Sep 092023
 
 September 9, 2023  Posted by at 9:24 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,


René Magritte The Art of Conversation 1963

 

Hunter the Hunted? Biden Indictment May be Ruse to Prolong Cover-Up (Tweedie)
Biden’s New Campaign Ad Presents Him As Last Action Hero (ZH)
What Game Is Hunter Biden Playing? (Victor Davis Hanson)
Biden Impeachment Vote Could Take Place in Mid-September – Comer (Sp.)
White House Scolded Hillary for Asking Ukraine for Help With Afghan Exit (Sp.)
Zelensky On Starlink-Gate: Musk “Committing Evil” & Driven By “Big Ego” (ZH)
Scott Ritter: Ukrainian Counteroffensive’s Last, Desperate Push (Sp.)
US Using Ukraine To Weaken EU – Sarkozy (RT)
Ukraine ‘Threatening’ Poland – Minister (RT)
Pentagon’s Hypersonic Woes Due to ‘Very Delicate’ Physics Problems (Sp.)
France Seeks Pullout From Niger (Sp.)
Is The G20 Obsolete In An Increasingly Multipolar World? (Malyk)
The Unshakeable Putin-Erdogan Nexus (Bhadrakumar)
A Theory of the Game (Jim Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1699900110627393714

 

 

Nap Sachs

 

 

The European Commission praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin for his efforts to fight corruption in a December 2015 progress report published nine days after then-VP Joe Biden demanded his ouster. The report flies in the face of Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms.

 

 

Trump Rapid City
https://twitter.com/i/status/1700353703079747841

 

 

Obama insider and author and biographer Joel Gilbert has claimed Michelle Obama is preparing to enter the 2024 race and become the Democratic presidential nominee allegedly due to Biden’s declining health.

 

 

Lara Logan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1699848500551328179

 

 

 

 

 

 

“David Weiss is a factotum, he’s a lickspittle. He does what he’s told for the Biden family. Always has, always will.”

Hunter the Hunted? Biden Indictment May be Ruse to Prolong Cover-Up (Tweedie)

Carter Clews, the president of Constitutional Rights PAC, Rory Riley Topping, a legal analyst at SpectrumNews 1 and opinion contributor at The Hill discusses the possible indictment of Hunter Biden with investigative journalist Dan Lazare. Looming charges against Joe Biden’s son Hunter may paradoxically be part of the long game of covering up his wrongdoing to save his father’s career, pundits have suggested. US media reported this week that special counsel David Weiss was planning to indict Hunter on illegal firearms possession charges before the end of the month. Carter Clews told Sputnik the indictment was an elaborate deception, but that “the American people aren’t that stupid.” “It’s all done for obfuscation,” Clews said. “David Weiss is a factotum, he’s a lickspittle. He does what he’s told for the Biden family. Always has, always will.”

He pointed out that a New York Post editorial column had already exposed how Weiss had “run interference” for Hunter Biden for five years. “If he wanted to indict Hunter Biden, he could have done it at any point during those five years,” Clews said. “All of the transgressions were there, all of the lawbreaking.” But by laying formal charges against the scion of the political family, the special counsel can declare all evidence sub judice and off-limits to journalists. “This will enable Weiss to refuse to turn over any more documents, to refuse to answer any questions: ‘well, you know, we have an indictment. There’s a very thorough, ongoing investigation’ — which will amount to nothing,” Clews argued.
He said the proceedings were a “three-part deception”

“They may be doing it to go to Joe and say: ‘we’re going to stick your son behind bars for the rest of his life, if you don’t declare that you’ve decided not to run for re-election’,” Clews said. “‘Toxic Joe’ is very difficult to get along with. And I’m sure they’ve approached him nicely and say maybe, maybe you should step aside come January or February. And he said: ‘no, I’m not doing that’.” Another aim may simply be to “dupe the American people once again… to deepen the cover-up, as I just said, to be able to say: ‘oh, no, we can’t comment. We can’t give you any information over this’. They have blocked every request from [Congress representative James] Comer, the Oversight Committee chairman for documents. And this will enable them to continue doing it and they will do it even more so.”

Legal analyst Rory Riley-Topping told Sputnik that many US citizens had wanted a “more expeditious process” of indicting the president’s son. “Had he been just a regular citizen, if you or I or anyone on the street was caught doing some of the things that Hunter Biden was doing, I think that we probably wouldn’t have taken five years to be indicted for some of those charges,” she pointed out. “That’s one of the main sources of frustration.” But she argued the Biden administration had left a timebomb for itself by obstructing and delaying the investigation. “But in a wonderful twist of irony, this is potentially going to trial during the campaign season. I think that’s something that the Biden administration certainly wanted to avoid” Riley -Topping said. “So in some sense, their strategy to drag this out and hope it went away ultimately backfired.”

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Hollywood at its worst.

Biden’s New Campaign Ad Presents Him As Last Action Hero (ZH)

“He entered Ukraine under the cover of night. And in the morning, Joe Biden walked shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the war-torn streets,” the narrator of a new one-minute Biden campaign ad begins. “Standing up for democracy in a place where a tyrant is waging war to take it away.” Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, where he’ll likely face Trump as the Republican nominee, the Biden team is focusing the reelection campaign around his surprise visit to Ukraine which took place last February. It’s being touted as the first time in American history that a sitting president traveled to an allied nation at war. “In the middle of a war zone, Joe Biden showed the world what America is made of,” the narrator says. “That’s the quiet strength of a true leader, who doesn’t back down to a dictator.”

So while his critics sarcastically refer to him as “sleepy Joe” – his supporters are envisioning him as some kind of last action hero being covertly whisked into a dangerous “war zone” in the dark of night. “Air raid sirens blared as the two men walked together,” the clip dramatically continues, showing Biden shoulder to shoulder with Zelensky. The video was timed to be released to coincide with Biden’s trip to the G20 summit in India, where he’ll likely have strong words for Putin, who will not be attendance. NBC writes of the spot entitled simply “War Zone”:

The new, 60-second advertisement will air in battleground states this weekend during the prime-time broadcast of “60 Minutes” while Biden is due to attend the G-20 Summit here, a gathering of leaders of the world’s largest economies that won’t include two geopolitical rivals, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. This comes as he’s set to pour yet billions more of American taxpayer dollars into Kiev’s coffers. Yet war observers and analysts have of late expressed intensifying concern over uncontrollable escalation in what’s now obviously a US-NATO proxy war against Russia. But Biden is doubling or tripling down, showing the world “what America is made of”, apparently.

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“Is it now, “Keep Hunter close and self-important — or else”?

What Game Is Hunter Biden Playing? (Victor Davis Hanson)

Hunter Biden’s attorneys sought to leverage federal prosecutors into agreeing to drop their charges — by threatening to call in as a pro-Hunter witness President Joe Biden himself and thereby likely invoke a constitutional crisis! In such a scenario, the president under oath would be forced to lie again that he had no knowledge of or involvement in Hunter’s illegal behavior. Or if he admitted the truth that he did, he would thus contradict years of his adamant denials. Why would Hunter put his father and president in such a publicity circus?

Hunter has lost an incriminating laptop by abandoning it at a repair shop. He has forgotten his crack pipe in a rental car. His illegally registered handgun turned up in a trash dumpster near a school. So would not the carefree Hunter insist that all the Bidens in the spotlight remain extra careful never to abandon incriminating drugs — especially in the White House. Yet in a West Wing first, recently cocaine was found lost in an entrance vestibule. Various media outlets claimed it belonged to someone in the “Biden family orbit.” One of two things explain the continuous reckless behavior of wayward son Hunter Biden: One, he is either still on drugs or so suffers from past addiction that he has lost all common sense and judgment, and simply cannot control his behavior.

Or, two, Hunter is an embittered, angry son. As the Biden bagman for foreign shakedown cash, he did the dirty work and most risked the legal exposure that made all the Bidens rich. Yet, instead of familial praise — or so the broke Hunter seems to whine on his laptop –Hunter gets no respect from those he enriched. And now he, not they, might first go to jail. As a result, does his continuous recklessness send a not so-subtle reminder to all the Bidens – his father the “Big Guy” especially? That is, Hunter is not going to take the fall. He will not end up in prison for decades while the other exempt Bidens continue to enjoy their ill-gotten riches, due to Hunter’s imaginative cons. No wonder the first family for months moved Hunter into the White House and put him on Air Force One. Is it now, “Keep Hunter close and self-important — or else”?

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Let’s see it.

Biden Impeachment Vote Could Take Place in Mid-September – Comer (Sp.)

The US House of Representatives could vote to impeach President Joe Biden as early as mid-September, James Comer, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said. Earlier in the week, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said a majority of House members support investigating Biden in order to move forward with impeachment proceedings. “I think the House will vote in September. And this is all up to [House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy … but he and I have had several conversations … I would predict that in the middle of September, we have a vote. I would predict that it passes,” Comer said in an interview with the news broadcaster. The lawmaker also said that the official inquiry could be useful in obtaining information from the National Archives and Records Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, which have allegedly slow-walked the investigation by postponing providing requested bank records of the Biden family.

Biden’s possible use of a pseudonym to communicate with his son, Hunter about foreign business dealings may have been precisely what prompted representatives to move forward with the investigation, Comer added. US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had earlier expressed support for a vote to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden, amid reports that it could be launched without a proper vote. He said that the information gathered by the Republican Party allows the question of Biden’s impeachment to be raised. He said that the family of the US president was involved in a “culture of corruption”. McCarthy also stated that the investigation into the alleged involvement of the US president and his son in corrupt activities dictates the need to initiate the impeachment process. As the high-ranking congressman noted, such a procedure would expand the ability of the US legislature to gather information necessary for the investigation into the presidency.

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Madam President.

White House Scolded Hillary for Asking Ukraine for Help With Afghan Exit (Sp.)

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan reportedly scolded former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to help evacuate Afghan women during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Citing the recently-published book “The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future,” US media reported on Friday that Clinton had asked Zelensky’s aide if she could board several Afghan women on military transport planes headed to Kiev. After Sullivan became aware of Clinton’s call, it’s alleged he questioned her methods and reportedly asked her: “What are you doing calling the Ukrainian government?”

Clinton later responded by explaining that she would not have to call Ukraine if the Biden administration would have done it in the first place. She subsequently assured Sullivan she would coordinate with US officials. However, as the book alleges, Clinton had already contacted world leaders in Canada, Qatar and Albania amid her efforts to evacuate 1,000 people out of Afghanistan who were said to be at-risk of being killed by the Taliban* once American forces fully departed the war-torn nation. The book’s author, Franklin Foer, explains that the list of women were referred to as “white scarves” since the Clinton camp instructed them to wear the specified head coverings so they were easily identifiable.

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He would have had to specifically order a lethal operation on the brink of WWIII. Not his style.

Zelensky On Starlink-Gate: Musk “Committing Evil” & Driven By “Big Ego” (ZH)

Since Elon Musk has apparently become Donald Trump – in that any lie/twist/gaslighting will do to further the narrative, no matter how false it is known to be – last night saw the mainstream media overwhelmed with circle-jerk-justified accusations that Musk meddled in the Ukraine-Russia war to stop a Zelenskyy-driven offensive (that likely would have turned the war and hailed victory ticker-tape parades up and down Kiev’s streets). Ok, admittedly that last bit was out hyperbole; but given a quick read of headlines from CNN and NBC, we could be forgiven for this view. Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”

As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes. NBC led with the following headline: “Ukraine is furious with Elon Musk for thwarting an attack on Russia’s navy”. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has come under fire from Ukraine after it emerged he thwarted a major attack on the Russian navy. According to excerpts published by CNN, a soon-to-be-released biography of the SpaceX CEO claims that Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his Starlink satellite network over Russian-occupied Crimea last year in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia’s naval fleet. The mainstream media did not have to look too far to find someone willing to denigrate Musk: Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blasted the tech billionaire on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk owns.

“Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake,” Podolyak wrote. “By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” he added. “As a result, civilians, children are being killed,” Podolyak said. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. However, the question still remains: why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” Isaacson quotes Musk at the time as questioning “How am I in this war?” “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

Couple quick questions – how would Musk know – pre-emptively – of the attack, and choose to disable Starlink? Is his intel better than Putin’s; better than the CIA’s? The spin here is utterly mind-blowing. In fact, according to Musk – who responded to the accusations on X, the details are the exact opposite to how CNN described them… In fact, Musk NEVER turned Starlink on in those controversial border zones – for exactly this reason, as he feared using this technology near borders could prompt an escalation in the war. In fact, Musk did not ‘turn Starlink off’ but refused to ‘turn Starlink on’ for Ukraine’s offensive. Which makes more sense to you – the richest man in the world unilaterally switching off internet access to pre-emptively thwart a secret attack by Ukraine on Russia in a Blofeld-esque move? Or the CEO of a major communications company refusing to enable his technology to be used to escalate a war that could well lead to armageddon?

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“..where you want to force the enemy to come in so you can hit them with artillery, to break up the attack, but not to hold and die..”

Scott Ritter: Ukrainian Counteroffensive’s Last, Desperate Push (Sp.)

Ukraine is gaining ground in its counteroffensive started in June, claimed NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday, addressing lawmakers at the European Parliament. Does that mean Ukraine has finally achieved a breakthrough after nearly four months and heavy casualties? “To answer that question, we have to know what the goals and objectives of the current phase of the Ukrainian counteroffensive are,” Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, told Sputnik. “We know that when they initiated this counteroffensive back in early June of this year, the goals were quite clear: to break through the first line of Russian defenses, the second line of Russian defenses, seize the town of Tokmak, and then use that as a launching point to penetrate deeper through the Russian defenses to seize the city of Melitopol, which would enable them to sever the land bridge between Crimea and Russia and bring Crimea under direct attack.

That was the stated objective put forward by General Zaluzhny, echoed by President Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials,” the military expert continued. However, these objectives have not been reached so far, per Ritter. Presently, the Ukrainians are claiming that they have put infantry units beyond the so-called “dragon’s teeth”, the concrete obstacles that constitute the first line of Russia’s defenses. In particular, the Kiev regime says its forces managed to take the villages of Verbovoye and Rabotino in the Zaporozhye region. Still, the Russian Ministry of Defense made it clear on September 7 and 8 that the Russian forces are continuing to successfully repel attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the areas of the settlements. As Russian military blogger Rybar remarked on his Telegram account: it’s the best way “to turn Rabotino into a continuous conveyor of death for Ukrainian units.”

“The village of Rabotino was always meant to fall. If the Ukrainians put sufficient military power in a specific zone of operations, they should be able to advance and seize terrain that the Russians have decided will be defended, but not to the death. Rabotino was always meant to be part of the crumple zone in the fire element, defensive zone of the first line of defense. The purpose of Rabotino was to help break up the Ukrainian attacks, and it has done this magnificently,” said Ritter. What’s actually going on in Rabotino and Verbovoe is part of a new Russian defensive doctrine, explains the former Marine intelligence officer. “Russia always had a primarily defensive doctrine inherited from the Soviet times.

But this new defensive doctrine that’s being implemented, especially in the Zaporozhye front, is the brainchild of Lieutenant General Alexander Romanchuck, former deputy commander, I believe, of the 58th Combined Arms Army. He was sent to the Combined Arms Academy after participating in the early phases of the Special Military Operation. While he was at the Combined Arms Academy, he rewrote Russian defensive doctrine and then he was brought out of the Combined Arms Academy and given a leadership position in the Zapporozhye front in the Rabotino area.” In accordance with the doctrine, “the purpose of the forward defensive zone is to receive an enemy attack to help break it up, to use defensive belts, minefields, obstacles, what they call, ‘fire cauldrons’ or ‘sacks’ where you want to force the enemy to come in so you can hit them with artillery, to break up the attack, but not to hold and die,” explained Ritter.

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“We cannot continue to wage war by simply saying: ‘More weapons, more deaths, more resistance.’ How do you get out of this?”

US Using Ukraine To Weaken EU – Sarkozy (RT)

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken out against Ukraine’s accession to the EU and NATO, arguing that the move would not bring peace to Europe and would chip away at the continent’s independence. Speaking to France 5 TV broadcaster on Wednesday, Sarkozy reiterated his calls for a compromise between Moscow and Kiev, noting that the conflict had already claimed the lives of around half a million of people, most of whom were Ukrainian. “But we continue because in the Boulevard Saint-Germain they are very brave in terms of sending young Ukrainians to die,” he added, referring to the street where many French government offices are located.

While denouncing Russia as an “aggressor” in the conflict, Sarkozy said he believed that Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the EU – which Kiev has been seeking for many years – would not lead to peace. “Because if you bring Ukraine into Europe, you strengthen American Europe as the Eastern European countries are dominated by the US,” he noted. According to Sarkozy, while Ukraine essentially expresses America’s wishes because it is heavily reliant on Washington’s military assistance, the same is not true for relations between Washington and Paris. “France has a unique voice… and does not align itself with American interests,” he said. While reiterating that he wants France to support Ukraine, Sarkozy said he believes that Ukraine should eventually receive security guarantees from the West but must remain neutral and continue to serve as a “bridge between the Slavic world of Russia and us.”

“We cannot continue to wage war by simply saying: ‘More weapons, more deaths, more resistance.’ How do you get out of this?” he asked. He claimed that the Ukraine conflict benefits only China, which he said is gaining clout by courting its partners in the BRICS economic group, and the US, which is profiting from arms sales and higher prices for liquefied natural gas. Last week, Sarkozy suggested that any compromise with Moscow would involve recognizing Crimea as part of Russia, a statement that triggered outrage in Kiev, with Mikhail Podoliak, an aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, calling the proposal “criminal,” and accusing Sarkozy of complicity in organizing “genocide and war.”

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Could blow up the EU?!

Ukraine ‘Threatening’ Poland – Minister (RT)

Ukrainian pressure tactics over Poland’s ban on grain shipments through its territory will not work, Minister for EU Affairs Szymon Szynkowski vel Sek said on Friday, responding to Kiev’s threat to take the issue to the World Trade Organization (WTO). According to the diplomat, Warsaw is not impressed by such a move, as the protection of Polish farmers and citizens is a top priority for the government. “This is a threat, and this is another element of pressure from the Ukrainian side,” he said. “These elements sometimes go beyond the certain boundaries of classical diplomacy on the part of Ukraine.” Szynkowski vel Sek added that the Polish authorities are not planning to lift the embargo imposed on the imports of Ukrainian agricultural exports that is due to expire on September 15.

Ukraine’s exports of grain, its major trade commodity, are currently banned from the markets of Poland, Hungary, and three other EU nations under a deal struck with the European Commission earlier this year to protect the bloc’s farmers from a glut of cheaper agricultural produce. The issue has driven a wedge between Kiev and the EU’s eastern members, which have been among Ukraine’s biggest supporters in its confrontation with Russia. The nations impacted by the glut have repeatedly pledged to impose unilateral import bans, in violation of the bloc’s common trade rules, if the EU decides to lift the restrictions.

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Who builds this for the Pentagon?

Pentagon’s Hypersonic Woes Due to ‘Very Delicate’ Physics Problems (Sp.)

Konstantin Sivkov, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, Doctor of Military Sciences, pointed out that the technology behind hypersonics is both old and new. “What is a hypersonic weapon? It allows you to hit targets using homing in the final stage and at the same time fly at hypersonic speed,” he summarized to Sputnik. “Many ballistic missiles that appeared in the world as intercontinental ones back in the 1950s also have hypersonic speed, but they do not maneuver on their flight path – but this is not the case for hypersonic weapons.” “The Americans cannot solve two problems: providing control over the flight of missiles at hypersonic speeds – that is, maneuvering – and the issue of ensuring the operation of targeting systems at hypersonic speeds.”

Dmitry Drozdenko, a military analyst and chief editor of the “Fatherland Arsenal” internet portal, told Sputnik that the LRHW was similar to Russia’s Avangard hypersonic weapon, which was the first to be announced in 2019. “That is, there is a standard container in which the rocket engine accelerates the warhead-laden glider up to a certain height and to hypersonic speed. At that point, it begins to maneuver in the atmosphere without an engine. The only difference is that our Avangard has a global strike capability: it can strike at the South or North Pole, even in Washington, even in Canberra – anywhere on the planet, with both nuclear and non-nuclear payloads.” Drozdenko explained the US has struggled to develop a usable hypersonic weapon because hypersonic technology is “subtle in the field of fundamental science.” “It is a very delicate topic,” he told Sputnik.

“Once upon a time there were problems with supersonic, if you remember the old stories, when the first jet aircraft had straight wings and propellers, and then they began to be made with wings angled back. It’s all related to the fact that when approaching the speed of sound, a shockwave occurs, which does not allow an effective increase in speed. Therefore, the wings were deflected back and this shockwave flowed back at supersonic speed.” “So at hypersonic speeds, physical phenomena also arise. That is, there are several barriers such as high temperatures – very high. The vehicle heats up a great deal. If we are talking about [Russia’s] Avangard, it heats up to the state of plasma” similar to a spacecraft’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, which also travels at hypersonic speed, he explained.

“The protective layer burns away as a result. The astronaut is not damaged, but at that moment the communication connection is lost. That is, it is a known fact that when they enter the atmosphere, radio communication is lost, because radio waves do not pass through the plasma.” “And here questions of control arise: a hypersonic weapon that flies for a long time at such speeds must, firstly, be refractory. That is, it should not burn out, otherwise it will not fly,” he said, adding that “This is a matter of materials science – maintaining high temperatures.” This, Drozdenko noted, was a key difference between reentry vehicles and hypersonic weapons: they have to be controlled and maneuvered, not just allowed to “ram the atmosphere with their belly” until they slow down.

“The task of hypersonic weapons like Avangard is to maneuver. This is the most important thing, so that air defense systems can neither detect it nor shoot it down. It needs a control system that can somehow analyze the external environment despite being in this plasma cloud. There is a whole complex of fundamental theoretical sciences – materials science, aerodynamics of high speeds – which current control systems and radio electronics do not have. This is a huge barrier.”

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US too. The troops are sittting ducks.

France Seeks Pullout From Niger (Sp.)

France is considering several options for troops pullout from Niger, contacts with the Nigerien army continue and relate to operational and technical aspects, a French General Staff spokesman told Arabian broadcaster. Niger’s newly-appointed Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine said on Monday that French forces were staying in the country illegally and called for their swift departure. French forces have been largely confined to their air base in Niger’s capital, Niamey, since military leaders ousted Paris-backed President Mohamed Bazoum in late July. The West African bloc ECOWAS threatened military intervention if Niger’s military did not restore Bazoum to power.

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Without Xi and Putin it is. Just another politicized gathering.

Is The G20 Obsolete In An Increasingly Multipolar World? (Malyk)

You can count the number of cases in which Western governments have been genuinely interested in Africa’s wellbeing on the fingers of one hand. However, the sharp drop of Western influence on the continent is forcing former colonial powers to try rebranding themselves. The first step in this rebranding can be seen at the upcoming G20 Summit in New Delhi, which will see the African Union admitted as a permanent member of the organization – on a par with the European Union. Will that be enough to heal old wounds? Probably not, especially considering that the G20 meeting takes place after last month’s historic BRICS Summit in South Africa. The event brought together countries from across the Global South and announced the admission of six new members into BRICS, including two African countries – Egypt and Ethiopia. Hard to see how the G20 tops that.

It turns out that Western-centric groups are beginning to cede global leadership to the multipolar world organizations, mostly led by Russia, China and India. Is this trend taking over the politics of the G20? And what are the prospects for the G20 in a future world stage? The G20 Summit in New Delhi will take place without the leaders of Russia and China. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will head the Russian delegation, while Premier Li Qiang will head the Chinese one. As both leaders were among the main actors of the recent BRICS Summit, this turn of events may be regarded as a bad omen for the upcoming summit. Although Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noted that Putin and Xi did not coordinate the refusal to attend the New Delhi Summit, the absence of these two leaders will be extremely significant.

Tony Kevin, former Australian ambassador to Poland and Cambodia and former carrier officer of the Australian Foreign Ministry, as well as the author of two books on Russia, ‘Return to Moscow’ (2017) and ‘Russia and the West’ (2019), highlighted to Sputnik that “the Russian President Putin and the Chinese President Xi have both sent a very clear signal by not attending the meeting.” In turn, Dr. Zhang Baohui, director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, claimed that the decision of the leaders of Russia and China not to attend the G20 “will indeed dampen the significance of this summit.”

“G20 was created as a concert system that incorporates the world’s leading powers so they can work together to resolve the biggest problems facing the globe. The absence of the top leaders of China and Russia pokes a hole in the G20 mechanism. The Ukraine war and many global issues ranging from climate to development need the cooperation of the world’s leading powers. As such, Xi and Putin’s absence will reduce the significance of this summit even though their representatives will be there,” he told Sputnik.

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“Russia is offering, on the one hand, the Wagner Group as gatekeepers, and on the other hand, food security for the continent. In one fell swoop, western propaganda was trashed..”

The Unshakeable Putin-Erdogan Nexus (Bhadrakumar)

Since the two heads of state last met in Astana last October, Moscow has gained the upper hand in the battlefields of Ukraine; the so-called grain deal involving Russia and Ukraine, brokered by Ankara under UN auspices, ran its course; security of the Black Sea region touched a new level of criticality as the Anglo-American obsession with Crimea surged; and, above all, Erdogan secured another term as president, which puts him in the hot seat to reverse Turkiye’s financial and economic crisis. In the full flush of his election victory, Erdogan made certain efforts to mend fences with the west, signaling a willingness to agree to Sweden’s induction into NATO and showing solidarity with Ukraine. In moves that could seriously upset Moscow, Ankara wantonly released Azov commanders who were captured by Russia in Mariupol last year and announced an intent to jointly produce weaponry with Ukraine.

Nonetheless, Moscow reacted cautiously. The Kremlin could afford to mark time since this is also an asymmetrical relationship where Russia holds the upper hand. Moscow could sense that Erdogan was not really “pivoting” to the west, but was rather showing an interest in improving western ties which had soured in recent years -and its outcome remains far from certain. Basically, Russia’s relations with Turkiye are fortified by the warm personal equations between Putin and Erdogan, and both leaders are consummate realists with shared interests and a keenness to challenge Western dominance in regional politics. Moscow is only too well aware that Turkiye’s hopes for membership in the European Union remain a far-fetched dream.

The “body language” of the meeting in Sochi confirmed that there is no change in the verve of the personal relationship between the two leaders. Television footage showed the two men smiling and shaking hands upon Erdogan’s arrival at Putin’s residence, where the Russian president suggested that his guest take a vacation in the Black Sea resort. In his opening remarks, Putin put Erdogan at ease by reassuring him upfront that the Russian offer to create a global “energy hub” in Turkiye is very much in the cards and will materialize soon. However, the icing on the cake is the proposed agreement that would facilitate free exports of grain from Russia to six African nations with the help of Turkiye and Qatar. In Erdogan’s presence, Putin announced:

“We are close to completing agreements with six African states, where we intend to supply foodstuffs for free and even carry out delivery and logistics for free. Deliveries will begin in the next couple of weeks.” The political and geopolitical resonance of this decision in Africa is simply immeasurable — Russia is offering, on the one hand, the Wagner Group as gatekeepers, and on the other hand, food security for the continent. In one fell swoop, western propaganda was trashed, with some help from Ankara.

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“Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection..”

A Theory of the Game (Jim Kunstler)

In cases of madness, there is often a dark, sordid secret behind the weird behavior that presents outwardly. In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation — and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory — had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandedly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.

The initial act of madness by the “Resistance” on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day was the women’s march of pink pussy-hats, so called, a symbolic exhibition of fleering female genitalia in Mr. Trump’s face, so to speak, as an act of defiance against the new national daddy figure (and his millions of deplorable supporters watching the ceremonies on TV). This proved to be a mere overture to the more extreme sexual acting-out that evolved in the years to follow, overall a campaign to horrify people of normal appetites, beliefs, and moral codes, culminating in the drag queen story hours aimed at maximally inducing outrage among people organized as families.

All of that psychodrama was hijacked, of course, by the serious neo-Marxists lurking among the Left, who used it in the usual neo-Marxian way: to overthrow everything in the established social order. And who were these? The circle around Barack Obama. And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate — for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there — then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election!

Since we’re speaking in terms of psychodrama, Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diver dog
https://twitter.com/i/status/1700098525835530502

 

 

Halitrephes maasi jelly.

 

 

Eagle
https://twitter.com/i/status/1700056479032570117

 

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle September 9 2023

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  • #142745

    René Magritte The Art of Conversation 1963   • Hunter the Hunted? Biden Indictment May be Ruse to Prolong Cover-Up (Tweedie) • Biden’s New Campai
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle September 9 2023]

    #142747
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    René Magritte The Art of Conversation 1963

    I knew that was a Magritte the instant I layed eyes upon it…
    The Art of Conversation; wonderful…made my day, it did………..

    #142748
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Stoltenberg: “Russian army is the second strongest in Ukraine”
    pic
    https://i.imgflip.com/45l1l9.jpg

    Michelle. Man. Look at those arms. Oh wait, grammar saves: Man, look at those arms.

    ““He entered Ukraine under the cover of night. And in the morning, Joe Biden walked shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the war-torn streets,”

    Sells great to violently, viciously, deeply pro-war Democrats. Including now the Progressives on the Far Left. Amazing to see, if we hadn’t already grown numb from seeing everything up to this point from them without “Resistance”. Now out there, “So…RFK is in, he seems reasonable, how about it, Far Left?”
    “Noooooooooo!!!!! We want only White Racist, Black-Jailer, anti-busser, Pro-war, anti-help, pro-drilling Biden!!!”

    Uh, Whut? The Biden you hated? The Never-Biden, Capitalist, Fascist, White guy? Yeeeesssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Yup, that’s where we are now. Little Blue Square says Biden is the only one, Boom, he’s the only one now. No Bernie, no Dore, no RFK, no-body, no-how, no-way.

    So that plan is now tapped out. Whatever the White Hats were doing to wake up the GenPop, it’s reached the wall. 1,000% inflation, Zero jobs, Trillion Student loans, Every Black Man Jailed = no effect. Must. Support. White Biden. And. All Corporate. Billionaires.

    So if they’ve got a plan to remove Biden, won’t matter now. Whoever’s going to Civil War, gonna Civil War now anyway. If I’d do that, I’d send Cheeto to Ken Lay island.

    Anyway, I’m glad Biden is running for President of Ukraine. And against all the poor, students, and welfare people here who paid for it. You only had $400 to spend on the whole month’s food. And Biden just cut it in half. Gotta get some cluster bombs and depleted uranium for the kiddies!

    “• US Using Ukraine To Weaken EU – Sarkozy (RT)

    Again, credit to Sarkozy for saying what no one else will say. Now, no one FOLLOWS a word he says, which is great for us, but he SAYS it at least, like a normal person, and an independent, sovereign leader. …The Pinhead.

    “most of whom were Ukrainian.” Who are the others, Nick?

    He’s also too late because he’s not brave. He’s proposing a frozen conflict, etc, like Stolz says, a diplomatic peace agreement where you sign with Russia. Too late. Whyyyyyyyyyy on earth would Russia ever do that? And here, Europe can’t even get close enough to reality to do what would have worked a YEAR ago. They’re nowhere on the pitch, clean out of the stadium. Which is fine with me, but still amazing.

    “• Pentagon’s Hypersonic Woes Due to ‘Very Delicate’ Physics Problems (Sp.)”

    Apparently not delicate at all. Russia can make and shoot them all day. So… As Medyedev says, Musk is the only “Adequate” mind left, and he doesn’t do hypersonics.

    Translated: all America has deeply IN-Adequate minds. Public school don’t learn any maths on purpose, and Preppies don’t learn any maths because they’re cheating and woke and no one cares.
    (Literally, look at the stats on cheating, it’s like universal, the only way to fail is NOT cheating)

    “because radio waves do not pass through the plasma.”

    So they are plasma weapons. It’s said that the Aurora – which itself doesn’t exist – ALSO doesn’t exist as a jet. It pretends to be a jet to reach speed and height, then has a skin-glow where it operates like a UFO plasma-vehicle. Electromagnetic due to…static friction, I guess? Why do you want me to know? I don’t work on ultra-top-secret jets that don’t exist, I lick people under a bridge. It is so rumored though.

    Okay, since we’re leaning in this direction, this is the (one) issue with the UFOs, like the city-wide mass “attack” in 1949(?). Sure they CAN get over the White House, then what? The whole shell is plasma. Yes, you can’t shoot it down because of that, but then they can’t keep a bomb out there either. They can’t open the bay doors and drop a watermelon on Buckingham. Yeah, that’s a great and powerful weapon, I’m sure they can do things, but like all items in the universe, it has parameters and limitations.

    Just opening the chapter here on microwave guns and not-jet flyers, since jets are from the 30’s. One-Hunned, years ago. Last time we made an invention like that, I fell off my horse.

    Suuuuuuuuure. Suuuuuuuure we never invented a single thing since then.

    Russia funded glide-tech, highly advanced internal calculations. The U.S. (stupidly) put it all on GPS satellites they’d blow out of the sky in the first 10 minutes. So it could be that. But we ALREADY KNOW they can quantuum entangle particles in order to communicate without time and space. Telepathically, as it were, no doubt THROUGH plasma. Is it that?

    Doesn’t matter, who cares?

    Niger alone is the size of the U.S. from Maine to Maryland to Indiana.
    https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/niger/united-states

    So…why don’t y’all hold that with 1,000 troops.

    ““Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection..”

    Yes. It’s a religion. It’s illegal for them to establish the violent theocracy they have just attempted.

    “5th Circuit court JUST UPHELD Missouri v Biden”

    You’re forgetting the corporations run the Government, not the other way ‘round. So they’ll keep doing it. Maybe without government, but probably just using more circuitous methods.

    #142749
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Picture of the author at work.

    lol

    And to be useful. Wealth to a Haitian. Or an American, poor as they are now.

    #142750
    Mister Roboto
    Participant

    It just doesn’t stop.

    #142752
    Red
    Participant

    Lying by omission
    Among the biggest failings of modern media is a growing inability to check a story. In large part, this is simply because the modern multi-media landscape is so competitive that only a handful of media giants are able to employ sub-editors to check stories before they are published. The result is that most of what we are fed as “news” is merely a re-hashing of corporate press releases designed to put a positive spin on the corporations behind them. In these circumstances, it is incumbent on those media organisations which can still afford to employ journalists and sub-editors to at least do some basic checking before publishing a story. But that’s not how the media environment is configured these days.

    So it is that the once-trusted (and increasingly despised) propagandists at Pravda provide “the party line” rather than the news. And the party line on matters economic here in the UK is that the only news must be good news. So it is that Noor Nanji, who purports to be a “business reporter,” tells us that:

    “Retail sales rose in August as customers ‘splurged on self-care’, new figures suggest. Sales of non-food items had their best month since February, helped by higher spending on health and beauty…

    “Taken as a whole, the value of retail sales increased by 4.1% in August, compared to a year earlier…”

    To the casual reader, this sounds like some good economic news in what has otherwise been a difficult couple of years… except for that one word – value. Since I am not a casual reader the word “value” appeared like a red flashing light (prompting me to write this critique). Because if the value of sales had risen by four percent at a time when inflation is running at nearly seven percent, the real story was that people are buying less but paying more for it… something a publicly funded and supposedly impartial news outlet ought to have made clear at the start.

    Nor can the folks at the BBC blame time pressure or staff shortages for merely parroting the British Retail Consortium’s press release, since it begins with this qualification:

    “Sales figures are not adjusted for inflation. Given that both the August SPI (BRC) and July CPI (ONS) show inflation running at higher than normal levels, the rise in sales masked a likely drop in volumes once inflation is accounted for.”

    It used to be that reputable news outlets would never publish on the basis of a single source. On an economic story like this, a second source would be expected to be an economist or statistician who would have spotted and been able to correct the discrepancy between sales volumes and sales values. And fair reporting would have put this in the second paragraph. Instead, the BBC manages a slight corrective from Esme Harwood at Barclaycard, pointing to a 1.2 percent fall in credit and debit card spending in August… and even this is at the end of the story, where many readers will not have bothered looking.

    One can understand why a broadcaster which relies increasingly on not upsetting the government to the point that it abolishes the license fee entirely, would not want to cast the economy in a negative light. After all, its misreporting of petrol queues in September 2021 led to a nationwide fuel panic. They probably wouldn’t want to be seen as the cause of a recession in 2023. But this is only swapping short-term advantage for long-term trust, because the experience of the majority living in ex-industrial, rundown-seaside, and small-town rural Britain is a world away from the narrative that the BBC would have us believe.

    Half-a-century ago, when the BBC was the most reliable of a tiny number of news outlets, they might have been able to get away with this (although, ironically, they would have run a thorough critique back then). But in an age of mass multi-media, there are too many alternative sources – particularly those documenting British life beyond the gated communities where the salaried class – including BBC managers – have retreated.

    In any case, the British economy is in dire straits, with stagflation looming. UK retail has yet to recover from the battering it took during lockdown. And with most people now making economies in the face of stubbornly high inflation, happy-clappy retail stories simply jar against most people’s lived experience. Indeed, in a sense, August’s actually poor retail figures may well be as good as it gets, as some 1.4 million mortgages along with thousands of lockdown business loans have to be rolled over from an interest rate of 1.5 percent to more than 6 percent between now and next summer. Indeed, if I was a gambler, I would put money on both retail volumes and retail values being down considerably by August 2024.

    Punishing ourselves
    Britain’s shit-spreading water companies are back in the news this week, as it turns out they have been quietly pumping shit onto our beaches just as holiday makers head for the coast to make the best of what has been an almost absent summer, despite the lack of heavy rainfall which is the usual justification for allowing shit to enter the storm drain system.

    The news has been met with the usual round of pearl-clutching and something-must-be-done-ing from politicians, regulators and the salaried classes. But the truth is that nothing will be done, because nobody has an incentive to do anything meaningful. At best, the water companies will be fined, and the cost of paying the fines will be added onto customers’ bills. And since water is what economists refer to as an “inelastic” commodity, boycotting is not an option.

    The problem runs much deeper though, and is a design feature (not a bug) in the neoliberal quasi-market structure used to flog off the water infrastructure to the highest bidder back in 1989. As with all of our critical infrastructure, regulators and newly privatised companies were set several not necessarily aligning objectives. In the case of water, these included:

    Improving and cleaning up the UK’s antiquated water and sewage infrastructure,
    Conforming to EU environmental regulations on river and sea water cleanliness,
    Building resilience to avoid a repeat of the 1976 drought,
    Flood management,
    Maintaining low prices for consumers,
    Maximising profits to shareholders.
    A quasi-independent regulator was required because each water company has a de-facto monopoly in the area where it operates. A disgruntled Thames Water customer, for example, could not choose instead to purchase water from the publicly owned Scottish Water or the non-profit Welsh Water. This though, gave rise to a possible unforeseen but definitely understated conflict of interest. While the ministerial appointees charged with overseeing the activities of the regulator may have been relatively diverse, the mangers and employees couldn’t be because they had to come from the industry they were regulating. So that the regulatory bodies were populated with people whose informal interest was in securing a career path within the industry.

    Ministers – from all of the mainstream neoliberal parties – meanwhile, had no desire to have to step in and manage – still less renationalise – the utility companies. And so, having ministers and regulators do no more than mouth words before handing out fines to water customers has become the way of handling stories like today’s for the best part of 34 years… the result being that the UK still has droughts and floods, water mains across the country still burst, water security is worse now than it was in 1989, water companies continue to dump shit in the rivers and seas, and the only winners are the shareholders who walked away with a cool £52bn.

    Given what lies ahead of us as the economy shrinks, the renationalisation of public utilities is probably inevitable. But in the interim, one potential way of reversing the warped incentives is to change the people who get to pay the fines for breaches of regulations. Instead of fining the companies – and allowing them to pass the fines on to customers – levying fines on the dividends paid to shareholders, the bonuses paid to senior managers, and the pension funds of employees would go a long way to focussing them on all of their objectives.

    Hot air
    The UK is about to do huge damage to the global net zero project. Under successive governments since the late 1980s, the UK has positioned itself as a world leader in the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) while rapidly phasing out its old coal power stations. Given the location of the British Isles, in the northeast Atlantic directly in the path of both the jet stream and the gulf stream, if anyone was going to make a success of wind power, it was the UK.

    Critics quite rightly point out that this amounts to virtue signalling on a grand scale – the UK produces less than two percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while China has burned more coal in the last two decades than Britain has since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If, critics argue, Great Britain was to sink beneath the North Sea tomorrow, it would have pretty much no effect on climate change.

    This is not true once we factor in the carbon emissions released elsewhere to produce the many resources and goods that the UK imports. But the broad point stands – even if the UK could somehow figure out how to run entirely on NRREHTs, it would have no effect on the climate. What it would do, however, is to set a pathway to a renewable energy future for other countries to follow. But this can only happen if the pathway is viable… and the gathering evidence is that it isn’t.

    The storage problem has yet to be solved, leaving Britain dependent upon expensive gas along with imported nuclear electricity to plug the gaps when the wind isn’t blowing. The UK hasn’t even begun to figure out how to de-carbonise transport. And three resources essential to the manufacture of NRREHTs – concrete, steel, and plastic – depend upon coal and oil to manufacture, transport, deploy, and maintain. Building wind turbines to generate electricity, it turns out, was the easy bit.

    There was though, always an issue with cost. While the wind is, for all practical considerations, both free and permanent, the technology used to capture and focus it is anything but. And the idea that wind turbines are cheap was largely the result of German factories manufacturing them using cheap Russian gas. Indeed, the German wind turbine industry was one of the first casualties of the self-destructive sanctions imposed on Russia. Now that European energy costs have spiralled – accounting for most of the inflation we have been experiencing – the price of NRREHTs has spiralled accordingly.

    This is about to throw a big spanner into the workings of the UK’s net zero program, since to have any chance of succeeding, the UK needs to deploy terawatts of new wind and nuclear capacity. As became clear last winter, however, there is an economic ceiling above which the price of electricity cannot rise without causing major economic disruption. And that price turns out to be too low for NRREHTs generators. As Simon Jack at Pravda reported earlier today:

    “An upcoming auction for seven UK offshore wind projects is set to flop, according to industry sources. The results are due to be announced on Friday, but the number of bids will be close to zero, or none at all…

    “Energy firm SSE and Swedish firm Vattenfall have already ruled themselves out of the bidding, saying that the government had failed to allow for sharp rises in the cost of steel and labour when setting the electricity price.

    “Industry sources have told the BBC that if big, experienced and well-financed firms cannot make the sums work, it is unlikely that others will be able to.”

    The “Contract for Difference” auctions are supposed to provide the government with a means of setting a maximum price for electricity – balancing the need to keep consumer prices low while ensuring that energy companies remain profitable. Under the CfD process, energy companies bid to build and operate new offshore wind projects in the expectation that they can supply electricity for less than the government price – keeping the difference between the two. But in the event that the price of electricity goes above the government price, the government takes the difference.

    The latest auction had a price of £44 per megawatt-hour – far lower than last year’s £128.93 per megawatt-hour average from all sources but reflecting the huge increases in energy prices since 2021. So, it should come as no surprise that none of the energy companies wants to have anything to do with it. The auction failure reinforces the conundrum set out by professor Helm in the government’s 2017 energy review:

    “It is not particularly difficult to set out what an efficient energy system might look like which meets the twin objectives of the climate change targets and security of supply. There would, however, remain a binding constraint: the willingness and ability to pay for it. There have to be sufficient resources available, and there has in a democracy to be a majority who are both willing to pay and willing to force the population as a whole to pay. This constraint featured prominently in the last three general elections, and it has not gone away.”

    The economic process that we find ourselves in today is a play in two parts. Act one was rising costs – which have been exacerbated by lockdowns and sanctions. In the UK, because of its heavy dependence on imports, these costs continue to rise even as they are slowing elsewhere. And, of course, rising interest rates compound the problem by making the cost of currency itself more expensive. It is Act two – falling incomes – however, which will deliver the killer blow. As demand crashes across the economy, businesses and consumers will no longer have the income needed to sustain expensive construction projects of any kind, whether wind farms, nuclear power stations or high-speed railway lines. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the UK government will be able to raise the tax income it needs if it is to avoid a run on the pound which will exacerbate the crisis by further increasing the cost of imports.

    Net zero is going to fail because the UK example is rapidly turning into a dystopian eco-austerity program. The inability to deploy the NRREHTs infrastructure at a price anyone can afford is further proof of this. And as the UK economy crashes and burns, people around the world will draw the obvious conclusion that, whatever else you might do to address climate change FFS don’t follow the British example.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/09/07/in-brief-lying-by-omission-punishing-ourselves-hot-air/

    #142753
    zerosum
    Participant

    Why is Canada/Trudeau acting with impunity? Moral superiority?

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/canada-taiwan-strait-ownership-1.6961816
    China claims ownership of the Taiwan Strait. Canada just sailed a warship through it

    The Taiwan Strait is 160 kilometres wide at its narrowest point and separates mainland China from Taiwan. The Chinese government claims both Taiwan and the strait as its own, as has described previous naval crossings as “stirring up trouble.”

    Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a June news conference that China is firmly determined to defend its sovereignty and security and regional peace and stability.

    The Taiwan Strait is crammed with vast cargo carriers and small fishing vessels. (However, none are Canadians vessels that require military protection/escorts.)
    ———-

    #142755
    zerosum
    Participant

    A successful net zero program.

    I use all the energy that I want,
    You reduce your energy wants

    #142756
    Noirette
    Participant

    On RFK, he says he may need to look at other alternatives.

    (from top post Sept. 8.)

    The DEMs will never allow any contest between RFK, any other figures, freaky, cool, well known for long, or whatever, vs. the instituted DEM party candidates => Senile Joe, or whatever other crappy persona, party hack, they pick.

    The Dems are hanging on to huge financial benefits and being somehow still Admired (fakealorum about inclusion, etc.), and won’t give them up unless forced to via some kind blitzkrieg, wild unexpected happenings, etc.

    They are arrogantly counting on controlling the voting mechanisms, tallying, to turn up the desired results, via all kinds of fraud and manipulations. They managed it recently (Trump – Biden) so no doubt that gives them confidence, rightly so.

    So RFK will run as an independent, I guess that is what is meant ..? Trump may be by then be knocked out as a candidate (lawfare.)

    Total corruption.. gangs fighting for profits, riches..

    #142757
    WES
    Participant

    As Noirette says the Democrat Cĺub has effectively knocked JFK out of the democrat primary race forcing JFK to run as an independent.

    The Republican Club hasn’t yet excited Trump from the Republican primary yet but the Democrat Club sure is trying to knock Trump out of the Republican primary race!

    Maybe the Republican Club’s plan is to let Trump win the primary race but lose the presidential race again by having Dominion count enough Trump votes as RFK votes with Joe sneaking up the middle again.

    #142758
    WES
    Participant

    If you are holding your breath waiting for Rinos McCarty or Comer to impeach Joe or indicte Hunter respectively, you will run out of oxygen before either ever happens.

    The two Rinos are just playing their assigned theatre roles of “talking the talk” for ongoing election season.

    The Rinos already have their man in the White House and are doing everything they can to keep the puppet in there.

    #142759
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    As a Canadian, I approve this message!

    F.S.

    #142760
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    JB-hb yesterday
    It is one of our inscrutable unspoken cultural rules in the West:

    “They’re just like us” applied to all sorts of situations

    This is accurate. And foolish. It is where the Golden Rule falls apart — sometimes, others simply don’t want what I want. (I think of the Golden Rule as a jumping off point for understanding another human—it isn’t an endpoint.).

    In spite of this, the beauty of Enlightenment thinking is that in spite of differences between humans we say that “before the law” or “in God’s eyes” each human has value, “is created equal,” and therefore should be treated with respect and equality in how the law is applied. These Enlightenment ideas help minimize the human tendency of treating those who are different as sub-human.

    #142761
    John Day
    Participant

    Noirette and Wes. I’ve been wondering about all of that. It looks like Red Queen Hillary still owns the DNC, and asecond Obama Presidency might be just what they have as an ace-in-the-hole.
    Clearly Bobby K. Jr. has considered being excluded, and has a plan-b, which he won’t discuss, “I don’t have a plan-b”.
    Bobby Jr. politely refers to “President Trump” at times. They are sure not “enemies”.
    The “enemies” control microwave beam weapons that kill local children on Maui, and Pfizer gene-therapy products that induce quick death, slow death and infertility. Those “enemies” seem to have a lot to do with the deeply interwoven global ownership/managerial eneterprises like BlackRock, Vanguard, and major central banks. I don’t think this big-exclusive-club is simple to describe. I don’t think they care much about forms of ethnicity, but they know each other as “peers”, somehow.

    Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to out-survive them.
    “We” are starting at an initial loss, but have been holding for a year or so, now…
    They are starting a new offensive against us on multiple fronts.

    #142762
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Arrrrrrr Matie!

    Hoist the Skull & Bones!

    .

    #142763
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    Aspnaz, yesterday
    We all know that people only behave well when there are checks on their behaviour, feedback that benefits them behave better.

    This statement is too exclusionary to be accurate, too over-simplified. Many people behave the way that they were trained to behave as children. As adults, they continue with the conditioning that was laid into them as children, and will only shift and change if life puts enormous pressure on them. Personally, I continued to behave kindly towards my ex husband during the marriage — as I had been trained to treat people kindly, in all circumstances — even when his behavior was atrocious. I did eventually kick him out of the home with an order of protection, but I warned him before I did so that if he drank alcohol one more time that an order of protection would follow. I suppose that he was so accustomed to me putting up with his crap that he didn’t believe me, or he was too mixed up in the head to think it through. I had to learn to set boundaries when dealing with other people, because the boundary setting in the home of my childhood was lax — we were trained to be kind, and kind people are circumspect and harsh boundaries were not required. The benefits from boundary-setting are often delayed — the initial result may be a worsening if the immediate situation.

    Humans often behave in accordance with principles and values which exist on a higher level of thought than rats pushing a lever to get food or heroin. This is why although the masses can be strongly influenced by bread, it also takes “circuses” — distractions, ways to befuddle their minds and confuse their thinking.

    #142764
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    I think everyone deserves to be considered innocent until proven human.

    #142765
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Pre-patch Vax Halcyon Days of Germany’s Sultry Liver Sausage Chancellor

    .

    #142766
    Oroboros
    Participant

    .

    #142767
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    The deep archeological evidence contains a curious characteristic that seems to accompany all those long gone empires that seem to rise, fall and disappear like some sort of sociological clockwork.. . . big cities.

    It doesn’t seem to have occurred to many academics that the cities are not any kind of desirable accomplishment but are instead a manifestation underlying disease and symptomatic manifestation or “signals” foreshadowing the collapse and dissolution that is right around the corner. The hundreds or even thousands of years preceding such Great Cities in various regions of the world (that is, the hubs of pathologically centralized wealth, power and control) are the actual society. The “advancements (not!) found in cities are mere evidence of Mass Formation Psychosis that thinks its a GREAT idea to kill children for “profit” or worship power and money above ALL other goals and values.

    So who lives in cities? Pretty much everybody who sincerely believes that the “perks” of city life (like money, snazzier clothing and easy access to drugs and hookers are worth the extremely high price, such as living in close proximity to filth, ugliness, crime, perversions of all sorts, and ruler who enforce tighter and tighter and tighter control (as they sense their failing grip on power).

    And who lives OUTSIDE the cities? All the folks who just won’t put up with that kind of shit.

    As the insane forces of centralized brutal control draw their wagons into every tightening circles they eventually contract into non existence when NOBODY is putting up with that shit anymore. Sometimes the peasants burn it all down, sometimes the empire next door sets up shop for awhile until its their turn to disappear, and sometimes the local human society just take it apart stone-by-stone to build barns and houses and stuff that are more useful to their actual lives.

    You can only herd sheep up to certain (but hard to precisely forecast) point, beyond which there are just too damn many sheep for too few shepherds and then, Blammo! The sheep who are for distant from the reach of the dying cities just go back to doing what they wanted to do all along, and the shrinking minority of ex-shepherds are forced back to having their would-be livestock ignoring them (or hanging them from lamp posts, depending upon local attitudes and conditions.

    I just hope no one interrupts Act III with an A-Bomb. That could REALLY slow down the recycling process.

    #142768
    phoenixvoice
    Participant

    #142769
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    So the Governor of New Mexico has attempted to personally cancel the US Constitution by declaring guns illegal to carry in HER state’s biggest city, Albuquerque. Aside from being illegal nonsense her solution to gun crime is amusing for the fact that anyone abiding and cowardly enough to actually comply with her executive order was not really much of a threat to anyone in the first place. I mean, what’s even the point of having a personal defense weapon if not having got the balls to use the weapon to defend oneself?

    As for those guys who defy the order, however, well they might be a significantly different matter. I would advise not trying to take their gun away if not up for a gun fight.

    #142770
    Oroboros
    Participant

    Not much else to do on a lazy Saturday with the kitchen utensils

    .

    #142771
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    @Oroboros
    That motorcycle sculpture made my day. What is in the world depends on how you see the world.

    #142772
    jb-hb
    Participant

    Boosted People More Likely Than Unvaccinated To Be Infected: New Study Finds

    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/boosted-people-more-likely-unvaccinated-be-infected-new-study-finds

    Fact check: WRONG, everyone is unvaccinated.

    Vaccinations inoculate. Being more likely to catch and spread is not inoculation, it is its opposite.

    #142773
    jb-hb
    Participant

    (is there an existing medical term for a shot to make you less resistant to a disease?)

    #142776
    Veracious Poet
    Participant

    @dbentonsmith

    I didn’t intend to imply your writing is ridiculous, although wordy & meandering at times (aren’t we all 😉 ), just trying to suss out where your formatting loses etiquette, making it tough to decipher ~ At times I don’t even bother with grammar or proof reading, I’m a wild creative & in our business my wife, soulmate, life partner was my wrangler, proof reader & editor…

    At times my anti-social, nonconformist, dislike of authoritarian monsters kicks in & I rebel against the machinations of academic know-no-things 😉

    For example, his assumption (based on the widely observed and awful manifestations of human folly and crime), that people are obviously irremediably flawed and must therefore either be corrected by outside forces or given up on as a lost cause.

    That’s simply wrong.

    Born on the wrong side of the tracks (THAR BE MONSTERS!), I’ve seen both sides of corrected by outside forces vs. corrected by inner nature *coin*, where I encountered *good* people along the way that pulled me out of the fire, inspired me, set me on The Way towards surrender into inspirational guidance through The Loving, Healing, Creative Power of The Infinite, which is *abundantly* available within every Child of God, though We usually don’t think so 🙄

    There’s many factors at play, including genetic memory, that we don’t understand but Facts are stubborn things

    Some people flourish on the Sunny Side of the Street, some dwell in Darkness, my wife is one of those that was born into The Light ~ She ALWAYS chooses the Loving, Truthful, Optimistic Path (to a fault), which at times can be painful, as it precludes *bending the rules* & other *creative* options, just ask her siblings. lol

    When I was growing up within The UniParty Global Empire there seemed to be an adequate amount of God’s Kids like my wife, scattered here & there, but starting with *boomers* they started dying off, as you might have noticed…

    People can NOT be corrected by outside forces, and there is no point in considering them a lost cause because the human condition (our own included) is the ONLY cause that we are (or even can be) aware of. In other words, we are each one of us STUCK with the inescapable and irrefutable fact that the only awareness we can ever have is the awareness that we have.

    We can bump it up or dumb it down but it’s the only game in town.

    Ultimately, if a “society” goes off-the-rails, no amount of “corrected by outside forces” will suffice, as policing & social controls only work “civilized” peoples, unless you think that police states are “functional” alternatives…

    There are so many levels to this discussion, which for me is moot at this time given the manifestations of Collective EG0ic Madness were experiencing *now*, but IMHO it’s all about *perception*, where *civilized* communities either have a normalized, healthy *perception* to unify around. Or. They. Dont. 😉

    #142777
    Kimo
    Participant

    Market Ticker guy snagged a great paper, not yet peer reviewed:

    “Our analysis revealed inconsistencies between the subject data listed in the 6-Month Interim Report and publications authored by Pfizer/BioNTech trial site administrators. Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in number of deaths due to cardiovascular events in BNT162b2 vaccinated subjects compared to Placebo controls. This significant adverse event signal was not reported by Pfizer/BioNTech. Potential sources of these data inconsistencies are identified.”

    Heads will roll.

    https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202309.0131/v1

    #142779
    jb-hb
    Participant

    For Germ…

    92% of Covid Deaths in 2022 Were Triple+ Vaxxed

    92% of Covid Deaths in 2022 Were Triple+ Vaxxed

    afsdfsd
    asddssf
    asaffffaa

    #142780
    jb-hb
    Participant

    more charts…
    asdfassf
    asssfaa

    #142781
    jb-hb
    Participant

    So who lives in cities? Pretty much everybody who sincerely believes that the “perks” of city life (like money, snazzier clothing and easy access to drugs and hookers are worth the extremely high price, such as living in close proximity to filth, ugliness, crime, perversions of all sorts, and ruler who enforce tighter and tighter and tighter control (as they sense their failing grip on power).

    #142782
    zerosum
    Participant

    Fauci is too busy to read and keep up to date. ” there’s other studies saying different.”

    #142783
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    @VeraciousPoet

    Thank you for the insightful reply. I re-read it three or four times and found it more and more encouraging each time over. The world’s a mess at the moment, but what else is new? We keep on mightily slogging through and it’s going to work out better than most expect.

    #142784
    zerosum
    Participant
    #142785
    Germ
    Participant

    @jb-hb. – Thanks!

    #142786
    John Day
    Participant

    Working For Yourself https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/working-for-yourself

    The “Uniparty” imperial courtiers in Washington DC, London and Brussels manage the investment properties (“world”) for the global owners. The owners hide their identities through management companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, and the central banks of the world. They all own stock in each other’s companies, so they share investment interests while remaining invisible as individuals and families. “Owning everything” is the basic strategy, and when business losses are to be imposed, they are to be imposed upon smaller companies and businesses outside of this global networks. That it straightforward, and it has worked well since 1990, while there wa a “unipolar world” the the western US/NATO empire holding persuasive force, enough to ruin Iraq, Libya, Syria, and to block central asian cooperation by making Afghanistan a war zone, bleeding heroin and violence into Iran, Russia and China.

    Those days of easy-management of the global properties have ended, but there is no restructuring yet. Doubling down on threats has turned into the kinds of defeat that weaken the threats, so that more countries are emboldened to pursue national interests, rather than be bled of their natural resources by globalist neo-colonialism.

    The colonized periphery is pulling away, and the colonization is retreating into Europe and to the streets of the United States, where the squeeze that was put on the Greeks to save German and French banks is now being put on German and French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, etc. citizens and businesses. This self-digestion cannot persist very long. The maximum value was already being extracted from the productive parts of western economies. More extraction is rapidly shrinking European economies, and the cutoff of inexpensive fuel and feedstocks has just put a lot of them out of business. There is no “recovery” possible in this context, not under the same management protocols.

    The rest of the world continues to reorganize trade incrementally, outside of the $US currency regime, bypassing that value-extraction arrangement. The rest of the world does not want to spook the declining and unstable empire, still armed with weapons of total-annihilation. The rest of the world is still paying tribute, but is looking forward to not paying tribute when that can be safely arranged. Argentina just joined BRICS (official 1/1/2024). Argentina owes a lot of $US denominated debt, but it is mostly held by local Argentine elite families. Hmmm, those families have interests which sharply diverge from the rest of Argentine citizens, don’t they. Elections are coming up. The local Argentine elites will do whatever they can to maintain their ownership positions. This reflects neocolonialist mechanisms in other countries, also. Local financial elites need the military and financial threats available from the rest of the $US denominated empire to sustain their local positions of power, ownership and value-extraction. BRICS+ threatens their prerogatives.
    This winter and this coming year are set for continual incremental weakening of $US based ownership and control status in the world. The direction is for national interests to gather the wealth at home, rather than to export cheap commodities to be processed for additional value in industrialized countries. No sudden, threatening moves, though.

    In the US/NATO/EU/Israel/5-Eyes countries, the interwoven courtiers and deep-states are all slowly sinking together. None is able to take initiative against the consensus, which is to pretend that the “unipolar world” is “still” the thing that it never quite became during the Bush/Cheney global war on brown people in oil countries.
    The US particularly faces an election cycle which can’t be convincingly faked to obtain an arranged outcome, as the Hillary Clinton election almost was, and the Joe Biden election decisively was. There is increasing chaos and disorder as bad political-economic managers in the collective west are increasingly desperate and open in their non-democratic criminal actions to maintain their positions of power and immunity from the consequences of their actions. This holds the productive and other members of society hostage and extracts the value of their work, while saddling them with unpayable debts.

    The globalist owners know that they also face a loss of income, and even of some of their ownership, while these managers continue in power, but what are the alternatives for the owners? They are collectively like the monkey holding onto sweet rice inside a coconut with a hole too small to let the grasping fist out, trapped until they let go…

    ​ BREAKING NEWS: Obama insider and author and biographer Joel Gilbert has claimed Michelle Obama is preparing to enter the 2024 race and become the Democratic presidential nominee allegedly due to Biden’s declining health.​ (​a fourth term for Barack Obama)
    https://twitter.com/dom_lucre/status/1700201573392019469

    ​ Jim Kunstler, A Theory of the Game:
    ​ Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss was a bigger shock to the Washington DC deep state Blob than Donald Trump’s victory… In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation — and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory — had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandedly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.​..
    ​..And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate — for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there — then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election! …
    ..Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump…
    ..To what degree was Mr. Obama a tool of other forces lurking in the deep background of world politics, and what are these forces? Many of the non-Left will say they are a loose consortium of corporate and financial actors desperate to keep in motion a set of rackets that magically stabilize business-as-usual, which asset-strips the remaining wealth of the middle classes and transfers it to the already super-wealthy…
    ​ “Joe Biden” was Mr. Obama’s device for wresting control of the DNC from Hillary Clinton’s gang. But now “Joe Biden” has criminal problems of his own that threaten to take down not only his own presidency, but of everything connected to it, namely his controller, Mr. Obama & Company, and the Democratic Liberal order itself driven insane by its own criminality. Meanwhile, his nemesis, Donald Trump has proven to be extraordinarily resilient in the remorseless war against him. And now that has culminated in the (so far) four cockamamie criminal cases cooked up by Obama / “Biden” as the final line of defense against the Golden Golem of Greatness — who obviously has no intention of surrendering.
    It looks like Mr. Obama is now in the process of being “outed” as something other than the suave performer he was for two terms in the White House. The Tucker Carlson interview with one Larry Sinclair, a gay cruiser and druggie who claims to have frolicked with Mr. Obama before he was a celebrity, was met with ominous silence in the mainstream media. They didn’t even dare denounce it to avoid drawing more attention to it. And the mysterious “drowning” of the Obama family’s chef, Tafari Campbell, paddleboarding at night in the shallow bay off the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, remains woefully under-investigated. Will Barack Obama and “Joe Biden” end up sinking each other and the Democratic Party with them? And then, will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be called in to rescue the darn thing while driving all the demons out of it?​ [Naw Jim, they’ll just nominate Michelle Obama and fight to somebody’s death.]

    A Theory of the Game

    As per Wayne’s World, “Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!” The uniparty has policies and procedures by which it “operates”.
    Biden Impeachment Vote Could Take Place in Mid-September – US Lawmaker
    https://sputnikglobe.com/20230908/biden-impeachment-vote-could-take-place-in-mid-september—us-lawmaker-1113195537.html

    #142787
    John Day
    Participant

    How protected are gay Jewish lawyers when push comes to shove?
    ​Greenwald Exposes “Fraudulent” WaPo Disinformation Study, David Frum, And ADL Propaganda To Silence Dissent
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/greenwald-exposes-fraudulent-wapo-disinformation-study-david-frum-and-adl-propagand

    ​Changing names and definitions is the main solution that our leaders can offer to us.
    The New Authoritarian Agenda Revealed (Globalism Rebranded)​
    ​..I came across a video promoting a barely publicized project called the “Council for Inclusive Capitalism.”
    ​ The group, headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, is the culmination of decades of various globalist agendas combined to represent the ultimate proof of conspiracy.
    The CIC is intimately tied to institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but it is primarily an attempt to link all these organizations more closely to the corporate world in an open display of cooperation. The group pushes the spread of what they call “Stakeholder Capitalism.” This is the notion that international corporations are obligated to engage in social engineering. That’s another way of saying that corporations are required to manipulate citizens and governments with economic punishments and rewards…
    ..We have also seen stakeholder capitalism on display in the push for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) guidelines among major companies. Most readers are probably familiar with ESG at this point, but keep in mind, the public was oblivious to the terminology until the past 2 years. Globalists have been developing ESG rules since 2005…..ESG was intended to be the tool that globalists and governments would use to force companies into the stakeholder capitalism model. It is a kind of social credit system, but for companies…
    ​..The exposure of ESG is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of the alternative media. It was proof that the “woke-ification” of our economy and society was not the result of some grassroots activist movement or the natural evolution of civilization. No, everything woke was a product, forced into existence by corporate and globalist interests.
    ​ It is with some disappointment I’m sure that Lynn Forester de Rothschild admitted the defeat of ESG at the B20 Summit in India recently. Though, as is usually the case, Rothschild admits that the goal will be to replace the term “ESG” with something else that the public is not as privy to while continuing to institute social credit scoring for companies as a means to dominate them.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-authoritarian-agenda-revealed-globalism-rebranded

    ​ On Friday evening, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) issued an emergency order suspending the right of law-abiding citizens to open and conceal​-carry firearms in crime-ridden Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days, after declaring a public health emergency in response to a spate of recent gun violence.​ Grisham, who apparently thinks criminals will follow her orders, says she expects legal challenges, but was ‘compelled to act’ following recent shootings.
    ​ The Governor of New Mexico has just declared the 1st & 2nd Amendment “does not exist” due to an “emergency.”
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/full-authoritarian-new-mexico-governor-restricts-constitutional-gun-rights-law-abiding

    ​Finally, some good news!
    The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that several Biden administration officials had likely breached the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to moderate or take down content they deemed problematic.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-officials-likely-violated-first-amendment-social-media-5th-circuit-court

    #142788
    John Day
    Participant

    ​ MK Bhadrakumar , The Ankara-Moscow relationship challenges western expectations: Here is a unique model of cooperation among regional powers, built on mutual interests, respect, and the recognition of each country’s independent foreign policies and strategic autonomy.
    ​ In the full flush of his election victory, Erdogan made certain efforts to mend fences with the west, signaling a willingness to agree to Sweden’s induction into NATO and showing solidarity with Ukraine. In moves that could seriously upset Moscow, Ankara wantonly released Azov commanders who were captured by Russia in Mariupol last year and announced an intent to jointly produce weaponry with Ukraine.
    ​ Nonetheless, Moscow reacted cautiously. The Kremlin could afford to mark time since this is also an asymmetrical relationship where Russia holds the upper hand. Moscow could sense that Erdogan was not really “pivoting” to the west, but was rather showing an interest in improving western ties which had soured in recent years -and its outcome remains far from certain.​..​
    ​..Basically, Russia’s relations with Turkiye are fortified by the warm personal equations between Putin and Erdogan, and both leaders are consummate realists with shared interests and a keenness to challenge Western dominance in regional politics…
    The “body language” of the meeting in Sochi confirmed that there is no change in the verve of the personal relationship between the two leaders. Television footage showed the two men smiling and shaking hands upon Erdogan’s arrival at Putin’s residence, where the Russian president suggested that his guest take a vacation in the Black Sea resort.
    ​ In his opening remarks, Putin put Erdogan at ease by reassuring him upfront that the Russian offer to create a global “energy hub” in Turkiye is very much in the cards and will materialize soon.
    ​ However, the icing on the cake is the proposed agreement that would facilitate free exports of grain from Russia to six African nations with the help of Turkiye and Qatar. In Erdogan’s presence, Putin announced:
    ​ “We are close to completing agreements with six African states, where we intend to supply foodstuffs for free and even carry out delivery and logistics for free. Deliveries will begin in the next couple of weeks.”
    ​ The political and geopolitical resonance of this decision in Africa is simply immeasurable — Russia is offering, on the one hand, the Wagner Group as gatekeepers, and on the other hand, food security for the continent. In one fell swoop, western propaganda was trashed, with some help from Ankara.
    ​ Erdogan, on his part, expressed confidence that Russia would “soon” revive the Black Sea grain deal, while also echoing Putin’s stance that the west had betrayed its deal commitments with Russia. Equally, he distanced Ankara from rival western plans to send grain across the Black Sea – which now becomes a non-starter. As he put it:
    ​ “The alternative proposals brought to the agenda could not offer a sustainable, secure and permanent model based on cooperation between the parties like the Black Sea Initiative.”​ …
    ..Putin voiced satisfaction that he and Erdogan have raised the relations to a “very good, high level.” Interestingly, Putin singled out the construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant – Turkiye’s first, built by the Russians – which will be fully operational next year, as he described Turkiye as a new member of the “international nuclear club.”
    ​ These are measured words, no doubt. The message out of the Sochi talks is that Russian-Turkish relations have gained maturity. The summit followed last week’s talks between Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Moscow.
    ​ Later, in the presence of Fidan, Lavrov spoke at some length and with extraordinary clarity about Russia’s policies towards Turkiye. The salience lies in Russia’s profound appreciation of Tukiye’s independent foreign policy, “which is geared towards its own national interests,” resisting Western pressure.
    ​ Lavrov said Turkiye’s “constructive and equitable interaction” with Russia is not only mutually beneficial economically and advantageous, but also strengthens “the sovereign basis” of Turkiye’s foreign policy. Lavrov expressed the hope that Turkiye “will continue to respond with reciprocity despite pressure from the United States and its allies who seek to pit everyone against the Russian Federation,” concluding:
    ​ “The effectiveness of our policy dialogue and economic cooperation will continue to depend on mutual willingness to consider each other’s concerns and interests and to seek to balance them. Our Turkish partners possess the necessary strategic vision. We will continue to adhere to approaches based on mutual respect and a balance of interests.”
    ​ Evidently, Lavrov spoke with great deliberation and purpose. What emerges is that although NATO-member Turkiye has not yet sought membership in the expanded BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) — unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Egypt — Russia nonetheless gives pivotal importance to Turkiye given its strategic autonomy, which is both a game changer in regional politics and a trendsetter.​..
    ..As Lavrov stated recently, Russia is willing to cooperate with any country that treasures its independence.
    https://new.thecradle.co/articles/the-unshakeable-putin-erdogan-nexus

    ​Gilbert Doctorow explains that NATO countries are barely in compliance with their commitments to mutual defense and will be out of compliance if they donate F-16s and such.
    Why Belgium is not sending F-16s to Ukraine

    Why Belgium is not sending F-16s to Ukraine

    ​ Recent Ukrainian attacks in against the villages of Rabotino and Verbovoe will only lead to further attrition of Kiev’s forces, Scott Ritter, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.​
    “Russia always had a primarily defensive doctrine inherited from the Soviet times. But this new defensive doctrine that’s being implemented, especially in the Zaporozhye front, is the brainchild of Lieutenant General Alexander Romanchuck, former deputy commander, I believe, of the 58th Combined Arms Army. He was sent to the Combined Arms Academy after participating in the early phases of the Special Military Operation. While he was at the Combined Arms Academy, he rewrote Russian defensive doctrine and then he was brought out of the Combined Arms Academy and given a leadership position in the Zapporozhye front in the Rabotino area.
    “In accordance with the doctrine, “the purpose of the forward defensive zone is to receive an enemy attack to help break it up, to use defensive belts, minefields, obstacles, what they call, ‘fire cauldrons’ or ‘sacks’ where you want to force the enemy to come in so you can hit them with artillery, to break up the attack, but not to hold and die,” explained Ritter…
    ..Exhausted by struggling to overcome Russia’s defense lines, the Ukrainians will have no strength left to push on forward, said Ritter. “This is part of Alexander Romanchuck’s defensive concept, and it’s been executed perfectly by the Russians at Rabotino,” he stressed…
    ..While Ukraine’s objectives include the physical reconquest of territory Ukraine believes belongs to it, NATO’s goal is not so much about achieving decisive military victory on the battlefield, but to inflict pain on Russia to an extent that there could be a “Moscow Maidan”, akin to one that happened in Kiev in 2014, Ritter explained…
    ..”The answer is, NATO itself has a paper tiger that for the last 20 years has not been funded properly. They haven’t been training properly. They’ve not been doing the right kind of defense procurement properly. And there’s not a single military today that’s healthy enough to carry out the kind of combat that’s taking place in Ukraine, let alone transfer equipment to the Ukrainian military that could assist them in doing this kind of warfare.”
    https://sputnikglobe.com/20230908/scott-ritter-ukrainian-counteroffensives-last-desperate-push-1113205046.html

    ​ US media reported on Thursday that the Pentagon had postponed testing of its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) a day prior, based on “pre-flight checks.” The test was to take place in Florida, with the weapon fired eastward into the Atlantic Ocean.​..
    ​..This, Drozdenko noted, was a key difference between reentry vehicles and hypersonic weapons: they have to be controlled and maneuvered, not just allowed to “ram the atmosphere with their belly” until they slow down.
    “The task of hypersonic weapons like Avangard is to maneuver. This is the most important thing, so that air defense systems can neither detect it nor shoot it down. It needs a control system that can somehow analyze the external environment despite being in this plasma cloud. There is a whole complex of fundamental theoretical sciences – materials science, aerodynamics of high speeds – which current control systems and radio electronics do not have. This is a huge barrier.”​ ..
    ..“And now we actually have just three types of weapons: the glider, Avangard, which has already been repeatedly tested; we have the Kinzhal missile with a rocket engine; and Zircon, a sea-based rocket that works with a ramjet engine that is a further development of the Onyx missile.”​ [and rubbing it in…]
    ​ “Part of these technologies was received by India in the process of joint development of the Brahmos missile. That is why the Americans fail: because a good part of humanity does not want to share technology with [them]. They didn’t manage to steal from them themselves, until they fully developed it.”
    https://sputnikglobe.com/20230907/huge-barriers-pentagons-hypersonic-woes-due-to-very-delicate-physics-problems-behind-tech-1113187726.html

    #142789
    John Day
    Participant

    Peter McCullough MD , Vaccination Makes Long-COVID Syndrome Worse and Last Longer
    ​ Lancet Paper Inadvertently Discloses Data on Vaccination Worsening Long-COVID Symptomatology
    ​ I have seen patients in my practice become progressively more ill with fatigue, weakness, hair loss, headaches, effort intolerance, sleep disturbance and in some cases cardiac and neurological symptoms with progressive mRNA injections every six months. Meanwhile the Biden Administration US HHS National Action Plan on Long COVID-19 has been running a billion dollar research plan with no consideration that the vaccine could be the cause of symptoms. The medical literature is loaded with papers on long-COVID ignoring the fact the same patient groups have all been taking COVID-19 vaccines. In essence, there is a global coverup of vaccine injury syndromes as “long-COVID.”
    ​ Mateu et al studied 548 individuals, 341 with long-COVID, followed for a median of 23 months (IQR 16.5–23.5). With continued vaccination, only 26 subjects (7.6%) recovered from long-COVID during follow-up; almost all of them (n = 24) belonged to the less symptomatic cluster and importantly the syndrome finally lessened when they dropped vaccination.
    https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/vaccination-makes-long-covid-syndrome

    ​And furthermore…
    People who received a new COVID-19 vaccine booster were more likely to contract COVID-19 than people who received no COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to a new study of prisons in California.​..
    ​..While the population of bivalent recipients was higher than the unvaccinated—36,609 compared to 20,889—the rate of infection was still elevated in the bivalent group owing to nearly double the number of infections, the researchers found.
    ​ Infection rates in the group that received bivalent shots was 3.2 percent, over the 2.7 percent in the unvaccinated.
    “The bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group,” Dr. Robert Mayes of the California Correctional Healthcare Services and the other authors wrote.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/boosted-people-more-likely-unvaccinated-be-infected-new-study-finds

    ​ I always advised pregnant patients against COVID vaccinations, and incurred the ire of the OB/GYN department. I gave the pregnant patients bottles of vitamin-D and instructions for taking it. This was a horrendous betrayal, and Obstetricians in America abandoned all of their usual conservatism to blindly follow and promulgate this advice in lock-step. The leaks about harms to pregnancy were out way before the vaccines came out. I already knew that. It was knowable.
    ​ Government Gave Millions To Top Reproductive Health Org To Promote COVID-19 Vaccines To Pregnant Women​
    The premier professional membership organization for obstetricians and gynecologists accepted $11.8 million from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to promote COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women, despite the exclusion of pregnant women from clinical trials and regulatory data showing the vaccine had not been tested for safety during pregnancy.
    ​ To learn more about COVID-19 funding received by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) during the pandemic and what prompted the organization’s guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women, Dr. James Thorp, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine physician made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2022 to HHS.
    ​ “My request was simple: It sought only to obtain documents involving the three ‘Cooperative Agreement’ grants HHS/CDC made to ACOG during the pandemic, one of which was for $11.8 million, listed on a publicly accessible open data source for federal spending, USASPENDING.gov,” Thorp told The Epoch Times.
    ​ Documents obtained by Dr. Thorp show ACOG, on Feb. 1, 2021, was awarded the first of three cooperative agreement grants by HHS and the CDC. The receipt of COVID-19 grant money was contingent upon ACOG yielding substantial control over projects funded by the CDC to the agency and ACOG’s full compliance with CDC guidance on COVID-19 infection and control.
    https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/government-gave-millions-top-reproductive-health-org-promote-covid-19-vaccines-pregnant

    Main Cause of Snowball Earth Period That Lasted 60 Million Years Identified​ (11 minutes)

    #142790
    Red
    Participant

    The whole point of democracy and free markets is to force competition on elites who are desperate to eliminate competition.

    What’s the point of discussing reforms that aren’t even possible in the current status quo? That’s a good question, as any discussion of major systemic changes can be dismissed as pointless (since they’ll never be adopted), and a distraction from the “real work” that can be managed within the current system.

    https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept23/reinventing-democracy9-23.html

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