Mar 072025
 


James McNeill Whistler Symphony in White, No. 3 1867

 

Are All of Biden’s Presidential Actions ‘Null and Void’? (Margolis)
Europe’s ‘ReArm’ Plan “Is Going To Come At A Vast Cost” (Rabobank)
European Leaders Want ‘Forever War’ In Ukraine – Musk (RT)
Lavrov Compares Macron to Hitler and Napoleon (RT)
Macron’s Remarks on Use of Nuclear Arms a Threat to Russia – Lavrov (Sp.)
Kremlin Reacts To Macron’s ‘War’ Speech (RT)
EU Must Win Arms Race – Poland (RT)
Macron Should Apologize – Moscow (RT)
Trump Begins CIA Cuts – NYT (RT)
US Ready To Change Legal Status Of 240,000 Ukrainian Migrants (RT)
Lavrov Weighs In On US Decision To Halt Intel Sharing With Ukraine (RT)
‘Science Should Be An Engine For Freedom’: NIH Nominee Bhattacharya (JTN)
Obama Judge Indefinitely Blocks Trump Admin Funding Freeze (ZH)
DOGE Looking To Cut More Than 80,000 Employees At Veterans Affairs (JTN)
IRS Reportedly Plans To Cut Half of Its 90,000 Workforce (JTN)
Elon Musk Says Amtrak, US Postal Service Should Be Privatized (ET)
Trump Planning Major NATO Shakeup – NBC (RT)
Trump Wants To Sideline EU – Politico (RT)
EU Seeking To Bypass Opponents of Ukraine Aid – Kallas (RT)
Israeli FM ‘Didn’t Know’ Kiev Glorifies Holocaust Perpetrators (RT)

 

 

 

 

1987

 

 

Destiny

PAC
https://twitter.com/i/status/1897633263750877606

Tulsi

Sachs Maidan

Rubio

Kash
https://twitter.com/i/status/1896935794532556981

 

 

 

 

Autopen. Could be explosive. Will the Trump admin want to pursue it? It has Pandora written all over it.

Are All of Biden’s Presidential Actions ‘Null and Void’? (Margolis)

The Biden presidency might have been the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the American people. A shocking investigation by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has revealed that virtually every document bearing Joe Biden’s signature during his presidency was signed by an autopen — except for one. What makes this revelation particularly damning is that the only document confirmed to have Biden’s actual signature was his letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. Let that sink in for a moment. Remember when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) revealed his discussion with Biden when Biden couldn’t recall signing the executive order halting LNG exports? Now we know why — he probably didn’t. The real question is: Who did? Who was running the country while Biden was not all there?

The use of the presidential autopen dates back to the 1950s, and there’s been much debate about its legality. In 2013, Barack Obama became the first president to sign a bill into law using an autopen. He was vacationing in Hawaii at the time. His office relied on a 30-page memo from President George W. Bush’s legal team asserting that the president’s presence was not required as long as said president had authorized the signature. What’s not clear, in the case of Biden, is who was running the autopen and whether Biden was aware it was happening. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is demanding that the Department of Justice investigate whether Biden’s obvious cognitive decline allowed unelected bureaucrats to essentially run the government without presidential oversight. If this is true — and let’s be honest, all signs point to yes — every executive order, every pardon, and every official action taken under Biden’s name could be constitutionally void.

Bailey’s letter to Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, spells it out perfectly. “I write to request that you conduct a full investigation into President Biden’s mental capacity in his final days in office. By now, Biden’s mental decline is famous. Under the 25th Amendment, his inability to make decisions should have meant a succession of power. Instead, it appears staffers and officers in the Biden administration may have exploited Biden’s incapacity so they could issue orders without an accountable President of sound mind approving them. That would explain why the Biden administration’s orders were aggressively much farther to the left than any previous President. If in fact Biden’s staffers were exploiting his mental decline, those orders are null and void.”

The evidence is overwhelming. We know that Biden’s handlers desperately tried to prevent anyone from meeting with him one-on-one. Even Democratic insiders admit the truth. DNC fundraiser Lindy Li recently spilled the beans and acknowledged that Biden wasn’t running the show; his staff, his wife, and Hunter were. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s investigation, we now have proof that Biden’s signature was automated throughout his presidency — which raises serious questions about whether he was aware of what was being signed in his name at all. The Oversight Project rightfully points out that since Biden revoked Trump’s executive privilege, we can easily determine who controlled the autopen and what safeguards, if any, were in place.

The implications are staggering. We essentially had a presidency by proxy, with unelected staffers wielding presidential power while the man himself was barely cognizant enough to read a teleprompter. This isn’t just a scandal; it’s potentially the biggest constitutional crisis in American history. The American people deserve to know who was really calling the shots during the Biden administration. If these allegations prove true, every single action taken under Biden’s name needs to be scrutinized and potentially nullified. The truth must come out, and those responsible must be held accountable.

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The end of Europe’s welfare state.

“They created a wasteland and called it democracy.”

Europe’s ‘ReArm’ Plan “Is Going To Come At A Vast Cost” (Rabobank)

The US has increased its pressure on Ukraine to pause the war by turning off military intelligence to it, removing Kyiv’s ability to fire missiles into Russia. This action has further outraged and –given their reliance on US systems in NATO– terrified Europe. Note President Eisenhower did the same vis-à-vis then-and-current ally South Korea in 1953, which didn’t want to stop fighting; the US didn’t want a direct war with China, or more inflation, and made it clear military aid would stop until an armistice was achieved. That frozen conflict seems where Ukraine-Russia is heading, especially as President Zelenskyy just said what rejected what the Russian terms for any formal peace deal (demilitarisation, formal renouncement of lost territories) would be.

Europe has added its own pressure on Zelenskyy as Germany’s ministry of defence admits it can’t supply more materiel to Ukraine either as it’s out of stock. That underlines the need for the German announcement on infrastructure investment and rearmament yesterday, which saw 10-year Bund yields rise 31bp on the day, their worst performance since 1997. EUR jumped. Ahead of today’s EU ReArm summit President Macron addressed his nation, stating: “Our prosperity and security have become more uncertain, and it must be said, we are entering a new era… if a country can invade its neighbour in Europe with impunity, then no one can be sure of anything anymore, and it is the law of the strongest that applies, and peace can no longer be guaranteed on our continent itself.” He added that the future of Europe will not be set by the Kremlin or Washington, DC, and spoke of extending the French nuclear umbrella to Europe.

This is going to come at a vast cost. If you think a 31bp rise in Bunds captures the scale of shocks involved in a soft-power Europe trying to set its own future in a hard-power world then you spend too much time in soft-power circles. For starters, the FT op-eds today that ‘Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state’: like it or not, that is starting to sound a bit MEGA (Europe, not America) and DOGE. One wonders what the ECB will say about it today.

Europe is outraged by US actions vs Ukraine and what some call the White House’s “reverse Nixon” strategy (so, ‘Noxin’?) of trying to split Russia from China, as with China vs the USSR in the 1970s: there is talk of Trump–Putin kinship or kompromat even in the financial press. However, facing a united China and Russia, when until this week Europe refused to rearm, is something all geostrategists, some belatedly, see as a deeply flawed US strategy. Moreover, the eurocentric fail to spot that Trump is not only pivoting from Europe to focus on Asia –which the EU largely thinks of in terms of trade not security– but is trying to use the quid pro quo gained there for Putin’s help with nuclear negotiations with Iran.

After all, Tehran is close to a nuclear weapon and Israel, who just rehearsed a joint strike on it with the US, to having to remove what it sees as an existential threat the hard way. Were that to occur, it would have a vast negative impact on the US and European economies. That key issue isn’t even part of current EU conversations; but as Europe rearms and tries to find its own place in the world, it will find it has to join more such dots in more locations at an ever-higher price. It also goes without saying that the odds of ‘Noxin’ and an Iran deal success are very low; but the alternative scenarios are not ones markets want to think about. Again, they do not imply just a 31bp move higher in 10-year Bunds. Especially not when the Chinese embassy in the US tweets: “If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end.”

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Leaders that will all be voted out soon. So why do it?

European Leaders Want ‘Forever War’ In Ukraine – Musk (RT)

European leaders who are pushing against a peace agreement in Ukraine want a perpetual state of war, tech billionaire Elon Musk said in a statement on X on Thursday. His remarks come in response to a recent video of Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen arguing that peace in Ukraine could be more dangerous than the ongoing conflict with Russia. Musk, who is also currently a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict and has spoken out against continued military aid to Kiev, arguing that it could lead to an escalation and risk a nuclear confrontation. Responding to a post featuring Frederiksen’s latest remarks, he argued that some European leaders “want the forever war” and asked how many more people will have to lose their lives.

“How many more parents with no sons? How many more children with no fathers? By their logic, it never ends,” Musk wrote. Frederiksen, who stated last month that “peace in Ukraine is actually more dangerous than the war that is ongoing now,” told journalists earlier this week that “Ukraine has to win this war.” She claimed that if Russia is allowed to win, it will continue to take military action against other European countries. “If we end this war now with some kind of a ceasefire, it will give Russia the possibility to mobilize more funds, people, and maybe to attack another country in Europe,” she said.

Her statements echoed comments by other EU leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, who has recently claimed that Russia poses a threat to the entire bloc and called for defense spending to be ramped up. Russia has also rejected unsubstantiated claims that it intends to attack European or NATO countries with Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissing such statements as “nonsense” and fear mongering by EU leaders aimed at alarming citizens and raising defense budgets. Moscow has warned that one of the key reasons for the Ukraine conflict was NATO expansion towards Russia, including the bloc’s promise that Kiev would eventually become a member.

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“..the French president’s “predecessors, who also wanted to fight Russia.”

Lavrov Compares Macron to Hitler and Napoleon (RT)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has compared French President Emmanuel Macron to Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, saying that he is also looking to impose a defeat upon Russia. During an address to the nation on Wednesday, Macron labeled Russia a “threat to France and Europe” and announced that he was considering expanding Paris’s nuclear deterrent to cover other EU member states. He insisted that the bloc needs to strengthen its independence when it comes to defense as there are doubts about the US continuing to protect the EU after the administration of President Donald Trump “changed its position” on the Ukraine conflict and became “less supportive” of Kiev. The French president insisted on further assistance to the government of Vladimir Zelensky, claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin will not stop if he is allowed to defeat Ukraine.

When asked to comment on Macron’s statements by journalists on Thursday, Lavrov mentioned Hitler and Napoleon, describing them as the French president’s “predecessors, who also wanted to fight Russia.” The two European dictators sent their armies into Russia in 1812 and 1941, respectively, but ended up suffering crushing defeats. The difference is that Hitler and Napoleon “said directly: ‘We must conquer Russia, we must defeat Russia.’ And he [Macron], apparently, wants the same thing, but for some reason says that we must fight Russia so that it does not defeat France; that Russia is creating a threat to France and Europe,” he stressed.

The minister refuted the French leader’s claims that Moscow has plans to attack Western Europe, calling such notions “unreasonable.” “President [Vladimir] Putin has said many times that this is absolute nonsense. I think that any sane person would understand that [by launching its military operation] Russia only wants to eliminate the root causes of the situation created by the West in Ukraine,” he explained. Lavrov also said that Moscow views Macron’s statement about widening France’s nuclear umbrella as a “threat towards Russia.” “If he considers us a threat, if he is calls a meeting of the chiefs of staff of the [Western] European countries and Britain; if he says that it is necessary to use nuclear weapons; if he prepares to use nuclear weapons against Russia – this is, of course, a threat,” he insisted.

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“..former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was right when he said, in his usual manner, that the conflict in Ukraine could be stopped very quickly, within two weeks, if military aid to the Ukrainian government was halted..”

Macron’s Remarks on Use of Nuclear Arms a Threat to Russia – Lavrov (Sp.)

Moscow sees French President Emmanuel Macron’s words on possible use of nuclear weapons as a threat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday. “Of course, this is a threat to Russia. If he [Macron] considers us a threat, gathers a meeting of the chiefs of General Staff of European countries and Britain, says it is necessary to use nuclear weapons, prepares to use nuclear weapons against Russia, this is, of course, a threat,” Lavrov told a news conference. On Wednesday, Macron said that Russia had become a “threat” to France and Europe, therefore, it was necessary to open a discussion on the use of France’s nuclear weapons to defend the entire European Union. Emmanuel Macron has the opportunity to call Russian President Vladimir Putin anytime, and accusations that Russia is allegedly preparing a war against Europe are unwise, Lavrov said.

“Macron periodically proudly declares that he will definitely call Putin and talk to him. He has such opportunities. No one forbids it. On the contrary, the president constantly emphasizes his openness to contacts with all his colleagues. And regarding these, frankly, unwise accusations of Russia in preparing a war against Europe and France, Putin has repeatedly said, calling such thoughts delusional, nonsense. Probably, it is absolutely clear to any sane person that Russia does not need this,” Lavrov told a joint press conference with Zimbabwean Foreign Minister Amon Murwira. Russia sees no possibility for achieving a compromise on possible deployment of European peacekeepers in Ukraine, Lavrov said. “We see no room for compromise. This discussion is being conducted with an openly hostile purpose. They are not hiding what they need it for,” Lavrov.

Suspension of US intelligence transfers to Ukraine confirm Russia’s statements that such assistance was provided to Kiev and it helped to carry out strikes deep into Russia, Sergey Lavrov said. “As for the current situation with the provision of military assistance and the pause that the US has announced, and the pause that was announced with respect to the provision of intelligence information, this has confirmed what we have always said, our president has repeatedly noted that without the direct participation of the West, the US, the UK, France, Germany, and other countries that provide intelligence data and help use the technologies for using this data to launch long-range missiles at our territory, the Ukrainians could not do this,” Lavrov said. The suspension of military aid to Ukraine from the United States may help to quickly end the Ukrainian conflict, Sergey Lavrov said.

“It has been said many times that former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was right when he said, in his usual manner, that the conflict in Ukraine could be stopped very quickly, within two weeks, if military aid to the Ukrainian government was halted. This is the answer to your question. We agree with this assessment. Another thing that Josep Borrell added was that this should never be done, because first you need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, and then dictate the terms of peace to it,” Lavrov told reporters. The Russian foreign minister noted that Russia is ready for a frank dialogue on the settlement of the Ukraine conflict.

“We are ready for an honest conversation, taking into account all the root causes of this conflict, including, of course, the main one – Russia’s security and guarantees against NATO’s continued expansion into Ukraine, which would then be used to create constant threats to Russia,” Lavrov said. In addition, the Russian official said that French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement about Russia and Ukraine was nervous and very verbose. “Macron, as I understand it, said in his lengthy, rather nervous statement yesterday [March 5] that the war should not be allowed to end with the surrender of Ukraine,” Lavrov said.

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“Following the 2022 escalation, both politicians admitted that the purpose of the accord from the West’s perspective had merely been to buy time for Kiev to strengthen its military..”

Macron said that Russia cannot be trusted because it violated the Minsk agreements. 4 days before the Russian invasion (February 20, 2022), Macron told Putin that the Minsk agreements have no legal force and are worthless!

Kremlin Reacts To Macron’s ‘War’ Speech (RT)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1897386604404306352

French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech focusing on Russia earlier this week was “highly confrontational,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday, arguing that it signals an intent to further escalate tensions. In his address to the nation on Wednesday, Macron labeled Russia “a threat” to the EU and called for a significant increase in defense spending to counter the perceived danger posed by Moscow. He also said that France would be prepared to deploy troops to Ukraine should a truce be reached in the conflict. Commenting on the remarks during a regular press briefing, Peskov stressed that it hardly conveyed a message of peace: “France apparently is contemplating war, a continuation of war.” This stance naturally elicits a negative reaction in Moscow, he suggested.

Macron’s address adhered to the conventional Western narrative portraying Russia as the unprovoked aggressor in the Ukraine conflict and claimed that Moscow has ambitions of conquest in Ukraine and beyond. However, according to Peskov, the French leader selectively ignored crucial events and circumstances that contributed to the current Ukraine crisis. Among these, he pointed to NATO military infrastructure “encroaching, or rather making seven-mile strides” towards Russia’s borders, creating significant security concerns for Moscow. Peskov stated that Russia had no choice but to respond to this growing threat. He also refuted Macron’s claims that Russia violated the Minsk Agreements, citing former French President Francois Hollande’s acknowledgment that the West never genuinely intended for them to succeed.

In 2015, Hollande and then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel co-mediated a roadmap purportedly aimed at peacefully reintegrating the then-breakaway regions in Donbass back into Ukraine. Following the 2022 escalation, both politicians admitted that the purpose of the accord from the West’s perspective had merely been to buy time for Kiev to strengthen its military with NATO support. Peskov also remarked that in 2014 France and other European nations “deceived” then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich by endorsing his power-sharing agreement with Western-backed militants, who violated the deal within hours and forcibly removed the democratically elected leader, all without any protest from Paris.

The EU is currently promoting a substantial military buildup that would cost some $840 billion and be funded through debt. Brussels asserts that European security risks have been intensified by the shift in Washington’s policy under President Donald Trump, who is seeking a resolution to the Ukraine conflict while urging Europe to assume responsibility for future security guarantees for Kiev. Peskov observed that while this does not make the US a friend of Russia, it at least opens avenues for normalizing bilateral relations.

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“The war, the geopolitical uncertainty and the new arms race started by Putin..”

EU Must Win Arms Race – Poland (RT)

The EU must escalate its military buildup and win the arms race against Russia, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said. This comes amid growing efforts by EU leaders to increase defense spending, citing what they describe as a threat from Moscow, which Russia has repeatedly denied. Tusk’s remarks also come as US President Donald Trump and his administration increasingly push European NATO members to take greater responsibility for their own defense. Washington has suggested that Europe should rely less on US military aid, particularly regarding Ukraine, and instead ramp up its own military spending. In a message posted on social media on Thursday, Tusk accused Moscow of starting a new arms race and insisted that Europe must respond.

“The war, the geopolitical uncertainty and the new arms race started by Putin have left Europe with no choice. Europe must be ready for this race, and Russia will lose it like the Soviet Union 40 years ago,” Tusk wrote, adding that from today, Europe will arm itself faster than Russia. His comments follow recent statements by French President Emmanuel Macron, who has claimed that Russia poses a threat to the EU. Macron has urged the bloc to increase defense spending and has also proposed expanding Europe’s nuclear deterrence, potentially extending France’s nuclear umbrella to other EU countries in response to the perceived risks from Moscow.

Moscow has dismissed the accusations that it poses a military threat to Europe and has condemned Macron’s latest statement as “highly confrontational.” Russian President Vladimir Putin called Western claims of an impending Russian attack “nonsense.” He has also accused European leaders of stoking tensions and using the perceived Russian threat as a pretext to justify increased military spending. In December, Putin also stressed that Russia does not want to be bogged down in an arms race, which would be detrimental to the social and economic development of the country. He warned, however, that Russia will take all necessary measures to ensure the security of itself and its allies.

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“Macron should invite his predecessor… Hollande, to the Élysée Palace to have a heart-to-heart talk with him… Then he’ll probably hear from Hollande… that he had no intention of implementing the Minsk agreements..”

Macron Should Apologize – Moscow (RT)

French President Emmanuel Macron should apologize for making “misleading” claims about the origins of the Ukraine conflict, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has told RT. In particular, Zakharova criticized Macron for alleging that Russia was to blame for the failure of the Minsk Accords. The agreements were brokered in 2014 and 2015 to halt fighting between Ukraine and the now-Russian Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, with France and Germany as guarantors. They were ultimately not implemented, and Moscow later accused Kiev and the West of using them to strengthen Ukraine’s military instead of securing peace. In a televised address on Wednesday,

Macron, however, blamed Russia of violating the accords and cited them as proof that the West “can no longer take Russia at its word” when it comes to resolving the conflict. “We cannot forget that Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and that we negotiated a ceasefire in Minsk at that time. And Russia did not respect this ceasefire,” the French president alleged, claiming that Moscow poses a direct threat to France and the entire EU. Zakharova condemned Macron’s comments as “aggressive and destructive” and pointed out that former French President François Hollande and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel have “openly confessed, and not under torture or pressure” back in 2022 they never intended to enforce the accords.

“Macron should invite his predecessor… Hollande, to the Élysée Palace to have a heart-to-heart talk with him… Then he’ll probably hear from Hollande… that he had no intention of implementing the Minsk agreements while representing France,” Zakharova stated, suggesting that after speaking to Hollande, Macron would “have to apologize to his own population for misleading them.” Macron has been a vocal advocate of strengthening Europe’s defenses against Russia and reiterated this position in his latest address. Moscow, however, has repeatedly denied having any plans to attack either the EU or NATO, with President Vladimir Putin dismissing such speculation as “nonsense” on multiple occasions.

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“..effectively granted Ratcliffe the authority to remove any CIA employee for any reason without the right to appeal.”

Trump Begins CIA Cuts – NYT (RT)

The administration of US President Donald Trump has begun cutting CIA staff as part of a broader effort to downsize government agencies, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing sources. The first dismissals reportedly targeted officers hired within the past two years, many of whom were still on probationary contracts. According to sources familiar with the situation, several recently hired CIA employees were summoned to a location away from the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where they were asked to surrender their credentials without prior notice. The firings have reportedly led to anxiety among remaining CIA staff, with some employees allegedly avoiding calls from security out of fear they may be next.

A CIA spokeswoman confirmed to the New York Times that certain recently hired officers had been let go but did not specify how many. She signaled that the dismissals were performance-based, as did several unnamed officials who spoke to the outlet. The reported firings come amid Trump’s efforts to cut government ranks as part of a drive to eliminate wasteful state spending, bureaucracy, and corruption – a campaign spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under billionaire Elon Musk. During the first cabinet meeting of his second term, Trump pledged to “cut down the size of government,” arguing that federal agencies had become “bloated” and “sloppy.” On February 11, he signed an executive order on workforce optimization, mandating large-scale reductions across government agencies and limiting hiring to essential positions.

The report also follows a federal judge’s ruling that cleared the way for CIA Director John Ratcliffe to fire employees at will. In late February, Judge Anthony J. Trenga ruled on a lawsuit brought by officers dismissed after Trump’s order to cut diversity programs in government agencies. That decision effectively granted Ratcliffe the authority to remove any CIA employee for any reason without the right to appeal. The Trump administration has previously cracked down on the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s primary mechanism for funding political projects abroad, firing some 2,000 employees and putting nearly all remaining staff on leave. According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Trump is also preparing an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education, which he has repeatedly criticized as a “big con job.”

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And “around 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans..”

US Ready To Change Legal Status Of 240,000 Ukrainian Migrants (RT)

US President Donald Trump’s administration is preparing to revoke the temporary legal status for all refugees, including around 240,000 Ukrainians – a move that could speed up their path to deportation, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing a senior administration official and three sources familiar with the matter. Expected to come into force in April, the decision is part of a broader crackdown on immigration which Trump launched since assuming office and marks a dramatic shift from the reception Ukrainians received under the previous administration of Joe Biden. The outlet noted that the effort to revoke protections for Ukrainians was already in progress before a verbal altercation between Trump and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky in the Oval Office last week.

According to sources, the move is part of a broader Trump administration initiative to eliminate the legal status of over 1.8 million migrants who entered the US through temporary humanitarian parole programs introduced under the Biden administration. In addition to the 240,000 Ukrainians, the administration plans to revoke parole for around 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans this month, the administration official and one of the anonymous sources told the outlet. Shortly after assuming office on January 20, Trump signed a number of executive orders introducing tougher immigration controls, including a decree instructing the Department of Homeland Security to “terminate all categorical parole programs.”

An internal US Immigration and Customs Enforcement email reviewed by Reuters indicated that migrants losing their parole status could face fast-track deportation proceedings. Other executive orders also included enhancing vetting for visa applicants, limiting birthright citizenship, directing the armed forces to guard the southern border with Mexico, and erecting additional barriers. Trump also repealed 78 executive orders signed by Biden, including directives related to immigration.

The development comes amid a deepening rift in US-Ukraine relations. Tensions have escalated in recent weeks following Zelensky’s ill-tempered meeting with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent over a minerals deal, culminating in a tense public argument between Trump and Zelensky in the White House last week. Zelensky was accused of “disrespecting” the US, with Trump insisting that the Ukrainian leader does not want peace. A proposed minerals deal between the US and Ukraine was left unsigned as a result.

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“Without the direct involvement of the West [..] Ukraine would not be able to use these technologies and data to launch long-range missiles at our territory. This is a very important acknowledgment,”

Lavrov Weighs In On US Decision To Halt Intel Sharing With Ukraine (RT)

Ukraine is entirely incapable of launching long-range missile strikes on Russia without direct support from Western nations, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, citing the recent US decision to pause intelligence sharing with Kiev as proof. On Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed that the US had halted intelligence sharing with Kiev, adding that the restrictions could be lifted if Ukraine demonstrated a commitment to peace negotiations with Russia. Washington has also frozen military assistance to Kiev, with both moves following a public spat between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky during an Oval Office meeting last week. The talks ended with Trump accusing Zelensky of “disrespect” and reluctance to seek peace with Moscow.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Lavrov highlighted the consequences of the US decision on intel sharing. “Without the direct involvement of the West – namely the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other countries – Ukraine would not be able to use these technologies and data to launch long-range missiles at our territory. This is a very important acknowledgment,” the minister said. At the same time, Lavrov declined to speculate on how long the freeze would last, stressing that Russia is focused on eliminating the root causes of the conflict, including securing guarantees that NATO “will not continue to absorb Ukraine as a territory that could later be used to create permanent threats against the Russian Federation.”

Ukraine has long used advanced Western-made weapons, including US-supplied HIMARS and ATACMS, and British Storm Shadow missiles, to target Russian facilities, including civilian ones. In the fall of 2024, the administration of then-US President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine to use American long-range missiles for strikes deep into Russian territory despite Moscow’s warnings that this would escalate the conflict. In response to Ukrainian long-range strikes using Western weapons, Russia deployed its newest intermediate-range ballistic missile system, the Oreshnik, to target Ukraine’s Yuzhmash military-industrial facility in the city of Dnepr. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the Oreshnik as impossible to intercept, noting its warheads travel at ten times the speed of sound. Putin has said that Ukraine could launch missile strikes deep into Russia only if it receives reconnaissance data from satellites operated either by the EU or the US.

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“..Senate Democrats seem to have thrown in the towel on defending their own COVID record and heroes including Dr. Anthony Fauci..”

‘Science Should Be An Engine For Freedom’: NIH Nominee Bhattacharya (JTN)

Senate Democrats and some Republicans liked the status quo at the National Institutes of Health before the second Trump administration and Department of Government Efficiency started closely scrutinizing its grant decisions, headcount and wildly generous reimbursement for “indirect costs” to institutions at the expense of money for their researchers. That seemed apparent at Wednesday’s Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing for NIH director-nominee Jay Bhattacharya, who faced repeated bipartisan demands to oppose President Trump who nominated him and immediately undo decisions made by agency leaders and the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, especially mass terminations and funding freezes.

Best known for his pioneering research on widespread COVID-19 immunity by April 2020 and vocal opposition to prolonged school closures and vaccine mandates, the Stanford medical professor and health economist barely drew criticism for his own record. He mentioned just a single vaccine whose safety record troubled him when asked by Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J.: “COVID vaccines for young men causing myocarditis,” which is inflammation of heart muscle. Like their House colleagues a month earlier, Senate Democrats seem to have thrown in the towel on defending their own COVID record and heroes including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the four-decade director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Instead they assailed Trump and DOGE boss Elon Musk, with ranking member Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, telling Bhattacharya he’d be subservient to the unofficial leader of DOGE and asking Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., to haul billionaire Musk before the committee. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., asked Bhattacharya whether he’d follow the law when Trump gave him an illegal directive. When he rejected the plausibility of the hypothetical, she responded “that strains credulity” and denounced his “disappointing answer.”

Sanders repeatedly cut off Bhattacharya as he tried to answer leading questions about unilaterally capping high prices for drugs developed through NIH research and using his “bully pulpit” to pressure TV stations to ban ads for “unhealthy foods.” The nominee barely got to answer that the U.S. could have saved untold spending on drugs by treating serious COVID infections with the “cheap steroid” dexamethasone, as documented in a July 2020 New England Journal of Medicine study. “A lot can be done through executive orders,” Sanders answered, referring to Trump’s first-month deluge, when Bhattacharya told him that previous NIH directors said only Congress can impose price caps. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called bullplop on Democrats for not cosponsoring his bill to remove junk food from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he said would disproportionately improve health for poor people.

The ophthalmologist cheered Bhattacharya’s tout of steroids that cost “pennies” to treat serious COVID, which he said Fauci rejected in March 2020. Paul called it “the best cure and the cheapest,” and Bhattacharya frowned that the U.K. did that research instead of NIH. Just as Democrats pivoted to praising COVID vaccines as “life-saving” after the novel therapeutics were found unable to stop transmission, to make infection more likely via the antibody “class switch” and to cause heart inflammation in young people, several used the compound adjective to describe research subject to NIH’s funding pause. So did Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who also joined Democrats in branding NIH’s new 15% cap on indirect cost recovery – in line with private foundations’ reimbursement ratios – a violation of congressional directives. She called the cap “ill-conceived and completely arbitrary” and a “one-size-fits-all approach,” a jab often applied to federal COVID guidance.

Bhattacharya reminded senators his own research received NIH grants and he served on a standing NIH grant committee for a decade, but said the agency must recover from the cratering public trust in public health leaders due to their pandemic management. His NIH will “vigorously regulate” research that could cause another pandemic, he said, referring to the theory favored by the FBI, CIA and Department of Energy that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a Chinese lab conducting gain-of-function experiments, indirectly funded by Fauci’s agency. Bhattacharya promised Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., he’d work with Congress to keep taxpayer money out of foreign biolabs such as Ukraine’s, publish records with “limited obfuscation” and require funding recipients to report “politically inconvenient” results.

Tuberville had asked about an NIH-funded study on youth gender transitions and mental health whose negative findings were intentionally withheld for seven years, helping create a false medical consensus on so-called gender affirming care for young people. He urged Bhattacharya to be “very visual on television” with his transparency message. Bhattacharya said he’ll prioritize research on chronic diseases including obesity and diabetes and reversing the slide in life expectancy, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and make it “replicable, reproducible and generalizable,” a weakness for the agency. He noted NIH’s “research integrity scandal” on Alzheimer’s disease, which he has studied, and its devotion to the “amyloid hypothesis,” an explanation for Alzheimer’s that may be based on falsified data and which he said crowded out study of other hypotheses.

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“..the Court finds that the public interest lies in maintaining the status quo and enjoining any categorical funding freeze.”

Obama Judge Indefinitely Blocks Trump Admin Funding Freeze (ZH)

A Rhode Island US District Judge has indefinitely blocked President Trump’s freeze on federal grants and loans, arguing in his ruling that the White House had “put itself above Congress” and undermined democracy. In a Thursday ruling, Judge John McConnell Jr., an Obama appointee – prohibited the Trump administration from freezing or otherwise impeding the disbursement of appropriated federal funds, WSJ reports. The decision is a victory for Trump critics who say he has trampled on Congress’s authority in his effort to cut federal spending and overhaul agencies. McConnell’s order follows a similar one issued by a different federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25. The judge had previously issued a temporary restraining order, which on Thursday he converted into an injunction, a more permanent form of relief.

“The Executive’s categorical freeze of appropriated and obligated funds fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” wrote McConnell. “Here, the Executive put itself above Congress,” he continued. “It imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.” Of note – McConnell was very active in Democratic politics before becoming a judge – serving 14 years as treasurer of the Rhode Island Democratic State Committee, and donating heavily to Democratic political candidates. McConnell’s ruling came after 22 Democrat states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit which challenged a directive from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directing them to pause funding while it assessed whether various government programs complied with executive orders issued by Trump which target foreign aid, DEI, and green energy projects.

While OMB then rescinded that directive, the states say that come Congressionally-approved funds were still being improperly withheld – and that the initial OMB policy rollout sowed confusion among state governments, nonprofits, and lawmakers. McConnell issued an earlier temporary restraining order (TRO), in which he said that the administration couldn’t “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” its federal financial-assistance obligations to the states. According to the judge, state governments face “significant disruption in health, education, and other public services” due to the funding freeze, and as such, “the Court finds that the public interest lies in maintaining the status quo and enjoining any categorical funding freeze.”

Read more …

“In February, [..] VA said it was continuing to hire for more than 300,000 mission-critical positions that are exempt from the federal hiring freeze..”

DOGE Looking To Cut More Than 80,000 Employees At Veterans Affairs (JTN)

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is planning to cut 80,000 positions as part of an “aggressive” overhaul of the agency that runs programs for veterans and members of their families. The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top VA officials on Tuesday that it would to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000 employees. That would require dismissing about 83,000 employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration. It will work with the Department of Government Efficiency to create a workforce optimization plan, Syrek said in an internal memo obtained by multiple news outlets, including Government Executive, which first reported on the memo. He said VA will “move aggressively” to reduce bureaucracy, cut the department’s footprint and “increase workforce efficiency,” the outlet reported. House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Democrats said the move could hurt veterans.

“83,000 VA employees are set to be fired,” the committee wrote on X. “These cuts won’t just impact those seeking health care. They will create chaos across every aspect of VA – delaying benefits, straining claims processing, and making it nearly impossible for student veterans and schools to get the assistance they need. Veterans will suffer the consequences.” The VA added staff quickly during the Biden administration as it staffed up to address increased coverage under the PACT Act, a law that expanded VA health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances. News of the overhaul comes after relatively minor cuts at the agency. Earlier this week, Veterans Affairs started cancelling close to 600 “non-mission critical” and “duplicative” contracts valued at about $1.8 billion – and this is just the beginning, according to the department.

The cancellations result from the early stages of a “deliberative, multi-level review” by some of the people responsible for the contracts, VA senior leaders and contracting officials and will allow Veterans Affairs to redirect about $900 million back to veteran benefits and services, the agency said. The 585 contracts the department has begun canceling “represent less than 1% of the roughly 90,000 contracts VA currently has in place,” and the department plans to perform a thorough review of all of them. In February, VA dismissed more than 1,400 probationary employees in non-mission critical positions. At that time, VA said it was continuing to hire for more than 300,000 mission-critical positions that are exempt from the federal hiring freeze. Earlier that same month, VA announced it dismissed more than 1,000 of its 43,000 probationary employees in a move expected to save $98 million a year. The agency said those let go included non-union probationary employees who have served less than a year in a competitive service appointment or who have served less than two years in an excepted service appointment.

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“This will ensure that the IRS is not going after the wealthy and is only an agency that’s really focused on the low income,” he said. “It’s a travesty.”

IRS Reportedly Plans To Cut Half of Its 90,000 Workforce (JTN)

The Internal Revenue Service reportedly plans to cut its roughly 90,000-employee workforce by as much as half, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce. The cuts will be made through a mix of attrition, layoffs and incentivized buyouts, two people familiar with the situation told the Associated Press. The reduction of the federal workforce is being led by the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, which is being led by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Those being laid off are mostly probationary employees who have not yet gained civil service protection.

The agency has already cut roughly 6,000 employees, or bout 6% of its workforce, Reuters reported in late February. Philip Hackney, a University of Pittsburgh tax law professor and Former IRS lawyer, warned such cuts could unfairly target the country’s underclass. “This will ensure that the IRS is not going after the wealthy and is only an agency that’s really focused on the low income,” he said. “It’s a travesty.”

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“I think logically, we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized..”

Elon Musk Says Amtrak, US Postal Service Should Be Privatized (ET)

Elon Musk, who is advising President Donald Trump on reducing government waste and downsizing the federal workforce, has called for privatizing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and passenger rail operator Amtrak. “I think logically, we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” Musk said at a March 5 Morgan Stanley conference. “I think we should privatize the Post Office and Amtrak for example.” Amtrak, a government-owned company created in 1970, reported an adjusted operating loss of $705 million in the prior fiscal year. USPS, also government-owned, has accumulated over $100 billion in losses since 2007, including $9.5 billion in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2024. Neither Amtrak nor USPS responded to requests for comment on Musk’s remarks by publication time. The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) voiced opposition to Musk’s idea of privatizing USPS, emphasizing the service’s public mission.

“A friendly reminder on behalf of every American who depends on USPS (including 51.5 million rural addresses): It’s called universal service, not ‘as much as possible’ service,” NALC wrote in a post on X. “And we’ll #FightLikeHell to protect it.” Trump has previously suggested that the USPS could be privatized, a move that would allow for more flexibility in pricing and labor negotiations. During Trump’s first term, his administration proposed a restructuring plan for USPS, citing “extremely high” fixed costs and an inability to support its financial obligations. The plan highlighted over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities, a decade of consecutive losses, and a growing capital investment backlog. “A privatized Postal Service would have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and make business decisions free from political interference, and have access to private capital markets to fund operational improvements without burdening taxpayers,” the proposal stated.

Last month, Trump said he was considering merging USPS with the Commerce Department, a move that Democrats said would violate federal law. Calling USPS “a tremendous loser for the country,” Trump said the objective of such a move would be to have a “post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money.” Democrats have consistently opposed privatization efforts, warning that changes to USPS operations could disproportionately impact rural communities and those dependent on postal services for essential goods and medication. Trump has also repeatedly pushed to cut Amtrak’s federal funding, which totaled approximately $2.4 billion last year. His past budget proposals sought to reduce Amtrak’s funding by 40–50 percent and eliminate long-distance routes, arguing that resources should be redirected to higher-traffic corridors. Musk, comparing U.S. rail service to China’s high-speed system, criticized Amtrak as a “sad situation,” saying, “It will leave you with a very bad impression of America.”

Read more …

Trump questions Article 5.

Trump Planning Major NATO Shakeup – NBC (RT)

The US could decide to only defend those NATO countries that actually meet the bloc’s spending requirements, four former and current officials have told NBC. Such a policy would mark a major departure from a core article of the military bloc, which states that an attack on any NATO member is to be treated as an attack on all of them. A similar principle would apply to joint military exercises and American overseas deployments, the report said. Washington could choose to prioritize drills with those NATO partners that meet the defense spending targets and also reposition its forces in Europe according to the same criteria.

The administration of President Donald Trump has previously signaled that it was planning to reduce its military presence in Europe. The president also recently urged the EU to take the lead in its own defense and to bear the brunt of any future security guarantees for Kiev. Last month, Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said that Washington intended to refocus its military priorities on countering China. He also warned the EU nations that they should not assume the presence of US troops on the continent will be indefinite. Some senior US officials contacted by NBC denied that the mutual defense clause – Article 5 – could be affected by any policy changes. Senator Chris Coons, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Defense, said that Trump’s nominee for the NATO ambassador’s position, Matthew Whitaker, “gave very reassuring answers” on the administration’s commitments to Article 5.

Trump has repeatedly criticized NATO members that fail to meet the bloc’s current defense spending threshold of 2% of GDP. The president floated the idea of raising mandatory defense spending by members to 5% of GDP, though none – including the US – currently meet that threshold. According to NATO estimates, 23 bloc members met the 2% threshold as of 2024, with just five, including the US, coming in above 3%. Poland was the only member to spend more than 4% of GDP on defense.

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“..too divided and insufficiently nimble to respond to the scale of the storm that Trump is whipping up over Ukraine,”

Trump Wants To Sideline EU – Politico (RT)

US President Donald Trump wants to sideline and destroy the European Union, an entity that he has long disliked, Politico has claimed in an article published on Thursday. The outlet argued that Trump is taking advantage of the cracks within the bloc caused by the Ukraine conflict. The administration in Washington has recently launched negotiations with Russia to broker peace in the Ukraine conflict and has excluded the EU from the process, which has elicited condemnation from Brussels. Trump has also halted American military aid to Ukraine, leaving the bloc jostling for funds to support Kiev. Washington’s anti-EU push “is triggering a crisis in Brussels institutions. The EU as a bloc is scrambling to prove its relevance,” Politico wrote. The Ukraine conflict has exposed differences among EU members in defense priorities, economic interests, and diplomatic approaches.

While countries such as Poland and the Baltic states have advocated for stronger military backing of Kiev, others, particularly Hungary and Slovakia, have pushed back, calling for a negotiated settlement with Russia. The financial burden of military aid and energy security concerns have also fueled tensions. Right-wing movements in several EU nations have questioned the bloc’s commitment to Kiev. “Trump will sideline the EU and play divide-and-rule with national leaders,” the publication wrote. While European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with US Vice President J.D. Vance in Munich last month, neither she nor European Council President Antonio Costa has had a face-to-face meeting with Trump, it noted.

The European Council, the body made up of the heads of state or government of all EU member states, “is being agonizingly exposed as too divided and insufficiently nimble to respond to the scale of the storm that Trump is whipping up over Ukraine,” Politico added. With Washington halting over $1 billion in arms shipments, Kiev faces potential shortages of ammunition and equipment. The EU is exploring alternatives to continue backing Ukraine militarily, despite the peace process initiated by the US and Russia. Von der Leyen on Tuesday unveiled a €800 billion plan aimed at bolstering the EU’s defense. In recent weeks, Trump has also targeted the bloc’s trade practices, describing them as “an atrocity” and announcing plans to impose a 25% tariff on EU goods. He also claimed that the bloc was “formed to screw the United States.”

Read more …

Trump wants to sideline EU, and the EU wants to sideline its own members.

“They created a wasteland and called it democracy.”

EU Seeking To Bypass Opponents of Ukraine Aid – Kallas (RT)

The EU is working on a new mechanism whereby a “coalition of the willing” would continue providing military aid to Kiev despite opposition by Hungary, according to Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s foreign policy chief. Kallas made the announcement on Thursday after arriving in Brussels for an emergency summit of the bloc’s 27 countries to discuss boosting defense and Ukraine aid amid waning US support.Asked by reporters about Hungary’s attempt to block aid to Ukraine, Kallas acknowledged the issue is “increasingly difficult” and explained that Brussels is considering a new initiative called a “coalition of the willing,” so that “one country cannot block everybody else.” She did not provide any details about how the mechanism would work in practice. Hungary has already rejected an EU draft text on Ukraine that included security guarantees for Kiev and a new military aid package. Budapest has also called on the EU to begin negotiations with Russia.

The idea of creating a “coalition of the willing” – a group of countries ready to support Kiev militarily – was first proposed by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at an emergency summit in London this past Sunday. The meeting in London was summoned shortly after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s ill-fated trip to Washington. The term “coalition of the willing” is most closely associated with the designation given to the countries supporting the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 on the ultimately disproven allegations of possession of weapons of mass destruction.“We are still striving for having the unity of 27 members,” Kallas said, but added that if unanimity cannot be reached, Hungary will have to “speak for themselves.” The military aid package for Ukraine reportedly being prepared by the EU is worth at least $6.2 billion, making it one of the bloc’s largest arms commitments since 2022. However, Hungary has indicated that it will veto the initiative.

Earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled the so-called ReArm Europe initiative, an €800 billion plan aimed at bolstering the EU’s defense capabilities. The proposal was prompted by US President Donald Trump’s freezing of military aid to Ukraine while urging the EU to take greater responsibility for its own defense. Moscow has long warned against Western arms shipments to Ukraine, arguing that they only prolong the conflict without altering the outcome, while increasing the risk of a direct Russia-NATO clash. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko has suggested that the EU could contribute to resolving the crisis by halting military and logistical support to Kiev.

Read more …

Without a past of nazis and holocaust, the country would not exist. It has one of the prime secret services in the world. But no idea what happens in Kiev.

Israeli FM ‘Didn’t Know’ Kiev Glorifies Holocaust Perpetrators (RT)

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has claimed ignorance of the well-documented fact that Ukrainian nationalists responsible for atrocities against Jewish people are venerated as heroes by Kiev. Moscow, in response, has offered to enlighten the Israeli official on the matter. On Monday, Sa’ar held a press briefing to mark Israel’s presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). West Jerusalem emphasized that anti-Semitism, which fueled Nazi crimes during World War II, “has not been eradicated from the world.” The minister seemed taken aback when a reporter asked for his thoughts on the modern-day glorification in Ukraine of Nazi-allied historical nationalist figures such as Stepan Bandera. In 2016, the Kiev city council renamed a large street in honor of Bandera, located just 3 km from Babi Yar, where an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Jews and thousands of others were exterminated under Nazi occupation.

“First of all, I didn’t know about it. I will check it,” the official responded, pledging to issue a statement of condemnation “if there is a necessity.” Bandera and other nationalists, including those directly implicated in wartime atrocities, have been celebrated in modern Ukraine for years – something the reporter described as “common knowledge.” The Russian government expressed bewilderment at the exchange, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova sarcastically questioning the competence of Israel’s diplomatic staff. “How so? What is the Israeli embassy in Kiev doing then? And in Moscow too?” she wrote on social media, offering a collection of relevant documents in English for the minister’s convenience.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry and its embassy in Kiev have in fact issued multiple statements denouncing the veneration of such figures. In January 2022, the diplomatic mission described that year’s annual torch march commemorating Bandera’s birthday as “desecrating the memory of the victims of the Holocaust in Ukraine.” No such condemnation was issued the following year, however. The embassy explained to Haarez that “we’ve made our position clear many times, but apparently there is nothing we can do, at least at the moment.” Moscow views the current government in Kiev as dominated by neo-Nazis and radical nationalists and insists that any potential peace deal with Ukraine must include a reversal of policies discriminating against ethnic Russians.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Elon

 

 

Nap
https://twitter.com/i/status/1897477371051360561

 

 

Feeders

 

 

Cheetah
https://twitter.com/i/status/1897665976646373393

 

 

Secret

 

 

Jekyll island

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Feb 122025
 


Leonardo da Vinci (?) La Joconde nue or Monna Vanna 1515

 

Stubbornness, Divine Providence and Donald Trump (Miele)
Trump Orders Federal Agencies To Comply With Musk’s DOGE Cuts (RT)
Democrat Senator Accuses Trump And Musk Of ‘Billionaire Takeover’ (RT)
Judge Blocks Federal Government From Cutting Medical Research Funding (ET)
US Tax Dollars Fuel Ukrainian Elites’ Lavish Lifestyles – Tucker Carlson (RT)
DOGE Investigating Feds Whose Net Worths Have Exploded (ZH)
Zelensky’s 100 Days Might End In Florida As Trump Prepares Ukraine Plan (Jay)
Musk Reacts To Zelensky’s ‘Ukrainians Don’t Want Elections’ Claim (RT)
Trump’s Envoy To Shift Ukraine Burden Onto Europe (RT)
Trump To Send Treasury Secretary To Kiev (RT)
Europe Told To Brace For Flood Of Ukrainian Soldiers With PTSD (RT)
Kiev Mayor Predicts ‘Painful Compromise’ To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)
Kiev Plotting Provocations To Drag NATO Into War – Moscow (RT)
Trump Nominees, COVID Dissenters Launch Science Journal (JTN)
“Get Violent and Fight”: Tennessee Minister Calls for Violence (Turley)
Clinton Probe to Expose Gates, Soros and Epstein Links (Sp.)
Russia Treated US ‘Very Nicely’ – Trump (RT)

 

 

 

 

DOGE 2024
https://twitter.com/i/status/1889188421400154472

MAGA minute

Leavitt

Gutfeld
https://twitter.com/i/status/1889115655565091300

FEMA


https://twitter.com/i/status/1889081920560189890

Jennings

AI

Rogan nice man
https://twitter.com/i/status/1889195160044486728

Kayleigh

Judge Nap/Mearsheimer

 

 

 

 

What would the world be like if Trump had won a 2nd consecutive term? No Butler murder attampt, no Elon, no RFK, no JD Vance…

Stubbornness, Divine Providence and Donald Trump (Miele)

Donald Trump has always been a complex character, but to fully understand him now, one must begin with the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024. Listen to how Trump described that experience in his second inaugural address: “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and indeed to take my life. Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” Even his harshest critics were hesitant to challenge Trump’s grandiose assertion because – at some level – they could put themselves in Trump’s shoes. And now, three months after the election and a mere three weeks after he was sworn in, the evidence is plain that Trump is a politician reborn, with a purpose renewed. If Making America Great Again started as an election slogan, it has been transformed into a divine mission.

Trump 2.0 is the Democrats’ worst nightmare. If he had won a second term in 2020, forcing him to govern with a Chuck Schumer-controlled Senate, he would have been virtually powerless. He would have limped through that second term with the usual bluster and name-calling, but without any new vision or agenda. His mandate would have been simple – keep the economy strong and don’t rock the boat too hard. Play golf whenever possible. There would have been no Elon Musk and no Department of Government Efficiency. There would have been no Bobby Kennedy Jr. or Make America Healthy Again. It is unlikely there would have even been a housecleaning at the FBI or CIA. Remember, there would not have been a raid at Mar-a-Lago, nor a “deranged” special counsel, nor a Jan. 6 riot in the U.S. Capitol. We would be living in an entirely different world, led for four years by an entirely different Trump on a glide path to retirement.

The 2024 election would have been a complete unknown. Republicans would have scrambled to find a worthy successor to Trump, but there would be no anointed one. Almost certainly not Mike Pence, but then who? Josh Hawley? Tom Cotton? Nikki Haley? Tim Scott? Not J.D. Vance, who would still be a mid-level literary author and never have been elected senator from Ohio. The Democrats would not have had to suffer through the embarrassment of a senescent President Joe Biden. They would have had a legitimate primary battle in 2024 between Govs. Newsom, Shapiro, Pritzker, and Hochul, and Sens. Klobuchar, Warren, Gillibrand, and maybe Sanders. Kamala Harris would have been an afterthought – or withdrawn before Iowa just as she did in 2020.

The likelihood of a Democratic victory after two consecutive Trump terms would have been high. MAGA itself might have fizzled out from attrition and eight years of mainstream media overkill. So it’s easy to theorize about the role of divine providence bringing us to this point, but one can’t discount the importance of Trump’s own character in asserting his will against the established order either. His ability to withstand the full court press of two impeachments, two special counsels, two assassination attempts, and multiple felony indictments and convictions to convince the American public to return him to the White House is nothing short of miraculous. If Trump was indeed “saved by God,” there must have been a reason – something that made Trump a perfect vessel for reshaping our times, even though not perfect himself. So what is it?

I’ve tried to think of analogs for Trump’s persona in life and literature and largely come up empty. As a politician, Trump is sui generis. You can scan the Bible for other examples of imperfect perfection such as King David and Cyrus the Great, but it’s best not to impute to a contemporary such as Trump the authority of the Old Testament. So where else do we turn? A few authors have noted the similarity of Trump to Napoleon Bonaparte, including for his ego, his exile, and his support from the common man. I myself have written twice about such a connection, including once in 2016 before he was elected and once in 2022 after he was banished to Mar-a-Lago. The columns stand the test of time, but there might be one avatar for The Donald drawn from literature that is even more appropriate.

I am thinking of the character known simply as the Mule in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy. Book two of the science fiction series, “Foundation and Empire,” introduces the Mule as a character of such intense individuality that he has the power to break every expectation, exceed every limit, and avoid virtually every trap put in his way as he attempts to conquer the galaxy. As Asimov has another character explain, “He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical strength, and stubbornness of purpose.”

We need not worry about physical strength in our comparison, but “stubbornness of purpose” can be applied to Trump and to only a few others in U.S. history, including George Washington during his role as commander in chief of the Continental Army and Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief of the Union Army. Were it not for Trump’s extraordinary second term, his divine commission, we might never have even understood his stubbornness of purpose. Oh yes, he was considered mule-headed for his unwillingness to follow political conventions, but until his return from exile, he still tried to curry favor with the ruling class by trying to fit in with expectations rather than imposing his will through brute force.

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“..agencies may hire only one employee for every four who depart..”

Trump Orders Federal Agencies To Comply With Musk’s DOGE Cuts (RT)

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order mandating US federal agencies to implement workforce reductions and efficiency measures outlined by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk. Signed on February 11, 2025, the order directs agencies to limit hiring to essential positions and collaborate with DOGE to identify areas for significant staff cuts and potential agency eliminations. Appearing alongside Trump in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Musk defended the initiative, stating that the American “people voted for major government reform, and that’s what they’re going to get.” “It’s not optional for us to reduce federal expenses – it’s essential. It’s essential for America to remain solvent as a country,” Musk said.

“We have this unelected, unconstitutional fourth branch of government – the bureaucracy – which, in many ways, currently holds more power than any elected representative,” he added. “It does not reflect the will of the people. So it’s something we’ve got to fix.” “And we’ve also got to address the deficit – a $2 trillion deficit. If we don’t do something about this, the country is going bankrupt. I mean, it’s astounding that the interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the Defense Department’s budget,” Musk noted.

Trump’s executive order establishes a hiring ratio in which agencies may hire only one employee for every four who depart, with exemptions for roles related to public safety, immigration enforcement, and law enforcement. Agency heads must develop data-driven plans, in consultation with DOGE team leads, to ensure new hires are allocated to high-need areas. The order also requires agency heads to submit reports within 30 days, evaluating whether their departments or sub-agencies could be eliminated or consolidated. It does not apply to military personnel, and agency heads may exempt “any position they deem necessary to meet national security, homeland security, or public safety responsibilities.” Critics have raised concerns about the potential impact of these measures on public services and the concentration of power within DOGE, with reporters pressing Musk on potential conflicts of interest.

Trump’s latest push for large-scale federal workforce reductions follows previous efforts by his administration to streamline government operations, including a foreign aid and hiring freezes. The Department of Government Efficiency has been granted expanded authority to oversee these reductions, aiming to identify and eliminate wasteful spending within the federal government.

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Musk is a Chinese puppet.

Democrat Senator Accuses Trump And Musk Of ‘Billionaire Takeover’ (RT)

US President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk are seizing power in Washington “for corrupt purposes,” according to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. The lawmaker from Connecticut accused the president of punishing his enemies and rewarding his friends in what he called “the billionaire takeover of government.” Trump has repealed dozens of executive orders signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, since returning to the Oval Office on January 20. Amid a broader push to cut government spending, the president has suspended all US foreign aid and halted numerous projects assigned to USAID, Washington’s main agency for administering funding to political projects abroad.

Trump also appointed Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, as a “special government employee” to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “This is the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly, since Watergate,” Murphy said in an interview with ABC News aired on Sunday, accusing Trump of “attempting to seize control of power for corrupt purposes.” The lawmaker claimed that the president is planning to single-handedly address public financial issues in order “to reward his political friends” and “punish his political enemies,” branding the administration’s latest decisions, in particular disbanding USAID, an “evisceration of democracy.”

Murphy also said the agency was “a thorn in the side of the Chinese government,” claiming that Trump’s move to eliminate it will “make America much less safe around the world” but will benefit Beijing. The senator accused Musk, who has branded USAID a “criminal organization,” of pursuing his own ends by taking steps to shut down the agency. “Elon Musk has many major business interests at stake inside Beijing, and so making Beijing happy is going to accrue to the financial benefit of Elon Musk and many billionaires who outsource work to China,” the lawmaker stated. Last week, Trump accused USAID of funnelling billions of taxpayer dollars into media companies to promote positive media coverage of the Democrats. At the same time, Musk accused USAID of funding bioweapons research.

Read more …

Waiting for Jay Bhattacharya to be confirmed as NIH director.

Judge Blocks Federal Government From Cutting Medical Research Funding (ET)

U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley entered a temporary restraining order on Feb. 10 preventing the federal government from cutting medical research funding in 22 states in response to a lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts. The order is in place until further word from the court, Kelley said. Government lawyers were also ordered to, within 24 hours, and at biweekly intervals thereafter, confirm with the judge that they are regularly disbursing medical research funding in the states, which include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon. California, New York, and Massachusetts receive the most funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The legal challenge targets the U.S. National Institutes of Health directive that imposes a lower cap on indirect research costs for institutions receiving government funding after a quarter of $35 billion in NIH research funds went to indirect costs in 2024.

The new cap was set in the Feb. 7 directive at 15 percent, which is largely in line with private funding limits, and down from what the NIH said was an average of 27 percent to 28 percent. “The United States should have the best medical research in the world. It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead,” according to an NIH memorandum from the agency’s Office of the Director. Dr. Matthew Memoli is the acting NIH director while the Senate considers President Donald Trump’s nominee, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. In an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, attorneys general representing the states alleged that institutions, if the change were allowed to go through, would lead to “catastrophic financial consequences, which could result in layoffs and furloughs, research program closures, financial defaults, and disruptions to clinical trials, potentially jeopardizing people’s lives and health.”

The states also said the change violates a law that prohibits the NIH from changing the cap on indirect research costs. “Even were NIH to have the authority it claims, a demanding regulatory process would be required; but NIH took none of the steps mandated by that process. In addition, the agency did not consider the detrimental effect of its decision on ongoing research that NIH itself has determined is integral to public health,” the motion stated. “Nor did NIH address the considerable reliance interests that are impaired when thousands of existing grants, totaling billions of dollars, are changed unilaterally over a weekend.” The government has not issued a response to the motion. After granting the request for a restraining order, Kelley set a hearing on the matter for Feb. 21.

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“All the visitors are Ukrainian, and they’re rolling into Hermes, and dropping a million dollars in an afternoon. It’s all through Europe you see this.”

US Tax Dollars Fuel Ukrainian Elites’ Lavish Lifestyles – Tucker Carlson (RT)

Ukrainian elites have enriched themselves from embezzling US taxpayer money sent to fund the conflict with Russia, American journalist Tucker Carlson has claimed. He recounted his observations of affluent visitors at an elite ski resort, during an interview with retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis on Monday. Carlson, a former Fox News host and a vocal opponent of US support for Ukraine, described his visit to a pricey resort in the Alps, where he discovered that “the whole town is Ukrainian.” “All the visitors are Ukrainian, and they’re rolling into Hermes, and dropping a million dollars in an afternoon. It’s all through Europe you see this. The richest people are the Ukrainians,” he said, adding that the money they’re throwing around “belongs to me and you and every other American taxpayer.”

Carlson went on to say that Ukrainian corruption not only squanders American resources but also endangers US citizens. He cited allegations of Ukrainian military personnel selling weapons on the black market, which have reportedly reached the Mexican drug cartels. He claimed to know this for a fact, but did not provide evidence. He also criticized US funding for the Ukrainian special services, saying they have orchestrated “terrorist attacks” within Russia.”Everyone who wants to know what’s going on knows,” Carlson said, accusing the media and officials from the administration of former President Joe Biden of covering up for Kiev. The contrast between the amount of assistance for Ukraine and the affluence of some Ukrainians in the EU has fostered resentment in countries such as Poland, which has welcomed nearly a million Ukrainian refugees since the conflict escalated in 2022.

In an interview last October, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said Poles are appalled by “the sight of young men from Ukraine, driving the best cars, spending weekends in five-star hotels.” Opinion polls suggest a shift in public sentiment against Ukrainians.In recent remarks, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky claimed that his country has received substantially less US aid than reported, saying the total is $76 billion, rather than $200 billion, which is often cited. He added that around 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in the conflict so far. Carlson highlighted both of these claims, calling them examples of blatant lies that the Western media reports uncritically.

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Normal in DC.

DOGE Investigating Feds Whose Net Worths Have Exploded (ZH)

DOGE head Elon Musk said on Tuesday that DOGE is going to investigate federal employees whose net worths have exploded despite their comparatively low pay. The announcement – which came after President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to work with DOGE, follows a bombshell report that Samantha Power, former head of USAID, saw her net worth explode to $30 million despite an annual salary under $250,000. “We don’t know why. Where did it come from? I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense,” Musk said on Tuesday. Power, a former ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama, and was sworn in as head of USAID in May of 2021, reported a net worth between $6.7 million-$16.5 million in January of 2021 on a disclosure form. Her net worth is now estimated as high as $30 million, according to the website Biden’s Basement.

According to various reports, Power’s sources of income have varied over the years. After serving as UN Ambassador, she reportedly made $471,000 per year as a Harvard professor, and made $351,000 from speaking engagements with major firmst such as Nestle, Google and UBS, along with $1 million in book royalties. Most notably, however, was an $11.73 million gain in her investment holdings. If we had to venture a guess, DOGE’s access to information from the Treasury, USAID, and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), run through Palantir’s intelligence apparatus (including AI), will quickly unravel graft hidden through multiple layers of organizational fog.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1888581827285148067

Meanwhile, there’s the issue of lawmakers who have become unbelievably ‘lucky’ when it comes to growing their net worth via insider trading.

In July, a bipartisan group of senators including Josh Hawley (R-MO) came to an agreement on a renewed effort to ban members of Congress from trading stock. “Congress should not be here to make a buck,” Hawley said at the time. “There is no reason why members of Congress ought to be profiting off of the information that only they get.”

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“.. it is quite wrong of both Lammy and Zelensky who claim Putin doesn’t want to talk. This is coded talk which means simply “he’s not prepared to give us what we want”.

Zelensky’s 100 Days Might End In Florida As Trump Prepares Ukraine Plan (Jay)

Are we witnessing the final days of caretaker President Zelensky? Two recent media events where he clearly stated, some would even say ‘begged’, for a deal with Donald Trump might indicate that he is now in panic mode. Zelensky’s recent offer to Trump for the U.S. to take Ukraine’s mineral reserves reveals a lot about the former comedian turned politician. In numerous speeches and various media events he has repeatedly talked about the Ukrainian people, Europe and the sanctity of democracy all being under threat when Russia wins the war. But now we can see all that was BS and that now, without Hollywood movie stars raising his profile of hundreds of media outlets pumping out the fake news to support him, we get to what really matters above all: mineral wealth.

The problem or dilemma Zelensky has is not unlike that of a dying old man who has millions in the bank. Does he hand over all his wealth to the best doctors to buy a few more years of life, based on their promises, or does he accept the end is near? His logic is not complicated. His chief focus is his own power and positon above all. But is a peace deal, with or without a mineral sweetner compatible with his presidential incumbency? Something, it would seem, has to give. What he is now doing is certainly panicking. There can be no other way to look at the recent media spots. With practically now all U.S. and UK media taking the line that the war is being lost now to Russia and further reports that Moscow could be planning a major push with one or two brigades, time is of the essence. He needs to think clearly.

Perhaps delusional western powers like the UK are preventing any lucid, realistic thinking, given that David Lammy, the British foreign secretary recently visited him and handed him a cheque for over 60 million USD and told him that Britain is prepared to replace the U.S. militarily. Yes, that’s 60, you read correctly. While it’s unclear what an army in defeat could do with this small change, given that U.S. experts are estimating that just for the Ukraine army to continue for one more year they would need between 50 and 100 BILLION dollars, the British should thank Zelensky for keeping a straight face at the farce. Zelensky’s problem is how to secure a peace deal and come out looking like a winner. Add to that almost mission impossible is his insistence on “western security” guaranties – read NATO membership – and you can see why things are not exactly moving forward very quickly.

Trump has announced a peace deal to be agreed in April. Like the 600-pound gorilla in the room, he is likely to make it happen, or at least a ceasefire of sorts, but will Zelensky still be president when it happens? Zelensky is rapidly realizing the trap and just how entangled he is in the centre of it. Give Trump a huge bribe? It might not cut it given that Trump must already be looking at who to replace Zelensky, who would probably offer more. Both Trump and Zelensky need to come out of it as victors and it was interesting how he used the word “victory” when explaining it to the Reuters journalists (do they actually ask questions or is it just their job to be his PR apparatus?). Yet the question of Putin being a victor has not been tackled, given that he’s already winning and holds all the cards. While it is true that the intensity of fighting is certainly the case on the Russian side, it is quite wrong of both Lammy and Zelensky who claim Putin doesn’t want to talk. This is coded talk which means simply “he’s not prepared to give us what we want”.

It’s unlikely Zelensky will be the broker to make the deal happen as we head towards Trump’s 100-day deadline and I predict, as I have been doing so for months, that both Putin and Trump will conclude that he needs to be removed for a deal to be made. NATO membership of Ukraine is a joke and cannot happen for any deal to be struck and it is telling that the West still clings to this fantasy, but explains why Zelensky is still harping on about it. At the time of writing Trump hinted to journalists that he was about to meet with Zelensky so we should estimate that this will be the ‘either piss or get off the pot’ moment where all diplomatic endearment will be put aside. Trump will tell him the plan and tell him there and then, you’re either with it or you’re out.

As easily as the Obama and Biden administrations ushered Zelensky and his predecessor into power, Trump will prove that he can counter the move. Watch very closely in the coming weeks for top aides of Zelensky to be fired, but who in reality have resigned. Trump’s specialty for years in NYC getting deals done was to threaten his competitors with seducing their wives. Many gave into this tactic. Almost certainly Trump’s people will be working on Zelensky’s entourage who might wipe him out financially with higher payoffs – if he chooses to stay. But will he stay?

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“..claimed that NATO is planning to oust Zelensky as it believes that he is one of the main obstacles to peace talks between Moscow and Kiev.”

Musk Reacts To Zelensky’s ‘Ukrainians Don’t Want Elections’ Claim (RT)

Elon Musk has taken a jab at Vladimir Zelensky over his claim that Ukrainians are opposed to holding presidential elections while the conflict with Russia continues. Zelensky’s term officially expired in May 2024, but he has refused to hold presidential elections since, citing active martial law. While Kiev’s backers in the West continue to recognize Zelensky as Ukraine’s president, Russia deems him illegitimate, insisting that legal power in the country now lies with the parliament and its speaker. In an interview with ITV on Friday, Zelensky explained Kiev’s reluctance to hold the new vote by arguing that “during this war, our population is against elections, all people are against it.” He claimed that holding elections under such circumstances would undermine Ukraine’s defense posture, adding, “If we suspend martial law, we will lose the army.”

Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump and the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), offered a response full of irony, posting “Sure” on social media. In November, the billionaire mocked Zelensky’s claim that the “US cannot force us to ‘sit and listen’ at the negotiating table. We are an independent country.” “His sense of humor is amazing,” the tech entrepreneur wrote at the time. According to the Ukrainian outlet Telegraf, Zelensky has already decided to run in the potential next election, if it is held. While the report estimated that the Ukrainian leader – who has a trust rating of around 52% – has a reasonable chance of winning, the situation could drastically change if former top general Valery Zaluzhny, currently Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, enters the presidential race.

The Ukrainian outlet claimed that to suppress the candidacy of the popular general, Zelensky could press criminal charges against Zaluzhny, including a probe related to the fall of Kherson to Russian forces in 2022. According to RBK-Ukraine, Zelensky’s team is also hoping that military intelligence chief Kirill Budanov could counter Zaluzhny’s potential bid for the presidency. Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to be pressuring Kiev to organize a new presidential election. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s top envoy for Ukraine, told Reuters earlier this month that Washington wants Kiev to hold the vote, potentially by the end of the year, especially if a ceasefire with Russia can be agreed upon in the coming months. “Most democratic nations have elections in their time of war. I think it is important they do so. I think it is good for democracy,” he said. Earlier this month, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) claimed that NATO is planning to oust Zelensky as it believes that he is one of the main obstacles to peace talks between Moscow and Kiev.

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From Friday, at the Munich Security Conference, we’ll have Vance, Kellogg, Rubio … and Zelensky.

Trump’s Envoy To Shift Ukraine Burden Onto Europe (RT)

Keith Kellogg, the US presidential envoy for the Ukraine conflict, will meet with European officials in the coming weeks to advance President Donald Trump’s objectives, according to Bloomberg and The Telegraph. The diplomatic campaign will reportedly kick off at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) on Friday, as the new US administration aims to recoup funds expended on the conflict in recent years. On Monday, the outlets cited insider sources outlining Kellogg’s plans to gather feedback from trans-Atlantic partners before finalizing a strategy for achieving a truce with Russia. He is interested in Europeans’ “willingness to take the lead on providing deterrent forces to ensure that any peace settlement holds,” a source reportedly told Bloomberg.

Kellogg is also expected to make it clear that the US has no intention of deploying troops to protect Ukraine and wants European NATO allies to increase their defense spending. The Telegraph claimed that Kellogg has reassured European officials of Trump’s commitment to maintaining some level of military assistance to Kiev. Concerns have been raised about the extent of Kellogg’s influence over Trump, after he reportedly said he was surprised by the president’s announcement of scheduled talks with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.

Trump aims to recoup money expended for support for Ukraine allocated under his predecessor, Joe Biden, by seeking rights to the country’s natural resources. In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, he said he had effectively secured $500 billion worth of rare-earth minerals as compensation, regardless of the outcome of negotiations with Russia. “They may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday, but we’re gonna have all this money in there, and I say, I want it back.”

US Vice President J.D. Vance will lead the American delegation at the MSC, where he is expected to meet with Zelensky. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the conference is an opportunity for American officials to “lay out a broad path forward” on Ukraine. Zelensky has claimed that Trump can achieve “peace through strength” with continued military assistance. He has conceded that without US support, the Ukrainian army risks collapse. Russian officials have rejected the idea of freezing the conflict along the current front lines, insisting on a comprehensive resolution addressing the underlying causes of hostilities, which include NATO expansion in Europe and discriminatory policies against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

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Got the money? Got the money?

Trump To Send Treasury Secretary To Kiev (RT)

US President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he will be sending Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Ukraine. The trip, which could take place as soon as this week, will include discussions of a potential deal for rare-earth minerals in exchange for aid to Kiev, according to various media reports. Trump recently demanded that Kiev must ensure a return on “America’s $300 billion” in aid by providing the US with critical minerals. He told Fox News on Tuesday that it would be “stupid” to keep funding Ukraine without tangible benefits. Rare-earth metals, which are essential for producing the magnets that convert power into motion in electric vehicles, smartphones, missile systems, and other advanced electronics, have no viable substitutes, and their demand is expected to rise significantly in the coming years. Bessent will be the first cabinet-level official in Trump’s administration to visit Kiev.

In a Truth Social post on Tuesday, Trump said he is sending Bessent to meet Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, stating that the conflict between Moscow and Kiev “must and will end soon.” Trump further claimed that the US had spent “billions of dollars globally, with little to show.” Though Trump did not specify Bessent’s travel date, Bloomberg and Reuters report it will happen this week for preliminary negotiations. Zelensky has signaled openness to such a deal but acknowledged that nearly half of what Kiev claims as its rare earths are located in areas controlled by Russia. He said Kiev’s supporters must help push Russian forces out of the mineral-rich areas before any investment can take place.

Before the 2022 escalation of the Ukraine conflict, the country held Europe’s largest titanium and lithium reserves, critical for military and energy industries. Around $7 trillion of Ukraine’s total mineral wealth of around $14.8 trillion is in its former Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, according to Forbes. However, these two regions declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 after the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev and later voted to join Russia. Trump’s demand has sparked strong criticism, including from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who argued that it “would be very selfish” to use Ukraine’s resources to finance defense support.

The US leader has been calling for a swift resolution to the conflict, signaling potential peace talks between Moscow and Kiev. He has reportedly tasked his special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, with negotiating a settlement within 100 days. However, no concrete details of a plan have been disclosed. Moscow has expressed openness to talks but insists that any negotiations must be based on equal and mutually acceptable terms, reflecting the realities on the ground and Russia’s national interests. According to Bloomberg, Kellogg plans to present Trump with potential strategies to end the conflict in the coming weeks.

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Lovely.

Europe Told To Brace For Flood Of Ukrainian Soldiers With PTSD (RT)

Ukrainian soldiers returning from the front could pose a threat to civilians across Europe due to untreated mental health issues, Polish military psychiatrist Radoslaw Tworus has warned. In an interview with Wirtualna Polska published on Sunday, Tworus, who heads the department of psychiatry, combat stress, and psychotraumatology at the Military Medical Institute in Warsaw, said trauma from the battlefield may lead to serious psychological problems, potentially endangering society. His warnings come amid growing concerns in the region that Ukrainian soldiers will emigrate en masse to neighboring countries after the conflict. “These extreme experiences related to stress, threats to life, witnessing injuries, destruction, hunger, and exhaustion will have great significance not only for Poland but for Europe. Because these people are in Europe,” Tworus stated.

“We have to prepare,” he added. Tworus emphasized that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is among the major concerns, but is only part of the issue. “If we are talking about the battlefield, we are talking about a very stressful environment… a person can face a number of different problems: adaptation issues, psychosis, depression, addictions. The spectrum of these disorders is very wide.” He warned that the most problematic cases involve individuals who are unaware of their mental health issues and therefore do not seek help. “There may be depression, but there may also be euphoria, agitation, and aggressive states. There are many of these symptoms,” Tworus said, noting that any problems related to sleeping, eating, nervousness, quick mental fatigue, exhaustion or euphoric states “require consultation.”

He cautioned that soldiers with unresolved mental health issues might project their struggles onto family members or even the countries hosting them, potentially leading to unpredictable consequences. Tworus’ comments follow a recent report by Personnel Service, a Polish recruitment company, which claimed that up to one million Ukrainians could emigrate to Poland after the conflict ends. Based on a poll conducted in December, the report indicated that one in four Ukrainian men and one in five Ukrainian women are considering leaving Ukraine post-conflict. The primary reasons cited were Ukraine’s economic difficulties and lack of security.

Poland initially saw the largest influx of Ukrainian asylum seekers in the EU following the escalation of the conflict with Russia, with the number peaking at 1.36 million in 2022. Across the EU, as of November 2024 approximately 4.2 million Ukrainians had been granted temporary protection status under a bloc-wide initiative. The program, which offers access to housing, education, and employment, was recently extended to March 2026, though it has faced opposition from some member states.

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“I am very much afraid that it could lead to riots or worse – to an internal standoff and a civil strife..”

Kiev Mayor Predicts ‘Painful Compromise’ To End Ukraine Conflict (RT)

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine could end “in a month or two,” Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko claimed on Tuesday, warning that a potential peace deal could be “very painful to every Ukrainian.” US President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to seek a swift end to the hostilities. He has not revealed his peace plan, but it reportedly involves freezing the conflict along the current front line, establishing a demilitarized zone patrolled by European soldiers, and suspending Kiev’s bid to join NATO. Russia has said it remains open to negotiations but insists that any agreement must include “reliable, legally binding agreements eliminating the root causes of the conflict” instead of just freezing it.

“I am sure that it would be difficult to call it a positive result,” Klitschko said, commenting on the peace prospects at a forum in Kiev. “The so-called compromise could turn out to be very painful for every Ukrainian.” The mayor believes that the end of the conflict could lead to social tensions and political strife that would lead to a “war of extermination” inside the country. Kiev is unlikely to be able to keep its wartime army after the conflict ends, he stated, adding that around a third of the current armed forces personnel would have to be discharged and reintegrated into civilian life. The end of the conflict would also mean the start of an election contest, the mayor said, adding that this could also spiral out of control.

“I am very much afraid that it could lead to riots or worse – to an internal standoff and a civil strife,” Klitschko warned. Elections are “traditionally accompanied by mutual accusations,” the Kiev mayor stated, adding that it could become “a difficult challenge” for Ukraine. The politician said he is “sure” that Ukraine is not ready to face this scenario and needs to seek a solution. Last week, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky stated that the nation cannot hold any votes under the present circumstances because it would supposedly “lose” its army. He also claimed that the whole election narrative was supposedly only peddled by Moscow, which would be the only one to benefit from a vote in Ukraine.

Moscow has repeatedly questioned Zelensky’s legitimacy since his presidential term officially expired in May 2024. Russian President Valdimir Putin has said the parliament is the only legitimate governing body in Ukraine. According to Klitschko, “everyone is talking about elections” in Ukraine even as the hostilities continue. “Political electoral processes have already begun,” the Kiev mayor added. Klitschko, a former world heavyweight boxing champion, was one of the most prominent figures in the Western-backed Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014 and became the capital’s mayor the same year. He has long had strained relations with Zelensky. In 2023, he accused the Ukrainian leader of steering the nation towards authoritarianism. Last month, he also stated that Zelensky’s team was seeking to “usurp power” by undermining local authorities.

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“.. the Kiev regime will not only actively hinder peace settlement processes but is also prepared to extend hostilities far beyond Ukraine’s borders..”

Kiev Plotting Provocations To Drag NATO Into War – Moscow (RT)

Ukrainian special services, with Western support, are preparing a series of high-profile provocations to implicate Moscow and draw NATO into a direct military confrontation, according to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). In a statement on Tuesday, the SVR claimed that Kiev plans to use Russian-made naval mines to orchestrate an explosion involving a foreign vessel in the Baltic Sea. The alleged goal is to blame Moscow and prompt NATO to restrict Russia’s access to the Baltic on the pretext of ensuring maritime security. NATO has been increasing its military activities along Eastern Europe’s borders in recent years, citing security concerns over Russia. Last month, it announced plans to expand its presence in the Baltic Sea, launching a new mission to safeguard undersea infrastructure following a series of disruptions and damage to cables between member states.

Russia, which perceives the Baltic Sea as a strategic area for its naval operations and energy exports, has vowed to do everything necessary to protect its interests. Last year, Nikolay Patrushev, the former head of the Russian Security Council who currently serves as an aide to President Vladimir Putin, warned that NATO is using its newest members, Sweden and Finland, to turn the Baltic into an “internal sea” under Western control.Moscow has stressed that it has no intention of attacking any NATO member states, but has criticized the military buildups on its border. It has also warned that direct confrontation between Russia and NATO could escalate into a nuclear conflict, adding that it will respond to any hostile moves.

In its statement, the SVR also alleged that Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), in collaboration with intelligence agencies from several European countries, is planning attacks on Russian “non-systemic opposition” figures and businessmen residing abroad. The plan reportedly involves recruiting perpetrators from Asian and Middle Eastern countries, offering up to $20,000 for participation, with instructions to blame the Russian intelligence services if apprehended. Russia has accused Ukraine of planning various provocations in order to blame Moscow. Ukraine has dismissed the claims as propaganda. In recent months, Russia’s security services have on numerous occasions arrested Ukrainian agents tasked with targeting prominent public figures. The SVR cited reports indicating that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and his associates are willing to resort to provocations to preserve their positions.

“To this end, the Kiev regime will not only actively hinder peace settlement processes but is also prepared to extend hostilities far beyond Ukraine’s borders,” it said. Zelensky remains in office despite his term expiring last May. He has refused to step down and postponed elections, citing martial law, which was imposed in 2022 following the escalation of the conflict with Russia.In a separate report this month, the SVR claimed that NATO is exploring ways to remove Zelensky from power by undermining his credibility before potential elections next year. It claimed that some Western officials see him as a roadblock to peace talks with Moscow. Moscow has expressed willingness to engage in peace talks, though Putin has insisted that negotiating with the current Ukrainian leadership will not have any legal meaning.

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Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary and Martin Kulldorff. One step away from crucifixion just a few years ago. Times change.

Trump Nominees, COVID Dissenters Launch Science Journal (JTN)

Before President Trump nominated them to lead the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, respectively, laid the groundwork for an academic journal on public health that would stand athwart the squelching of scientific dissent and narrative policing endemic to academic publishing around COVID-19. Now awaiting confirmation, the Stanford and Johns Hopkins medical school professors are handing the reins of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health to their collaborators, including founding editor-in-chief and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who endured social media censorship for his COVID views and firing from Harvard Med for his medical choices.

The house organ of the newly formed Academy of Public Health, JAPH stands apart from similar journals not only in its enthusiasm to challenge COVID-19 dogmas and bite the federal hand that feeds researchers, as evident in its first crop of articles Jan. 30, but in its business model, peer-review process and transparency practices. APH is an international nonprofit organized under the RealClearFoundation, a sibling to RealClearPolitics and itself a donor-financed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which announced the journal Wednesday and called Bhattacharya and Kulldorff its cofounders. While at least one author must be an APH member, received papers are published immediately and reviewers are each paid a $500 honorarium and publicly credited, and reviews are published alongside the papers – unusual practices in academic publishing.

JAPH will even publish “external article reviews” of influential papers published in journals without the “same philosophy of open peer-review and scientific discourse” – an unsolicited, public layer of peer review – and invite the authors to respond. More common: Its open-access model makes JAPH free to read, while authors pay $2,000 to publish research, “literature syntheses” and history articles and $500 for unreviewed “perspectives,” though the honorarium for reviewers may be applied to their own publications. Each APH member gets one free research, synthesis and history article, and an annual free perspective, while authors without research grants or institutional funds can also apply for waived publication fees on a case-by-case basis.

Kulldorff elaborated on the problems in science journals, which in “some ways” are now “hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,” and called JAPH a “proof of concept” for proposed solutions in his opening perspective Jan. 30. Beneficiaries of the new model include funding agencies, which are “not allowed to see the reviews they paid for” but “will get an external evaluation of the research they fund” through JAPH’s model, he said. Other first-issue articles include a study that found no “significant” differences in COVID case rates or “incidence rate ratios” between neighboring K-12 school districts when one had a mask mandate or when neither had one, and Kulldorff and Bhattacharya’s analysis of the “fundamental design flaws in the Covid vaccine trials” contrasted with polio vaccine trials.

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“..When Elon Musk forces his way into the United States Treasury, and threatens to steal your personal information and your social security check..”

“Get Violent and Fight”: Tennessee Minister Calls for Violence (Turley)

Clearly, Dr. Steve Caudle of Greater Second Missionary Baptist Church in Chattanooga is not the “turn-the-other-cheek” type of minister. Caudle called upon his flock to choose violence in responding to the policy changes in progress in Washington with the new Administration. It is a further escalation of the rage rhetoric from Democratic politicians and pundits. In a sermon live streamed to YouTube on Sunday, Caudle denounced Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for threatening to “steal” Americans’ information and money, and said that a violent “conflict” will be coming:

“In this nation, I’m worried that we are on the verge of bloodshed. This is an attempt to take us back to a day that we do not want to go, and we will not go. Therefore, there will be conflict. I pray that the peace of God will win out and overcome the madness that is attempting to take over this nation.” “And I will say to you, beloved: no one likes violence, but sometimes violence is necessary. When Elon Musk forces his way into the United States Treasury, and threatens to steal your personal information and your social security check, there is a possibility of violence. Sometimes the devil will act so ugly, that there is no other choice but to get violent and fight!”

Invoking Matthew 11:12, he added: “… Why not talk this way? Because Jesus did… Jesus said in this key verse… ‘The kingdom of Heaven suffers — what — violence. And the who — the violent — take it by force. The kingdom of God is a warzone, it is a battlefield. You did know this, right?”

There is a normalization of such violent rhetoric with mainstream figures. The result can be a sense of license for some willing to turn to violent forms of expression, particularly when given the patina of moral justification. As I have previously written, rage rhetoric has long been a part of our political process. However, when religious figures rationalize violent action, we cross a dangerous Rubicon in the use of such rhetoric.

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“Hundreds of billions in grants could be returned to US and foreign governments if fraud is proven..”

Clinton Probe to Expose Gates, Soros and Epstein Links (Sp.)

The fall of the House of Clinton would trigger a domino effect, upending globalist entities like Bilderberg, billionaires such as Bill Gates & George Soros, and their bought politicians worldwide, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel. Ortel calls CF the largest unprosecuted fraud. If true, its trustees, executives and donors – both US and foreign – could face IRS and legal probes at home and abroad. Hundreds of billions in grants could be returned to US and foreign governments if fraud is proven, according to the analyst.

Australia, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, the UK, Ukraine and others funded CF, public records show. The largest known donor is UNITAID (WHO), which has sent hundreds of millions more than CF has reported to the IRS since 2006. Other suspicious donors: DFID, AusAID, NORAD and aid agencies from Canada, Ireland and Sweden, Ortel says. Private foundations also funded Clinton frauds. The Gates Foundation has donated since 2005 – while convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein collaborated with Bill Clinton. George Soros is another key donor.

Harvard, Yale and Columbia University gave credibility to Clinton charity frauds, Ortel says. Legacy media & publishers boosted Clinton Global Initiative events, ignoring that none were legally registered charities. A full probe into CF and its offshoots is needed ASAP, Ortel says. A 2018 hearing revealed CF owes $2.5 billion to the US government for acting as a foreign agent instead of a nonprofit. But the scandal exceeds $2.5 billion – Bill Clinton used the charity as a front, with no honest accounting for AIDS, climate, or Haiti’s missing $10 billion, Ortel concludes.

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“..marijuana and hashish oil [..] ..carefully concealed in his personal belongings..”

Russia Treated US ‘Very Nicely’ – Trump (RT)

President Donald Trump has said that Moscow agreed to release Marc Fogel, a former US embassy employee sentenced to 14 years in prison on drug trafficking charges, without asking “much” in return. Moscow has not yet commented on the development, but US officials have praised the move as a “show of good faith” after US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff’s private jet departed Russia with Fogel on board on Tuesday. “We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually. I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed,” Trump told journalists at the White House later in the day.

Asked whether Washington had given Moscow “anything in return,” Trump paused briefly before responding: “Not much. No, they were very nice.” Fogel, a teacher at an Anglo-American school in Moscow, had previously worked at the US embassy in Russia. He lost his diplomatic immunity in May 2021. In August of the same year, he was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow after authorities found marijuana and hashish oil in his possession. He was later sentenced to 14 years in prison after Russian officials accused him of attempting to establish a drug trafficking route, alleging that the banned substances were carefully concealed in his personal belongings.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Aluminum
https://twitter.com/i/status/1889332373222797385

 

 

Koala

 

 

Yelp

 

 

Welcome
https://twitter.com/i/status/1888946524182528022

 

 

Chauvet (read the whole thread)

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 012025
 
 January 1, 2025  Posted by at 11:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Paolo Uccello Story of Noah 1447

 

Ukraine ‘Has Ceased To Exist’ – Ex-Commander (RT)
Trump Eager To Settle Ukraine Conflict – Zelensky (RT)
Fuel Prices in Europe Surge Amid Looming End to Russian Gas Transit (Sp.)
Russia Halts Gas Supplies To EU Via Ukraine (RT)
Musk Living In Trump’s House – NYT (RT)
Musk Predicts Election Loss For ‘Chancellor Oaf Schitz’ (RT)
Scholz Hits Back At Musk In New Year’s Address (RT)
Encode Joins Musk in Fight Against OpenAI’s For-Profit Transition (ET)
Appeals Court Upholds Trump’s Liability in E. Jean Carroll Case (Spencer)
Jack Smith Drops Appeal Of Classified Docs Case (JTN)
Even With Trump’s Endorsement, Johnson’s Speakership Is Far From Secure (JTN)
Let’s Get the United States Out of the Censorship Business (Turley)
2025: A Second Renaissance, Or Chaos? (Pepe Escobar)
COVID Catechists Come For Incoming NIH Chief Bhattacharya (JTN)
Jimmy Carter’s Legacy Still Hampers A World Trump Must Fix (JTN)
Paramount Series ‘Landman’ Surprises With Anti-Climate Agenda Message (ZH)

 

 

Happy New Year everyone!

 

 

 

 

451

Eva

 

 

 

 

“..ceased to exist” as a functional state due to widespread graft and mismanagement..”

“Ukrainian leaders have transformed the nation into a “concentration camp..”

Ukraine ‘Has Ceased To Exist’ – Ex-Commander (RT)

The Ukrainian state has essentially ceased to exist, is plagued by endemic institutional failure and corruption, with Kiev’s troops continuing to hold on by sheer will alone, a former commander has argued. He also warned that Ukraine’s defenses could collapse, allowing Russia to march all the way to the Dnieper River. In an interview with Novyni Live on Monday, Vladimir Shylov, former commander of the 3rd Company in the 134th Separate Territorial Defense Battalion, lashed out at Ukraine’s political leadership, stating that the country has “ceased to exist” as a functional state due to widespread graft and mismanagement. Shylov expressed concern that these woes could allow Russian forces to increase their gains, warning that they may be able to overrun frontline positions in Donbass and reach as far as the Dnieper River. The advances could be facilitated by internal chaos, he added, stating “In our country, everything is a mess…the front is holding only thanks to the Ukrainian people.”

Ukrainian leaders have transformed the nation into a “concentration camp,” Shylov claimed, highlighting systemic failures across all branches of government, including the legislative, executive, and judicial sectors. Shylov also specifically criticized the country’s leader, Vladimir Zelensky, for what he described as a blatant neglect of his defense responsibilities, alleging that his government had ignored Western warnings of a Russian offensive prior to the special military operation, resulting in the inadequate preparation of Kiev’s forces. The ex-commander went on to comment on Ukraine’s ongoing incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region, portraying it as a political ploy without any real strategic military value. He argued that the Ukrainian offensive had turned out to be a symbolic gesture which does not compensate for the substantial territorial losses Ukraine has suffered, particularly in Donbass.

Over the past several months, Russia has made significant gains in Donbass and elsewhere, with President Vladimir Putin noting that regular advances now amount to kilometers rather than hundreds of meters. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov said earlier this month that Ukraine had lost one million service members since February 2022, with more than half of that number in 2024 alone, adding that Moscow’s forces are in full control of the strategic initiative. Meanwhile, Ukrainian battlefield commanders continue to complain of a critical shortage of manpower, despite Kiev implementing stricter mobilization rules and lowering the draft age from 27 to 25 this spring.

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“..the full-scale aggression of a mad state against a civilized one.”

Trump Eager To Settle Ukraine Conflict – Zelensky (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump is fully capable of achieving peace in Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky has said, suggesting that Trump understands the necessity of containing Russia. Zelensky made the remarks in his New Year’s address on Tuesday, stressing that “Ukraine is not alone” in its conflict with Russia, while praising Kiev’s Western allies, particularly the US, for their consistent support. He recalled conversations he had with both US President Joe Biden and Trump, noting that he has “no doubt that the new American president is willing and capable of achieving peace and ending [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s aggression.” According to Zelensky, Trump “understands that the first is impossible without the second. Because this is not a street fight where you have to calm down both sides,” calling the conflict “the full-scale aggression of a mad state against a civilized one.”

“I believe that we, together with the United States, are capable of exerting that force. Of compelling Russia into a just peace,” he said, adding, however, that “a truly just peace cannot be based on the principle of ‘let’s start with a clean slate,’” due to the numerous casualties and widespread destruction in the conflict. Trump vowed during the 2024 election campaign to swiftly end the Ukraine conflict, with his team’s reported peace plans calling for a 20-year delay in Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations, a freeze of the conflict, and the establishment of a demilitarized zone patrolled by European peacekeepers to monitor the ceasefire.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has signaled that while Moscow is open to talks with the Trump administration, it will not accept NATO membership for Ukraine in any form. Lavrov stressed that Russia seeks a legally binding peace agreement ensuring its long-term security and opposes any freeze of the conflict that would merely prolong the hostilities. Moscow has said Kiev’s aspirations to join NATO are among the root causes of the conflict and insists that all the goals of its military operation, including Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification, must be achieved. Russia has also signaled that it is ready to declare an immediate ceasefire and begin peace talks as soon as Kiev begins withdrawing from all Russian territory, including the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye.

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Ain’t seen nothing yet.

Fuel Prices in Europe Surge Amid Looming End to Russian Gas Transit (Sp.)

Gas prices in Europe have shot up to $536 per 1,000 cubic meters during ICE trading, the highest since November 27, 2023, amid expectations of halted Russian gas transit through Ukraine starting January 1. Prices rose by over 4% since the day’s start. February futures at the Dutch TTF hub exceeded $536 per 1,000 cubic meters (€50 per MWh). The current transit agreement, allowing the transport of 40 billion cubic meters annually through Ukraine, expires on January 1. Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that no new agreement would be signed before the New Year, and Kiev announced plans to halt Russian gas transit at 8:00 a.m. Moscow time on January 1.

Ukraine stated, however, that it is open to resuming transit upon the European Commission’s request, provided it is non-Russian gas. Putin suggested contracts with third-party suppliers, including Turkish, Hungarian, Slovak, or Azerbaijani companies. Meanwhile, gas transit bids from Russia through Ukraine for January 1 have dropped to zero, according to data from the Ukrainian Gas Transmission System Operator. Supplies will end at 8:00 a.m. Moscow time (05:00 GMT) on January 1, according to a contractual document on gas transit. Ukrainian authorities have repeatedly stated they do not plan to extend the transit agreement.

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“Ukrainian officials confirmed the cessation of transit, calling it a “historic event” in the interests of national security..”

Russia Halts Gas Supplies To EU Via Ukraine (RT)

Russia has officially ceased gas transit through Ukraine as of 8am Moscow time on January 1, confirming the expected end of contracts that have been in place since 2019. Russian energy giant Gazprom announced the halt after negotiations to extend the transit agreements with Ukrainian companies Naftogaz and the Gas Transmission System Operator of Ukraine fell through. In a press release issued on Wednesday, Gazprom said, “Due to the repeated and clear refusal of the Ukrainian side to extend these agreements, Gazprom was deprived of the technical and legal opportunity to supply gas for transit through Ukraine starting from January 1, 2025.” As a result, gas supplies to Europe via this route are now completely suspended. The gas pipeline that traverses Ukraine leads into Slovakia, which had hoped to continue receiving Russian gas and urged Ukraine to extend the transit agreements.

In response to Kiev’s decision to stop the gas transit, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico threatened last week to cut electricity supplies to Ukraine. The five-year contract for Russian gas deliveries through Ukraine expired despite ongoing long-term agreements between Gazprom and several European buyers. Ukrainian officials confirmed the cessation of transit, calling it a “historic event” in the interests of national security. Kiev has long denied the possibility of a new transit deal with Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed the finality of the situation during his annual press conference on December 19, stating, “This transit contract will not exist anymore, it’s clear. But we will manage; Gazprom will manage.”

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“The tech mogul’s stay at Mar-a-Lago allegedly began around Election Day..”

Musk Living In Trump’s House – NYT (RT)

Billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has reportedly been living in a cottage on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida since the US presidential election in November, according to The New York Times. Musk took up residence at the Banyan Cottage, which typically rents for $2,000 per night and is situated just a few hundred feet from Trump’s main house, providing Musk with easy access to the president-elect, the NYT reported on Monday, citing a person familiar with the property. This arrangement underscores Musk’s significant influence on Trump’s transition team and has allowed him frequent visits with the president-elect, including dinners and policy discussions, the newspaper noted. Since publicly endorsing Trump following a failed assassination attempt in July, Musk has gradually become one of his key advisors on both policy and personnel decisions.

He attended meetings at the Mar-a-Lago Teahouse, participated in phone calls with foreign leaders, and involved his employees in vetting candidates for senior administration roles. Recently, Musk joined Trump for dinner with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a rival in the tech industry. Musk’s financial contributions to Trump’s campaign have also been substantial: he reportedly spent around $250 million in the final months of the election cycle to support Trump. This level of backing has cemented Musk’s role as one of the most important donors and social media promoters for the president-elect. The tech mogul’s stay at Mar-a-Lago allegedly began around Election Day, during which he watched the returns with Trump.

He left the property briefly around Christmas but is expected to return soon, the newspaper wrote, noting that the exact amount Musk will pay for his stay at Mar-a-Lago remains unclear. Vice President-elect JD Vance has also been frequently seen at Mar-a-Lago during the transition period. Last week, Trump posted what appears to be a private text to Musk on his social media platform, extending an invitation to visit Mar-a-Lago. Screenshots shared by several outlets included Musk’s acknowledgment of the invitation but did not confirm whether he planned to attend. ”Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago?” Trump wrote in a soon-deleted post, adding, “We miss you and X! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!!” before signing off with his initials, “DJT.”

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They have no idea what to do with his comments.

Musk Predicts Election Loss For ‘Chancellor Oaf Schitz’ (RT)

Elon Musk has forecasted that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who he mockingly referred to as “Oaf Schitz,” as well as his Social Democratic Party (SPD) will lose the Federal Republic’s upcoming parliamentary elections. Germany will hold snap elections at the end of February; Scholz’s ‘traffic light’ coalition government has collapsed over disagreements regarding Ukraine aid, economic reforms and climate policy. Earlier this month, the SPD leader lost a vote of confidence in parliament, leading to its dissolution. According to Statista, 56% of Germans believe Scholz has done a poor job, while 37% are satisfied with his performance. The rating was influenced by Germany’s economic stagnation, his migration policies, and a general perception of ineffective government.

Musk, who has been a consistent critic of the current German government, took a jab at Scholz on Monday, predicting that “Chancellor Oaf Schitz or whatever his name is will lose.” The tycoon also suggested that the right-wing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party – which he previously praised as the country’s “last spark of hope” – would “win an epic victory” in the election. Musk’s apparent endorsement, however, has sparked a backlash from German officials, who described his comments as “intrusive and arrogant,” suggesting they constitute unwelcome interference.

Chancellor Scholz noted that the country’s future “will not be decided by the owners of social media channels” but rather by the country’s “vast majority of reasonable and decent people.” The billionaire’s comments follow a terrorist attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg earlier this month, in which a car rammed into a crowd, killing five people and injuring nearly 200. The incident, linked to a Saudi asylum seeker, has intensified criticism of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, with opposition parties and far-right groups blaming lax migration policies ahead of Germany’s snap elections.

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Yeah, if you’re a head of state, you really want to get into a war of words with a foreign citizen. That shows statesmanship..

Scholz Hits Back At Musk In New Year’s Address (RT)

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a veiled swipe at tech billionaire Elon Musk during his annual New Year’s Eve address, warning that the country’s future will be decided by its citizens, not the owners of social media platforms. In a televised message on Tuesday, Scholz highlighted national unity and called for solidarity amid economic challenges. However, he also addressed a more contentious issue: Alleged “foreign interference” in German politics, particularly by Musk, who has openly supported the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as the country’s “last spark of hope.” “Where Germany goes from here will be decided by you – the citizens. It will not be decided by the owners of social media channels,” Scholz said, without calling the X owner out by name.

“In our debates, one might be forgiven for thinking that the more extreme an opinion is, the more attention it garners. But it won’t be the person who yells the loudest who will decide where Germany goes from here. Rather, that will be up to the vast majority of reasonable and decent people,” he added. Musk’s recent endorsements of the AfD, which is under surveillance by domestic intelligence for its alleged “extremist” views, has drawn widespread criticism from German officials. The billionaire, a key adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump, has been vocal on social media and in opinion pieces, praising the AfD and criticizing mainstream German politicians. Friedrich Merz, the head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), called Musk’s endorsement “overbearing and presumptuous.” Lars Klingbeil, co-chairman of Scholz’s Social Democrats, compared Musk to Russian President Vladimir Putin, claiming that both aim to weaken Germany and plunge it into chaos.

A government spokeswoman, Christiane Hoffmann, said at a news conference on Monday that while everyone has the right to an opinion, Musk is attempting to influence the German election. Scholz’s coalition government collapsed in November over disagreements regarding Ukraine aid and economic policies. The chancellor lost a confidence vote in December, leading to the dissolution of parliament and the scheduling of snap elections on February 23. The chancellor’s New Year’s Eve address also touched on other pressing issues, including Germany’s flagging economy, the recent attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, and the upcoming 35th anniversary of German reunification. Scholz urged Germans to resist manipulation and “not let ourselves be played off each other.”

According to Statista, 56% of Germans believe Scholz has done a poor job, while 37% are satisfied with his performance. This rating reflects concerns over Germany’s economic stagnation, his migration policies, and a general perception of ineffective governance. The AfD is currently polling second with around 20%, behind the CDU/CSU bloc at about 31%. However, a strong performance by the AfD could make forming a government more challenging, as all mainstream parties have ruled out a coalition with it.

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AI is very dangerous. Make no mistake.

Encode Joins Musk in Fight Against OpenAI’s For-Profit Transition (ET)

Encode, an artificial intelligence (AI) advocacy group, filed a brief in support of Elon Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that enabling the conversion toward a for-profit entity could endanger public interest. Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last month, arguing that the entity was formed on promises that it would retain its nonprofit status focused on safe AI use. Musk said he invested in the project based on this premise. Disrupting the status quo “will seriously harm plaintiffs and the public at large,” the complaint said. In the brief, Encode is described as “a youth-led organization advocating for safe and responsible artificial intelligence (AI)” with “a network of over 1,000 volunteers across 40 countries.” On Dec. 27, Encode filed a proposed amicus curiae brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Oakland Division, supporting Musk’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the transition.

“If the world truly is at the cusp of a new age of artificial general intelligence (AGI), then the public has a profound interest in having that technology controlled by a public charity legally bound to prioritize safety and the public benefit rather than an organization focused on generating financial returns for a few privileged investors,” the brief said. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has admitted that AI poses severe risks to humanity, Encode said. Altman signed a statement along with numerous luminaries, including Nobel Prize winners, saying that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” People worldwide are already facing challenges from AI technologies including disinformation, algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and democratic erosion, which makes keeping AI safe a “pressing, immediate concern,” the advocacy group said.

OpenAI currently runs a capped-profit subsidiary that is fully controlled by the OpenAI nonprofit parent company, which is expected to ensure the safe use of AGI. In Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, the boards of nonprofit charitable corporations owe fiduciary duties toward their beneficiaries, which in this case would be humanity, Encode said. By transferring operations to a Delaware public benefit corporation (PBC), OpenAI’s priorities would shift from ensuring the safety of advanced AI to shareholder interests. Allowing such a transition is harmful to the public interest, the brief said. In a Dec. 27 blog post titled “Why OpenAI’s Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission”, OpenAI said that transitioning to a PBC would be best for the long-term success of the nonprofit’s mission to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity.

“The PBC is a structure used by many others that requires the company to balance shareholder interests, stakeholder interests, and a public benefit interest in its decision making”, the post said. OpenAI began as a research lab in 2015. It had a goal of advancing AI in a way “most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” the post said. Out of the $137 million in donations it collected initially, less than a third came from Musk. After OpenAI management realized the project would require “far more capital,” they created the current for-profit structure controlled by the nonprofit in a bid to collect funds from investors. According to OpenAI, the new PBC “will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff to pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.”

In a Dec. 13 post, OpenAI had dismissed claims made by Musk in his lawsuit. It said the lawsuit was the fourth legal challenge against OpenAI by the billionaire in less than a year. “In 2017, Elon not only wanted, but actually created, a for-profit as OpenAI’s proposed new structure. When he didn’t get majority equity and full control, he walked away and told us we would fail,” it said. “Now that OpenAI is the leading AI research lab and Elon runs a competing AI company, he’s asking the court to stop us from effectively pursuing our mission.” Besides the ethical concerns, Musk alleged in the complaint that OpenAI and its investor Microsoft roughly control around 70 percent of the generative AI market and engage in “anticompetitive conduct.”

OpenAI and Microsoft ban investors from funding OpenAI’s competitors, specifically Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, it said. “OpenAI’s path from a nonprofit to for-profit behemoth is replete with per se anticompetitive practices, flagrant breaches of its charitable mission, and rampant self-dealing,” the complaint said. xAI was formed in July 2023. The company introduced the Grok-1 AI model on the X social media platform a few months later, in November 2023, and has introduced updates to the tool. In May, xAI raised $6 billion in funding. Last week, xAI said it has closed the funding and that the company’s progress is “accelerating rapidly.”

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30-year old hearsay devoid of any evidence. Wonder what the Supreme Court thinks of that..

Appeals Court Upholds Trump’s Liability in E. Jean Carroll Case (Spencer)

The election is over, Trump has been reelected, but the lawfare continues nonetheless. On Monday, a federal appeals court that must have been under the influence of some psychotropic drug upheld Trump’s liability for supposedly sexually abusing the partisan fantasist E. Jean Carroll in a Bloomingdale’s dressing room sometime in the 1990s. Carroll’s story has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese that has been used for target practice, but despite lacking any evidence, she keeps winning in court — believe all women, doncha know, even the crazy mendacious ones. Trump’s team is going to keep on appealing, and that’s good. Maybe sanity will prevail at some point. Fox News reported Monday that the appeals court’s is “a blow to the president-elect,” and leaves him “on the hook for the $5 million payout ordered by the jury.”

An unnamed panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which consists of 27 judges in all, issued an unsigned ruling claiming that Trump’s attorneys had not succeeded in establishing “that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings.” The Trump team “has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial.” In the immortal words of Peter Lorre in the cinematic classic “All Through the Night,” “But that’s silly!” Back in Sept. 2024, the Post Millennial reported that Trump attorney Will Scharf, “speaking at Trump Tower in New York City after a hearing to ask to overturn the final verdict against Trump in the E Jean Carroll case,” pointed out quite correctly that the alleged victim’s story “at its heart is an utterly implausible, he said she said story.”

Serious allegations of this kind are supposed to be established on the basis of evidence and witnesses, but Scharf noted that in this case, there was “no corroboration for anything” that Carroll claimed about what went on between her and Trump. The fix was in from the beginning: Carroll’s attorneys never produced any “corroborating witnesses” or “confirmatory DNA.” She filed no police report at the time of the supposed incident, and couldn’t even say when exactly her encounter with Trump was supposed to have happened. “No surveillance evidence or witnesses have ever been found or come forward confirming any asked of E Jean Carroll’s story.” Even worse, the case only went to court in the first place because corrupt leftists changed the rules so that they could get Trump.

As PJM’s Ben Bartee noted back in Apr. 2023, Carroll was only able to file her case at all because of “an exception carved out in the New York state legal code that many speculate was crafted especially to enable the prosecution of Trump.” New York Magazine explained at that time that Carroll was able to file her suit “because of the Adult Survivors Act, a new New York state law that went into effect that same month giving adult survivors of sexual misconduct a one-year window to file civil cases that would otherwise be outside the statute of limitations.” So New York changed the law to get Trump, Carroll took immediate advantage and now the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is playing along with this vicious and partisan charade.

There are more problems besides all that. In 2019, Carroll appeared on the cover of New York Magazine beside a large headline that read: “This is what I was wearing 23 years ago when Donald Trump attacked me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” Yet the Donna Karan dress she was wearing on the magazine cover wasn’t manufactured at the time of the alleged encounter between Trump and Carroll. And while the magazine cover is certain that the “attack” took place in 1996, Carroll has never been that definite.

This sort of thing should have gotten the case thrown out of court on the first day, but that would require those who brought it into court in the first place to be interested in justice when all they really wanted to do was get Trump. And get him they did: Fox notes that the appeals court’s ruling “comes after a New York jury last year found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman store in the mid-1990s—and for subsequently defaming her when she came forward with her story during his first term in office.”

This isn’t over. Steven Cheung, a Trump transition spokesman and incoming White House communications director, stated: “The American People have re-elected President Trump with an overwhelming mandate, and they demand an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and a swift dismissal of all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded Carroll Hoax, which will continue to be appealed. We look forward to uniting our country in the new administration as President Trump makes America great again.” So do we, Mr. Cheung. We look forward to the day when all the plotters against our free republic are unmasked, and E. Jean Carroll is publicly known as what she really is. Are there still courts that are free enough of corruption and politicization to bring that day closer?

Read more …

Jack is licking his wounds.

Jack Smith Drops Appeal Of Classified Docs Case (JTN)

Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday withdrew his appeals request for his Florida classified documents case against President-elect Donald Trump’s co-defendants. The attorney dropped his appeal against Trump last month after Trump won reelection to the White House, citing a Justice Department policy not to prosecute sitting presidents. Trump will be sworn in next month. Smith previously accused Trump in 2022 of improperly taking classified documents from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. But the case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in July, who cited the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment as special counsel.

Trump and the co-defendants, longtime Trump aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos De Oliveira, all pleaded not guilty to the charges. The new order withdraws Smith’s appeal in the prosecution of the two co-defendants, per ABC News. Smith also passed the appeal to federal prosecutors in Florida, including U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Markenzy Lapointe. It is not clear whether the prosecutors intend to continue the appeal. Smith is expected to step down from his post ahead of Trump’s inauguration next month.

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Time for Trump to apply force. Without a speaker in place, everything he wants will be delayed.

Even With Trump’s Endorsement, Johnson’s Speakership Is Far From Secure (JTN)

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R., La., faces a difficult path toward retaining the speaker’s gavel in the next Congress, even with President-elect Donald Trump’s endorsement. When the House votes on Friday, lawmakers will hold a formal contest in which the prospective leader must secure a majority of votes to lead the chamber. That process is likely to give irate conservatives an opportunity to keep the Louisiana Republican from returning to the top job. The House elections returned a narrow Republican majority, which will temporarily shrink as Trump has tapped members of the lower chamber to serve in his administration. In early 2023, Kevin McCarthy, then the Republican leader, struggled to claim the gavel as roughly 20 Republicans sought to extract budgetary concessions from him. McCarthy ultimately lost the post when roughly half a dozen Republicans voted with Democrats to boot him from the job.

Republicans won 220 seats in the 2024 House elections, compared to the 215 that went for the Democrats. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., left Congress after Trump named him as his pick for attorney general, though he later withdrew himself from consideration. His seat will not be filled by the time of the leadership contest. At least some journalists, however, have raised questions as to whether Gaetz may yet take the oath of office to vote this week as he was elected to the next Congress. Johnson will face a narrower majority than McCarthy did two years prior, and, arguably, a more frustrated bloc of budget hawks. Johnson only claimed the gavel after several other Republicans failed to win the support of the disparate wings of the conference. But Trump’s endorsement could prove a boon to him as he seeks to unify Republicans.

“Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social. That endorsement seems to have one over at least one member of the anti-McCarthy bloc that brought down Johnson’s predecessor. “Trump endorsing Johnson is ‘art of the deal’ level practicality. We could never have held up McCarthy two years ago for concessions if a Trump certification hung in the balance,” Gaetz posted. “Now, it does. We were able to hold up McCarthy because Republican voters weren’t all that eager to see us getting back to being Biden’s bitch (which Kevin ultimately did anyway). The resistance to [Johnson] is now futile. Let’s work to make him the best version of himself (which was more like the 2023 vintage of Mike).”

Unfortunately for Johnson, Gaetz’s ability to vote at all appears unlikely. Other dissidents, however, have suggested they will not support Johnson, with Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Victoria Sparz, R-Ind., among the most prominent of his critics. “I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan,” Massie posted on X. “We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget.” “Mike Johnson is the next Paul Ryan. On January 3rd, 2025, I won’t be voting for Mike Johnson. I hope my colleague will join me because history will not give America another ‘do-over,’” he added.

“There are a lot of other people who are interested,” Spartz said Monday on “Fox and Friends.” “He didn’t deliver for President Trump, too, what he promised just recently.” “He needs to be able to convince the American people that he is able to do it,” she added.

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“These groups form a censorship consortium where the suppression of speech attracts millions in federal dollars.”

Let’s Get the United States Out of the Censorship Business (Turley)

On this New Year’s Eve, billions of people will gather with friends to ring in 2025 with the hope of a better year to come. For the first time in many years, free-speech advocates have a reason to celebrate. With 2024, we will say goodbye to one of the most reviled offices in the Biden Administration: The Global Engagement Center. I discuss the Center in my recent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage as one of the most active components in the massive censorship system funded by the Biden Administration. The demise of the GEC is a good start. However, like weight loss resolutions, it will take much more of a commitment if we are going to restore free speech in the United States. It is time to make the ultimate resolution to rip out the censorship root and stem from our government.

This month, the Biden Administration fought to keep the GEC funded, but Republicans refused to include it in the continuing resolution for the budget. However, even with the closure of this one office, Biden will leave behind the most comprehensive censorship system in the history of the United States. Over the last three years, many of us have detailed a comprehensive system of grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or to pressure advertisers to withdraw support for targeted sites. The subjects for censorship ranged from election fraud to social justice to climate change. I testified at the first hearing by the special committee investigating the censorship system funded or coordinated by the Biden Administration.

It is an unprecedented alliance of corporate, government, and academic groups against free speech in the United States. The Biden Administration established the most anti-free speech record since the Adams Administration. House investigations showed the critical role played by government officials in “switchboarding,” or channeling demands for removal or bans in social media. Officials evaded the limits of the First Amendment by using these groups as surrogates for censorship. Even with the elimination of the GEC, other offices remain in various agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security, which emerged as one of the critical control centers in this system.

CISA head Jen Easterly declared that her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure would be extended to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes not just “disinformation” and “misinformation,” but combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” These groups form a censorship consortium where the suppression of speech attracts millions in federal dollars. Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created in association with Stanford University “at the request of DHS/CISA.” EIP supplied a “centralized reporting system” to process what were known as “Jira tickets” targeting unacceptable views. It would include not only politicians but commentators and pundits as well as the satirical site The Babylon Bee.

Stanford’s Virality Project pushed to censor even true facts since “true stories … could fuel hesitancy” over taking the vaccine or other measures. Emails show government officials stressing that they could not be seen as “openly endors[ing]” censorship while other groups sought to minimize public scrutiny of their work. For example, one article featured the work of Kate Starbird, director and co-founder of the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. In one communication, Starbird cautioned against giving examples of disinformation to keep them from being used by critics, adding “since everything is politicized and disinformation inherently political, every example is bait.” Likewise, University of Michigan’s James Park is shown pitching that school’s WiseDex First Pitch program, promising that “our misinformation service helps policy makers at platforms who want to . . . push responsibility for difficult judgments to someone outside the company . . . by externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship.”

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“Trump for his part has less than zero incentive to be dragged into a further quagmire; leave that to the clueless European chihuahuas.”

2025: A Second Renaissance, Or Chaos? (Pepe Escobar)

FLORENCE – It’s a dazzling Tuscan winter morning, and I am inside the legendary Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, founded in the early 13th century and finally consecrated in 1420, in a very special place in History of Art: right in front of one of the monochrome frescos painted in 1447-1448 by master of perspective Paolo Uccello, depicting the Universal Deluge. It’s as if Paolo Uccello was depicting us – in our current times of trouble. So inspired by neoplatonic superstar Marsilio Ficino – immortalized in a chic red robe by Ghirlandaio at the Cappella Tornabuoni – I tried to pull off a back to the future and ideally imagine who and what Paolo Uccello would feature in his depiction of our current deluge.

Let’s start with the positives. 2024 was the Year of the BRICS – with the merit for all the accomplishments going for the tireless work of the Russian presidency. 2024 was also the Year of the Axis of Resistance – until the serial blows suffered during the past few months, a serious challenge which will propel its rejuvenation. And 2024 was the year that defined the lineaments of the endgame in the proxy war in Ukraine: what remains to be seen is how deep the “rules-based international order” will be buried in the black soil of Novorossiya. Now let’s turn to the auspicious prospects ahead. 2025 will be the year of consolidation of China as the paramount geoeconomics force on the planet. It will be the year where the defining battle of the 21st century – Eurasia v. NATOstan – will be sharpened in an array of unpredictable vectors. And it will be the year of advancing, interlocking connectivity corridors – the defining factor in Eurasia integration.

Not by accident Iran is central to this interlocking connectivity – from the Strait of Hormuz (through which transits, daily, at least 23% of the world’s oil) to the port of Chabahar, which links West Asia with South Asia. Connectivity corridors to watch are the return of one of the top Pipelineistan sagas, the 1,800 km-long Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline; the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), which links three BRICS (Russia-Iran-India) and several aspiring BRICS partners; the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project; and last but not least, the fast advancing Northern Sea Route (or Northern Silk Road, as the Chinese call it), which will eventually become the cheapest and fastest alternative to the Suez canal.

A few days before the start of Trump 2.0 in Washington, Russia and Iran will finally, officially sign a comprehensive strategic partnership deal in Moscow, over two years in the making: once again, a key deal between two top BRICS, with immense, cascading repercussions in Eurasia integration terms. A completely sealed channel of negotiation Dmitri Trenin, respected member of Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council, has what is so far the most realist road map for an acceptable end of the proxy war in Ukraine. “Acceptable” does not even begin to describe it – because from the point of view of the collective West political “elites” which bet the farm and the bank on this war, nothing is acceptable except Russia’s strategic defeat, which will never happen.

As it stands, President Putin is in fact containing elite sectors in Moscow who favor not only cutting off the head of the snake but the body as well. Trump for his part has less than zero incentive to be dragged into a further quagmire; leave that to the clueless European chihuahuas.

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Everything linked to healthcare will be fought in bloody battles. RFK, Makary, Bhattacharya et al. Too much money involved. Nothing to do with care quality. A sad picture.

COVID Catechists Come For Incoming NIH Chief Bhattacharya (JTN)

Proponents of once-dominant COVID-19 views and policy, from the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 to mandatory lockdowns, remote learning, masking and vaccines, often chose between two strategies to marginalize dissenters. They flooded medical licensing boards with complaints against doctors such as Minnesota’s Scott Jensen, who faced new investigations from Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s administration after announcing his candidacy for governor, or sought to destroy their reputations in general, scientific and social media, calling them racist, cold-hearted and “fringe.” The Supreme Court will soon vote on hearing a First Amendment case that could put the kibosh on such license investigations, while COVID catechists are making a last-ditch effort to stop Senate confirmation of an epidemiologist targeted by name by his predecessor.

Justice Clarence Thomas scheduled a judicial conference for Jan. 10 on whether to block Washington state’s crusade against doctors based on their COVID views before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules in the case by NBA legend John Stockton, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense and several doctors. The plaintiffs’ application for injunction, rejected by Justice Elena Kagan on Nov. 20, also invites the high court to accept the whole case “to provide a definitive nationwide ruling on whether physicians’ public speech is fully protected” and requires the strict-scrutiny standard of judicial review, given “an ongoing nationwide campaign to censor dissenting speech.” Scientific American raised eyebrows with a Dec. 19 opinion essay that allegedly retcons the mainstream response to Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, nominated by President-elect Trump for National Institutes of Health director, who is also a plaintiff in a First Amendment lawsuit rebooted after an early SCOTUS setback.

Its sibling Nature Medicine required the authors of “Proximal Origin,” covertly shaped by then-NIH Director Francis Collins and then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, to completely rule out a COVID lab leak before it would publish their paper, which cemented natural origin as gospel. Bhattacharya made himself persona non grata with the public health establishment in spring 2020 by running a seroprevalence study in Stanford’s backyard that found infection was already widespread before lockdowns, undermining elite narratives of COVID’s universal risk. Months later he cowrote the Great Barrington Declaration against lockdowns and in favor of “focused protection” for populations most vulnerable to COVID, which played a role in Stanford faculty pressuring the university to dump the Hoover Institution, with which Bhattacharya and fellow lockdown critic Scott Atlas are affiliated.

Bhattacharya accused university leadership of cowardice for not speaking against faculty efforts to censor him, Atlas and meta-research pioneer John Ioannidis, whose seroprevalence studies similarly undermined COVID narratives and who first warned of the weak evidence for drastic mitigation efforts he compared to “an elephant being attacked by a house cat.” Collins told Fauci, who is now a non-teaching professor at Georgetown, that he wanted a “quick and devastating public take down” of the “fringe epidemiologists” who wrote the GBD, because they were “getting too much traction” and it was even signed by “a Nobel Prize winner,” Stanford biophysicist Michael Levitt. Bhattacharya told Just the News, No Noise before President Biden’s reelection withdrawal that he was working on a public health reform plan for the next president, which would remove large pharmaceutical influence from the Food and Drug Administration and refocus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention away from politics and back on science.

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Article’s much longer. Iran etc.

Jimmy Carter’s Legacy Still Hampers A World Trump Must Fix (JTN)

As the tributes roll in before America bids farewell to Jimmy Carter, current global turbulence provides fresh reminders that the decisions the late 39th president made in office continue to impact the world four decades later and present both challenges and opportunities for the man about to assume the White House for a second term. Many of the issues confronting President-elect Donald Trump – Iran, the Panama Canal, the Education Department and appeasement diplomacy – have their roots in the Carter presidency, a reality that can’t be erased by the significant humanitarian achievements the former president aggregated after he left office or the widely recognized kindness of the God-fearing, Navy-serving peanut farmer who lived to be 100.

“I don’t think there’s anyone that would say a bad thing about him, personally,” said Nicholas Giordano, a political science professor at Suffolk Community College and a popular podcaster. “He was genuinely a good and decent human being. “But it shows you that sometimes being good and decent isn’t necessarily equating to success as president,” he added. Here are a few of the good-guy-bad-policy debates that arose in Carter’s final days on earth as Trump prepares to return to the White House next month.

Panama Canal The Panama Canal was an engineering marvel that the United States built and paid for in 1914 and that Carter gifted away in a 1977 treaty. That treaty gave Panama full control of the canal as of 1999 after decades of U.S. operation, but it also codified it would remain free and neutral to shipping traffic. Carter declared at the time the transaction removed “the last remnant of alleged American colonialism.” Critics like Ronald Reagan, however, warned the treaty gave away America’s hard-earned construction genius and would one day place the western world in a security lurch over one of the most important marine passageways in the world. “The canal is ours, we bought and we paid for it and we should keep it,” the late Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond said at the time.

China and Panama Those security concerns are coming into clearer focus today as communist China’s companies have won bids in the last decade for several major infrastructure projects like power plants, a bridge and canal locks near the site. To show his newfound influence in Panama, President Xi also made a state visit to Panama in 2018 after the Latin American country joined Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative. Today, Panamanian exports to China dwarf those to the United States and imports from Beijing have caught up to those from America, a tilt in economic allegiance that is nearly as concerning to members of Congress as the growth of the Chinese presence around the famed canal.

“A visitor to the Panama Canal might think they were in China. Ports at both ends of the Canal are managed by companies from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), while Huawei dominates the country’s telecoms system,” then-Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., wrote in a Newsweek Op/Ed a year ago as part of his leadership of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “Panama illustrates the relentless advance of CCP influence across the Western Hemisphere,” he added. “…. The real prize is control—not only control of strategic points such as the Panama Canal and ports but of natural resources, telecommunications, and ultimately governments.”

Trump began raising such concerns in 2019 and he catapulted the issue to the front of public consciousness over the Christmas holiday with a bold declaration. If Panama doesn’t begin lowering shipping rates for passage through the canal, “we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question,” he wrote on Truth Social. Liberals and Panamanians scoffed at such a notion. But Trump’s declaration seized public fascination, prompting a debate unlike anything since Carter first touched off a firestorm with the treaty. Even left-leaning National Public Radio had to admit “it feels like 1976 all over again.” Wherever Trump’s quest on the canal ends, the debate was just one reminder in Carter’s final days that his decisions five decades ago continue to raise concern today.

[..] The Biden department’s advocacy for far-left ideologies like DEI and allowing transgender men in women’s sports also disillusioned many Americans, adding fresh public support for a smaller, if not eliminated agency. While the statistics show student performance has stagnated, many feel the overall state of education has declined. “All of these things have gotten worse since we created a Federal Department of Education,” Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters told Just the News on Monday. “We’ve allowed the left to win this argument for too long: give more power to bureaucrats, give more power to government, and our kids will magically get smarter. Well, that’s just not true,” he added. “As a matter of fact, the opposite is true. The more that you give power to the government, the less power families have.”

When the nation mourns Carter at his Jan. 9 State Funeral in Washington, D.C., he will accurately be remembered for his kindness, his faith, his service to country and the humanitarian achievements of his years out of office. But his successor as the 47th president will also be face global and national challenges that were also of Carter’s making, and history will ultimately write the final chapter on how those turned out. “Look, he was a statesman,” Walters said of Carter. “His impact, especially after coming out of the White House, was tremendous. You know, a guy that really gave a tremendous amount from him and his family to his fellow man. But listen, I. I think when you study history, we’ve got to be up front with our kids. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican, Democrat, what your background is. We’ve got to go in and say, here’s what happened while this person was president. Here were their policies. Here was the impact,” he added.

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Saw the first clip a while back. Looks good.

Paramount Series ‘Landman’ Surprises With Anti-Climate Agenda Message (ZH)

It’s been a long time since conservatives were treated like the “good guys” by Hollywood, largely because ESG initiatives and the over-representation of social justice cultism on social media convinced production companies that it was more lucrative to go woke. However, this assumption turned out to be a massive error in calculation as “Get Woke, Go Broke” became the mantra that ultimately toppled the media industry and the Democratic Party.Today, the majority of entertainment companies are struggling with failure after failure; most of their projects lose vast sums of money and producers have been unable to squeeze any blood from the classic franchises they used to rely on. When corporations like Disney are actually losing money on Star Wars and Marvel, you know that audience boycotts are becoming effective.

Well, it appear that someone in Tinsel Town is finally listening. Paramount, another company known for a steady stream of woke disasters, saw some streaming series gold with the success of ‘Yellowstone’ – The Kevin Costner led show featured conservative Montana ranchers battling to maintain their legacy. Though, the company could not help itself and started implanting woke messaging in the later seasons.Yellowstone might have given Paramount a taste of that old-school era of big money entertainment, and they have doubled down on what can only be described as an ultra-MAGA series called ‘Landman’ starring Billy Bob Thornton.

Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a “crisis executive” or “fixer” for a small Texas oil company. While the show does involve some extraordinary plot twists to keep the audience invested, each event ties back to very real problems related to the dangerous business of oil drilling, the open US border, Mexican drug cartels, government interference and disinformation from the environmental lobby. You might not find a more fair or factual depiction of the American oil industry in modern media.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about Landman is that someone at Paramount had the stones to green light a show that speaks against the man-made climate change agenda and the fraudulent claims of the “sustainable” energy lobby. It doesn’t glamorize oil, but it acknowledges that there are no practical alternatives. In terms of story, Thornton’s character is great at his job, but terrible at raising his family. This leads to some hilarious discomfort as his histrionic ex-wife, impulsive teenage daughter and strong-headed 20-something son come back into his life and collide. Though highly flawed, Thornton’s sharp Texas wit keeps you laughing at his domestic mistakes and misfortunes. Keep in mind, Landman is definitely not a family show.

Conservatives will probably gravitate to the straightforward depiction of the working man’s world and the dangers involved in resource industries like oil. These are the vital jobs and men that keep the world running, and many of them die while trying to earn a paycheck. Landman makes no attempt to demean or belittle blue collar workers and its simple exploration of their daily lives comes off as shockingly empathetic. Appealing to the working man in media without pandering is a tough balance, but Landman does it well. There’s also no absurd melodrama or unrealistic character changes to artificially drive the plot forward. What you see is what you get, which is incredibly refreshing these days.

Overall, Landman is definitely worth a watch. It’s important to encourage entertainment companies by rewarding them when they abandon woke messaging and make something intelligent. This is not to say that they won’t screw up the show by adding leftist propaganda in later seasons (we all know liberal executives can’t control themselves), but the first season of Landman is a win.

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Commercial

 

 

Amish

 

 

Turtle

 

 

Howl
https://twitter.com/i/status/1873771038355710220

 

 

Great white
https://twitter.com/i/status/1874098182403330264

 

 

Kestrel

 

 

Heaven
https://twitter.com/i/status/1874127436289630505

 

 

Auld

 

 

 

 

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Oct 302024
 


Frans Masereel Montmartre 1925

 

Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)
I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)
Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)
‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)
Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)
Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)
Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)
Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)
Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)
Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)
When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)
Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)
Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)
Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)
A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)
Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1851047185808572479

Lethal
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851217810908754043

Bret

Georgia

PA fraud

MEP
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851213588695826440

RFK

Elon

Tucker Dore

Jocelyn

 

 

 

 

He said it while Kamala was doing her final speech at the Ellipse. That got no attention because of it. Was that the intention?

Trump Supporters Are ‘Garbage’ – Biden (RT)

The supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are “garbage,” outgoing US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday. He later claimed that he misspoke and meant to condemn a specific speaker at Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden rally. Biden made his comments during a Zoom call organized by the Hispanic advocacy group Voto Latino. He began by bringing up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who made a joke on Sunday comparing Puerto Rico to “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” “Just the other day, a speaker at [the Trump] rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage,” Biden said, adding that Puerto Ricans are “good, decent honorable people.” “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden stressed. “It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.”

The president went on to accuse Trump of trying to “divide the country based on race,” and insisted that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, “will be a president for all of America.” Biden later took to X to clarify that he had “referred to the hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally as garbage.” “That’s all I meant to say. The comments at that rally don’t reflect who we are as a nation,” Biden wrote. The president’s remarks were quickly condemned by Trump’s allies. “He’s talking about everyday Americans who love their country,” Republican Senator Marco Rubio said, urging the Biden campaign to apologize. “We are not garbage, we are patriots who love America,” Rubio said during a Trump rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Hinchcliffe himself had accused Democrats of overreacting to his set at the Madison Square Garden event. “These people have no sense of humor,” he wrote on X on Sunday, claiming that the Harris team had taken the joke out of context “to make it seem racist.” Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently accused each other of hateful rhetoric and demonization. Some conservatives have drawn a parallel between Biden’s ‘garbage’ comment and that of Hillary Clinton, who described Trump supporters in 2016 as a “basket of deplorables.” Trump himself has been recently criticized for labeling his opponents an “enemy from within.”

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“Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur..”

“..the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended [..] If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t”

I’m The Opposite of a Nazi – Trump (RT)

US Republican candidate Donald Trump has lashed out at Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign for comparing an event he held in New York’s Madison Square Garden last week with a rally of Nazi supporters at the same venue in 1939 at which speakers praised Hitler’s Germany. At the recent Trump event, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage,” triggering a wave of rebuke from across the political spectrum. A senior advisor for the Republican campaign told the press that “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump” and his team. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz jumped on the gaffe, telling a rally in Henderson, Nevada of a “direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.”

Trump responded by telling a crowd of backers in Atlanta, Georgia: “The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi. We’re Nazis.” “I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi,” he stated. Trump explained that his father taught him to never use either “Nazi” or “Hitler” as a slur. Both words, among many other insults, have been hurled his way, he said. “They call me everything from a mad genius looking to take over the world to a very very stupid person,” according to Trump. While proclamations that Trump is a new Hitler who seeks to abolish democracy are nothing new, such language was only recently adopted by the Harris campaign. The vice president publicly called her rival a “fascist” last week, citing the opinion of retired General John Kelly, who served as the chief of staff in the Trump administration.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, meanwhile, said at the same rally that “I imagine that nearly every person in this room has a relative who served in the Second World War. Our families actually went and defeated the Nazis. To call us Nazis is a disgrace.” Vance claimed that the US soldiers who took part in the Normandy landings in June 1944 would have been offended by the policies proposed by the Democratic campaign. “If you think those brave men were fighting for an open border and sex change surgeries for illegal aliens, the proper term for you is ‘dips**t’,” he declared.

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Completely gone. As is Mika.

NOTE: JD Vance’s wife is “non-white”.

Whoopi: Trump Will Break Up Interracial Marriages, Deport The Non-Whites (MN)

The media continues to make absurd assertions against Donald Trump in a desperate effort to derail his campaign just a week out from the election. The latest came via Whoopi Goldberg on The View who claimed that Trump plans to break up interracial married couples and deport the person who is not white. Not only that, but Golderberg also claimed that Trump would then “put the white guy with someone else.” It’s completely absurd claim that resides only in her warped reality. “He’s not gonna be – he’s not gonna say, ‘Oh, you’re with a white guy, I’m gonna keep you from being deported,’” Goldberg blurted. “No, he’s gonna deport you and put the white guy with someone else,” she ridiculously asserted.

“The man is out there!” she screamed wide eyed. Who is “out there” exactly? Who are the ones fomenting division? If this is what they’re like now, imagine what’s going to happen when Trump wins. As if that wasn’t enough batshit crazy, The View then wheeled out “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski who literally started crying and saying all Trump supporters are Nazis. “These are the final hours,” she warned, adding “I come with such dire warnings, and I mean them from the bottom of my heart!” asserting that we are witnessing the “descent into fascism.”

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“..the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

‘World’s Most Accurate Economist’ Predicts US Election Outcome (RT)

Republican candidate Donald Trump will “most probably” win the US presidential election next month, economist Christophe Barraud, ranked by Bloomberg as the top forecaster of the American economy, has said. With one week to go until the election, Democratic candidate and current vice president Kamala Harris leads Trump by less than one percentage point, according to the New York Times, which has reported that the gap is narrowing and that battleground states remain “extraordinarily tight.” Making his prediction in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Monday, Barraud wrote: “Looking at different metrics such as betting markets, polls, election modelers’ forecasts, financial markets, as of now, the most probable outcomes are: Trump victory; GOP clean sweep.”

Barraud is chief economist and strategist at Market Securities, and has been awarded the title of Top Forecaster of the US Economy by Bloomberg every year bar once since 2012. He also presented several possible scenarios of the US election outcome in an interview with Business Insider earlier this week. “A Trump win with a Republican sweep” and a majority in the Senate would enable the new president to implement tax cuts for corporations and households, as well as focus more on domestic rather than foreign policy, Barraud said. It would also have a short-term positive impact on US economic growth, creating a GDP boost between 2.1% and 2.3% in 2025, he added.

Among the other scenarios is a Trump victory with a divided Congress, according to the expert. This would limit his ability to cut taxes, forcing him to focus on foreign policy, likely by implementing trade restrictions and tariffs, Barraud said. The outcome would hurt global growth and slow the US economy in the long term, he added. If Harris wins with a divided Congress, there will be minimal changes to economic policies, according to Barraud. Earlier, Allan Lichtman, known as the “Nostradamus” of US elections for accurately predicting nine of the last ten presidential outcomes since 1984, said Harris will win the November 5 vote.

Trump Political Director

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“I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records..”

Musk Denies Allegations He Worked Illegally in America (ET)

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has denied allegations that he worked illegally in the United States in the early days of his career. An Oct. 27 report from The Washington Post alleges that Musk began his career working illegally in the U.S. for a period in 1995 while he was building a Silicon Valley startup, Zip2, which sold for about $300 million four years later. The outlet cited company documents, former business associates, and a past CEO of the company who said investors were worried that Musk could be deported if discovered. In a series of posts on social media, Musk denied the allegations. Responding to a video of President Joe Biden referencing the Post’s claims, Musk said he had authorization to work in the United States.

In another post, he provided more details about his immigration status. Musk says he was initially on a J-1 visa for international students to pursue academic training or research, then transitioned to an H1-B visa allowing temporary employment for specialty occupations. “I was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B. They know this, as they have all my records,” Musk said. Musk was born in South Africa. At age 18, he immigrated to Canada after gaining Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He attended Queen’s University at Kingston in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. Musk moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days and co-founded Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

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Rep. Mark E. Green, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District.

Chaos and Crime: Legacy of the Biden-Harris Border Policies (Mark Green)

Upon being inaugurated, one of the responsibilities Joe Biden and Kamala Harris assumed was to keep the American homeland secure and safeguard our sovereign borders. Nearly four years later, looking at the catastrophic, unprecedented border crisis that has unfolded on their watch, can anyone say with a straight face they have fulfilled that obligation? The answer, unequivocally, is no – and Americans are the ones paying the price. From the beginning, Biden, Harris, and other key officials in their administration were determined to end President Donald Trump’s effective border security policies – regardless of the consequences. They also refused to enforce long-standing immigration laws that administrations of both parties have enforced.

According to a new report by my committee, the incoming Biden-Harris team was warned by current and former Department of Homeland Security law enforcement during the presidential transition of what would happen if they embarked on this path – and yet, they chose to do so anyway. This dereliction of duty has led to disastrous outcomes in the realm of public safety. Under Biden and Harris’ leadership, our borders are wide open and ripe for exploitation, and interior enforcement has fallen off a cliff. The numbers bear this out. Since Fiscal Year 2021, the Border Patrol has recorded more than 55,000 arrests of illegal aliens with criminal histories, compared to just around 22,000 from FY2017-2020. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens has said that “[h]ardened criminals often hide in smuggled migrant groups.” According to one Border Patrol deputy chief patrol agent, “any crime that can be committed, we do encounter people who have committed them.”

The problem of criminal aliens is not just limited to the border. Between FY2017-2020, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 480,000 aliens with criminal convictions or pending charges on their record. By contrast, in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration, such arrests dropped to just around 165,000, despite the historic numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border. Likewise, the Trump administration removed more than 604,000 criminal aliens from FY2017-2020, while the Biden-Harris administration only removed around 158,000 from FY2021-2023 (ICE data for FY2024 has not yet been publicly released). Additionally, removals of gang members last year were down 40% from their peak during the Trump administration.

These numbers have dropped because the Biden-Harris administration tied the hands of law enforcement. According to guidance issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in September 2021, ICE personnel cannot “rely on the fact of conviction … alone” in deciding whether to detain a suspected criminal alien, a statement that one federal judge ruled in 2022 “flips the presumption of detention on its head.” It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s Non-Detained Docket has exploded to well over 7.4 million individuals – up from just around 3.2 million at the end of FY2020. Among these millions are nearly 650,000 aliens with criminal backgrounds, including more than 13,000 convicted murderers, 15,000 with sexual assault convictions, and more than 62,000 convicted of assault.

The consequences of this policy of non-enforcement have been deadly. One need only ask the families of Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others whose lives have been taken or otherwise irrevocably shattered at the hands of those here illegally.

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No, the US has no political prisoners…

Steve Bannon Released From Prison After Serving 4 Months (ET)

Steve Bannon, who served as a top White House adviser early on in the Trump administration, was released from prison on Oct. 29 after serving four months for contempt of Congress. “The four months in federal prison not only didn’t break me, it empowered me,” he said during his “WarRoom” podcast. “I am more energized and more focused than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” Bannon, 70, was serving time in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. His release comes after a federal judge on Oct. 22 denied his request for early release. Bannon entered prison in July after the Supreme Court refused to take up his request to avoid his four-month sentence. When he began serving his sentence in July, Bannon called himself a “political prisoner.” “I am proud of going to prison,” he said at the time, adding that he was standing up to Attorney General Merrick Garland and what he called a “corrupt” Justice Department.

A jury convicted him in 2022 for two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with requests from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Bannon, 70, claimed that former President Donald Trump had extended executive privilege over his testimony. Bannon’s attorney, David Schoen, told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that the district court had wrongly excluded evidence surrounding another attorney advising Bannon that he didn’t have to comply with the subpoenas because Trump had invoked that privilege. “At a bare minimum, it’s required that the defendant know or understand that his or her conduct was unlawful or wrong,” Schoen told the court in November 2023. “Mr. Bannon acted in the only way he believed and understood from his lawyer that the law permitted him … to behave in response to the subpoena.” The appeals court said that under its precedent, Bannon’s advice-of-attorney defense “is no defense at all.”

“As both this court and the Supreme Court have repeatedly explained, a contrary rule would contravene the text of the contempt statute and hamstring Congress’s investigatory authority,” Judge Brad Garcia said, writing for the court. “Because we have no basis to depart from that binding precedent, and because none of Bannon’s other challenges to his convictions have merit, we affirm.” Bannon faces other criminal charges in New York, where a judge has set Dec. 9 as the start date for the trial in his border fundraising case. Prosecutors allege that Bannon helped funnel more than $100,000 to a co-founder of the nonprofit WeBuildTheWall Inc. who was allegedly getting a secret salary after Bannon and others had promised donors that every dollar would be used to help construct a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border. Bannon has pleaded not guilty to money laundering and conspiracy charges, calling them “nonsense.” In 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon in a federal case similar to the one he’s currently facing from New York prosecutors.

That case was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which also prosecuted Trump for alleged election interference involving a payment to adult performer Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels. Trump similarly pleaded not guilty. Bannon entered prison the same month that another former Trump White House adviser, Peter Navarro, exited under similar circumstances. Navarro claimed executive privilege in defying a congressional subpoena, but D.C. District Judge Amit Mehta said he hadn’t shown enough evidence the privilege was asserted. Trump is facing potential prison time for his role in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, but has successfully avoided trial in Washington. His appeal on presidential immunity resulted in a landmark Supreme Court case and a lengthy delay of the pre-trial process for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of him.

Bannon

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“..It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically..”

Secessionism and Polarization on Rise in US (Sp.)

The election integrity dispute surrounding the 2020 vote reportedly reinvigorated secessionist sentiment across the US which is continuing to grow ahead of election day. The Texas Nationalist movement, which advocates for Texas to secede from the US, is gaining momentum amid the southern border crisis. The Lone Star state is not the only one where activists are pushing for independence: around 25 US states are “ready” to leave, according to the Daniel Miller, the president of the secessionist Texas Nationalist Movement, in April. It is “the overreach of the Biden-Harris administration”, starting from anti-Trump lawfare and ending with transgender propaganda, that has fuelled the division dramatically, according to Michael Shannon, a Conservative political commentator and Newsmax columnist.

“Things like that and then the federal government mandating that men who think they are women can compete in women’s sport, arresting abortion protesters, people praying quietly in front of abortion mills, the political manhunt against the January 6th rioters that has extended even down to grandmothers, all of this really concerns Republicans, conservatives and I guess the few independents who still respect the rule of law. And so that’s what started this real division,” Shannon told Sputnik. The US political commentator noted that Texas secession is unlikely to happen any time soon. Still, he does not rule out that some red states could strive to leave the nation if Harris wins. “If there becomes a real split, it’ll probably start with Ron DeSantis in Florida, who will begin by refusing to cooperate with any federal agency that tries to, and this is assuming Harris wins, any federal agency that tries to impose these, frankly, totalitarian edicts from Washington,” Shannon noted.

The YouGov February poll indicated that 23% of Americans would support their state seceding from the US, whereas 28% would support a state other than their own leaving. While 51% of American respondents firmly oppose secession, 27% remain unsure. A separate YouGov survey shows that the divide across the nation comes along party lines: Democrats and Republicans think they have little in common, unlike their peers a decade ago. Last February, House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene called for nothing short of a “national divorce” between Republican and Democratic states. The Trump-Harris race is very close, making the country almost evenly split, Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida, told Sputnik. Bottom line is that one side is going to be very disappointed by the election results no matter who wins, according to the pundit.

“If Trump wins, you’re going to have almost 50% of the country where Democrats are very disappointed,” Jewett said. “And if Kamala Harris wins, you’re going to have all those Republican Trump fans, almost 50% of the country. They’re going to be very upset as well. I think in the short run, it’s definitely going to exacerbate, make it worse.” Therefore, the question is whether the winner would try to pull people together, or whether half of American voters will remain alienated, the academic noted, drawing attention to the fact that presently there is some big difference between Democratic and Republican states.

“We’ll have to see how the leaders on both sides react if they react as normal or the winner is gracious and the loser is gracious, and then maybe those partisan divides won’t be so bad. But if they do not, if they question the election results, or if the winner really rubs it in and says ‘okay, now I’m going to do everything I want and I’m only representing the people that voted for me’ – that’s not going to be great for American society overall.” The professor warns that partisan divisions might get worse potentially in the longer run.

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“It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.”

Jay Bhattacharya Receives Prestigious Award for Intellectual Freedom (Turley)

Few in the media seemed eager to attend a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C., where the prestigious American Academy of Sciences and Letters was awarding its top intellectual freedom award. The problem may have been the recipient: Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. [Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya] has spent years being vilified by the media over his dissenting views on the pandemic. As one of the signatories of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, he was canceled, censored, and even received death threats. That open letter called on government officials and public health authorities to rethink the mandatory lockdowns and other extreme measures in light of past pandemics. All the signatories became targets of an orthodoxy enforced by an alliance of political, corporate, media, and academic groups. Most were blocked on social media despite being accomplished scientists with expertise in this area. It did not matter that positions once denounced as “conspiracy theories” have been recognized or embraced by many.

Some argued that there was no need to shut down schools, which has led to a crisis in mental illness among the young and the loss of critical years of education. Other nations heeded such advice with more limited shutdowns (including keeping schools open) and did not experience our losses. Others argued that the virus’s origin was likely the Chinese research lab in Wuhan. That position was denounced by the Washington Post as a “debunked” coronavirus “conspiracy theory.” The New York Times Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli called any mention of the lab theory “racist.” Federal agencies now support the lab theory as the most likely based on the scientific evidence. Likewise, many questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks and supported natural immunity to the virus — both positions were later recognized by the government. Others questioned the six-foot rule used to shut down many businesses as unsupported by science. In congressional testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently admitted that the 6-foot rule “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.”

Yet not only did the rule result in heavily enforced rules (and meltdowns) in public areas, the media further ostracized dissenting critics. Again, Fauci and other scientists did little to stand up for these scientists or call for free speech to be protected. As I discuss in my new book, “The Indispensable Right,” the result is that we never really had a national debate on many of these issues and the result of massive social and economic costs. I spoke at the University of Chicago with Bhattacharya and other dissenting scientists in the front row a couple of years ago. After the event, I asked them how many had been welcomed back to their faculties or associations since the recognition of some of their positions. They all said that they were still treated as pariahs for challenging the groupthink culture. Now the scientific community is recognizing the courage shown by Bhattacharya and others with its annual Robert J. Zimmer Medal for Intellectual Freedom.

So what about all of those in government, academia, and the media who spent years hounding these scientists? Biden Administration officials and Democratic members targeted Bhattacharya and demanded his censorship. For example, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) attacked Bhattacharya and others who challenged the official narrative during the pandemic. Krishnamoorthi expressed outrage that the scientists were even allowed to testify as “a purveyor of COVID-19 misinformation.” Journalists and columnists also supported the censorship and blacklisting of these scientists. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Michael Hiltzik decried how “we’re living in an upside-down world” because Stanford allowed these scientists to speak at a scientific forum. He was outraged that, while “Bhattacharya’s name doesn’t appear in the event announcement,” he was an event organizer. Hiltzik also wrote a column titled “The COVID lab leak claim isn’t just an attack on science, but a threat to public health.”

Then there are those lionized censors at Twitter who shadow-banned Bhattacharya. As former CEO Parag Agrawal generally explained, the “focus [was] less on thinking about free speech … [but[ who can be heard.” None of this means that Bhattacharya or others were right in all of their views. Instead, many of the most influential voices in the media, government, and academia worked to prevent this discussion from occurring when it was most needed. There is still a debate over Bhattacharya’s “herd immunity” theories, but there is little debate over the herd mentality used to cancel him. The Academy was right to honor Bhattacharya. It is equally right to condemn all those who sought to silence a scientist who is now being praised for resisting their campaign to silence him and others.

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“If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job..”

Assange’s Father on Von Der Leyen: EU Falls to Bits Under ‘Frau Genocide’ (Sp.)

The European Union is “falling to bits” under the leadership of the head of the European Commission Ursula Van der Leyen, who is commonly called “Frau Genocide,” John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik. “The EU is falling to bits. Everybody within the EU is squabbling. The commissioner of the EU, Van der Leyen, we call her Frau Genocide – it is very popular. I mean, everybody despises her. She’s an authoritarian figure. In Germany the GDP [growth] last year was 0.2%. That’s not even 1%, it’s two-tenths of 1%,” Shipton noted. In December 2023, Clare Daly, a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Ireland, called von der Leyen “Frau Genocide” and said that she was responsible for the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Immediately after the escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, von der Leyen, who took a pro-Israeli position and for some time ignored the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the deaths of civilians, was harshly criticized in the media, which accused her of “double standards,” recalling her statements on the conflict in Ukraine, and warned against making statements on behalf of the entire EU. Later, the European Commission press service and the European External Action Service had to correct von der Leyen’s one-sided statements, explaining that the opinion expressed “is her personal and does not reflect the position of the entire EU.” The United States does not like and does not accept the truth about itself, John Shipton, an Australian activist and the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said in an interview with Sputnik.

In July, Assange was released from a British prison after many years of imprisonment and returned to Australia following a plea agreement with the US authorities. According to Shipton, Washington “took very strong measures against Julian for publishing the truth.” “And also they put Chelsea Manning in jail for 35 years. And Edward Snowden had to have asylum in the Russian Federation. So it is clear that they do take very strong exceptions to the truth about themselves being published. They don’t like the truth about themselves,” the activist said about the US actions. However, Shipton said Washington had “too many problems” to continue worrying about the Assange case. “If they’re worrying about Julian Assange, well, they ought to get a new job,” Shipton advised the US authorities.

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“Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”

When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays (Paul Craig Roberts)

On two previous occasions Israel sent its vaunted army into southern Lebanon only to be driven out by the Arab militia, Hezbollah, operating without tanks, without an air force, without air defense. It appears that it has now happened again. Israel has been stopped cold on the ground, causing the Israeli defense minister to announce an end to the ground operations. The Israeli Army is only good at killing women and children from the air, as in Gaza. Israel’s war against Hezbollah has been replaced with Israeli air strikes against civilian residential areas in Beirut, which provides more evidence that the only function of the Israeli military is to murder women and children from the air. The obvious conclusion is that the Israeli military doesn’t fight; it commits war crimes against civilians. The reason civilian neighborhoods in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon and not Hezbollah territory, are being destroyed from the air is that Iran and Russia permit it by not providing air defense systems to Lebanon.

Iran and Russia are “maintaining peace” by permitting Israel to slaughter Lebanese women and children and destroy schools and hospitals from the air. It is a paradox that Washington, Putin, and Iran are equally indifferent to Israel’s slaughter from the air of civilians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon. Any one of the three countries could stop the murder of civilians, but not one of them will do anything. Putin has placed his bets on BRICS, but that is an economic organization that might or might not succeed. Its success is handicapped by the fact that the Russian and Chinese economists are indoctrinated by the American neoliberals, and, therefore, are not merely worthless to their countries but positively harmful. If Washington wanted the Israelis’ murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to stop, Washington would stop providing Israel with the weapons. Clearly, Israel is doing what Washington wants.

But why do Russia and Iran want Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to be massacred when either country can stop it? It is beginning to look as if it is not merely Washington and Israel that Satan has in his grasp, but Russia and Iran as well. Every time Putin gets off-focused from Russia’s only threat–Washington–he finds himself with a mess on this hands. With Putin focused on the Olympics in China, Washington sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia. With Putin focused on the Sochi Olympics, Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government and brought war to Russia. Now Putin is focused on BRICS and Washington is stirring up a color revolution in Georgia to regain the former Russian province as another beached against Russia. The opposition parties and the President of Georgia do not accept the election results, which are favorable to Russia.

I think that Putin by refusing to use power is losing credibility. I don’t think Putin understands the ideological character of the Democrat Party and the ideological woke liberal-left that controls it. If the Democrats manage to retain control over the government, I don’t think Putin is prepared for the consequences. Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” That is as true of Russians as of Americans. Reality conflicts with hopes, aspirations, and plans, and when ignored upsets all of them. Putin’s Ukraine conflict which has greatly widened, the brewing color revolution in Georgia supported by Washington, and Iran’s demonization and isolation are all self-inflicted disasters caused by ignoring reality.

When powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran stand aside from genocide, they destroy their own reputations. The world is crying out for someone with the means to stand up for humanity, for justice, for truth, and there are no takers. In Gaza children undergo amputations without anesthesia. The little water available is polluted. Everyone is sick. Washington keeps sending the weapons used from the air against purely civilian populations. Disease and starvation will finish the job for the Americans and the Israelis. It is America that has enabled this genocide. And Americans, in their insouciant existence, think they are the salt of the earth.

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They’re calling up another 160,000.

Ex-President Warns of Growing Ukrainian Anger Over Military Draft (RT)

Ukrainian society is growing increasingly resentful of Kiev’s mobilization campaign and is now plagued by divisions, former President Leonid Kuchma has said. In an interview with Interfax on Monday, Kuchma, who held office between 1994 and 2005 and led Kiev’s delegation during talks to settle the Donbass crisis between 2014 and 2020, lamented that Ukraine’s internal unity has eroded since the escalation of hostilities with Russia in February 2022. According to Kuchma, the army, society and the leadership initially managed to set their differences aside and became a “monolith.” “Even in politics, the infighting disappeared for a while. Today it is no longer the case,” he said, adding that Ukrainian elites “have renewed the rat race of their petty interests.” In wider society, there is also dissatisfaction “with the army’s demands for increased mobilization,” Kuchma added.

“The government blames society for not being ready to stand up for the state, while society urges the authorities to lead by example and start with themselves. There are many such contradictions,” he said. The former Ukrainian leader said that while the country remains “united by hatred of the enemy,” there is “less mutual understanding” among people and that this “postpones victory” for Kiev. Ukraine’s foreign policy is beset by a similar problem, Kuchma claimed. A kind of pluralism appeared in our global communication,” he stated, contrasting it with the early stages of the conflict, when Kiev signaled it would “fight to the end” and called for help from nations around the world. This comes from a need to hone separate narratives for different international partners depending on how hawkish they are on Russia, Kuchma said.

“Some are defenders of fundamental Western values, others are supporters of ‘business as usual’ with Russia. Some are determined ‘hawks’, others are cautious ‘peacemakers’,” Kuchma said. Kiev announced general mobilization after the escalation of hostilities with Russia, barring most men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving the country. This spring, faced with mounting losses, Kiev lowered the draft age from 27 to 25, and significantly tightened mobilization rules. Videos showing recruitment officers attempting to catch eligible men in various public places, often resulting in violent clashes, have since appeared online. Ukrainian frontline troops interviewed by Western media consistently complain of a lack of manpower, leading to long rotation, extreme exhaustion, and gradual retreat under Russian pressure.

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“..the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history..”

Took him just 4 months. Who’s next?

Not long ago, Elon Musk predicted civil war in the UK. To what extent was he wrong?

Support For New UK PM collapses (RT)

Keir Starmer has suffered the largest post-election drop in approval rating of any British prime minister in modern history, according to a recent poll. Starmer is now more unpopular than his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, was when he resigned in July. Starmer rode to power in July on the back of a landslide general election victory for the Labour Party. Seeking to distance himself from the leftism of the party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer promised to drag Labour back to the centrism of Tony Blair, and to deliver “good government, national security, secure borders, and economic stability.” Less than four months into his premiership, Starmer’s approval rating has plummeted from a post-election high of +11 to a dismal low of -38, according to a survey of 1,012 adults carried out by More in Common. This 49-point drop in approval is “unprecedented” in modern history, More in Common Director Luke Tryl told the Telegraph on Monday.

According to the poll, Starmer is less popular than Rishi Sunak was when he resigned as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party following July’s election. Sunak had an approval rating of -37 when his party was wiped out by Labour, which has since risen to -31. Blair enjoyed a +60 approval rating following Labour’s landslide 1997 election win, which took three years to fall into negative territory. Tryl told The Telegraph that two key decisions have cratered Starmer’s popularity. “If you ask what people have noticed, by a country mile it is the decision on the winter fuel allowance and the early release of prisoners,” he explained, adding that controversy over Labour donor Waheed Alli’s gifts to senior officials, including Starmer, has also dented the PM’s standing.

Last month, Starmer’s government tightened eligibility rules for winter fuel payments, effectively denying around 10 million pensioners payments of up to £300 ($390) toward heating their homes. Days earlier, it was announced that thousands of prisoners, including convicted killers and kidnappers, would be released after serving just 40% of their sentences, in a bid to ease prison overcrowding. As images of career criminals celebrating their release and publicly thanking Starmer emerged, the PM said that he “shares the public’s anger,” but insisted that “there was no choice.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been jailed for taking part in anti-Islam and anti-immigration riots across the UK in late July and early August. More than two dozen people have been handed prison sentences for online offenses, including a Conservative councillor’s wife who received 31 months behind bars for making X posts calling for migrant accommodation to be burned down. The More in Common poll was published ahead of Starmer’s first budget on Wednesday, which is expected to include tax hikes to fund healthcare and housing spending. Around 68% of respondents said they are worried about the budget, while 70% said that overall, “things are getting worse” in the UK.

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“The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.”

Delusions Of Adequacy: How British Ambassadors Became A Joke (Jay)

The ugly incident at the airport in Moscow with the British deputy ambassador to Russia grabbing at journalists’ cameras and even ripping a press badge off one should be seen as a message to all of us, when talking about British diplomacy. It’s dead. Tom Dodd’s embarrassing few minutes, which will surely haunt him for the rest of his career, could not be a more damning example of what diplomacy was once and what it is now. Like international journalism, diplomacy is barely a shadow of its former self and those who work as diplomats are third grade at best, cardboard cut outs for their predecessors 30 years ago who really had clout and affected how the world operated. The new generation of British diplomats, like Dodd, are not only entirely ineffective and a waste of space and taxpayers’ money but they also come with a number of peculiarities which you wouldn’t normally expect.

Narcissism, arrogance and delusion are the new qualities of this breed and it was all there to see in the video clip of Dodd who was absolutely outraged that journalists could actually approach him with questions. Of course there is quite a great deal of tension between Russia and the UK at the moment as Dodd is now part of a team “inspecting the work of the country’s mission in Moscow in the aftermath of the spy scandal”, reports RT. In mid-September, six British embassy staff were declared persona non grata over their alleged involvement in “subversive activities” and espionage. Dodd is confused though. He broke the unwritten rules of the foreign office. Typically, ambassadors in Africa and Middle East countries manipulate local media for their own needs and generally treat local journalists like their personal servants. Of course, they avoid international journalists like the plague, especially their own.

They basically go native and align themselves with the regime’s own strategy on handling local press. But this ‘rule’ cannot apply in Moscow where, apart from the press there having more freedoms that your average British hack, the UK is considered practically an enemy of the state. And so Dodd was lost by the ambush situation where his requirements as a ‘new generation’ foreign office twerp didn’t extend to dealing with press with tricky questions. His predecessor of 30 years ago would have revelled in the opportunity to deal with the questions with a certain élan and composure. Yet it’s narcissism which is the weakest point which shows. It’s this belief that the individual themselves is the most important subject which shames Britain as a once glorious country, now making it look like a failed state which no longer has any relevance on the world stage.

Todd belongs to a generation of diplomats who consider journalists more or less as stenographers who dutifully write what you tell them to write, on the occasion, and remain silent for the rest of the period. Like rats in a basket which you occasionally shake to amuse yourself. And yet you can hardly blame him. Britain’s own press is such a shambles these days and so embedded in the government’s annals that you can hardly call it the fourth estate any more. Any foreign correspondent who emails a question to the foreign office media team will tell you that. When a reply comes, it is Sir Humphry gobbledygook language which doesn’t even tackle your question. On many occasions, in my own experience, the FCO plainly lies to journalists. That isn’t what is shocking. The shocking part is how the journalists comply with this draconian system which would have made Stalin glow with pride.

The system, which you would normally associate with a regime in West Africa, is supported by the journalists themselves. And Dodd is part of this system. Corrupt, outdated, backward delusional view about Britain and how it should deal with the press. But it’s a pattern which I have noticed is quite typical of British ambassadors. While I was in Lebanon, there was a British ambassador there who agreed to an interview with me. When I didn’t do the ‘local’ thing of writing a shining piece on his achievements but instead wrote objectively about him, the same ambassador turned on me. Tom Fletcher, an effeminate narcissist who posed for a photo shoot as James Bond while ambassador and spent most of his time filling social media with photos of himself and super models with swollen upper lips, defamed me to a group of MEPs who visited Beirut, trying to destroy my credibility – as an act of childish petulance for the interview which touched upon his vanity and lack of knowledge of the region.

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“Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after..”

A Heroic Preference For Self-Destruction Takes Hold In Israel (Alastair Crooke)

The war without limits ideology – purely theoretically – could be a thinkable solution: Ron Dermer, a former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and confidant of Netanyahu, was asked a few months earlier what he saw as the solution to the Palestinian conflict. He replied that both the West Bank and Gaza must be totally dis-armed – “yes”. Yet more important than disarmament, Dermer said, was the absolute necessity that all Palestinians be “de-radicalised”. (This has now been extended to the whole region that must be ‘de-radicalised’). When asked to expand, Dermer pointed approvingly to the outcome of WW2: The Germans were defeated, but more plainly the Japanese were fully ‘de-radicalised’ at the end of the war. ‘De-radicalisation’ therefore means installing a Leviathan-esque “despotism that reduces the majority to total powerlessness, including spiritual, intellectual and moral powerlessness.

The total Leviathan is a unique, absolute and unlimited power, spiritual and temporal, over other humans”, as Dr Henri Hude has observed. Thus, as postmodern culture sinks into the inhuman and favours the Leviathan – with the total annihilation of other peoples and the suppression of their separate identities – the question arises, could ‘war without limits’ work? Could such terror impose on the Middle East an unconditional surrender “that would allow it to change profoundly, militarily, politically and culturally, and to transform as a satellite within Pax Americana?” Hude goes on to note, “The conditions demanded of Japan by the USA were exorbitant, and it was to be expected that Japan would put up a tremendous resistance. The atrocious use of the bomb broke this resistance”. The clear response that Dr Hude gives in his book Philosophie de la Guerre is that war without limits cannot be the solution, because it cannot deliver long-lasting ‘deterrence’ or de-radicalisation.

“On the contrary, it is the most certain cause of war. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational than it is, arousing opponents who are even less rational than it is. The Leviathan will fall; and even before its fall, no security is assured”. The latter gives two insights as to how Hude’s analysis might apply to today’s wars: One is that whenever postmodern culture capsizes into ‘necessary’ violence (which it hyper-culpabilises, since it prioritises life, rather than suffering), it can only justify the violence through evoking a more than absolute evil – the demonized enemy. Secondly, Hude identifies such extreme ‘will to power’ – without limits – as necessarily containing the psyche of self-destruction within it too. For the Leviathan to function, it must remain rational and powerful. Ceasing to be rational, despising opponents who are more rational, and angering opponents who are less rational than it is itself, the Leviathan then must fall.

One respected military observer – Maj. Gen. (Res.) Itzhak Brik, a former senior IDF commander and a former long-serving IDF ombudsman – has warned again of Israel’s looming fall: Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long.

Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us. Israel teeters at the edge: It doesn’t have the necessary forces; it doesn’t have a culture of tolerating persistent suffering; and it will not be able to impose itself over the plurality of resistance that it faces. Reason already is cast aside, its opponents are ridiculed: a ‘heroic’ preference for self-destruction has taken hold. ‘Masada’ is being spoken of.

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No Russian gas.

Mass Industrial Strikes Begin In Germany (RT)

German trade union IG Metall on Tuesday launched strikes in the nation’s metal and electrical industries in an attempt to win higher wages, German media has reported. The action comes amid growing concern about the health of the EU’s largest manufacturing economy. According to the tabloid Bild, employees began walking off the job during the night shift, including at Volkswagen’s plant in the city of Osnabruck, where workers worry the plant may be closed. Elsewhere, around 200 employees of the battery manufacturer Clarios went on strike in Hanover, Lower Saxony, carrying torches and union flags, the outlet wrote. Meanwhile, in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, around 400 employees, including those at Jensen GmbH, KSM Castings Group, Robert Bosch, Waggonbau Graaff and ZF CV Systems Hannover, have reportedly halted operations.

Protests are also expected at BMW and Audi plants in Bavaria. Work is to be stopped nationwide during the course of the day, the tabloid wrote. ”The fact that production lines are now at a standstill and offices are empty is the responsibility of the employers,” IG Metall’s negotiator and district manager Thorsten Groger stated, as quoted by Deutsche Welle. IG Metall is demanding a 7% pay raise compared to the 3.6% raise over a period of 27 months offered by employers’ associations, due to soaring inflation. The companies call such demands unrealistic. The mass strikes come as Volkswagen announced on Monday it would close “at least” three of its ten plants in Germany, lay off tens of thousands of staff and downsize remaining plants in the country.

The measures are part of a cost-cutting drive, the conglomerate said earlier. Oliver Blume, chief executive of the VW Group, has cited a “difficult economic environment” and “failing competitiveness of the German economy” as factors behind the decision. The German Association of the Automotive Industry warned last year that the country was “dramatically losing its international competitiveness” due to soaring energy costs. A recent survey by the VDA auto industry association suggested that the reshuffling of the German car industry could lead to 186,000 job losses by 2035, roughly a quarter of which have already occurred.

Read more …

 

 

 

YMCA

 

 

Little things
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851182802735108492

 

 

Turbo cancers
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851199741276602449

 

 

Kiseki
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851030294784327912

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 172022
 


Saul Leiter Phone call c1957

 

Moscow Reveals Capabilities Of Forthcoming ICBM Mobile Launcher (RT)
US Considers Providing Ukraine With More Weapons – Politico (RT)
Kissinger Outlines Ukraine Peace Proposal (RT)
Time For Ukraine Talks ‘Not Right Now’ – White House (RT)
Carthage Must Be Destroyed! (David Sant)
Approval of EU Support For Ukraine Lags Among Greeks (K.)
THE TWITTER FILES: Twitter… The FBI Subsidiary (ZH)
Twitter Docs Reveal FBI Pressure To Control Speech (RT)
EU Threatens Elon Musk With Sanctions (RT)
AOC Accuses Musk Of ‘Proto-fascism’ (RT)
What I Discovered At Twitter HQ (Jay Bhattacharya)
Truth And Consequences (Jim Kunstler)
Has ‘The End Of History’ Arrived In The Balkans? (Lukyanov)
Is Europe’s Energy Crisis Actually A Boon? (OP)
German MP Blasts ‘Absurd’ Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)
The Petrodollar’s Long Goodbye (Prashad)

 

 

 

 

FTX O’Leary This is good.

 

 


Germany died suddenly

 

 

Dutch farmers nitrogen

 

 

Trump

 

 

 

 

Tucker vaccine risks

 

 

 

 

“..capable of evading any anti-ballistic missile system that could be fielded in the foreseeable future..”

Moscow Reveals Capabilities Of Forthcoming ICBM Mobile Launcher (RT)

Russia will commence the development of a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system next year, which will be a significant upgrade on the existing Yars system, Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) Commander Sergey Karakaev has said. The new platform will have increased mobility to facilitate “swift redeployment and launch from any region anywhere in the Russian Federation,” he told Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the official newspaper of the country’s military. Karakaev offered no further details about the new project. The interview was published on Friday, ahead of SMF Day, which will be celebrated on Saturday. The SMF is the arm of the Russian military responsible for the country’s ground-based nuclear deterrence. It is currently “on the lookout for new technologies… which could be used to improve strategic weapon systems or create new ones,” Karakaev stated.


The silo-based Sarmat ICBM, as well as the Avangard and Yars systems, are examples of what is possible through such research, he added. The general praised the Sarmat missile in particular, which he said was capable of evading any anti-ballistic missile system that could be fielded in the foreseeable future. Russia approved production of the rocket following a successful test launch in April. Earlier this week, the Defense Ministry showcased the rearmament of an SMF site in central Russia by releasing footage, which showed two Yars missiles being loaded into silos. The ICBM has silo-launched and road-mobile variants.

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“..an additional 300 tanks, up to 700 infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 Howitzers would be needed to repel the Russian forces..”

US Considers Providing Ukraine With More Weapons – Politico (RT)

The US is planning to provide Ukraine with more weapons in the near future, extending the strike range of its military, Politico has reported. The media outlet, citing “six people with knowledge of the discussions,” claimed the move to provide additional supplies was prompted by concerns among top Ukrainian officials that Russia is amassing forces ahead of a major winter offensive. In its report on Thursday, Politico alleged that the Biden administration is currently entertaining the possibility of providing Kiev with, among other things, ground-launched small diameter bombs – high-precision munitions with a range of 150km (94 miles). Also under consideration, according to the article, is the delivery of joint direct attack munition kits, which are used to convert unguided aerial munitions into smart bombs.

These deliveries would be in addition to existing plans for the shipment of Patriot air-defense systems, Politico reported. Several US media outlets have indicated that those plans are in the final stages. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that Russia would certainly target these missile systems in Ukraine, should they be deployed there. On Thursday, Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder announced the expansion of a training program for Ukrainian military personnel at a US base on German soil. The number of troops attending there each month is reportedly expected to rise to around 500. In recent days, top Ukrainian officials – including the country’s top military commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, and Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba – have expressed concerns that Russia could launch a massive offensive as early as next month.

Zaluzhny did not rule out a new attempt by Moscow’s forces to take the Ukrainian capital Kiev. He also called on the West to provide Ukraine with more weaponry, saying that an additional 300 tanks, up to 700 infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 Howitzers would be needed to repel the Russian forces. While the US has already supplied Ukraine with short-range NASAMS air-defense systems, Kiev has been specifically requesting Patriot batteries since October, when Russia began massive missile and drone strikes on the country’s critical infrastructure. Moscow said the new strategy came in response to Ukraine’s attacks on Russian infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge. Back in September, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned Washington that “it would cross the red line and become an actual party to the conflict,” should it provide Ukraine with longer-range missiles.

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“..the other territories Ukraine claims – Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea – “could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.”

Kissinger Outlines Ukraine Peace Proposal (RT)

Urgently negotiating an end to hostilities in Ukraine would prevent another world war, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued in an essay published on Friday. The 99-year-old statesman noted that, in 1916, the US government had the chance to end the First World War through diplomacy, but missed it for reasons of domestic politics. Kissinger laid out his reasoning in the December 17 issue of The Spectator, describing the current conflict as a “war in which two nuclear powers contest a conventionally armed country,” a clear reference to Ukraine being a proxy war between the US and Russia. The “peace process” Kissinger proposes would “link Ukraine to NATO, however expressed,” as he believes neutrality for Kiev is no longer an option.

He also wants Russia to withdraw to the lines before February 24, while the other territories Ukraine claims – Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea – “could be the subject of a negotiation after a ceasefire.” In addition to “confirming the freedom of Ukraine,” the arrangement would strive to “define a new international structure, especially for Central and Eastern Europe,” in which Russia should “eventually” find a place, he explained. While some would prefer “a Russia rendered impotent by the war,” Kissinger disagrees, arguing that Moscow’s “historical role should not be degraded.” Dismantling Russia could turn its vast territory into a “contested vacuum,” where “competing societies might decide to settle their disputes by violence” and neighbors could seek to claim territory by force, all in the presence of “thousands of nuclear weapons.”

In substance, this is the same proposal Kissinger had first floated in May, for which he was labeled an enemy of Ukraine and added to the notorious ‘Peacemaker’ kill list. In an interview earlier this month, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky categorically rejected any sort of ceasefire that did not take Kiev’s claimed 1991 borders as the starting point. It was also unclear whether Moscow would accept any Western-mediated ceasefire at all, after former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s admission that the 2014 Minsk armistice was intended to “give Ukraine time” to prepare for war. What’s fresh in Kissinger’s Spectator essay is his reasoning. He points to August 1916, at the height of the First World War, when the warring powers sought US mediation to end the unprecedented bloodshed.

Though “a peace based on the modified status quo ante was within reach,” President Woodrow Wilson delayed the talks until after he could get re-elected in November. By then it was too late, and the war would go on for two more years, “irretrievably damaging Europe’s established equilibrium.” Asked about Kissinger’s proposal, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “eager to give the article a thorough reading,” but “hasn’t had a chance to do so yet, unfortunately.” Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The Kremlin demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that would never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.

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“..if and when the diplomacy is ripe, they will be in the best possible position at the negotiating table.”

Time For Ukraine Talks ‘Not Right Now’ – White House (RT)

It is not yet time for Ukraine to negotiate with Russia, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued in an interview on Friday. Meanwhile, Henry Kissinger – who held the same post in the early 1970s – has said talks should happen sooner rather than later. “We don’t know where this is going to end up,” Sullivan said of the conflict, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment think tank in Washington. “What we do know is that it’s our job to continue to sustain our military support to Ukraine, so they are in the best possible position on the battlefield, so that if and when the diplomacy is ripe, they will be in the best possible position at the negotiating table.” “That moment is not right now,” he added. According to Sullivan, Ukraine has won a series of battles, “repelled the Russian invaders from most of the country,” and is now “fighting to reclaim the remaining land.”

He called it “a remarkable thing” and said the Biden administration is asking Congress for “a substantial amount of further resources” to ensure “Ukraine has the means to fight this war.” Meanwhile, Americans training Ukrainian troops on the ground have spoken of mounting casualties and Ukraine’s chief of general staff, Valery Zaluzhny, is asking for more tanks, armored vehicles and artillery than most NATO members have in their arsenal, much less to spare. The US and its allies have supplied Ukraine with tube and rocket artillery, air defense systems, small arms, vehicles and ammunition, allowing Kiev to fight long after its domestic capabilities had been degraded. Russia has condemned the shipments as needlessly prolonging the conflict and increasing casualties, repeatedly warning the West that it risks becoming an open party to the conflict.

Earlier in the day, Sullivan applauded Japan’s new national security strategy, which will see Tokyo embark on massive military expansion citing the “strategic challenge posed by China.” The Japanese constitution – drafted mainly by the US occupation authorities after the Second World War – had renounced war and limited the country to a “self-defense” force. There was no indication that 46-year-old Sullivan was aware of his predecessor’s essay in The Spectator, in which the 99-year-old Kissinger called for an armistice in Ukraine before the conflict spins out of control. He pointed to the missed US opportunity to negotiate an end to the First World War in 1916, which led to millions more deaths and a far less stable post-war world that eventually collapsed into another global conflict.

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“One might say that the West forgot the art of diplomacy..”

Carthage Must Be Destroyed! (David Sant)

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was not the result of losing a war. It was caused by the failed policies of a centralized economy, exacerbated by American manipulation of the oil markets, and a costly American-backed guerilla war in Afghanistan. The United States moved in with “shock therapy” economic advisors and took the opportunity to restructure a confused and gullible Russia, including writing a new constitution. For Russia the collapse of the Soviet Union had many similarities to the loss of Carthage in the Second Punic War. Despite making peace with their former adversary, and honoring their treaties, Russia found that she could never be accepted as a friend on equal terms by the Western world order. And this was for the very same reason that Carthage could never be tolerated by Rome.

Russia was and is in every way an equal to the Anglo-American Empire. Ever since Vladimir Putin became President of Russia, the chorus of the West has become louder and louder that Putin must go. While they cannot say it aloud yet, what they really mean is “Russia must be destroyed!” If Russia had continued the policy of submission to Western control that was begun by Boris Yeltsin, we can be assured that Moscow would have eventually met the same fate as Carthage from the Anglo-American Empire. However, the appointment of Vladimir Putin as President of Russia derailed their plans. Under his rule Russia has steadily reasserted her former leadership and strength against the machinations of the Anglo-American Empire.

While at first Mr. Putin made a genuine effort to be a “partner” with the West, by the year 2011 it was clear that the West would never accept Russia as a friend or an equal. The West had enjoyed two decades of bossing everyone else around and had learned to enjoy giving orders rather than negotiating. One might say that the West forgot the art of diplomacy. After watching in horror the NATO-led destructions of Serbia, Libya, and Syria, the Kremlin began asserting itself with foreign policy problems that directly affected Russian security interests starting in 2013.

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Harder to brainwash.

Approval of EU Support For Ukraine Lags Among Greeks (K.)

Deviating from the general mood in Europe, a large number of Greeks hesitate to declare their approval of the European Union’s backing for Ukraine following the Russian invasion. In the relevant question of the Parliament’s Eurobarometer for autumn 2022, a majority of citizens in the 24 member-states approve of the position taken by the EU, with the exception of Slovakia, Bulgaria and Greece, which have the lowest percentages (49%, 48% and 48% respectively). The highest levels are recorded in Sweden (97%), Finland (95%), the Netherlands (93%), Portugal (92%) and Denmark (92%). The same survey showed that three quarters of European citizens (73%) agree with the specific measures taken by the EU, namely sanctions against the Russian government, as well as economic, military and humanitarian support to Ukraine. Again, Greece is at the bottom of the ranking, with only 46%.

Loffredo

Read more …

And the FBI works for the DNC, Pfizer and Raytheon..

THE TWITTER FILES: Twitter… The FBI Subsidiary (ZH)

Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.


The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

Read more …

“..she asked whether there would be “impediments” to passing along classified information to industry partners. In response, the FBI was “adamant” that there were “no impediments to sharing.”

Twitter Docs Reveal FBI Pressure To Control Speech (RT)

Twitter has maintained “constant and pervasive” contacts with the FBI and other US intelligence agencies for several years, according to internal company documents leaked to reporters. The files appear to show a concerted government campaign to blacklist content labeled as “misinformation.” Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday, the sixth installment of the ‘Twitter Files’ revealed additional pressure placed on the website by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) between January 2020 and as recently as last month, largely focused on moderating particular posts and accounts discussing American elections. While earlier documents indicated high-level coordination between intelligence agencies and Twitter, the latest files suggest such collusion took place on a larger scale than was previously known.

In a period of less than three years, the site’s former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth alone exchanged more than 150 emails with the FBI. Prior to Friday, Roth was the only executive said to have had regular, direct contacts with the bureau, however the new files show that legal exec Stacia Cardille also held weekly meetings with not only the FBI, but the DHS, Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) beginning in September. In a letter addressed to Twitter’s former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker – himself an ex-lawyer for the FBI – Cardille noted that she asked whether there would be “impediments” to passing along classified information to industry partners. In response, the FBI was “adamant” that there were “no impediments to sharing.”

“This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to ‘no impediments’ to classified information?” Taibbi asked. A number of messages sent to Twitter by the FBI contain explicit requests to take down certain posts, or even ban accounts altogether. In one case, the agency flagged so much “possible violative content” that Twitter staffers were later seen congratulating each other in an internal company chat for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing it. Another missive sent on November 5, 2022 from the FBI’s ‘National Election Command Post’ provided a list of 25 accounts that “may warrant additional action.” Twitter was quick to permanently ban seven of those handles, while it temporarily suspended another and deleted eight tweets for alleged “civil misinformation policy violations.”

Read more …

EU=hot air.

EU Threatens Elon Musk With Sanctions (RT)

The EU has warned Elon Musk that Twitter could be targeted by sanctions after the platform owned by the entrepreneur suspended several journalists for allegedly sharing real-time location data about the billionaire and his family. “News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying,” wrote EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova in a tweet on Friday. “EU’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights,” she said, adding that these rights are reinforced under the recently adopted European Media Freedom Act.= “[Elon Musk] should be aware of that. There are red lines.

And sanctions, soon,” Jourova warned, as the Digital Services Act is set to start coming into force next summer and will be fully implemented by 2024. Her threats come after Twitter suspended around half-a-dozen journalists on Thursday who reported and shared links to ElonJet, which provides real-time tracking of Musk’s personal flights. Musk has explained the decision by stating that the information being shared was “basically assassination coordinates” and pointed to Twitter’s terms of service, which prohibit doxxing – the illegal publishing of personal information – of anyone by anyone. “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” the billionaire wrote on Thursday.

Twitter has previously suspended the original @elonjet account, as well as other similar flight-tracking channels owned by Florida student Jack Sweeney, who had been posting real-time data on private flights of the world’s wealthiest men, including Musk, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Musk – a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” – purchased Twitter for $44 billion in late October. Back then he initially promised not to suspend any accounts that were exercising free speech, noting that that extended “even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”

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“Take a beat and lay off the proto-fascism. Maybe try putting down your phone,” the New York congresswoman suggested. Musk brushed off AOC’s criticism by simply replying: “You first.”

AOC Accuses Musk Of ‘Proto-fascism’ (RT)

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, commonly referred to as AOC, has joined the backlash against Elon Musk after Twitter suspended several journalists for allegedly violating the platform’s anti-doxxing policies while reporting on the ElonJet flight tracker. AOC accused Musk of abusing his power as the new owner of Twitter and told him to “lay off the proto-fascism.” That was after he temporarily suspended half-a-dozen journalists from CNN, the New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others, for reporting on and providing the links to ElonJet – a flight tracker that posted real-time flight data about Musk’s private jet.

Musk had accused the journalists of sharing information that was “basically assassination coordinates” and cited Twitter’s terms of service, which prohibit doxxing – publishing the personal information and real-time coordinates of other people. In a series of Twitter posts on Friday, Cortez insisted that Musk should not have suspended the reporters because he was “a public figure,” suggesting that being the victim of such location information-sharing comes with the territory. “You’re a public figure. An extremely controversial and powerful one,” AOC wrote. “I get feeling unsafe, but descending into abuse of power + erratically banning journalists only increases the intensity around you.”

“Take a beat and lay off the proto-fascism. Maybe try putting down your phone,” the New York congresswoman suggested. Musk brushed off AOC’s criticism by simply replying: “You first.” The billionaire had previously stated that he was fine with any criticism coming his way over his handling of Twitter, which he purchased in late October for $44 billion, but insisted that threatening the safety of his family was over the line. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he wrote.

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“I could have bought an island with the $44 billion, but this was a much better use of the money.”

What I Discovered At Twitter HQ (Jay Bhattacharya)

You spoke with Elon for almost an hour. How was your conversation? The topic, of course, was censorship. My sense is that he bought Twitter in part because he is deeply offended by the idea that something like Twitter, which is so important for public communication… had put their thumb on the scale. It wasn’t specifically about Covid. Generally, his sense was that one side of the conversation wasn’t being heard on many, many issues… I think he views this as: he’s in a very privileged position that allows him to restore free speech, allow for free discussion of ideas. And he wants to use what gifts he’s had for that purpose. He even made a joke: I could have bought an island with the $44 billion, but this was a much better use of the money.

Was he a lockdown sceptic during the pandemic? I think he generally was a lockdown sceptic… He famously, early in the pandemic, protested against being locked down when the shutdown orders came, and then moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas… He was very clear that he was aware of the harms of lockdowns. He mentioned the early days of the pandemic — that he had a number of plants in China, with tens of thousands of employees. He said: “Look, if somebody dies in amongst my employees, I find out immediately, because we stop paying them.” But he noticed that there were very, very few deaths on that metric early on. So his view was that it wasn’t clear that the case fatality rate numbers that were coming out matched reality in China itself, even from the earliest days of the pandemic… Certainly at this point, he was very sympathetic to my message about the harms to the poor of the world threatened by the economic dislocation caused by lockdowns, the closing of schools — all of that I think he opposed.

So then an engineer shows you your files. What did you find out? An engineer comes to me, we talk in this little cubicle. And so it turns out that there are two major sources of information for the journalists that are looking at this. First, there’s this tool, which Bari Weiss made famous: for each person, they’ll have the status of the person and history of the status of that person… That includes some personal identifying information, which is why you’re not seeing a dump of those files for everybody, because they’re not supposed to share that… I had got permission to look at myself of course. And I asked for permission to look at Martin Kulldorff.

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“The Big News Media may not be able to avoid reporting on it, especially with Twitter loosened up, and their lying attempts to spin events is going to look pathetic..”

Truth And Consequences (Jim Kunstler)

Even if NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The WashPo, and the rest of the Big News Media mafia ignore the Twitter Files story, the revolution at Twitter is going to shake their windows and rattle their walls. There will be free debate in 2023 on this social media platform. News and ideas will be set loose across the landscape, and, for the first time in years, reality will have a chance to compete with the bad faith narratives of a regime at war against its own people. We’ll have to see how long this lasts before the Intel Community tries to shut Twitter down, ramp up a campaign to defame it, or blow it up as a viable business. Or make a move to, shall we say, neutralize the person behind the revolution there.

The more that free speech is actually permitted on Twitter, the more every other platform will look like a lame organ of propaganda, especially when it comes to issues that really matter such as the deadly consequences of the mRNA “vaccines,” the shady doings around recent US elections, the actual condition of the US economy, the perilous folly of “Joe Biden’s” war in Ukraine (and the family grifting operation that prompted it), and the evil machinations of the Intel Community itself. In about three weeks, the Party of Chaos will be swept out of power in the US House of Representatives. Their opponents will take control of all the House committee chairs, with subpoena power to compel the testimony of public figures who have managed to avoid answering questions for years. The Big News Media may not be able to avoid reporting on it, especially with Twitter loosened up, and their lying attempts to spin events is going to look pathetic when it is instantly contrasted with free analysis and informed debate in the public arena.

You can’t overstate what an advantage the insidious takeover of social media gave to forces seeking to wreck the country, though the effects have not been adequately explored yet. The people remain bamboozled over the Covid-19 operation especially. It certainly wasn’t some random act by Mother Nature, not with US public health agencies supporting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses from Ukraine to North Carolina to Wuhan, China. And the subsequent damage caused by the government’s response to the outbreak was either an epic fiasco of inept officialdom, or something that smells like mass murder. Dr. Anthony Fauci’s little trick to so far avoid answering questions about these matters was simply to not use the term “gain-of-function” in his correspondence arranging grants for it — especially after President Barack Obama banned that type of research by its name in 2014. So when asked about gain-of-function, he could just lie with abandon. After that simple ruse is exposed, the patent and royalty benefits enjoyed by Dr. Fauci — who doubled his net worth after 2019 — will be dragged into the light of day.

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“Current events in northern Kosovo resemble an attempt to bring about the “end of history” in the Balkan context..”

Has ‘The End Of History’ Arrived In The Balkans? (Lukyanov)

Current events in northern Kosovo resemble an attempt to bring about the “end of history” in the Balkan context. Of course, the same one that was promised 30-odd years ago, on a global scale, hasn’t happened, but the idea behind it has remained in people’s minds. Francis Fukuyama, the author of the concept, later admitted that he had been hasty and had failed to take into account important circumstances in the development of societies. However, he hasn’tabandoned it, and continues to believe that the predicted triumph of Western liberal ideology, and the corresponding way of life, will still take place, just later than expected. What has Kosovo got to do with this? The disintegration of Yugoslavia has taken as long as the concept of “the end of history” has existed.

And it has been, perhaps, the clearest example of what it meant in practice. The nature of that state – a socialist federal republic – was diametrically opposed to what was thought to be right after the Cold War. Firstly, socialism as a socio-political construct was simply written off as having failed. Secondly, it was a complex federation dominated by the largest ethnic group. This, to be fair,could be described as being in the spirit of multiculturalism, which has become popular in developed countries over the past couple of decades. But no, because multicultural communities have only been welcomed if they were part of a process that develops from homogeneous to heterogeneous through immigration and the influx of new citizens of different origins.

Thus, multinational states like Yugoslavia or the USSR (or even Czechoslovakia) have instead been perceived through the prism of self-determination. In other words, national aspirations were worthy of support but the desire to maintain (con)federative unions was equated with imperial ambitions.

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“..now that winter proper has begun and the cold is settling in, consumption will increase, whatever the price of gas.”

Is Europe’s Energy Crisis Actually A Boon? (OP)

The energy crisis that began last year in Europe and dramatically escalated following the EU response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has seen many in government worry about the survival of the continent during the winter. Yet not all see such a bleak picture. In fact, some believe that not only is the worst over for Europe but that the crisis actually did the EU a favor. That favor took the form of accelerating the buildout in renewables and the restart of hydrocarbon-fueled power plants. This take, which is certainly not very common right now, came from one investment manager, Per Lekander, who is managing partner at a firm called Clean Energy Transition LLP. Speaking to CNBC this week, Lekander said that Russia had, in fact, very little to do with Europe’s crisis, and it could even be said Vladimir Putin did Europe a favor.

“This [the crisis] is the consequence of long term under-investments in conventional, long term red tape in renewables and then these political closures of nuclear, coal, lignite, etcetera,” Lekander told CNBC. He then went on to add that the measures that European countries took after Russia began responding to EU sanctions by reducing gas flows went a long way toward ensuring that the continent would survive this winter. Energy demand reduction was one of these measures, according to the financier, and returning to hydrocarbons for power generation was another. A third one was the planned reduction in red tape in wind and solar power system construction—obstacles that these two industries have been complaining about for years.

It could be argued that this energy demand reduction that has allowed Europe to save on gas was a result of exorbitant prices rather than any voluntary change in energy consumption behavior patterns. Indeed, millions of people across the continent are being hit with electricity bills that are substantially higher than last year’s bills because of the international gas price inflation caused by the tightening of supply following the EU sanctions on Russia and Russia’s easy to predict response. The sabotage of Nord Stream added to this tightening and pushed prices higher. Another reason for the lower demand was the warm European autumn, as many noted at the time. As the weather was warmer than usual, people’s heating needs were lower. Yet now that winter proper has begun and the cold is settling in, consumption will increase, whatever the price of gas.

Indeed, the worst might not be over. The Guardian reported this week that Germany was at risk of gas shortages because it had failed to hit its consumption reduction target. The reason it had missed it—the target is 20 percent of consumption—was the colder weather last week, the head of the country’s energy regulator said. The European Union last month approved a gas consumption reduction target of 15 percent, but Germany was more ambitious because of its high reliance on the commodity. Whether the rest of Europe would be able to hit the 15-percent target is yet to be seen because, as Klaus Mueller said, “With temperatures of -10C [14F], gas consumption shoots up dramatically.”

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“..such policies are “leveled against” ordinary consumers across the bloc.”

German MP Blasts ‘Absurd’ Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)

Imposing an artificial ceiling on the price paid for Russian oil will provoke an increase in prices for the commodity, the chairman of the Bundestag committee on energy, Klaus Ernst, said in an interview with TASS, calling the measure “absurd.” Berlin is planning to entirely abandon energy imports from Russia, according to Ernst, who stressed that the operations at an oil refinery in the German city of Schwedt are critically dependent on Russian supplies. “It is absolutely clear that when a ceiling is introduced on energy prices, the object targeted by the measure will inevitably reduce the supply. It is clear that this will be counterproductive, because the price will rise,” Ernst argued. “In this regard, I think that such a restriction is absurd.”


The price limit on Russian seaborne oil, set at $60 per barrel, was introduced earlier this month by the EU, the G7 countries, Australia and Norway. The measure bans Western companies from providing insurance and other services to vessels loaded with Russian oil, unless the cargo is bought at or below the price indicated. The EU is currently debating a similar step targeting Russian gas supplies. According to Ernst, the policies pursued by Brussels are “self-destructive.” “The EU deliberately excluded pipeline oil supplies from sanctions. The government rejects them, although there is no need for this,” he said, adding that such policies are “leveled against” ordinary consumers across the bloc.

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“..they will do so slowly, as they both remain exposed to the U.S. economy..”

The Petrodollar’s Long Goodbye (Prashad)

At this first China-GCC summit, Xi urged the Gulf monarchs to “make full use of the Shanghai Petrol and Gas Exchange as a platform to conduct oil and gas sales using Chinese currency.” Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia suggested that it might accept Chinese yuan rather than U.S. dollars for the oil it sells to China. While no formal announcement was made at the GCC summit nor in the joint statement issued by China and Saudi Arabia, indications abound that these two countries will move closer toward using the Chinese yuan to denominate their trade. However, they will do so slowly, as they both remain exposed to the U.S. economy. (China holds just under $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds).

Talk of conducting China-Saudi trade in yuan has raised eyebrows in the United States, which for 50 years has relied on the Saudis to stabilise the dollar. In 1971, the U.S. government withdrew the dollar from the gold standard and began to rely on central banks around the world to hold monetary reserves in U.S. Treasury securities and other U.S. financial assets. When oil prices skyrocketed in 1973, the U.S. government decided to create a system of dollar seigniorage through Saudi oil profits. In 1974, U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon — fresh off the trading desk at the investment bank Salomon Brothers — arrived in Riyadh with instructions from U.S. President Richard Nixon to have a serious conversation with the Saudi oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

Simon proposed that the U.S. purchase large amounts of Saudi oil in dollars and that the Saudis use these dollars to buy U.S. Treasury bonds and weaponry and invest in U.S. banks as a way to recycle vast Saudi oil profits. And so, the petrodollar was born, which anchored the new dollar-denominated world trade and investment system. If the Saudis even hinted towards withdrawing this arrangement, which would take at least a decade to implement, it would seriously challenge the monetary privilege afforded to the U.S. As Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for Analysis of Global Security, told The Wall Street Journal, “The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency. If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse.”

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Play
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Wood art
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Wat Samphran is a Buddhist temple in Amphoe Sam Phran, Nakhon Pathom province, around 40 km west of Bangkok. The temple is notable for its 17-story tall pink cylindrical building with a gigantic dragon sculpture curling around the entire height

 

 

Goose
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