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Debt Rattle February 20 2026

Feb 202026
 
 February 20, 2026  Posted by at 10:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  56 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Scène de rue à Montmartre 1887


• Former Prince Andrew Arrested After Epstein Files Revelations (Margolis)
• Hegseth Responds to Reports War With Iran Is Imminent
• Patel: We Know Who’s Bankrolling Antifa, and We’re Coming for Them (Hoge)
• 2-Hour Meeting in Geneva of US, Ukraine and Russia with Not Much Progress (CTH)
• Trump at Board of Peace meeting: ‘War in Gaza is over’
• Historic: Surprise High-Level U.S. Visitor Lands in Venezuela (Sarah Anderson)
• Rubio’s Case for a Stronger West (Ben Shapiro)
• CNN Issues Dire Warning To Democrats On 2026 Governors’ Races (ZH)
• The Bug In The Navalnaya Frog Poison Story (Helmer)
• GOP Should Be Willing to Politically Bleed, Fight, and Die (Victoria Taft)
• Mamdani and Other People’s Money (Turley)
• Orban Blasts EU ‘Fantasy’ About Russia (RT)
• EU In Worst Crisis Ever – Fico (RT)
• EU Elites Driven By Nazi Nostalgia – Lavrov (RT)
• Trump Has A UFO Speech Ready To Deliver (ZH)

 


 

Gates is an Epstein victim. Anthropic

 


 

 


 


Nothing to do with underage victims.

“…he shared confidential government trade documents with the late Jeffrey Epstein..”

“BBC’s Lucy Manning provided more color on what the investigation centers around: My understanding is that there’s been a very significant development in the investigation into the Epstein files. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested this morning on suspicion of misconduct in public office. That goes back to documents from when he was a trade envoy, that are alleged to have been passed to Epstein.”

 


 

PLEASE NOTE; Before she died, Virginia Roberts Giuffre wrote multiple times that if she died, it wouldn’t be from suicide, that she would never do that. But every single source says she died from suicide. The press, governments… She was a brave woman. She deserves being taken eriously. She is not.

For many years, she lived in Australia with her husband and -eventually- three children. “Ms Giuffre had recently been living with her children and husband Robert in the suburb of North Perth, Australia, though recent reports suggest the couple have split after 22 years of marriage.

BBC Apil 1 2025; “Ms Giuffre posted on Instagram that she had suffered kidney failure after her car collided with a school bus, stating doctors had given her “four days to live” and were transferring her to a specialist hospital.”

[..] It remains unclear where and when the crash occurred. Both the Western Australia police and ambulance services told the BBC they had no records of such an accident happening in recent weeks. The police later specified that they had located records of a “minor crash” between a bus and a car on 24 March, but that no injuries had been reported as a result.”


• Former Prince Andrew Arrested After Epstein Files Revelations (Margolis)


Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew and brother of the UK’s King Charles III, has been arrested. “I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” the king said in a statement. “As this process continues, it would not be right for me to comment further on this matter. Meanwhile, my family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.”


Thames Valley Police did not identify the individual but confirmed in a statement the arrest of a man “in his sixties” from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office.” Thames Valley Police has opened an investigation into the offence of misconduct in public office. As part of the investigation, we have today (19/2) arrested a man in his sixties from Norfolk on suspicion of misconduct in public office and are carrying out searches at addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk. The man remains in police custody at this time. We will not be naming the arrested man, as per national guidance. Please also remember that this case is now active so care should be taken with any publication to avoid being in contempt of court.

Assistant Chief Constable Oliver Wright said: “Following a thorough assessment, we have now opened an investigation into this allegation of misconduct in public office. “It is important that we protect the integrity and objectivity of our investigation as we work with our partners to investigate this alleged offence. “We understand the significant public interest in this case, and we will provide updates at the appropriate time.” In October, the royal family stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal titles and privileges over his association with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who committed suicide last year, alleged in her memoir that he had sex with her while knowing she was just 17. She recounted how Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly instructed her, “When we get home, you are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey.”

https://twitter.com/TheSaviour/status/2024429714203447521

“He was friendly enough, but still entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright,” she wrote. The following morning, she said, Maxwell told her, “You did well. The prince had fun.” According to Giuffre, Epstein later handed her $15,000 for servicing him. Mountbatten-Windsor has denied those allegations. Giuffre’s family responded to the arrest with a pointed statement: “At last. Today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty. On behalf of our sister, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, we extend our gratitude to the UK’s Thames Valley Police for their investigation and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He was never a prince. For survivors everywhere, Virginia did this for you.” Police are reportedly searching two addresses in Berkshire and Norfolk linked to Mountbatten-Windsor.

Read more …

No nukes. Iran says they don’t want them. But then there’s Bibi.

• Hegseth Responds to Reports War With Iran Is Imminent

Amidst reports that the United States is close to a major war with Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said his job is to make sure the military is capable of backing up the president. “We have enormous capabilities, unlike anyone else in the world, and I think the big difference between this department and others is that we unlock and unleash our war fighters to get the job done should they have to,” Hegseth said in response to a question from The Daily Signal in St. Louis, Missouri. “But our hope is that we never have to use that,” he added. “The president is a negotiator looking for a deal. It would be wise for Iran to see that deal.”


Axios reported Wednesday that President Donald Trump is close to waging a war with Iran, and that a U.S. military operation in Iran would likely be a massive, weeks-long campaign that would look more like full-fledged war than the recent operation in Venezuela. While Iranian leaders want to reach a nuclear deal with the U.S., they are also rushing to prepare for war if negotiations fail, the Wall Street Journal reported.The U.S. could be ready to launch a “sustained” bombing campaign on Iran in the near future, the New York Post reported.

“The world has seen over the last year plus what the president is willing to do,” Hegseth said. “When he speaks, they should listen, and when he says Iran’s not going to have a nuclear weapon, and they should negotiate that. He means it, and our job at the Department of War is to have the capabilities to back him up.” The Trump administration has one message to Iran: come to the table and make a deal, Hegseth said. “Two people will make this decision: the Iranians could step up and make a real deal,” Hegseth said, “and ultimately President Trump will decide if it’s a good enough deal for the American people.”

On Tuesday, Trump advisers Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had a three-hour meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva, Switzerland. Hegseth echoed the message of other Trump administration officials that the talks yielded progress. Vice President Vance told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that the talks “went well” in some ways, but “in other ways it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through.” The Daily Signal asked Hegseth about Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei suggesting Iran could sink a U.S. war ship. “I feel very good about the capabilities of our warships,” Hegseth said. “Very good.”

The war secretary spoke to reporters following a stop on his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour in St. Louis, Missouri, to visit a Boeing facility. Hegseth addressed some of Boeing’s 18,000 employees in St. Louis and asked them to build more planes at a faster pace. “When we unleash American industry, America wins,” Hegseth said. “When we compete, we win. When we innovate, we win. When we move fast, we win.”

Read more …

“A federal judge declared a mistrial Tuesday, but that was because the defense lawyer was wearing a politically charged T-shirt, about as dumb a thing as you could do as a trial attorney.”

• Patel: We Know Who’s Bankrolling Antifa, and We’re Coming for Them (Hoge)

We’ve seen the 2016 anti-Trump rallies, the 2020 George Floyd riots, and the ongoing anti-ICE protests in blue cities since President Trump started trying to clean up the illegal immigration disaster left by former President Joe Biden. There’s been one constant: Antifa. The group, whose name is short for anti-fascist, is known for their menacing black outfits, complete with masks, and their often violent behavior. They show up as if by magic the moment a demonstration breaks out, and they’re not there to keep the peace. But where does their funding come from? Who’s behind it? FBI Director Kash Patel wanted to know, so he’s been investigating it — and he says the bureau has found some answers:


FBI Director Kash Patel said Wednesday that investigators have uncovered what he described as major funding streams tied to antifa. The revelation signaled possible new enforcement action as the bureau intensified scrutiny of left-wing violence, according to a report from the Washington Examiner. Speaking on “The Dan Bongino Show,” Patel said the FBI under President Donald Trump has been conducting a financial investigation into how demonstrations linked to the loosely organized far left movement are supported.

By the way, all those who think that Bongino left his job as FBI Deputy Director on bad terms would be hard-pressed to explain why then Patel would appear on his show. The director continued, saying they’ve identified some culprits, but they’re not ready to reveal their identities just yet: “These organizations don’t operate alone or in silence,” Patel said. “They operate with a heavy, heavy stream of funding. And we started looking into it, and guess what? We found them.”

Patel did not identify specific donors, organizations, or financial mechanisms, but said more details could emerge in the coming months as the investigation continues. “Money doesn’t lie,” he added. He also smacked former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for ignoring the violent activists and calling the decentralized group “an idea.” “It’s not an idea when actual action follows the idea,” he chided them. Here’s what that “idea” looks like in the real world, Barack and Joe:

A public safety director at @Reed_College cooperated with the FBI investigation to identify Hoopes. In response, the college fired the man, and leftists in public denounced him.Currently, nine anti-ICE have been charged with ambushing an ICE officer in Texas and wounding him with gunfire. A federal judge declared a mistrial Tuesday, but that was because the defense lawyer was wearing a politically charged T-shirt, about as dumb a thing as you could do as a trial attorney. We’ll see where that goes next. Patel said he had elevated the issue internally, and they’re working hard on their case, but he did not announce any new imminent DOJ charges. Let’s hope that changes in the near future.

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Ukraine doesn’t want peace. War makes the guys behind their curtain superrich.

• 2-Hour Meeting in Geneva of US, Ukraine and Russia with Not Much Progress (CTH)

The U.S. mediating team met with Ukraine and Russia negotiators for the second day in Geneva, Switzerland. Unfortunately, despite the high praise and customary diplomatic niceties spoken, there was not much progress. There was, however, a rather remarkable accusation hurled by Russian media about uninvited British officials going to Geneva in order to conduct surveillance of the negotiations. Apparently, this is part of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s efforts to retain maximum involvement and influence.


STEVE WITKOFF – “Today, at President Trump’s direction, the United States moderated a third set of trilateral discussions with Ukraine and Russia. Thank you to the Swiss Confederation for being gracious hosts for today’s meetings. President Trump’s success in bringing both sides of this war together has brought about meaningful progress, and we are proud to work under his leadership to stop the killing in this terrible conflict. Both parties agreed to update their respective leaders and continue working towards a deal.” (source)

RUSTEM UMEROV (UKRAINE) – “In Geneva, the second day of trilateral negotiations has begun.mConsultations are taking place in working groups by areas within the political and military tracks. We are working on clarifying the parameters and mechanisms of the decisions discussed yesterday. We are focused on substantive work. We will provide additional information on the results.” (source)

https://twitter.com/PM_ViktorOrban/status/2024116561091477726

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The end of the UN?

• Trump at Board of Peace meeting: ‘War in Gaza is over’ (JTN)

President Trump said Thursday at the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., that “the war in Gaza is over.” Trump invited dozens of countries to participate in the Board of Peace and help end the war between Israel and Hamas. “The war in Gaza is over. It’s over,” Trump said, adding that, still, “there are little flames,” NBC News reported.”Hamas has been, I think they’re going to give up their weapons, which is what they promised,” Trump said. “If they don’t, it’ll be, you know, they’ll be harshly met, very harshly met. They don’t want that.”


The president explained that the U.S. would contribute $10 billion to the Board of Peace. “We’ve had great support for that number,” he said. “And that number is a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.”] He also said that the leaders of several nations, including Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Kuwait “have all contributed more than $7 billion toward the relief package.” “That’s great, thank you, fellas,” Trump said, adding that, “and many more are contributing … this is our first meeting.”

The president noted that Indonesia, Morocco, Albania, Kosovo, and Kazakhstan “have all committed troops and police to stabilize Gaza.” He said that other nations, like Egypt and Jordan, “are likewise providing very, very substantial help,” to create “a very trustworthy Palestinian police force.” Trump called the Board of Peace “one of the most important and consequential things” he has been involved in and touted the countries and leaders who are participating. He was also optimistic that other countries invited to the Board of Peace would accept the U.S.’s offer after multiple key allies declined invitations.

“Almost everybody’s accepted, and the ones that haven’t will be,” Trump said. “Some are playing a little cute. Doesn’t work. You can’t play cute with me.” The United Kingdom, France, Norway, Sweden, and Slovenia are among the countries that have said they won’t join, partly due to concerns that it could diminish the United Nations. However, Trump said during his speech that Norway agreed to host a Board of Peace event. “I’m excited to announce that Norway has agreed to host an event bringing together the Board of Peace,” Trump said. As Norway previously indicated that it would not immediately join the Board of Peace, it is unclear if the country’s stance has changed.

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Trump must talk to Machado. Easy.

• Historic: Surprise High-Level U.S. Visitor Lands in Venezuela (Sarah Anderson)

For years, the idea of a high-ranking United States official visiting Venezuela was not something that was ever going to happen. Heck, six weeks ago, it was not something that was ever going to happen. But last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright touched down in Caracas and met with Donald Trump’s pawn, “acting president” Delcy Rodríguez, and even joined her on a site tour related to the country’s energy sector. On Wednesday, another high-ranking U.S. official came in for a visit: SOUTHCOM Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan. He was joined by Joseph M. Humire, the current assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs. Donovan was just confirmed as the new head of SOUTHCOM a couple of weeks ago.


The two men met with our woman on the ground there, Ambassador Laura Dogu, and, according to a press readout, they also met with “Venezuelan interim authorities.” During the meeting, the leaders reiterated the United States’ commitment to a free, safe and prosperous Venezuela for the Venezuelan people, the United States, and the Western Hemisphere. Discussions focused on the security environment, steps to ensure the implementation of President Donald Trump’s three-phase plan – particularly the stabilization of Venezuela – and the importance of shared security across the Western Hemisphere.

It’s hard to put into words just how historic this is, but it’s yet another win for the Trump administration. I just Googled it to see if the MSM is reporting on it — so far, it looks like just a few outlets, like the Jerusalem Post and Reuters, are the only others mentioning it. That could change tomorrow, but the media does not like to celebrate these wins. I will. Here are some other things you might not find in the MSM. I’ve seen many headlines that Venezuelans are somewhat worried about the country’s future, and I’m sure some are, but according to a poll from Gold Glove Consulting, 72% felt that the country is “moving in the right direction following [Nicolás] Maduro’s January 3 capture.”

When it comes to hypothetical elections that will hopefully be held at some point in the not too distant future, Nobel Peace Prize winner and opposition leader María Corina Machado wins by a landslide with at least 67% of the vote. Only 25% of people said they wanted to Delcy to stay in place. I’m shocked it’s even that high, but I do hear from many people that there are some, mostly older, holdouts in the country who still support the regime. Thankfully, the young people seem to be heading in the opposite direction. All of that said, 58% are concerned about security.

There are still some bad actors within the regime, and they keep testing Delcy, Marco Rubio, and Trump. As I wrote earlier this week, 86-year-old Evanan Romero, a U.S. citizen who is helping the Trump administration court oil investors, was arrested last Friday. He was held for about four days and released on Tuesday afternoon. Apparently, the reason was a charge that dated back to a 2010 case, but since Romero comes and goes from Venezuela often, many exiles have said the reasons were political or an attempt to disrupt the forward movement of the energy sector.

[..] Last but not least, speaking of opposition leader Machado, she appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime on Fox News on Wednesday night, and said she is quite anxious to get back to Venezuela and help with the transition. Of course, it’s not safe for her to do so yet, but she did say something interesting: There are over a million Venezuelans living in exile in the U.S. She estimated that 70% will voluntarily return home once a democracy is in place. That’s a big number, but I can say that I’ve personally met and talked to many over the last year who are ready to return home and make their country great again and see their families and friends. With any luck, they’ll get to do that soon.

Read more …

“.. the harder question Rubio implicitly posed but did not fully resolve: What are the ideas of Western civilization that justify defense and sacrifice?”

• Rubio’s Case for a Stronger West (Ben Shapiro)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday that stood out not for its bombast but for its clarity. In a room filled with political figures from across the Atlantic — and from both parties at home — Rubio was unmistakably the adult in the room. Within the Trump administration, Rubio is easily the most articulate spokesman on foreign policy, and at Munich he demonstrated why. His address offered a robust defense of the transatlantic alliance while avoiding the sharper edges that have unsettled European audiences in recent years.


That contrast was hard to miss. Last year, Vice President JD Vance traveled to Europe and delivered a speech in Davos that struck many Europeans as a warning shot. The message, intentional or not, was that America might be pulling back — and that Europe should prepare to stand alone. Some of that critique was warranted. Some of it was counterproductive. Rubio charted a different course. He emphasized the depth of America’s ties to Europe, ties measured not in election cycles but in centuries. The United States, he argued, does not seek weaker partners or dependent allies. It seeks strong ones.

“Together we rebuilt a shattered continent in the wake of two devastating world wars,” he said. “When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism. We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again. And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar.” Rubio also delivered an unmistakable warning: Alliances only work when all parties carry real weight. The United States cannot indefinitely subsidize sprawling European welfare states while also underwriting the continent’s security. Strong alliances require strong allies — capable of deterring threats, including a revanchist Russia.

“We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker,” Rubio said. He urged Europe to abandon what he described as self-imposed guilt and shame, and instead reclaim confidence in its own culture, heritage and civilization. That critique extended beyond defense spending. Rubio pointed to policy choices Europe has made — from aggressive green energy mandates to mass migration — often driven by a sense of moral atonement rather than national interest. These choices, he suggested, have left the continent less stable, less cohesive and less capable of defending itself.At the heart of Rubio’s speech was a deeper question: What, exactly, is the West defending?

“Armies do not fight for abstractions,” he said. “Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.That claim invites debate. Armies have, in fact, fought for abstractions — communism, religious doctrines, ideological visions of the world. Which raises the harder question Rubio implicitly posed but did not fully resolve: What are the ideas of Western civilization that justify defense and sacrifice?

Europe itself is, in many ways, an idea, one forged through conflict as much as cooperation. From the Roman Empire to Christendom to the nation-state system born after the Peace of Westphalia, Europe has continually redefined itself, often in opposition to external threats. Christianity, Enlightenment liberalism, scientific inquiry, market economies and constitutional government all shaped what we now call “the West.”Those values — rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, property rights, democratic governance and republican self-rule — form the real foundation of the transatlantic alliance. They are also the reason Russia has always existed at Europe’s margins rather than fully within it.If those values erode, the alliance erodes with them. “

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“So this should stand as a major wake-up call to Democrats.. ”

• CNN Issues Dire Warning To Democrats On 2026 Governors’ Races (ZH)

Midterm elections have rarely been kind to the party in the White House. Republicans lost both chambers in 2006 under George W. Bush; Democrats were crushed under Barack Obama in 2010 and again in 2014; Republicans lost the House under Donald Trump in 2018; and Democrats narrowly lost the House under Biden in 2022. The lone exception was 2002, when Republicans gained seats in both chambers after 9/11. Otherwise, the pattern is clear: the president’s party almost always faces setbacks.With the 2026 midterm elections months away, Democrats have many reasons to feel confident they will, at the very least, win back control of the House, which would be enough to effectively stall Trump’s agenda, and most certainly find something to impeach for.


Over at RealClearPolitics, Democrats currently hold an average lead in the generic congressional ballot of +4.6 points. Only one pollster in the average – RMG Research – shows Republicans ahead, and even then by just 2 points. The Democratic advantage isn’t particularly large, and there’s ample reason to believe that a strong economy could boost the GOP in November, but when you look at gubernatorial elections, the advantage is clearly with the Republican Party. On Wednesday, CNN’s Harry Enten painted an unflattering picture of the Democrats when it comes to this year’s gubernatorial races.m”Look at this, a majority, a majority, 26. That is, at this point, the number of governors that are expected at least tilting towards the Republican Party at this point. Democrats come in at just 20. The rest of the races are toss-up,” Enten said.

“Of course, you sum up to 50. And I will note that the Republicans right now hold a 26 to 24 gubernatorial seat advantage.”That’s the current baseline. Republicans enter 2026 holding more governor’s mansions, and the trajectory doesn’t appear to favor a Democratic reversal. But, according to Enten, even accounting for toss-up races, the GOP is likely to come out ahead. “So at this point, it doesn’t look like Republicans on the net and the aggregate are actually going to lose any governorships. In fact, when you add in those toss-ups, they may gain,” he explained. “So this should stand as a major wake-up call to Democrats, because if there’s a wave building, it has not, at least at this point, hit the state level when it comes to governorships.”

Read more …

The UK, and with it the entire West, has no credibility left in the poison field after the Novichok disasster.

Do read: Put this frog in a lab, and it’s no longer poisonous.

“.. the same process in the current information war and in vulpine zoology has been recognized by forensic scientists as “the fox smells his own hole first.”

• The Bug In The Navalnaya Frog Poison Story (Helmer)

The Ecuadorian Poison Dart frog, Epipedobates anthonyi, doesn’t produce the deadly epibatidine poison out of personal spite. Indigestion, more like. According to British toxicologists, epibatidine is refined by the frog’s innards from precursor chemicals, also toxins, which come from the flies, ants, beetles, and other bugs which live in the same environment and are within range of the frog’s tongue. Captive frogs in a chemical warfare laboratory in the US, UK, Germany, France or Sweden would be unable to produce epibatidine unless the toxic insects the frogs eat are also captive.



“Technically, a captive frog would need to be given the same variety of food that it eats in the wild,” a forensic toxicologist in England explains. “These ants, bugs, etc. in the wild contain the toxins and chemicals which in turn the frog eats and then produces its own poison. So a lab would have a supply of these bugs that are present in the frog’s natural environment in order for the captive frog to produce the poison. You would need to airmail live ants from Brazil to the lab. Not impossible, but if a toxicologist is going to detect the poison post-mortem anyway, why bother with such an effort.”

The British discoverers of the frog in the 1970s reported the great difficulty they had in isolating the toxicated from the untoxicated frogs in the Ecuadorian jungles. By the 1990s, however, this problem had been solved by scientists all over the civilized chemical warfare world. On payment from the military research budgets of their governments, they then synthesized epibatidine, so that the supply could be assured without the bugs and frogs on hand. In the Wikipedia summary of the science, “more than fifty ways to synthesize it in the laboratory have been devised.”

The Americans came first in synthesizing and stocking epibatidine, then the British. More Americans followed in 1993. The Chinese succeeded in their synthesis methodology at a university in Virginia, also in 1993. The Russians were twenty years late. The first openly reported synthesis of the poison by Russian researchers was announced in 2013. In a British government press release, issued last week on February 14, it was claimed that “based on analyses of samples from Alexei Navalny. These analyses have conclusively confirmed the presence of epibatidine…Epibatidine is a toxin found in poison dart frogs in South America. It is not found naturally in Russia.”

The allegation by five governments – the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands – is that “given the toxicity of epibatidine and reported symptoms, poisoning was highly likely the cause of his death. Navalny died while held in prison, meaning Russia had the means, motive and opportunity to administer this poison to him.” Referring to the Novichok allegations in Germany when Navalny was in hospital in Berlin and in the UK following the Skripal and Sturgess cases, the press release adds: “only the Russian state had the combined means, motive and disregard for international law to carry out the attacks.”

This is false. The state chemical warfare establishments of the US and UK had not only synthesized epibatidine more than a decade before the Russians, but they had accumulated substantial stocks for battlefield antidote testing, as well as for commercial production of painkillers. Like the role of Porton Down (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, DSTL, see lead image) in producing and stocking Novichok in the UK before the alleged Russian attacks of 2018, and the German, French and Swedish laboratory roles in analyzing the Navalny samples in 2020, the means, motive and opportunity for falsifying the Russian poison story have been openly documented for years.

Yulia Navalnaya’s presentations of the poisoning allegation confirm that she and the government agencies behind her have been preparing it for more than six months at laboratories they refuse to identify, and with evidence of tissue samples which, after two years, are forensically worthless. That means there is no proof that Navalny’s samples are genuine – that they have not been tampered with.“Conclusive” may well be the evidence of epibatadine in the Navalny tissue samples, but it is “highly likely” — the evidence standard identified in the press release — that the poison evidence has been added after Navalny’s death. Speaking scientifically, tracing epibatadine from the Ecuadorian frog is herpetology; the same process in the current information war and in vulpine zoology has been recognized by forensic scientists as “the fox smells his own hole first.”

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The price of voter ID .

• GOP Should Be Willing to Politically Bleed, Fight, and Die (Victoria Taft)

Let’s pretend it’s your last meal before midterms, Senate Republicans. What’s on the menu? Is it steak, caviar, and a dry gin martini or do you just roll over and ask for microwave pizza and Big Gulp? Well, I don’t know about you, but I want it all. And throw in a dog and a beer while you’re taking my order before you shuffle off to genuflect before that loser Chuck Schumer and the New York Times to sell out my vote. I want all of it. You should want all of it. If you believe the Polymarket wags and think you’re going down in the midterms, Republicans, then go down winning the biggest, most important, thing you’ve ever done in your legislative lives: Cleaner elections. Go for it all. If you’re going to politically die, then politically die a hero.


Leave it ALL on the field and save your country. Let this be your unselfish legacy. Be an inspiration worth voting for. Can you do that? It will be the most important thing you’ve ever done. And, who knows? Maybe Republicans in Oregon, Washington, California, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Maryland may win a few rounds. The least you can do, Republicans, after being rolled by the fraud-friendly absentee/mail-in ballot free-for-all in the 1980s is to ask for a photo ID based on citizenship to vote. The least you can do, Republicans, after being rolled by the fraud-friendly Cloward-Piven motor voter nonsense, which intentionally blurred the voter roll lines between citizen and illegal aliens, is demand a photo ID based on citizenship to vote.

The least you can do, Republicans, is make the Democrats live up to their own rules and require their dirty voter rolls be audited and connected to a person with a photo ID based on citizenship, birth records, and Social Security records. We don’t want to hear about your timidity to challenge Democrats to a speaking filibuster. We want to see some humility and bravery from you — and the Democrats. Make them defend the status quo of dirty voter rolls, racist memes about blacks not being able to get ID, and force them to explain to the American people why they support allowing illegal aliens to vote. Make them own it. Make it hurt. Record them. Put their own words in your campaign ads.

And here’s what we also want based on the Election Integrity Project, California specs: Stop universal mail-out ballots that completely warped the 2020 elections. Return to absentee ballots on a per election basis based on need. Return Election Day to Election Day. Your ballot must be in the hands of election officials by the close of polls on — what was that term again? Oh, yes, Election Day. No late ballots. Period. Outlaw ranked choice voting. That’s crap and we all know it. There must be “auditable paper ballots in lieu of electronic slips” to check their work. “Tighten voter list maintenance requirements” of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

No ballot harvesting by “unrelated third parties” and that means SEIU workers at retirement and rehab homes, in addition to political parties. No tabulating votes until 8 p.m. on Election Day. Oy: Gavin Newsom Wants You to Know It’s Not His Fault That He Doesn’t Know What He’s Doing Prohibit ballot curing until “until 22 days before Election Day” Cleaning up the voter rolls is hugely popular. Why do you continue to drag your feet? Get on it. Save the country. And if you do, you may even save your jobs.

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Socialism will never come to the US.

• Mamdani and Other People’s Money (Turley)

In my book “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the rise of support for socialism in both the U.S. and Europe, including the election of Zohran Mamdani. The new mayor was elected on many of the same socialist mantras, promising to introduce New Yorkers to the “warmth of socialism.” Now elected, he is discovering the problem of, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “running out of other people’s money.” Mamdani has announced that he may have to implement “painful” property tax hikes, including a potential 9.5% increase that would devastate an already struggling economy and accelerate the exodus of high-taxpayers from the state.


Notably, while Mamdani is suggesting cuts in police and other areas of the budget, he is proposing a $127 billion budget, an increase of $5 billion from last year. His budget would now be larger than those of 47 of 50 states. As noted by the Washington Post, that includes states like Florida with larger populations. The editors added, “The reality is that Americans may like the idea of ‘free’ stuff — it’s how socialists win elections — but they are less excited about having to pay for it.” nWith New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers in Albany balking at increasing taxes, Mamdani is faced with having to actually pay for all of the free stuff that he promised.

When confronted with the fact that the Governor opposes new taxes as the state struggles to keep wealthy citizens from fleeing to Florida, Mamdani responded that it was not important how they paid for the new stuff. The important thing was that they pay for it somehow. With rent controls, new massive spending programs, and proposed new taxes, Mamdani could be on the brink of causing the greatest exodus since the Red Sea Crossing.

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“.. while the bloc’s GDP is “almost ten times higher” than that of Russia, “Europe today is not ten times stronger than Russia.”

• Orban Blasts EU ‘Fantasy’ About Russia (RT)

EU leaders are wrong to believe that they can exhaust Russia and help Ukraine win the conflict, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. The remarks came in response to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s statement at the Munich Security Conference last week, where he suggested that Brussels exacting “unprecedented losses and costs on Moscow” could weaken it and force it to “agree to peace.” “Who believes that the Russians will run out of steam sooner than Ukraine? It’s a fantasy, an illusion, and irresponsible,” Orban said in a speech on Tuesday, criticizing Brussels’ continued financial and military aid to Kiev.


During his Munich address, Merz claimed that the EU has not used its full potential against Moscow, saying that while the bloc’s GDP is “almost ten times higher” than that of Russia, “Europe today is not ten times stronger than Russia.” EU leaders have doubled down on pressuring Moscow. Top diplomat Kaja Kallas has insisted Russia is not ready for meaningful negotiations on the Ukraine conflict. The Munich conference also saw Kiev and its backers sign several defense industry deals, including joint ventures for drone production in Germany.US Secretary of State Marco Rubio lamented in Budapest on Monday that the Ukraine conflict is “one of the few wars” that some in the international community have been backing and resisting efforts to bring to an end.

Russia, Ukraine, and the US have held two rounds of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi this year. A new round began on Tuesday in Geneva, with US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff praising “meaningful progress” by the delegations. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in December that Moscow prefers diplomacy but will achieve its goals by military means if necessary. On the battlefield, Russian forces have maintained a steady offensive. Russian officials have accused Kiev’s European backers of hindering US-led peace efforts and of increasingly preparing for a direct confrontation with Moscow, aiming at creating an enemy image to distract Western taxpayers from domestic problems.

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“Without a coherent strategy on competitiveness, the EU could “become a cultural open air museum..”

• EU In Worst Crisis Ever – Fico (RT)

The EU is facing the deepest crisis in its history, with economic problems compounded by a lack of leadership and long-term vision in Brussels, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has warned. Fico made the remarks on Tuesday while speaking at a conference on affordable rental housing in country’s capital Bratislava, saying the difficulties confronting ordinary Europeans are part of a wider malaise affecting the entire bloc.“The European Union has never been in such a crisis as it is now,” Fico said, adding that the situation is “not only about economic indicators, but also about leadership and vision.” Without a coherent strategy on competitiveness, the EU could “become a cultural open air museum,” and risk further decline on the global stage, he cautioned.


Some regions of the world, such as China, are now 15-20 years ahead of the EU in key sectors, he added. Fico has repeatedly criticized Brussels over its policies, particularly on energy and Russia sanctions, saying the restrictions are “only hurting” the bloc. Commenting on the European Commission’s 20th sanctions package earlier this month, he said the EU should prioritize dealing with its internal problems over imposing new restrictions on Moscow. He has also sharply criticized the EU’s plan to completely phase out Russian gas imports by November 2027, describing the scheme as “suicide” for dependent economies, and announced that Bratislava would sue EU institutions.

The sharp decline in cheaper Russian pipeline gas imports following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 and ensuing Western sanctions, has driven wholesale prices and living costs higher across the EU, while undermining the bloc’s industrial competitiveness.Fico, who survived an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukraine activist in 2024, has described Kiev as a “black hole” of corruption that has swallowed billions of euros in EU funds. Last month, he called for the removal of the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, known for her hardline anti-Russian stance.

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“What can we talk about with Europeans who openly say that Ukraine is upholding European values?”

• EU Elites Driven By Nazi Nostalgia – Lavrov (RT)

Much of the Western European antagonism towards Russia is driven by revanchist aspirations rooted in the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday. In an interview with Al Arabiya, Moscow’s top diplomat accused senior EU and NATO officials of prioritizing personal ambitions and grudges over national interests. He argued that European anti-Russian officials label dissenting politicians as Moscow’s stooges while indulging in nostalgia “for the era when their forebears steered Europe towards Nazism, whether within [Adolf] Hitler’s apparatus or in countries where Hitler conscripted nearly all for the assault on the Soviet Union.”


According to Lavrov, “this hatred has resurfaced” and drives European governments to seek Russia’s defeat through Ukrainian proxies. European support for Kiev is meant to prolong the “war against us, a war which the EU wants to continue,” he asserted. “Europe has degenerated. Yet there remain voices of reason,” Lavrov said, naming Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. “These are sensible, pragmatic leaders who prioritize their nations’ interests.”

Lavrov said Brussels wants a role in US-mediated Ukraine peace talks only to undermine them, while it simultaneously claims Moscow is avoiding negotiations despite evidence to the contrary. “What can we talk about with Europeans who openly say that Ukraine is upholding European values?” he asked. Western European leaders have expressed concern that US President Donald Trump will sideline their interests as he pushes for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. During the latest round of talks held in Geneva this week, officials from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the UK were waiting on the sidelines to consult with Kiev’s delegation.

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“I think Trump might be the only guy that’s willing to do something that crazy,” Rogan replied.”

And then yesterday he did:

“Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

• Trump Has A UFO Speech Ready To Deliver (ZH)

Documentary filmmaker Dan Farah appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in November to promote his new documentary, The Age of Disclosure, and predicted that his film might force Trump to become the first world leader to confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life publicly.”I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens soon after the film comes out — the sitting president has to step to the microphone and say: humanity is not alone in the universe,” Farah told Rogan. “We have recovered technology of non-human origin. So have other nations. There is a high-stakes, secret cold war race to reverse engineer this technology. We need to win this race.” “I think Trump might be the only guy that’s willing to do something that crazy,” Rogan replied.


Well, now Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, let it slip during an appearance on the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast that Trump has a speech prepared confirming extraterrestrial life exists. “Do you think that he’s about to make an announcement about UFOs?” host Miranda Devine asked. “Because President Obama was just on a podcast talking about how he believes in UFOs and hinting that he saw something when he was president.” “Well, I said this in my podcast, too,” Lara Trump began.

“What’s funny is we’ve kind of asked my father-in-law about this, ’cause we’re like, ‘Well, what do you know?’ ‘Cause, Miranda, we all wanna know about the UFOs, or we all wanna know what’s going on and he played a little coy with us. And so that, of course, led us to believe, Eric and I, were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, if he won’t even, like, fully tell us, maybe there’s more to it.’ And then I have just heard kind of around that… I think he’s actually said it, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has that, I guess, at, at the right time, and I don’t know when the right time is, he’s gonna break out and, and talk about, and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life, so to speak.”

The White House offered exactly the kind of answer you’d expect. “I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team,” White House Press Secretary Karoline said. ”That would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too.” A clip from Obama’s recent appearance on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast went viral over the weekend after he was asked point-blank whether aliens exist. “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in … Area 51 … There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.

By Sunday, Obama was on Instagram trying to walk it back. “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances aliens have visited us is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama wrote. Washington’s relationship with UFOs — or, in the preferred bureaucratic phrasing, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) — has shifted considerably in recent years. A House hearing in July 2023 featured testimony from former military intelligence officer David Grusch, who told lawmakers under oath that he “was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access.” Grusch further alleged the government had retrieved what he called “non-human biologics” from recovered craft, citing accounts from dozens of witnesses he interviewed over four years.

The Pentagon, of course, pushed back. A March 2024 report rejected the core claims — no reverse-engineered alien spacecraft, no hidden extraterrestrial biological material, no off-world technology stashed in some classified warehouse. The agency stood by its denials even as lawmakers held classified briefings.Lara Trump’s comment adds new intrigue to the discussion. Whether Trump eventually delivers that address — or whether this is one more piece of carefully managed intrigue from a president who has never met a story he didn’t know how to control — is a question that, for now, has no answer. But Trump sure does seem like the president who would do so.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Censorship machine Solar system https://twitter.com/MAstronomers/status/2024251057212158079?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 18 2020

Jan 182020
 
 January 18, 2020  Posted by at 10:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  13 Responses »


Esther Bubley Watching parade to recruit civilian defense volunteers, Washington DC 1943

 

• Sanders Campaign Looks At Warren For Vice President AND Treasury Secretary (IC)
• US Seeks To Determine If Yovanovitch Was Under Threat – Pompeo (R.)
• Grave Tendings (Kunstler)
• A Malicious Indictment (Buchanan)
• New IMF Boss Says Global Economy Risks Return Of Great Depression (G.)
• Battle of the Ages To Stop Eurasian Integration (Pepe Escobar)
• China’s Growing Economic Collapse (WRB)
• UK Cops Block Bid To Trace Prince Andrew’s Location 19 Years Ago (NYP)
• Rich People Are Staying Healthy For Almost A Decade Longer Than Poor People (CNN)
• Children, Young Adults Can’t Sue US Government Over Climate Change – Court (R.)

 

 

The fight didn’t poll well, methinks.

• Sanders Campaign Looks At Warren For Vice President AND Treasury Secretary (IC)

The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders has researched the question of whether the same person can serve as both vice president and treasury secretary, according to three sources on the campaign. The person the Sanders campaign had in mind with the inquiry was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, his rival for the nomination and the bane of Wall Street over the last decade. The answer the lawyers came back with was yes: There is nothing in the Constitution that bars the vice president from also serving as treasury secretary. Sanders has made no final decisions on a potential running mate or cabinet officers, considering such questions premature and presumptuous, but the research into the question of Warren’s dual eligibility reflects the political affinity that has long existed between the two — an affinity that was dealt a setback over the past week, as the pair clashed over the contents of a year-old private conversation.


Warren and Sanders have been allies since at least 2008, before she came to Washington to chair a panel with oversight of the Wall Street bailout. An author of books on the struggles of the middle class and an expert on bankruptcy law, she was invited by Sanders to a Vermont town hall, where the two talked about their shared agenda. Sanders was a strong supporter of her effort to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the wake of the financial crisis and privately lobbied President Barack Obama to name her the head of the new agency. Ideologically, Sanders and Warren are largely aligned when it comes to Wall Street, though Warren has concentrated more attention on bankers, meaning the two different skill sets could complement each other in the same administration.

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Still no idea how Parnas went from very major Dem enemy to posing with Maddow in no time. Everyone just stopped thinking?

• US Seeks To Determine If Yovanovitch Was Under Threat – Pompeo (R.)

The U.S. State Department will do everything necessary to determine whether former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was under threat in Ukraine, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday. Documents released this week indicated Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen, helped U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani investigate U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. They also showed Parnas was involved in monitoring Yovanovitch’s movements before Trump removed her in May. Yovanovitch, a respected career diplomat, was a key witness in the U.S. House of Representatives’ investigation of Trump before he was impeached in December.

Late on Friday, a Democratic aide said House Democrats will be sending additional text messages, photographs and other documents provided by Parnas for the Senate impeachment trial that gets underway in earnest next week. Some of the documents appeared to show communications between Parnas and an aide to Representative Devin Nunes, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. In his first comments on the issue since the documents were released on Tuesday evening, Pompeo said he had never met nor communicated with Parnas, adding that he thought much of what had been reported on the issue would be proven wrong.

“We will do everything we need to do to evaluate whether there was something that took place there,” he told conservative radio host Tony Katz in an interview. “I suspect that much of what’s been reported will ultimately prove wrong, but our obligation, my obligation as secretary of state, is to make sure that we evaluate, investigate. Any time there is someone who posits that there may have been a risk to one of our officers, we’ll obviously do that,” he said. Yovanovitch testified she had received a late night call from Washington warning her that she needed to return to the United States urgently and that there were concerns about her safety.

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Jim is hurting some of his earlier fans.

• Grave Tendings (Kunstler)

Wouldn’t you like to hear from the legendary “whistleblower,” since his actions provoked this chapter of the three-year orchestrated coup to oust Mr. Trump? If it’s a basic tenet of law that a defendant has a right to face his accuser, can there be any further excuse for concealing this person’s identity — whose supposed right to anonymity, by the way, has been one of the signal frauds of the whole episode. Would it not be instructive to seat his mentor and former boss, John Brennan, in the witness chair and give him another opportunity to perjure himself? We must also hear from Michael Atkinson, the “whistleblower’s” enabler and Lawfare warrior Mary McCord, Atkinson’s former boss at the DOJ national security desk, who apparently stage-managed the “whistleblower’s” doings through Adam Schiff’s House intel Committee. Mr. Schiff would be the ripest witness of all, of course, since he has left a trail of falsehoods and fabrications longer than the Pacific Trail — but it’s unclear just now whether the Senate rules will allow a manager to be called to testify.

There is also much to be unraveled about the American mischief in Ukraine — which includes, but goes far beyond — the arrant grift of Hunter Biden. For example, the relationships between between the George Soros-backed NGO Atlantic Council and Burisma, the NatGas company that put Hunter B on its board, and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, board member of the Atlantic Council (and $25-million contributor to the Clinton Foundation), and Dmitri Alperovitch (also Atlantic Council) co-founder of Crowdstrike, the company that “examined” the supposedly “hacked” DNC servers, and Hillary Clinton herself, the self-dealing Secretary of State behind the international pay-for-play charity fraud she operated while in office. Also bring back former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to ‘splain the actions she took to conceal all these machinations, as well as her role in operating the 2016 Kiev Hillary campaign office.

What would soon be obvious is that the precipitating “whistleblower” caper was an effort to divert attention from a network of Americans that used a politically captive Ukraine — following the Maidan Revolution of 2014 — to protect an enormous racketeering operation threatened by the candidacy, and then the election, of Mr. Trump. Naturally, they are desperate to get him out of the way. So many of the facts are already publicly known and documented about these matters that the legal machinery has yet to catch up with it all. And when it does, the Democratic Party will have driven a wooden stake through its own depraved heart.

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Pat Buchanan doesn’t let up either.

• A Malicious Indictment (Buchanan)

Assume Zelenskiy, without prodding, sent to the U.S., as a friendly act to ingratiate himself with Trump, the Burisma file on Hunter Biden. Would that have been a crime? Why is it then a crime if Trump asked for the file? The military aid Trump held up for 10 weeks — lethal aid Barack Obama denied to Kyiv — was sent. And Zelenskiy never held the press conference requested, never investigated Burisma, never sent the Biden file. There is a reason why no crime was charged in the impeachment of Donald Trump. There was no crime committed. Not political, said Pelosi. Why then did she hold up sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a month, after she said it was so urgent that Trump be impeached that Schiff and Nadler could not wait for their subpoenas to be ruled upon by the Supreme Court?

Pelosi is demanding that the Senate get the documents, subpoena and hear the witnesses, and do the investigative work Schiff and Nadler failed to do. Does that not constitute an admission that a convincing case was not made? Are not the articles voted by the House inherently deficient if the Senate has to have more evidence than the House prosecutors could produce to convict the president of “abuse of power”? Can we really have a fair trial in the Senate, when half of the jury, the Democratic caucus, is as reliably expected to vote to remove the president as Republicans are to acquit him? What kind of fair trial is it when we can predict the final vote before the court hears the evidence?

It is ridiculous to deny that this impeachment is partisan, political and personal. It reeks of politics, partisanship and Trump-hatred. As for patriotic, that depends on where you stand — or sit. But the forum to be entrusted with the decision of “should Trump go?” is not a deeply polarized Senate, but with those the Founding Fathers entrusted with such decisions — the American people.

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But the IMF will save us, I’m sure.

• New IMF Boss Says Global Economy Risks Return Of Great Depression (G.)

The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the global economy risks a return of the Great Depression, driven by inequality and financial sector instability. Speaking at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington, Kristalina Georgieva said new IMF research, which compares the current economy to the “roaring 1920s” that culminated in the great market crash of 1929, revealed that a similar trend was already under way. While the inequality gap between countries had closed in the last two decades, it had increased within countries, she said, singling out the UK for particular criticism.


“In the UK, for example, the top 10% now control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This situation is mirrored across much of the OECD, where income and wealth inequality have reached, or are near, record highs.” She added: “In some ways, this troubling trend is reminiscent of the early part of the 20th century – when the twin forces of technology and integration led to the first gilded age, the roaring 20s, and, ultimately, financial disaster.” She warned that fresh issues such as the climate emergency and increased trade protectionism meant the next 10 years were likely to be characterised by social unrest and financial market volatility. “If I had to identify a theme at the outset of the new decade, it would be increasing uncertainty,” she said.

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Pepe’s starting to sound a bit like a broken record. We already know what he thinks about this. he should try a different angle.

• Battle of the Ages To Stop Eurasian Integration (Pepe Escobar)

The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the “indispensable nation” economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily. The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as “threats.” Hybrid War techniques – carrying inbuilt 24/7 demonization – will proliferate with the aim of containing China’s “threat,” Russian “aggression” and Iran’s “sponsorship of terrorism.” The myth of the “free market” will continue to drown under the imposition of a barrage of illegal sanctions, euphemistically defined as new trade “rules.” Yet that will be hardly enough to derail the Russia-China strategic partnership. To unlock the deeper meaning of this partnership, we need to understand that Beijing defines it as rolling towards a “new era.”

That implies strategic long-term planning – with the key date being 2049, the centennial of New China. The horizon for the multiple projects of the Belt and Road Initiative – as in the China-driven New Silk Roads – is indeed the 2040s, when Beijing expects to have fully woven a new, multipolar paradigm of sovereign nations/partners across Eurasia and beyond, all connected by an interlocking maze of belts and roads. The Russian project – Greater Eurasia – somewhat mirrors Belt & Road and will be integrated with it. Belt & Road, the Eurasia Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank are all converging towards the same vision.

So this “new era”, as defined by the Chinese, relies heavily on close Russia-China coordination, in every sector. Made in China 2025 is encompassing a series of techno/scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, Russia has established itself as an unparalleled technological resource for weapons and systems that the Chinese still cannot match. At the latest BRICS summit in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that “the current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination.” Putin’s response: “Under the current situation, the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication.”

Russia is showing China how the West respects realpolitik power in any form, and Beijing is finally starting to use theirs. The result is that after five centuries of Western domination – which, incidentally, led to the decline of the Ancient Silk Roads – the Heartland is back, with a bang, asserting its preeminence. On a personal note, my travels these past two years, from West Asia to Central Asia, and my conversations these past two months with analysts in Nur-Sultan, Moscow and Italy, have allowed me to get deeper into the intricacies of what sharp minds define as the Double Helix. We are all aware of the immense challenges ahead – while barely managing to track the stunning re-emergence of the Heartland in real-time.

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This would be a good angle for Pepe. How do countries integrate that are in serious trouble?

• China’s Growing Economic Collapse (WRB)

China’s $40 Trillion banking system dwarfs the American system at double the size, with over 4,000 small, medium and massive, state-owned banks. The world’s four largest banks, including behemoth ICBC ($4TN), are all Chinese. The failure of just three banks was important enough that Chinese regulators submitted Chinese banks to a stress test and the results were shocking. China’s central bank admitted that China’s banking sector is “showing signs of strain.” The stress tests had revealed that over 13% of China’s 4,379 lenders were designated “high risk” by the central bank’s report. With this amounting to over 570 banks, and thus multiplied by the three existing examples of bank bail-out funding, with the Chinese economy following the world into recession, the financial numbers and likelihood of any future series of bail-outs are truly biblical. If not, fiscally impossible.


Separately, the PBOC also stress-tested 30 medium- and large-sized banks in the first half of 2019. In the base-case scenario, assuming GDP growth dropped to 5.3% – or well above where China’s real GDP is now – nine out of 30 major banks failed and saw their capital adequacy ratio drop to 13.47% from 14.43%. In the worst-case scenario, assuming GDP growth of 4.15%, or just 2% below the latest official Chinese GDP report, seventeen out of the thirty of these major banks failed the test. Separately, a liquidity stress test at 1,171 banks, representing nearly three-quarters of China’s banking sector by total assets, showed that ninety failed in the base-case and 159 in the worst-case scenario. The metrics of any collective bail-out indicates that China has upwards of an insurmountable $20 trillion problem rapidly approaching.

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I kid you not: for “national security” reasons. All they talk about is Big Ben bongs and blaming Meghan for being chased out of town by the paparazzi.

• UK Cops Block Bid To Trace Prince Andrew’s Location 19 Years Ago (NYP)

British police have blocked a legal bid to trace Prince Andrew’s bodyguards’ movements on the night he allegedly first had sex with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser. The disgraced royal claims that he could not have had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in London in March 2001 — because he was grabbing pizza with his daughter at a chain restaurant in the small town of Woking. With no witnesses of the prince’s pie date, the Mirror Online submitted a Freedom of Information Act request hoping that his royal protection officers’ movements would help prove his whereabouts that day. But London’s Met police rejected the request, citing national security concerns — and sparking an immediate backlash, the UK news site said.


Graham Smith, of anti-monarchy group Republic, slammed the decision. “Revealing locations from 19 years ago cannot possibly reveal personal data, either directly or indirectly,” Smith told Mirror Online. “The police are tasked with protecting the royals from physical harm, not from legitimate inquiry, criminal investigation or embarrassment.” Giuffre — who claims to have had sex with Andrew three times after being trafficked by late pedophile Epstein — attacked the “lies after lies” that she claims protect the prince. “There could only be one reason the prince’s bodyguards would not to expose where the prince had been on March 10th 2001- the night in question, bc he wasn’t at Woking Pizza with his daughter B,” she tweeted, referring to Princess Beatrice.

Read more …

Health care, education etc. must be universal. Or you can aim for the majority to be sick and stupid.

• Rich People Are Staying Healthy For Almost A Decade Longer Than Poor People (CNN)

Rich people live healthy, disability-free lives an average of nine years longer than less wealthy people, according to a major study that lays bare the troubling economic inequalities behind lifespans in the US and UK. Researchers analyzed data on more than 25,000 adults over 50, looking for factors that could predict how long they lived before they started suffering from age-related disabilities, like being unable to get out of bed or cook for themselves. The biggest socioeconomic factor in predicting when those problems began was wealth, the team discovered, with richer people enjoying almost an extra decade before experiencing difficulties.

From the age of 50, the wealthiest men analyzed could expect another 31 healthy years of life — compared with the least well-off, who could only expect another 22 to 23 healthy years. For women, the wealthiest were projected to enjoy 33 more years of good health, compared with 24 for the poorest. “While life expectancy is a useful indicator of health, the quality of life as we get older is also crucial,” lead author Paola Zaninotto, a public health specialist at University College London, said in a statement. “By measuring healthy life expectancy we can get an estimate of the number of years of life spent in favorable states of health or without disability.”

The study — the work of researchers from a team of universities in Europe and the US — is far from the first to pinpoint the importance wealth plays in how long people live, though most have focused on life expectancy rather than quality of life. Research in 2016 found that men in the top financial 1% in the US can expect to live until the age of 87.3, nearly 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1%. The gap for women was 10 years. And in the UK, a study in 2018 found that poor people die around a decade earlier than those who are better off. [..] In general, the global life expectancy at birth in 2016 — the latest year for which data is available — was 72 years, according to the World Health Organization. The global average life expectancy rose by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, the fastest increase since the 1960s, WHO said.

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They probably need to be much more specific. How do they intend to achieve their goal? And don’t say electric cars.

• Children, Young Adults Can’t Sue US Government Over Climate Change – Court (R.)

A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday threw out a lawsuit by children and young adults who claimed they had a constitutional right to be protected from climate change, in a major setback to efforts to spur the U.S. government to address the issue. In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 19 when the lawsuit began in 2015, lacked legal standing to sue the United States. Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz said the majority reached its conclusion “reluctantly,” given “compelling” evidence the government had long promoted fossil fuels despite knowing they could cause catastrophic climate change, and that failing to change policies could hasten an “environmental apocalypse.”

Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based non-profit behind the lawsuit, said in a statement that it would seek an 11-judge panel of the court to review the decision. The ruling had “catastrophic implications,” said Julia Olson, the group’s executive director. A Department of Justice spokesman said the government was pleased with the outcome. The 21 children and young adults had accused federal officials and oil industry executives of violating their due process right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life,” by knowing for decades that carbon pollution poisons the environment but doing nothing about it. The government argued that neither U.S. law or history supported the young people’s claim of a fundamental right to a “livable climate.”

It also called the lawsuit an unconstitutional attempt to control the entire country’s climate and energy policy through a single court. Hurwitz said the case left “little basis for denying that climate change is occurring at an increasingly rapid pace,” but that addressing it required “complex policy decisions entrusted, for better or worse, to the wisdom and discretion” of the White House and Congress. “That the other branches may have abdicated their responsibility to remediate the problem does not confer on Article III courts, no matter how well-intentioned, the ability to step into their shoes,” he wrote.

Read more …

 

Ali would have turned 78 yesterday

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 18 2019

Nov 182019
 
 November 18, 2019  Posted by at 9:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  28 Responses »


Salvador Dali Cubist self portrait 1926

 

• Leaked Report Concludes Russia May Have Influenced Brexit Vote (AP)
• Hong Kong Police Storm Into University After Violent Standoff (ZH)
• Another Chapter in the Democrats’ 2020 Clown Car Disaster (Taibbi)
• Morrison Told Schiff Panel: Nothing Improper During Trump-Zelensky Call (ZH)
• In Trump-Nixon Impeachment Comparison, Pelosi Raises Specter Of Resignation (R.)
• Pelosi: Trump’s Conduct Is ‘So Much Worse’ Than Nixon’s (NBC)
• About Trump (Sylvain Laforest )
• Fed Fears Next Crash Fatal – John Rubino (USAW)
• China Quietly Bails Out Another Bank (ZH)
• Airbus Exec: Boeing’s 737 MAX Grounding Benefits No One (CNBC)
• Pictures of Prince Andrew Partying and Sweating (DM)
• Against Economics (David Graeber)

 

 

Britain’s RussiaRussia craze continues. This concerns a bunch of Russian oligarchs with British citizenship who have donated to the Tories, and they are conveniently labeled “Russia”. For all we know they may be sworn enemies of Putin. And even if they’re not, they’re also not “Russia”. When the Brits show us Skripal, we can talk.

• Leaked Report Concludes Russia May Have Influenced Brexit Vote (AP)

Questions about the British government’s failure to release a report on Russia’s interference in the country’s politics have continued to dog Prime Minister Boris Johnson as critics said leaks from the document raised concerns about the security of next month’s election. The report from Parliament’s intelligence committee concludes that Russian interference may have affected the 2016 referendum on Britain’s departure from the European Union, though the impact is “unquantifiable,” the Sunday Times reported. The committee said British intelligence services failed to devote enough resources to counter the threat and highlighted the impact of articles posted by Russian new sites that were widely disseminated on social media, the newspaper reported.

Emily Thornberry, the opposition Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, said the leaks raise questions that deserve answers ahead of the December 12 poll. “Boris Johnson therefore needs to clear up the confusion, spin and speculation around this [intelligence committee] report by publishing it in full at the earliest opportunity,” she told the Times. “If not, people will rightly continue to ask: what is he trying to hide from the British public and why?” Johnson’s government has said it needs more time to review the security implications of the report. It says it will release the report after the election.

Critics have alleged the report is being withheld because it shows Russians have made large donations to the Conservative Party, which is seeking to win a majority that would allow Johnson to push his Brexit deal through Parliament. Security Minister Brandon Lewis dismissed the criticism. Asked about Russian donors to the campaign, Lewis told Sky television on Sunday that all contributions are reported to the proper authorities and the donors in question all have British citizenship.

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Developing story with some seemingly contradictory “facts”.

Guardian: 800 protesters “trapped”. “Teargas stops protesters escaping despite president of Polytechnic University assuring them of safe passage.”

• Hong Kong Police Storm Into University After Violent Standoff (ZH)

Update 3: As the AP reports, local police charged demonstrators at Hong Kong Polytechnic University early Monday in a bid to end a lengthy standoff with protesters who had occupied the campus for a week, even though the local police later denied they had, in fact, raided the campus. As the WSJ adds, pro-democracy activists who had spent the night at barricades outside retreated inside the university, while those already inside campus buildings hurled Molotov cocktails and bricks at elite and riot police, who stormed the campus through the main entrance.

“Several protesters had been perched on higher floors and used a large slingshot to launch Molotov cocktails. The entryway and areas around the university’s perimeter were quickly engulfed in flames. One protester shown on live-streamed video from the site fired an arrow at the officers. Police appeared to arrest a small number of demonstrators as they advanced, but it was unclear how many students remained inside.”

Update 2: Sky News in a breaking report says officers have been given the ‘green light’ to use lethal force if needed against ‘rioters’ deploying lethal weapons at student protester-occupied Polytechnic University. According to the report: “Hong Kong protestors have fired arrows and hurled petrol bombs at police, as they seek to keep control of a barricaded university. Warning they were authorized to use “lethal force”, officers threatened to use live bullets if rioters continued. The territory continues to suffer some of its worst unrest in six months of demonstrations.” Throughout the weekend and into Monday the campus is resembling a war zone. And as protester tactics escalate, including shooting at police with bows and arrows, and launching petrol bombs via sling shots off buildings, HK police gloves are now coming off.

The battle over student protester-occupied Polytechnic University grew more violent over the weekend and grabbed headlines Sunday after a police officer was wounded by an arrow and a riot control vehicle attempting to disperse what HK authorities have labelled ‘rioters’ was set aflame by dozens of Molotov cocktails. Chinese state media has now labeled the student protesters “terrorists” and has urged police to deploy live fire given the students themselves are in possession of deadly weapons.

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Deval Patrick is candidate no. 28.

• Another Chapter in the Democrats’ 2020 Clown Car Disaster (Taibbi)

People like Bloomberg and Patrick seem to believe in the existence of a massive electoral “middle” that wants 15-point plans and meritocratic slogans instead of action. As befits brilliant political strategists, they also seem hyper-concerned about the feelings of the country’s least numerous demographic, the extremely rich. A consistent theme is fear (often described in papers like the Times as “concern”) that the rhetoric of Warren and Sanders might unduly upset wealthy folk. “I don’t think that wealth is the problem. I think greed is the problem,” Patrick told CBS This Morning. He added that “taxes should go up on the most prosperous and the most fortunate,” but “not as a penalty.”


What does that mean? Should we impose higher taxes on the rich but include a note from the IRS saying, “It’s not because we don’t love you”? Along with an alarmingly high number of press figures, politicians like Patrick seem to be trapped in an “electability” concept that hasn’t made sense since the Reagan-Bush years. Outside of a few spots on the Upper East Side and in Georgetown and L.A., the “center” has been gone a long time. From Donald Trump to Sanders to Warren, the politicians attracting the biggest and most enthusiastic responses in recent years have run on furious, throw-the-bums-out themes, for the logical reason that bums by now clearly need throwing out.

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He said this last month. Schiff didn’t exactly quote him on it. Help me here: who was the guy Schiff told to reconsider his statement weeks ago? Anyone remember?

• Morrison Told Schiff Panel: Nothing Improper During Trump-Zelensky Call (ZH)

A former top national security adviser to President Trump told a secret impeachment panel that he believed nothing improper occurred during a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky, according to a transcript released over the weekend. NSC official Tim Morrison, who was on that phone call, expressed this narrative-killing opinion to the Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee last month – which would have undermined recent public testimony by several US officials who said that President Trump abused his office when he asked Zelensky to investigate former VP Joe Biden and matters related to the 2016 US election. That said, Morrison also testified that US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, was involved in an effort to encourage Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden – though he could not say whether Trump was involved in those efforts.

“I’m still not completely certain that this was coming from the President,” Morrison testified to House Democrats. “I’m only getting this from Ambassador Sondland.” During a closed-door deposition as part of the House impeachment inquiry, Morrison was asked, “In your view, there was nothing improper that occurred during the call?” “Correct,” he answered as he was testifying under oath.” -Epoch Times. Morrison replaced former NSC official Fiona Hill, who resigned from her position on July 19, days before the infamous Trump-Zelensky call. He says that the word “Burisma” never came up during that call, referring to the Ukrainian natural gas company which employed Hunter Biden on its board [..]

Trump asked Zelensky to investigate this, as well as allegations that Ukraine was involved with the hacked DNC server as well as the only firm allowed to look at it, Crowdstrike. Morrison also testified that the Trump administration withheld foreign aid from Ukraine due to Trump’s general skepticism toward foreign aid, and a “concern that Ukrainians were not paying their fair share, as well as concerns [that] our aid would be misused because of the view that Ukraine has a significant corruption problem.”

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I’m getting the impression this is Pelosi’s PR team speaking. That switch to “bribery” gave it away. Is “resignation” another term they checked with a focus group?!

• In Trump-Nixon Impeachment Comparison, Pelosi Raises Specter Of Resignation (R.)

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is amplifying her unfavorable comparison of President Donald Trump to fellow Republican Richard Nixon, saying that disgraced president at least cared enough about the country to leave office before his impeachment. The top Democrat in Congress told reporters last week that Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to investigate one of his potential opponents in the 2020 election “makes what Nixon did look almost small.” In a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday, she alluded to Nixon’s resignation after the Watergate scandal involving a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters and the subsequent cover-up.


“I mean, what the president did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did, that at some point Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue,” Pelosi said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” [..] Pelosi for months resisted calls from her more liberal Democratic lawmakers to initiate impeachment proceedings, but said Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy compelled her to open the inquiry against the president.

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They’re starting to intimidate witnesses.

• Pelosi: Trump’s Conduct Is ‘So Much Worse’ Than Nixon’s (NBC)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s conduct is “so much worse” than that of former President Richard Nixon, adding that Trump is insecure about being an “imposter.” Pelosi spoke with CBS’s “Face the Nation” days after House impeachment investigators conducted their first public hearings. Three more days of public hearings are scheduled for this week. “I will make sure he does not intimidate the whistleblower,” Pelosi said of the CIA employee whose complaint about Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine led to the impeachment inquiry. “The president can come before the committee and speak all the truth that he wants … He has every opportunity to make his case.”

“But it’s really a sad thing,” Pelosi continued. “What the president did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did. At some point, Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue.” Since the House launched its impeachment inquiry in September, multiple Trump administration officials have alleged that Trump tied U.S. aid to Ukraine to an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Republicans have defended the president by pointing out that the aid was eventually released and Ukraine never announced an investigation into the Bidens. But Pelosi and other Democrats have said that, by conditioning aid on the investigations, Trump was attempting to commit bribery.

“The whistle was blown, the whistle was blown, and that was blown long before we heard about it,” Pelosi said. “Don’t forget that in-between all of that came the inspector general. An inspector general appointed by President Trump. And the inspector general said this was of urgent concern. That is what intervened.” Speaking with “Fox News Sunday,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Republicans have offered up “a whole bunch of defenses that don’t make sense.” “Lots of crimes can be committed … by the boss hinting and giving direction,” Himes said. “Corrupt people don’t always say, ‘Hey, here’s the signed contract.’ What has already developed from second-hand witnesses is that this aid was withheld as a condition.”

Even more Trump administration officials are set to testify publicly in the impeachment probe this week, including E.U. Ambassador Gordon Sondland, who Himes said is a first-hand witness to Trump’s conduct, having been tasked with carrying out his wishes. While Sondland’s initial October testimony largely absolved him from any wrongdoing, he submitted additional testimony in November acknowledge that he did deliver a quid pro quo message to Ukraine. Acknowledging that Sondland’s credibility is in question, Himes said it “was not lost on Ambassador Sondland what happened to” Trump associates Roger Stone and Michael Cohen “for lying to Congress.” “My guess is Gordon Sondland is going to do his level best to tell the truth because otherwise, he may have a very unpleasant legal future in front of him,” Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said.

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Nice find by Tyler, an article by Sylvain Laforest. Not saying I agree with it, but he tickles some pre-conceived “virtues”. Anyone who calls Trump the ultimate anti-narcissist knows he’s in for tons of derision. Laforest is okay with that.

“Donald simply doesn’t care if you like him or not, which makes him the ultimate anti-narcissist, by its psychological definition.”

• About Trump (Sylvain Laforest )

Let’s make one thing clear: to the establishment, Trump isn’t mentally challenged, but he’s definitely seen as a possible nemesis of their world. Ever since he moved in the White House, Trump has been depicted as a narcissist, a racist, a sexist and a climate-skeptic, loaded with shady past stories and mental issues. Even though an approximate 60% of the American people don’t trust medias anymore, many have bought the story that Trump might be slightly crazy or unfit to rule, and the statistic climbs even higher when you get out of the USA. Of course, Donald isn’t doing anything special to change the deeply negative perception that so many journalists and people alike have about him.

He’s openly outrageous and provocative on Twitter, he sounds impulsive and dumb most of the time, acts irrationally, lies on a daily basis, and throws out sanctions and threats as if they were candy canes out of an elf’s side bag in a mall in December. Right away, we can destroy one persistent media myth: the image Trump is projecting is self-destructive and it’s the exact opposite of how pathological narcissists act, since they thrive to be loved and admired by everyone. Donald simply doesn’t care if you like him or not, which makes him the ultimate anti-narcissist, by its psychological definition. And that’s not even up for opinion, it’s a quite simple and undeniable fact.

His general plan exhales from one of his favorite motto: «We will give power back to the people», because the United States and its imperialist web woven over the world have been in the hands of a few globalist bankers, military industrials and multinationals for more than a century. To achieve his plan, he has to end wars abroad, bring back the kids, dismantle the NATO and CIA, get control over the Federal Reserve, cut every link with foreign allies, abolish the Swift financial system, demolish the propaganda power of the medias, drain the swamp of the deep state that’s running the spying agencies and disable the shadow government that’s lurking in the Council on foreign relations and Trilateral Commission’s offices. In short, he has to destroy the New World Order and its globalist ideology. The task is huge and dangerous to say the least. Thankfully, he’s not alone.

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John Rubino is one of the first, and most loyal, fans of the Automatic Earth. Seeing this video makes me think I should really start talking more about finance again. If only because after all, that’s where we come from. But having watched how the Fed et al have distorted and erased what are still called markets, I started to look elsewhere -as well- for what was interesting.

• Fed Fears Next Crash Fatal – John Rubino (USAW)

Rubino explains, “Every sector of the U.S. economy is so over indebted I don’t see how we go on much longer. The Fed is desperately trying to prolong this thing. We are running trillion dollar deficits now, and what that is for is to keep the system from falling apart. We are 11 years into an expansion, a record. This is the longest bull market in history, and this is the longest economic expansion in history. . . . These guys don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the next recession, but they are afraid that the system is so highly leveraged that even a garden variety three quarters of a percent of negative growth and a garden variety of 20% drop in stock prices might be fatal. The system might not be able to handle that because it would cause so much damage and there are so many different places that can blow up that the system would spin out of control. We would get 2008-2009 again but on steroids because the numbers are so much bigger this time around. So, they want to avoid that at all costs.”


Rubino points out, “Fear is the enemy in a fiat currency system. Everything is based on our assumption that the guys in charge know what they are doing and that the confidence in them is good. You take that away, and they let us see them sweat, and it’s over. There is no real bottom for the dollar, euro or the yen. Their intrinsic value is zero. When the economic players out there in the global financial system realize that the central banks of the world are out of ammo, and nothing these guys do is going to fix our problem, then all hell breaks loose. . . . What worries me about today’s world is that everything falls apart all at once, and there is no way to fix what went wrong. . . .We have a lot of examples of governments doing crazy things when everything falls apart.”

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Harbin’s biggest problem: it trades on Hong Kong’s stock exchange. You know, HK dollars.

• China Quietly Bails Out Another Bank (ZH)

Harbin Bank, which is one of the biggest banks in China’s northeast with 622 billion yuan in assets as of June 30, 2019, and trades on Hong Kong’s stock exchange, becomes the fifth bank – after Baoshang Bank , Bank of Jinzhou, Heng Feng Bank, and Henan Yichuan Rural Commercial Bank – to be bailed out by the state, and will be 48%-controlled by two government entities after six private shareholders shed their stakes, according to a bank statement issued late on Friday. Total consideration for the shares involved came to almost 15 billion yuan, or around $2.1 billion, the bank said, though it described the transactions as transfers rather than stock sales, which is to be expected if the bank was being bailed out instead of actually selling a viable stake.

As has been the customary case, the bank didn’t provide any reason for the transactions in the statement, and Chinese bank regulators made no comment on the action. And, as was the case with at least one previous bank “rescue”, Harbin Bank was connected to a former oligarch who disappeared not that long ago amid allegations of massive fraud. Indeed, as the WSJ reports, the bank is among a handful of financial businesses in China linked to once-powerful tycoon named Xiao Jianhua who in early 2017 disappeared amid a wave of prosecutions of big private investors. Businesses owned by some of those people, including Wu Xiaohui’s Anbang Insurance Group Co., have also since become government-owned.

[..] So why did Harbin Bank fail? In its financial report for H1 2019, Harbin Bank cited deteriorating asset quality – read surging bad loans – as well as intensified competition for deposits and higher borrowing costs in money markets as China’s economy slows. Yet, paradoxically, the near-insolvent lender also said it recorded a profit of 2.18 billion yuan, or about $311.1 million, though that was off about 16% because of, drumroll, more-aggressive write-offs of bad debts. Which goes to show that corporate earnings reports in China are as “credible” as all other Chinese economic “data.”

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He said it straight-faced, I’m sure.

• Airbus Exec: Boeing’s 737 MAX Grounding Benefits No One (CNBC)

Airbus Chief Commercial Officer Christian Scherer forcefully rejected the notion that his company is benefiting from the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max fleet while speaking to CNBC during the Dubai Air Show. “I really need to correct that cultural belief. This does not benefit anyone in this industry, the least of which would be Airbus,” Scherer told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on Sunday. “It’s a tragedy, it is an issue for Boeing to resolve, but it is not good for competitors to see problems on any one particular airplane type.” The 737 Max [..] grounding has forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights, driven up costs and dented airlines’ profits. To make up for the expected loss in services, Boeing in the second quarter took a $4.9 billion after-tax charge to compensate airlines but final amounts are unknown because regulators haven’t yet lifted the grounding.


Boeing and Airbus, often described as holding a duopoly over the large commercial airline industry since the 1990s, each own approximately half of that market. Orders for each company’s airliners, however, are expected to be smaller this year as the industry faces headwinds including a slowing global economy, climate change and safety concerns. Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace group, cut its delivery expectations for 2019 as it grapples with manufacturing delays at its recently expanded plant in Hamburg, Germany. It now plans to deliver “around 860” planes this year, down from an original target of between 880 and 890. It recorded an adjusted operating income of 1.6 billion euros ($1.78 billion) for the third quarter of 2019.

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Andrew said in the Saturday interview that he didn’t party, didn’t show personal displays of affection, couldn’t sweat and only went out wearing a suit and tie. Well, now he’s got the Daily Mail on his trail. They have a lot of pictures of him doing exactly that.

• Pictures of Prince Andrew Partying and Sweating (DM)

Prince Andrew is facing an extraordinary backlash over his interview, which Prince Charles’ former PR chief Dickie Arbiter described as: ‘Not so much a car crash but an articulated lorry crash’. Mr Arbiter said he must ‘take a break’ from royal duties, adding: ‘What charity wants a VIP guest with this hanging over him?’ Viewers described watching Andrew’s grilling from behind the sofa and through their fingers as he denied having sex with Virginia Roberts because he was in Pizza Express in Woking and suggested that the world-famous picture of them together could be faked. Miss Roberts’ evidence that he sweated ‘profusely’ during sex were explained away by claiming a rush of adrenaline while being shot at during the Falklands conflict in 1982 made it impossible for him.

A royal source claimed last night he has told his mother the Queen that his appearance on the BBC Two Newsnight special was largely a ‘great success’ – but a friend told the Mail he ‘regretted’ not expressing sympathy for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in his disastrous TV interview. Today former royal protection officer said it went so badly for Prince Andrew it should spark a police investigation. In another infamous set of pictures taken on the French Riviera in July 2007, the Prince looks wild-eyed as he parties with American socialite Chris Von Aspen. The blonde interior designer can be seen licking Andrew as the pair cavorted together.

More clips from 2008 show him wandering around a party thrown by wine tycoon Claude Ott, heading to the dance floor with two women as techno music plays out. The Prince appears to look worse for wear as he enjoys the party, hair dishevelled and shirt untucked.

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Graeber is always an interesting read. But not one I can do justice in this format, if only because of the length of the essay.

• Against Economics (David Graeber)

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist. A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth.


These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors. We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

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