about their compatriots and have been trying for a century to eradicate Russians and their culture.

THE UKRAINE WE KNEW IS DEAD

Until now, Ukraine has been above all a power of communication. Kiev succeeded in making people believe that the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected president in favor of integral nationalists was a revolution. Likewise, it has managed to make people forget the way it crushed its citizens in the Donbass, refusing to give them access to public services, to pay civil servants’ salaries and pensions to the elderly and, ultimately, bombing its cities. Finally, it succeeded in convincing Westerners that Ukraine was a homogenous country with a single population living a common history.

As in most wars, there is also a “civil war” aspect [2]. Today, everyone can see that, contrary to what was claimed, Vladimir Putin’s analysis was not a reconstruction of history, but a factual truth. The people of Donbass are profoundly Russian. The people of Novorossia (including Crimea) are of Russian culture, albeit with a different history (they have never known serfdom). Ukraine has never existed as an independent state in history, apart from one decade, during the periods 1917-22 and 1941-45, and three other decades, since 1991.

During these three experiences, Kiev never stopped purging its people and massacring its citizens when the full nationalists were in power (1917-22 with Simon Petliura, 1941-45 with Stepan Bandera, and 2014-22 with Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky). In total, over the course of a century, the “integral nationalists” – as they call themselves – have murdered more than 3 million of their compatriots.

During the First World War, the people of Novorossia had already risen up around the anarchist Nestor Makhno; during the Second World War, the people of Donbass and Novorossia rose up as Soviets; while this time, they are fighting against the “integral nationalists” in Kiev with Russian forces.

The only way to stop these massacres is to separate the “integral nationalists” from the population of Russian culture they want to kill [3]. Since Nato staged a coup in 2014 and put them in power, there’s no other way but to note the country’s current division and leave them in power in Kiev. It is the Ukrainians, and they alone, who will have to overthrow them.

Current military operations have already done so. The part of the country liberated by the Russians voted in a referendum to join the Federation. However, last year’s Russian advance was halted by President Vladimir Putin as part of negotiations with Ukraine, conducted first in Belarus, then in Turkey. Odessa is still Ukrainian in law, even though it is culturally Russian. Transnistria is still Moldavian, even though it is culturally Russian.

The war is technically over. No offensive can alter the current borders. Admittedly, the fighting may drag on and a peace treaty is a long way off, but the die is cast. There is still a problem in Ukraine and Moldavia: Odessa and Transnistria are still not Russian. Above all, there remains a fundamental problem: in violation of their oral and written commitments, the members of the Atlantic Alliance have stockpiled US weapons on Russia’s borders, jeopardizing its security.

June 15, 2023 Posted by | history, politics, Reference, weapons and war | 3 Comments

Ignoring the Fiction of a Nuclear Silver Bullet

by Ben JealousJune 14, 2023,  https://www.washingtoninformer.com/jealous-ignoring-the-fiction-of-a-nuclear-silver-bullet/

A growing chorus in Washington equates weaning our country off energy from killer fossil fuels to relying more heavily on new nuclear power plants. The same debates are happening in state capitals from Richmond to Raleigh, Springfield to Sacramento. This chorus distracts from the real work ahead of ensuring clean, renewable, affordable energy for every community.

The risk of nuclear energy is an easy dividing line. To opponents, names like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima are all the evidence we need that a catastrophic event is unavoidable and unacceptable. For supporters, those events are a sign that disasters are few. Both are right – they happen infrequently, and when they do occur, they are cataclysmic.

The more compelling reasons we should drop the silver bullet thinking about nuclear power are its cost and its reliability.

Since the mid-20th century when nuclear power entered the public imagination, the belief has been that energy is “free” – start the chain reaction make electricity. It’s not, and it never has been (uranium must be mined and reactor fuel is consumable). We’ve reached a point where renewable sources like wind and solar power are cheaper, in part because they are quicker to come online.

Lazard, a global investment bank and financial consultancy that reports annually on the “levelized cost of energy” from various sources, found that nuclear power is two to six times more costly per megawatt hour than wind and solar (which now cost the same per megawatt hour). The capital cost of large-scale solar and wind is at least eight times lower. The time to get new wind and solar into the electricity grid is at least half the time for a new nuclear plant; history shows that anyone who estimates the completion date for a new nuclear plant is wrong.

Unlike most industries that rely heavily on science and technology, the cost of building nuclear plants is rising over time. In Silicon Valley, they call it a reverse learning curve.

Supporters of nuclear power like to argue that nuclear plants are required for reliability, and that they can operate all the time. This ignores nuclear’s vulnerability to climate change: severe weather, extreme temperatures, and both floods and droughts have forced nuclear plants to shut down unexpectedly in recent years. Additionally, a reactor goes offline for routine maintenance at least every two years, which means a plant must have more total capacity to cover that maintenance routine. By comparison, wind and solar farms have much fewer operational problems. And battery backups have gotten faster than the gas power generation that nuclear plants often turn to meet peak demand.

It’s time to confront nuclear’s challenges — uranium mining, accident risk, cost, and climate vulnerability — and double down on the solutions we know will be central to our shift away from fossil fuels.

We can’t afford the distraction of a fiction around nuclear power when burning fossil fuels threatens the health of millions around the world annually. Our focus must be on bringing the clean air, cost saving, and economic benefits of clean energy to communities across the country as quickly as we can. From home energy retrofits and rooftop solar to wind energy and battery storage, we have more and better ways than ever before to transform our energy systems from fossil fuels to energy that’s actually clean, reliable and renewable.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club, America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization.

June 15, 2023 Posted by | business and costs, spinbuster | Leave a comment

French nuclear watchdog specifies questions for EDF reactor life extensions

June 15, 2023,  https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-nuclear-watchdog-specifies-questions-edf-reactor-life-extensions-2023-06-14/

PARIS, June 14 (Reuters) – French nuclear operator EDF (EDF.PA) will have to assess several technical challenges during the review period for a lifespan extension to 60 years for its nuclear fleet, watchdog ASN said in a press release on Wednesday.

ASN is asking the French power giant to address the mechanical resistance of certain portions of the main pipes of the primary circuit for several reactors and analyze feedback from an earthquake around the Cruas plant in 2019.

Other factors, such as the expected effects of climate change and the operation of facilities for the different stages of the fuel lifecycle, will also need to be addressed, the press release said.

EDF said the group was currently looking into the questions raised by the watchdog and was confident in its ability to meet the safety conditions necessary for the continued operation of all its reactors past 50 years.

Particular attention is being paid to the four Cruas reactors near a geological fault, and the conclusion may lead to a specific approach for the extension of these reactors, the group said.

The piping components ASN are concerned with are difficult to adjust or fix, as they connect the primary circuit to the reactor vessel, exposing workers to high doses of radiation.

EDF said it was working on automating a mechanical process in case an intervention is needed.

Reporting by Forrest Crellin and Benjamin Mallet; Editing by Mark Porter and Mark Potter

June 15, 2023 Posted by | France, safety | Leave a comment

CIA: Black Market of Arms Trade. Part 1

CIAGATE, MAY 26, 2023

We can see that the CIA controls a significant part of the arms trade black market. Millions of dollars are being spent on financing terrorist groups and political radicals around the globe. Biden has already allocated more than $50 billion for purchasing weapons for Ukraine.

We know that the vast part of this money ends up in the pockets of corrupt CIA agents and officials bribed by them, and are also spent on other illegal activities.

In the first part of our investigation, we publish a list of the CIA agents who are involved in corrupt schemes for weapons supply to hotspots all around the world. We want their activity to become public and be thoroughly investigated. The U.S. foreign policy should emphasize peace with all nations, entangling alliances with none.

List of persons involved in the weapons supplies to Ukraine.…………………………… more https://ciagate.substack.com/p/cia-black-market-of-arms-trade-part

June 15, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Talks ongoing over plans for Vulcan base to move into hands of Nuclear Decommissioning Authority

 By Iain Grant

Talks ongoing over plans for Vulcan base to move into hands of Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority. Discussions are continuing with moves to put the
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) in charge of the clean-up of the
Vulcan military base in Caithness. Officials are working on smoothing the
way for the NDA, which already runs the redundant civil fast reactor plant
at Dounreay, to take over the next-door site from the Ministry of Defence
(MoD).

The MoD had put the wheels in motion towards the end of 2021 to seek
bids from private firms to carry out the clean-up of Vulcan, whose
pressurised water reactor shut down eight years ago. But the tender process
was halted soon after, since when the focus has been on paving the way for
the NDA to move in.

The MoD announced the start to the decontamination and
dismantling of the Royal Navy’s long-time nuclear submarine test base had
been put back until early 2026. In the meantime, the plant will continue to
be run by the MoD’s long-time contractor, Rolls-Royce.

Commander Ian
Walker, who heads the small Royal Navy presence at Vulcan, said the NDA
takeover is a credible option. But he said putting Vulcan and Dounreay
under the same operator is not straightforward, as the sites come under
different licensing and regulatory regimes and government departments. He
said: “We’re still looking at how the transfer to the NDA could be enacted
and a decision is expected later this year.” The move has been supported by
Struan Mackie, chair of the Dounreay Stakeholder Group.

John O’Groat Journal 13th June 2023

https://www.johnogroat-journal.co.uk/news/talks-ongoing-over-plans-for-vulcan-base-to-move-into-hands-316870/

June 15, 2023 Posted by | decommission reactor, UK | Leave a comment

South Korea begins public briefings to address concern over Fukushima water

South Korea’s fisheries ministry held the first of a series of nationwide
briefings for the public on Tuesday regarding seafood safety amid Japan’s
plan to release treated radioactive water from the disaster-hit Fukushima
nuclear power plant into the sea.

The Oceans and Fisheries Ministry said
Monday the briefings will continue until late June to provide scientific
information on the treated water at the Fukushima No. 1 plant that Japan
plans to start discharging in the summer.

The first event was held in the
southern port city of Busan with about 40 people — all working in the
local fisheries industry — in attendance, a ministry official said. Song
Sang-keun, the vice fisheries minister, said Monday, “(The ministry)
plans to meet face-to-face with the public, especially those working in the
fisheries industry, to explain how safe our marine products are, based on
scientific and objective facts. “There is no way that inappropriate
marine products will get to the table of our people,” Song added.

Japan Times 14th June 2023

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/06/14/national/south-korea-briefings-fukushima-water/

June 15, 2023 Posted by | politics international, South Korea | Leave a comment

The US Energy Department is spending $26M to help find a temporary site to store spent nuclear fuel

Federal energy regulators have announced that they are spending $26 million
to find communities willing to accept a temporary federal site to store
spent nuclear fuel while a permanent repository is completed. Thirteen
groups made up of industry, academic, nonprofit, government and community
representatives will each get $2 million to explore the most equitable
approach to picking an interim site to store highly radioactive waste from
nuclear power plants, according to a recent news release from the U.S.
Energy Department. The approach will include a dialogue with residents and
local governments, the department said.

Daily Mail 13th June 2023

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-12191721/The-US-Energy-Department-spending-26M-help-temporary-site-store-spent-nuclear-fuel.html

June 15, 2023 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

In July, NATO nations will upgrade Ukraine’s status as a future member, but in a rather confusing way.

Gathering in Vilnius is likely to result in post-war security guarantees and easier route to join alliance when the time comes

Ukraine will not be offered timeline for Nato membership at summit in July Patrick Wintour, Guardian, 14 June 23,

Ukraine will not be offered a timeline with specific dates by which it can join Nato at its summit in Vilnius next month but instead may be offered a shorter route when an offer of membership is made. The proposal, reflecting a gathering consensus of key partners in the western defence alliance, will come as a disappointment to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Nato members, but outside formal Nato structures, will also offer post-conflict security guarantees to Ukraine, which are likely to take the shape of broad commitments to protect Ukraine from assaults by Russia. They are also expected to continue to provide ammunition and to help the Ukrainian armed forces become more convergent with Nato. But the commitments are likely to take a broad high level form rather than be specific offers of weaponry.

The countries at the centre of the negotiations said it is normal in the run-up to a summit for Nato members still to be in disagreement. However, they hoped a possible commitment that Ukraine would not have to meet conditions set out in a laborious membership application plan (MAP) and instead gain near automatic membership once an invitation is offered would be recognised as an upgrade from anything offered to the country before. Finland and Sweden have been offered Nato membership without needing to complete a MAP.

It is also likely that Nato will upgrade its current political relationship with Ukraine from the current Nato-Ukraine commission to a Nato-Ukraine council, an upgrade that gives Ukraine a higher status in joint meetings. One diplomat conceded the upgrade was unlikely to mean much to the average Ukrainian soldier fighting on the frontline but insisted it had a real value.

Juliette Smith, the US ambassador to Nato, said an upgrade to a council format “would shift the fundamental dynamics”, since Ukraine would be meeting as one of 32 attendees, as opposed to a format of 31 plus one. This would change the potential agenda items, something the US would welcome, she said.

All sides have long accepted that Ukraine cannot become a Nato member in the middle of a conflict but Kyiv, backed by Baltic states and Poland, would like a date or a timeline by which it could join once the conflict ends. A Vilnius commitment to membership has been proposed.

The absence of a date or clear conditions that Ukraine would need to meet to gain automatic Nato status will lead to Ukrainian accusations that Nato is doing little more than re-offering the promise of membership made to Ukraine at the Nato Bucharest summit in April 2008 when Nato said it had agreed Ukraine and Georgia will become members of Nato. Western countries said it would be perfectly understandable for Ukraine to be angry but insist the wording, coupled with the security commitments, can be an improvement.

The need to maintain Nato unity at such a critical time is seen as paramount, with Vladimir Putin likely to be the only beneficiary of an acrimonious Nato summit in which different sides fall out over Ukraine’s future Nato status. Full Nato membership gives members the protection umbrella of Nato’s Article 5 commitment to collective self-defence.

An attempt to require all Nato members to ensure 2% of GDP is spent on defence is also expected at the summit……………………………….more https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/14/ukraine-will-not-be-offered-timeline-for-nato-membership-at-summit-in-july

June 15, 2023 Posted by | politics international, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Russia trying to market nuclear power stations to Sri Lanka

IAEA studying plans to build nuclear power plant in Sri Lanka, Colombo Gazette, June 15, 2023

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is studying Russia’s plans to build a nuclear power plant in Sri Lanka.

Rosatom, the Russian the State Atomic Energy Corporation will help build a nuclear power plant in Sri Lanka.

The Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the Russian Federation, Janita Liyanage, said that the project was approved by the country’s authorities and is now being studied by IAEA specialists.

According to her, there is still a discussion on making the nuclear power plant floating or building it on the ground.

Rosatom will also help train specialists who will work at the nuclear power plants…….

Sri Lanka plans to build its first nuclear power plant with technical support from Russia by 2032……………………..  https://colombogazette.com/2023/06/15/iaea-studying-plans-to-build-nuclear-power-plant-in-sri-lanka/

June 15, 2023 Posted by | marketing, Russia | Leave a comment

Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr’s candidacy at our peril

When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there.

As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer – seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy..

Naomi Klein, Guardian, 14 June 23

Given the strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum. Ignoring him is not an option


When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plan to run for president in the Democratic party primaries this April, the dominant liberal strategy towards the once tough environmental lawyer – now spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories – seemed to be: ignore him and wait for him to go away. Don’t cover, don’t engage and don’t debate. Jim Kessler, a leader of the pro-Biden think tank Third Way, called him a “gadfly and a laughingstock”; Democratic consultant Sawyer Hackett brushed him off as “a gnat.”

Well, if recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy. Kennedy honed his social media skills over years to spread his anti-vaccine message, so he has simply done an end-run around traditional media and party structures: a “Twitter Spaces” tete-a-tete with Elon Musk and a string of video streams, several with hundreds of thousands of views and listens, on every channel from Breaking Points on the left to Jordan Peterson’s podcast on the right (that one quickly broke a million views on YouTube).

He has landed an apparent endorsement from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this week is being feted at a Bay Area fundraiser filled with heavy hitters. According to a CNN poll released in late May, support for Kennedy was at 20% among respondents who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning.

It’s time to abandon wishful thinking and figure out what is going on. What are the reasons his campaign is resonating with a consequential slice of US voters? (And voters beyond the US, where he has a large following?) What pain, silence and rage is he tapping into? What important truths and realities is he concealing and eliding? And, given the near impossible odds of him winning the race which he is currently running in, what is his real end-game?

Let’s start with the reservoirs of Kennedy’s appeal.

The Power of Story…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Tapping Into the Rage

It’s not only the combined power of a dynastic family, violent crime and choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy culture that RFK Jr is riding. He is also tapping into a wellspring of real pain and outrage. These points may be obvious but they bear repeating: a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world – inflamed on every level – that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.

RFK Jr’s campaign speaks directly to this outrage, with its central message about “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.” When he talks about drug companies controlling the national health agencies and polluters controlling environmental regulators, he is persuasive, which is why he was a good lawyer. When he rails against the corporations who made a killing during Covid, profiteering off the pandemic and using it to crush their rivals, he is speaking my language and it’s hard not to nod along.

When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there.

………………………………………………………………………… Giving Voice to Ecological Grief

As a lifelong outdoorsman and longtime environmental lawyer, RFK Jr also does something very few politicians in modern life seem capable of doing: put into words our moment of shattering ecological loss and grief. “Environmental protection binds us to our own humanity and to all of creation,” he said on Earth Day. “When we destroy a species, when we destroy a special place, we’re diminishing our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is, and what our own potential is as human beings.”

Kennedy is fluent in the language of heartbreak about dead rivers and devastated fisheries; of asthmatic lungs and increasingly silent springs. As smoke blots the sun across entire continents, this is not a skill to dismiss lightly. Who else has it? Not Joe Biden. Not Kamala Harris. Not even Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders was great on the facts of the climate crisis when he ran, and full of righteous fury at fossil fuel companies – but I don’t think I ever heard him speak with unabashed emotion about extinction. This is another vacuum that RFK Jr is skillfully filling.

Given the undeniable strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum, and continue to find new audiences. Ignoring him is not an option. What is needed instead is a serious engagement with the myths that underlie the Kennedy performance and that are key to his progressive appeal.


Myth #1: He would be a climate champion.

Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.” He also says that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires” – a green-tinged reboot of the same, all-too familiar conspiracy theories he rode to pandemic stardom, when he opposed virtually every Covid public health measure, from masks to vaccines to closures. Now he is marshaling the same arguments against climate action.

…………………………………………. But we should also be clear: actively spreading terror on the scale that RFK Jr has done for two decades is itself a public health crisis. The vaccine-autism myth stigmatizes people who are neuro-atypical, presenting them as tragic, and distracts from the urgent need to fight for greater accessibility and lifelong supports. It also discourages vaccination, which is already leading to a resurgence of diseases we thought we had defeated, from measles to diphtheria.

Kennedy complains that he used to be so marginalized for his conspiratorial views that speaking felt “like talking into a fucking tin can.” Well, thanks to his primary run, his tin can has been replaced with a global megaphone and millions more people are hearing his bogus theories. We will feel the ramifications of that for decades to come.

Myth #3: He is anti-war and pro-human rights.

Kennedy is most persuasive when opposing US military intervention abroad, or when he is discussing the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine, and calling for a peaceful settlement. But how seriously should we take his pacifism and human rights concerns? One hint rests in the blanket support he offers the Israeli government, one of the top recipients of aid from the US military industrial complex he decries, and a nation consistently unwilling to entertain peace with justice, while escalating tensions with Iran.

…………………………………………………………. As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer – seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy.n  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option?CMP=share_btn_tw

June 15, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment