Dec 132022
 
 December 13, 2022  Posted by at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  73 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Female bust 1943

 

The Alarm Bells Go Off (Kunstler)
Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested In Bahamas After US Files Criminal Charges (CNBC)
SEC Chair Gensler Scrubbed Evidence Of Clinton, Soros And Pelosi Meetings (ZH)
Twitter Trust And Safety Team Found Trump Tweets Did Not Violate Policy (ZH)
The Banning of President Trump by Bari Weiss: Just a Few Rogue Actors (CTH)
Germany Should Do Business With Russia Again – Scholz (RT)
50% Of Ukraine’s Energy Facilities Destroyed – Zelensky (Az.)
Russia Has No Right To Security Guarantees – Poland (RT)
Increased Heart Failure Deaths Linked To Extreme Hot And Cold (CTV)
European Parliament Lawmaker Denies Taking Bribes From Qatar (R.)
Assets of Greek MEP Accused Of Graft Frozen (K.)
Von der Leyen Ducks Questions On Qatar Corruption Scandal (Pol.eu)
Wars – How They Start and End? (Salamah)
The End of Europe: The Sad Conclusion of a Long Historical Cycle (Ugo Bardi)
Biden Faces Growing Pressure To Drop Charges Against Julian Assange (G.)

 

 

 

 

Unicef

 

 

And then you get the coldest night of the year…

 

 

First ever recorded snowball fight (1897)

 

 

 

 

“Everything appears to be veering out-of-control, including thought itself.”

The Alarm Bells Go Off (Kunstler)

Here’s another awful reality (better fasten your seatbelts): What also emerged in the tweet record of Yoel Roth, the company’s chief censor (former “Head of Trust and Safety”), begins to look like a gay mafia assault on the collective American psyche. Having gained official federal government sanction and protection, a statistically tiny homosexual demographic left in charge of the country’s main public forum has been out for revenge against their perceived enemy, political conservatives — Americans disinclined to join the cheerleading for drag queen story hours, “minor-attracted persons,” transsexuals in the military, and other LBGTQ cultural pranks. In the process, that gay mafia running the public dialogue supported every lie that the government, its protector, put out, to keep the Deep State happy and well-fed. Shocking, I’m sure… but there it is.

That means the gay mafia also helped promote the most-deadly psy-op in world history: the Covid-19 scare and the mass “vaccination” crusade that will end up killing many millions world-wide, after destroying the economies of the Western Civ nations. The whole package looks like an attempt to turn the world upside down and inside out. Is it any wonder that so many feel the USA has gone crazy? Of course, these revelations aroused the widespread suspicion that these now-exposed nefarious operators in social media were merely tools for some murky plutocrat elite led by the likes of the WEF, Bill Gates, and George Soros. Could that be the greatest “conspiracy theory” of all? More likely, I hesitate to suggest, all these characters in one way or another are merely tools of history itself, as the world enters the darkest days of a Fourth Turning secular winter.

As T.S. Eliot observed: “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.” Thus, so many sense we live in dangerous times. Everything appears to be veering out-of-control, including thought itself. Disorder incites more disorder. While all this madness is going on in-country, the US government, led by the phantom president “Joe Biden,” continues to prosecute its insane proxy war in Ukraine in order to antagonize Russia. Lately the US has sent drones hundreds of miles inside Russia to blow up military airfields. How is that not an escalation of hostilities, and exactly how far do the American people want their government to take this crazy project?

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SBF could have been arrested, and charges filed, anytime over the past, what has it been, 6 weeks?! But they pick the day before his virtual hearing in Congress. Which now won’t happen.

Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested In Bahamas After US Files Criminal Charges (CNBC)

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities Monday evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse. His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multibillion-dollar implosion of FTX last month. Before his arrest was announced, Bankman-Fried had been expected to testify virtually before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, but his attorneys told CNBC that he will not appear.


Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who oversees that committee, said that she was “surprised” at his arrest, and disappointed that Congress would not be able to hear from him on Tuesday. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to “unseal the indictment in the morning.” The charges include wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering, according to the New York Times, citing a person familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission has initiated a separate set of charges against Bankman-Fried, relating to “violations of our securities laws, which will be filed publicly tomorrow in the Southern District of New York,” enforcement director Gurbir Grewal said in a statement.

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What was SBF going to talk about? His links to Gensler, Ukraine, Democrats?

“The charges include wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering – NYT”

Securities fraud. Wait, that’s Gensler…

SEC Chair Gensler Scrubbed Evidence Of Clinton, Soros And Pelosi Meetings (ZH)

Sunlight is the best disinfectant – unless you’re Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler – who scrubbed evidence of a meeting with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from his calendar, along with key details of a meeting with Billionaire leftist-operative George Soros. He also concealed September 21 meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former Bill Clinton White House official-turned-DC consultant, Minyon Moore. Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, Obama administration official, Clinton’s 2016 campaign CFO, and FTX associate, essentially had two calendars. His public calendar showed that on Aug. 7, 2021, he only had a staff meeting, while his private calendar lists a meeting with Hillary Clinton, Fox News reports.

Thirteen days later on Aug. 20, 2021, Gensler’s public calendar does list a meeting with Soros, but the agenda was hidden. His private calendar reveals that the meeting was held to discuss an upcoming WSJ op-ed Soros was planning to write in which he slammed BlackRock for launching investment products for Chinese customers, while also applauding the company’s ESG policies. “Gensler’s private calendar revealing the discrepancies was obtained by the watchdog group Energy Policy Advocates and shared with Fox News Digital. The group was only able to obtain the internal records after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the SEC. In recent days, around the time Fox News Digital contacted the SEC, the agency updated Gensler’s public calendar to include his meeting with Clinton in August 2021. As recently as Wednesday the public calendar didn’t include the meeting, and archived copies of the webpage from April also list just a meeting with staff. -Fox News ”

When contacted for comment, the SEC initially lied – saying that the Clinton meeting was visible on Gensler’s public calendar. When confronted with screenshots to the contrary, the spokesperson said that the agency updates calendars “from time to time” when inaccuracies are discovered (by watchdog groups?). Gensler also concealed several September 2021 meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Minyon Moore – both of which have been now updated on Gensler’s public calendar. “That even George Soros is calling out progressive darling BlackRock for craven blundering is striking — even if it did carry the requisite, tribal praise for BlackRock’s truly damaging ‘ESG’ (environmental, social and governance) campaigning to impose their shared ‘climate’ agenda on the U.S., an agenda also much to China’s delight,” said Chris Horner, a lawyer representing Energy Policy Advocates. “That it appears Soros received counsel from Gary Gensler on the mega-donor’s call for more SEC powers as a result is truly astonishing.”

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“We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”

Twitter Trust And Safety Team Found Trump Tweets Did Not Violate Policy (ZH)

The new drop reveals that Twitter employees did not believe former President Trump had violated Twitter’s policies. “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer in an internal message, adding: “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?)…” Another staffer agreed, writing: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.” “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.”

4. For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate. 5. “Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in 2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account.” 6. But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @shellenbergermd have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.

7. There were dissenters inside Twitter. “Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” 8. But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier. 9. After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee. 10. “We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” said one staffer. It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules,” said another.

11. In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.” 12. But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer. 13. “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.” 14. Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”

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sundance still doesn’t buy it. He wants to see what government officials are involved, not just the Twitter employees..

The Banning of President Trump by Bari Weiss: Just a Few Rogue Actors (CTH)

The fifth installment of the Twitter Files release drops today courtesy of Ms. Bari Weiss. The focus of Ms Weiss was on the decision to ban President Donald Trump from the platform, and her outline walks through the events leading up to the decision to remove him. After a review of internal discussions, slacks and conversations within the social media platform, ultimately the officers within the company decided to protect their view of democracy by removing their biggest ideological opponent. The Twitter executives justified their actions by echo-chambering a belief that President Trump was tweeting “coded messages,” the secret transmission of thoughts that can only be received by those wearing red hats, tuned to a specific psychological frequency.

As Weiss notes: “Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Vijaya Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it could, in fact, be “coded incitement to further violence.” President Trump tweeted the term “American Patriots,” which would be viewed by the Twitter ideologues as something akin to “the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.” It did not take long for the narrative to embed as the most senior Twitter regulatory officers assembled. “One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

The entirety of Twitter File #5 release surrounds this internal Twitter dynamic, carefully avoiding any discussion or sunlight from outside government actors who may have been in direct contact with the senior Twitter team. Indeed, the documents chosen to provide evidence of the debate and decision to remove President Trump are transparently devoid of any inbound government contact to the Twitter organization. Thus, at the end of Ms. Weiss carefully written expose’, she concludes with this:

See, it’s only “a handful of people at a private company“…. Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along. Apparently, DHS, FBI and CISA officials were involved in direct contact with Twitter through their DHS “trusted partnership” portal to get rid of innocuous rebel voices and influence agents like Dan Bongino, Q conspiracy theorists, and various COVID doctors who were providing information against the interests of the government. However, when it came to removing the most powerful voice of President Donald John Trump, there was nothing but static radio silence from the government side of the DHS portal. You getting this? Do you see how this is presented? “A handful of people at a private company,” that’s the story and they are sticking to it. Swear.

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Presumably only after NATO has defeated them.

Germany Should Do Business With Russia Again – Scholz (RT)

Once Russia ends the conflict in Ukraine, it should be given a chance to do business with Germany again, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday. He repeated that Moscow must and will not win, however. A Russian government that ends the hostilities “needs a chance to restart economic cooperation, in another time when this is possible,” Scholz said in Berlin, at the meeting of the Eastern Committee for German Business (OA), a trade association focused on relations with eastern Europe. “Now is not that time.” “At the moment, the relationships we have are being scaled back,” Scholz said, according to the weekly Zeit. The EU is “tightening the sanctions” now, but Russia will remain the largest country on the European continent after the conflict is resolved. “It is therefore very important that we make preparations for this time.”

Scholz described the current conflict as an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to re-create a Russian Empire that is destroying the country’s future instead, and accused Moscow of atrocities against the Ukrainian civilians. Russia must not win “and Russian will not win, either,” he told the business group. Berlin’s determination to ditch Russian energy imports – pushed mainly by Scholz’s Green coalition partners – created troubles for Germany even before the gas deliveries were disrupted by the sabotage on Nord Stream pipelines in September. Germans are now trying to make up the shortages from elsewhere, though unsuccessfully. Earlier this month, Germany’s ambassador in Washington admitted to the economic troubles, but said this was a small price to pay for a “profound transformation” of her country into a remilitarized continental power, more hostile to Russia and closer to the US.

For all of Scholz’s promises to help Ukraine, Kiev has continued to browbeat Berlin about deliveries of tanks and even more artillery. Last week, the chancellor’s predecessor Angela Merkel admitted that the 2014 Minsk agreement was not aimed at resolving the conflict in Donbass, but to “give Ukraine time” to arm against Russia. Putin said he was disappointed by Merkel’s admission and that the trust between Moscow and Berlin was now “almost at zero.”

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Trying to escalate.

50% Of Ukraine’s Energy Facilities Destroyed – Zelensky (Az.)

Missile strikes have destroyed 50% of Ukraine’s energy facilities, the country’s President Vladimir Zelensky said in a call with US President Joe Biden, according to a statement published on the Ukrainian leader’s website on Monday. The Ukrainian leader also highlighted US assistance in restoring Ukraine’s energy grid and hoped that the parties would deepen cooperation on this track. In addition, Zelensky urged Biden to help Kiev establish air defenses.

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Poland wants its part of Ukraine.

Russia Has No Right To Security Guarantees – Poland (RT)

Russia cannot expect security guarantees from other nations, a senior Polish diplomat has said. Calls to address Moscow’s concerns about NATO expansion in Europe have come from former and serving leaders of EU nations, including ex-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. People should not “let themselves be persuaded … that Russia has the right to expect security guarantees from anyone,” Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski told journalists ahead of a meeting of top diplomats of EU member states, which kicked off in Brussels on Monday. “It’s just a strategic mistake – that kind of consideration. It is not Russia that needs security guarantees today, but Europe needs security guarantees from Russia,” he said, adding that the Polish delegation will call for the harshest sanctions possible on Russia during the ministerial meeting.

Moscow has for years told the US and its allies that the expansion of NATO poses a threat to Russian national security, and warned that by ignoring its objections on issues such as Ukraine’s potential membership in the US-led bloc, Western nations were crossing a red line. A last-ditch attempt to defuse tensions came last year, when Moscow offered an agreement which it said would address this concern. The proposal was rejected, with Western leaders doubling down on NATO’s open-door policy. Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February, citing, among other reasons, the bloc’s creeping expansion to the east. While EU nations condemned the move as an act of supposedly unprovoked aggression, some politicians acknowledged that the lack of a European security architecture that would alleviate Russia’s concerns was a major destabilizing factor.

In her first interview after stepping down as chancellor, Merkel said that the failure to build such an arrangement was something “we should think about” when discussing Ukraine. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, said that “we have to go back to the agreements which we had in the past decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.” He also claimed that Russia broke these arrangements and that there was “no aggression coming from NATO.” Macron argued this month that the US-led bloc needs to prepare an offer of security guarantees for Moscow to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. He said the concerns that “NATO will deploy weapons that will threaten Russia” were understandable.

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Ha! It’s not the vaccines, it’s climate change.

Increased Heart Failure Deaths Linked To Extreme Hot And Cold (CTV)

New research has found extremely hot and cold temperatures increase the risk of death among people with cardiovascular diseases, particularly heart failure. An international study, published Monday in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, looked at more than 32 million cardiovascular deaths over four decades from more than two dozen countries. It found people with heart failure experienced the most additional deaths from extreme temperatures compared to those with other heart conditions. “The decline in cardiovascular death rates since the 1960s is a huge public health success story as cardiologists identified and addressed individual risk factors such as tobacco, physical inactivity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and others,” Dr. Barrak Alahmad, a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a faculty member at the College of Public Health at Kuwait University, said in a news release.


“The current challenge now is the environment and what climate change might hold for us.” The study used health data, pulled from 567 cities in 27 countries across five continents between 1979 and 2019, through the Multi-Country Multi-City Collaborative Research Network. Researchers compared cardiovascular deaths on the hottest and coldest 2.5 per cent of days for each city with cardiovascular deaths in those same cities on days that had optimal temperatures or when death rates were lowest. The study found that for every 1,000 cardiovascular deaths, extreme hot days accounted for 2.2 additional deaths, while extreme cold days accounted for 9.1 additional deaths.

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Europe has a nice scandal. Allegedly, €600,000 was found in this woman’s father’s home. Cash, in bags.

European Parliament Lawmaker Denies Taking Bribes From Qatar (R.)

European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili, a suspect in an investigation into money laundering and corruption at the parliament, has denied receiving money from Qatar, one of her lawyers said in Greece on Tuesday. Kaili, one of 14 vice presidents of the parliament, was among four people arrested and charged in Belgium at the weekend over allegations that Qatar lavished them with cash and gifts to influence decision-making. “Her position is that she is innocent, I can tell you that,” Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, a lawyer representing Kaili in Greece, told Open TV. “She has nothing to do with financing from Qatar, nothing – explicitly and unequivocally. That is her position,” Dimitrakopoulos said. He added that Kaili had “undertaken no commercial activity in her life.” Greece on Monday froze Kaili’s assets in the country. The European Parliament has suspended her from her duties.

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Yes, “one of 14 vice presidents of the parliament..” Wonder what they all get paid.

Assets of Greek MEP Accused Of Graft Frozen (K.)

Greece’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority has issued a general order to freeze, until further notice, all assets that MEP Eva Kaili, 44, and her husband or her immediate family members (parents, siblings) may have in Greece. Kaili, a vice president of the European Parliament, and her husband were among four people arrested on Sunday on charges of corruption, money laundering and participation in a criminal organization. Police carried out raids at 16 houses in and around Brussels and seized €600,000 on Friday as a part of the investigation into a corruption scandal involving Qatar and prominent European politicians, dubbed Qatargate.

The order by the head of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority, former Supreme Court deputy prosecutor Haralambos Vourliotis, has already been forwarded to all Greek credit institutions to identify accounts, control movements, existence of safe deposit boxes, possession of other financial products, while at the same time an order was given to all land registry offices to freeze all real estate of the above persons. The move of the Anti-Money Laundering Authority, in addition to the broader control, which will be carried out anyway, aims, as sources told Kathimerini, to identify any cash that may be in the possession of the persons under investigation, and to ascertain whether they are products of legitimate origin or bribes.

As this investigation began on Monday morning, a real estate company set up about a month ago by the MEP and her husband in Kolonaki was identified and audited, and its entire activity has been frozen. The authority has also ordered and conducted a check on the assets of Kaili’s father. In the event that incriminating evidence is also found in Greece, Kaili could, in theory at least, request to be tried in Greece, but sources said this is unlikely. Under Belgian law, the charges against the MEP and her husband are punishable by three to five years in prison, while under Greek law the sentences range from15 years and can exceed 20 years, even reaching life sentences in very exceptional cases. However, legal sources have stressed that it is still too early to make assessment as the investigations are still in full swing and no one can predict what will emerge and what will be revealed.

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More Greeks connected to Qatar.

Von der Leyen Ducks Questions On Qatar Corruption Scandal (Pol.eu)

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declined to answer questions about her Vice President Margaritis Schinas’ relations with Qatar at a press briefing Monday, triggering fury from the Brussels press corps seeking answers on the biggest corruption scandal to hit the EU in years. The Greek commissioner represented the EU at the opening ceremony of the World Cup last month, and has been criticized by MEPs over his tweets in recent months, lavishing praise on Qatar’s labor reforms. Asked about the Commission’s response to the Qatar corruption scandal engulfing the European Parliament, and in particular the stance of Schinas, von der Leyen was silent on the Greek commissioner.

The decision by deputy European Commission spokesperson Dana Spinant to shut down questions from journalists, sparked a furious reaction from reporters in the room, who called for more answers. “You didn’t answer a single one of the questions,” one reporter shouted as Spinant tried to close a session with reporters. “This is not the way to organize a press conference here,” Spinant responded through a chorus of protest. While von der Leyen did respond to further questions on the scandal, she did not address reporters’ questions about the circumstances surrounding Schinas’ visit to Qatar. Instead, she pointed to a proposal for a new ethics body to police all EU institutions — something she committed to more than three years ago, but which has gained little traction within any of the main institutions.

Referring to the European Commission’s transparency register, a database which lists representatives who carry out activities to influence EU policy and decision-making, she said: “We have one with very clear rules internally in the European Commission. There I think it is time to discuss whether we could not establish this over all for all EU institutions.”

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Borders change all the time.

Wars – How They Start and End? (Salamah)

Most countries have different religions, cultures, customs, values, local laws, practices, and political systems. Not only does changing other countries’ cultures not qualify as fair and just national interests, but also borders on the ridiculous when some countries unilaterally appoint themselves as heaven’s guardian on earth and incorporate such metaphysical concepts into their national interests. Does changing other people into one’s image make them more humane or Godlier? Or does it make them more pliable for exploitation? History confirms that such attempts have never been successful in perpetuating themselves, as evidenced by Alexander’s Hellenistic empire, Great Rome, Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde, the Crusades, the Islamic conquests, etc. – they were all eventually expunged or melded into the cultures that they tried to change, at a huge human and physical cost.

Undoubtedly, an exploiter’s rewards can be attractive in the short term, subject that the infringement or exploitation being successful. But in the longer term, pressure will continue to be exerted to return to the original status, or a semblance of it, and again, at a huge human and physical cost. Defending a country’s national territory is considered a paramount national interest (is also a security objective). Consequently, territorial or border disputes are the most popular reasons for starting wars, especially for smaller nations. But if we dig only skin-deep into the history, we will quickly find that almost no country has, throughout the ages, maintained its theoretical or historical borders – it has always been a continuous ebb and flow of territory usurped or lost, more so in Europe and the ex-colonialized world.

Nevertheless, many falsely justify this as a casus belli, or a rallying call, to regain what they regard as usurped national land. They do this with total disregard to the views and wishes of the current inhabitants of the territories in dispute, thus lending credence to the likelihood that it, in reality, is a camouflage to exploit another nation’s land. The sad part is that these wars regularly flare up despite the presence of the UN and the International Court, which were created, among other things, to adjudicate the validity of such territorial disputes and, unless a gross miscarriage of justice occurs, all grounds for territorial wars are unjustified.

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I know Ugo is Italian. But ignoring the entire Greek civilization is a step too far.

“..On the Southern coast of Europe, a lively network of commercial exchanges emerged, made possible by transportation over the Mediterranean Sea. Out of this network, the Roman Empire was born..”

The End of Europe: The Sad Conclusion of a Long Historical Cycle (Ugo Bardi)

The latest (and perhaps the last) attempt to unify Europe was the European Union. The creators of the Union understood that it was impossible to unify Europe by military means, so they tried to do it in the form of an economic free zone and an elected parliament. It was a bold attempt, but it didn’t work. It could not have worked. The Union faced enormous hostile forces, both internal and external. Britain and France were supposed to be balancing the German power, but when Britain left, in 2020, the Union suffered an economic defeat equivalent to the military one suffered by Germany in the Battle of Britain, in 1940. In both cases, they had tried to absorb Britain into continental Europe, and they had failed.

The defection of Britain left the European Union with Germany dominating it. Just like during WW2, the German government never understood that throwing its weight around was not the way to endear itself with the neighboring states. The result was the growth of anti-European forces all over the continent — the movement called “sovereignty” that aimed to restore the power of nation-states and get rid of the EU bureaucrats. So far, this movement has played only a marginal role in politics, but it has succeeded in making the EU deeply hated by everyone who is not getting their salaries from Brussels. Just as it had happened in 1941, Europe is now engaged in a desperate battle on two different fronts, but the struggle is now mainly economic and cultural, not military: it is a “full spectrum dominance” war.

The struggle is still ongoing, but it seems already clear that Europe is being defeated. Just like Germany had destroyed itself with a military attack on Russia in 1941, the European Union is destroying itself with its economic sanctions against Russia. Effectively, Europe is committing a slow and painful suicide. But that’s how full spectrum dominance works: it destroys enemies from the inside. And now? It was unavoidable that Europe would cease to be an Empire. The human and material resources that had made European dominance possible are not there any longer. But it was not unavoidable that Europe would destroy itself. Europe could have survived and maintained its independence by remaining on good terms with the other Eurasiatic powers, China, Russia, and India,

But, choosing to break the commercial, cultural, and human relations with the rest of Eurasia was not just an economic suicide. It was a cultural and moral suicide. So, what’s going to happen to poor Europe? History, as usual, rhymes: do not forget that in 1945 the official US plan was to destroy the German economy and exterminate most of the German population. Fortunately, the plan was shelved, but could that idea become fashionable again? We cannot exclude this possibility. In any case, an impoverished Europe could go back to something not unlike what it was during the early Middle Ages: depopulated, poor, primitive, a mere appendage of the great Eurasian Continent. And, yet, Europe has rebounded more than once from terrible disasters. It may happen again. Not soon, though.

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The Guardian on Assange again. Feels uncomfortable. Their smear pieces are still up.

Biden Faces Growing Pressure To Drop Charges Against Julian Assange (G.)

The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump. The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”. But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.

Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press. Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution. Five major media organizations that relied on his trove of government secrets, including the Guardian and the New York Times, put out an open letter earlier this month saying that his indictment “sets a dangerous precedent” and threatens to undermine the first amendment.

At the same time, officials in Australia, where Assange was born and remains a citizen, met with American counterparts to appeal for his release. “My position is clear and has been made clear to the US administration: that it is time that this matter be brought to a close,” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told the Australian parliament late last month. In Brazil, meanwhile, President-elect Luis Inácio Lula da Silva demanded an end to what he called the “unjust imprisonment” of Assange after a meeting with WikiLeaks editors lobbying for his freedom. Some of Assange’s defenders, who have attacked his prosecution as a trampling of the first amendment, say they are optimistic that the case may have reached a turning point that could ultimately lead to his freedom.

“This case is hugely significant,” the Columbia University law professor Jameel Jaffer, who runs the Knight First Amendment Institute at the university, said in an interview. “At the end of the day, I find it hard to believe that the Biden administration wants this case to be its press freedom legacy, and it will be its legacy if they continue to pursue it. That will overshadow everything else when it comes to press freedom.” Justice department officials aren’t tipping their hand about where Assange’s prosecution might eventually lead, as he continues to challenge his extradition to the US before a British appeals court. The justice department declined to comment on all the outside calls to drop the case, but one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Garland “has made clear that he will follow the law wherever it leads”, as he has in other politically charged cases.

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Hot water
https://twitter.com/i/status/1602254557329108993

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec 102022
 


Saul Leiter Harlem 1960

 

THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 1 (ZH)
Twitter Files Unveil More FBI Collusion (RT)
Twitter Files Highlight the Mechanics of Controlling Platform Information (CTH)
How “Trust” Executives Misled Congress and the Public (Turley)
The Tool of Tools (Kunstler)
Putin Doesn’t Bluff (Jim Rickards)
Putin: West is Using Ukrainians as ‘Cannon Fodder’ (Celente)
US To Unveil New Military Aid Package For Ukraine – Reuters (RT)
Western Europe Caught In A Strategic Trap, Unclear How It Can Escape (Lukyanov)
The New Russia and a Prophetic Ballad (Batiushka)
Oil Price Cap Will Backfire, Warns Putin (RT)
‘Minsk II Was Agreed On To Arm Ukraine’ – Did Merkel Really Say That? (MoA)
How Big Are the Fed’s Losses and Where Can We Go See Them? (WS)
Dutch Farmers Battle Technocratic Forces Driving Them Into Oblivion (GZ)

 

 

Scott Adams has a hard time updating his list of hoaxes; there are too many.

 

 

Dr. Michael Vlahos & Col. Douglas Macgregor: Is the war in Ukraine entering its decisive phase? Pt.1

 

 

Child exploitation

 

 

 

 

Bhattacharya
https://twitter.com/i/status/1601232328935686145

 

 

 

 

Third batch. Much more to follow. Hard to keep up.

THE TWITTER FILES: The Removal Of Donald Trump, Part 1

The third installment of Elon Musk’s release of internal Twitter communications has been released, once again via veteran journalist Matt Taibbi. In this episode, which is a 3-parter, we learn what happened behind the scenes which led to the banishment of former President Donald Trump from the platform. 2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th… 3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.

4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @ShellenbergerMD will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @bariweiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th. 5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech. 6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways. 8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots. 9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.

10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway. 11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners.

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“This “smaller, more powerful cadre” of senior executives made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches..”

Twitter Files Unveil More FBI Collusion (RT)

US federal agencies worked closely with Twitter moderators to clamp down on “disinformation” during the 2020 election, while executives went to great lengths to scrub certain content they deemed false and dangerous following increasingly frequent sit-downs with law enforcement and intelligence orgs, according to the third installment of the “Twitter Files.” Shared on Friday by journalist Matt Taibbi, the trove of files includes a set of messages from Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. The executive reveals he was running out of “generic” names on the company’s internal calendar to hide the increasingly regular meetings with federal officials ahead of the 2020 election. “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR,” he quipped in response to a colleague who suggested calling it a “Very Boring Business Meeting That Is Definitely Not About Trump.”

Another missive speaks of Roth’s “weekly sync” with officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), suggesting he consulted with three-letter agencies to discuss “election security.” The message also mentions a “monthly meeting” with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a unit created to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States” in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential win. The FBI even went as far as to flag individual tweets thought to be problematic, in one case urging Twitter to censor a former Republican official – apparently on the basis of a Politifact article alone. The DHS, ODNI and “some NGOs that aren’t academic” were also involved in the process.

A special channel was created on October 8, 2020 for senior executives like Roth, Trust and Policy chief Vijaya Gadde and top lawyer Jim Baker – who previously worked as general counsel for the FBI – to coordinate election-related decisions, given the name “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” This “smaller, more powerful cadre” of senior executives made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches,” while also “clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content,” Taibbi wrote, dubbing the group a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation.” In yet another exchange involving Policy Director Nick Pickles, a staffer asked if the site’s marketing team could say that posts are reviewed in conjunction with “outside experts” in promotional material. However, Pickles raised doubts, saying “not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts,” instead suggesting the term “partnerships” alone.

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Lawyer sundance has long said he doesn’t trust DeSantis, who he sees as representing larger forces behind the curtain. Since Bari Weiss supports DeSantis’ campaign, while also publishing the Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi, for Elon Musk, he doesn’t trust any of them either.

Twitter Files Highlight the Mechanics of Controlling Platform Information (CTH)

The latest release of information behind the controversial “Twitter Files”, comes from Bari Weiss complete with the strategic promotion of a new website [The Free Press] launching via the booster provided by their access to the internal Twitter documents. Curiously intelligent people will note the Weiss website is structured to support the 2024 presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is, not coincidentally, riding atop a multi-staged booster guided by Elon Musk and fueled by Wall Street billionaires. For the moment, just note and I digress – but please do not miss the connections. As noted by the former New York Times journalist, Ms. Weiss states, “the [website] authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.” [..]

Overall, the story as released walks through the process that Twitter used to control users and as a consequence control the flow of information on the platform. Accounts were subject to restrictions, manipulations and other inorganic engagement controls depending on the ideology of the content being provided. [..] To put it in brutally honest terms, The United States Dept of Homeland Security is the operating system running in the background of Twitter. You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn’t know all this before purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the scenario of owner/operator motive actually is. Decide for yourself. For me, I feel confident that all of the conflicting and odd datapoints only reconcile in one direction. DHS, via CISA, controls Twitter.

Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of that govt controlled enterprise. If you concur with my researched assessment, then what you see being released by Elon Musk in the Twitter Files is actually a filtered outcome as a result of this new ownership dynamic. And with that intelligence framework solidly in mind, I warn readers not to take a position on the motive of the new ownership. Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating public exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and feeding selected information about their prior Twitter operations.

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“..Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.” Dorsey also expressly denied under oath that there was “shadow banning” based on political ideology.”

How “Trust” Executives Misled Congress and the Public (Turley)

Calling executives the “Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust” (Vijaya Gadde) and the “Global Head of Trust & Safety” (Yoel Roth) doesn’t alter their status as some of the greatest censors in history. Yet the license for this massive system clearly came from Twitter’s very top. Shadow banning and “visibility filtering” are consistent with the policies of ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, who pledged the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the Internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.” So we now know that Twitter was not only banning dissenting voices on subjects ranging from COVID to climate change but was throttling or suppressing the traffic for disfavored writers.

Among those targeted was Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who wrote about how COVID lockdowns would harm children. He and others have been vindicated in flagging those worries, but Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist” to prevent his tweets from trending. It’s a telling list because it reflects an acknowledgment that such tweets would trend with users if the company didn’t suppress them. Some of us have been raising concerns over Twitter’s massive censorship system for years, including what I called the emergence of a “shadow state” where corporations carry out censorship the Constitution bars the government from doing. What’s striking is leading Democrats have been open about precisely this type of corporate manipulation of political speech on social media.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called upon these companies to use enlightened algorithms to protect users from their own bad reading choices. Even President Joe Biden called for such regulation of speech and discussions by wise editors. Without such censorship and manipulation, Biden asked, “How do people know the truth?” It is still early to determine possible legal implications of these files, but there are some areas likely to be of immediate concern for counsel. First, Elon Musk has suggested that some material may have been intentionally hidden or destroyed despite inquiries from Congress. Twitter was told to expect a congressional investigation into these areas. It’s not clear if this was material allegedly deleted as part of a regular process or a specific effort to destroy evidence of censorship or throttling.

Such obstruction cases, however, can be difficult to bring absent clear evidence. In 2005, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned accounting firm Arthur Andersen’s conviction for its destruction of documents under a standard record-management system. Second, destruction of documents could also prove relevant as part of an investigation into whether false statements were given under oath. Twitter executives denied such secret suppression efforts both in public and before Congress. Indeed, a recent federal filing revealed a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford wanted to censor “unapproved opinions” on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before Congress this week [it] is tricky.”

At that hearing, social-media companies were asked about my prior testimony on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment. In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.” Dorsey also expressly denied under oath that there was “shadow banning” based on political ideology.

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“Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter..”

The Tool of Tools (Kunstler)

At what point in his arduous take-over of Twitter did Elon Musk realize that the package came with a joker in the deck: James A. Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI? Did he wonder: what is this guy doing here? Were there any conversations between the two? Or did Mr. Musk just quietly observe his presence at a remove in nervous wonder, as one might, say, upon discovering a scorpion in the corner of his hotel room? Mr. Baker, you understand, was notoriously at the center of the FBI’s FISA court fuckery that got the ball rolling in the Crossfire Hurricane operation, Act One of RussiaGate, as well as the Alfa Bank caper concocted by Hillary Clinton (disclosed this year by special counsel John Durham), and probably every other sedition pie the FBI cooked in its oven in those years, considering Mr. Baker’s position as chief legal advisor to Director Chris Wray.

When the alt-news media caught onto Mr. Baker’s nefarious activities, he became inconvenient to the agency, was re-assigned to some nebulous task (polishing Mr. Wray’s cuff links?), and quit in May, 2018. He landed temporarily — or was he, rather, parked out-of-sight? — at the shadowy R Street Institute, an Intel Community cut-out, one of its countless PR channels in the DC Swamp. But then, mysteriously, Mr. Baker got hired by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in June of 2020 — the heat of a presidential election — to work under Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel (and chief of “legal, policy, and trust” [ha!]), where he remained until just the other day. Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter to help “moderate” the national conversation in the central forum that public debate had moved to in our time?

If so, he apparently did a crackerjack job, and just at the right time, too, after the FBI discovered, in emails they ripped off Rudolph Giuliani’s purloined cloud account, that Donald Trump’s attorney possessed of a copy of the laptop hard-drive of one Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden — said computer (the FBI knew full-well by then) being stuffed not just with pornographic photos of crack orgies and other personal infelicities, but also a trove of emails and deal memos laying out a bribery and money-laundering scheme that the younger Biden was running all over Eurasia as a family business.

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“..the upcoming counteroffensive would give Russia control of the entire coast from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea..”

Putin Doesn’t Bluff (Jim Rickards)

Much has been made of Ukraine’s retaking of Kherson, but Russia regarded it as a city of little strategic value. Rather than waste resources fighting for it, they withdrew. The Russians also let the Ukrainians have the open land, which will later become a killing field for Russian artillery. That’s the reality you’re not being told. In the words of retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor: “The Biden administration repeatedly commits the unpardonable sin in a democratic society of refusing to tell the American people the truth: Contrary to the Western media’s popular “Ukrainian victory” narrative, which blocks any information that contradicts it, Ukraine is not winning and will not win this war. Months of heavy Ukrainian casualties, resulting from an endless series of pointless attacks against Russian defenses in southern Ukraine, have dangerously weakened Ukrainian forces.”

In the meantime, Russia is preparing to launch a massive counteroffensive. It’s completed its 300,000-man mobilization, with over 180,000 of those troops now deployed behind Russian lines in combat formations. The remaining 120,000 troops will arrive soon. This brings total Russian strength up to about 30 divisions. Once again, Col. Macgregor: “The coming offensive phase of the conflict will provide a glimpse of the new Russian force that is emerging and its future capabilities…The numbers continue to grow, but the numbers already include 1,000 rocket artillery systems, thousands of tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, plus 5,000 armored fighting vehicles, including at least 1,500 tanks, hundreds of manned fixed-wing attack aircraft, helicopters and bombers. This new force has little in common with the Russian army that intervened nine months ago on Feb. 24, 2022.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian strength has been greatly diminished due to high casualty rates and being stretched thin. Then What? If successful, the upcoming counteroffensive would give Russia control of the entire coast from the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. It would also give Russia control of the Dnipro River, which separates the western part of Ukraine from the eastern part and connects Kyiv to the Black Sea. Ukraine would be left as a rump state between Kyiv and Lviv. Almost all the industrial, technological and natural resource capacity of former Ukraine would be under Russian control.

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“If we are talking about a disarming strike, perhaps we should think about using the approaches of our American partners.”

Putin: West is Using Ukrainians as ‘Cannon Fodder’ (Celente)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, once again, accused the West of using Ukrainian troops as cannon fodder as some of the war’s most intense fighting rages in Bakhmut, an eastern city in Donetsk. Putin said the West is fighting for global domination but acknowledged that Russia will have to make a deal vis-a-vis Ukraine at some point. He said he is concerned that countries like Germany and France, which would likely help broker any deals, may not be trust worthy. “The question of trust arises. And trust of course is almost at zero… But nevertheless, in the final analysis we have to come to agreements. I have already said many times that we are ready for these agreements,” Putin said in a video message, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the fighting playing out in the city has been compared to how forces used to square off in WWI.

The Financial Times described one of the scenes:“Then came the Russian infantry, charging in a first world war-style attack across a no man’s land of shredded trees and artillery craters. The Ukrainians popped up and mowed down many of them with machine guns and grenade launchers. Moments later, the scenes were repeated — although this time the Russian fighters had to navigate their comrades’ bodies. Again many were cut down by Ukrainian bullets. “It’s like a conveyor belt,” Kostyantyn, an exhausted Ukrainian machine-gunner who described the scene to the Financial Times, said of the Russian tactics. “For what? A fucking metre of our land.” The city is considered to be located at a valuable location and has been fortified by Ukrainian troops.

Both Russia and Ukraine have been tight lipped about their casualties in the city, but The Wall Street Journal said hospitals have been inundated with Ukrainian casualties. Ukrainian troops and civilians have taken to social media to post images from the city that show gutted buildings and charred homes. Sky News noted that Bakhumt has been called a meat grinder because of the “huge and growing number of casualties.”Putin also said in the video that Russia may look into updating its nuclear policy and take a new look at the possibility of a preventive nuclear first strike to disarm an opponent to its military doctrine, Bloomberg reported. “We’re thinking about this,” he said. “If we are talking about a disarming strike, perhaps we should think about using the approaches of our American partners.”

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One after another. Never stop.

US To Unveil New Military Aid Package For Ukraine – Reuters (RT)

Washington is about to send another security assistance package to Kiev, which will include anti-drone and air defense systems, Reuters reported, citing sources. The $275 million measure is expected to be officially announced on Friday. According to officials and documents cited by the news agency, the security aid will also include rockets for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), 155mm ammunition, Humvee vehicles, and generators. At the same time, there are no details on the air defense equipment, the report says. In addition to this, the contents and the size of the aid package may change before it is approved by US President Joe Biden.

The new measure is expected to be covered by the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows Washington to dispatch military equipment quickly and without congressional approval. Supporting Ukraine with air defense systems has become an “absolute priority” for Western countries since Russia began targeting the country’s energy infrastructure, according to the US Department of Defense. The recurring bombardments picked up steam after Moscow accused Kiev of conducting “terrorist attacks” on Russian structures, including the strategic Crimea Bridge. In early November, the Pentagon announced a $400 million security package for Ukraine, which included ammunition for the HAWK air defense system as well as four Avenger air defense systems and additional Stinger missiles.

The same month, Ukraine received two first National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), with Washington promising to send another six. Since the start of the conflict, the US has committed more than $19 billion in security assistance to Kiev. Moscow has repeatedly warned Western countries that providing heavy weapons to Ukraine risks both crossing Russia’s “red lines,” and could lead to their direct involvement in the conflict. Washington and its allies insist they are not a party to the hostilities, but continue sending arms shipments to Kiev. The Russian Defense Ministry said the strikes on Ukraine’s power infrastructure were intended to degrade Kiev’s ability to transport troops, and Western-supplied weapons and equipment to the battlefield by rail.

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“Beijing will be Washington’s strategic rival for decades to come. However, it’s not a threat to Western Europe, and it’s not a challenge. Indeed, cooperation with it is advantageous.”

Western Europe Caught In A Strategic Trap, Unclear How It Can Escape (Lukyanov)

[..] the Democratic administration’s rhetoric was reminiscent of the Clinton era, which was arguably the golden era of US-European symbiosis. Back then, Washington regarded the continent as an important priority and made considerable efforts to beautify it in a pan-Atlantic spirit, which was then in line with the overwhelming European sense of what was beautiful. The current US president, Joe Biden, is an old-school politician, from a time when Europe was the center of American interests. But the old school involves a sober analysis of costs and benefits. And the ability to optimize the former by maximizing the latter.

After the Second World War, and especially the Cold War, Western Europeans abandoned strategic thinking and instead followed policies which ensured a comfortable existence. The US, on the other hand, has retained the ability, if not to think, then, at least, to feel strategically. Hence an understanding (or rather an instinct) of the changing geopolitical realities. Of course, gut feelings don’t guarantee the correctness of policy, but they do imply an alignment with current needs and circumstances. Ironically, Western Europe, historically famed for its rationalism, is now much less correlated with the consequences of its actions.

Whether Washington had a cunning plan to shift the brunt of the confrontation with Russia onto its European allies, we may someday find out. However, the behavior of the United States can perhaps be explained not by scheming, but rather by clever opportunism. The fallout from the Ukrainian crisis is spreading all over the place, with the US making decisions to manage the consequences or even to exploit them for the future. This causes consternation amongst the Western Europeans: the Americans can do it, but they themselves can not. Thus, when the Biden administration passes the Inflation Reduction Act, putting American citizens in a much better position than Europeans, it is perfectly in the interests of the US. So?

Western Europe is caught in a trap and it’s unclear how it can escape. Absolute solidarity with the US on the Russian question implies subordination to a stronger partner. That said, the EU and UK are ready for this, but it means (for objective reasons): 1) that they must bear most of the costs, and 2) they should follow a common strategic position on the other issues of principle for their patron. And the main one here is China. Beijing will be Washington’s strategic rival for decades to come. However, it’s not a threat to Western Europe, and it’s not a challenge. Indeed, cooperation with it is advantageous. But why should the big brother allow his little sidekick to help someone who is at odds with him?

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“..Western companies made a killing inside Russia, tens of millions of people were robbed of their savings and pensions and millions died of poverty, despair, alcoholism and in nationalist wars in the Caucasus..”

The New Russia and a Prophetic Ballad (Batiushka)

Tragically, instead of keeping the best of the old USSR, full employment, housing for all, free education, free health care, free culture and support for the exploited Third World, once the nouveau-riche nomenklatura had taken long-coveted power, they simply put in place a poor-quality imitation of the corrupt West, keeping only all that was worst in the old USSR, alcoholism, abortion and divorce on demand, corruption etc. It was the worst of both worlds. National assets were stolen (‘privatised’) by what were politely called ‘oligarchs’, tens of millions of abandoned Russians found they had become disliked minorities in new countries, Western companies made a killing inside Russia, tens of millions of people were robbed of their savings and pensions and millions died of poverty, despair, alcoholism and in nationalist wars in the Caucasus, which were directly provoked and supported by the West. It was one of the greatest thefts of resources and identity in the history of the world.

It is only since 2000 that Russian patriots have been able to develop something better to put in place of these monstrosities and despite them. This has been a generational project and could not be rushed. Only thirty years later, in 2022, was the project ready. The New Russia, purged of the parasites and traitors, is needed, but there are still institutions, like the Church, where the corrupt and infiltrators are present and so compromise them. These traitors are just like the aristocrats, generals, politicians and professionals who coveted power in 1917 and so brought the system down. Just like today’s aristocrats/oligarchs and bourgeois elite of traitors, they implemented the Western-planned February 1917 palace revolt and, once they had caused chaos, civil war and destruction, they irresponsibly ran away to the West.

Having rejected the corrupt and failed post-Soviet Russia and the bankrupted Soviet Russia (1917-1991), the patriots who wanted to form the New Russia had two past models to consider: the brief Imperial Russia (1721-1917) and the long pre-Imperial Russia (988-1721), whose ideal was ‘Holy Rus’. Interestingly the last Tsar, Nicholas II, seeing the appalling decadence of the upper class in Saint Petersburg, had looked back with nostalgia precisely to that pre-Imperial Russia and especially to one of its last rulers, Tsar Alexis (1645-1676). He named his only son after him, reconciling those who used the Old Ritual with the Church, worked towards the restoration of the Patriarchate, building churches in the national style of the previous age and reforming church singing and iconography according to that age’s standards

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“..specific steps to retaliate against the measure will be outlined in the coming days through a presidential order..”

Oil Price Cap Will Backfire, Warns Putin (RT)

The price ceiling imposed by the West on Russian oil exports will impact the nations adopting the measure rather than Russia itself, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. He noted that the cap is equal to prices at which the country is currently selling its crude. “We won’t sustain losses under any circumstances,” Putin said during a press conference following a summit of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. The price limit on Russian seaborne oil, set at $60 per barrel, was introduced by the EU, the G7 countries and Australia on December 5. It bans Western companies from providing insurance and other services to shipments of Russian oil, unless the cargo is purchased at or below the indicated price.


Russia is not planning to sell oil to nations supporting the price cap, Putin said, adding that specific steps to retaliate against the measure will be outlined in the coming days through a presidential order. According to Putin, Russia will consider oil production cuts if necessary, although no decisions on the issue have been made so far. “We have an agreement with OPEC + on a known production target, we will think of something additional if necessary,” he said. According to the Russian leader, introducing a price ceiling will inevitably reduce investments into the oil sector, and send global crude prices skyrocketing.

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“It was a serious defeat for her but there was nothing she could do about it. She therefore now comes up, ex post, with a Chamberlain excuse…”

‘Minsk II Was Agreed On To Arm Ukraine’ – Did Merkel Really Say That? (MoA)

Helmholtz Smith, Andrew Korybko and Andrei Martyanov have some thoughts about a recent interview the former German chancellor Angela Merkel gave to the German weekly broadsheet Die Zeit. Smith says it shows that the ‘West’ is not trustworthy. Korybko thinks it the interview will prolong the conflict in Ukraine. Martyanov says that Merkel is stupid. She isn’t. In the interview Merkel seems to claim that the Minsk agreements between the Ukrainian government and the Donbas region, which she negotiated and co-signed as guarantor, was never meant to be fulfilled. It was only meant to give time to build up the Ukrainian military. I however think that such an interpretation is wrong. Merkel is under very harsh critique not only in the U.S. but also in her own conservative party.

She is now out to justify her previous decisions as well as the current bad outcome in Ukraine. My hunch is that she is making things up. Unfortunately she also creates serious damage. The relevant passage of the interview is longer than the one paragraph Helmholtz Smith and other cite. The context is important. Here is my translation of it: “ZEIT: Do you ask yourself if the years of relative calm were also years of omissions and if you were not only a crisis manager, but also partly the cause of crises? Merkel: I would not be a political person if I did not deal with that. […some stuff about climate action …] Let us look at my policy towards Russia and Ukraine. I come to the conclusion that I made the decisions I made back then in a way that I can understand today. It was an attempt to prevent just such a war. The fact that this was not successful does not mean that the attempts were wrong.”

I think the above is genuine. The Minsk agreements were a serious attempt to prevent war by reintegrating Donbas into a federalized Ukraine. However, the Ukrainian president Poroshenko did not have the will and the political backing to fulfill the agreement. There was no chance that, under him, a federalization law would pass the Ukrainian parliament. Moreover the U.S., the only party who could have really pressured him, told him not to follow up on the agreement. But then came Zelensky who was elected by a large majority on the promise to fulfill Minsk II. He even made attempts to do that. But he soon found out that his own life was in serious danger if he continued to try. There was also U.S. pressure as it did not want Minsk fulfilled.

Merkel however can not say that out loud. By late 2019 she must have recognized that Minsk II was blocked forever. It was a serious defeat for her but there was nothing she could do about it. She therefore now comes up, ex post, with a Chamberlain excuse. The 1938 Munich agreement Chamberlain signed prevented Germany from immediately going to war and gave the UK and others time to arm up. The Minsk agreement, Merkel claims now, bought time for Ukraine to get its military into better conditions.

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“This shift from “weekly change” to “cumulative balance” is kind of a funny way of doing something?”

How Big Are the Fed’s Losses and Where Can We Go See Them? (WS)

The chart tracks the line item, “Earnings remittances due to the U.S. Treasury,” on the Fed’s weekly balance sheet (second “Table 6,” Liabilities). This is normally a line that tracks the weekly increase in the amount that the Fed estimates it owes the US Treasury as the year goes on. “Normally” means in times when the Fed is making money. Each week adds up. For example, in 2021, all the 52 weekly amounts, each in the range between $500 million and $4 billion, added up to $106 billion that the Fed would owe the Treasury Department. Close enough for an estimate of the $107.4 billion in remittance for the year. But when the Fed started losing money on a weekly basis in September, the account did a switcheroo. Instead of showing the “weekly change” as during normal times, it shows the “cumulative loss since September 2022.”

In other words, when the Fed started losing money on a weekly basis in September 2022, the account shifted from showing a weekly change of a positive balance, to showing the total cumulative negative balance. It now no longer shows the weekly change but its total loss since September 2022. This shift from “weekly change” to “cumulative balance” is kind of a funny way of doing something? But it sort of makes sense, and here’s why: In theory, if the amount that the Fed owes the US Treasury is negative, it would mean that the US Treasury owes this amount to the Fed and would have to pay the Fed. But that’s not their deal. Their deal is that the remittance is a one-way channel, from the Fed to the Treasury.

And when it turns negative, the Fed will just sit on the negative balance that will grow over the years as long as the Fed is losing money. And when the Fed is making money again, the Fed will not remit its net income to the Treasury Department, but will apply it to this pile of accumulated losses until the pile is gone. When the pile is gone, the Fed starts remitting its profits to the Treasury again. [..] The Fed calls this growing pile of accumulated losses a “deferred asset.” Storing losses on the balance sheet as an asset, rather than showing the loss on the income statement right away, is an old corporate accounting trick, encouraged by GAAP, and includes such infamous accounts as “Goodwill” and “Intangible Assets.” The Fed is sort of just sticking to devious corporate accounting 101 here.

[..] The Fed, which creates & destroys money, cannot run out of money. I mean, we knew this all along. The Fed is not Enron, though the loss-accounting might look similar. The Fed creates its own money. And the Fed’s losses – no matter how large – will not cause the Fed to run out of money because it can always create more. So we can take that off our worry list. For the Fed, a loss is just an accounting entry, not an existential crisis. The Fed won’t print money to pay for its losses — it won’t need to. But it’ll use some of the money from the QT roll-offs that would have been destroyed and pay interest with it. And so that money for interest payments goes out the door, and the balance sheet will shrink on track with QT.

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“..global bodies like the World Bank’s “Climate Smart Agriculture” program, the UN’s “protected area initiatives,” the European Commission and armies of well-funded NGO’s are executing a wholly-comprehensive platform targeting Dutch farmers..”

Dutch Farmers Battle Technocratic Forces Driving Them Into Oblivion (GZ)

Holland exports the most food on earth, behind only America, on a landmass roughly the size of Indiana. Farmers the world over come to study Dutch techniques. The country embraces what’s known as the Mansholt theory—a philosophy of ensuring food security and self-sufficiency that emerged from the second world war as a response to Nazi-imposed famine. To stave-off a similar tragedy, Dutch agriculture embraces the Haber-Bosch process, a method of infusing fertilizer with nitrogen to increase yield efficiency. Invented in the early 1900s by a pair of Nobel Prize-winning chemists, Haber-Bosch is responsible for the existence of half the world’s population today (and is known in Malthusian circles as “the detonator of the population explosion”), thanks to its ability to grow more food on less land.

But now global bodies like the World Bank’s “Climate Smart Agriculture” program, the UN’s “protected area initiatives,” the European Commission and armies of well-funded NGO’s are executing a wholly-comprehensive platform targeting Dutch farmers — restricting both organic and artificial fertilizer use — while asserting “biodiversity protection” as the pretext for snatching land from the productive. Dutch farmers, in protest, have driven tractors to the Hague, tossed flaming trash onto the roads and sprayed manure across government buildings. It’s worth reemphasizing that the Dutch government is carrying out the same radical experiment conducted in Sri Lanka earlier this year — eliminating nitrogen-based fertilizer, the basis of modern survival. In the southeast Asian country, it led to a famine that toppled the government.

The Sri Lankan “disaster” fronted a simple premise: replace something with nothing. And to eliminate Russian gas from the geopolitical scene. The Colombo declaration, signed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2019, celebrated the end of food security and sovereignty, offering in its place a model for import-dependency and agricultural destruction now being imposed on the Dutch. “They are sweeping the culture from the land,” says Sieta Van Keimpema, a sturdy 6-foot Dutchwoman in her 50s with short, wavy black hair. She is head of the European Milk Board, and leader of the Dutch farmers’ de-facto political arm, Farmer’s Defense Force (FDF). “Our government has made laws and laws that put us in a corner that you cannot come back from,” she says. “If people cannot put food on the table you get riots. You get an unstable society. I don’t see the benefits to this.”

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If Harry Potter had been written by Dostoevsky:

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 092022
 


Salvador Dali Back the girl 1926

 

Second Wave Of Twitter Docs Reveal ‘Blacklists’ And ‘Shadow Bans’ (JTN)
Saxo Bank Predictions Warn Of A Wild 2023 (Spears)
Merkel’s ‘Confession’ May Be Ground For Tribunal – Moscow (RT)
US Trying To Make Ukraine Conflict Last For Years – Russia (RT)
Kremlin Explains When Ukraine Conflict May End (RT)
Bandera’s ‘Insurgency-in-Waiting’ (Robeson)
ADL: Ukraine’s Azov Battalion No Longer ‘Far-right’ (GZ)
EU Lacks ‘Critical Defense Capabilities’ – Borrell (RT)
The Russian Oil Price Cap Isn’t As Simple As It Seems (OP)
“People Are Losing Faith In This Institution”: ECB Staff (ZH)
FBI Sees ‘Threat’ In Apple Encryption Move (RT)
The Coming Purge of the China-Hands (Pattberg)
The Fixed-pPice Shopping Basket: Greece’s Answer To Cost Of Living Crisis (G.)
Daniel Ellsberg: Indict Me Too (Lauria)
Disinformation Down 92% As NYT Writers Go On Strike (BBee)

 

 

In 2018, Twitter was doing fine with the same amount of people they now employ. What was the rest doing? Just censoring?

 

 

Shadow ban

 

 

Zelensky

 

 

@CelineDion reveals she has ultimately been diagnosed with Stiff Person Syndrome. This is a known vaxx side effect that Pfizer kept quiet until the court forced them release the side effects in the first Pfizer dump.

 

 

Tucker board

 

 

 

 

Christine Anderson
https://twitter.com/i/status/1599487419530629120

 

 

 

 

Interesting discussions on Twitter about Twitter. Much more to come. It’ll be hard on Elon too. For instance, he tweeted that Twitter doesn’t employ the Perkins Coie law firm. And then someone sends a Dec. 8 paper that says it does. How now?

Second Wave Of Twitter Docs Reveal ‘Blacklists’ And ‘Shadow Bans’ (JTN)

Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss on Thursday released internal documents on Twitter’s censorship efforts and detailed the creation of blacklists and use of shadow ban technique to throttle “disfavored” tweets. Last week, Musk released information on the company’s censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story via alternative journalist Matt Taibbi. Thursday’s dump came through a team of reporters Weiss led and to whom Musk granted broad access to the company’s files to investigate on condition they first publish their findings on Twitter. “[T]eams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” Weiss posted in the first of a series of tweets.

Weiss subsequently outlined how conservative personalities or individuals with “disfavored” positions would end up on internal blacklists to stunt the spread of their messaging. Talk-show host Dan Bongino was featured on a “search blacklist” while Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s account was set to “Do Not Amplify,” Weiss detailed. COVID-19 lockdown critic Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University wound up on a “trends blacklist” that prevented his tweets from featuring on the website’s trending section. Weiss then recalled prior comments from Twitter executives denying that the company used shadow bans to stifle traffic on accounts without their knowledge.

“We do not shadow ban. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology,” said then Head of Legal Policy and Trust Vijaya Gadde and Head of Product Kayvon Beykpour in 2018. Weiss then outlined testimony from Twitter engineers detailing an identical process the company termed “Visibility Filtering” in which the platform would quietly limit the reach of specific posts. VF decisions would go through the Strategic Response Team — Global Escalation Team Weiss explained, which she said often handled up to 200 cases per day. She further asserted that a secret dubbed “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” included top-level officials who made the biggest decisions. Weiss asserted that former CEO Jack Dorsey participated in the group’s deliberations.

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‘If I was a strategic thinker in the non-western world I would be thinking about what to do with my US dollar reserves..’

Saxo Bank Predictions Warn Of A Wild 2023 (Spears)

From Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to a British prime minister being ousted after six weeks, it has been a year of shocking events. More volatility lies ahead if Saxo Bank — whose previous annual list of ‘outrageous predictions’ did not see those two coming — is accurate with its prophecies for 2023, which include the reversal of Brexit and the end of dollar dominance. Some of Saxo Bank’s predictions are more outrageous than others, admits Steen Jakobsen, chief investment officer, who has been overseeing the annual project for more than 20 years. He says the most likely prediction of Saxo’s 10 for 2023 could see the US dollar’s dominance assailed by concerted action among non-Western countries.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to the ‘US weaponising the US dollar,’ as part of the sanctions response, says Jakobsen. ‘If I was a strategic thinker in the non-western world I would be thinking about what to do with my US dollar reserves going forward.’ Oil-producing nations could agree with large consumers such as China and India to do deals in a new reserve asset, leaving the dollar behind. Saxo’s possible scenario sees non-US allied countries create an international clearing union (ICU) and a new reserve asset. Based on an idea by economist John Maynard Keynes after the Second World War, the idea would make the purchasing price for oil more stable in currency terms. ‘Why would Saudi Arabia and China do deals in dollars?’ adds Jakobsen. He believes it would be a natural move ‘at a time when the US has stepped back from being a world policeman.’

Saxo’s predictions suggest a splintering world in which national economies ‘shift into War Economy mode, where sovereign economic gains and self-reliance trump globalisation.’ But closer regional links are also foreseen, most notably in the UK, which votes to ‘un-Brexit’ and rejoin the EU in the wake of economic turmoil and political demonstrations. Jakobsen does not think Rishi Sunak’s more measured approach as prime minister will be any more effective than predecessor Liz Truss’s attempts to create a laissez-faire economy. ‘Neither is going to do anything for the debt or inflation (problems) in the UK,’ he says. ‘Maybe this leads to dissatisfaction, demonstrations and ultimately an election which will see Labour come in. Maybe the Liberal Democrats show up as a Europe-friendly party, (popular) with young people in particular.’

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Merkel made clear that the “collective west” spent years trying to create a war with Russia. It’s that simple.

A tribunal would have no effect. Because all tribunals these days listen to only one side. A “Russian war crimes tribunal” will exclude Ukraine war crimes. Useless. Or worse.

Merkel’s ‘Confession’ May Be Ground For Tribunal – Moscow (RT)

A confession by former German chancellor Angela Merkel regarding the true nature of the Minsk agreements – a roadmap for peace in Ukraine that was brokered by Berlin – could be used as evidence in a tribunal involving Western politicians responsible for provoking the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. The former German leader admitted in an interview with Die Zeit on Wednesday that the actual purpose of the Minsk agreements was to give Ukraine time to prepare for a military confrontation with Russia. “They talk a lot about legal assessments of what is happening around Ukraine, certain tribunals and so on in all sorts of ways,” Zakharova said during a media briefing on Thursday. “But this is a specific reason for a tribunal.”

She claimed that Merkel’s comments were nothing short of the testimony of a person who had openly admitted that everything done between 2014 and 2015 was meant to “distract the international community from real issues, play for time, pump up the Kiev regime with weapons, and escalate the issue into a large-scale conflict,” Zakharova added. She said Merkel’s statements “horrifyingly” reveal that the West uses “forgery as a method of action,” and resorts to “machinations, manipulation and all kinds of distortions of truth, law and rights imaginable.” The spokeswoman claimed that the West had known well in 2015, when it spent hours negotiating the second part of the Minsk accords, that it would never even attempt to fulfill any part of the agreements and would instead pump weapons into Kiev.

“They did not feel sorry for anyone: women, children, the civilian population of Donbass or the whole of Ukraine. They needed a conflict and they were ready for it back then, in 2015,” Zakharova said. Earlier this month, a number of Western officials called for the creation of a special UN-backed court to investigate alleged war crimes committed by Russia during its ongoing military campaign in Ukraine. The Kremlin has said the West has no legal or moral right to set up any courts to investigate or prosecute Russia over the conflict, which Moscow claims was ultimately provoked by the US and its allies.

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“She also said that Zelensky should watch his back, considering last week’s visit to Ukraine by Victoria Nuland..”

US Trying To Make Ukraine Conflict Last For Years – Russia (RT)

US arms procurement documents show that Washington intends to fuel the conflict in Ukraine for at least three more years, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky should take notice of it when assessing the future of his country, she added. “Washington plans to fuel hostilities in Ukraine at least till the end of 2025. That’s what their plans are, judging by documents, which they don’t hide from anybody,” the Russian diplomat told journalists during a briefing on Thursday. Zakharova was referring to a contract for Raytheon’s National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS), which the Pentagon announced last week.

The US Army will buy $1.2 billion worth of hardware for Ukraine, according to the announcement, with an estimated completion date in late November 2025. The US, which pledged to provide military assistance to Kiev for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia, previously supplied this type of anti-aircraft system to Ukrainian troops. Advisors to President Vladimir Zelensky should tell him about the procurement timeline, Zakharova suggested, so that he didn’t promise his people that the conflict would end next year, as he did this week. “Washington has different plans. There is a lot of money to be embezzled” through Ukraine aid programs, she alleged. Zakharova claimed that Western assistance was “a corruption marathon” going from the White House to Kiev and back again and profiting grifters on a global scale.

She also said that Zelensky should watch his back, considering last week’s visit to Ukraine by Victoria Nuland, a veteran US diplomat, whom Zakharova called “a harbinger of tragic shocks, caused by the Washington-orchestrated bloody putsch” of 2014. “A new palace coup may be in the making or some other reshuffle. I believe the Zelensky regime, which has repeatedly tested Washington’s patience, has some things to consider,” she remarked, adding that the US didn’t care who was in power in Kiev. Nuland, who served as US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in 2014, was recorded discussing with then-US Ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, the composition of the post-coup Ukrainian government. The private conversation was leaked online by unidentified parties. Her preferred candidate for prime minister subsequently got the job.

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“Zelensky knows when all this can end, it can end tomorrow if desired..”

Kremlin Explains When Ukraine Conflict May End (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky knows that if desired the fighting between Moscow and Kiev could end at any moment, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said during a press call on Thursday. “You can talk about when all of this will end until you are blue in the face,” Peskov said in response to the Ukrainian president’s recent prediction that the conflict could be over next year. “Zelensky knows when all this can end, it can end tomorrow if desired,” the spokesperson added. In a recent interview with Politico – which named him ‘the most powerful person in Europe’ – Zelensky stated that Ukrainians “will be the most influential next year, but already in peacetime.”


Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine could turn out to be a “lengthy process” because achieving all of Russia’s objectives could take quite some time. Earlier, the Russian leader also said that it was wrong to talk about the timing of the special operation or try to adjust it. He noted that it was impossible to set an exact date for when the conflict could end because the fighting is still intense. “We are working calmly, the troops are moving, reaching the lines that are set as tasks. Everything is going according to plan,” Putin said back in June.

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“[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back..”

Bandera’s ‘Insurgency-in-Waiting’ (Robeson)

In early February 2022, a couple weeks before Putin’s invasion, Ragozin observed, “While downplaying the risk of a Russian offensive and even reprimanding the West for sowing panic, the Ukrainian leadership appears preoccupied with a different threat – that of a coup.” In the same article (“What is Zelenskiy afraid of?”), he described the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” as “a radical street force dedicated to toppling Zelensky” and “a paramilitary force associated with the nationalist opposition that coalesced around former president Petro Poroshenko.” Nationalists officially launched the “Capitulation Resistance Movement” (Rukh Oporu Kapitulyatsiyi, ROK) in October 2019 to sabotage Zelensky’s peace mandate after the political newcomer crushed Poroshenko and his political party in elections held earlier that year.

“No Capitulation” became the slogan of a broader, far-right-led campaign against Zelensky and his government, with protests typically spearheaded by the neo-Nazi Azov movement and the ROK. “Zelensky ran as a peace candidate,” and the hardliners vigorously opposed him, the late Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen explained to journalist Aaron Maté that month. “He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.” But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists “have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine.” Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. “[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back,” he said.

“Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high.” That was three years ago. After Russia invaded, the ROK became the FURM, or the Free Ukraine Resistance Movement, which has mostly flown under the radar. After interviewing a representative of the FURM in early March, a neoconservative US journalist referred to the “Resistance Movement” as an “insurgency-in-waiting, one of many, no doubt, that plans to resort to guerrilla warfare in the event that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempted conquest of Ukraine turns into a prolonged occupation of major population centers.”

After keeping tabs on this “quasi-fascist” movement for a few years (although it mostly went dark after Russia invaded), I feel comfortable speculating that the ROK was partially responsible for making Zelensky feel that negotiating peace with Russia would be too dangerous for him. I also suspect that once Putin declared war, Zelensky as an actor felt his only choice was to become an action hero, not just to rally international support for his country, but to become so popular in Ukraine and the West to rule out a coup d’etat.

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“The New York Times has even referred to the unit as the “celebrated Azov Battalion.”

ADL: Ukraine’s Azov Battalion No Longer ‘Far-right’ (GZ)

A November 9 email from the Anti-Defamation League to The Grayzone provided a twisted defense of Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. Despite its self-proclaimed “anti-hate” mission, the ADL insisted in the email it “does not” consider Azov as the “far right group it once was.” The Azov Battalion is a neo-Nazi unit formally integrated into the US government-backed Ukrainian military. Founded by Andriy Biletsky, who has infamously vowed to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led untermenschen,” Azov was once widely condemned by Western corporate media and the human rights industry for its association with Nazism. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In the months that immediately followed, Azov led the Ukrainian military’s defense of Mariupol, the group’s longtime stronghold. As the militia assumed a frontline role in the war against Russia, Western media led a campaign to rebrand Azov as misunderstood freedom fighters while accusing its critics of echoing Kremlin talking points. The New York Times has even referred to the unit as the “celebrated Azov Battalion.” Like the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets, the ADL ignored Azov’s atrocities this April in Mariupol, where locals accused the group of using civilians as human shields and executing those who attempted to flee. One video out of Mariupol showed Azov fighters proudly declaring the Nazi collaborator and mass murderer of Jews, Stepan Bandera, to be their “father.”

The Azov Battalion has long served as a magnet for the international white nationalist movement, attracting recruits from the terrorist Atomwaffen Division to a US Army Specialist arrested on charges of distributing bomb-making instructions. Back in March 2022, just a month before the battle of Mariupol, the ADL itself issued a report acknowledging that white nationalists see Azov “as a pathway to the creation of a National Socialist state in Ukraine.” Eight months later, however, the ADL has changed its tune, asserting to this outlet that Azov has rooted the fascists from its ranks. So did Azov change its Nazi ways, or did the ADL simply shift its messaging to conform to the imperatives of a Biden administration still intent on sending billions in military aid to Ukraine?

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Does Borrell work for Raytheon? His spending demands will make Europe a lot poorer…

EU Lacks ‘Critical Defense Capabilities’ – Borrell (RT)

Europe must begin to take more responsibility for its own security, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has said, announcing that total expenditure by member states will grow by €70 billion over the next three years. Speaking at the ‘Investing in European Defence’ forum on Thursday, Borrell, who also heads the European Defence Agency (EDA), called on European nations to cooperate more on upping defense capacities in the common interest of bloc security. They should also look past the current conflict in Ukraine and anticipate “future threats.” Borrell said states’ spending on defense had surpassed the €200 billion-level in 2021 for the first time, though they’re still playing catch-up. “After the Cold War, we shrunk our forces to small-size armies without coordination … We lack critical defense capabilities,” he said.

“We have to compensate for years of underspending.” “Total defense expenditure that Member States have announced will grow by another €70 billion in the next three years,” Borrell said, adding that “people don’t fight with banknotes.” Borrell said Brussels faced a challenge to spend the money “in a coordinated manner” and that national decisions should not be focused solely on present needs, an apparent reference to the turmoil in Ukraine. If the focus remains only on current requirements, Europe will once again be faced with “a fragmented European capability landscape,” he warned. The top diplomat said a balance must be found between responding to current needs and preparing for future threats. Those threats are “close by and likely to get worse,” he said.

The EU has committed around $2.5 billion in weapons to Ukraine since Russia’s offensive began in February. Borrell’s pledge comes as European nations are running out of weapons to give Ukraine as they see their own stocks dwindling. The constant transfers of weapons to Ukraine has left most NATO nations’ stockpiles strained, according to a New York Times report last month, which said the bloc’s smaller nations had “exhausted their potential” and at least 20 of NATO’s 30 members were “pretty tapped out.” Politico reported last week that France unofficially admitted it has run out of weapons to send Kiev due to the state of its own supplies, while Germany also faces a €20-billion shortfall in ammunition.

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“..wondering how a fixed price would work in a market that trades oil on a forward floating basis against international benchmarks..”

The Russian Oil Price Cap Isn’t As Simple As It Seems (OP)

The $ 60-per-barrel price cap on Russian crude oil, which came into effect on Monday, looks pretty straightforward. Buyers paying $60 or less per barrel of Russia’s crude will have full access to all EU and G7 insurance and financing services associated with transporting Russian crude to non-EU countries. However, the physical oil market doesn’t usually see trades with fixed prices of crude – oil is being sold at a price premium or discount against the forward prices of the major international benchmarks such as Brent or the Oman/Dubai average. So, the price cap is much more complicated than a straightforward $60 per barrel ceiling. As a result, traders of physical oil cargoes are confused by the price cap on Russian crude, wondering how a fixed price would work in a market that trades oil on a forward floating basis against international benchmarks.

Physical oil traders, those who are willing to trade crude in compliance with the price cap, are also concerned that they could end up inadvertently violating the cap if, for example, the price of Russia’s flagship grade, Urals, with a discount to Brent, is higher than $60 per barrel weeks after the oil trade has been made. In such cases, traders would be stuck with above-$60 Russian crude that violates the price cap and would significantly limit access to EU/G7 tankers and maritime transportation services such as insurance and financing, oil traders tell Bloomberg. This could complicate the physical handling of Russian crude oil cargoes and hedging, they say. “Physical traders rarely trade on a fixed price,” John Driscoll, chief strategist at JTD Energy Services Pte Ltd, told Bloomberg.

“It’s a much more complex space where they trade on formulas and spot differentials to a benchmark crude for the trading of actual cargoes as well as for hedging that follows,” said Driscoll, who has more than 30 years of trading oil in Singapore. The price cap is not set in stone – it “is fixed for now but adjustable over time,” the EU said last week. A price revision would “take into account a variety of factors, which can include the effectiveness of the measure, its implementation, international adherence and alignment, the potential impact on coalition members and partners, and market developments,” the EU says. Even within the price cap, banks are generally wary of providing financing, industry officials told Global Trade Review this week.

Banks are concerned by the high compliance risk and fear they will have to increase scrutiny and due diligence to avoid being caught in a trade or deceptive shipping practices. Adding further confusion for physical oil traders is Russia’s position on the matter. Moscow says it will not trade its oil with countries that have joined the price cap. The EU says that “With the price cap, there are clear incentives for Russia, oil importing countries and market participants to maintain the flow of Russian oil. This will achieve both objectives at the same time.” But Russia says the price cap artificially limits prices—a mechanism Moscow will not accept.

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In times of plenty, incompetence tends to remain hidden. But today, almost everyone working in European institutions turns out to be incompetent. They’ve been selected not for their skills, but for loyalty to some ideology or another.

“People Are Losing Faith In This Institution”: ECB Staff (ZH)

This one is just too funny to pass by: having watched as their incompetent and clueless “leaders” sparked the biggest surge in European inflation since Weimar, crushing the purchasing power of ordinary people across the continent, it is only when their own purchases were suddenly threatened that the ECB’s rank and file decided to make some noises. According to the FT, workers at the world’s biggest hedge fund (or at least it was until the Euro hit parity), known as the European Central Bank, will discuss protest action and even potential strikes after rejecting a pay offer well below the rate of eurozone inflation, a union official has warned. The ECB’s proposal to increase pay by “only” 4.07% in January is – hilariously enough – consistent with the bank’s own opposition to deals that link wages to inflation that it believes risk fuelling a damaging wage-price spiral.

There is just one problem: its own employees think Christine Lagarde – herself a multimillionaire who barely avoided jail time despite being a convicted felon – is full of it and demand much higher pay… which if extended to all European workers will result without doubt in a wage-price spiral, as higher wages will mean higher prices, which mean even higher wages, and so on. The ECB’s latest pay offer, up from a 1.48% rise at the start of this year, is less than half what annual eurozone inflation is expected to be this year and will leave its staff with a significant pay cut in real terms (don’t tell them, but most Europeans won’t even get a 4.07% nominal wage increase: are they supposed to strike too). “People are losing faith in this institution,” said Carlos Bowles, vice-president of the Ipso union that represents ECB staff. “What the ECB leadership is telling us is ‘sorry we missed our own inflation target and now you, the staff, are going to pay the price’. “We really see an issue in the way the ECB stance is damaging the bargaining power of workers,” said Bowles.

“This is playing a role in increasing inequality.” Of course, that’s what we have been saying since 2009. But it was only when their own livelihood was on the line, did workers for Europe’s money printer figure it out too. A recent survey by the union found “the vast majority of colleagues are angry” about the ECB’s pay offer, he said. “The pay consultation is due to finish at the end of the year and we will decide in January if we protest.” The union reportedly met with the ECB’s ultra wealthy president Christine Lagarde – who doesn’t care what food costs, after all with the help of Bernard Tapie she embezzled enough to last her a lifetime – a few weeks ago and she made it clear there was no room for negotiation, he said. A strike, as happened at the ECB over pension reforms in 2009, was “not excluded” but it would only “come after an escalation curve”.

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“In this age of cybersecurity and demands for ‘security by design,’ the FBI and law enforcement partners need ‘lawful access by design.’”

FBI Sees ‘Threat’ In Apple Encryption Move (RT)

The FBI has issued a warning about upcoming security updates for Apple products, insisting the company’s plans to strengthen end-to-end encryption will interfere with efforts to track down criminals and terrorists. The agency sounded alarms soon after Apple announced several “advanced security features” set to be introduced in the coming months – including new protections for files stored in the cloud – telling the Washington Post it is “deeply concerned with the threat end-to-end and user-only-access encryption pose.” “This hinders our ability to protect the American people from criminal acts ranging from cyber-attacks and violence against children to drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorism,” an unnamed FBI spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.

“In this age of cybersecurity and demands for ‘security by design,’ the FBI and law enforcement partners need ‘lawful access by design.’” US and allied law enforcement officials have long demanded tech firms to provide open access to all devices, with the FBI frequently citing the aftermath of a 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernadino, California, when agents were unable to get into an Apple phone used by the shooter. Though the bureau pressed the company to help it break in, Apple refused, leading to a lengthy legal battle centered on encryption. Between 2015 and 2016 alone, Apple received at least 11 separate court orders to help police access various devices thought to be involved in criminal activity, but objected to all of them. A New York City court would later conclude that Apple could not be compelled to unlock its phones on the basis of the 1789 All Writs Act, which the FBI had repeatedly cited in prior cases.

Alongside agencies in the UK and Australia, the US Department of Justice has placed similar pressure on other tech giants in the past. In 2019, the three countries issued an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg which argued that “companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content.” Officials suggested encryption could interfere with investigations into “the most serious crimes,” effectively asking for the ability to crack any device at any time. Privacy advocates, including famed national security whistleblower Edward Snowden, have pushed back on the drive to undermine strong encryption, saying it is impossible to create a backdoor exclusively for law enforcement, and that any such security loophole will also be open to everyone, including bad actors.

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How our impression of China is shaped. Read!

The Coming Purge of the China-Hands (Pattberg)

There comes a time during or shortly after the academic training of every “Student of China” when he frequently runs into one of the many agents of Western anti-China state security. They are adverse hostile forces, they run a complete background-check on you, and then they‘ll make you a simple offer: You either produce anti-Chinese content for the West, or they‘ll mark you as anti-democratic and enemy of freedom, a traitor. In that case, you’ll never find work in the West again. And if you make a big fuss about it and cry coercion or blackmail, they are gonna start decomposing you. Like most young students back then, I, too, was completely ignorant about the inner workings of Western world hegemony. And, like the idiot I always was, I threw myself heedlessly into “China Studies” at a respective University in the United Kingdom, Edinburgh to be exact.

Immediately, the conceited profs and lecturers, they taught us the horrors of Han chauvinism, the horrors of Qing China and the horrors of the Maoists and the horrors against the poor people of Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. When I looked it up, those were all former British colonies and/or places of interest to the British Crown. We were told LIES by the very British people whose soldiers raped, looted and colonized China, and were now angry that China somehow stood its ground and survived. I do not expect you to believe at first what I am about to tell you. I would not have believed it myself, back then I mean, before I joined some of the many “Studies” invented by the Western Empire of LIES. “China Studies” is not about China. It could be, but it is not. It is warfare against China. To keep China down. To sabotage her. To control her people and her history. In this war, it is the West or you perish.

Joining the enemy, China, is a capital crime. Have you ever wondered why there are no pro-China talking heads in the books, in the papers or on telly? It is because pro-China people in “China Studies” were the enemy. They didn’t make it through graduation, they weren’t hired, etc.. Our common sense is often betrayed by what sociologists call ‘the survivor bias’: We believe that since all we hear or read about China is negative, this must be sure proof that China is a very nasty place. What we fail to see, however, is that all the negative stuff we heard and read about China was the product of just 1 “China Studies” graduate for every 1,000,000 people or so of the general Western population. Nobody who was pro-China survived the selection process or came anywhere near central power.

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“For many it was not in the increased number of homeless on the streets, or beggars huddled around tourist sites, or eye-wateringly high energy bills – although all of those existed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ”

The Fixed-pPice Shopping Basket: Greece’s Answer To Cost Of Living Crisis (G.)

Even before the cost of living crisis was formally pronounced, it had arrived in Greece. For many it was not in the increased number of homeless on the streets, or beggars huddled around tourist sites, or eye-wateringly high energy bills – although all of those existed before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It was there for everyone to see on the supermarket shelves,” says Panagiota Kalapotharakou, who heads the consumer rights association Ekpizo. “Eighteen months ago there were so many products with price labels that a great number of Greeks could not afford. Costs were going up long before the war in Ukraine.” It came as little surprise for consumer groups, then, that when talk turned to the need for relief measures to counter rising inflation the government chose to focus on staple goods.

What emerged was the novel concept of the “household basket”: supermarkets agreed with the government to sell about 51 staples – from flour to fish – at fixed prices. The measure, thrashed out around a long mahogany table in the ministry of commerce, went into effect in early November. Officials in the centre-right government intend the scheme, scheduled to run to the end of the winter, as a bulwark for the most vulnerable against the inflationary storm. No government subsidies are involved. “We spent weeks sitting around this table working on it with supermarket market representatives and our competition committee,” says Sotiris Anagnostopoulos, the ministry’s fresh-faced general secretary. “In politics you have to anticipate what is coming next. The cost of living crisis is a huge challenge, maybe the biggest we have faced since the adoption of the euro.”

Nationwide chains have signed up to the programme, selling products under blue household basket labels. With the country’s annual consumer inflation rate currently at 10% – down from a high of 12% in September – the government insists the initiative has succeeded in stabilising prices at a time of uncertainty and, in some cases, driving them lower. “What was never expected was the price war that we have seen among the big supermarket chains,” says Anagnostopoulos. “It’s been a surprise and a pleasant one because in general Greeks have much lower purchasing power.” Forced to survive on some of the lowest wages in the EU – at less than €1,200 a month, the average monthly salary is about a quarter of that in Germany – Greeks have felt the impact of soaring prices perhaps more than other EU nations.

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“Anyone who has downloaded a classified document from WikiLeaks, Cryptome or any other source, or posted it online is liable to prosecution under the Act..”

Daniel Ellsberg: Indict Me Too (Lauria)

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has told the U.S. Justice Department and President Joe Biden that he is as indictable as WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange for having unauthorized possession of classified materials before they were published by WikiLeaks and that he would plead “not guilty” because the Espionage Act is unconstitutional. Ellsberg revealed this week to the BBC interview program Hard Talk that Assange had given him the files leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to keep as a backup before they were published by WikiLeaks in 2010. Assange has been charged with violating the Espionage Act for possession and dissemination of classified information and faces 175 years in a U.S. prison if he is extradited from Belmarsh Prison in London.

Ellsberg is the second figure this month to come forward calling on the U.S. government to indict them for the same reasons Assange has been charged. “Cryptome published the decrypted unredacted State Department Cables on September 1, 2011 prior to publication of the cables by WikiLeaks,” John Young wrote in a Justice Department submission form, which Young posted on Twitter last week. “No US official has contacted me about publishing the unredacted cables since cryptome published them,” he wrote. “I respectfully request that the Department of Justice add me as a co-defendant in the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act.” The 1917 Espionage Act does not exempt journalists from receiving and publishing classified information, which Ellsberg says is a clear violation of the First Amendment and should be challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Anyone who has downloaded a classified document from WikiLeaks, Cryptome or any other source, or posted it online is liable to prosecution under the Act, which would include millions of people around the world. Receiving and publishing classified information is routine work for journalists at major publications. Five newspapers partnered with WikiLeaks to publish Manning’s material in 2010 but only Assange has been charged. Those five newspapers last week called on the Biden administration to drop the charges on Assange because of the threat to the First Amendment. The Obama administration declined to indict Assange in 2011 because it understood that it would also have to indict New York Times editors and reporters for having published the same materiel Assange did. That is the only material Assange was indicted for.

He was not charged for releases exposing Central Intelligence Agency hacking activities in 2016, though that so infuriated then C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo that Pompeo later asked for plans to be drawn up to either kidnap or kill Assange while he was living under asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy. The Trump administration then had Assange arrested and charged under the Espionage Act in 2019. Despite being part of the Obama administration, Biden has refused to drop the case. When those plans were first revealed at Assange’s extradition hearing in 2020, Ellsberg said that the government was treating Assange worse than he had been treated and that it should have set Assange free.

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“..all other news outlets around the country reported feeling “lost” as they were so used to just copying and pasting from the New York Times each morning.”

Disinformation Down 92% As NYT Writers Go On Strike (BBee)

Researchers are reporting that disinformation on Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream news sources is already down by 92% in the wake of a 24-hour writer’s strike at the New York Times. “We always wondered where all this harmful disinformation was coming from,” said Darryl Ball, a researcher with the Center for Combatting Bad Things Online. “Turns out, it was all coming from those knuckleheads at the Times. Who knew?” Several studies indicate the country has seen a sharp decrease in hate speech, foreign propaganda, and shockingly dumb hot takes since the entire writing staff walked out of the building in New York City, which experts believe could lead to an outbreak of peace and harmony across the nation.


“All this time, the threat to democracy was us all along!” said NYT Union Boss Fuggs Crullers to reporters from other news organizations not on strike. “We have begun negotiations with leadership to pay us more money to never come back to work in hopes of saving America.” At publishing time, all other news outlets around the country reported feeling “lost” as they were so used to just copying and pasting from the New York Times each morning.

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Paul Marik

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tucker dreamers

 

 

 

 

Referee
https://twitter.com/i/status/1600902123486470145

 

 

Polar bear cub

 

 

 

 

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