Jan 082024
 


Salvator Rosa Lucrezia as poetry 1640-41

 

The Defeat of the West (Sp.)
US Lawmakers Sideline Ukraine To Reach Budget Deal (RT)
Without Congress Funds Biden Must ‘Freeze’ Ukraine Conflict – Think Tank (Sp.)
Zelensky Wants West ‘To Teach’ Russia (RT)
Israel Would Not Win War With Hezbollah – US Officials (RT)
Iran Faces ‘All-Out Battle With the Enemy’ Says Military Chief (Sp.)
Joe Biden Is No George Washington, And Valley Forge Proved It (Turley)
Mayorkas Impeachment Center Stage In House Homeland Security Committee (JTN)
California To Provide Free Sex Changes For Illegal Immigrants (RT)
New York Prosecutor’s Office Seeks $370m From Trump After Fraud Trial (RT)
Secret Service Records Undercut Another Key J6 Committee Narrative (JTN)
Bill Barr: DOJ Went ‘Too Far’ In Prosecuting Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Cases (JTN)
Family of Ashli Babbitt Files $30 Million Wrongful Death Action (Turley)

 

 

 

 

Trump Biden

 

 

Dementia Hitler

 

 

 

 

Horse paste

 

 

 

 

“Americans have preferred to destroy Europe rather than save the West.”

The Defeat of the West (Sp.)

A renowned French historian and sociologist better known for predicting the Soviet Union’s dissolution well in advance now foretells the West’s overthrow in his newest book. French historian Emmanuel Todd believes that NATO is already losing the Ukrainian conflict. He likewise concluded that the defeat would eventually culminate in Russia’s reconciliation with Europe and its rapprochement with Germany, contrary to the wishes of the United States. This view was expressed to Le Point Magazine during an interview ahead the release of his new book La Defaite de L’Occident (The Defeat of the West). In the book, he denounces the Western attitude toward Russia, stating that “Avoiding the rapprochement between Germany and Russia was one of the US goals. This rapprochement would have signed the ejection of the United States from the European system of power. Americans have preferred to destroy Europe rather than save the West.”

Todd’s La Defaite de L’Occident excerpt highlights America’s waning status as a global superpower and its weak military-industrial complex. The French historian also underlined the diminished influence of Europe, once represented by a strong partnership between France and Germany, highlighting that Germany has taken a dominant role since the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, he pointed out that in the wake of the Ukrainian conflict, the European Union has distanced itself from Russia, therefore hurting its own trade and energy interests. “We also saw Emmanuel Macron’s France vaporize on the international stage, while Poland became Washington’s main agent in the European Union, succeeding in the role of the United Kingdom that became outside the Union by the grace of Brexit…

On the mainland, overall, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced a London-Warsaw-Kiev axis piloted from Washington,” Todd opined. Todd decried the dominant narrative in the West about the conflict in Ukraine: “We are in a completely Putinophobic and Russophobic world.” He went on to argue for a pluralistic view that recognizes different perspectives. “I am fighting to keep the West pluralistic. If we look for my values, they are values of truth and pluralism,” he remarked. Addressing the question of how this year’s US election might alter the trajectory of the Ukrainian conflict, the expert highlighted Russia’s steadfast commitment to its existing course. “For the Russians, it makes no difference. For Russia is at war with America, and they ignore changes in rulers,” according to Todd.

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$1.6 trillion.

US Lawmakers Sideline Ukraine To Reach Budget Deal (RT)

Republican and Democrat leaders have reached an agreement on US government spending for 2024, sidelining negotiations to secure additional resources for Israel and Ukraine, as well as money for border control. The deal comes as lawmakers are set to return from a break this week, ahead of a two-tiered federal funding deadline. The agreement follows defense and domestic spending caps set by Congress as part of a bill to suspend the US debt ceiling until 2025. It “clears the way for Congress to act over the next few weeks in order to maintain important funding priorities for the American people and avoid a government shutdown,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement with top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries on Sunday.

The first set of allocated federal finances are set to expire January 19, the second on February 2, without which the US government would be forced to shut down. Overall, the deal provides for $886 billion in defense funding, and $772 billion in domestic, non-defense spending. In a letter to Republican colleagues, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the deal would secure $16 billion in additional spending cuts compared to the previous agreement negotiated by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, and is around $30 billion less than what the Senate was weighing. “This represents the most favorable budget agreement Republicans have achieved in over a decade,” Johnson claimed.

Biden thanked the lawmakers for cooperating in reaching a consensus in a statement published on Sunday, but added that he expects them to work harder to unlock billions in military aid to Israel and Ukraine. “Now, congressional Republicans must do their job, stop threatening to shut down the government, and fulfill their basic responsibility to fund critical domestic and national security priorities, including my supplemental request,” he said. In October 2023, the White House released a sweeping set of proposals to support Israel and Ukraine in their respective military conflicts, among other things. The total cost of the supplemental funding request was over $100 billion, of which just over $60 billion was slated for Kiev. House Republicans have blocked iterations of this supplemental budget numerous times, on the grounds that US border security should take precedence over aid to Ukraine.

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He can’t freeze it. Only Russia can.

Without Congress Funds Biden Must ‘Freeze’ Ukraine Conflict – Think Tank (Sp.)

There is no way to help Ukraine aside from Congress approving a new package, Team Biden signaled on Friday. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft does not rule out the possibility that US congressmen will refuse provide Joe Biden with requested aid in the near term. US aid funds for Ukraine officially ran out this week, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told the press on January 3. “We have given now Ukraine the last security assistance package that we have funds to support right before New Year’s, right after Christmas. And we’ve got to get support from Congress so we can continue to do that,” Kirby said. Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned on Friday that Ukraine is running out of time and needs legislators to react urgently. Although the US Department of Defense still has some limited ability to help the Kiev regime, “that is not going to get big tranches of equipment into Ukraine,” Young stressed.

The Ukrainian leadership admitted on Wednesday that they have no “plan B” if US funding runs out despite previous speculations by economist Oleg Ustenko, an advisor to Volodymyr Zelensky. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson has demanded illegal immigration issues be solved before approving new aid packages for Ukraine. On January 3, Johnson together with 60 fellow Republican lawmakers visited the Mexican border to push for stronger measures. “If President Biden wants a supplemental spending bill focused on national security, it better begin with defending America’s national security. We want to get the border closed and secured first,” Johnson underlined.According to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “it is no great exaggeration to say that what happens on Capitol Hill over the next few weeks could decisively shape the next phase” of the Ukrainian conflict.

The DC think tank suggests that the Senate “has never been the real obstacle” to passing the Ukrainian package, while the House remains the major battleground in this internal game of funds. Johnson wants H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which was passed by the lower chamber last May, to be signed into law. One shouldn’t underestimate the House speaker’s determination as he has made it clear that he’s going to risk a government shutdown to pass the bill. H.R. 2 would obligate all employers to verify, under penalty of prison, that all their workers were documented. It would make it far harder for immigrants to claim asylum, and also require the federal government to build at least a 900 mile-wall along the US’s roughly 2000-mile border with Mexico. The bill would also require the Department of Homeland Security to re-establish migrant family detention and fast-track deportations of unaccompanied minors. But with much of the Democrat voter base in favor of liberal immigration laws, the government faction in Congress may block the legislation. “The main takeaway is clear: Congress may well fail to pass new funding for Ukraine aid this year,” believes the DC-based think tank.

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“To fight successfully, to reclaim what is yours… ”

Zelensky Wants West ‘To Teach’ Russia (RT)

Ukraine can continue to resist Russia only if Western countries show solidarity on numerous fronts while intensifying joint arms production programs, President Vladimir Zelensky has said. Speaking via video link at the annual Society and Defense conference held in Sweden on Sunday, Zelensky claimed that Russia, which he described as “a much larger enemy… in terms of military strength,” was using “the potential that has… amassed over the lifetimes of several generations” against both Ukraine and Europe. The president said Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine, and what he described as its “hybrid” activities against the West, could be foiled only via cooperation on numerous fronts. “To fight successfully, to reclaim what is yours… and to teach the aggressor that aggression brings no benefits, is only possible if defense gets strength from solidarity,” Zelensky stated.

In this vein, he urged his European partners to “create an arsenal for the defense of freedom” by intensifying joint weapons production. “Regardless of which political moods will dominate on both sides of the Atlantic, our strength can and should be sufficient to protect our way of life,” he added. Zelensky’s comments come after Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba admitted last month that Kiev was aware of acute concerns in the West regarding Ukraine’s prospects in the conflict, as well as growing “war fatigue” following the country’s botched counteroffensive. In early November, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni acknowledged in a phone call with a pair of Russian pranksters that EU nations were getting tired of the conflict and that it would eventually have to be resolved through some kind of a compromise.

Meanwhile, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell warned in December that the parliamentary election in the bloc scheduled for later this year could result in right-wing politicians – many of whom have been skeptical about sending arms to Ukraine – gaining more clout. On the other side of the Atlantic, US President Joe Biden has vowed to support Ukraine “as long as it takes,” but his efforts have been hampered by congressional gridlock. Republicans continue to block the White House’s supplemental funding request, which includes more than $60 billion for Ukraine, demanding that the administration do more to enhance border security. Russia has repeatedly warned the West against sending weapons to Ukraine, arguing it will only prolong the conflict and make it a direct participant in the hostilities.

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“..American officials have privately warned him against opening a second front, the Washington Post reported.”

Israel Would Not Win War With Hezbollah – US Officials (RT)

A secret assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington has found that Israeli forces would find it “difficult to succeed” in a two-front war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have engaged in tit-for-tat exchanges of fire with Hezbollah militants since the start of the war with Hamas in October. Initially limited in scale, Hezbollah’s pounding of an Israeli intelligence base with missiles on Saturday in response to Israel assassinating a senior Hamas leader in Beirut several days earlier, has marked a significant escalation. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to make a “fundamental change” to the security situation along the Lebanese border, American officials have privately warned him against opening a second front, the Washington Post reported.

“If it were to do so, a new secret assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) found that it will be difficult for Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to succeed because its military assets and resources would be spread too thin given the conflict in Gaza,” citing two anonymous officials and a classified report by the DIA. Israel’s military is relatively small in peacetime, relying on reservists to swell its ranks in times of conflict. The IDF called up around 360,000 reservists when the war with Hamas began, although a senior Israeli official told Reuters last week that an undisclosed number would soon be released from duty.

Amid this drawdown, Hezbollah has been open about its role in the conflict. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, claimed in November that his forces had tied up around a third of Israel’s troops along the Israel-Lebanon border, preventing them from being deployed to Gaza. He added that Hezbollah’s continued skirmishes with the IDF were causing “a state of anxiety, anticipation, panic, and fear among the enemy’s political and military leadership.” Multiple US officials told the Washington Post that they fear Netanyahu may attack Hezbollah in order to save his political career. The Israeli leader faced widespread protests before the start of the war, and was criticized afterwards for failing to pre-empt Hamas’ October 7 assault, which left around 1,200 Israelis dead.

“A full-scale conflict between Israel and Lebanon would surpass the bloodshed of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war on account of Hezbollah’s substantially larger arsenal of long-range and precision weaponry,” the paper stated, citing officials who also warned that the militant group could launch missile attacks on Israeli petrochemical plants and nuclear reactors. Washington also fears that such a conflict could draw in Iran – Hezbollah’s principal backer – and eventually the US, the paper’s sources said. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Jordan on Sunday, ahead of visits to Israel, the West Bank, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. “We have an intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading,” he said, before meeting Jordanian King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi.

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“..We need to defend our national interests to wherever they extend..”

Iran Faces ‘All-Out Battle With the Enemy’ Says Military Chief (Sp.)

The commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) sounded a note of defiance in a speech Saturday, warning enemy countries to “stay away from this area.” “Today we are facing an all-out battle with the enemy,” said Major General Hossein Salami in a ceremony marking the debut of a new ship and missile launchers. The remark comes as war threatens to break out in the Red Sea, where Houthi militants in Yemen have been attacking ships associated with Israel in retribution for the country’s incursion in Gaza. The death toll recently reached 22,438 in the besieged enclave according to local authorities. “We need to defend our national interests to wherever they extend,” said the general in the speech carried on Iranian television.

“It will be harmful for the enemy to be found near and at a half distant.” He added that Iran’s navy had made a “brilliant leap in its offensive and defensive powers.” The United States recently announced a coalition of countries would work together to counter the Houthis’ attacks, but the Biden administration has had difficulty securing substantial commitments. Spain was originally believed to be part of the coalition, but its defense minister clarified it would only act along with NATO or the EU. France insisted its ships would only operate under its own command. Meanwhile several shipping countries have begun taking longer routes around Africa in order to avoid the area.

Iran sent a warship to the Red Sea earlier this month to protect its own commercial interests there. Some analysts have suggested Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu desires a broader war between the United States and Israel’s arch-enemy Iran. Netanyahu frequently employs threatening rhetoric against the country. The Israeli president recently announced military operations would continue in Gaza for several more months, but international condemnation of the country’s conduct there is mounting. Recently South Africa filed charges against Israel in the International Court of Justice, accusing the country of authoring genocide. Israel is expected to answer the charges next week in The Hague.

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“In this election, voters can choose anyone they want, as long as it is Biden.”

Joe Biden Is No George Washington, And Valley Forge Proved It (Turley)

“This is like something out of a fairy tale, a bad fairy tale.” That line, from the speech of President Joe Biden at Valley Forge this week, may have been the most accurate observation in the entire address kicking off Biden’s 2024 campaign. The speech was a masterpiece of contradiction. Biden started by denouncing how Donald Trump’s campaign is only “about him” and “obsessed with the past.” He then spent virtually all of the speech obsessing about Trump and Jan. 6, 2021. It was an early indication of the Orwellian character of the speech. Facing the lowest polling numbers of any modern president, Biden attempted a constructive substitution. “Democracy is on the ballot,” he said. So voters do not have to vote for him. When they see Biden, they should just read “democracy.”

That will require more than an act of substitution in the voting booth. It would require an act of willful blindness. Biden spoke of how Democrats are fighting to protect the “right to vote.” Democratic activists and officials across the country are seeking to remove Trump from the ballot even though he is the most popular choice for the presidency right now. In fact, dozens of Democratic officials have sought to remove 126 Republicans from Congress on the same basis. Even as Biden was telling citizens to vote Democrat to preserve democracy, a Democratic activist was seeking to remove a GOP congressman from the ballot in a nearby Pennsylvania district. Biden’s speech would be more credible if he had joined principled Democratic politicians who have denounced this nationwide effort. As usual, he has remained silent as he did on court packing in the last election.

It would also have been a tad more convincing if his party were not preventing citizens from voting for anyone other than Biden in the primary. Florida called its Democratic primary for Biden and blocked opposing candidates, despite two-thirds of Democrats wanting an alternative to Biden. Faced with such polling numbers, the party establishment is so committed to democracy that it has decided voters cannot be trusted with a choice. North Carolina’s Democrats became the latest to bar anyone but Biden from the ballot. Democratic officials are approaching democracy the way Henry Ford responded to calls for different color choices for the Model T. He pledged to provide “any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.” In this election, voters can choose anyone they want, as long as it is Biden.

For millions of voters, democracy may be on the ballot but it is aspirational. If you vote for Biden, you might just get democracy back, but only after the election. Even more galling was Biden’s claim to be the defender of free speech. As I have previously written, Biden has been the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. His administration has been unrelenting in pushing for censorship and blacklisting of those with opposing views.The Biden censorship efforts have been described by one federal court as unprecedented in our history and a virtual “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” The Biden Administration has called for the censorship of even true statements that it deems misleading. For Biden to run on free speech is about as convincing as Bill Clinton running on abstinence.

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“The majority are single, military age men.”

Mayorkas Impeachment Center Stage In House Homeland Security Committee (JTN)

The House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing this week as part of its chairman’s stated plan to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Chairman Mark E. Green, R-Tenn., said the Wednesday hearing will be held to evaluate the impacts on the country of” Mayorkas’ “failed leadership and refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress.” The hearing is the first of three the committee has scheduled this month, Green said last month as the committee released its fifth report evaluating Mayorkas’ policies. The committee majority released five reports as part of its nearly year-long investigation into “the causes, costs, and consequences of the crisis at the Southwest border and how the reckless decision-making and legally dubious policies of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and President Joe Biden have precipitated the worst border crisis in American history.”

The first report details the laws and court orders the committee says Mayorkas “ignored, abused or failed to follow.” The second report details how Mexican cartels “have seized unprecedented control at the Southwest border to smuggle illegal aliens, criminals, suspected terrorists, and deadly fentanyl and other drugs into the United States.” The third report detailed how transnational gangs are working with cartel operatives to oversee a massive human smuggling operation; the fourth estimated border crisis costs to U.S. taxpayers of over $451 billion. The fifth report details “consistent misuse and abuse of taxpayer resources enabled by Mayorkas, specifically through his failure to detain illegal aliens and use Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention resources in accordance with their intended purpose.” It also addresses the costs of halting construction of the border wall already paid for by taxpayers.

The committee also released 65 pages of transcripts of interviews with multiple Border Patrol chiefs. The chiefs told committee members “illegal aliens spread the word the border is open” and that the policy of pulling Border Patrol agents from the field has had “detrimental consequences and the homeland isn’t safe.” Agents in California and Arizona also described the consequences of these policies on CBP sectors in their states, including closing checkpoints at ports of entry and in the field with no boots on the ground to interdict criminals, and expressing concerns about the record number of gotaways entering the country posing national security risks. “Gotaways” is the official CBP term to describe foreign nationals who illegally enter the U.S. between ports of entry, avoid capture and don’t return to Mexico or Canada.

Gotaways don’t file asylum or other immigration-related claims; intentionally illegally entering to avoid being caught. Many have criminal records and often run when they are pursued by Border Patrol agents or others in law enforcement, authorities have explained to The Center Square. The majority are single, military age men.

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New American priorities.

California To Provide Free Sex Changes For Illegal Immigrants (RT)

As of last week, California’s taxpayer-funded healthcare system now covers sex changes for illegal immigrants, thanks to legislation recently signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The cost of the program is expected to top $3 billion. California became the first state in the US to provide health insurance to all adults regardless of immigration status on January 1, when legislation signed by Newsom last summer came into effect. Approximately 700,000 illegal immigrants will now have their healthcare covered by the state’s taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal insurance system, according to a press release from State Senator Maria Elena Durazo in May. Among the procedures covered by Medi-Cal are hormone therapy and gender transition surgery, according to a report this week by the Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet.

“Gender affirming care is a covered Medi-Cal benefit when medically necessary,” a 2022 state memo cited by the outlet states. “Requests for gender affirming care should be from specialists experienced in providing culturally competent care to transgender and gender diverse individuals and should use nationally recognized guidelines.”According to the Transgender Law Center, Medi-Cal should cover “hormone treatment, gender reassignment surgery, and other necessary procedures.”Newsom’s expansion of the Medi-Cal program will cost California taxpayers an estimated $3.1 billion, according to an Associated Press report from last year. Republican lawmakers criticized the expansion even before it emerged that it would cover transgender surgery, but their criticism turned to ridicule in recent days. “California is now paying for illegal aliens to get sex changes,” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday. “There’s no punchline to this tweet. California is the punchline.”

Newsom has defended the decision to add 700,000 more patients to the program. “In California, we believe everyone deserves access to quality, affordable health care coverage – regardless of income or immigration status,” his office told ABC News. “Through this expansion, we’re making sure families and communities across California are healthier, stronger, and able to get the care they need when they need it.”Some 300,000 illegal immigrants were caught entering the US from Mexico in December 2023, the highest number on record for a single month. Under President Joe Biden’s controversial ‘Catch and Release’ policy, almost all of these migrants are released into the US with orders to show up at court hearings at a later date. Amid a backlog of more than two million cases, the average wait time for such a hearing stood at 762 days as of last January.

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“..the attorney general has woefully failed to prove her case and is not entitled to any of the relief,” including any financial penalty.”

New York Prosecutor’s Office Seeks $370m From Trump After Fraud Trial (RT)

The New York attorney general on Friday asked the judge who had overseen the civil fraud trial of Donald J. Trump to penalize the former president about $370 million, saying the trial had demonstrated that he had gained that amount through unlawful conduct, Report informs, citing The New York Times. The sum was well over the $250 million that the attorney general, Letitia James, had estimated in the fall of 2022, when she sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable treatment from banks and insurers. The trial began in October and proceedings ended last month, but Mr. Trump’s fate is not yet settled. The attorney general’s penalty request came in a post-trial brief filed on Friday. Mr. Trump’s lawyers, in one of their own filings, wrote that “the attorney general has woefully failed to prove her case and is not entitled to any of the relief,” including any financial penalty. In a statement, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christopher M. Kise, called the amount “unconscionable, unsupported by the evidence, untethered from reality and unconstitutionally excessive.”

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“All presidential trips are highly scripted because of the need for security. The Secret Service places assets at all locations where a president may go.”

Secret Service Records Undercut Another Key J6 Committee Narrative (JTN)

It has become one of the enduring messages of the House Democrats’ final report on the Jan. 6 riot: Donald Trump had a plan and an intention to go directly to the U.S. Capitol to join those disrupting the certification of the 2020 election results. “The Committee’s principal concern was that the President actually intended to participate personally in the January 6th efforts at the Capitol, leading the attempt to overturn the election either from inside the House Chamber, from a stage outside the Capitol, or otherwise,” the committee wrote in its final report on December 2022. “The Committee regarded those facts as important because they are relevant to President Trump’s intent on January 6th. There is no question from all the evidence assembled that President Trump did have that intent,” it added.

Lawmakers, pundits and journalists have all echoed that line in the months before and after the report’s release. “I imagine that he thought that he would enter like Mussolini being carried on the shoulders of his supporters and enter the Capitol,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, comparing Trump to Italy’s fascist leader during World War II. In his speech at Valley Forge on Friday reviving his argument that Trump and MAGA supporters pose a threat to democracy, President Joe Biden pointedly avoided making the claim. In fact, he took the opposite tact and suggested a cowardly Trump declined to join his supporters storming the Capitol. “He promised he would right them — right them. Everything they did, he would be side by side with them. Then, as usual, he left the dirty work to others. He retreated to the White House,” Biden said.

Such conflicting portrayals may be confusing to voters. That confusion is also rooted in an undisputed fact: Trump never actually went to the Capitol after his speech on the Ellipse. The House Democrats claims are based on two pieces of testimony. Some Trump aides recalled to the committee the 45th president mentioning in a meeting on Jan, 4, 2021, that he might want to go to the Capitol. And then former aide Cassidy Hutchinson claimed in a disputed account based on hearsay that on the way back from his speech Trump lunged at the driver of the presidential limo to commandeer it and take it to the Capitol. The Secret Service and Trump deny that happened, and no evidence has emerged to validate Hutchinson’s claim.

That did not stop the account from making its way into mainstream media. The Democratic Party’s narrative is further undercut by internal Secret Service documents reviewed by Just the News, which show there was no plan heading into the Jan. 6 event to take Trump to the Capitol. All presidential trips are highly scripted because of the need for security. The Secret Service places assets at all locations where a president may go. That did not happen at the Capitol, according to the Secret Service records reviewed by Just the News, suggesting Trump’s alleged statements to the presidential aides two days earlier did not result in a change of plan.

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“..have been hounding people that really, you know, just walked into open doors in the Capitol and hung around..”

Bill Barr: DOJ Went ‘Too Far’ In Prosecuting Jan. 6 Capitol Riot Cases (JTN)

Former Attorney General Bill Barr said that the Justice Department went “too far” in charging more than 1,200 people in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, including those he said simply walked around the building but did not assault anyone. “Like everything else the left does, they did, I think, go too far,” Barr said Saturday, the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, in an interview on Fox News. Some people, such as those who assaulted police officers and literally broke into the Capitol, should be prosecuted for Jan. 6, Barr said. “But I think they cast their net far too broadly and have been hounding people that really, you know, just walked into open doors in the Capitol and hung around,” he also said. “I think they just took it too far.”

Barr said that he does not want to “minimize” the events of Jan. 6, but he thinks it was a “shameful episode” rather than an insurrection. The Justice Department said last week that more than 1,265 defendants have been charged in connection to the riot in nearly all 50 states. More than 90% of the defendants, or about 1,186 of them, were charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds.

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“Under these standards, police officers should not shoot unarmed suspects or rioters without a clear threat to themselves or fellow officers.”

Family of Ashli Babbitt Files $30 Million Wrongful Death Action (Turley)

The long-awaited tort action from the family of Ashli Babbitt has now been filed in Southern California. Babbitt was shot and killed on Jan. 6th and her family is seeking $30 million in a wrongful death. Equally important, the lawsuit could force additional answers to why Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed the unarmed protester as she attempted to climb through a window near the House Chamber. I have previously raised concerns over the shooting as conflicting with governing standards on the use of lethal force despite the Capitol police. I also noted contradictions Byrd’s own statements and the government’s conclusion that this was a justified killing. The complaint below adds some troubling facts to these prior concerns. Babbitt, 35, was an Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who participated in the riot three years ago. She was clearly committing criminal acts of trespass, property damage, and other offenses. However, the question is whether an officer is justified in shooting a protester when he admits that he did not see any weapon before discharging his weapon.

Just to recap what we previously discussed in the earlier column: When protesters rushed to the House chamber, police barricaded the chamber’s doors; Capitol Police were on both sides, with officers standing directly behind Babbitt. Babbitt and others began to force their way through, and Babbitt started to climb through a broken window. That is when Byrd killed her. At the time, some of us familiar with the rules governing police use of force raised concerns over the shooting. Those concerns were heightened by the DOJ’s bizarre review and report, which stated the governing standards but then seemed to brush them aside to clear Byrd. The DOJ report did not read like any post-shooting review I have read as a criminal defense attorney or law professor. The DOJ statement notably does not say that the shooting was clearly justified. Instead, it stressed that “prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so ‘willfully.’”

It seemed simply to shrug and say that the DOJ did not believe it could prove “a bad purpose to disregard the law” and that “evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent.” While the Supreme Court, in cases such as Graham v. Connor, has said that courts must consider “the facts and circumstances of each particular case,” it has emphasized that lethal force must be used only against someone who is “an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and … is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” Particularly with armed assailants, the standard governing “imminent harm” recognizes that these decisions must often be made in the most chaotic and brief encounters. Under these standards, police officers should not shoot unarmed suspects or rioters without a clear threat to themselves or fellow officers. That even applies to armed suspects who fail to obey orders.

Indeed, Huntsville police officer William “Ben” Darby was convicted for killing a suicidal man holding a gun to his own head. Despite being cleared by a police review board, Darby was prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison, even though Darby said he feared for the safety of himself and fellow officers. Yet law professors and experts who have praised such prosecutions in the past have been conspicuously silent over the shooting of an unarmed woman who had officers in front of and behind her on Jan. 6. Byrd went public soon after the Capitol Police declared “no further action will be taken” in the case. He proceeded to demolish the two official reviews that cleared him. Byrd described how he was “trapped” with other officers as “the chants got louder” with what “sounded like hundreds of people outside of that door.”

He said he yelled for all of the protesters to stop: “I tried to wait as long as I could. I hoped and prayed no one tried to enter through those doors. But their failure to comply required me to take the appropriate action to save the lives of members of Congress and myself and my fellow officers.” Byrd could just as well have hit the officers behind Babbitt, who was shot while struggling to squeeze through the window. Of all of the lines from Byrd, this one stands out: “I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are.” So, Byrd admitted he did not see a weapon or an immediate threat from Babbitt beyond her trying to enter through the window. Nevertheless, Byrd boasted, “I know that day I saved countless lives.” He ignored that Babbitt was the one person killed during the riot.

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Smile
https://twitter.com/i/status/1744006222087422145

 

 

Being a bird
https://twitter.com/i/status/1744007471033733227

 

 

Capybara

 

 

Honey badger

 

 

Elephants

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sep 042022
 


Odilon Redon Breton harbor 1879

 

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)
Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)
One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)
The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)
Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)
Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)
Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)
Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)
Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)
Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)
The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)
Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)
1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)
Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)
Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

 

 


MAGA kids

 

 

Putin dollar

 

 

 

 

Biden day after

 

 

Rallies

 

 

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
– Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

Ha ha ha! That’s one big gaping barn door he’s opening here:

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war..”

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Saturday that efforts by G-7 nations to introduce a price cap on Russian oil would require commitment from the wider international community to be successful. The G-7 economic powers announced Friday that they had agreed on a plan to impose a set price on Russian oil. The initiative is the latest attempt to apply economic pressure on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. But aside from cutting Russia’s oil revenues — a key source of funding for President Vladimir Putin’s war chest — Le Maire said the policy should be implemented as a “global measure against war.” “You need an outreach because we don’t want this measure to be only a Western measure,” Le Maire told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy.

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war,” he added. The G-7 — which consists of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Japan — is yet to finalize how the price cap will be implemented, a process that Le Maire acknowledged will be “quite difficult.” However, it is expected to be ready before early December when EU sanctions on seaborne imports of Russian crude kick in. “We know that we need the unity from all the 27 member states if you want to get the green light for introducing that cap,” he said, referring to the EU bloc of nations, a non-enumerated member of the G-7. More than that, however, Le Maire said the policy would require participation by other major global economies.


It follows comments from Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy chief, who urged involvement from China and India, both of which have increased their purchases of Russian oil this year, benefiting from discounted rates. “If we want to be efficient in these sanctions, we need to reduce the revenues that Russia is gaining from oil and gas selling,” Le Maire said.

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First step. “The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.”

“They require direct gas supplies from Russia and food and energy guarantees for the Czech Republic. They hold the EU solely responsible for the European economic disaster and the rise in energy bills.”

Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)

Tens of thousands hit central Prague on Saturday, taking part in a protest dubbed ‘Czech Republic First.’ The protesters urged the government to resign over soaring energy prices, inflation and the international policies they believe have brought the country to that state. According to police estimates, some 70,000 took part in the rally, with the organizers putting the mark even higher at 100,000. The event brought together people of polar political views, with the Communist party and right-wing Freedom and Direct Democracy Party alike taking part in the protest. “The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn,” one of the event’s co-organizers, social democrat Jiri Havel, told local media.

The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia. They have also condemned the government for supporting the EU’s sanctions against Moscow, adopted in multiple waves in wake of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “The best for the Ukrainians and two sweaters for us,” one of the banners displayed at the event read, referring to the rising heating costs and potential energy cuts in winter. The protest came a day after the government survived a no-confidence vote over the same issues, with the opposition blaming it for inaction in wake of the soaring energy prices and inflation.


Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, leading the ruling five-party, center-right coalition, was quick to accuse the protesters of acting against the country’s best interests, implying the Kremlin might have had a hand in staging the protest. “The protest on Wenceslas Square was called by forces that are pro-Russian, are close to extreme positions and are against the interests of the Czech Republic,” he told CTK broadcaster. “It is clear that Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns are present on our territory and some people simply listen to them.”

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The protests won’t be long now.

One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)

One in six Italians, or up to nine million people, could sink into energy poverty due to soaring bills across the EU, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported on Saturday, citing the Italian General Confederation of Crafts. Households are considered to be in energy poverty if they cannot afford to regularly heat their homes in winter or use air conditioning in summer, and are forced to stop using high-energy household appliances, or severely limit their use. Southern regions of the country are reportedly the worst-hit. In Campania, between 519,000 and 779,000 households are using electricity or gas on an irregular basis. In Sicily the figure is between 481,000 and 722,000, and in Calabria there are 287,000 such households.


Earlier this week, local media reported that Italy’s Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani planned to ask the entire population to turn the heating down, starting from October. Italy has already introduced some limits on the use of central heating in public buildings and apartment blocks, and these are expected to be tightened under the new measures. On Friday, Italy’s Serie A football league announced plans to put a four-hour limit on the use of floodlights in stadiums on match days, as part of energy-saving measures. The new rule is expected to cut floodlight electricity consumption by about 25%.

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Evgeny Norin is a Russian historian focused on conflicts and international politics.

“The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands.”

The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)

Just a day before the agreement was struck between Serbia and Kosovo, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Gabriel Escobar made an infuriating statement, “It’s time to forget the narrative ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ and move to the one that says ‘Kosovo and Serbia are actually Europe.’” The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands. His words, however, sparked protest among the Serbian public and politicians. “The line between terrorists and freedom fighters is very thin for them. This is US policy. What can you expect from Mr. Escobar? Why do we keep pretending we don’t know what it is about?” said an outraged Serbian president, Alexandar Vucic, in an address to the nation.


Escobar’s rhetoric didn’t go unnoticed in Russia either. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reminded her American colleague that “UN Security Council Resolution 1244 <…> is still the legal framework for the Kosovo settlement, clearly reaffirming the territorial integrity of Serbia.” There are two sides to this story, but history definitely favors the Serbian and Russian perspectives. Kosovo is located in the south-west of Serbia, near the Albanian border. In the 12th century, it became part of the nascent Serbian state, gaining prominence during the Middle Ages. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church resided in Kosovo’s Peja. Kosovo also played an important role in the building of the Serbian nation. The Battle of Kosovo, when the Turkish army fought the Serbs and won, became one of the bloodiest battles in Serbia’s history and a symbol of heroic defeat. A large portion of Serbian poetry is dedicated to those events.

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Siemens denies.

Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)

Germany’s Siemens Energy is ready to correct a turbine fault in the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline, but there is currently nowhere to service the failed equipment, Russian energy major Gazprom said on Saturday. “Siemens is taking part in the repair works under the terms of the current contract [with Gazprom], has detected faults and signed an act on diagnosing of oil leaks, and is ready to fix them,” the Russian company said via its Telegram channel. “There is just no place to carry out the repair works,” Gazprom added, providing no further details. Earlier this week, the company [said] an engine oil leak was found in the turbine during a joint inspection with manufacturer Siemens Energy at the Portovaya compressor station near St.Petersburg. Natural gas supplies via Nord Stream, a major gas route from Russia to Europe, have been terminated for an indefinite period due to the leakage. The pipeline had been due to restart early on Saturday after a three-day maintenance break.

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Add this to the war tab. All EU countries must follow.

Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)

Last weekend, Credit Suisse repo guru Zoltan published what may have been the most insightful snippet of the entire European energy crisis (to date) when he extended the infamous “Minsky Moment” framework to Europe, and specifically Germany, which he said “can’t cover its payments without Russian gas and the government is asking citizens to conserve energy to leave more for industry.” He then elaborated that “Minsky moments are triggered by excessive financial leverage, and in the context of supply chains, leverage means excessive operating leverage: in Germany, $2 trillion of value added depends on $20 billion of gas from Russia… …that’s 100-times leverage – much more than Lehman’s.”

But while Germany still pretends it can somehow avoid a devastating crisis this winter besides bailing out Uniper, one of the country’s biggest utilities (after all, admission would make Trump’s 2018 warning accurate and prescient, and everyone knows that according to Western intellectual snobs Trump can’t possibly ever be correct), other European nations are succumbing to what Zoltan dubbed a “supply-chain Minsky moment.” On Wednesday it was Austria, which announced it would bail out the country’s main energy supplier with a two-billion-euro ($2 billion) loan, the AFP reported. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the loan to Wien Energie was an “extraordinary rescue measure” to ensure its two million customers – mainly Vienna households – continue to receive electricity. It will run until next April.

Wien Energie asked for a bailout this weekend after suffering financial trouble amid soaring energy prices and speculation the company mismanaged their funds. Nehammer said Wien Energie, which is owned by Vienna, would have to answer questions as to how they got into trouble. “The goal was to help people quickly… It has now been agreed that all of these questions, which are rightly raised, must be answered promptly by Vienna (and) the energy supplier,” he told reporters. The company – almost entirely dependent on Russian gas – said earlier this week that it had been hit by the “price explosion” which it has not yet passed on to customers, assuring it remained solvent. As part of its rescue, the company is expected to pass through soaring costs, which means a historic price shock is coming to Austria next… and soon Sweden.

Following in Austria’s footsteps, on Saturday morning Sweden announced it will give emergency liquidity support to electricity producers after the government said it feared Russia’s decision to halt gas deliveries to Europe could place its financial system under severe strain. Prime minister Magdalena Andersson said the government would offer hundreds of billions of kroner in support to electricity producers, the FT reported. The PM warned that, left unchecked, rising collateral demands for electricity producers could ripple through the main Nasdaq Clearing market in Stockholm and, in the worst case, spark a financial crisis…. just as Zoltan warned almost half a year ago. Her remarks came after Russia said on Friday evening that it would no longer supply gas via the Nordstream 1 pipeline. That announcement came after energy markets had closed for the weekend. s

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Visas for UN diplomats.

1947: “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.”

Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)

Russia’s permanent representative at the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has asked the organization to persuade the US to grant visas for members of Moscow’s delegation to the UN General Assembly. They are heading to New York to attend the high-level general debate that will be held between September 20 and 26. The request was made in a letter that Nebenzia forwarded to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday. The document has been seen by both Russian and the Western media. In his message, the envoy pointed out that, with less than three weeks remaining before the General Assembly, not a single member of Russia’s delegation has received entry visas from the US.

The Russian side, headed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, had submitted the relevant applications to attend the event to the American embassy in Moscow, the diplomat reportedly added. “This is even more alarming since, for the last several months, the authorities of the US have been constantly refusing to grant entry visas to a number of Russian delegates assigned to take part in the official United Nations events,” the letter read, as quoted by the media. Earlier this week, Nebenzia pointed out that Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and his delegation could not attend a meeting of UN police chiefs because the US refused to grant them visas.


The Russian envoy cited the 1947 agreement between the UN and the US, which states that “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.” The already strained relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated even further since the launch of the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The US has slapped harsh economic sanctions on Russia while backing Kiev and providing it with billions of dollars in military aid, as well as with intelligence. Nebenzia urged Guterres “to once again emphasize to the authorities of the US that they must promptly issue requested visas for all Russian delegates and accompanying persons,”including the Russian journalists covering Lavrov’s trip to the General Assembly.

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They even searched Barron’s bedroom.

Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)

The legal fight between former President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice escalated Friday morning when the DOJ released a detailed inventory of the documents seized in last month’s Mar-a-Lago raid. The inventory list comes following an order from Florida Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is deciding whether to appoint a “special master” to the case. On “America Reports” on Friday, former Attorney General Bill Barr criticized Trump’s push for a “special master” as a distraction from the details of the case and argued it is not likely to be granted. “I think the whole idea of a special master is a bit of a red herring,” Barr told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts. “I think it’s a waste of time.”


Since the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the former president has slammed the DOJ for what he argues was a politically motivated witch hunt. Trump recently called for a special master to hold an independent review of the documents. According to details revealed in the warrant, affidavit and the inventory list, dozens of the documents seized from Trump’s property were classified materials. A portion of the items taken were not classified, with several entries labeled “Article of Clothing/Gift Item.” Trump has claimed the documents at his Florida home were documents he had “declassified” prior to leaving office and were protected under executive privilege.

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“With Hillary Clinton selling “But Her Emails” hats at $30 a pop, Merrick Garland will have to explain the prospect of one politician going to jail while the other goes retail.”

Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)

A criminal charge of obstruction against Trump would offer certain political benefits for Garland. As previously discussed, the government has routinely elected not to prosecute high-ranking officials for improperly removing classified material or has sought mere misdemeanor charges in the most egregious cases. Prosecuting Trump for a misdemeanor for possessing or removing classified documents would seem gratuitous, while prosecuting him for a felony would raise questions of biased or selective prosecution. After all, in 2016, Hillary Clinton had not just 113 documents containing classified material but some documents “classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level” on her private email servers. (In Trump’s case, the government allegedly found roughly 100 documents in the Mar-a-Lago raid in addition to roughly 150 handled over by the Trump team under an earlier subpoena.)

Clinton’s documents were even more vulnerable to being compromised via her unclassified email account and, according to the FBI, “hostile actors gained access” to some of the information. Yet she was never subjected to a raid, let alone a charge. Yet, while less glaring as a contradiction than the charges on the possession or handling of classified information, an obstruction charge would allow up to a 20-year sentence and could be brought with misdemeanor charges on the mishandling or retention of classified information. Thus, an obstruction charge against Trump would be prosecuted in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s case. In addition to the transfer of top-secret and other classified documents to her private server, Clinton and her staff did not fully cooperate with investigators.


During the investigations of her conduct, some of us marveled at the temerity of the Clinton staff in refusing to turn over her laptop and other evidence to State Department and DOJ investigators. The FBI had to cut deals with her aides to secure their cooperation. Later, more classified material was found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — 49,000 emails potentially relevant to the Clinton investigation. After Congress sought these emails, Clinton’s staff unilaterally destroyed thousands of emails with BleachBit. Clinton was aware that Congress and the State Department were seeking the emails in 2014. Her lawyers turned over about 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department and deleted 33,000 others while insisting they unilaterally deemed them “personal.”

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Democracy is something else.

Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)

Federal officials in the Biden administration secretly conspired and communicated with social media companies to censor and suppress Americans’ private speech. This is revealed in a new lawsuit brought in a joint effort by The New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Attorney General of Missouri, and the Attorney General of Louisiana against the President of the United States. The suit is brought under the first amendment right to freedom of speech. The lawsuit seeks to identify among other things “all meetings with any Social-Media Platform relating to Content Modulation and/or Misinformation.” The discovery shows that there was “A recurring meeting usually entitled USG – Industry meeting, which has generally had a monthly cadence, and is between government agencies and private industry.

Government participants have included CISA’s Election Security and Resilience team, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the FBI’s foreign influence task force, the Justice Department’s national security division, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Industry participants have included Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the Wikimedia Foundation. The topics discussed include, but are not limited to: information sharing around elections risk, briefs from industry, threat updates, and highlights and upcoming watch outs.” Communications across 11 federal agencies reveal that the federal government, under the Biden administration, “has exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies—pressure to which companies have repeatedly bowed,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance details in a new release.


The social media companies that were part of this Partner Support Portal include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The CDC invited “all tech platforms” in to their meeting to discuss how to suppress free speech about Covid online. Those agencies involved include the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The NCLA notes further that, during the discovery process of this lawsuit, “the government has been uncooperative and has resisted complying with the discovery order every step of the way—especially with regard to Anthony Fauci’s communications.”

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Eugyppius has read The Great Reset, so you don’t have to.

The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)

Like many bad books, The Great Reset lapses into occasional inadvertent autobiography. In the final pages especially, where Klaus Schwab writes of his hopes for a “Personal Reset” through state repression, we catch a glimpse of the man during the first-wave lockdown at his house in Cologny. At first he enjoyed the break with routine and the opportunity to commune with nature, but before long he began to feel a nagging unease. He’d spent most of his years prior to 2020 flogging “stakeholder capitalism”, his umbrella term for various schemes to disarm criticism of the globalist corporate borg and co-opt leftist opposition.

Schwab succeeded in parlaying his simplistic ideas into an international conference circuit, known today as the World Economic Forum, where he could hobnob with corporate and political celebrities and burnish his Bond-villain reputation among political dissidents. But the pandemic had thrown Schwab off balance. For once his reprocessed nostrums about environmental, social and corporate governance issues were no longer in demand; virologists and epidemiologists and exponential growth curves filled the news instead. His powerful celebrity clients were suddenly listening to other people. Obscurity loomed.


Thus Schwab enlisted his sidekick research-assistant Thierry Malleret, booted up his laptop, and spent a few months decanting the cloud of buzzwords, talking points and half-remembered powerpoint presentations plaguing his brain into a meandering and thoroughly pointless document. When he had finished, he sent the whole thing to Malleret’s wife for a proof-read, and then he ordered his own Forum Press to print off a few thousand copies. Thus did yet another lamentable exercise in self-publishing come to pass.

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“..forced preference falsification..”

Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)

One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb? The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good – regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.

One of history’s great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As László Ladány recalled, Mao’s decades-long campaign to remould the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War. By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organised lynchings and public executions. [..] This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as China’s dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Mao’s enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their country’s own history, demolishing China’s relics en masse.

Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies. Until now. As it turns out, an astonishing new release of discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden – in which NCLA Legal (New Civil Liberties Alliance) is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covid – reveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.

“Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalising snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavour.” The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.

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8 mice.

1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)

A landmark peer-reviewed study appears to be the first of its kind to provide hard data on the “excess risk” of adverse side effects of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines in an independent “randomized clinical trial.” The results of the accepted scientific study confirm that the concerns that many patients had about the mRNA vaccines were well-founded. “In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (15.1 per 10,000 participants) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants),” the study found. “In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants),” the study added.

The study was published on ScienceDirect on August 31, 2022. The authors include researchers from Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and UCLA. The study provides the following list of confirmed adverse events (or side effects) of the respective mRNA vaccines. It also provides the risk ratios versus Covid-19 (over 1 is a factor increase, under 1 is a factor decrease). The study also provided known complications for Covid-19. “Although the randomized trials offer high level evidence for evaluating causal effects, the sparsity of their data necessitates that harm-benefit analyses also consider observational studies,” the authors state. “Since their emergency authorization in December 2020, hundreds of millions of doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines have been administered and post-authorization observational data offer a complementary opportunity to study AESIs. Post-authorization observational safety studies include cohort studies (which make use of medical claims or electronic health records) and disproportionality analyses (which use spontaneous adverse event reporting systems).”

“In July 2021, the FDA reported detecting four potential adverse events of interest: pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation following Pfizer’s vaccine based on medical claims data in older Americans.” the researchers add. “Three of these four serious adverse event types would be categorized as coagulation disorders, which is the Brighton AESI category that exhibited the largest excess risk in the vaccine group in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials. FDA stated it would further investigate the findings but at the time of our writing has not issued an update.”

Joseph Fraiman announced the study results on Twitter: “Our study examining mRNA vaccine serious adverse events study is now peer-reviewed in the Journal Vaccine,” Fraiman wrote. “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.” Thus, the objection to Americans’ concerns that the mRNA vaccines may have adverse side effects has come to a close, despite the initial advertisements that the vaccines were “100% safe and effective,” prevented infection and transmission, and had no known serious side effects.

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“We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around.”

Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)

Vultures are birds that seek out wounded animals about to die and then swoop down on them when they are dead (or close to death) and devour them—apocryphally starting with gouging out the eyes. Vultures are typically not classed in the “warm and fuzzy” anthropomorphic grouping, although they accomplish a great service to the ecology of the planet, such as other animals thrown in the “yuck” bucket of human perception such as flies, spiders, laughing hyenas, and carrion beetles (who knows what a carrion beetle is?—they ARE pretty, so before you know what they do for a living, you might like them). So are we human vultures when we swoop down on dead or dying people we have heard about to see if they are vaxxed or not and if what they are suffering or dying from is due to the jab? Two? Three, god forbid four?

At the beginning of the vaccine madness, I was quite brazen and would unashamedly blurt out when hearing of someone’s misfortune, “were they vaccinated???!!!” I never got brazen enough to ask this to the person suffering (obviously if dead), but did to their friends, or whoever was explaining what was happening. I eventually backed off of the personal incidents I was experiencing as it did seem a bit too vulture-like, but I still would ask sheep in my company what they thought of dozens of athletes dropping in the fields, now extended out to just average Joe’s not waking up or doctors way too young to be experiencing such severe cardiac issues. Now I don’t even do that. I just listen. It seems this particular vulture just enjoys the shock of seeing no one (sheep) realizing the secret. “You’ll see,” I say to myself, in my evil vulture voice. “You’ll see.”

Now, isn’t that sick? Maybe. But what else is this experience going to drive us to if not un-empathetic lunacy. Think of Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Isn’t that what did him in? We have been put into this untenable position of finding “joy” or at least “satisfaction” in the trauma of another. At its worse it is a form of schadenfreude, pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. But I would argue this is not really the case. I do not think what we are feeling (assuming others are fellow vaccine vultures) is “pleasure” and whatever it is that we are feeling is not due to someone else’s health misfortune. Of course the definition does include “self satisfaction from another’s failures”—maybe that is the closest schadenfreude comes to defining vaccine vultures.

[..] I have recently decided that the number one culprit for keeping sheep asleep is the media. The media has always played the role of the unbiased family member that will let you in on any corruption it saw in our leaders or other groups trying to get our attention. I think that is still true (that people rely on media for that reason) but the corruption is now in the media, at least the mainstream media. We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around. I do believe that if any of these “gods of media” ran a story like we see day in and day out in the alternate media, many sheep heads would turn regardless what the venerated talking heads of government and power had to say.

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“An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

A new peer-reviewed study found that regular use of ivermectin reduced the risk of dying from COVID-19 by 92%. The large study was conducted by Flávio A. Cadegiani, MD, MSc, PhD. Cadegiani is a board-certified endocrinologist with a master’s degree and doctorate degree in clinical endocrinology. The peer-reviewed study was published on Wednesday by the online medical journal Cureus. The study was conducted on a strictly controlled population of 88,012 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil. Individuals who used ivermectin as prophylaxis or took the medication before being infected by COVID experienced significant reductions in death and hospitalization.

According to the study, those who took ivermectin regularly had a 92% reduction in their COVID death risk compared to non-users and 84% less than irregular users. “The hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in regular users compared to both irregular users and non-users,” the study stated. The impressive reduction for regular ivermectin users was evident despite the regular users being at a higher risk for COVID deaths. The regular users were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. Irregular users of ivermectin had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users. The study defined regular users as those who used more than 30 tablets of ivermectin over five months.


The dosage of ivermectin was determined by body weight, but “most of the population used between two and three tablets daily for two days, every 15 days.” “Non-use of ivermectin was associated with a 12.5-fold increase in mortality rate and a seven-fold increased risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the regular use of ivermectin,” the study read. “This dose-response efficacy reinforces the prophylactic effects of ivermectin against COVID-19.” Cadegiani believes the study showed a “dose-response effect” – which means that increasing levels of ivermectin decreased the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Cadegiani wrote on Twitter, “An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

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Sanctions make Russia rich

 

 

 

 

Buttigieg
https://twitter.com/i/status/1565941643869577217

 

 

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Jun 032022
 
 June 3, 2022  Posted by at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


Carl Bloch The transfiguration c1865

 

The East Grows Stronger While The West Gets Weaker (ZH)
Zelensky Says Russia Controls A Fifth Of Ukrainian Territory (BBC)
Quo Vadis, Mr Johnson? (Batiushka)
US Engaged In “Offensive” Cyber Ops Against Russia In Ukraine: NSA Director (ZH)
Biden To Visit Saudi Arabia In Push To Lower Oil Prices And Punish Russia (G.)
Biden’s Inner Trudeau (Turley)
Arms Sent To Ukraine Will End Up In Criminal Hands, Says Interpol Chief (G.)
Voting Software Vulnerable In Some States (AP)
Bill Barr Applauds Durham For Showing Truth On Clinton Campaign, FBI (JTN)
The Decline and Fall of Davos Man (PS)

 

 

 

 

Inflation

 

 

Kat Lindley

 

 

Interesting graph. Qué pasa?

 

 

It’s like they do it on purpose.

The East Grows Stronger While The West Gets Weaker (ZH)

The latest agreement among member nations on export bans targeting Russia is largely oil focused, not natural gas focused, with the union demanding an immediate 70% decrease in Russian oil transferred BY SHIP. Oil transferred by pipeline will continue to flow into the EU for now. The ban is intended to expand to 90% of all shipborne Russian oil by the end of this year. Natural gas imports from Russia will also continue. While some European nations are more dependent on Russian energy than others, overall 40% of the EU’s needs are supplied by the country’s industry. It is not surprising that they are seeking an incremental approach to sanctions, they simply would not be able to survive another winter if they were to go cold turkey and block Russian imports completely. Of course, this does not mean that Russia has to operate on Europe’s timetable.

Russia is already reducing exports of natural gas to multiple EU countries, with Denmark, Netherlands and Germany being the latest to see losses. The EU’s ban was oil and ship focused because they cannot find an alternative source for natural gas that would resolve shortages if they banned everything. Germany in particular would be destroyed by the loss of natural gas supplies from Russia with its 42% dependency. The solutions offered by governments and in the mainstream media neglect certain realities. Namely, they claim that output can be increased or diverted to Europe to fill the gap. Joe Biden has suggested that the US is a “net exporter” of oil (this advantage has swiftly declined since he entered the White House according to the IEA) and that the US could help alleviate European demand. The IEA and OPEC members like Saudi Arabia have offered to increase market availability and output of oil if Russian exports are hit with sanctions.

The problem is that increased production is a fantasy stifled by the realities of labor shortages, increased drilling costs due to inflation and shortages in raw materials caused by supply chain disruptions. There is little chance that production capacity will ever be able to match EU demands, according to experts in the drilling industry. [..] Russia has shown considerable resilience to sanctions on oil as both China and India have increased purchases in tandem with Europe’s bans. The wider implication of this being that Europe and the West will be facing reduced global oil supplies and paying a premium while countries like China and India will be enjoying increased supplies and lower prices from Russia. The East grows stronger while the West gets weaker

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“Zelensky admits Russia now holds one-fifth of Ukraine, the largest country entirely within Europe. What he didn’t acknowledge is that Russia controls Ukraine’s industrial heartland, 90% of its energy resources (including all of offshore oil), and its critical ports and shipping.”

“BREAKING: Tribunal over Ukrainian warcrimes will be held in Mariupol. It will be called the Mariupol Tribunal. In addition to the Ukrainian Nazis who committed war crimes in Mariupol, foreign mercenaries and NATO instructors will also be tried there.”

Zelensky Says Russia Controls A Fifth Of Ukrainian Territory (BBC)

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says that Russian forces have seized 20% of his country’s territory, as Moscow’s invasion nears its 100th day. Addressing lawmakers in Luxembourg, he added that the front line extended for more than 1,000km (621 miles). “All combat-ready Russian military formations are involved in this aggression,” he told MPs via videolink. Russian forces have been intensifying attacks on the city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Donbas region. UK defence officials say Russia has seized most of the city and are making “steady local gains, enabled by a heavy concentration of artillery”.


Severodonetsk is the easternmost city under Ukrainian control and regional governor Serhiy Haidai said Russia was trying to break through defences in the city “from all directions”. However he said Ukrainian troops were carrying out counter-attacks, “pushing back the enemy on some streets and taking several prisoners”. Intense street-to-street fighting in the city had hampered evacuations, he said, describing such efforts as “extremely dangerous”. In a video address late on Thursday evening, Mr Zelensky said the situation in Donbas had not changed significantly that day but that Ukrainians had experienced “some success” in battles in Severodonetsk.

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“..Johnson regurgitates the old Victorian anti-Russian myths of ‘The Great Game’..”

Quo Vadis, Mr Johnson? (Batiushka)

Alexander Johnson, or to give him his full name, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, was born to wealthy British parents in New York in June 1964, fifty years after the Sarajevo assassination in June 1914. Since 2019 Johnson has been the Prime Minister of the UK. Giving the impression of an elitist and snobbish aristocrat and distantly related to Queen Elizabeth II, he used to work as a right-wing journalist but is above all a renowned political opportunist. A man of the people he is not. Like so many other politicians, does he actually believe in anything, apart from in himself? Johnson is a biographer of his idol, the half-American Winston Churchill, whom he appears to imitate in his stoop and gait. His fawning book The Churchill Factor, clearly indicates who his model is.

He has five or six or seven children (he himself does not seem to be too sure how many he has fathered by various mothers) and enjoys drunken parties in Downing Street during and outside lockdowns. A highly divisive and controversial figure inside the UK, loved by a few and hated by most, the following quip is made about him: What is the difference between Zelensky and Johnson? Zelensky is a buffoon who became a politician, whereas Johnson is a politician who became a buffoon. More serious commentators ask the question: Is Johnson a natural buffoon, or does he just pretend to be a buffoon? Or, perhaps most likely of all, is he a natural buffoon who pretends to be an even greater buffoon? Of course, most people will admit that as regards Zelensky, he never became a politician, but remained a buffoon. But that is another story.

Despite his middle name of Boris (1), Johnson is a Russophobe to the core, as prejudiced as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (given his title because he defended the indefensible Boer War) or any other old Imperialist. Like other blinkered representatives of the Norman-British Establishment, Johnson regurgitates the old Victorian anti-Russian myths of ‘The Great Game’ as well as the new ones. These latter include the 2006 poisoning of the British spy and traitor, Alexander Litvinenko (clearly not an act of the Russian secret services, who would have acted so as not to be identified), and the 2018 Skripal poisonings in the British Establishment military centre in Salisbury (and the subsequent censorship of the case and the father’s and daughter’s abductions carried out by MI5). These poisonings were due to a nasty substance to be found, perhaps uniquely on earth, at the highly secretive and evil Porton Down chemical weapons plant, just six miles from Salisbury. That MI5 and its SIS assassination arm (100 murders per year on average) with its many South African hirelings, could have been responsible would never be admitted by Johnson’s tiny mind.

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“..infrastructurally devastating cyberattacks..”

US Engaged In “Offensive” Cyber Ops Against Russia In Ukraine: NSA Director (ZH)

The US military has issued a stunning but perhaps not entirely unexpected admission that it has been conducting offensive cyber operations in support of Ukraine. It marks the first ever such acknowledgement, and suggests – as many observers have long suspected – a deeper Pentagon and US intelligence role in Ukraine against the Russian military than previously thought. National Security Agency (NSA) and US Cyber Command Director Gen. Paul Nakasone told the UK’s Sky News on Wednesday, “We’ve conducted a series of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations.” This includes “offensive hacking operations” he said.

Without offering specific details, he continued, “My job is to provide a series of options to the secretary of Defense and the president, and so that’s what I do.” Importantly, Gen. Nakasone gave the interview from allied Baltic country Estonia, from which other supporting operations including weapons transfers for Ukraine have come. He spoke of major attempts of the Russians to launch infrastructurally devastating cyberattacks on Ukraine, saying, “And we’ve seen this with regards to the attack on their satellite systems, wiper attacks that have been ongoing, disruptive attacks against their government processes.” “This is kind of the piece that I think sometimes is missed by the public. It isn’t like they haven’t been very busy, they have been incredibly busy.

“And I think, you know, their resilience is perhaps the story that is most intriguing to all of us,” he said, describing the Ukrainian response. As for support the US has given Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion, the NSA director referenced the following: Nakasone previously said his agency deployed a “hunt forward” team in December to help Ukraine shore up its cyber defenses and networks against active threats. But his latest remarks appear to be the first time that a U.S. official said publicly that the U.S. has been involved in offensive cyber operations in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Pick your enemies wisely.

Biden To Visit Saudi Arabia In Push To Lower Oil Prices And Punish Russia (G.)

Joe Biden will reportedly visit Riyadh later this month and meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, abandoning a campaign pledge to make Saudi Arabia “a pariah” for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. The Riyadh trip, first reported by the Washington Post and New York Times, suggests Biden has prioritized his need to bring oil prices down and thereby punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, over his stand on human rights. The visit will be added on to an already planned trip to Israel, Germany and Spain. The White House said it had no new travel plans to announce, but made clear there was no barrier to Biden meeting the crown prince.

“If he determines that it’s in the interests of the United States to engage with a foreign leader and that such an engagement can deliver results, then he’ll do so,” a senior White House official said. “In the case of Saudi Arabia, which has been a strategic partner of the United States for nearly 80 years, there’s no question that important interests are interwoven with Saudi Arabia. And the President views the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as an important partner on a host of initiatives that we are working on both in the region and around the world.” The end of the crown prince’s US isolation has looked likely since the Ukraine invasion began on 24 February. Seeking to cut off Russian revenue, Washington has sought an expansion of the global oil supply to bring down prices, which also represented a threat to already poor Democratic prospects in this year’s congressional elections.

The White House reportedly sought to set up a phone call between Biden and Mohammed in March, but was snubbed by the crown prince. However, the president’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, and his special envoy for energy issues, Amos Hochstein, have persevered in paving the way for a meeting with a string of quiet trips to Riyadh.

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“..politicians are once again ignoring what is constitutionally possible..”

Biden’s Inner Trudeau (Turley)

In our increasingly hateful and divisive politics, there are times when our nation seems incapable of coming together for a common purpose. Tragedies — moments of shared national grieving and mutual support — once were the exception. Yet one of the most chilling aspects of the aftermath of the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, was how the moment of unity was quickly lost to political posturing. Politicians have long admitted that a crisis is an opportunity not to be missed — the greater the tragedy, the greater the opportunity. After the mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket, New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) called for censorship to “silence the voices of hatred and racism.” After the Uvalde massacre, some Democrats renewed calls for everything from court packing to ending the Senate filibuster.

The most immediate response, however, was a call for gun bans. Vice President Kamala Harris got out front of the White House by demanding a ban on AR-15s, the most popular weapon in America. Then President Joe Biden created a stir by suggesting he might seek to ban 9mm weapons. Such calls are not limited to the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government is introducing legislation to “implement a national freeze on handgun ownership.” He said Canadians would no longer be able “to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” adding that “there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.”

The difference between the push in the two countries is the existence of the Second Amendment in the United States — a constitutionally mandated “reason” why Americans are allowed to have guns; they don’t have to prove it to the government. While the White House subsequently tried to walk back his comments, Biden saying there’s “no rational basis” to own 9mms and AR-15s sounds like he’s channeling his inner Canadian.There is now a strong majority for gun control reforms. However, politicians are once again ignoring what is constitutionally possible by focusing on what is politically popular with their voting base.

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A strange difference between guns for Ukraine and guns in America.

Arms Sent To Ukraine Will End Up In Criminal Hands, Says Interpol Chief (G.)

Weapons sent to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February will end up in the global hidden economy and in the hands of criminals, the head of Interpol has said. Jürgen Stock says once the conflict ends, a wave of guns and heavy arms will flood the international market and he urged Interpol’s member states, especially those supplying weapons, to cooperate on arms tracing. “Once the guns fall silent [in Ukraine], the illegal weapons will come. We know this from many other theatres of conflict. The criminals are even now, as we speak, focusing on them,” Stock said.

“Criminal groups try to exploit these chaotic situations and the availability of weapons, even those used by the military and including heavy weapons. These will be available on the criminal market and will create a challenge. “No country or region can deal with it in isolation because these groups operate at a global level.” He added: “We can expect an influx of weapons in Europe and beyond. We should be alarmed and we have to expect these weapons to be trafficked not only to neighbouring countries but to other continents.” He said Interpol urged members to use its database to help “track and trace” the weapons.

“We are in contact with member countries to encourage them to use these tools. Criminals are interested in all kinds of weapons … basically any weapons that can be carried might be used for criminal purposes.” Ukraine’s western allies have sent shipments of high-end military weapons to Ukraine since the Russian invasion more than three months ago. On Tuesday, the American president, Joe Biden, announced the US would supply Kyiv with advanced missile systems and munitions. After the US pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, following 20 years of war, huge amounts of often highly sophisticated military equipment was left behind and fell into the hands of the Taliban.

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Who wrote that headline? It’s Dominion, in 16 states!

Voting Software Vulnerable In Some States (AP)

Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed, the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency says in an advisory sent to state election officials. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, said there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results. The advisory is based on testing by a prominent computer scientist and expert witness in a long-running lawsuit that is unrelated to false allegations of a stolen election pushed by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss. The advisory, obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its expected Friday release, details nine vulnerabilities and suggests protective measures to prevent or detect their exploitation.


Amid a swirl of misinformation and disinformation about elections, CISA seems to be trying to walk a line between not alarming the public and stressing the need for election officials to take action. CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales said in a statement that “states’ standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely.” Yet the advisory seems to suggest states aren’t doing enough. It urges prompt mitigation measures, including both continued and enhanced “defensive measures to reduce the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities.” Those measures need to be applied ahead of every election, the advisory says, and it’s clear that’s not happening in all of the states that use the machines.

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That’s all?

Bill Barr Applauds Durham For Showing Truth On Clinton Campaign, FBI (JTN)

Former Attorney General Bill Barr defended special counsel John Durham after the acquittal of ex-Clinton Campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, saying the prosecutor was able to shed light on the Hillary Clinton campaign’s “dirty trick” with the disproven Trump-Russia scandal and the related problems at the FBI. “No, I’m very proud of John Durham, and I do take responsibility for his appointment, and I think he and his team did an exceptionally able job, both digging out very important facts and presenting a compelling case to the jury,” Barr told Fox News host Jesse Waters on Wednesday. After Sussmann was acquitted of lying to the FBI, the jury forewoman told reporters that the case was a waste of time. “I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she said, according to The Washington Times.


“There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.” Durham told Waters that while Durham “did not succeed in getting a conviction from the D.C. jury, I think he accomplished something far more important, which is he brought out the truth in two important areas. “First, I think he crystalized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching, as a dirty trick, the whole Russiagate Collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it,” Barr explained. “And second, I think he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors in the FBI… who knowingly used this information to start an investigation of [former President Donald] Trump and then duped their own agents by lying to them and refusing to tell them what the real source of that information was,” Barr said, adding, “And that was appalling.”

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“..not a single aspect of globalization has been spared from the fallout of new geopolitical conflicts..”

The Decline and Fall of Davos Man (PS)

“Davos Man” has had a grim 14 years. The late Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington popularized the term in 2004 to describe a new overclass of evangelists for globalization. Davos Man, he claimed, wanted to see national borders disappear and the logic of politics superseded by that of the market. But since the 2008 global financial crisis, politics has increasingly trumped economics, a trend that reached its apotheosis in 2016 with Donald Trump’s election in the United States and the Brexit referendum. Both events represented a backlash against Davos Man’s vision of a frictionless world governed (not run) as efficiently as possible by “multi-stakeholder processes.”

Moreover, at this year’s annual gathering in Davos, attendees had to confront an even bigger challenge than national politics: the return of geopolitics. The World Economic Forum’s theme was “History at a Turning Point,” in recognition of the fact that we have reached the end of the “end of history.” Although the WEF’s ethos is to promote cooperation in the pursuit of “one world,” the new agenda is necessarily focused on conflict and division. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression on Ukraine obviously loomed large at this year’s meeting. To open the event, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – appearing virtually in his now familiar military fatigues – spoke of a world split along the fault lines of fundamental values. And Russia House, the facility where Russian delegations hosted parties and networking events in years past, was transformed by Ukrainian activists and donors into the Russian War Crimes House, with an exhibition calling attention to Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

After browsing this year’s program, it soon became clear that not a single aspect of globalization has been spared from the fallout of new geopolitical conflicts – between Russia and the West, China and the West, China and its neighbors, and so forth. Instead of panels discussing free-trade agreements, there were multiple sessions on economic warfare. Political and business leaders grappled with the fact that we now live in a world where central-bank reserves can be confiscated, commercial banks can be summarily disconnected from the SWIFT international payments system, and private assets can potentially be seized to pay for a country’s reconstruction.

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Fertilization
https://twitter.com/i/status/1532366041115938816

 

 

Crazy dog
https://twitter.com/i/status/1385955664506150913

 

 

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May 272022
 
 May 27, 2022  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  48 Responses »


Edouard Manet The absinthe drinker 1859

 

Former Attorney General Bill Barr Says Hillary Guilty Of ‘Sedition’ (CB)
Ukrainian Volunteer Fighters In The East Feel Abandoned (WaPo)
Is America the Real Victim of Anti-Russia Sanctions? (Bertrand)
EU Suspends Russia’s Access To Vital Crime Data Sharing Program (ZH)
Lockdowns Had ‘Little To No Effect’ On Covid Death Rate (DM)
The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty (Kheriaty)
Jerome Powell’s Volcker Deficit (Stephen Roach)
Leaking Information Is a Key Tenet of Democracy. Just Look at the Past (NW)
Twitter Investors Sue Elon Musk For “Manipulating Stock Price Lower” (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Malone Candace

 

 

 

 

Schwab

 

 

These people live in a different world and age

 

 

“It was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy, and so forth..”

Former Attorney General Bill Barr Says Hillary Guilty Of ‘Sedition’ (CB)

Former United States Attorney General Bill Barr has given a stark warning to former Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her “seditious” conspiracy against former President Donald Trump. “I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis. I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office,” he said on Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV podcast. “I believe it is seditious,” he said, but he warned that those charges would be tough to prove in a court. “It was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy, and so forth,” the former attorney general said.

He said that he named Special Counsel John Durham to lead the case in private so it would stop President Joe Biden and Attorney general Merrick Garland from interfering with him. “I was highly confident he would remain in office and they wouldn’t touch him,” he said. “The Biden administration had no real interest in protecting either Hillary Clinton or Comey,” he argued. “And at the end of the day, for them to lose the capital and appear to be covering something up that would then never get resolved, I didn’t think was in their interest,” he said. “And I think institutionally that would’ve destroyed the new AG if he had tried that. “If you don’t have the threat of a grand jury, no one will come in and talk to you. You’ll say, the usual thing is, ‘Please come in for a voluntary interview,” the former attorney general said.

“And people come in because they know if they don’t, they’re subpoenaed. “But if there is no grand jury, they say, ‘No, I’m not coming in,’ and there’s nothing you can do,” he said. “And people don’t understand that that state of affairs lasted until the month before the election,” he said of the pandemic that delayed the Durham probe. “So his hands were very much tied as to how far he could push things and how much pressure he could bring on people through most of 2020,” he said.

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A glimpse of reality, or just a way to get more weapons into Ukraine?

Ukrainian Volunteer Fighters In The East Feel Abandoned (WaPo)

Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end — and for their own tanks to stop targeting the Russians. “They [Russians] already know where we are, and when the Ukrainian tank shoots from our side it gives away our position,” said Serhi Lapko, their company commander, recalling the recent battle. “And they start firing back with everything — Grads, mortars. “And you just pray to survive.” Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability — of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught.

Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea. Ukrainian forces have succeeded in thwarting Russian efforts to seize Kyiv and Kharkiv and have scored battlefield victories in the east. But the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine’s struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions.

The volunteers were civilians before Russia invaded on Feb. 24, and they never expected to be dispatched to one of the most dangerous front lines in eastern Ukraine. They quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive. “Our command takes no responsibility,” Lapko said. “They only take credit for our achievements. They give us no support.”

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“..Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s..”

Is America the Real Victim of Anti-Russia Sanctions? (Bertrand)

Remember the claims that Russia’s economy was more or less irrelevant, merely the equivalent of a small, not very impressive European country? “Putin, who has an economy the size of Italy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in 2014 after the invasion of Crimea, “[is] playing a poker game with a pair of twos and winning.” Of increasing Russian diplomatic and geopolitical influence in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, The Economist asked in 2019, “How did a country with an economy the size of Spain … achieve all this?” Seldom has the West so grossly misjudged an economy’s global significance.

French economist Jacques Sapir, a renowned specialist of the Russian economy who teaches at the Moscow and Paris schools of economics, explained recently that the war in Ukraine has “made us realize that the Russian economy is considerably more important than what we thought.” For Sapir, one big reason for this miscalculation is exchange rates. If you compare Russia’s GDP by simply converting it from rubles into U.S. dollars, you indeed get an economy the size of Spain’s. But such a comparison makes no sense without adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for productivity and standards of living, and thus per capita welfare and resource use. Indeed, PPP is the measure favored by most international institutions, from the IMF to the OECD.

And when you measure Russia’s GDP based on PPP, it’s clear that Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s, about $4.4 trillion for Russia versus $4.6 trillion for Germany. From the size of a small and somewhat ailing European economy to the biggest economy in Europe and one of the largest in the world—not a negligible difference. Sapir also encourages us to ask, “What is the share of the service sector versus the share of the commodities and industrial sector?” To him, the service sector today is grossly overvalued compared with the industrial sector and commodities like oil, gas, copper, and agricultural products. If we reduce the proportional importance of services in the global economy, Sapir says that “Russia’s economy is vastly larger than that of Germany and represents probably 5% or 6% of the world economy,” more like Japan than Spain.

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Shoot. Foot.

EU Suspends Russia’s Access To Vital Crime Data Sharing Program (ZH)

Amid the unprecedented waves of EU and US sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of its Ukraine invasion, and as tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions continue between Moscow and European capitals, among the last frontiers of Russia-Europe cooperation remains in the area of crime monitoring and data sharing. But that too appears to be winding down, as Russian state media has announced the European Union has suspended its drug traffic data sharing program with Russian law enforcement agencies. “The EU has suspended contacts and data sharing with Russia as part of the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official said,” TASS reports.

“The European Union has unilaterally suspended expert contacts and data sharing with us” as part of the EMCDDA, Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov confirmed. “The annual OSCE-wide Anti-Drug Conference has been postponed indefinitely,” he added. The Russian official slammed the move as counterproductive, with the inevitable consequence being that drug traffickers will be able to act with greater impunity as a country the size of Russia (literally the world’s largest by land mass and border area) is cut out of the program. “We believe this is a destructive approach. It plays into the hands of drug traffickers, who are taking advantage of the disagreements among countries to increase illicit drug supplies to Europe,” he said.

Russia, however, remains and will likely continue to remain a vital country within INTERPOL – the world’s largest international policing organization, representing 194 member countries. According to the INTERPOL website, “Russia is the world’s largest country by area, and shares borders with countries in northern Asia and Europe. Identifying, investigating and preventing serious crime across Europe and Asia is a large part of the daily work carried out by INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau (NCB) in Moscow.”

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It was always idiotic.

Lockdowns Had ‘Little To No Effect’ On Covid Death Rate (DM)

The first Covid lockdowns saved 10,000 lives in Europe and US had ‘little or no effect’ on the virus death rate, updated analysis suggests. A review by an international team of economists found draconian shutdowns only reduced Covid mortality by 3 per cent in the UK, US and Europe in 2020. The experts, from Johns Hopkins University in the US, Lund University in Sweden and the Danish think-tank the Center for Political Studies, said that equates to 6,000 fewer deaths in Europe and 4,000 fewer in the US. This figures is a revised from the group’s first report last year, which found lockdowns cut Covid deaths by just 0.2 per cent. The team said the updated figure is down to changes in their calculations and new studies. But they still conclude: ‘Stricter lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.’


MailOnline was one of only three major British media outlets to cover the initial findings when they were released back in January. Experts at the time told MailOnline it is unsurprising that some left-wing publications avoided the story because they wanted to ‘maintain fear around the pandemic’. Their 3.2 per cent figure is the average effect of all lockdown measures combined. When looking at stay-at-home orders specifically, the team estimate this had even less of an impact, reducing the death toll by just 2 per cent. Their report does not look at the effect of lockdowns excess deaths, which includes people who died from other causes because hospitals were shut, for example. It did find mask wearing to be the most effective intervention, leading to a 18.7 per cent drop in virus fatalities — however this result was based on just three studies.

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Think mob rule.

The WHO’s Pandemic Treaty (Kheriaty)

The WHO recently announced plans for an international pandemic treaty tied to a digital passport and digital ID system. Meeting in December 2021 in a special session for only the second time since the WHO’s founding in 1948, the Health Assembly of the WHO adopted a single decision titled, “The World Together.” The WHO plans to finalize the treaty by 2024. It will aim to shift governing authority now reserved to sovereign states to the WHO during a pandemic by legally binding member states to the WHO’s revised International Health Regulations. In January of 2022 the United States submitted proposed amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations, which bind all 194 UN member states, which the WHO director general accepted and forwarded to other member states.


In contrast to amendments to our own constitution, these amendments will not require a two-thirds vote of our Senate, but a simple majority of the member states. Most of the public is wholly unaware of these changes, which will impact the national sovereignty of member states. The proposed amendments include, among others, the following. Among the changes the WHO will no longer need to consult with the state or attempt to obtain verification from the state where a reported event of concern (e.g., a new outbreak) is allegedly occurring before taking action on the basis of such reports (Article 9.1). In addition to the authority to make the determination of a public health emergency of international concern under Article 12, the WHO will be granted additional powers to determine a public health emergency of regional concern, as well as a category referred to as an intermediate health alert.

Posobiec T-Mobile

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“If you are not prepared to act on interest rates, you may as well get out of town.”

Jerome Powell’s Volcker Deficit (Stephen Roach)

Poor Jerome Powell. With US inflation close to a 40-year high, the Federal Reserve chair knows what he needs to do. He has professed great admiration for Paul Volcker, his 1980s-era predecessor, as a role model. But, to paraphrase US Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s famous 1988 quip about his vice-presidential rival, Senator Dan Quayle, I knew Paul Volcker very well, and Powell is no Paul Volcker. Volcker was the quintessential US public servant. He smoked cheap cigars, wore rumpled off-the-rack suits, and had a strong distaste for the glitz of Washington power circles. His legacy was a single-minded discipline in attacking a pernicious Great Inflation.

Unlike the modern Fed, which under Ben Bernanke’s intellectual stewardship created a new arsenal of tools – balance-sheet adjustments, special lending facilities, and the “forward guidance” of outcome-dependent policy signals – the Volcker approach was simple, blunt, and direct. Monetary policy, in Volcker’s view, started and ended with interest rates. He once said to me, “If you are not prepared to act on interest rates, you may as well get out of town.” Volcker, of course, raised US interest rates to unheard-of levels in 1980-81, and there were many who did want him to get out of town. But howls of protest from builders, farmers, citizens’ groups, and members of Congress demanding his impeachment did not dissuade him from an unprecedented tightening in monetary policy. It was long overdue.

Under Volcker’s predecessor, Arthur Burns, the Fed had become convinced that inflation was part of the US economy’s institutional fabric. The price level was thought to have less to do with monetary policy than with the power of labor unions, cost-of-living wage indexation, and regulatory pressures on costs stemming from environmental protection, occupational safety, and pension benefits. Burns argued that oil and food-price shocks reinforced the institutional biases of an inflation-prone US economy. In other words, blame the system, not the Fed. The Fed’s research staff, which at the time included me, squirmed but raised no objections.

Volcker did more than squirm when he took over as Fed chair in August 1979. At the time, the consumer price index was surging by 11.8% year on year, on its way to 14.6% in March 1980. Volcker was determined to find the interest-rate threshold that would break the back of US inflation. Using the political cover provided by the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act, which formalized the Fed’s price-stability mandate, and drawing operational support from a shift to targeting the money supply, Volcker went into action. The Fed increased its benchmark federal funds rate from 10.5% in July 1979 to 17.6% in April 1980. Volcker then reversed course during an ill-advised but short-lived experiment with credit controls in the spring of 1980, before resuming a monetary-policy tightening that eventually pushed the funds rate to a monthly peak of 19.1% in June 1981. Only then did the fever of double-digit inflation break.

By late 1982, with the US in deep recession, annual headline CPI inflation had slipped below 4%, and the Fed started to reduce the benchmark policy rate. Mindful of the deeply entrenched inflationary psychology still gripping America, the Fed moved slowly and cautiously. Volcker, having broken the back of inflation, was not about to “leave town” until the Fed’s mission was complete.

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Martha Mitchell.

Leaking Information Is a Key Tenet of Democracy. Just Look at the Past (NW)

The art of leaking, as recent events suggest, are integral to upholding American values when the upper echelons of power seek to denigrate them. The story of Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, is a case in point to why whistleblowing must be protected under American law at all costs. Her story is being recounted via a Starz miniseries that pays tribute to her whistleblowing efforts and pours scorn on those who treated her with contempt. Mitchell offered the press a behind the palace walls glimpse into the goings-on in the White House, and her vivacious truth-telling was key to the unravelling of the Watergate scandal that consequently cost Nixon the presidency.

Mitchell was drugged and kidnapped by her husband’s coterie of sycophants for her role in trying to expose Nixon’s unjust involvement in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. She was tainted as mentally unfit by the White House in their bid to tarnish a critic ready to spill information on corruption at the highest level. Why must the nation of the free world, a purported bastion of democratic principle, hasten to launch a smear campaign against anyone who seeks to divulge the truth? There’s been a smear campaign like no other against Wikileaks founder and thorn-in-the-side of American cover-ups, Julian Assange, for years. Assange is currently held in a maximum security prison in the U.K., awaiting his fate by the Home Office on whether he will be extradited to the U.S. over disclosure of national security information.

Wikileaks uncovered numerous scandals committed by the American establishment, but it’s the establishment that attempts to absolve itself by lamenting the website as treasonous. Assange’s willingness to reveal dark secrets emboldened other whistleblowers to follow suit. Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was responsible for releasing a tranche of classified materials by the U.S. military, which included videos of merciless airstrikes in Iraq and thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. Manning was castigated by international governments, as was Edward Snowden for leaking to The Guardian documents on global surveillance programs headed by the National Security Agency. Both have become polarizing figures in world history where critics call them cowards, while others hail them as patriots.

The leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion is the latest in a long line of events committed to uncovering the truth and subsequently holding those in power accountable. This leak is timely, with a milestone that marks a period of reflection for the whistleblowers at the center of the Watergate affair, particularly those like Mitchell who were routinely admonished. The leaker within the Supreme Court, alongside the art of whistleblowing itself, must be protected under democracy without question. Decisions are currently being made that will affect Americans for generations to come. If it wasn’t for those who have the courage to blow the whistle, crimes committed by an increasingly autocratic America would continue to imperil the thriving democracy it claims to be.

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He tried his best to lose $100 billion.

Twitter Investors Sue Elon Musk For “Manipulating Stock Price Lower” (ZH)

Among the headaches that Elon Musk faces regarding his proposed takeover of Twitter is now an investor lawsuit claiming that Musk “manipulated the company’s stock price downward” during the course of his involvement in the company. Investors are alleging that Musk saved himself $156 million by not reporting, in a timely fashion, that he had purchased more than 5% of Twitter by March 14, a new report from Bloomberg/Yahoo says. The investors also asked to be certified as a class and to be awarded both punitive and compensatory damages. In addition to Musk, Twitter was also named as a defendant, as investor agued that the company didn’t do enough to look into Musk’s conduct. The suit alleges his conduct was to “drive Twitter’s stock down substantially in order to create leverage.”

“Musk’s market manipulation worked. Twitter has lost $8 billion in valuation since the buyout was announced,” the lawsuit reads, according to a follow up writeup by Bloomberg Law. The suit alleges that Musk continued to buy stock after not disclosing his stake, amassing a 9.2% stake. “By delaying his disclosure of his stake in Twitter, Musk engaged in market manipulation and bought Twitter stock at an artificially low price,” the lawsuit says. It also claims that Tesla’s drop has hampered Musk’s ability to consummate the transaction. The lawsuit alleges that Musk’s Tweets about Twitter – namely allegations that the company had too many spam bots and the resultant decision to put the buyout “temporarily on hold” – also were an attempt to drive the share price lower.

Musk’s motive may have been to stave off a margin call, the report notes: According to the proposed class action, Musk’s moves were aimed at staving off the risk of a margin call stemming from the fluctuating value of shares in Tesla, the electric vehicle maker he leads, which is “worth much less now than when Musk agreed to buy Twitter” after a 37% drop over the past month. The suit came the same day Musk disclosed that he was partly restructuring the transaction to offset that risk by providing more than $6 billion in additional equity financing.

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Imran Khan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec 182020
 


Egon Schiele Meadow, Church and Houses 1912

 

Twitter To Remove Tweets That Spread Lies About COVID Vaccines (G.)
“Who Wants To Be A Guinea Pig?”: Health Workers Balk At Vaccine (ZH)
How Virtual Learning Has Traumatized Their Children (DC)
WHO -Finally- Admits PCR Tests Create False Positives (OffG)
Joe Biden Calls His Son Hunter ‘The Smartest Man I Know’ (DC)
They Won’t Take “No” For An Answer (Ward)
Georgia Announces Signature Matching Review For Election Ballots (JTN)
Where Bill Barr Failed the President (ET)
Trump Takes Bipartisan Criticism For Silence On Massive Cyber Attack (F.)
Google Secretly Gave Facebook Perks, Data In Ad Deal: US States (R.)
Pentagon Training Equates Whistleblower Chelsea Manning With Terrorists (IC)
Q3 Share Buybacks Plunged 42% YoY, Big Banks Are Gone (WS)
Facebook To Require Masks In All Profile Pictures (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Awfully close to thought police. “Spreading lies about vaccines” here means “questioning vaccines”.

Twitter To Remove Tweets That Spread Lies About COVID Vaccines (G.)

Twitter will remove tweets that spread harmful misinformation, starting with the Covid-19 vaccine, the company has announced – and from 2021 it will begin to label tweets that push conspiracy theories. The move sees the company follow Facebook and YouTube in tightening up policies around the coronavirus vaccination as the rollout of the jab begins across the world. “Starting next week, we will prioritise the removal of the most harmful misleading information,” the US company said in a blogpost. “And during the coming weeks, we will begin to label tweets that contain potentially misleading information about the vaccines.”

Examples of posts that may be removed include false claims “that suggest immunisations and vaccines are used to intentionally cause harm to or control populations”, and claims “that Covid-19 is not real or not serious, and therefore that vaccinations are unnecessary”. Tweets that do not reach the level of potential harm will not be removed, but may receive a label linking through to authoritative public health information, the company said. Examples of that sort of claim include unsubstantiated rumours, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines. The labelling will have a similar visual appearance to the company’s notorious labels about the US election, regularly placed on tweets from Donald Trump in which he falsely claimed victory in the US election.

Twitter said it would enforce the policy “using a combination of technology and human review”. Confusingly, the company has no way for users to report Covid misinformation, or misinformation about vaccines, despite the content being banned on the site. Instead, Twitter says users who think a particular tweet breaks the company’s rules on the topic should report it for any other offence – such as “threatening harm” – and use the text box to add that it is banned misinformation. The move comes two weeks after Facebook tightened its own policy about Covid vaccines. The larger social network will remove claims that rise to the level of imminent physical harm, as well as claims that have been debunked by public health experts, even if they do not reach that level. Chinese network TikTok has also strengthened its policies on vaccine misinformation, announcing on Tuesday that it has policies in place that prohibit misinformation “that could cause harm to an individual’s health or broader public safety”.

Tucker Don’t question the Coronavirus vaccine.

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“until I see that it’s actually safe for myself or my kids to take, I’m not going to take it.”

“Who Wants To Be A Guinea Pig?”: Health Workers Balk At Vaccine (ZH)

As tens of thousands of doses of the new Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine make their way across the country, some health workers – first on the list to receive the two-stage jab – are leery of the emerging treatment which mainstream pundits warned would take a ‘miracle’ to produce before the end of the year. And while public concerns over the vaccine have eased compared to polling conducted before the November election, a not-insignificant number of health workers are unwilling to take the shot. Perhaps they’re concerned about taking the fastest vaccine developed in Western history, developed to treat a mysterious new virus which primarily kills the elderly (though can have lasting effects on people of all ages save for children).

As Bloomberg notes, the initial vaccines have few serious side effects (aside from a handful of serious allergic reactions), though nobody knows what long-term effects it has, if any. For example, nobody can possibly know what it does to a gestating fetus for nine months, or whether it affects fertility – yet, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend that pregnant women take the vaccine. “At one Chicago hospital where the city’s first COVID-19 vaccine was administered on Tuesday, 40% of the staff said in a survey earlier this month that they would not take it. Sherrie Burch, 56, a ward clerk at Loretto, is baffled by how quickly the Covid-19 vaccine was developed, given how long medical developments typically take. And that makes her nervous.

“It just happened too fast for me,” Burch said, adding that her children, grandchildren and 76-year-old mother aren’t planning to get it either. “It’s the fear of the unknown.” Burch wants more details about the vaccine’s research and longer-term side effects. She plans to wait at least a couple of months to see how co-workers respond to the shot. Until then, she’ll keep masking, distancing and hand washing. Some nurses, respiratory therapists and technicians at Loretto also are opting out, said Nikhila Juvvadi, the hospital’s chief clinical officer who was the first person to administer the vaccine in Chicago. At a staff town-hall meeting on Wednesday, she explained the science of how the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine works.” -Bloomberg

In Maine, 40% of staff and 30% of residents at the state’s larger nursing homes won’t take the jab, according to an “informal discussion” conducted by the Maine Health Care Association. “Without official polling, it’s hard to know how accurate a picture this paints, and we fully expect these percentages to increase with greater education and awareness,” said the organization’s director of communications, Nadine Grosso. “Ultimately, we know that vaccination is key to safely reopening our long term care facilities.” And if these are all the people who will admit to refusing the vaccine, how many lied and said they will?

Still, some remain unpersuaded. Jonathan Damato, 41, a New York City paramedic for 21 years, is not an anti-vaxxer. He gets an annual flu shot, and he trusts the life-saving potential of vaccines against measles, mumps, polio. His station does about 50 or 60 Covid ambulance runs a week — people presenting high fevers and shortness of breath. “I know the virus is real,” said Damato, who has a 4-year-old son with health issues. But “until I see that it’s actually safe for myself or my kids to take, I’m not going to take it.” -Bloomberg In short, nobody wants to be a guinea pig.

Tucker Don’t question the Coronavirus vaccine. Part 2

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More reports coming out on this theme. Good. Don’t know that missed education is the big thing here, though. Missed social life might be bigger.

How Virtual Learning Has Traumatized Their Children (DC)

Data accumulated globally has shown that infections did not surge when schools reopened, and the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said as much in late November when he called on schools to reopen. While many private schools have reopened completely or partially, some of the nation’s largest school districts are still closed. In Washington, D.C., the city’s teachers union rejected an agreement with the public school system to reopen campuses in November. In Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Topeka, San Diego and multiple other cities, districts put off their plans to reopen in mid-November and gave no set date for reopening.

Eileen, a Latin teacher at a Christian Classical school in Maryland, has been able to teach in her regular classroom since Sept. 3, when her school reopened with health and sanitation protocols implemented to prevent COVID-19 spread. Eileen’s 15-year-old daughter, who is a sophomore at a public school, has been learning virtually for 14 weeks. She goes to school with her mother once a week just to “be part of normal life,” Eileen tells the Caller. In an essay Eileen’s daughter wrote about her virtual learning experience, she describes the despondency and defeat students and teachers feel. In some classes, students mute their audio feature to hide the fact that they’re playing video games instead of paying attention.

Teachers have difficulty holding students accountable, making flouting the rules easier. Eileen’s daughter, an aspiring writer and accomplished student, also faces her own waning motivation. “Every minute I sit at my desk I am being erased. It started with one of my dimensions. Then my voice was replaced by the chat, my face with a logo, and my life with progress checks,” Eileen’s daughter writes. “Virtual school is not real school. They are not giving us an education. They are teaching us how to not get caught using google translate. They are teaching us which websites will do your algebra homework for you. And if the Board of Education doesn’t take my education seriously, then why should I?”

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“We have a vaccine now. We don’t need false positives anymore. Notionally, the system has produced its miracle cure.”

“all the PCR tests being done will be done “under the new WHO guidelines”, and running only 25-30 cycles instead of 35+. Lo and behold, the number of “positive cases” will plummet..”

WHO -Finally- Admits PCR Tests Create False Positives (OffG)

The World Health Organization released a guidance memo on December 14th, warning that high cycle thresholds on PCR tests will result in false positives. While this information is accurate, it has also been available for months, so we must ask: why are they reporting it now? Is it to make it appear the vaccine works? The “gold standard” Sars-Cov-2 tests are based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR works by taking nucleotides – tiny fragments of DNA or RNA – and replicating them until they become something large enough to identify. The replication is done in cycles, with each cycle doubling the amount of genetic material. The number of cycles it takes to produce something identifiable is known as the “cycle threshold” or “CT value”. The higher the CT value, the less likely you are to be detecting anything significant.

This new WHO memo states that using a high CT value to test for the presence of Sars-Cov-2 will result in false-positive results. To quote their own words [our emphasis]: “Users of RT-PCR reagents should read the IFU carefully to determine if manual adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is necessary to account for any background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold (Ct) value result being interpreted as a positive result.” They go on to explain [again, our emphasis]: “The design principle of RT-PCR means that for patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low. Conversely, when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.”

Of course, none of this is news to anyone who has been paying attention. That PCR tests were easily manipulated and potentially highly inaccurate has been one of the oft-repeated battle cries of those of us opposing the “pandemic” narrative, and the policies it’s being used to sell. Many articles have been written about it, by many experts in the field, medical journalists and other researchers. It’s been commonly available knowledge, for months now, that any test using a CT value over 35 is potentially meaningless. Dr Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the PCR process, was clear that it wasn’t meant as a diagnostic tool, saying: “..with PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody.” And, commenting on cycle thresholds, once said: “If you have to go more than 40 cycles to amplify a single-copy gene, there is something seriously wrong with your PCR.”

The MIQE guidelines for PCR use state: Cq values higher than 40 are suspect because of the implied low efficiency and generally should not be reported,” This has all been public knowledge since the beginning of the lockdown. The Australian government’s own website admitted the tests were flawed, and a court in Portugal ruled they were not fit for purpose. Even Dr Anthony Fauci has publicly admitted that a cycle threshold over 35 is going to be detecting “dead nucleotides”, not a living virus. Despite all this, it is known that many labs around the world have been using PCR tests with CT values over 35, even into the low 40s. So why has the WHO finally decided to say this is wrong? What reason could they have for finally choosing to recognise this simple reality?

The answer to that is potentially shockingly cynical: We have a vaccine now. We don’t need false positives anymore. Notionally, the system has produced its miracle cure. So, after everyone has been vaccinated, all the PCR tests being done will be done “under the new WHO guidelines”, and running only 25-30 cycles instead of 35+. Lo and behold, the number of “positive cases” will plummet, and we’ll have confirmation that our miracle vaccine works.

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“Joe Biden defends his son — who is under federal investigation, was kicked out of the Navy for cocaine, and was sued by a stripper for paternity — as “the smartest man I know.”

“It’s used to get to me. I think it’s kind of foul play, but, look, it is what it is. And he’s a grown man. He is the smartest man I know. I mean, in a pure intellectual capacity.”

And boy, whatever happened to Stephen Colbert?

Joe Biden Calls His Son Hunter ‘The Smartest Man I Know’ (DC)

President-elect Joe Biden says he is “not concerned” about a federal investigation into his son, Hunter, and accused his opponents of weaponizing the probe for political points. Biden said that Hunter, who has been involved in a string of high-profile personal and business controversies in recent years, as “the smartest man I know.” Hunter Biden announced last Wednesday that he is under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware over his “tax affairs.” A source familiar with the investigation told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the investigation began in 2018, before Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign.


The Associated Press reported that prosecutors subpoenaed Biden for his records with more than two dozen businesses, including companies in China and Ukraine. (RELATED: Joe Biden Says He Is ‘Confident’ His Son Did Nothing Wrong) Biden, who was interviewed by CBS’s Stephen Colbert, accused his political opponents of “foul play” by seizing on the investigation. “We have great confidence in our son. I am not concerned about any accusations made against him. It’s used to get to me,” Biden said in the interview, which he conducted with his wife Jill Biden at his side. “I think it’s kind of foul play,” said Biden, adding, “look, it is what it is.” “He’s a grown man. He is the smartest man I know. I mean, in a pure intellectual capacity. And as long as he’s good, we’re good.”

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“The US Shadow State and its creatures are of the Soviet school of information: top-down tell, and censor the ‘show’ part.”

They Won’t Take “No” For An Answer (Ward)

There are many issues facing us today both personally and globally. But they all boil down to one thing: those who have captured power through either electoral desperation or corporacratic subterfuge simply will not take no for an answer. We must look beyond the issue to the principle, and learn to say no in a forcefully peaceful and organised manner. It does seem eternally odd, does it not, that the US judicial system seems happy to throw out Republican affidavits giving evidence of electoral fraud, but at the same time the US has a media set that suffixes every report on what President Trump says about it with “although he has no evidence to support his claims”….and the world anglosphere falls lamely into line.

It is truly Pythonic, with just a dash of Catch22: “We’re not going to review these affidavits because they’re worthless,” said the Ostriches, “so will you stop saying you were cheated, because you haven’t got any evidence – we know this, because we don’t need to look at it”. My view is simple: it is entirely possible that Trump is lying his fat head off. But the common sense rejoinder to that pov is: 1) Why press ahead so vigorously with a case if (privately) you know it to be BS? And 2) If you the State know it to be BS, why not investigate every affidavit thoroughly and enumerate their lack of worth instance by instance? In short, we have a plaintiff behaving like a guy who’s done his homework, and the State dismissing everything out of hand for fear of finding magic bullets flying backwards, and Presidential Heads exploding in the wrong direction.

Show not tell: it’s an old adage, but still universally applicable. The ‘Tell’ approach: “Laugh at me because believe me, I’m funny….boy, am I funny”. The ‘Show’ approach: Tell a very funny joke with timing and élan. The US Shadow State and its creatures are of the Soviet school of information: top-down tell, and censor the ‘show’ part. When it doesn’t convince, smear the doubters as ill-educated, delusional and deviant.

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“After the third and final recount, Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes, or 0.2%.”

Georgia Announces Signature Matching Review For Election Ballots (JTN)

After three recounts, Georgia certified the 2020 presidential election. But on Thursday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a statewide move to match signatures to their absentee ballots in all 159 counties in the state. The announcement comes just weeks before two Georgia Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5 will determine which party controls the Senate. Raffensperger announced that the signature matching will be done in partnership with the University of Georgia. The study will review a random sample of signatures for mail-in ballots that were cast in the presidential election. “We are confident that elections in Georgia are secure, reliable and effective,” Raffensperger said.


“Despite endless lawsuits and wild allegations from Washington, D.C., pundits, we have seen no actual evidence of widespread voter fraud, though we are investigating all credible reports. Nonetheless, we look forward to working with the University of Georgia on this signature match review to further instill confidence in Georgia’s voting systems,” he also said. Earlier this week, Georgia officials announced an audit of signatures for mail-in ballots in Cobb County, a suburb of Atlanta. The Trump campaign claimed that Cobb County did not properly conduct signature match in June,” said Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state. “After the countywide audit, we will look at the entire state. We will look at the entire election to make sure signature match was executed properly.” After the third and final recount, Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes, or 0.2%.

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The Durham probe comes to mind. Where is it?

Where Bill Barr Failed the President (ET)

Barr’s most significant achievement during his tenure was perhaps his role in the final stages of the Mueller investigation, leading to his joint conclusion with Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein that evidence compiled by Robert Mueller failed to establish that the president had obstructed justice. But a series of curious missteps then followed. The investigation being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Huber disappeared entirely, although a portion of that investigation may have been folded into U.S. Attorney John Durham’s still ongoing investigation. Durham was appointed as special counsel by Barr, but reports indicate that Durham’s investigative scope has been narrowed, and the investigation’s long-promised results remain delayed.

Trump found himself impeached by the House in December 2019, despite evidence within the DOJ that might have prevented the politically driven result. Indeed, it now appears that Trump may have been impeached for making inquiries into the very crimes for which Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, is now formally under investigation. Said differently, Trump may have effectively been impeached for being right about Biden. To date, only one person has been formally charged from the multi-year probe into the FBI’s handling of their investigation of the Trump campaign. Although two FISA warrants on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page were deemed as invalid—and thus illegal—there have been no prosecutions or convictions of high-level individuals involved in the surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign.

Barr remained concerned, perhaps rightly, about exhibiting any overt signs of interference in the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, while he studiously avoided disclosing any evidence regarding the Hunter Biden investigation, so did the mainstream media. The impact of the general public’s lack of knowledge on this matter may have been material to the election outcome. Barr also made what might generously be termed a material strategic error by speaking with The Associated Press in the weeks following the election. Barr’s comments that the DOJ had yet to uncover fraud on a level sufficient to affect the outcome of the election reverberated throughout the nation and caused material damage to the case being made by the president’s lawyers. Why Barr would choose to speak to the media, let alone the AP, at this critical juncture in post-election events remains unknown.

Barr, no political novice, has more than enough political acumen to comprehend the manner in which his comments would be interpreted and relayed to a nation in post-election turmoil. That he apparently held the belief there was no material evidence of election fraud strikes many who have been wading through court evidence for weeks as curious. Durham’s efforts may yet produce tangible results, but nearly four years of investigation has surely been long enough to bring forth something material. With each passing month, the lack of tangible results has allowed for unspoken discrediting of the president’s claims. And with the possibility of a politically motivated Biden administration, concerns over potential interference in Durham’s results—special counsel status notwithstanding—are valid.

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In case you didn’t notice: the neocons won. So Russiagate is alive and kicking.

Trump Takes Bipartisan Criticism For Silence On Massive Cyber Attack (F.)

President Donald Trump is taking heat from members of Congress in both parties in recent days for his continued silence on a massive cybersecurity breach linked to Russia, even as the president’s own officials say the U.S. is highly vulnerable to further attacks. Through a weakness in software from SolarWinds Orion, an IT firm that services numerous U.S. government agencies, hackers – that U.S. officials say are tied to Russia – were reportedly able to infiltrate the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the Treasury Department, the National Institutes of Health and various other departments. Democrats have been vocal about the breach and critical of the president’s actions, with Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) noting the president fired Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) head Chris Krebs for debunking his election fraud conspiracy theories just one month before the attack occurred.

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) called Trump’s silence “unacceptable,” adding, “For 4 years, Congress has been urging him to take Russian threats seriously,” while Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) suggested the silence is because Trump has “cozied up to” Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of Trump’s most prolific Republican detractors, compared the breach to “Russian bombers… repeatedly flying over our entire country,” and slammed the “inexcusable silence and inaction from the White House.” Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) was critical of Trump’s silence as well, alleging a “leadership vacuum” in the administration and telling Forbes that Trump’s reticence to weigh in is because doing so “could highlight his firings” of cybersecurity, defense and intelligence officials in recent weeks.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and outgoing Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) both took aim at Trump for his threat to veto a defense bill that includes cyber protections and would create a National Cyber Security Director, with Hurd adding, “We need to find the inaugural director ASAP because he/she is going to have a full plate on day one.” “No statement, no tweet, nothing from [Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.)] on Russia hack of Federal agencies,” tweeted Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell (D-Fla.), echoing Democrats who have alleged not just Trump, but many Republicans in Congress have shied away from weighing in on the hack. “As Chair of Senate Intelligence his silence=complicity,” she added. “CISA has determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations,” the agency said in a statement on Thursday.

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Is this even illegal?

Google Secretly Gave Facebook Perks, Data In Ad Deal: US States (R.)

Facebook Inc and Alphabet’s Google, the two biggest players in online advertising, used a series of deals to consolidate their market power illegally, Texas and nine other states alleged in a lawsuit against Google on Wednesday. Google and Facebook compete heavily in internet ad sales, together capturing over half of the market globally. The two players agreed in a publicized deal in 2018 to start giving Facebook’s advertiser clients the option to place ads within Google’s network of publishing partners, the complaint alleged. Executives at the highest level of the companies signed off on the deal, according to the complaint. For example, a sneaker blog that uses software from Google to sell ads could end up generating revenue from a footwear retailer that bought ads on Facebook.

Google reached similar partnerships with other advertising companies as part of an effort to maintain market share that was internally codenamed Project Jedi, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said. But what Google did not announce publicly is that it gave Facebook preferential treatment, the complaint alleged. Facebook agreed to back down from supporting competing software, which publishers had developed to dent Google’s market power, the complaint said. “Facebook decided to dangle the threat of competition in Google’s face and then cut a deal to manipulate the auction,” it said, citing internal communications. In exchange, the states said, Facebook received various benefits, including access to Google data and policy exceptions that enabled its clients to unfairly get more ads placed than clients of other Google partners could.

[..] The complaint also alleged that Google and Facebook engaged in fixing prices of ads and have continued to cooperate, though the section was heavily redacted and left it unclear just how and when the companies allegedly used their “market allocation agreement.” However, it said that “given the scope and extensive nature of cooperation between the two companies, Google and Facebook were highly aware that their agreement could trigger antitrust violations. The two companies discussed, negotiated, and memorialized how they would cooperate with one another.”

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The Pentagon needs enemies.

Pentagon Training Equates Whistleblower Chelsea Manning With Terrorists (IC)

In the decade since her historic transfer of secret military and diplomatic materials to WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning has consistently and across party lines been condemned as a traitor. Less common, and absent entirely from the government’s efforts to imprison her, are allegations that her leak was an act of terrorism. But anti-terrorism training materials obtained by The Intercept show that the Pentagon is teaching defense workers exactly that. Both civilian contractors and enlisted personnel are commonly required to complete JS-US007, a Pentagon course designed to “increase your awareness of terrorism and to improve your ability to apply personal protective measures,” according to Joint Knowledge Online, a Department of Defense education portal. JS-US007 covers a variety of grimly serious topics, from detecting roadside bombs to surviving active shooter scenarios and skyjackings.

The training also covers so-called insider threat attacks, acts of terroristic violence in which members of a group strike the group itself, like the 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, shooting in which Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 individuals on the base, wounding 30 more. The Department of Homeland Security defines insider threat terrorism as “an unlawful use of force and violence by employees or others closely associated with organizations, against those organizations to promote a political or social objective.” Other definitions may differ on technicalities, but like other acts of terrorism, the unifying theme is the violence of the acts.

But unclassified JS-US007 materials obtained by The Intercept show that the Pentagon’s anti-terrorism trainees are learning a far broader definition of terrorism, one that includes the entirely nonviolent acts of Manning. On a slide listing “Examples of attacks by individuals thought to be loyal to the US,” Manning’s “2010 leaking of over 500,000 documents concerning operations in Iraq and Afghanistan” is listed first, followed by three examples of murder: the “2009 active shooter attack at Fort Hood,” the “2003 active shooter attack at Camp Pennsylvania,” and the “2001 anthrax attacks against Government facilities” that closely followed the attacks of September 11. Another slide in the presentation lists Manning’s alleged “anti-American statements” as a “pre-attack indicator.”

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“..down 54% from peak share-buyback mania in Q4 2018..”

Q3 Share Buybacks Plunged 42% YoY, Big Banks Are Gone (WS)

The big four banks are out. And other companies are out. But Big Tech is in, as big as ever, and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, after pooh-poohing share buybacks for years, is now the second largest share buyback queen. In the third quarter 2020, companies in the S&P 500 Index bought back $101.8 billion of their own shares, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices this morning. While this still sounds like a lot of share buybacks, it’s down 42% from Q3 last year, and down 54% from peak share-buyback mania in Q4 2018 following the corporate tax cuts:

Since the beginning of 2012, the S&P 500 companies have bought back nearly $5 trillion of their own shares. How much is $5 trillion? It’s nearly one-quarter of US 12-month GDP in current dollars. It’s about equal to the amount by which the US government debt has exploded over the past 12 months. These $5 trillion could have been invested in expansion projects in the US, and in labor, and in training, or God forbid, in reducing the debt that Corporate America has loaded up on in a historic manner.

[..] Corporate debt levels have been showing up in the Fed’s Financial Stability Reports. The corporate “debt overhang,” as the Fed calls it, frazzled Fed researchers in 2019 and it is now again cropping up in Fed research papers, including by the New York Fed a few days ago. “We find that the economic costs of corporate debt booms rise when inefficient debt restructuring and liquidation impede the resolution of corporate financial distress and make it more likely that corporate zombies creep along,” summarize the researchers at the New York Fed. It was another research paper duly ignored by Fed Chair Powell.


Last year, the four big banks – Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup – occupied the #2, #3, #4, and #7 spots on the Top 20 list of our share buyback queens. Now they’re gone from the list, having been told by regulators to stop share buybacks to preserve capital to absorb the coming losses from the Crisis. Big Tech and, ironically, Warren Buffett dominate the list. Apple retains its top spot with $17.6 billion in share buybacks in Q3, bringing the 12-month total to $76 billion.

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I don’t normally include 4-month old articles in Debt Rattles, but this could just as well be from today.

Facebook To Require Masks In All Profile Pictures (BBee)

Facebook confirmed today that to prevent the spread of coronavirus and promote a safe space to virtue-signal, masks will be required on all profile pictures going forward. If you log in to Facebook you will be prompted to change your profile picture to one where you are wearing a mask. If you don’t have a mask, Facebook offers digital mask filters to give the appearance that you’re wearing one. Those who refuse the mask will be asked to delete their accounts.


“This is an issue of public safety,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We were seeing people just commenting on things and posting memes and stuff while their face was clearly visible. The CDC currently says that masks are good, and therefore, you must wear a mask.” An assistant then whispered in Zuckerberg’s ear. “Oh, uh, this just in: the CDC now says that masks are bad. So we’ll take this all back.” But, before he could reverse the mask order, the CDC issued another update saying that masks were good again. “Anyway, yes, a mask for everyone. It’s a small thing to do to make everyone feel safe.”

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UK MPs ask for a meeting with Assange.

 

 

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Dec 152020
 


William Merritt Chase Back Of A Nude 1888

 

Biden Lashes Out At Trump In Post-Electoral College Speech (ZH)
Republican Electors In Five Disputed States Cast Votes For Trump (JTN)
Offstage Noises (Jim Kunstler)
Barr Steps Down As AG, Decries ‘Frenzied And Baseless’ Russia Allegations (JTN)
The Case For Pardoning Edward Snowden By President Trump (Greenwald)
Left and Right Unite in Calls for Snowden Pardon (MPN)
Trump’s Last Chance to Snub the Deep State (SCF)
Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations (Taibbi)
Stimulus Bill Bails Out Defense Contractors, Denies Families Payments (DP)
Fauci: Masks, Social Distancing Likely Needed Until ‘Early Next Winter’ (JTN)
The Covid-19 Data is a ‘Travesty’ (OffG)
Venezuela’s Guaido-Led Opposition Holds Alternative Vote, Burns Ballots (RT)
Sunday Times Claims Navalny Was Poisoned Twice (Robinson)

 

 

Hats off to Jimmy Dore.

 

 

Me, I fear for the future of the country.

Biden Lashes Out At Trump In Post-Electoral College Speech (ZH)

Joe Biden lashed out at President Trump Monday night, saying in a 14-minute speech following his win in the electoral college that Trump’s ongoing challenges to the 2020 election are “an unprecedented assault on our democracy,” and that claims of widespread fraud are “baseless” – despite the fact that the Supreme Court elected not to review the merits of various cases. “Every single avenue was made available for President Trump to contest the results. He took full advantage of each and every one of those avenues.


“President Trump was denied no course of action he wanted to take,” Biden added – also slamming the 17 GOP Attorneys General and 126 GOP Congressmembers who challenged the results of the election as well. Biden implied Trump has both abused – and won’t let go of power, saying “In America, politicians don’t take power — the people grant it to them,” adding “The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing — not even a pandemic or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame.”

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“It’s our duty to the people of Michigan and to the U.S. Constitution to send another slate of electors if the election is in controversy or dispute, and clearly it is..”

Republican Electors In Five Disputed States Cast Votes For Trump (JTN)

Republican electors in four states said Monday that they would cast their procedural votes for President Trump from the Nov. 3 elections, and Michigan sent two separate slates of electors to Capitol Hill, 16 electors for Trump and 16 electors for Democrat Joe Biden. “It’s our duty to the people of Michigan and to the U.S. Constitution to send another slate of electors if the election is in controversy or dispute, and clearly it is,” said Meshawn Maddock, Republican at-large national elector. Michigan state Rep. Daire Rendon said: “What it comes down to is this: have the secretary of state, director of elections, and election officials proved to you that the election had accuracy and integrity? They have not. And because of this, the election is in dispute.”

Under the Constitution, state legislatures have plenary power over their respective elections. Because there is an ongoing dispute over the Michigan 2020 general election, members of the Michigan legislature have called on Washington, D.C., to not count Michigan electors until further action from the Michigan legislature, according to a press release about the Michigan effort. Congress will count electoral votes Jan. 6. The Trump campaign embraced the alternate slate of electors’ actions, saying it preserved legal options before the Jan. 6 deadline. “We applaud the Republican electors in those states for showing up and casting the votes,” the campaign’s senior legal counsel Jenna Ellis told Just the News.

The Republican electors in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona all said they voted for Trump. It comes as their states formally appointed Democratic electors who voted for Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, according to the Epoch Times. The Pennsylvania GOP said in a news release that electors met at the state capital to “cast a conditional vote” for Trump and Pence “at the request of the Trump campaign.” Democratic electors voted in the Pennsylvania Electoral College for Biden and Harris.

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“If Dominion vote tabulation machines all over America are not allowed to be hooked up to the Internet, how can they be a network? And why would they need a server?”

Offstage Noises (Jim Kunstler)

President Trump’s 2018 Executive Order 13848 requires the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), John Ratcliffe, to report forty-five days after the election on foreign election interference. That’s this Friday. What might Mr. Ratcliffe know? Well, supposedly everything. Except both the CIA and the FBI must be considered undependable now, with RussiaGate prankster Gina Haspel in charge of the CIA, and Christopher Wray slow-walking every requested declassified FBI document for years. So, Mr. Ratcliffe must be receiving more dependable intelligence from others, most likely Defense Intelligence. Many readers may have heard about a supposed raid on the CIA cyber-warfare station in Frankfurt, Germany, and the seizure there of the Dominion computer servers by US Army special ops personnel.

Forty-five days was probably enough time for Defense Intelligence to run forensic analysis on those servers, if, in fact, they existed and the raid actually happened. Standing by on that. We just don’t know. But if so, then Mr. Ratcliffe must have some results by now. What nobody has asked is: in the first place, what on earth would the Dominion servers be doing in Frankfurt, outside the USA, in possession of the CIA? Is the CIA monitoring the vote tabulation… or assisting in it? This raises another question no one has addressed: Servers serve computer networks, which operate via the Internet. If Dominion vote tabulation machines all over America are not allowed to be hooked up to the Internet, how can they be a network? And why would they need a server? If I’m missing something there, please discuss in the comments section.

Which raises another question: Is there not sufficient evidence to see that the use of computers has completely screwed up our election process? Is this not a classic Joseph Tainter style quandary of overinvestments in complexity producing diminishing returns — which, when enough of them pile up, gets you to the collapse of civilizations? Are we going to allow further screw-ups by letting the State of Georgia conduct their January 5 senate run-off election on the same Dominion machines that they used on November 3? Apparently, that’s exactly what Georgia intends to do.

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Did Bill Barr just make room for Trump to pardon Assange and Snowden?

Barr Steps Down As AG, Decries ‘Frenzied And Baseless’ Russia Allegations (JTN)

William Barr has decided to step down as attorney general before Christmas, ending a tumultuous tenure that saw his department clear President Trump of Russia collusion and crack down on violent gangs, Chinese spies and religious liberty violations. Trump announced the departure Monday evening on Twitter shortly after meeting with Barr, ending a tense week in which the president and his allies criticized the attorney general for both failing to reveal the existence of a Hunter Biden probe before the election and taking little public action to punish those who perpetrated the false Russian collusion narrative, “Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!” Trump tweeted. “As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.”

“Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!” the president added. In his letter, Barr revealed his last day will be Dec. 23 and that the purpose of his meeting with the president Monday was to brief the president about his department’s efforts to investigate voter fraud. Barr also went out of his way in the letter to decry the “frenzied and baseless” narrative of Russia collusion that hampered the first two-plus years of the Trump presidency.

“Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic no matter how abusive and deceitful was out of bounds,” Barr wrote. “The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust your administration, with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia,” he added.

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Calls for pardons are getting loud.

The Case For Pardoning Edward Snowden By President Trump (Greenwald)

A U.S. appellate court in September unanimously ruled that the NSA’s program of mass domestic surveillance was illegal, as well as likely a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The court, and the broader public, knew about this illegal mass surveillance program created by the NSA only because Edward Snowden, while working inside that agency, discovered its existence and concluded in 2012 that the American public has the right know about what was being secretly done to them and their privacy by their own government. Upon making the decision to blow the whistle on this security state illegality, Snowden delivered the documents relating to that program and other then-unknown systems of mass online surveillance not by dumping them indiscriminately on the internet or selling them or passing them to foreign governments, but by providing them to journalists (including myself) with The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news outlets.

The documents Snowden provided were accompanied by requests to report them responsibly. He thus relinquished the power entirely to make decisions about which documents would and would not be published, leaving those decisions exclusively to news outlets. That meant that Snowden himself never made a single document publicly available; every document that was reported was the result of decisions by newsrooms around the world that their publication would be in the public interest and would not endanger innocent people. That method of whistleblowing chosen by Snowden — patterned after the one Daniel Ellsberg used in 1971 to make the public aware of years of lying to the American public by the U.S. Government about the Vietnam War, when he gave the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and asked them to report it in the public interest — enabled journalists to inform the American citizenry about illegal and unconstitutional spying by the U.S. Government in the most responsible manner possible.

Indeed, the very first program we reported — on June 6, 2013 — was the mass domestic spying program which the appellate court just ruled was illegal and likely a violation of the constitutional rights of all Americans. That first article we published revealed a top secret court order under which “the National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers,” and required major telecommunications carriers “on an ‘ongoing, daily basis’ to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.”

The months of reporting that followed, all singularly enabled by Snowden’s courageous whistleblowing, triggered so much vital public debate about privacy and mass surveillance, and fostered so many legal and technological privacy reforms around the world, that the reporting earned virtually every award journalism has to give, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. For those who have not seen it, the 2014 documentary by Laura Poitras about the work Snowden did with journalists, Citizenfour, which received the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, shows much of the Snowden story in real time and can be viewed on YouTube; the feature film “Snowden,” available on Netflix and other platforms, separately explores the trajectory which Snowden traversed from enlisted U.S. Army soldier, CIA contractor and NSA expert to one of this generation’s most consequential whistleblowers.

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“I support pardons for Snowden, Assange and especially Chelsea Manning. All exposed the criminality of the Bush-Obama/Biden period.”

Left and Right Unite in Calls for Snowden Pardon (MPN)

Amid mounting speculation that President Trump is about to announce a list of presidential pardons, calls for — and against — NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s name to be included are growing louder. In November, as is customary, Donald Trump pardoned a turkey for Thanksgiving. Now, in the lame duck session of his presidency, he appears to be making a customary list of people to pardon as well. Influential and well-connected publication Axios reported, in a scandalized tone, that he is planning to hand out pardons “like Christmas gifts” to “every person who ever talked to [him].” In August, the president was asked about Snowden specifically, responding by saying that, “I’m going to take a very good look at it. I’ve seen people that are very conservative and very liberal and they agree on the same issue…I’m going to take a look at that very strongly.”


Now, a host of figures are calling in unison for Trump to follow through on the proposal. “President Trump is listening to the many of us who are urging him to pardon Snowden. It’s the right thing to do,” Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz said yesterday. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul agreed, slamming former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in the process. “Clapper brazenly lied to Congress denying that the Deep State was spying on all Americans. Snowden simply revealed Clapper’s lies and exposed unconstitutional spying. He deserves a pardon from Donald Trump,” he wrote. Those calls were joined by a number of voices on the left, including former Green Party vice-presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka, who said, “I support pardons for Snowden, Assange and especially Chelsea Manning. All exposed the criminality of the Bush-Obama/Biden period.” The American Civil Liberties Union, who have previously described Snowden as a “patriot,” concurred, stating, “Edward Snowden blew the whistle on illegal government activity kept secret for years. Our democracy is better off because of him.”

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“Wasn’t Trump supposed to be the anti-Deep State candidate? Now’s his chance to prove it.”

Trump’s Last Chance to Snub the Deep State (SCF)

The Trump administration calls the International Criminal Court a kangaroo court. He refuses to allow any U.S. soldier to be brought before the court for purported war crimes in Afghanistan. None of the court investigators or judges will receive visas to enter U.S. territory. Any property or bank accounts they have in the U.S. will be confiscated. If any court is a disingenuous kangaroo court it is the extradition trial against Julian Assange, in London. The first magistrate who sat in judgment of possible extradition to the U.S. for alleged violations of its Espionage Act, is a subject in Wikileaks’ revelations. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, and her husband, James Arbuthnot, who was a defense minister for procurement, have “earned” money from two companies exposed by Wikileaks.

During the August-September extradition hearings, Arbuthnot “stepped down” to be supervisor of the new magistrate, Vanessa Baraitser. During three weeks of hearings, Baraitser looked at her laptop to read decisions she had written before defense lawyers had made their arguments, or witnesses had testified. I am not the only one hoping that Donald Trump will do the right thing with Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden too. The last president, one Trump hates, first put Assange’s key whistleblower in prison, in isolation, under torture. Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years. Obama leaving office with a gesture of “goodwill”, commuted Chelsea’s sentence once she served seven years. She was later jailed for another year for not snitching on Julian.

Tulsi Gabbard, the only Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 who wasn’t a war hawk, is asking Trump for goodwill. She tweeted tagging Trump, “Since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state,” and named Assange and Snowden for him to drop charges. The proposal for Trump to pardon Assange was also endorsed at this recent webinar which included speakers Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Law Professor Marjorie Cohn, Consortium News editor-in-chief Joe Lauria. If Trump did the honorable thing of halting the persecution of Julian Assange, it would be a blow for freedom and a middle finger to the Deep State including Obama and Clinton. Wasn’t Trump supposed to be the anti-Deep State candidate? Now’s his chance to prove it.

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“They totally caved..”

Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations (Taibbi)

A senior Democratic congressional aide is irate tonight. “The Democrats,” the aide seethed, “have just done the worst negotiating in modern history.” At issue: a pair of new Covid-19 relief bills, just submitted by a bipartisan group of Senators. Republican Senator Susan Collins gushed that a“Christmas Miracle” allowed the two parties came together on the twin bills, which the press describes as totaling $748 billion and $160 billion, respectively. “Bipartisanship and compromise is [sic] alive and well in Washington,” clucked West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. It sure is. With the election over, the Democratic leadership in the space of a few weeks somehow negotiated against themselves, working with Republicans to push the total amount of a Covid-19 relief deal further and further downward, to the point where previous plans offered by the likes of Mitch McConnell and Steve Mnuchin now look like LBJ’s Great Society.

Democrats ultimately settled for less than a third of what they had set as a baseline for state and local aid, accepted a package without any $1,200 direct payments, and signed off on a plan that, after offsets, includes less than $350 billion in new money, well below a slew of pre-election proposals rejected by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as being too low. “They totally caved,” the aide says. Back in May, the Democrat-led House passed the HEROES Act, a $3.4 trillion relief package that was pitched as the bill Democrats really wanted. It contained $413 billion new dollars for $1,200 direct payments to citizens, as well as $437 billion in additional unemployment benefits, and a whopping $1.13 trillion for state and local governments.

Trump said the bill was “dead on arrival,” McConnell blasted it as a “$3 trillion left-wing wish list,” and the anti-spending group Taxpayers for Common Sense seethed that Democrats unrealistically put “everything they could think of” in the bill. Still, Democrats insisted this was the right amount, at the right time, a moral necessity. “The House has passed a major bill dealing with COVID,” Schumer said in May, blasting his Senate Republican colleagues for a “pause” in negotiations. “We have done nothing.”

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Meanwhile, what a mess.

Stimulus Bill Bails Out Defense Contractors, Denies Families Payments (DP)

Earlier this year, Republican senators slammed the idea of spending money to pay Americans not to work during the pandemic. Only a few months later, a group of GOP senators has signed onto stimulus legislation that would authorize the government to pay idle defense contractors to not work, even as those contractors’ rack up big profits during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the same bill excludes bipartisan provisions authorizing direct payments to millions of Americans struggling to survive. The stimulus legislation released by Republican and Democratic senators this afternoon includes an extension of a program to replace the wages of certain government contractors who miss work due to COVID-19.

The program, Section 3610 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, allows federal agencies to reimburse contractors who are unable to work in person due to the pandemic, and whose jobs do not allow telework, for up to 40 hours per week of lost wages. In effect, the program uses government money to reimburse defense contractors for giving paid leave to their employees. The provision was added to the last page of the 525-page bill after defense contractors sent a letter to congressional lawmakers lobbying for the language. The same bill does not authorize direct payments to millions of Americans — nor does it reimburse small businesses for providing paid leave benefits to their workers.

While the bill would fund $300-a-week in new federal unemployment benefits, that’s half as much as Congress distributed under the CARES Act — and millions of people will still see their unemployment benefits lapse on December 26, as it will likely take weeks to reprogram state unemployment systems. “This is about need and not greed,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., one of the Democratic sponsors of the bill who has called new direct payments to families “a bad idea.” Nearly 12 million U.S. renters will be behind $5,850 in rent by January, according to the Washington Post. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have been pushing lawmakers to include language in stimulus legislation giving $1,200 stimulus checks to millions of families. That was not included in the same stimulus that includes the subsidy program for defense contractors.

In July, Senate Republicans introduced a stimulus package which included $11 billion in appropriations to reimburse defense contractors for payments made under Section 3610, following lobbying from the defense industry. “Section 3610 provides authority for agencies to cover from existing funds certain contractor costs and keep key personnel and skilled workers in a ready state,” lobbying groups and executives from representing defense contractors and other government contractors wrote on December 11.

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How is it possible that in so many countries that failed so miserably in their pandemic fights, all the same faces hold on to all their same jobs?

Fauci: Masks, Social Distancing Likely Needed Until ‘Early Next Winter’ (JTN)

As the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine gets underway, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the American public should anticipate likely needing to wear masks and socially distancing through next winter. Fauci was asked Monday when he thinks society will be able to get back to pre-coronavirus normality. “I think we will know when we see the level of infection in the country at a dramatically lower level than it is right now that we can start gradually tiptoeing towards normality,” Fauci said during a discussion hosted by the Center for Strategy and International Studies. “I don’t believe we’re going to be able to throw the masks away and forget about physical separation and congregate settings for a while, probably likely until we get into the late fall and early next winter, but I think we can do it. The numbers will guide us.”


Fauci also said that having a vaccine distributed before the end of the year was “unimaginable” at the beginning of the pandemic. He referred to Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership implemented under the Trump administration, as a “success story,” given that a “group of vaccines” for COVID-19 have been produced. “I think Operation Warp Speed, putting hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, into facilitating the technical aspects of the trial, the clinical trial, the pre-purchasing of hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine is unprecedented,” he said. “So it’s really quite a success story, I must say.”

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We should have this down by now. We don’t.

The Covid-19 Data is a ‘Travesty’ (OffG)

If we turn our attention back to the Covid death data, just because someone has tested positive for Covid-19 and died sometime after (even if we put aside for a second that some tests are known to give false positives), that does not mean that Covid-19 caused that person to die. Yet, the main figure certain countries around the world are using to express Covid-19 deaths is simply recorded, or coded, as essentially any death involving a positive Covid-19 test within 28 days of death. Because correlation does not equal causation, simply recording Covid-19 deaths as any deaths involving a positive Covid-19 test within a given period of time is an extremely poor way to measure how many people have died. For instance, in the UK, the main figure being used for Covid-19 deaths is coded, as stated on the official Coronavirus website, as the…

number of deaths of people who had had a positive test result for COVID-19 and died within 28 days of the first positive test. This completely ignores the problem of causality, and thus, produces a much larger death toll than there actually is. For instance, if someone has had an underlying heart condition for 10 years, and has a heart complication and dies, their death was most likely mainly caused by the heart condition that has plagued them for a decade. However, if that person had tested positive for Covid-19 for the first time within 28 days of them dying, that person could be included as a Covid-19 death in the UK, if all is required to be categorized as a Covid-19 death is simply a positive test result.

For those who understand that the way you code deaths dramatically changes the number of deaths you get, the UK authorities kindly illustrate this for us. There is a second number recorded by UK authorities which codes deaths as… people whose death certificate mentioned COVID-19 as one of the causes. By coding deaths this way, there are thousands more Covid-19 deaths compared to when deaths are coded as… people who had had a positive test result for COVID-19 and died within 28 days of the first positive test. Despite the UK authorities having two ways to code Covid-19 deaths however, none of them are particularly accurate in my opinion. This is because the positive test figure does not deal with the issue of causality, and the death certificate figure only mentions Covid as needing to be “one of the causes” of death, rather than “the primary cause,” in addition to the death certificate figure not explicitly demanding the need for a positive Covid-19 test result.

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Right on cue, Guaido and Navalny are back in the western news, two people who play no role whatsoever in their own home countries. What’s the mechanism behind this?

Venezuela’s Guaido-Led Opposition Holds Alternative Vote, Burns Ballots (RT)

Venezuelan opposition led by US-backed ‘interim president’ Juan Guaido has held “popular consultations” to demonstrate rejection of the nation’s government after boycotting parliamentary vote but ended up burning ballots instead. The so-called “popular consultations” organized by the supporters of the self-styled “interim president” started online on Monday and concluded with an in-person participation on Saturday. The move was held after an official election held earlier this month handed control over the Venezuelan National Assembly to President Nicolas Maduro’s Socialist PSUV party. As it was during the 2018 presidential elections that handed victory to Maduro himself, most of the opposition boycotted the official vote.

After losing what was considered its last institutional stronghold, Guaido’s supporters decided to demonstrate the scale of the alleged popular rejection of the Venezuelan government they continue to call illegitimate. Although the turnout for the official election was not particularly high, Guaido’s initiative has hardly faired any better since, according to the organizers’ own estimates cited by Reuters, just under 6.5 million out of roughly 17.5 million eligible voters took part in the “consultation,” including some 845,000 people living abroad. The outcome of the “consultation” did not seem to affect the political situation in the Latin American nation hit by strict US sanctions targeting its oil sector and exacerbating a prolonged economic crisis.

Maduro himself brushed off the opposition’s initiative by saying that “no internet consultation has constitutional status” or any “legal value.” In 11 out of 24 Venezuela’s states, the law enforcement sought to disrupt the in-person participation in the “consultation” by removing the informal voting sites, the organizers complained. Still, they themselves ended up destroying all the traces of the “consultation”, at least at some of the improvised polling stations. A video published on the social media shows a pile of ballots and voting records burning on the floor at one of such sites in the northern Miranda state. The organizers claimed they did so to protect the identities of the participants.

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“..the murder of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916 proves “Russia’s penchant for poisoning”

Sunday Times Claims Navalny Was Poisoned Twice (Robinson)

This weekend’s article in the Sunday Times is probably meant to undermine the doubters. In reality, it’s likely to have the opposite result. For its claims are so outrageous that many thinking people will react with laughter, and then perhaps start questioning the poisoning story as a whole. According to the Sunday Times, Navalny wasn’t poisoned by a nerve agent smeared on his water bottle, as has previously been asserted, but rather was attacked by means of his underpants. Moreover, he wasn’t poisoned once, but twice, and despite Novichok’s reputation for extreme deadliness, both attempts failed.

When examined, though, these claims don’t amount to much. The Sunday Times story is nearly 4,000 words long, but 95 percent of it is irrelevant filler, including the comical assertion that the murder of Grigory Rasputin in December 1916 proves “Russia’s penchant for poisoning” (because, of course, nobody other than Russians ever poisoned anyone). The allegations regarding the attack on Navalny take up a mere 100 words of the 4,000-word total. As well as being brief, they are to say the least unproven. The Sunday Times says: “Vladimir Uglev, a retired Russian chemist who developed nerve agents, believes Navalny’s poisoners would have been instructed to place novichok on the elastic waistband of his pants, where it would come into contact with his skin. … A German laboratory later found traces of a nerve agent on the surface of one of the water bottles. Uglev, the retired chemist, believes that this is because Navalny touched it having got novichok on his fingers after putting on his underpants.”

In other words, the underpants story is just what a single Russian scientist, unconnected to the case, happens to think. Nothing more. Does Uglev provide any evidence to prove his assertion? No. He just “believes” it. Yet, this is sufficient for the Sunday Times to treat the story as essentially true, leading off its article with the claim that, “Navalny was exposed to a nerve agent – not, as initially believed, when he drank a cup of tea in the departure lounge but when he got dressed that morning.” This is not exactly good reporting. If the underwear story smells a little off, so too does the claim that Russian secret agents tried to murder Navalny not once, but twice.

As evidence, the Sunday Times says that, “German security sources have told their associates in the UK that the attackers struck again as Navalny lay in an induced coma before being put on a medical flight to Germany. ‘This was with a view to him being dead by the time he arrived in Berlin,’ one source said.” To put it another way, an anonymous person (probably a member of the British intelligence or security services) told a journalist that some other anonymous person believes that this is so. In other words, it’s not just hearsay, but anonymous hearsay. One can believe it if one wishes. But there’s no particular reason why one should.

Read more …

 

 

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Dec 052020
 


Paul Cézanne Young Italian Woman at a Table c1900

 

Jerusalem Hospital Orders 1.5 Million Doses of Russian COVID Vaccine (Haaretz)
Moderna Says Its Vaccine Provides COVID19 Immunity For At Least 3 Months (NYP)
Intent to Get a COVID19 Vaccine Rises to 60% (Pew)
Nursing Homes Create ‘Perfect Storm’ For COVID Outbreaks (CNBC)
The Jobs Report is a Mess, December Will Be Messier (WS)
The Beltway Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism (DP)
Joe Biden’s Cabinet Is a Lost Cause for the Left (TNR)
Barr’s Appointment Of Special Counsel Leaves Biden, Dems In A Muddle (Turley)
A Hall of Smoke and Mirrors (Kunstler)
Sidney Powell: Plenty of Time for Trump to Overturn Election Results (NM)
Judge Emmet Sullivan Still Refusing To Dismiss Michael Flynn Case (JTN)
AZ Senate, House Call For Audit Of Dominion Machines In Maricopa County (JTN)
Dutch Taxi Company Is Taking Tesla To Court Over “Defective” Cars (Sifted)
Oliver Stone, America Firster (AC)

 

 

 

 

“There’s a good probability that the vaccine is safe. And there’s a reasonable probability … that it’s also effective.”

Jerusalem Hospital Orders 1.5 Million Doses of Russian COVID Vaccine (Haaretz)

Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center has ordered 1.5 million doses of a Russian vaccine against the coronavirus, hospital director Zeev Rotstein said Tuesday. First reported on Army Radio, Rotstein added that the hospital will give the Health Ministry all necessary data about the vaccine this week, with the goal of obtaining a permit to administer it to Israelis. Rotstein, who has clashed repeatedly with the ministry in recent months, is convinced that the fears voiced in the media about the vaccine aren’t well-founded, and that they have more to do with the global struggle between Russia and the United States than with the scientific data. But even if the ministry refuses to approve the vaccine, he said in an interview with Haaretz, “We’ll have something do with it,” because Hadassah also operates overseas.

The Russian vaccine has been in phase three clinical trials since August and has already been given to tens of thousands of people. Hadassah’s branch in Moscow has both given the vaccine to people and monitored them afterward, “and the results and safety we’ve seen have been very good,” Rotstein said. Hadassah’s activities in Moscow are what led the Russian authorities to propose that the hospital seek Israeli approval for the vaccine, he added. If the phase three trials show that the vaccine is both safe and effective, and if the Health Ministry approves its use, the vaccine could be available in Israel in two to three months.

Rotstein stressed that until the phase three trial ends and the data has been analyzed, it’s impossible to know if the vaccine will be effective in preventing the virus. But based on the data so far, he said, “There’s a good probability that the vaccine is safe. And there’s a reasonable probability … that it’s also effective.” Both the development of the Russian vaccine and Russia’s unusual decision to administer it to its own citizens, even before the phase three trials ended, have been widely criticized worldwide. But Rotstein insisted that much of this criticism stems from the American-Russian battle over who will develop a vaccine first.

Read more …

Yeah, very convincing.

Moderna Says Its Vaccine Provides COVID19 Immunity For At Least 3 Months (NYP)

Moderna’s vaccine against COVID-19 has been shown to create immunity against the bug for at least three months, the biotech company said. Thirty-four healthy adults who received two doses of Moderna’s vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, were shown to have antibodies for 90 days, according to new findings published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The first dose “produced high levels of binding and neutralizing antibodies that declined slightly over time, as expected, but they remained elevated in all participants 3 months after the booster vaccination,” the study said. The two doses were administered 28 days apart.


The report did not make clear what level of risk people would have after 90 days and whether another shot would be needed. Earlier this week, Moderna asked the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization, saying data shows its vaccine is more than 94 percent effective against coronavirus. On Friday, the Massachusetts-based company said it would be able to produce 500 million doses of the vaccine in 2021. “For 500 million, I am very comfortable we are gonna get there,” chief executive officer Stéphane Bancel said at the Nasdaq Investor Conference.

Read more …

More confidence? Based on what? Just news stories?

Intent to Get a COVID19 Vaccine Rises to 60% (Pew)

As vaccines for the coronavirus enter review for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the share of Americans who say they plan to get vaccinated has increased as the public has grown more confident that the development process will deliver a safe and effective vaccine. Still, the U.S. public is far from uniform in views about a vaccine. A majority says they would be uncomfortable being among the first to take it, and a sizable minority appear certain to pass on getting vaccinated. Overall, 60% of Americans say they would definitely or probably get a vaccine for the coronavirus, if one were available today, up from 51% who said this in September.

39% say they definitely or probably would not get a coronavirus vaccine, though about half of this group – or 18% of U.S. adults – says it’s possible they would decide to get vaccinated once people start getting a vaccine and more information becomes available. Yet, 21% of U.S. adults do not intend to get vaccinated and are “pretty certain” more information will not change their mind. Public confidence has grown that the research and development process will yield a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19: 75% have at least a fair amount of confidence in the development process today, compared with 65% who said this in September.

These findings come on the heels of preliminary analysis from two separate clinical trials that have produced vaccines that are over 90% effective; the FDA is expected to issue decisions about the emergency authorization of these vaccines in the coming weeks. While public intent to get a vaccine and confidence in the vaccine development process are up, there’s considerable wariness about being among the first to get a vaccine: 62% of the public says they would be uncomfortable doing this. Just 37% would be comfortable.


The toll of the pandemic is starkly illustrated by the 54% of Americans who say they know someone personally who has been hospitalized or died due to the coronavirus. Among Black Americans, 71% know someone who has been hospitalized or died because of COVID-19.

Read more …

What is being done about this? Why do we never read about that?

Nursing Homes Create ‘Perfect Storm’ For COVID Outbreaks (CNBC)

The coronavirus death toll at U.S. nursing homes at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic was brutal and unrelenting. The Life Care Center nursing home outside Seattle made international headlines in March after the coronavirus infected residents and staff, resulting in at least 123 cases and dozens of deaths. In New Jersey, public officials discovered 17 bodies piled into a makeshift morgue in a nursing home in April when Covid-19 fatalities overwhelmed the facility. Nursing homes, which house the most vulnerable of society, quickly became ground zero for countless coronavirus outbreaks across the U.S. in the early months of the pandemic. While the outbreak subsided somewhat this fall, long-term care facilities are now seeing their most intense surge in Covid cases since at least the summer.

As new cases break record after record most days, infections at long-term care facilities reached a new weekly high in late November, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, an organization launched by The Atlantic magazine. More than 46,000 infections at those facilities were recorded in what was the worst week in six months; reliable data only goes back that far. Despite making up just 5.7% of all U.S. Covid cases, nursing home and assisted living facilities residents and staff accounted for 39.3% of the deaths, according to tracking project data. That number is generally considered low since many nursing home deaths tend to get reported without an underlying cause, physicians have said.

Deaths at U.S. nursing homes for the week ended last Thursday topped 3,000 — the highest weekly death toll since June, pushing cumulative fatalities over 100,000, according to the tracking project. “I’ve likened nursing homes to being like a tinderbox. It takes one person, one person, to unknowingly bring the virus into a facility and it could kill several people, make a lot of people sick,” said Dr. Joseph Ouslander, a geriatrician at Florida Atlantic University who works as a clinician in nursing homes. No matter what precautions staff take, it’s going to be difficult to prevent outbreaks in nursing homes, said Ouslander, who is also a professor of integrated medical science. “All those elements of the perfect storm are in place.”

Read more …

The Households Survey showed an actual decline of 74,000 working people. 100s of 1000s no longer count as in the labor force.

The Jobs Report is a Mess, December Will Be Messier (WS)

Everyone seems to be baking the highly anticipated potential future vaccines into the economic cake, but what has been happening for weeks is a spike in Covid cases across the US that has already triggered economic restrictions, including various versions of stay-at-home orders in Los Angeles County, San Francisco, and some other Bay Area counties, with restaurants closed for outdoor dining, strict capacity restrictions in retail stores, and many other restrictions. These moves are ahead of the State of California’s new framework for dealing with the spiking infections. Other states and cities have similar programs, either on the front burner or on the back burner. The Covid spike has already crimped economic activity and jobs over the past few weeks and is going to do more severely going forward.

But the jobs report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was based on surveys of “establishments” for the pay period through November 12; and on surveys of households for the week through November 14. So the data we got today largely missed the labor market consequences of the spike in Covid cases. Those consequence are coming in the next employment reports, starting with the report for December. Despite the cut-off dates having kept much of the Covid-impacted jobs data out of the results, the data have actually deteriorated in several aspects, including the number of people with jobs as reported by households, the employment-population rate, and the labor force.

The headline number of 245,000 jobs created came from surveys of establishments (companies, governments, nonprofits, educational institutions, etc.). That survey doesn’t track gig workers. It depicted a lousy recovery. But lousy as it was, it was the more benign part. The survey of households, on the other hand, tracks people who are working full or part time, including gig workers. And households reported that the number of people with jobs ticked down to 149.7 million. This wasn’t a slowdown in growth, but an actual decline of 74,000 working people – the first month-to-month decline since April.

The chart shows both results, from establishments (green) and from households (red) – the biggest part of the difference being gig workers. It’s obvious that even by November 12, before the real impact of the Covid surge, this was no good, in terms of catching up with population growth, or in terms of anything else:

The employment-population ratio, which tracks the number of employed workers against the working-age population (16 years or older) also dipped in November, to 57.3%, a level first seen since in 1972:

Read more …

From Bernie campaigner Sirota. He’ll never be left near a Dem campaign again.

The Beltway Left Is Normalizing Corruption And Corporatism (DP)

Last night, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a straightforward question: “Who would you point to now as a leading progressive voice in the cabinet?” Harris had no answer, saying only that “we’re not even halfway there” on nominations. Biden touted only his Homeland Security nominee, who previously helped run Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The spectacle was revelatory and honest: A month after the election, Biden’s nominations make clear that the president-elect is most focused on trying to fulfill his promise to donors that nothing fundamentally changes. And yet, that tacit admission may have stunned those who keep hearing from liberal and progressive groups in Washington that, in fact, the left has been notching monumental victories in Biden’s cabinet appointments.

This disconnect between Biden nominating business-friendly corporatists and Beltway liberals effusively celebrating those nominees spotlights the latter groups’ decision to genuflect for access and influence — rather than being brutally honest about the situation. That strategy of appeasement has almost never worked in an America where change has typically come only through opposition, struggle and sacrifice. And yet somehow, prostration remains the dominant strategy among the professional left. Why? In some cases, liberal groups are naively trying to curry favor with an incoming Democratic administration. Others are probably just trying to demonstrate to their supporters and future donors they won’t be completely irrelevant in Biden’s Washington.

Some are just too chickenshit to ever stand up and have any real fight with Democrats — and still others are just auctioning off their principles because the establishment counterrevolution offers better, stable career prospects. The result, though, is the same: What little organized left political infrastructure exists in Washington is largely valorizing or publicly defending swamp creatures who at minimum deserve a loyal opposition. The good work being done by a small handful of under-resourced groups to mount a real opposition is getting trampled by a culture of obsequiousness. This culture of acquiescence gives swamp creatures a free pass — and it may not just deliver an incrementalist Biden administration that takes progressives for granted and consequently fails to address national emergencies. It could also help permanently change what is even considered politically possible in the future.

Read more …

Seems the left has little to no spine.

Joe Biden’s Cabinet Is a Lost Cause for the Left (TNR)

Few portions of political discourse are as predictably shallow as presidential Cabinet discourse. Who should run the Department of Transportation? An affable also-ran in the Democratic primary who once said something about trains? A moderate politician or a businessman who might bring the country together from their perch at the agency that handles civil aviation and our highways? “No,” a sage voice somewhere in Washington, or Delaware, says. “It should be Rahm Emanuel.” As Chicagoans know, Emanuel’s most ambitious step into transportation policy as mayor was his endorsement of a high-speed tunnel project from Elon Musk that has yet to materialize. Chicagoans also know that Emanuel’s efforts to cover up video of a black teen’s murder by a Chicago policeman probably better qualify him for a post at the CIA.

That agency, we’ve been told this week, might finally be headed by a Black man; we also know a woman has been chosen to run the Department of Defense. Overall, Democratic policy professionals of all identities and stripes have been given plenty of reasons to rejoice at Biden’s choices so far. Civilians in Yemen have not. It’s been noted elsewhere that the left has responded much more quickly and aggressively to Biden’s selections than it did to Obama’s as he put together his first presidential Cabinet. If so, it doesn’t seem like the flurries of statements, social media posts, and articles that have been written to counter every stray rumor and announcement have mattered very much at all—the process is chugging along, and Biden’s nominees are just a couple of notches left of the Obama team; activists might take a small victory in torpedoing an Emanuel nomination.

There was never good reason to expect more. This is partially because a Republican Senate, should Democrats lose in Georgia’s runoff elections next month, will be an obstacle to the confirmation of even moderate nominees. But it’s more substantially because the moderates in the Democratic Party don’t share the left’s policy goals and would oppose giving them a meaningful presence in the Biden administration even if they could. The conventional wisdom about the left’s relationship with the Democratic Party has fully reversed itself in the space of six to eight months. As the Democratic primary ended, it was often argued that Sanders and the left lost because they had marginalized themselves—anti-establishment rhetoric, refusals to accept compromise, and the toxicity of prominent voices had alienated not only most of the Democratic electorate but also Democratic elites who might have otherwise been won over.

“Twitter isn’t real life,” it was said. But naturally, after Election Day, Democratic underperformance down-ballot from Biden was blamed mostly on the left’s influence. Democratic elites, it’s said now, were persuaded by the left to take on or accept unpopular messaging about socialism and policing—thanks in part, evidently, to the awesome and terrible power of tweets from left activists, writers, and podcasters.

Read more …

Turley points out that the timing indicates Durham now focuses on members of the perspective Biden administration.

“From a political perspective, the move is so elegantly lethal that it would make Machiavelli green with envy.”

Barr’s Appointment Of Special Counsel Leaves Biden, Dems In A Muddle (Turley)

Attorney General Bill Barr made two important evidentiary decisions yesterday that delivered body blows to both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden. First, Barr declared that the Justice Department has not found evidence of systemic fraud in the election. Second, he declared that there was sufficient evidence to appoint United States Attorney John Durham as a Special Counsel on the origins of the Russia probe. The move confirmed that, in a chaotic and spinning political galaxy, Bill Barr remains the one fixed and immovable object. By appointing Durham as a Special Counsel, Barr contradicted news reports before the election that Durham was frustrated and found nothing of significance despite Barr’s pressure.

Some of us expressed doubts over those reports since Durham asked for this investigation to be upgraded to a criminal matter, secured the criminal plea of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, and asked recently for over a thousand pages of classified intelligence material. Under the Justice Department regulations, Barr had to find (and Durham apparently agreed) that there is need for additional criminal investigation and “[t]hat investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances.” He must also find the appointment in the public interest. Notably, the investigation of Clinesmith is effectively completed. So, what is the criminal investigation and what is the conflict?

Presumably, the conflict is not in the current administration since it would have required an earlier appointment. The conflict would seem to be found in the upcoming Biden administration. Some conflicts developing seem obvious as Biden turns to a host of former Obama officials for positions, including the possible selection of Sally Yates as Attorney General. Yates was directly involved in the Russian investigation and signed off on the controversial surveillance of Trump associate Carter Page. She now says that she would never have signed the application if she knew what she knows today.

Durham is now authorized to investigate anyone who may have “violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.” The list of the names of people falling within that mandate is a who’s who of Washington from Hillary Clinton to James Comey to . . . yes . . . Joe Biden. Bizarrely, reports have claimed that Trump was irate at the move as a “smokescreen” to delay the release of the report. That ignores not just the legal but political significance of the action. From a political perspective, the move is so elegantly lethal that it would make Machiavelli green with envy.

Read more …

“Is it outlandish to wonder if Joe Biden is a national security risk?”

A Hall of Smoke and Mirrors (Kunstler)

Is it outlandish to wonder if Joe Biden is a national security risk? Is it, at least, worth looking into, considering the evidence trail? Many people on the Left, who read and view only the captive Left news media, may know nothing about Hunter B’s laptop and the tales it told because social media blacked out all the news about it and the mainstream media went along with the blackout. Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave $350-million to a “safe elections” project run by the non-profit Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), that was chiefly active in setting up Democratic vote-harvesting operations. Could he be liable for prosecution in enabling ballot fraud? Has the FBI asked him any questions?

Another story ‘out there’ says that behind the election hijinks a war is underway between the DOD and the CIA. On Wednesday, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller announced that all special operations run by the CIA would henceforward report to the SecDef. In effect, the President has ordered the dismantling of the CIA’s troublemaking capabilities, reducing the agency to the task of intel analysis. This means, for instance, ending the CIA’s ability to foment “color revolutions” (coups d’état) in foreign lands — with the implication that irregularities around the Dominion System may have amounted to an attempted color revolution in the USA. Is it worth wondering whether former CIA Director John Brennan, a leftist activist and probably an architect of RussiaGate, was involved in any of the election ops? If the FBI won’t question him about it, who will? (Answer: The Department of Defense.) Ditto Gina Haspel, current CIA Director. After all, what were the Dominion servers doing at the CIA’s server farm in Germany?

Events are moving quickly under the plodding surface of the ongoing swing state hearings, which are largely concerned with on-site mail-in ballot fraud shenanigans. Will the Supreme Court take a case in the few days left before the state vote certification deadline next Tuesday? Will Mr. Trump intervene with some extraordinary measure — martial law, the Insurrection Act? — to actually abort the election and bring about some kind of do-over? Will the country survive its own feckless inability to hold a credible vote? Stand by with me on all that.

Read more …

Let the dice roll where they may. Still, Dec 14 doesn’t sound like “plenty of time”.

Sidney Powell: Plenty of Time for Trump to Overturn Election Results (NM)

Attorney Sidney Powell says there’s plenty of time for President Donald Trump’s legal team to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. ‘With the fraud case, the Dec. 8 deadline doesn’t apply,” Powell said Friday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s ”Stinchfield” in reference to the ”safe harbor” deadline that frees a state from further challenge if it resolves all disputes and certifies its voting results. ”We have at least until Dec. 14,” she said. ”We might file more suits. The court in Michigan or Wisconsin today just gave us a great order recognizing that. These are not pure election contests we are filing. These are massive fraud suits that can set aside the results of the election due to this fraud at any time. The states should not be certifying election results in the face of it.”


Powell, a former member of Trump’s legal team, has been a part of multiple lawsuits in a crusade to overturn results from the 2020 election. Several states have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the election. Newsmax has yet to project a winner as Trump continues to contest the results in court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday said it wouldn’t accept a lawsuit by Trump’s legal team, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling that the case must first wind its way through the lower courts. The president asked the court to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots in the state’s two biggest Democrat counties, alleging irregularities in the way absentee ballots were administered.

Read more …

It doesn’t shut up Flynn anymore.

Judge Emmet Sullivan Still Refusing To Dismiss Michael Flynn Case (JTN)

In a Freedom of Information case related to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, District Judge Reggie Walton said on Friday that Judge Emmet Sullivan doesn’t have a lot of options in dealing with the fact that President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, “unless he takes the position that the wording of the pardon is too broad, in that it provides protections beyond the date of the pardon.” “I don’t know what impact that would have, what decision he would make, if he makes that determination that the pardon of Mr. Flynn is for a period that the law does not permit,” said Walton, according to the National Law Journal. “I don’t know if that’s correct or not,” the judge continued. “Theoretically, the decision could be reached because the wording in the pardon seems to be very, very broad. It could be construed, I think, as extending protections against criminal prosecutions after the date the pardon was issued. I don’t know if Judge Sullivan will make that determination or not,” Walton added.


[..] Emmet Sullivan, who was presiding over the case, refused to dismiss the charges even though there was no one attempting to prosecute the case. The legal process has dragged on through the appeals process, and finally President Trump issued a full pardon on November 25. On November 30, the DOJ notified Sullivan of the pardon, but he has still refused to drop the case. Judge Walton appears to have hinted at what Sullivan is thinking as he refuses to dismiss the case. Solomon Wisenberg, former deputy independent counsel, told Just the News that “It is disappointing but not surprising that Sullivan has yet to dismiss the case.”

Read more …

Shouldn’t all these machines be audited? And then be retired?

AZ Senate, House Call For Audit Of Dominion Machines In Maricopa County (JTN)

Leaders in the Arizona state legislature on Friday called for an audit of Dominion Voting Systems software and equipment in Maricopa County, a request of which county leaders appear “supportive.” The Arizona Senate Republican Caucus announced it intent to seek such an audit via Twitter on Friday afternoon. “As a longtime advocate for improving and modernizing our election system,” incoming Senate Government Chairperson Michelle Ugenti-Rita said in the news release, “I am pleased to learn that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors is supportive of conducting an independent audit of their voting software and equipment.” House Majority Leader Warren Petersen said: “A significant number of voters believe that fraud occurred. And with the number of irregularities it is easy to see why.” Petersen also called it “imperative” that officials conduct a forensic audit on Dominion’s setup in the county. Democrat Joe Biden currently has a lead of about 0.3% in Arizona in the Nov. 3 presidential balloting.

Read more …

“Tesla owners reported 250 problems per 100 vehicles..”

Dutch Taxi Company Is Taking Tesla To Court Over “Defective” Cars (Sifted)

The Netherlands was one of Europe’s most prolific buyers of Teslas but now the Dutch honeymoon seems to be over, with Tesla facing a lawsuit from a large taxi company, and a group of disgruntled car owners considering a class action suit. Bios Group, a taxi firm that operates a fleet of more than 70 Teslas out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport is taking Elon Musk’s company to court over €1.3m in damages, citing a high number of defects in the vehicles and difficulties in getting them repaired. There are defects with some 20 of the 70 taxis, ranging from broken power steering to broken drive shafts and broken power steering, according to the Hella Hueck’s story in Dutch financial newspaper Financieele Dagblad.

Bios had to have 75 defects repaired in 2018 and another 60 in 2019. Even more problematically Bios says there have been problems with odometer readings in the cars being inaccurate, registering journeys from the wrong location or for the wrong distance, something which could land the taxi company in legal difficulties. Though the European car industry may feel like it has been outcompeted by Tesla in electric vehicles — Tesla has a bigger share of the electric vehicle market than all the European carmakers combined — these types of service quality problems may yet give the incumbent automakers an opportunity to win back customers. Bios says it has recently bought 5 Audi E-trons, in part because it expects better after-sales service from Audi.

There have been many recent reports about problems with Tesla vehicles. In June, JD Power, a consumer intelligence company whose car reliability report is considered the industry standard found that Tesla owners reported more problems in their first 90 days of ownership than the other 31 US auto brands included in the study. Tesla owners reported 250 problems per 100 vehicles, compared with an industry average of 166 problems per 100 vehicles. Bios bought the fleet of 72 Model S Teslas in 2014 for €5.7m, one of Europe’s biggest fleets at the time, creating a splash of publicity for the young car company as the fleet paraded around the streets surrounding Schiphol, proclaiming the airport’s commitment to going 100% electric.

But in the last few years, Bios says, it has grown steadily more difficult to get the faulty cars repaired, finally leaving them with no option but to launch a court case to get a resolution. In October, meanwhile, a group of disgruntled Dutch Tesla owners have started the Tesla Claims Foundation, bringing together owners who want Tesla to do more to repair faults in their cars. Some 200 people have so far joined the foundation, with complaints ranging from relatively simple things like rattling noises and poorly working windscreen wipers to broken computers and charging problems.

Read more …

Stoen in the conservative press.

Oliver Stone, America Firster (AC)

Ah, a left-wing America Firster! Not quite, as his subsequent work and his entertaining new memoir, Chasing the Light, illumine, but Oliver Stone, our most political major filmmaker, evinces a rowdily heterodox vision shaped by the unusual quartet of Jim Morrison, Sam Peckinpah, Frank Capra, and Jean-Luc Godard. What do you call a man who joins the Merchant Marine on a whim, runs up big pro football gambling debts, and takes the Old Right view of FDR’s foreknowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? I’d call him an American. Stone was a rich kid, the son of an FDR-hating Jewish Republican who had served on Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force staff and a French Catholic party girl. He attended the Hill School, played on the tennis team, was devastated by his parents’ divorce, and then went seriously off script.


Avid for experiences, Stone dropped out of Yale, taught in a Catholic school in Taiwan, and volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He came home with a Bronze Star, shrapnel in his ass, and a taste for “powerful Vietnamese weed.” Stone’s politics hadn’t changed all that much, though. He had supported Barry Goldwater in 1964 and would vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. In later years he became more explicitly libertarian, expressing support for Ron Paul and making a film about Edward Snowden. At root, Oliver Stone is a patriot who despises the American Empire for corrupting his country. JFK, his fantasia on the Deep State, echoes Dwight Eisenhower’s warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by “the military-industrial complex.” Platoon and Salvador bespeak an old-fangled American anti-interventionism in an age when that tendency, once the default position of ordinary Americans, is a virtual thoughtcrime.

Read more …

 

 

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Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Sep 252020
 


Louis Anquetin Avenue de Clichy 1887

 

Durham, Barr, Jensen and DOJ Production to Sidney Powell (CT)
FBI Analysts Bought Insurance Fearing They’d Be Sued For Flynn Case (JTN)
Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Said Russia Favored Hillary (RCI)
FBI Investigated Steele Dossier Source As A Possible Russian Spy In 2010 (DC)
McCabe At Center Of Durham’s Probe, Source A Suspected Russian Agent (SAC)
House Dems Prep Bill To Limit Supreme Court Justice Terms To 18 Years (F.)
Hunger In America, Especially For Children, Has “Skyrocketed” (Int.)
UK, France Break Daily COVID Case Record As Europe Braces For 2nd Wave (F.)
Territorial Reach—The 1961 Amendment That Imperils Assange (Lauria)
Assange a ‘Resilient Man’ Not at Risk of Suicide If Extradited – “Expert” (Sp.)
Assange Hearing Day 17 (Craig Murray)
This Is Lake Trump And It Is In Kosovo (GE)

 

 

40 days before the election, US Attorney Jeff Jensen handed over a pile of documents to Michael Flynn attorney Sidney Powell yesterday. They are damning for a lot of people at the FBI, CIA and Obama White House. And this can no longer be labeled a politcal move. Powell published the documents right away, something Jensen and Bill Barr couldn’t have done at this point in time. The docs also show that FBI agents even took out insurance in case they would be sued. It may come in handy. Powell will no longer settle for a full exoneration of Flynn, she will go after the people who set him up, and that includes Obama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Rogan interviews Edward Snowden. Long but recommended.

 

 

Taibbi Putin

 

 

An option I wrote down months ago, but I don’t think I ever finished my piece on Sidney Powell: that Bill Barr knew any of his moves would be labeled “(party) political”, but if he handed over files to Sidney Powell, that would not be possible. Or, rather, he even had Jeff Jensen hand them over.

Durham, Barr, Jensen and DOJ Production to Sidney Powell (CT)

The document production by USAO Jeff Jensen to Michael Flynn attorney, Sidney Powell, provides an opportunity for me to share a detached research opinion from my ongoing time outside the wire in the center of the swamp. No matter what open source information is collected; and no matter what evidence congress can assemble; the toxic political environment in DC is the primary driver of DOJ investigative events. It shouldn’t be, but the reality of action reflects an uncomfortable truth. Here’s my opinion on what is happening.

Attorney General Bill Barr is trying to split the baby against two competing narratives. On one hand there is enough evidence to indict former officials for gross abuses of power, falsifying information to a FISA court (violating fourth amendment protections); manipulating investigative effort for political purposes; weaponizing the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. to target political opposition, and then using their positions to cover-up their corrupt and unlawful conduct. On the other hand there is a current highly toxic political environment; consisting of elected politicians and a fully vested branch of government; attempting to cloud the reality that corrupt former government officials worked hand-in-glove with deceitful media, which includes agents of Lawfare, who collaborated in the effort.

This leads to current DC officials and people within those remaining institutions saying: there are delicate balances. In my opinion, in an effort to thread this needle -and considering the timing of the 2020 election- Bill Barr is using the document production from Missouri USAO Jeff Jensen as a backdoor method to provide the information he will not/cannot put forth in a press conference, report or series of indictments. This is why Jensen is providing new information to Michael Flynn s defense attorney Sidney Powell. The U.S. Attorney General knows Powell will make this information public; therefore Powell becomes a conduit to receive significant amounts of evidence previously hidden by the Special Counsel (Weissmann/Mueller) cover-up operation; the “insurance policy” of sorts.


Barr is essentially funneling information through Powell in lieu of a report which would include much of the same evidence. This is just how all indications align. Occam’s razor. Much of the released information has no direct bearing on Flynn *IF* there was going to be an alternate use of the evidence. Bill Barr is splitting the baby.

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“The new AG might have some questions….then yada yada yada…we all get screwed..”

FBI Analysts Bought Insurance Fearing They’d Be Sued For Misconduct in Flynn Case

FBI analysts working on the Michael Flynn Russia investigation originally planned to end the inquiry in fall 2016 and eventually bought liability insurance fearing they could be sued after their bosses continued to keep the investigation open based on “conspiracy theories,” explosive new text messages showed Thursday. “We all went and purchased professional liability insurance,” one analyst texted on Jan. 10, 2017, just 10 days before Trump took office. “Holy crap,” a colleague responded. “All the analysts too?” “Yep,” the first analyst said. “All the folks at the Agency as well.” “Can I ask who are the most likely litigators?” a colleague responded. “As far as potentially suing y’all.”

“Haha, who knows….I think the concern when we got it was that there was a big leak at DOJ and the NYT among others was going to do a piece,” the original analyst texted back. The explosive messages were attached to a new filing by Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell, who argued to the court that is considering dismissing her client’s guilty plea that the emails show “stunning government misconduct” and “wrongful prosecution.” A hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday. “There was no case against General Flynn,” Powell wrote in the new motion. “There was no crime. The FBI and the prosecutors knew that. This American hero and his entire family have suffered for four years from public abuse, slander, libel, and all means of defamation at the hands of the very government he pledged his life to defend.”


The new FBI evidence was turned over late Wednesday and included a stunning revelation that FBI agents originally planned to close Flynn’s probe, known as Crossfire Razor, on Nov. 8, 2016, nearly a year before he was charged with lying to the FBI. “He said shut down Razor” and “so glad they’re closing Razor,” an FBI official texted that day. “However [redacted] was silent though, so who knows what he will want.” By January, the FBI analysts were alarmed that their agency was engaged in misconduct that could be discovered by President Trump’s new attorney general. “The new AG might have some questions….then yada yada yada…we all get screwed,” one official wrote.

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But how do you prosecute him? Also a job for Sidney Powell?

Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Said Russia Favored Hillary (RCI)

Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document. The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump. The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.


[..] The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.” The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

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So you have the CIA involved -Brennan- and cooperating with the FBI. They had Danchenko in their sights as early as 2005. Did they introduce him to Steele?

FBI Investigated Steele Dossier Source As A Possible Russian Spy In 2010 (DC)

The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on the primary source for dossier author Christopher Steele, and considered obtaining a warrant to wiretap him in 2010, according to a document released Thursday. The FBI was also aware of the information about the source, identified elsewhere as Igor Danchenko, by December 2016, according to the document. “This is the most stunning and damning revelation the committee has uncovered,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said in a statement after releasing an FBI memo about the dossier source. The document shows that the FBI considered a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant of Danchenko years before the bureau relied heavily on information that he had provided Steele, a former British spy, to obtain FISAs against Carter Page.

Danchenko is not named in the memo, though is attorney has confirmed to reporters that the Russian national was Steele’s source. The information also could increase concerns that Russian disinformation was fed to Steele, a former MI6 officer who investigated the Trump campaign on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC. A Justice Department inspector general’s report released Dec. 9 said that the FBI received evidence in January and February 2017 that Russian intelligence officers may have fed false information into Steele’s network of sources. Footnotes from the IG report say that two Russian intelligence officers knew in July 2016 that Steele was investigating the Trump campaign.


According to the FBI document, Danchenko had contact with suspected Russian intelligence officers in Washington, D.C. in 2005 and 2006. The document says that the FBI had an investigation into Danchenko open from May 2009 to March 2011, based on an interaction he allegedly had with three employees of an American think tank. Danchenko worked at the time as a Russia analyst for the Brookings Institution, a prominent liberal foreign policy think tank. An employee of the think tank said that another employee, seemingly Danchenko, told others that if they got jobs in the government and obtained classified security clearances, they might be put them in touch with people so they could “make a little extra money.” “The coworker did express suspicion of the employee and had questioned the possibility that the employee might actually be a Russian spy,” the FBI memo says.

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“…were contacted last week by the DOJ and were warned that a “shit storm was heading their way.”..”

McCabe At Center Of Durham’s Probe, Source A Suspected Russian Agent (SAC)

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham hinted more than a week ago that more bombshell information regarding the FBI’s handling of its probe into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia was about to be public. He was right because it was Graham’s committee that discovered the information. A letter released Thursday night by Graham’s committee from Justice Department Attorney General William Barr revealed a declassified summary from the bureau indicating that former British spy Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source in his debunked dossier was believed to be a Russian spy. Not only was the sub source believed to be a spy but the FBI knew about it and had conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the individual.

“In light of this newly declassified information, I will be sending the FISA Court the information provided to inform them how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information regarding the Carter Page warrant application was in 2016 and 2017,” said Graham. “A small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court. I do not believe they represent the overwhelming majority of patriotic men and women who work at the Department of Justice and FBI.” One of those individuals being investigated by Connecticut Prosecutor John Durham is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for lying to the Inspector General on multiple occasions.

He is now in Durham’s crosshairs, along with multiple other former senior FBI officials that were involved in the investigation, according to a source with direct knowledge. McCabe, along with other FBI officials, withheld that information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as some of the FBI special agents investigating Trump’s campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, according to the source. “McCabe and others were suppressing information, misrepresenting it or lying about the information that they had in order to purposefully undermine the Trump candidacy and that turned into the predication for undermining the Trump presidency,” said a source with direct knowledge of the situation.


The source, who is familiar with the ongoings of the senior brass at the FBI, told this reporter the FBI Director Christopher Wray, along with Deputy Director David Bowdich, were contacted last week by the DOJ and were warned that a “shit storm was heading their way.” The source alleged that McCabe is now a central figure in Durham’s investigation, along with several other senior FBI officials who were aware of the information but failed to disclose it.

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Everyone’s first reaction: They should limit their own terms.

House Dems Prep Bill To Limit Supreme Court Justice Terms To 18 Years (F.)

Democrats in the House of Representatives will reportedly introduce a bill next week to limit the tenure of U.S. Supreme Court justices to 18 years as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death puts a spotlight on the partisan fight over vacancies. Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.), Joe Kennedy III (D-Ma.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.) said they plan to introduce the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act on Tuesday, Khanna told Reuters. “It would save the country a lot of agony and help lower the temperature over fights for the court that go to the fault lines of cultural issues and is one of the primary things tearing at our social fabric,” said Khanna. The bill would limit each president to nominating two justices per four-year term, per Reuters which said it obtained a copy.

It would be the first legislation to set Supreme Court term limits by statute, according to Gabe Roth, the executive director of the judicial advocacy group Fix the Court, who notes Ginsburg’s death has brought more attention to the idea of term limits for the justices, who currently have lifetime appointments, with legal scholars and politicians from both sides of the aisle weighing in with potential proposals. [..] A 77% majority of Americans favor restrictions on the tenure of Supreme Court justices while 23% are against it, according to a recent PBS survey commissioned by Fix the Court.


The survey found that 70% of Republicans, 72% of Democrats and 68% of Independents found the statement, “No one with a position as powerful as Supreme Court justice should serve for life,” either “somewhat” or “very” persuasive. It also found that 70% of Republicans, 73% of Democrats and 68% of Independents were somewhat or very persuaded by the argument that, “Vacancies on the Supreme Court often occur unexpectedly and sporadically; term limits will make it so that vacancies are routine, which will reduce the political gamesmanship around them.”

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But bankers and “investors” are fine.

Hunger In America, Especially For Children, Has “Skyrocketed” (Int.)

The level of hunger in U.S. households almost tripled between 2019 and August of this year, according to an analysis of new data from the Census Bureau and the Department of Agriculture. Even more alarming, the proportion of American children who sometimes do not have enough to eat is now as much as 14 times higher than it was last year. The Agriculture Department conducts yearly studies on food insecurity in the U.S., with its report on 2019 released this month. The Census Bureau began frequent household surveys in April in response to Covid-19 that include questions about hunger.

The analysis, by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that 3.7 percent of U.S. households reported they sometimes or often had “not enough to eat” during 2019. Meanwhile, the most recent Census data from the end of August of this year showed that 10 percent of households said they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat within the past seven days. Levels of food insecurity in Black and Latino households are significantly higher, at 19 percent and 17 percent, respectively, compared to 7 percent in white households. Even worse, while about 1 percent of adults with children said their children sometimes or often went hungry in 2019, between 9 and 14 percent of such adults said the same about their kids in August 2020.


CBPP estimates that this adds up to about 5 million school-aged children in such households. “What I see every day from the pandemic is amazingly-increased numbers of severely underweight children coming to our clinic, and parents really panicked about how they’re going to find enough food,” says Dr. Megan Sandel, an associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine. [..] The increase in hunger among children is particularly disturbing, for several reasons. Generally, explains Dottie Rosenbaum, another CBPP expert, “parents shield their children.” Sandel says that “parents are reporting to me sometimes at mealtime going back into the kitchen so the kids don’t notice that they are not eating themselves.” So when children are going hungry, there is little food for anyone.

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Greece is preparing military and private hospitals for a patient influx. But tourists from countries like France and Holland, which have huge increases in cases, are still welcome.

UK, France Break Daily COVID Case Record As Europe Braces For 2nd Wave (F.)

Both the United Kingdom and France counted record-breaking new daily coronavirus infections Thursday, and while officials partly credit an increased testing capacity, the numbers point toward a possible second coronavirus wave sweeping across Europe. The U.K. reported a record of 6,634 new coronavirus cases Thursday, the highest number recorded by the country, even before its nationwide lockdown. However, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Sky News the situation is not as dire as during the peak of the pandemic, when the government estimates that as many as 100,000 people were being infected with the virus per day, though lower testing rates at the time mean the daily infection figures from that period don’t reflect the virus’ true spread.

“Now we estimate that it’s under 10,000 people a day getting the disease,” Hancock said. “That’s too high, but it’s still much lower than in the peak.” Just across the English Channel, France also counted a record-breaking 16,096 new daily cases Thursday, the fourth time the record has been broken in just the past week or so. The news comes just after new coronavirus crackdowns were placed on cities like Paris, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Lyon to help damper a resurgence of new cases after the nationwide lockdown was scaled back. Like in the U.K., French officials say improved testing has meant more infections are being detected and recorded, though the country has seen a worrying trend of increased hospitalizations—the number of coronavirus patients in Paris’ hospitals has doubled over the past few weeks and will likely increase nearly twofold again before October, a Parisian hospital system official told Agence France-Presse.

“Although these numbers reflect more comprehensive testing, it also shows alarming rates of transmission across the region,“ the European director of the World Health Organization Hans Kluge said last week according to the BBC, when daily new cases began to rival the pandemic’s peak in spring. Kluge added that those numbers “should serve as a wake-up call for all of us.” European countries, some of the hardest hit early on in the coronavirus pandemic, were hailed as a model for the rest of the world after their governments enacted strict, nationwide lockdowns that drastically decreased the number of new coronavirus cases. However, many of those successful countries have reported a resurgence of cases in recent months after emerging from lockdown and gradually returning to a more normal life.


Countries like Spain, France, the U.K., The Czech Republic, Hungary, Austria, France and the Netherlands have all counted jumps in cases. The surges of new infections—though not considered as serious as the situation in spring, the peak of the pandemic in Europe—has led to new, often localized crackdowns in a bid to keep new cases at bay. The spikes across the continent have been blamed on young people shunning social distancing guidelines and attending parties after long months of isolation and people going on holiday despite travel warnings. While the European resurgence of the virus is concerning, it is still nowhere near the devastation seen in countries like the United States, which counted its 200,000th coronavirus death this week.

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Should have been banned right there and then.

Territorial Reach—The 1961 Amendment That Imperils Assange (Lauria)

If the original 1917 Espionage Act were still in force, the U.S. government could not have charged WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange under it. The 1917 language of the Act restricted the territory where it could be applied to the United States, its possessions and international waters: “The provisions of this title shall extend to all Territories, possessions, and places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States whether or not continguous thereto, and offenses under this title when committed upon the high seas or elsewhere within the admiralty and maritime jurisdiction of the United States …” WikiLeaks publishing operations have never occurred in any of these places. But in 1961 Congressman Richard Poff, after several tries, was able to get the Senate t0 repeal Section 791 that restricted the Act to “within the jurisdiction of the United States, on the high seas, and within the United States.”

Poff was motivated by the case of Irvin Chambers Scarbeck, a State Department official who was convicted under a different statute, the controversial 1950 Subversive Activities Control Act, or McCarran Act, of passing classified information to the Polish government during the Cold War. (Congress overrode a veto by President Harry Truman of the McCarran Act. He called the Act “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798,” a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism.” Most of its provisions have been repealed.) Polish security agents had burst into a bedroom in 1959 to photograph Scarbeck in bed with a woman who was not his wife. Showing him the photos, the Polish agents blackmailed Scarbeck: turn over classified documents from the U.S. embassy or the photos would be published and his life ruined. Adultery was seen differently in that era.


Scarbeck then removed the documents from the embassy, which is U.S. territory covered by Espionage Act, and turned them over to the agents on Polish territory, which at the time was not. Scarbeck was found out, fired, and convicted, but he could not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act because of its then territorial limitations. That set Congressman Poff off on a one-man campaign to extend the reach of the Espionage Act to the entire globe. After three votes the amendment was passed. The Espionage Act thus became global, ensnaring anyone anywhere in the world into the web of U.S. jurisdiction. After the precedent being set by the Assange prosecution, it means that any journalist, anywhere in the world, who publishes national defense information is not safe from an Espionage Act prosecution.

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He had not even evaluated Julian.

Assange a ‘Resilient Man’ Not at Risk of Suicide If Extradited – “Expert” (Sp.)

A psychiatrist testifying for the government says that whilst the WikiLeaks publisher is suffering from mild clinical depression he does not think he is a suicide risk if he is extradited to the United States to face espionage charges. A psychiatrist testifying for the US government in the extradition case of Julian Assange told the Old Bailey on 24 September 2020 that in his assessment the WikiLeaks publisher “would be able to resist any suicidal impulse” were he to be sent to the United States. During the examination-in-chief conducted by James Lewis QC, for the prosecution, Dr Nigel Blackwood, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist with the NHS, explained that he saw Mr Assange in April 2020, in Belmarsh maximum-security prison. The doctor thought Mr Assange was “moderately depressed”, in the clinical sense, though a review of his most recent medical records from Belmarsh leads him to believe that there is some improvement of his state of mind.

Dr Blackwood did not think Mr Assange suffered from a “severe depressive disorder with psychotic symptoms” in November 2019, though he had not himself evaluated Mr Assange at that time and relied in his assessment on other observations made by the prison staff. The doctor, who consults with inmates at Wandsworth prison, notes some risk of suicide but that risk has been very carefully managed in Belmarsh, and the publisher engages closely with treatments to manage that risk. He believes Mr Assange retains the capacity to resist suicide, the court heard. Dr Blackwood says that he disputes that Mr Assange “was at the very severest end of the spectrum” and complains that Professor Michael Kopelman, a defence expert, “did not recognise” that if the treating physician at Belmarsh would have been bound to refer Mr Assange to a secure unit and that that did not occur.


Defence experts told the court earlier in the week that that they believed the risk that Mr Assange may commit suicide if extradited is “high” or even “very high”. Dr Blackwood explained that a person’s description of their own mood and mental state “will definitely be coloured” by their personality and own perspective. He thinks Mr Assange may have had a self-dramatising or hyperbolic approach to describing the symptoms and insisted that one must look very clearly at the psychological records Dr Blackwood also told the court that he has “anxieties” about making an autism diagnosis in a 49-year-old man where there has been no such diagnosis historically, despite Mr Assange’s contact with the medical community earlier in his life.

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“..three psychiatrists and a physician with extensive experience of treating trauma have all testified in court that Assange’s mental and physical condition deteriorated while he was in “healthcare” for several months. ..”

Assange Hearing Day 17 (Craig Murray)

During the hearing of medical evidence the last three days, the British government has been caught twice directly telling important lies about events in Belmarsh prison, each lie proven by documentary evidence. The common factor has been the medical records kept by Dr Daly, head of the jail’s medical services. There has also been, to put it at its very lightest, one apparent misrepresentation by Dr Daly. [..] This is Mr Kemp’s description of the medical wing at Belmarsh: “Security is on another level here with six times more staff per inmate than the rest of the jail.” While in the medical wing or “healthcare”, Julian Assange was in effect in solitary confinement, and three psychiatrists and a physician with extensive experience of treating trauma have all testified in court that Assange’s mental and physical condition deteriorated while he was in “healthcare” for several months.

They also said he improved after he left “healthcare”. That says something profound about the “healthcare” being provided. The same doctors testified that Assange has a poor relationship with Dr Daly and will not confide his symptoms or feelings to her, and this has also been asserted by defence council. That is all essential background to the lies. Now let me come to the lies. Unfortunately to do so I must reveal details of Julian’s medical condition which I had withheld, but I think the situation is so serious I must now do that. I did not report that Professor Michael Kopelman gave evidence that, among other preparations for suicide, Julian Assange had hidden a razor blade in his folded underwear, but this had been discovered in a search of his cell.

As I did report, Kopelman was subjected to an extremely aggressive cross-examination by James Lewis, which in the morning had focused on the notion that Julian Assange’s mental illness was simply malingering, and that Kopelman had failed to detect this. The razor blade was a key factor in Lewis’s browbeating of Kopelman, and he attacked him on it again and again and again. [..] In an attempt to humiliate Kopelman, Lewis said “You say you do not rely on the razor blade for your diagnosis. But you do rely on it. Let us then look at your report. You rely on the razor blade at paragraph 8. You mention it again at paragraph 11a. Then 11c. Then paragraph 14, paragraph 16, 17b, 18a. Then we come to the next section and the razor blade is there at paragraph 27 and 28. Then again in the summary it is at paragraphs 36 and again at paragraph 38. So tell me Professor, how can you say that you do not rely on the razor blade?” [I do not give the actual paragraph numbers; these are illustrative].


Lewis then went on to invite Kopelman to change his diagnosis. He asked him more than once if his diagnosis would be different if there was no razor blade and it were an invention by Assange. Kopelman was plainly unnerved by this attack. He agreed it was “very odd indeed” it was not mentioned in the medical notes if it were true. The plain attack that he had naively believed an obvious lie disconcerted Kopelman. Except it was Lewis who was not telling the truth. There really was a concealed razor blade, and what Assange had told Kopelman, and what Kopelman had believed, was true in every single detail. In a scene straight out of a TV legal drama, during Kopelman’s testimony, the defence had managed to obtain the charge sheet from Belmarsh Prison – Assange had been charged with the offence of the razor blade. The charge sheet is dated 09.00 on 7 May 2019

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Ha ha! In gold letters please!

This Is Lake Trump And It Is In Kosovo (GE)

It all started as an idea to relax negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia delegations, but the idea to name the Gazivoda/Ujman Lake “Lake Trump” as seen in the photo seems more serious than initially thought. An idea that started as a joke for the Ujman Lake, which Serbs refer to as Gazivoda, to find a compromise name seems to be taking shape. During the negotiations at the White House, the US Presidential envoy for the dialogue, Richard Grenell, gave the idea to name the lake after Trump. Initially everybody laughed with the idea. But not today. Gazeta Express has learned that Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti expressed his readiness to support Grenell’s idea at a meeting with him.


The same idea was endorsed also by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic at another meeting. The debate, and later the Agreement, about Ujman Lake have triggered a wave of reactions in Kosovo. Kosovo has reached an agreement with the US for the State Department to carry out a feasibility study on how to share the lake’s resources. The Ujman/Gazivoda Lake is mostly located in Kosovo’s territory but almost 20 percent of it is part of Serbia’s territory. This artificial lake was accumulated decades ago by the “Iber Lepenci” company, back when Kosovo was part of Yugoslavia. After the end of the war in 1999, there was a lot of tension caused about the lake as Kosovo considers it as its own property, while Serbia claims its ownership since part of it is in Serbia.

Read more …

 

 

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Aug 232020
 


Paul Cézanne Les (Grandes) Baigneuses 1905

 

Send in the Clowns for the Circus Is in Town (Curtin)
Biden Says Trump Seeks To ‘Defund The Police’ (Fox)
House Passes $25 Billion Post Office Bailout As Trump Rages On Twitter (ZH)
My Discussion With John Durham’s Lead Investigator, William Aldenberg (CT)
John Brennan Was Put in a Completely Legitimate Perjury Trap (RS)
550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016 (NPR)
US Spies’ Obsession With RT Comes Full Circle In Senate Report (RT)
Navalny Was Not Poisoned (MoA)
US Sanctions Devastate Syria’s People And Post-War Reconstruction (Maté)
The Real Huge Jobs Numbers Will Make Your Blood Run Cold (Snider)
Governments Are Faking It, and Copying Each Other (AIER)

 

 

Global new cases and deaths remain stubbornly high. US new cases are trending down, wonderful, now bring down deaths numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee Smith
https://twitter.com/i/status/1297350692357668865

 

 

The Society of the Spectacle.

Send in the Clowns for the Circus Is in Town (Curtin)

Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People. Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses. Sadly, many people think this circus is the real world and that the clowns are not allied pimps serving the interests of their masters, but are real enemies.

The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella. They produce and direct the daily circus that is the American Spectacle, the movie that is meant to entertain and distract the audience from the side show that continues outside the big top, the place where millions of vulnerable people are abused and killed. And although the sideshow is the real main event, few pay attention since their eyes are fixed on the center ring were the spotlight directs their focus. The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle.

For many months now, all eyes have been directed to the Covid-19 propaganda show with Fauci and Gates, and their mainstream corporate media mouthpieces, striking thunderbolts in the storm to scare the unknowing audience into submission so the transformation of the Great Global Reset, led by the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund, can proceed smoothly. Now hearts are aflutter with excitement to see the war-loving Joe Biden boldly coming forth like Lazarus from the grave to announce his choice of a masked vice-presidential running mate who will echo his pronouncements. And the star of the big top, the softly coiffured reality television emcee Trump, around whom the spectacle swirls, elicits outraged responses as he plays the part of the comical bad guy. Punch and Judy indeed.

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Defending the mass incarceration policies? You sure?

Biden Says Trump Seeks To ‘Defund The Police’ (Fox)

President Trump is the one who wants to “defund the police,” Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden asserted during an interview Friday. “I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance,” Biden told ABC News for a wide-ranging interview airing Sunday that also includes Biden’s running mate, U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Biden accused the president of proposing cuts to programs that support local police, in sharp contrast to the Republican incumbent’s campaign-trail rhetoric. Harris also stressed that voters should watch the president’s actions rather than listen to his words. “There is so much about what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth that is designed to distract the American people from what he is doing,” Harris told ABC.

Instead of slashing funding, police departments should focus on forcing out officers who abuse their authority, the former vice president said. “There are unethical senators, there are unethical presidents, there are unethical doctors, unethical lawyers, unethical prosecutors, there are unethical cops. They should be rooted out,” Biden told interviewer Robin Roberts. Racial injustice protesters across the country have been calling for the defunding of police departments in the wake of George Floyd’s May 25 death in police custody in Minneapolis and other cases of alleged police brutality. Biden told Roberts that if elected president he would call for national standards for police departments and would make police misconduct records more easily accessible for public scrutiny.

He said Trump plans to cut “half a billion dollars of local police support,” referring to proposed cuts to a federal program aimed at hiring more local officers. Biden said he would call for more resources and social service support for police. “We have to make it clear that this is about protecting neighborhoods, protecting people, everybody across the board,” he said. “The only guy that actually put in a bill to actually defund the police is Donald Trump,” Biden added, after defending the 1994 crime bill he backed while a U.S. senator from Delaware.

That legislation, signed into law by former President Bill Clinton, called for community-based policing efforts – but has been criticized for leading to mass incarceration of African Americans and other minorities. “Everybody forgets a third of that bill that I wrote was to put more cops in the street, not in their automobiles, but getting out and knowing the community – knowing who owns the local grocery store, knowing everybody in the community, and crime will drop,” he said.

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If it really needs $25 billion (or more), the problem doesn’t seem to be where critics currently locate it.

House Passes $25 Billion Post Office Bailout As Trump Rages On Twitter (ZH)

Despite the fact that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has delayed his most controversial cost-saving measures until after the November vote, and endured a shellacking at the hands of Senate Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee, House Speaker and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi forged ahead with the help of 26 defecting Republicans to pass a bill calling for $25 billion in financial assistance for the Post Office. As more states announced plans to hold their elections largely by mail in November (a system that some used for the primaries) the Postal Service announced earlier this month that too much voting by mail could delay the arrival of some votes. Pelosi called a special session of the House during recess and on a Saturday to lend this piece of political theater even more impact.

The vote is the culmination of a Democratic crusade about late mail – literally, a few people complained about their mail being late, a few others posted some context-free photos of mail sorting machines being destroyed, and – boom – Democrats suddenly had an army of twitter trolls shrieking about veterans dying because their medication came a day late. One Connecticut family even complained that USPS had lost the cremated remains of a loved one and veteran (they were found 12 days later thanks to one dedicated worker who supposedly delivered the remains personally). They blamed DeJoy personally for the mistake, and ever since, the state’s AG William Tong has seized every opportunity to draw attention to “out of service” mail sorting machines.

DeJoy is due for round two before the House Oversight Committee on Monday, which should be even more brutal than Friday’s pile-on (at least, for DeJoy’s sake, the Senate is controlled by Republicans). But in the latest transparent bit of political theater organized by “political mastermind” Nancy Pelosi – and surely this is right up there with her wardrobe choices during the unveiling of the Dems’ police reform bill – is the victorious vote on Saturday, which has almost no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate. As we mentioned above, 26 Republicans defected to help Democrats pass the bill 257 votes to 150. In addition to the money, the bill called for reversing certain operational changes imposed under DeJoy. Six states are also suing USPS and DeJoy personally (along with the chairman of the USPS board) claiming these changes infringe on states ability to hold free and fair elections.

[..] Now, get ready for some strongly worded statements from Pelosi when Mitch McConnell inevitably refuses to call it for a vote. The Senate has introduced its own, scaled down, plan to help USPS as part of a proposed COVID relief bill that thanks to Democrats, likely will never become a reality.

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The conservative press has a few very clever and educated people writing on the Russiagate fall-out. They’re going to be needed. This is “sundance” at The Last Refuge.

My Discussion With John Durham’s Lead Investigator, William Aldenberg (CT)

On June 7, 2018, an indictment against Senate Intelligence Committee Security Director James Wolfe was unsealed. Approximately six weeks later, July 21, 2018, the DOJ mysteriously declassified and publicly released the Carter Page FISA application. That’s when I noticed the first two documents were related. The FISA application was the “top secret classified document” described in the Wolfe indictment. Immediately I recognized it wasn’t just any copy of the FISA application that was released by the DOJ; but rather a very specific copy of the FISA application. What the DOJ released was the exact copy used in the leak investigation of James Wolfe. The ramifications of this specific copy being publicly released were immediately noted, although almost everyone seemed to gloss over the issue in favor of discussing the content.

Over the course of the next several months the ramifications became more clear. Despite overwhelming evidence James Wolfe was never charged with leaking the FISA application on March 17, 2017. Quite the contrary, even to this day the official position of the FBI, DOJ and U.S. government is that Wolfe *did not* leak the FISA application. There’s a very big reason for that; as both myself and special agent William Aldenberg discussed. First, in order to fill in another corner of the interview foundation it must be remembered the goal of the DOJ under former AG Jeff Sessions, despite his recusal on all things Trump, was the removal of political influence in the DOJ. That same objective has been repeated ad infinitum by current AG Bill Barr.

This approach is why everyone in/around any issue that skirts on the investigative tissue keeps saying: “a very delicate balance is being navigated”, and “very sensitive approaches” are needed. None of the former -and some remaining embed- officials in the FBI, DOJ, or Special Counsel actors, had any aversion to the use of weaponized politics in their corrupt investigations of President Trump. However, in the current investigation of the former weaponized political investigations the primary avoidance filter is politics. As expressed by almost everyone in and around the issue, any evidence that comes from inside the political silo is considered unusable. This sets up a rather challenging approach… hence the overused “delicate balances” etc. This overlay, the aggressive need not to use political information, is also frustrating.

Some are beginning to question whether it is actually a shield to justify a lack of accountability or institutional preservation. Keep up the pressure, the concerns are valid. The public doesn’t draw distinctions from the origin of evidence. Regardless of whether information comes from HPSCI ranking member Devin Nunes; and/or Senators Grassley, Johnson or Graham (political silo); or from the DOJ itself via John Bash, Jeff Jensen or John Durham; the public is absorbing all it. However, the current AG Barr instructions imply the non use of evidence emanating from the political silo in very direct terms.

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And here is lawyer/prosecutor “Shipwreckedcrew” at Red State.

John Brennan Was Put in a Completely Legitimate Perjury Trap (RS)

Shapiro’s statement claims that Brennan was told by Durham that he is neither a “target” nor “subject,” and that he is only a witness to events under review. Maybe that’s true, but it does not sound true to me. And the statement does not say that comment was made to Brennan yesterday before the interview took place. I can say that I had several occasions during my career as a prosecutor where criminal defense lawyers asked me similar questions about their client in response to an interview request. I can’t say that I always refused to answer, but as a general matter my response was something that I learned when I was starting out from more experienced federal prosecutors —

“Counsel, this interview today is voluntary. Your client is free to leave right now, and answer none of the questions we have. He’s free to stop answering questions at any time while the interview is underway. He’s free to ask to take a break, step outside the room with you, and then return to answer the question or not answer the question. What does he want to do?” John Brennan could have been questioned before a grand jury, without the presence of his attorney in the room. That would be true IF, as suggested by Shapiro’s statement, Brennan was only a “witness”. To explain that, let’s take a moment to address the whole “Target” v. “Subject” v. “Witness” construct the press is so happy to report about.

Labeling an individual a “target” has a clear meaning in federal criminal prosecutions. It refers to someone about whom the prosecutor believes there is already sufficient admissible evidence to seek an indictment from a grand jury, and obtain a conviction at trial. The investigation is ongoing, but the grand jury already has identified a “target” for eventual prosecution. Anyone who is “not a target” is — “not a target”. There is no other “classification” of individuals with meaning. Many people in the business toss around the term “subject”, but that is a “made-up” classification that does not exist. I have received “Subject” letters from prosecutors on behalf of clients, but those all involve a request to interview my client.

A “Target” letter is different. When you receive a “Target” letter it advises you that a federal grand jury has already received evidence upon which criminal charges may be issued in the future. It advises the “Target” that they should seek counsel, and if they cannot afford counsel they should contact the Federal Defender’s Office in their district for legal representation. Once they have secured counsel, their lawyer should contact the prosecutor to discuss the matter. The purpose behind a “subject” letter is merely to instill fear in the recipient and to “encourage” them to talk about others before others talk about them — as information from others might push them closer to the “target” category. Unwitting lawyers think there is meaning behind the “subject” designation but there is not.

Fear is a great motivator. “Doing unto others before they do unto you” is sort of a universal maxim among the idiot criminal class. So if you are not a “target” — meaning there isn’t sufficient evidence at this time to charge you with a crime — then by default you are a “witness.” But “witnesses” can, and often do talk themselves into being “targets” during such interviews. That was the purpose of the interview, Mr. Brennan, not because you have some wonderful insights to provide Mr. Durham and his investigators to make their job easier.

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This is not even about the mail-in votes yet. There better be a very clear winner in November, or else.

550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016 (NPR)

An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year’s presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR. That’s far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time. Election experts said first-time absentee voters are much more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that lead to rejected ballots. Studies also show that voters of color and young voters are more likely than others to have their ballots not count. Most absentee or mail-in ballots are rejected because required signatures are missing or don’t match the one on record, or because the ballot arrives too late.

“If something goes wrong with any of this, that’s a problem writ large, but it’s also going to be one that hits some populations of the United States a bit harder than others, potentially disenfranchises different groups of folks at higher rates,” said Rob Griffin of the Democracy Fund, which is conducting a sweeping survey of the 2020 electorate with researchers at UCLA. Griffin said, so far, about a quarter of those who voted in person in the last election say they plan to vote by mail this November. The same is true for those who have never voted before and will be casting their first ballots in this year’s election. The numbers compiled by NPR are almost certainly an underestimate since not all states have made the information on rejected mail-in ballots available.

Even with limited data, the implications are considerable. NPR found that tens of thousands of ballots have been rejected in key battleground states, where the outcome in November — for the presidency, Congress and other elected positions — could be determined by a relatively small number of votes. For example, President Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by almost 23,000 votes. More than 23,000 absentee ballots were rejected in the state’s presidential primary in April. More than 37,000 primary ballots were also rejected in June in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won by just over 44,000 votes.

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US intelligence and the Wolfowitz/Brzezinski neocon cabal have severely compromised US national security for decades, only to funnel trillions towards US arms manufacturers, who today produce second rate weapons to boot. It is high time to stop this. Security is much better served by dialogue.

US Spies’ Obsession With RT Comes Full Circle In Senate Report (RT)

Reading the final Senate Intelligence Committee report on ‘Russian meddling’ in US elections, it’s obvious they believe RT is the Christmas tree at its center, with WikiLeaks, troll bots, third parties etc. merely the ornaments. The US establishment’s obsession with RT dates all the way back to March 2011, when then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton complained about the US “losing… the information war.” The infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on ‘Russian meddling’ from January 2017 devoted more than a quarter of its total volume to RT – seven out of 25 pages, to be precise. It was so obvious, even reporters with intimate inside knowledge of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) were skeptical.

The ICA was based on the CIA-FBI-NSA-ODNI claim that “RT is the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” Yet the bulk of its ‘evidence’ consisted of 2012 ‘open source’ research that was entirely irrelevant to the 2016 election. That pattern is now repeated in the latest SSCI report, in which RT is referenced more than 100 times. Published on Tuesday, the 966-page behemoth almost seems intended to discourage reading. It’s not difficult to see why: the report basically regurgitates every single assertion made over the past four years of ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy-mongering, with insinuation and innuendo doing a lot of the heavy lifting. For example, the word “likely” appears nearly 140 times throughout the report, while “almost certainly” appears 21 times.

One such assertion is that WikiLeaks and its senior leadership “resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors,” which is backed by circular reasoning: media reports, and then US laws based on them. This is followed by the assertion that RT has “provided both beneficial coverage of WikiLeaks and a formal, compensated media platform for [Julian] Assange.” Assange hosted a 12-episode interview show for RT in 2012, called World Tomorrow. This is the sole basis for the SSCI to assert the existence of an “alliance between RT and WikiLeaks” that is somehow “part of the Russian government’s overall strategy to use its state-controlled media to undermine US democratic institutions.”

Straining to prove the existence of this ‘alliance,’ the SSCI literally resurrects the completely debunked conspiracy theory that during the October 2016 release of the Podesta emails, “RT announced WikiLeaks releases on Twitter prior to WikiLeaks making that announcement itself.” As both WikiLeaks and RT have repeatedly clarified, the content of Podesta6 and Podesta15 releases had been posted on the website, but not yet announced on Twitter. RT journalists were monitoring the website, saw the upload, and reported on it – as journalists are supposed to do. That hasn’t stopped Western media, pundits and politicians from making a crazy conspiracy theory out of it, obviously.

The committee doesn’t stop there, however. They also argue that RT’s “efforts to impugn the US democratic process involve its support for third-party candidates and pushing messaging that ‘the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” You heard it right, reporting on the existence of parties beyond Democrats and Republicans is somehow impugning democracy. Never mind that this quote is actually from the 2012 annex of the ICA, though it is used here to discuss RT’s “support” for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016. That alleged support consisted of hosting a Green Party debate on a RT America show, and inviting Stein to RT’s anniversary receptions in New York and Moscow.

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An unnecessary step too far, if you ask me. It should have said the odds that he was poisoned are very slim. Other than that, yes, Navalny is a dimwitted CIA puppet whom Putin doesn’t mind at all having around.

Navalny Was Not Poisoned (MoA)

On Thursday morning the Russian rightwing and racist rabble rouser Alexey Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk in Siberia to Moscow. He eventually went into a coma. The plane had to be rerouted for an emergency stop in Omsk. Navalny was brought into a clinic and put on a ventilator. Meanwhile his spokeswomen Kira Yarmysh claimed, without evidence, that Navalny had been poisoned: Yarmysh believes Navalny, who showed no symptoms prior to the flight, was “poisoned with something mixed into his tea” as it was “the only thing he drank this morning.” In the middle of the journey, she wrote later, he began sweating, went to the toilet, and apparently lost consciousness for a period. RIA Novosti reported that Navalny did not eat or drink anything on the flight.

The doctors in the intensive care unit in Omsk had difficulties to stabilize Navalny. A number of tests were made but no poisons were found. Yesterday evening the patient had stabilized. On request of his family he was transported to Germany where he is currently undergoing treatment. The hospital in Omsk said that Navalny had experienced severe hypoglycemia: The head physician of the Omsk emergency hospital, Alexander Murakhovsky, said that Alexei Navalny’s condition was caused by a sharp drop in blood sugar. Hypoglycemia is also known as diabetic shock: “When a person experiences diabetic shock, or severe hypoglycemia, they may lose consciousness, have trouble speaking, and experience double vision. Early treatment is essential because blood sugar levels that stay low for too long can lead to seizures or diabetic coma.”

Hypoglycemia can sometimes happen rapidly and may even occur when a person follows their diabetes treatment plan. A diabetic shock happens when someone with diabetes has taken too much insulin or has eaten too little. My father had diabetes and I have seen him experiencing this problem several times. He always carried a piece of sugar with him to use it as soon as he felt the first symptoms. My mother taught me the basic first aid I would have to to apply should my father be unable to help himself. Thankfully I never had to use it. It is important that the measures are taken immediately. A prolonged coma can lead to brain damage. As Navalny was on a plane up in the air it took quite a while to get him into a hospital. His prolonged coma may have created additional damage to his body.

People with diabetes usually learn how to control their blood sugar level. I have found no information that Navalny actually has diabetes but that does not say much as it is not something people usually talk about. I am not aware of any medication or poison that rapidly lowers the blood sugar level and can be applied secretly. It would also be stupid to use such in an attempt to kill someone as the attacked person simply has to eat something to negate the effect. The ‘western’ media jumped onto the ‘Navalny was poisoned’ claim to heap the usual trash on Russia. They also claimed that Navalny is the ‘opposition leader’ in Russia even as he polls at 2% which is lower than the leader of the communist party and several other real opposition politicians. Nor is Navalny a ‘liberal’. He is a rightwing nationalist and racist who sees Cechen and other non-Russian people as cockroaches that should be killed.

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Start talking to Russia and this, too, can be over.

US Sanctions Devastate Syria’s People And Post-War Reconstruction (Maté)

JOSHUA LANDIS: Well, the sanctions are…the stated reason for the sanctions is that they are to…they’re to force the Assad regime to accept UN resolutions, which call for free elections—free and fair elections—to end the sectarian form of government, and to start a political process that the Special Envoy to the United States, James Jeffrey, has said would lead to Assad leaving power. So, in a sense, this is regime change. He has said it’s not about regime change, and the Trump administration people say we don’t insist on regime change; we want a radical change of regime behavior. But we know that’s not going to happen. Assad has won the war, and these sanctions end up, you know, immiserating the Syrian people, is what it…you know, Assad is going to be able to eat three square meals a day, he can fly it in if he has to, he’s not going to be made miserable.

There are a lot of Syrian opposition members that see this as a way to punish Assad. James Jeffrey has, in his downtime, has said this…his job is really about turning Syria into a quagmire for Russian and Iran. So, those are the three different agendas, really, to punish Assad, to try to carry out some kind of regime change, and perhaps ignite this UN sanct…you know, these UN resolutions that are supposed to bring about a political process, and then also turn Syria into a quagmire so it becomes a millstone around the necks of Russia and Iran. And those, you know, those policies are not going…are not really going to be achieved. Russia has made Syria a key factor in its foreign policy. It’s not going to abandon Syria, and Syria doesn’t cost them that much.

There’s not going to be a public uprising against Assad. Many people have said, oh, some Druze were demonstrating this and that, but Assad has put down the opposition and has won a civil…very bloody civil war. He’s not going to be overthrown by some demonstrations today, and he’s not going to be moved by Western sanctions. So, this…the result of these policies is going to be to starve Syrians, increase instability in Syria, send Syrians [as] more refugees…waves of refugees out into the West, and probably to promote terrorism, because their people will be so poor and unhappy. So, it’s not good for American foreign policy, I think, in the long run. It’s not good for Syrians. It’s not good for humanitarian interests.

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This is going to take a very long time to resolve in any possible way. What’s going to happen to these people in the meantime?

The Real Huge Jobs Numbers Will Make Your Blood Run Cold (Snider)

There is simply no way to spin these figures as anything good. Not just the usual ones were talk about here, but more so some new data that you probably haven’t seen before. Beginning with the regular, it doesn’t matter that the level of initial jobless claims has declined substantially over the past few weeks. The fact of the matter is after 22 weeks of dislocation, at least eleven of them under reopening, these continue to rip along at around 1 million per week. One million. We’d never seen so much as 700k before (though the labor market is getting into the top range of 1981-82 adjusting for population, as if that’s some good thing). Forget about the first half of the contraction (which the shutdown caused) and just focus on this second set of weeks since early May.

There’s no way to describe them, more than double anything we’ve ever seen before. Not shutdown but the visible display of economic damage. The rebound isn’t being very bouncy, for one thing, no matter how many gigantic gobs of purported “stimulus” has been thrown at the economy. It ain’t stimulating. The number of jobs still being lost this late into it is unthinkable; historic. I wrote a couple days ago about another key factor which appears to be what the productivity estimates have revealed; the terrifying possibility that though there’s been more job losses than at any time in history there may not yet have been enough of the longer-run variety to balance business perceptions of far lower post-GFC potential.

“Before even getting to July, this divergence between hours and headline payrolls had already suggested that companies may have been holding on to more workers than the decline in output would’ve demanded. In other words, the level of output and actual work performed had declined more than the reduction in headcounts, by a lot more, leaving us to suspect businesses were holding back a sort of reserve of their own workers (who were still on the books but idle nonetheless) having them at-the-ready for when reopening got started.”

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Jeffrey A. Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research gets a lot right, but some things awfully wrong (common flu is a coronavirus?! That hurts!).

In a world with zero preparedness and zero competence, politicians hide behind each other and state they only follow science, because that is an even better shield against criticism.

Governments Are Faking It, and Copying Each Other (AIER)

A mystery for months is how it is that so many governments in so many different places on earth could have adopted the same or very similar preposterous policies, no matter the threat level of the virus, and without firm evidence that interventions had any hope of being effective. In the course of two weeks, traditional freedoms were zapped away in nearly all developed countries. In a seriously bizarre twist, even the silliest policies replicated themselves like a virus in country after country. For example, you can’t try on clothing in a store in Texas or in Melbourne, or in London or in Kalamazoo. What’s with that? We know that the COVID bug is least likely to live on fabrics unless I have symptoms of it, sneeze on my handkerchief and then I stuff it in your mouth.

[..] I invite you to examine a very interesting study published by the National Academy of Sciences: Explaining the homogeneous diffusion of COVID-19 nonpharmaceutical interventions across heterogeneous countries. A clearer title might be: how so many governments behaved so stupidly at once. The theory they posit seems highly realistic to me:

“We analyze the adoption of nonpharmaceutical interventions in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the early phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Given the complexity associated with pandemic decisions, governments are faced with the dilemma of how to act quickly when their core decision-making processes are based on deliberations balancing political considerations. Our findings show that, in times of severe crisis, governments follow the lead of others and base their decisions on what other countries do. Governments in countries with a stronger democratic structure are slower to react in the face of the pandemic but are more sensitive to the influence of other countries. We provide insights for research on international policy diffusion and research on the political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

This seems to fit with what I’ve seen anecdotally. These guys in charge are mostly attorneys with specializations in bamboozling voters. And the “public health authorities” advising them can get credentials in the field without ever having studied much less practiced medicine. So what do they do? They copy other governments, as a way of covering up their ignorance. As the study says: ” While our paper cannot judge what an “optimal” adoption timing would be for any country, it follows, from our findings of what appears to be international mimicry of intervention adoptions, that some countries may have adopted restrictive measures rather sooner than necessary. If that is the case, such countries may have incurred excessively high social and economic costs, and may experience problems sustaining restrictions for as long as is necessary due to lockdown fatigue.”

Which is to say: the closures, lockdowns, and imposed stringency measures were not science. It was monkey see, monkey do. The social psychology experiments on conformity help explain this better than anything else. They see some governments doing things and decide to do them too, as a way of making sure they are avoiding political risk, regardless of the cost. ” Why did so many governments go so nuts at once, disregarding their own laws, traditions, and values by bludgeoning their own people with the excuse of science that has turned out to be almost completely bogus? Some people claim conspiracy but a much simpler answer might be that, in their ignorance and stupor, they copied each other out of fear.”

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Aug 222020
 
 August 22, 2020  Posted by at 10:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  19 Responses »


Steve Schapiro Robert Kennedy US Presidential Campaign 1968

 

Coronavirus Pandemic Could Be Over Within Two Years – WHO (BBC)
Dr. Birx: November In-Person Voting As Easy As Going To Starbucks (JTN)
Where’s Tulsi? (RT)
This Year’s DNC Was 2016’s DNC on Steroids (Savage)
The Truth About The Post Office Controversy (Patel)
Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda (Ray McGovern )
Fighting Russia Has Become An Existential Necessity For NATO – Lavrov (RT)
AG Barr Throws Cold Water On Possible Edward Snowden Pardon (ZH)
What A Nation Cut Off From The Rest Of The World Looks Like (Saxo)
Alan Rusbridger: Assange Case Is Worrying For All Journalists (PG)

 

 

Passing 800,000 deaths globally is a sad milestone again, but US new cases had their best week since the end of June, so that’s a good thing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postmaster

 

 

Not sure every single person will see this as a reassuring message.

Amazing how little the man has to say who pretends to aid the entire world. When PPE corruption is one of your main talking points…

Coronavirus Pandemic Could Be Over Within Two Years – WHO (BBC)

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says he hopes the coronavirus pandemic will be over in under two years. Speaking in Geneva on Friday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Spanish flu of 1918 took two years to overcome. But he added that current advances in technology could enable the world to halt the virus “in a shorter time”. “Of course with more connectiveness, the virus has a better chance of spreading,” he said. “But at the same time, we have also the technology to stop it, and the knowledge to stop it,” he noted, stressing the importance of “national unity, global solidarity”.


The deadly flu of 1918 killed at least 50 million people. The coronavirus has so far killed almost 800,000 people and infected 22.7 million more. Dr Tedros also responded to a question about corruption relating to personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic, which he described as “criminal”. “Any type of corruption is unacceptable,” he answered. “However, corruption related to PPE… for me it’s actually murder. Because if health workers work without PPE, we’re risking their lives. And that also risks the lives of the people they serve.”

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Well she actually said “If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates..” But then, in states with lower case rates it should be even safer…

Dr. Birx: November In-Person Voting As Easy As Going To Starbucks (JTN)

The doctor coordinating the White House Coronavirus Task Force says she believes it will be safe for voters to go to the polls in November. “Well, I can tell you it has been safe for me to go to Starbucks and pick up my order,” Dr. Deborah Birx told Just The News in an interview when asked about in-person voting. Birx has been traveling the country by car and one of her practices is to visit as many Starbucks as she can in an attempt to gauge whether people are wearing masks and socially distancing. She said her coffee experiences in states that have higher than normal COVID-19 cases, has led her to a conclusion about voting. “If you go into Starbucks in the middle of Texas and Alabama and Mississippi that have very high case rates, then I can’t say that it would be different waiting in line in the polls,” Birx said.

Of course, she cautions that masks must be worn and social distancing must be adhered to. “I know there’s a way but you really do have to pay attention,” she added. Birx spoke Friday afternoon at the White House on a myriad of topics. While much of the discussion centered on vaccines and a potential timetable for a return to normal, she also revealed something personal: she’s been a victim of harassment and threats via technology. “I do get death threats, and I get text messages that are horrific,” she said. “I get stuff sent to my home where my daughters are that is shocking and their phones get shocking messages. All of that has been happening since March.”

In a way, Birx has a thankless job as she tries to navigate not just the reality of a deadly virus but the political realities as well. Most of the criticism has come from liberal Democrats who have criticized her for not doing enough to set the record straight on some of the president’s medical claims. Birx, who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades, said she will soldier on. “You just have to stay true to your own personal values,” she said. “I’ve never been asked to cross that line. I believe when people look back that they’ll find out that I personally never crossed that line.”

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The Tulsi treatment is the state of the DNC in a nutshell. Cancel culture at its finest, advertized as unity. And Bernie, AOC, Tulsi swallow it all.

Where’s Tulsi? (RT)

This week’s Democratic virtual gathering to nominate the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket for the November election was a triumph of party centrism over the progressive wing. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was given a whopping 90 seconds to nominate Bernie Sanders in a technical procedure, and no members of her ‘squad’ were given the stage. Instead, a parade of speakers from both parties told Americans that replacing Donald Trump with Biden was the single most important task at hand. One other party outsider was noticeably absent at the convention. Tulsi Gabbard, the representative for Hawaii, was snubbed despite remaining in the primary race right until Biden’s imminent victory and winning two delegates.

In those metrics, she performed better than VP nominee Harris herself. Yet Gabbard “was not invited to participate in any way”, she confirmed on Twitter. Frankly speaking, she would have been welcomed at the convention about as gladly as evil witch Maleficent at the birthday party of Sleeping Beauty. Once considered a rising political star and given the same duty to nominate Sanders in 2016 as AOC this year, Gabbard has become a pariah in her own party over the past two years. Apparently, the Democratic leadership would rather give a platform to someone who helped lie the country into the 2003 Iraq invasion than to a woman who calls for an end to forever wars, some commenters noted. During the campaign, Gabbard stepped on quite a few toes. Going after Harris’s prosecutorial record was arguably the moment the California senator’s bid for presidency went sideways.

Guest of honor Pete Buttigieg, described by Biden as the future of the party, would probably not appreciate her either. After all, after he brought up her infamous trip to Syria during a debate, Gabbard gave him a lecture on the importance of talking to your adversaries. [..] The redbait smearing of Gabbard began early in her campaign. In February 2019, NBC declared her a “Russian favorite” based on the opinion of New Knowledge, the shady firm best known for fabricating a ‘Russian influence campaign’ during the 2017 Senate special election in Alabama. In October, the same attack was launched from the very top of the party establishment, as Hillary Clinton claimed the Kremlin was “grooming” Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate.

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1296591920538550273

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“As the country’s social fabric is torn apart by evictions, record unemployment, and mass death, they decided to hold a virtual prayer circle for Republican senator John McCain.”

This Year’s DNC Was 2016’s DNC on Steroids (Savage)

Save a few protests from frustrated Sanders delegates, the convention was a pristine spectacle of celebrity-driven, limousine liberalism at its most cartoonish and out of touch. No one expected a politician like Clinton to remake herself as a populist figure. But the four-day elite love-in — hosted, no less, at a convention center bearing the name of one of the world’s biggest banks — was so dripping with Ivy League pretension and Hollywood glam that it looked more like an awards show than a democratic appeal to the citizens of a republic. November was still three, potentially perilous months away, and — despite a year of unexpected populist insurgencies from both the Left and right — Democrats were already measuring the drapes for an indefinite future residency in the White House.

When November finally did come, their complacency would be punished with the single greatest political upset in modern history. In more ways than one, this year’s DNC evoked an ominous feeling of deja vu. True enough, the context is very different. This time, Donald Trump is the incumbent president and America is in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Contra Clinton, the party’s nominee was merely the final centrist standing among what was this time a vast field of candidates rallying to neutralize Sanders — and, unlike its last standard-bearer, he was more the establishment’s measure of last resort than its first choice.

Notwithstanding these differences, the parallels between this week’s convention and the gilded spectacular of 2016 are difficult to overlook. Yet again, Democrats are headed into a consequential election with a Wall Street–friendly ticket raking in millions from financial concerns and doing its utmost to signal it has minimal interest in honoring key campaign pledges.

As in 2016, party leaders feel they can openly flaunt their contempt for a progressive left that has nowhere else to go while putting their chips on anti-Trump Republicans and conservative suburbanites (to that end, John Kasich and Colin Powell were featured prominently on the schedule while the Democrats’ brightest star got just over one minute).

With the state of the country inarguably worse than it was in 2016, this formula somehow looks even more out of touch than it did four years ago. During a moment of national reckoning with racism and police violence following the brutal murder of George Floyd, Democrats opted to give the architect of stop-and-frisk a prime-time speaking slot. As the country’s social fabric is torn apart by evictions, record unemployment, and mass death, they decided to hold a virtual prayer circle for Republican senator John McCain. Despite giving a speech that exceeded most expectations, their tribune is a candidate whose ability to win is privately doubted even by the people who proved most critical to his nomination.

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“With universal mail-in voting, the government would mail ballots to everyone, regardless of whether they request them.”

The Truth About The Post Office Controversy (Patel)

Do we really have to worry about the Postal Service? That’s the latest faux controversy to dominate our political debate. It’s a sign of our times that even the mail system isn’t without controversy. As usual, there’s plenty of blame to go around on how we got into this mess. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s reasonable to presume we need more absentee voting. Packing voters into overcrowded indoor polling places with long lines is not a good idea. Our government and politicians of all stripes have a duty to promote free and fair elections whether in person or absentee. That shouldn’t be a controversial idea. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about universal mail-in voting.

Absentee voting is different. With absentee voting, a specific voter requests his or her specific ballot to vote by mail. That system has been used for years and — especially in the states doing it best — it works pretty well. Universal mail-in voting is different. With universal mail-in voting, the government would mail ballots to everyone, regardless of whether they request them. Some places even allow for “ballot harvesting,” where a third party can collect ballots for many people and file them in bulk. This system has not traditionally been used widely, and it raises legitimate concerns over voter fraud. A 2018 North Carolina congressional election was in fact overturned after a state probe found that a Republican operative illegally collected ballots with forged signatures and filled in votes.

The Postal Service controversy falls in the midst of the very legitimate debate. We should all be able to agree that to the extent mail-in voting is used — the absentee variety would be my preference — the Postal Service has to be able to handle its role to ensure a fair election in a reasonable time frame. The Postal Service — which is supposed to operate independently based on funding from the postal fees it charges — has been losing money for years. Due to email and other forms of communication, we send about 30% fewer letters each year than we did just a decade ago. To combat this, the Postal Service has been reducing its operating costs. That all makes sense. Now comes the controversy part. There are three drivers contributing to it. Two are self-inflected by the Republicans, and one — likely the biggest — is being driven pretty disingenuously by the Democrats.

First, it would have made sense to pause some Postal Service operating cuts as it became more and more clear after COVID-19 that we were going to rely more on the mail this election cycle than in any other. Taking mail sorting machines out of service and cutting back on mailboxes that are less used may not be the best moves when you know the mail will be crucial for a national election. A pause in operating cuts makes sense in case the equipment is needed for real, substantive reasons — to ensure a fair and timely election — and also to induce confidence among the American people that our sacred right to vote will not be abridged due to the pandemic. This is exactly the justification the Postal Service provided this week when they finally announced such a pause. It was, of course, too late to stem the controversy.

Second, as is the case with so many controversies of this era, President Donald Trump did not do himself any favors with his comments on the matter. Trump said he opposed more money for the Postal Service because without that money, “You can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.” The president is not wrong to question universal mail-in voting, but his statement that he was going to unilaterally in effect stop it through a holdup of postal funds only added fire to Democrats’ claims that he was against taking steps to have a fair election during the pandemic.

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Read of the day. Excellent. Where it all comes together.

Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda (Ray McGovern )

The Best Defense… is a good offense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its study — call it “Mueller (Enhanced)” — and the propaganda fanfare — come at a key point in the Russiagate/Spygate imbroglio. It also came, curiously, as the Democratic Convention was beginning, as if the Republican-controlled Senate was sending Trump a message. One chief worry, of course, derives from the uncertainty as to whether John Durham, the US Attorney investigating those FBI and other officials who launched the Trump-Russia investigation will let some heavy shoes drop before the election. Barr has said he expects “developments in Durham’s investigation hopefully before the end of the summer.”

FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith already has decided to plead guilty to the felony of falsifying evidence used to support a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to surveillance to spy on Trump associate Carter Page. It is abundantly clear that Clinesmith was just a small cog in the deep-state machine in action against candidate and then President Trump. And those running the machine are well known. The president has named names, and Barr has made no bones about his disdain for what he calls spying on the president. The cognoscenti and the big fish themselves may be guessing that Trump/Barr/Durham will not throw out heavier lines for former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for example.

But how can they be sure? What has become clear is that the certainty they all shared that Hillary Clinton would be the next president prompted them not only to take serious liberties with the Constitution and the law, but also to do so without taking rudimentary steps to hide their tracks. The incriminating evidence is there. And as Trump becomes more and more vulnerable and defensive about his ineptness — particularly with regard to Covid-19 — he may summon the courage to order Barr and Durham to hook the big fish, not just minnows like Clinesmith. The neuralgic reality is that no one knows at this point how far Trump will go. To say that this kind of uncertainty is unsettling to all concerned is to say the obvious.

So, the stakes are high — for the Democrats, as well — and, not least, the LSM. In these circumstances it would seem imperative not just to circle the wagons but to mount the best offense/defense possible, despite the fact that virtually all the ammunition (as in the Senate report) is familiar and stale (“enhanced” or not). Black eyes might well be in store for the very top former law enforcement and intelligence officials, the Democrats, and the LSM — and in the key pre-election period. So, the calculation: launch “Mueller Report (Enhanced)” and catapult the truth now with propaganda, before it is too late.

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NATO is not capable of fighting Russia. But it can wage a one-sided domestic disinformation war.

Fighting Russia Has Become An Existential Necessity For NATO – Lavrov (RT)

Confrontation with Russia has become the sole reason for NATO’s existence, and this encourages instability in Europe, creating artificial dividing lines on the continent. That’s according to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. The veteran diplomat told the Moscow daily Trud that everyone knows there are no real threats to security in Europe but that NATO needs to invent them in order to keep itself relevant. Lavrov also drew attention to the fact that Russia has repeatedly proposed measures to reduce tensions and reduce the risk of incidents on the continent. “Now, just like during the Cold War, fighting Russia on all fronts, including information and propaganda, has become the alliance’s reason for existence,” he explained.

“NATO has deployed extensive resources on the eastern flank, near our borders, including conducting exercises and improving military infrastructure.” “The alliance continues to expand its area of military and political influence, inviting all new countries under its ‘umbrella’ under the pretext of protecting them from Russia,” he added. Lavrov further explained that the alliance adheres to the line of “containment and dialogue” in relations with Russia, although “as a result, there is practically no place for a real and open dialogue on pressing problems.” In the same interview, the foreign minister accused Ukrainian authorities of not hiding their desire to use the conflict in the Donbass to preserve European Union sanctions pressure on Russia, by not fulfilling their obligations under the Minsk Agreements.

According to him, Kiev takes advantage of the fact that the EU continues to link the issue of improving relations between the bloc and Russia with the implementation of the Minsk agreements, to which Russia is not a party. “Alas, this artificial and short-sighted link persists to this day – to the great satisfaction of the Kiev authorities, which not only do not fulfill their obligations under the Minsk Package of Measures, but also make no secret of their desire to use the unresolved conflict to maintain sanctions pressure against Russia,” Lavrov said.

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If Barr continues to fiddle on the Durham report, Trump may do it anyway.

AG Barr Throws Cold Water On Possible Edward Snowden Pardon (ZH)

Once again President Trump’s anti-establishment and ‘anti-deep state’ instincts look like they’ll be promptly reigned in by those around him. He shocked leaders in Congress and within his own administration when one week ago he mused openly in a New York Post interview that maybe Edward Snowden should be pardoned. In follow-up he said at a press briefing last Saturday “There are many, many people – it seems to be a split decision that many people think that he should be somehow treated differently, and other people think he did very bad things.” And further that: “I’m going to take a very good look at it.” The president raised eyebrows and anxiety across the D.C. beltway with his unprecedented remarks.

“There are a lot of people that think that he is not being treated fairly. I mean, I hear that,” he had initially told NY Post, before adding: “Many people are on his side, I will say that. I don’t know him, never met him. But many people are on his side.” This immediately raised hopes among those that hail the NSA leaker as a whistleblower who exposed deeply unconstitutional surveillance of the domestic populace that he might one day soon see freedom. But now Attorney General William Barr is throwing cold water on such a bold prospect, saying to the Associated Press on Friday that he’d be “vehemently opposed” to any initiative to pardon Snowden, who remains on the run from US authorities – but given asylum in Russia.

If he were to return to the United States he would face severe charges related to the Espionage Act and spilling of state secrets, which would certainly bring life imprisonment. “He was a traitor and the information he provided our adversaries greatly hurt the safety of the American people,” Barr said in the new comments. Interestingly, Trump’s own view as expressed years ago was that Snowden was a “traitor”. Barr’s latest comments frame Snowden’s actions as motivated by money and fame, and not of out of a sense of patriotism or concern for upholding the Constitution: “He was peddling it around like a commercial merchant. We can’t tolerate that,” Barr added firmly. Recall that last year the DOJ under Barr fought to ensure that Snowden wouldn’t see any money generated from US sales of his tell-all book Permanent Record.

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Japan has been quiet, it’s true.

What A Nation Cut Off From The Rest Of The World Looks Like (Saxo)

Earlier this morning, there has been a couple of Japanese data releases. Japanese consumer price inflation was unexciting with a rate at 0% YoY. While we see some relative price changes in many countries, the basic story for the moment is that inflation will remain low in most countries. In addition, Japan National Tourism Organization has published its latest data regarding the flow of foreign visitors in July. Basically, it shows what a nation cut off from the rest of the world looks like. The flow of foreign visitors in Japan published by Japan National Tourism Organization is out this morning. The country was supposed to welcome an unprecedented number of Olympic fans from all around the world just about now, but the pandemic has turned everything upside down.

Arrivals of foreign visitors plunge 99% YoY in July, at 3,800 individuals (slightly up compared to the previous month, when it stood at 2,600 individuals). For the sake of comparison, at the beginning of the year, the country recorded more than 2.6 million foreign visitors in a month’s time. Whilst the country expected to draw around 40 million visitors this year, the final number for 2020 might fall to 7-8 million at best, which would represent a drop of 80% compared to the target. Over the past years, the contribution of travel and tourism to GDP has significantly increased, to reach 7% in 2019, on the back of government’s incentives to promote foreign tourism via marketing push overseas and eased visa requirements.


The COVID-19 constitutes a serious setback for the government’s hopes for tourism and it is unlikely that the recent campaign to spur domestic tourism launched on July 22 will offset losses generated by the drop in the flow of foreign visitors. Considering the number of new COVID-19 cases has sharply increased since mid-July and that many countries at global level are facing the acute risk of second wave, the country is not expected to reopen to foreigners anytime soon and will probably postpone initial plans to let foreign students and businessmen return.

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Well, speak out then. A lot louder than this.

Alan Rusbridger: Assange Case Is Worrying For All Journalists (PG)

Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said the ongoing US extradition case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “disturbing” and “has worrying implications for all journalists”. And he has said it is “surprising” that more don’t share his concerns. While Assange has garnered support from a range of campaigning groups for his plight, the response from journalists and the news industry in the UK has been relatively muted. Rusbridger was editor of the Guardian for 20 years, leaving in 2015. Under his editorship the paper worked with Wikileaks on the 2010 Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and, a few years later, the Snowden Files. [..] Any charges against Assange relating to journalistic activity, such as the publishing of material in the public interest, “should be dropped”, Rusbridger told Press Gazette.

[..] Rusbridger said that while Assange had done things he can’t defend, and which “stray beyond the conventional definition of journalism”, the Australian is not “all good or all bad”. “When you stand back and say, well, whatever we think of Assange, what he is being targeted for is the same or similar as many journalists have done, then it’s surprising to me that more people can’t see that this case has worrying implications for all journalists” Rusbridger said the precedent set by the UK of allowing someone to be extradited for prosecution under another country’s official secrets laws could ultimately be used by regimes to target British journalists who report on sensitive information about foreign powers. “It’s quite a disturbing thing that we should send somebody to another country for supposedly breaking their laws on secrecy. If journalists are not concerned by that, then I think they should be,” he said.

“The danger here is that if everyone sort of shrugs and leaves Assange to his fate and this sets some kind of judicial precedent, then the next time… a journalist on the Sunday Times writes about a secret Israeli weapons system, as has happened in the past, the Israelis say ‘well actually that breaches our Official Secrets Act, under the Assange precedent we now ask for this person to be returned to our country so we can prosecute them’. “You could see how what seems like a sort of tangential case involving somebody that I know lots of journalists don’t really regard as a proper journalist suddenly becomes something that has set a very alarming precedent.”

On the question of whether Assange is a journalist, Rusbridger said he was “one of these complicated figures that we’ve never had to deal with before the 21st Century” and had “many identities”. He said Assange clearly did “some things that are journalistic”, pointing in particular to the Collateral Murder video that showed a US air attack in Iraq that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters media workers. “Any newspaper would have been thrilled to run that story,” said Rusbridger. “It was a really, truly shocking story in the public interest. “So that was clearly journalism, but [Assange is] also an activist, he’s a publisher, he’s a kind of impresario, he is a whistleblower, he’s a kind of information anarchist, and so that that makes him very difficult to categorise or to work out what our attitude to him is.

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