Menu Icon

Debt Rattle February 18 2026

Feb 182026
 
 February 18, 2026  Posted by at 10:26 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  29 Responses »


Jean-Michel Basquiat Warrior 1982


• Anthropic–Pentagon Talks Stall Over AI Guardrails (ZH)
• Behind the Burnout and High Turnover Rates in the AI Industry (ET)
• Bill Clinton Just Got Brutally Dissed By His Own Party (Matt Margolis)
• The Obama Admin’s Prostitution Scandal And The Ruemmler-Epstein Connection (ZH)
• Aliens Are ‘Real’ – Obama (RT)
• Zelensky Launches F-bomb Laden Rant In Munich (RT)
• The War Party Takes Munich (Kosachev)
• The US Wants a Deal. Russia Wants a System (Lukyanov)
• The Middle East Is Splitting Into Rival Blocs (Sadygzade)
• In Defence of Sir Jim Ratcliffe (Charles Johnson)
• Trump DOJ Seeks To Dismiss Steve Bannon’s J6 Conviction and Indictment (JTN)
• Trump’s Surpising Reaction to Jesse Jackson’s Death (Matt Margolis)
• Race Hustler or Civil Rights Icon? Jesse Jackson Dead At 84 (Rick Moran)
• Regarding the Rev (Christian Josi)
• ‘Mr. Wonderful Destroyed CNN’s Anti-SAVE Act Narrative in 30 Seconds (Margolis)

 


 

AI Dalio Ed Dowd Deindustrialization was DELIBERATE. https://twitter.com/PrometheanActn/status/2023501026712539320?s=20 China

 


 

 


 


Will AI command the military?

• Anthropic–Pentagon Talks Stall Over AI Guardrails (ZH)

Contract renewal talks between Anthropic and the Pentagon have stalled over how its Claude system can be used. The AI firm is seeking stricter limits before extending its agreement, according to a person familiar with the private negotiations and Bloomberg. At the heart of the dispute is control. Anthropic wants firm guardrails to prevent Claude from being used for mass surveillance of Americans or to build weapons that operate without human oversight. The Defense Department’s position is broader: it wants flexibility to deploy the model so long as its use complies with the law. The tension reflects a larger debate over how far advanced AI should go in military settings.


Bloomberg writes that Anthropic has tried to distinguish itself as a safety-first AI developer. It created a specialized version, Claude Gov, tailored to U.S. national security work, designed to analyze classified information, interpret intelligence and process cybersecurity data. The company says it aims to serve government clients while staying within its own ethical red lines. “Anthropic is committed to using frontier AI in support of US national security,” a spokesperson said, describing ongoing discussions with the Defense Department as “productive conversations, in good faith.” The Pentagon, however, struck a firmer tone. “Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight,” spokesman Sean Parnell said, adding that the relationship is under review and emphasizing troop safety.

Some defense officials have grown wary, viewing reliance on Anthropic as a potential supply-chain vulnerability. The department could ask contractors to certify they are not using Anthropic’s models, according to a senior official—an indication that the disagreement could ripple beyond a single contract. Rival AI developers are watching closely. Tools from OpenAI, Google and xAI are also being discussed for Pentagon use, with companies working to ensure their systems can operate within legal boundaries. Anthropic secured a two-year Pentagon deal last year involving Claude Gov and enterprise products, and the outcome of its current negotiations could influence how future agreements with other AI providers are structured.

Read more …

“.. a median hourly wage of $15 and a median annual salary of $22,620.”

• Behind the Burnout and High Turnover Rates in the AI Industry (ET)

Across the artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain, insiders describe a precarious, high-turnover workforce with limited support and stability. This “invisible” human labor that labels data, evaluates outputs, and filters harmful material has become a revolving door of talent that navigates high-pressure gigs and burnout. Moreover, workers and industry experts say this talent churn can degrade the very AI models that workers are paid to improve. Across the board, workers who are hired to support, evaluate, or operationalize AI systems face similar challenges: high-stress environments that often involve complex tasks, unrealistic timelines, job instability, and low wages.


It’s no secret that the tech industry has long suffered from high turnover rates. Numbers vary, but many studies put the average rate of talent churn in the tech sector at between 13 percent and 18 percent. This becomes clear when considering the cost of replacing tech talent, which can be up to 150 percent of a worker’s salary, including recruitment expenses, onboarding time, productivity losses, and effects on customer relationships.Some have said that the loss of institutional knowledge alone makes worker retention critical. “People love to talk about the ‘magic’ of AI, but the work culture behind it is a meat grinder. I’ve seen talent turnover in model evaluation hit record highs because the work is repetitive and psychologically draining,” Barry Kunst, vice president of marketing at Solix Technologies, told The Epoch Times.

“When you lose a lead researcher to churn, you don’t just lose a body; you lose the ‘why’ behind the model’s safety guardrails.” Kunst said this is why he’s adamant about AI workforce stability, which he said correlates directly with model reliability. “If you’re rotating contractors every six months to keep labor costs low, your data governance will fail, period,” he said.Sovic Chakrabarti, the director of digital marketing agency Icy Tales, told The Epoch Times: “Team turnover is more common than people expect. “In some groups, especially those tied to model training, evaluation, or data labeling pipelines, churn can happen every few months.

“Short contracts, project-based funding, and constant reorganization mean people cycle in and out quickly.” Chakrabarti said he has worked on the development and support side of AI systems long enough to see patterns that, as he put it, “rarely make it into public discussions.” “That [workforce] churn absolutely leads to lost knowledge,” he said. “Important context about why a dataset was filtered a certain way, why a safety rule exists, or why a model behaved oddly in testing often lives in someone’s head. ”When that person leaves, documentation rarely captures the full story, according to Chakrabarti. “New hires inherit systems without understanding the original tradeoffs, which can quietly introduce risks,” he said.

Burnout rates among information technology workers are high. LeadDev’s Engineering Leadership Report 2025 found that 22 percent of the 617 polled engineering leaders and developers felt critically burned out at work. An additional 24 percent of respondents reported feeling “moderately” burned out, while 33 percent reported low levels of burnout. Some of this is driven by job security fears after two years of layoffs at big tech companies, but the pay for many of the workers fueling the AI revolution is often low. The Alphabet Workers Union, Communications Workers of America, and TechEquity led a study on the working conditions of U.S.-based data workers and found conditions similar to those of tech contractors in developing countries.

In a survey of 160 U.S. data workers, 86 percent worried about being able to pay their bills, and 25 percent relied on public assistance to get by. The same group reported a median hourly wage of $15 and a median annual salary of $22,620. Eighty-five percent of the study group said they’re expected to be “on call” for work, but only 30 percent reported being paid for that time. More than a quarter of respondents reported spending more than eight hours per week on call. “If there’s anything I wanted the general public to know, it is that there are low paid people [in the United States] who are not even treated as humans—just little more than employee ID numbers—out there making the 1 billion dollar, trillion dollar AI systems that are supposed to lead our entire society and civilization into the future,” Kirn Gill II, a search quality rater working on Google products at Telus, told the Communications Workers of America.

Chakrabarti said the work culture behind AI fuels these challenges. “There is real pressure to keep labor costs low,” he said. “I have seen unrealistic timelines, understaffed teams, and expectations to ‘do more with less’ while the stakes keep rising. That tension creates stress, especially when the systems affect millions of users.”

Read more …

“.. the party is so embarrassed by Clinton’s Epstein connections that they’re willing to airbrush him out of history entirely.”

• Bill Clinton Just Got Brutally Dissed By His Own Party (Matt Margolis)

The Democratic Party put together a Presidents’ Day tribute on social media that snubbed one of their most electorally successful presidents in modern history. Bill Clinton, the guy who won two terms and left office with a 66% approval rating, got left out of the party’s official image like the creepy uncle no one wants to sit next to at Thanksgiving dinner. The post from the Democrat Party’s official X account showed a “Happy Presidents’ Day” collage featuring JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, FDR, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Notice anyone missing? The only Democrat presidents they skipped were Clinton and Harry Truman. You could probably argue that to today’s Democrat Party, all old white men look alike, but Clinton is still quite active in the party, and probably should have been included.


Naturally, the RNC pounced, retweeting the Democrats’ post with a photo of Clinton sitting next to Hillary, both looking appropriately concerned. “Forget someone again??” the caption reads. It’s the kind of burn that lands because everyone knows something weird is happening here. Fox News Digital reached out to the DNC to ask whether leaving Clinton out was intentional, but they didn’t receive an answer. The Clinton Foundation didn’t respond either. That silence speaks volumes when your own party features Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden—two presidents who collectively gave America stagflation, hostage crises, the Afghanistan disaster, and 40-year-high inflation—yet can’t find room for the guy they used to credit with balancing the budget. However, that was technically Newt Gingrich who did that. So, why did Bill get dissed? Fox News Digital offers a theory.

“Clinton, one of the most popular presidents in recent history, was not without his share of scandal. The late Kenneth Starr investigated Clinton for connections to a controversial 1978 land deal in the Ozarks nicknamed “Whitewater” dating to Clinton’s time as Arkansas attorney general. While Clinton was never charged with wrongdoing, Arkansas business partners Jim and Susan McDougal were convicted in connection with the failed Whitewater deal. Hillary Clinton had previously worked for the law firm that represented Jim McDougal’s bank. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton’s successor, was also convicted. But the Whitewater case led Starr to discover what became the Monica Lewinsky scandal — wherein Clinton allegedly had a sexual relationship with a White House intern. On January 26, 1998, Clinton famously maintained his innocence in the face of impeachment over Starr’s case, declaring at the end of a childcare policy press conference:”

Not buying that. If presidential scandals were enough to warrant exclusion from the image, Barack Obama would never have made it. Many on social media speculate it has something to do with the fact that Clinton’s name appears all over the Epstein files. He flew on Epstein’s private jet at least 16 times between 2001 and 2003. Recently released documents include photos of Clinton with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, including one showing a shirtless Clinton in a hot tub with someone identified by the DOJ as a victim of Epstein’s abuse.

Both Bill and Hillary Clinton recently agreed to testify before Congress about their relationship with Epstein after facing potential criminal contempt charges. Sure, they claim House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is employing dirty tricks. Still, when your party won’t even put your picture on a Presidents’ Day card, the only possible explanation is that the party is so embarrassed by Clinton’s Epstein connections that they’re willing to airbrush him out of history entirely.

Happy Presidents’ Day, Bill.

Read more …

“The procedure for checking in prostitutes is hardly rigorous.”

• The Obama Admin’s Prostitution Scandal And The Ruemmler-Epstein Connection (ZH)

Remember Obama’s 2012 Colombian prostitution scandal? Turns out, Jeffrey Epstein was involved… Newly released Department of Justice documents from the Epstein files have exposed a previously unknown connection between a 2012 White House advance-team scandal in Cartagena, Colombia, and Kathryn Ruemmler – the former Obama White House counsel who later became Goldman Sachs’ top lawyer. Ruemmler resigned from Goldman late last week, after the latest Epstein document dump revealed her extensive, affectionate, and years-long correspondence with the convicted sex offender.


The emails show she called him “Uncle Jeffrey,” accepted expensive gifts, and turned to him for advice on sensitive legal and reputational matters – including how to respond to a 2014 Washington Post report that accused her of helping suppress evidence of prostitution involving a rich kid White House aide whose daddy was a huge Obama donor. The WaPo report, by all accounts, cost Ruemmler a job as Obama’s Attorney General.

The 2012 Cartagena Prostitution Scandal
In April 2012, ahead of President Obama’s trip to the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, at least 20 Secret Service agents, military personnel, and others were involved in hiring prostitutes. The scandal led to multiple firings and disciplinary actions. A lesser-known element involved Jonathan Dach, a 25-year-old Yale Law student and unpaid White House advance-team volunteer (son of prominent Democratic donor Leslie Dach). Hotel records obtained by investigators showed a prostitute was checked into Dach’s room at the Hilton Cartagena shortly after midnight on April 3, 2012.

Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan briefed White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler on the evidence. The White House conducted a review, interviewed advance-team members (including Dach), and publicly declared “no indication of any misconduct” by White House personnel. Dach was later cleared and went on to work at the State Department. More recently, Dach was found to have ‘chronically violated state rules’ in his role as former chief of staff to Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) by using a state vehicle as his personal car for nearly two years “and driving at speeds constituting reckless driving under Connecticut law.”

The 2014 Washington Post Revival and Ruemmler’s Response
In October 2014, while Ruemmler was in private practice at Latham & Watkins and reportedly under consideration to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General – WaPo published new details. Reporters Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura revealed that the White House had received specific evidence (hotel records and witness accounts) implicating a White House advance-team member but had not fully investigated or disclosed it. On October 9, 2014, Epstein emailed Ruemmler: “Doing fine. Was talking to reporters until late in the morning last night. Trying to isolate/contain wapo.”mOn October 17, 2014, Ruemmler forwarded Epstein a draft of her response to the Post reporter and asked for his input. In the draft she downplayed the allegations, writing:

“The whole thing is ridiculous – they had to obtain the record ‘under the table’ because the last thing the Hilton wanted to do is to voluntarily give over info implicating the privacy of their guests. The procedure for checking in prostitutes is hardly rigorous.”

Read more …

“When asked what question he most wanted answered upon becoming president, Obama joked that it was: “where are the aliens?“

• Aliens Are ‘Real’ – Obama (RT)

Former US President Barack Obama has said he believes that aliens are “real” but dismissed longstanding conspiracy theories that the US is concealing proof of extraterrestrial life at a secretive military facility called Area 51. Obama made the remarks on the No Lie podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen released on Saturday. Asked whether aliens “are real,” the ex-president replied in the affirmative, adding “I haven’t seen them, and they’re not being kept in Area 51.” “There’s no underground facility, unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” he added.


When asked what question he most wanted answered upon becoming president, Obama joked that it was: “where are the aliens?” Area 51 is a highly classified US Air Force facility at Groom Lake in southern Nevada. The CIA officially acknowledged the site’s existence in 2013, when declassified documents revealed it had been used since 1955 to test the U-2 spy plane and other experimental aircraft. The facility’s secrecy sparked decades of speculation about extraterrestrial research, including theories that crashed alien spacecraft were stored there and that it was a venue for meetings with extraterrestrials. There have been a few UFO sightings in the area, but the CIA claimed they were test flights of the U-2 spy plane.

However, conspiracy theories have also been fueled by hundreds of alleged UFO sightings elsewhere. Pentagon officials told Congress in May 2022 that there were nearly 400 reports of unidentified aerial phenomena by military personnel, up from 144 tracked between 2004 and 2021. In 2024, the Pentagon stressed, however, that it had “no evidence to indicate extraterrestrial life has visited the planet.” Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was not a “believer” in extraterrestrial life, adding, though, that he had met with “serious people that say there’s some really strange things that they see flying around out there.”

Read more …

“..a $100 million kickback scheme in Ukraine’s struggling energy sector.”

• Zelensky Launches F-bomb Laden Rant In Munich (RT)

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky delivered a profanity-laden tirade urging Western countries to expel Russian citizens, including students.Speaking to Politico Playbook on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference Saturday, Zelensky called on US President Donald Trump and European leaders to ramp up sanctions against Moscow.“Europeans still didn’t put sanctions on nuclear energy of Russians, on [the state-run energy company] Rosatom, on people, on their relatives, on their children which live in Europe, which live in the United States, which study in the universities of Europe, which have real estate in the United States,” Zelensky said. “So, they have a lot of real estate, they have children, relatives everywhere. F**k away to Russia. Go home,” he added.


Zelensky’s remarks come as the US, Russia, and Ukraine prepare for a third round of three-way talks in Geneva. Moscow has criticized measures targeting Russian nationals and cultural “cancellation” abroad as Russophobia. The trip also comes amid a conscription crisis and ongoing blackouts in Ukraine caused by Russian air strikes, which Russia says aim to weaken Ukraine’s defense production. Zelensky’s reputation has been tarnished by multiple corruption scandals involving his inner circle, prompting the resignation of two government ministers and his longtime chief of staff. On Monday, anti-corruption agencies charged former Energy Minister German Galushchenko with money laundering linked to a $100 million kickback scheme in Ukraine’s struggling energy sector.

Read more …


Very correct: “Zelensky received the expected applause from Munich’s hawkish audience and once again demanded security guarantees from Washington. In plain terms, he was asking the United States to commit itself to direct war with Russia.”

• The War Party Takes Munich (Kosachev)

This year’s Munich Security Conference was not merely disappointing; it was pointless. It produced no new ideas and no added value. Instead, it resembled a rally of a self-styled “coalition of the willing” for war. That, unfortunately, is consistent with Germany’s long tradition of failing to draw the right lessons from history. Western European leaders spoke almost exclusively about rearmament and the creation of an independent military capability aimed, openly or implicitly, at confrontation with Russia. The tone was unmistakable: preparation for war, not peace. At the same time, participants repeated the familiar mantra that “more must be done” to ensure Ukraine’s victory. The contradiction went largely unnoticed. What emerged instead was a disturbing impression that Western Europe’s war party has overwhelmed everything else, including common sense and the instinct for self-preservation.


There was something unsettlingly familiar about the atmosphere. One could not help recalling Germany in the spring of 1945, when defeat was inevitable yet resistance continued with fanatical intensity, sustained by fantasies of miracle weapons. In Munich itself, Bavarian Gauleiter Paul Giesler crushed an attempted surrender on April 28, 1945 by executing Wehrmacht officers and civilians who wanted to hand the city over to the Americans without a fight. Hitler rewarded this “loyalty” by appointing Giesler interior minister the day before his own suicide. Within days, Giesler shot his wife and then himself. History rarely repeats itself neatly, but it often rhymes, and Munich echoed loudly this year.

On stage, European figures such as Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, alongside American voices like Senator Roger Wicker, openly called for supplying Ukraine with ever more advanced weapons, including Tomahawk missiles, described with an alarming casualness as if it were a modern “wunderwaffe.” The old refrain was repeated yet again: Ukraine can win, but Russia is also poised to attack NATO. This logical contradiction has become a permanent feature of Western discourse.

Washington, for its part, played along. But cautiously. This time, it sent the ‘good cop’: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in contrast to last year’s ‘bad cop’, J.D. Vance. Gone were the blunt warnings about Western Europe’s inevitable collapse if it stayed the course. Instead came soothing assurances of American support and solidarity. Yet the underlying message remained unchanged: without the United States, the EU cannot survive. The transatlantic alliance was not restored; it was merely cosmetically repaired. Zelensky received the expected applause from Munich’s hawkish audience and once again demanded security guarantees from Washington. In plain terms, he was asking the United States to commit itself to direct war with Russia.

Germany, meanwhile, declared its readiness to rearm and assume leadership of the Western slice of Europe in a new confrontation with Moscow. At the same time, Emmanuel Macron cautiously signalled that the bloc must eventually negotiate with Russia. Albeit, if only to avoid being excluded altogether while talks proceed in a Russia-Ukraine-US format. He even floated extending the French and British nuclear umbrella to other NATO members. In other words, “all quiet on the Western Front.” Once again, the conclusion is unavoidable: there is little to be gained from dialogue with this EU. And furthermore, one is reminded why it was precisely “civilized” and “enlightened” Europe that became the cradle of the two most devastating wars in human history.

Equally telling were the subjects that never surfaced. Talk of corruption in Ukraine, or of where Western funds are going, or when accountability will begin, was absent. So too was the fate of Venezuela’s leadership and the precedent set for international law. Iran was barely mentioned, despite last year’s US-Israeli military actions and the obvious risks of escalation. Even Greenland appeared only in whispered conversations offstage. Why complicate matters, when invoking the Russian threat remains the safest and most reliable option? That, in essence, is all one needs to know about this year’s Munich Conference. A forum with a promising youth and a respectable maturity, now drifting toward ideological exhaustion.

Read more …

“Territory has, inevitably, grown in importance over time. But the core issue has remained unchanged: the principles governing security on the continent.”

• The US Wants a Deal. Russia Wants a System (Lukyanov)

After last August’s meeting between the Russian and American presidents in Alaska, a new phrase entered diplomatic circulation: the “spirit of Anchorage.” The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed and can only be reconstructed from selective leaks. The form, however, was striking: a personal greeting, an honor guard, a shared limousine. Symbolism mattered. It was meant to signal seriousness. Yet the question remains: what exactly was born in Anchorage? And does it belong in the lineage of earlier diplomatic “spirits” that once defined entire eras? The term itself is not new. Before Anchorage, there was the “spirit of Yalta,” the “spirit of Helsinki,” and, briefly, the “spirit of Malta.”


All three marked turning points in relations between the great powers during the second half of the twentieth century. Yalta in 1945 laid the foundations of the post-war world order, recognizing the USSR and the United States as its central pillars. Helsinki in 1975 codified that order, even as it quietly set the stage for its eventual erosion. Malta in 1989 symbolized the end of the Cold War and, with it, the division of Europe.These meetings differed in format and outcome. Yalta brought together three victorious powers dividing spheres of influence. Helsinki was the product of prolonged multilateral negotiations designed to stabilize a tense status quo. Malta was a bilateral encounter that effectively ratified the retreat of one side under the banner of a “new world order.” But they shared one defining feature: each sought to determine the parameters of the international system itself.

Does Anchorage belong in this tradition? Formally speaking, the Alaskan talks focused on Ukraine. That immediately raises a fundamental question. How realistic is it to reach a durable settlement without the direct participation of one of the warring parties? Such an approach is only viable if one of the interlocutors, in this case the United States, is both willing and able to compel Kiev to accept decisions taken without it. Events since August suggest that Washington lacks this capacity, despite its considerable leverage. A more convincing explanation, however, is that it lacks the motivation. Donald Trump has made resolving the Ukrainian conflict a matter of personal prestige. But prestige is not the same as strategic necessity. For Trump and the narrow circle around him, the precise configuration of a settlement matters less than the avoidance of an outright Russian victory. Beyond that, the exact line of demarcation, and the conditions under which it is maintained, are not critical.

The United States would only deploy the full weight of its political and economic power if it perceived these negotiations as shaping a new world order. That was the case at Yalta, Helsinki, and Malta. It is not the case today. Moscow, by contrast, has invested Anchorage with precisely this broader meaning. From the very beginning of the military operation, Russia has framed the conflict not primarily in territorial terms, but as a question of European security architecture. Territory has, inevitably, grown in importance over time. But the core issue has remained unchanged: the principles governing security on the continent.

Today, this is often described as the question of “security guarantees for Ukraine.” In reality, it concerns the broader system within which such guarantees would exist. This may ultimately prove the most serious obstacle to any agreement. Washington’s approach is different. The current American administration does not think in terms of comprehensive frameworks or shared rules. Its vision of world order is far more fragmented and instrumental. Control is exercised through economic pressure, military presence, and political leverage applied selectively to specific regions and problems. It is a model of targeted intervention rather than systemic design. A kind of forceful acupuncture.

In this context, agreements are not about principles, but about transactions. They are designed to deliver concrete, often mercantile, outcomes rather than to establish enduring rules of interaction. Ukraine, from this perspective, is one issue among many, not the axis around which a new order would be built. If the goal is merely a political settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, the Russian-American format is insufficient. Ukraine itself would have to be involved, as would Europe. While Europe’s strategic weight is limited, it retains a significant capacity to obstruct any settlement it finds unacceptable. Ignoring this reality would be a mistake.

For the “spirit of Anchorage” to stand alongside Yalta, Helsinki, and Malta, it would need to aim higher: at the construction of a new global political system to replace the one that emerged after the Second World War and has endured, in various forms, for nearly 80 years. Washington does not see Moscow as a central interlocutor in such a project. At most, this role is tentatively assigned to China. However, even that is far from settled. As a result, the “spirit of Anchorage” hovers uneasily between two incompatible interpretations of what the conversation is actually about.

From the Russian perspective, it is about redefining the foundations of European and global security. From the American side, it is about managing a specific conflict without altering the broader architecture of power. When the parties are not even discussing the same subject, the risk is obvious. In such circumstances, the “spirit” inevitably fades, becoming less a guiding force than a rhetorical shadow. A ghost of an agreement that never quite came into being. Could this change? Possibly, but only if events intervene that force both sides to move beyond regional calculations and confront the need for a more fundamental reordering. Until then, Anchorage remains suspended between ambition and reality, its promise unfulfilled.

Read more …

Complex.

• The Middle East Is Splitting Into Rival Blocs (Sadygzade)

Across the globe, the post-Cold War settlement that once carried the promise of Western primacy is no longer taken as an unshakeable fact. Its vocabulary remains in circulation, yet real-time history continues to contest its authority. In the space left behind, many states are seeking a different idea of order, one that sounds less like instruction from a single center and more like negotiated balance among several centers. In such a moment, regions that were once treated as arenas begin to behave like authors. The Greater Middle East is one of the first places where this change is becoming visible as a messy strategic recomposition in which security is no longer outsourced and alliances are no longer assumed to be permanent.


For decades, a simple model dominated strategic thinking in the region. Washington would remain the ultimate guarantor, and regional states would calibrate their risks inside the umbrella of American deterrence. That model did not always prevent wars, but it provided a framework for expectation. Even when trust frayed, the underlying assumption was that the US could be induced to act, and that the cost of ignoring its interests would be prohibitive. In recent years, however, the region has experienced a succession of shocks that have made the old calculus feel less reliable.

One of the most dramatic was the Israeli strike in Doha in September 2025, an operation that pushed a long-simmering anxiety into the open by showing how quickly escalation could breach political red lines in the Gulf. If such an event could occur with only limited external restraint, then the notion of an automatic security backstop began to look like a story the region told itself rather than a guarantee the system could still deliver.

It was in this atmosphere that the Saudi-Pakistani Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement, signed in September 2025, drew intense attention. It suggested that major regional players were preparing for a future in which protection would be organized through layered partnerships rather than delegated to a single patron. Analysts noted that the pact followed a pattern of disappointment with external responses, including perceptions of American restraint or hesitation when regional allies felt exposed. Whether the agreement functions as a hard war guarantee or as a strategic warning, it belongs to a wider movement in which states are building options.

Two emerging security configurations are now becoming visible across the Greater Middle East, and it is important to name their participants clearly. On one side, a prospective bloc is coalescing around Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, and Oman, with this core increasingly presented as a sovereignty-driven framework meant to reduce reliance on external guarantees and to deter destabilizing escalation, while Qatar, Algeria, and several other states observe this alignment with growing interest as a possible partner network rather than as a formal membership.

On the other side, a countervailing alignment is taking shape around Israel and the United Arab Emirates, whose partnership is reinforced by defense industrial cooperation and advanced technology collaboration, and whose strategic reach is further strengthened by Azerbaijan, which acts less as a conventional member than as a pivotal partner connecting overlapping networks because it maintains close ties to Türkiye while simultaneously sustaining deep security and energy links with Israel and expanding cooperation with Abu Dhabi.

Read more …

” In the 2017/18 tax year Ratcliffe was the fifth highest taxpayer in the country, footing a bill of £110.5 million.”

• In Defence of Sir Jim Ratcliffe (Charles Johnson)

Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s statement that Britain has been “colonised by immigrants” has sparked a fierce reaction. From Starmer to Bluesky, to the Athletic and all the football social media pundits in between, the co-owner of Manchester United has been bombarded with the same attack lines repeatedly. He has been called a tax dodging, racist immigrant hypocrite. Such an uproar has flared up in such a short space of time because Ratcliffe is radically different from those who have issued similar statements before. Ratcliffe is not a political figure: you do not see billionaires nor football club owners voicing discontent like this. The pushback has been fierce because Ratcliffe has no political incentive to say any of this. He isn’t running for office, seeking favour, or chasing votes — which makes his intervention harder to dismiss. Part of the backlash, too, reflects an unease that his diagnosis may be accurate.


The remarks came from an initial conversation regarding the economic challenges Britain faces in general, not solely on immigration. The snippet that has been so widely shared is merely part of a wider statement of the economic problems Britain faces; Ratcliffe refers to the issues of “immigration” and “nine million people” on benefits simultaneously. Colonised is a strong opening salvo for a figure such as Ratcliffe, who is not known for any previous anti-migration stance. This generated responses of tone policing from his critics – cries that his choice of words were “disgraceful and deeply divisive” and that “this language and leadership has no place in English football” from Kick It Out, a notable “Anti Racism” football pressure group. There was no attempt to argue or debate: this was no more than tone policing, of “mate mate mate, you can’t say that mate”. It did not engage with the substantive point. It was not an argument.

The Prime Minister has pushed for Ratcliffe to apologise. Less than a year ago, Starmer was referring to Britain as an ”Island of Strangers”; he has little argument here. Sir Ed Davey has stated that Ratcliffe is “totally wrong” and is “out of step with British Values”. Once again this is weak tone policing, not an argument. Regardless, which British values are being violated in particular? What are British values precisely meant to mean here? The fact is that Ratcliffe’s vocabulary choice is nowhere near as divisive as the impacts of mass migration in the last quarter century.

Mass migration is the most important issue in British political debate. It has bought sectarianism, Bengali and Palestinian politics swinging both local council and Parliamentary elections, a deepening of housing crisis, the rape and murder of British women from taxpayer funded hotels and programs which bloat the welfare state even further. It is undeniable mass migration has defined British politics of the 2010s onwards. It has been much more harmful and divisive than any comment made by Sir Jim Ratcliffe. His words are nothing compared to the actions of Deng Chol Majek, or Hedash Kebatu, to name a couple of examples.

Critics have also cried that Ratcliffe is “an immigrant himself, dodging tax in Monaco”. The difference between Ratcliffe and migration into Britain is so different they are almost incomparable. In the 2017/18 tax year Ratcliffe was the fifth highest taxpayer in the country, footing a bill of £110.5 million. With such an extraordinarily high bill, it is no wonder that he has since moved to Monaco. Meanwhile, the average salary of of a migrant entering Britain in 2023 (which has fallen by £10,000 since 2021) was £32,946, according to a report by the Centre for Migration Control. From this we can estimate a migrant would pay about £5,000 in income tax. That means it would take over 22,000 (statistically average) migrants to foot the tax bill that Ratcliffe paid in one year alone. Ratcliffe has been an exceptional cash cow to the British state. He has been taxed incredible amounts and contributed more to this country than almost anyone currently living; to call him hypocritical since he dared to criticise migration and its impact on the welfare state is simply not fair.

Census data from the ONS in 2021 shows that migrants from four nations – Somalia, Nigeria, Jamaica and Bangladesh – head over 104,000 social homes in London alone. With such incredible numbers of subsidised housing going to foreign born nationals, it is absolutely correct to state that mass migration is costing the British economy a fortune. The same census states that over 70% of Somali born households are in social housing in England and Wales, whilst also being of lowest contributors to income tax in the nation – paying well under the £5,000 stated per head previously. The increase and sheer scale of benefit reliance for many immigrants in Britain is not sustainable, and it is a problem that is right to be addressed.

Perhaps the most nonsensical argument presented by some is that as co-owner of Manchester United he employs a significant number of immigrant players. Bruno Fernandes is not living in social housing in Wythenshawe. Benjamin Sesko is not in a single bed council flat in Hulme. When he arrived in Manchester last year, the first thing Senne Lammens did was not register for Universal Credit. Not a single foreign player is a drain on the state. They are, as elite athletes in the most lucrative league in the world, very clearly exceptions to the norm of British migration. The difference between Bruno Fernandes, who earns a reported £300,000 a week, and the over 40% of Bangladeshi immigrants who are economically inactive should really not need spelling out. We are referring to just 17 foreign senior team players who all earn more in a week than the average migrant – or Brit – will earn in a year. It is ludicrous to even attempt to compare the two. Regardless, employing or working with immigrants does not mean you waive your right to criticise the state of affairs in Britain. As an Englishman, Sir Jim Ratcliffe has a given and inalienable right to comment on the affairs of his country.

Read more …

“The move by DOJ is extremely rare — but not unprecedented — considering Bannon was already convicted and served time in prison. ”

• Trump DOJ Seeks To Dismiss Steve Bannon’s J6 Conviction and Indictment (JTN)

In a stunning reversal, the Trump Justice Department on Monday asked the Supreme Court and a federal judge to dismiss the criminal contempt indictment and conviction of Steve Bannon for refusing to testify in the January 6 investigation by Congress, declaring such a request is in the “interests of justice” after years of politically weaponized lawfare by Democrats. The move by DOJ is extremely rare — but not unprecedented — considering Bannon was already convicted and served time in prison. “The government has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in a brief to the nine justices, who were reviewing an appeal from Bannon’s lawyers.


“The government has accordingly lodged a motion in the district court under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a) to vacate the judgment and dismiss the indictment with prejudice,” the motion also states The filing noted that the law “allows the government to seek dismissal even after a jury finds the defendant guilty and the district court enters judgment.” Separately, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Perro asked a federal judge in Washington D.C. to vacate Bannon‘s conviction and dismiss the indictment. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Just the News that the Democrat-led House January 6 Select Committee was part of a larger weaponization machine that abused the justice system.

“Today the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court that Steve Bannon’s conviction arising from the J6 ‘Unselect’ Committee’s improper subpoena should be vacated,” Blanche said. “Under the leadership of Attorney General Bondi, this Department will continue to undo the prior administration’s weaponization of the justice system.” The request to the two courts to abandon Bannon’s case is the latest twist in a five-year legal saga. The Democrat-led House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol issued a subpoena on Sept. 23, 2021, to Bannon demanding documents and testimony related to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack.

Bannon, a private citizen, had been a policy adviser to President Donald Trump for approximately seven months in 2017. He declined to produce any documents, and the House voted the next month to hold him in contempt of Congress. On Nov. 12, 2021, federal prosecutors in the Biden administration secured a grand jury indictment against Bannon on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress. He was convicted and served time in prison.

Read more …

“I provided office space for him and his Rainbow Coalition, for years, in the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street..”

“He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand..”

• Trump’s Surpising Reaction to Jesse Jackson’s Death (Matt Margolis)

Jesse Jackson, the polarizing civil rights figure and race hustler, died Tuesday morning at age 84. Though his cause of death was not immediately shared, he had been previously diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called progressive supranuclear palsy, which is reportedly similar to Parkinson’s disease. While the media will inevitably lionize him as a civil rights icon, Jackson’s legacy is far more complicated—marked by allegations of extortion, self-promotion, the notorious exaggeration of his role in the events surrounding Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and his blatant attempts to be seen as King’s successor in the civil rights movement. You can read more about that in my colleague Rick Moran’s piece here.



President Donald Trump, who knew Jackson for decades before their political paths diverged, has weighed in on the controversial figure’s death with a lengthy and personal statement on Truth Social, reflecting on their long relationship. And it’s not at all what I expected. Last year, Trump’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner and his wife was rather — well, let’s just say I wasn’t a fan of it. Naturally, I was expecting something similar about Jackson, and I was surprised to see it wasn’t like that at all. “The Reverend Jesse Jackson is Dead at 84,” Trump wrote. “I knew him well, long before becoming President.” He described Jackson as “a good man, with lots of personality, grit, and ‘street smarts,’” adding, “He was very gregarious – Someone who truly loved people!”

Trump also took aim at Jackson’s critics, noting, “Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way.” He detailed several ways he says he supported Jackson and causes important to him. “I provided office space for him and his Rainbow Coalition, for years, in the Trump Building at 40 Wall Street,” Trump said. He also pointed to his criminal justice reform efforts, writing that he “Responded to [Jackson’s] request for help in getting CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM passed and signed, when no other President would even try.”

Trump further cited his administration’s record on historically black colleges and universities. He said he “Single handedly pushed and passed long term funding for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs), which Jesse loved, but also, which other Presidents would not do.” In addition, he noted that he “Responded to Jesse’s support for Opportunity Zones, the single most successful economic development package yet approved for Black business men/women, and much more.”

Calling Jackson “a force of nature like few others before him,” Trump also made a striking claim about Jackson’s political influence. “He had much to do with the Election, without acknowledgment or credit, of Barack Hussein Obama, a man who Jesse could not stand,” Trump wrote. Trump concluded by offering condolences to Jackson’s loved ones. “He loved his family greatly, and to them I send my deepest sympathies and condolences. Jesse will be missed!”

Read more …

“My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.. ”

• Race Hustler or Civil Rights Icon? Jesse Jackson Dead At 84 (Rick Moran)

He was a con artist and a “race pimp.” He was an opportunist, a race hustler, and a corporate shakedown expert who enriched himself by using funds earmarked for “the cause” for his own personal gain. He was an admirer of notorious racist and virulent antisemite Louis Farrakhan.Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday at the age of 84, was all of that. He was also one of the greatest orators of the 20th century, a groundbreaking political figure, one of the best political strategists in American history, and a towering figure in local Chicago Democratic politics. You can’t look at Jesse Jackson as a one-dimensional stick figure. Like all humans, especially those who have left their mark on history, he was a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can’t simplify his sins or his enormous contributions to American politics. He was a force whose impact will be felt for generations.


There is no doubting Jesse Jackson’s impact on American history. He was the first “serious” black candidate for president in that he energized the base of the Democratic Party in a multi-racial coalition that forced the party to swing hard left. His grassroots coalition, known as “Operation Push,” was the most dynamic organization in the U.S. until a scandal brought it down.He was given the opportunity to speak in prime time in the 1984 and 1988 conventions despite finishing far behind Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in the nomination race. Both speeches are considered among the finest convention speeches in American history. “My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised,” Mr. Jackson said at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. “They are restless and seek relief.”

“His transcendent rhetoric was inseparable from an imperfect human being whose ego, instinct for self-promotion, and personal failings were a source of unending irritation to many friends and admirers and targets for derision by many critics,” writes the New York Times. Prominent black social critic Stanley Crouch once said that Jackson “will be forever doomed by his determination to mythologize his life. That mythologizing began in earnest within minutes of the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968. While the rest of King’s inner circle was in shock, Jackson seized the moment, looking to wrest the mantle of “civil rights leader” from any of King’s close associates.

New York Times: “He was one of several aides who rushed toward Dr. King after he was shot. Later that night, Mr. Jackson hurried back to Chicago, parts of which were in flames in the unrest that followed the assassination. The next morning, he appeared on the “Today” show wearing the olive turtleneck sweater, blotted with blood, that he had worn the day before in Memphis. At a memorial convocation of the Chicago City Council that day, he declared, “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.” He added: “He went through, literally, a crucifixion. I was there. And I’ll be there for the resurrection.”

At least once publicly, he indicated that he was the last person to speak with Dr. King and that he had held his bloodied head as Dr. King lay dying. Others who were there said it never happened. Mr. Jackson’s account changed over time, from cradling Dr. King’s head to reaching toward it.If Mr. Jackson had been a figure of suspicion before, he became an object of outrage after Dr. King’s death. Some in Dr. King’s inner circle — including his eventual successor, Mr. Abernathy, and Hosea Williams, both of whom rushed to Dr. King when he was shot — questioned the accuracy of Mr. Jackson’s account and resented what they saw as his calculated grab to seize the spotlight as the First Mourner.

Over the decades, the story Jackson would tell about where he was and what he did during the assassination would go through several iterations. The storytelling revealed Jackson as a man desperate to be seen as King’s anointed successor. “If no one could replace Dr. King, Mr. Jackson was the one who spent most of his life trying,” writes the Times. It was never to be. Jackson couldn’t get out of the way of his own biases and racist dogmas. Where King reached out and begged for understanding, Jackson fueled the fires of racial division, while trying to claim he was a uniter, not a divider. His comments about New York City being “hymietown,” his friendship with Nation of Islam leader Farrakhan, and his insistence on being anywhere and everywhere a racial incident occurred in order to grab the spotlight and try to “racialize” the issue caused resentment and disgust among friend and foe alike. v

His “shakedowns” of corporate America, where he threatened companies with boycotts unless they adopted policies he prescribed (and donated cash to Operation PUSH), were outrageous and bordered on extortion. Jackson’s success as a political organizer was nothing short of astonishing. His 1988 presidential campaign was so successful that the Democrats were forced into trying to sideline him by putting up the white liberal governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis.

He tried again in 1988, and this time he began as a party heavyweight. In the Super Tuesday primary on March 8, he ran first or second in 16 of the 21 primaries and caucuses. Party leaders, fearing they could not win a general election with an assertively left-wing Black presidential candidate, desperately looked for an alternative. In the end, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts won the nomination, even though Mr. Jackson had earned almost seven million primary votes — 29 percent of the total.

No radical left candidate would come close to matching that total until Bernie Sanders in 2016. There is little doubt that Jesse Jackson was one of the primary personalities responsible for dragging the Democratic Party to the far left. Through his rhetoric and consummate organizing skills, Jackson made a huge impact on the Democratic Party and thus, on American history.

Read more …

“Rest in peace, Reverend. America owes you a massive debt of gratitude. ”

• Regarding the Rev (Christian Josi)

We lost an icon today. While it wasn’t entirely shocking considering his health condition, it certainly shocked me and, I imagine, many of us. He was an icon. Fought for others his entire life. Was at Dr. Martin Luther King’s side as he was assassinated. Did amazing work through Rainbow PUSH. My children watched him when he appeared on Sesame Street and thought he was cool. He was cool indeed. Imperfect? Yes, but aren’t we all… I met and befriended him later in his life. I’ll get to that.


But first, an old memory. It was 1984, and he was running for president. I was in college, living with my mother in Redlands, Calif. There is a place called the Redlands Bowl, which is sort of like a local Greek Theater… an outdoor venue. My mom’s house was a mile away. While at the time I was not a fan, I heard his speech from my bedroom. That powerful voice. And it impressed the young me. That strong, passionate voice… As for the meeting and befriending, I’ve been a longtime conservative (now libertarian) activist, but I have always sought out friends on the other side. My best friend from the other side is Dr. Julianne Malveaux, whom I used to watch on tv and get pissed off at.

When I moved to Washington years ago, a mutual friend put us together, and we became instant pals. Her work and history impressed me. Whilst rarely on the same page ideologically, our passions matched. Passion is power. No one had more passion or power than The Rev. Dr. Malveaux invited me two years ago to his annual MLK Day breakfast event. Before it began, she took me backstage. JD Pritzker was there, other important people, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to see him. In the flesh.

And what a nice visit it was. I introduced myself, and he said, “I know who you are, Josi”… as he looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand tight. It was a moment I will never forget. That’s when he won my loyalty. I saw his soul. The soul was a beautiful one.The look in his eye… the unexpected respect. We are a diverse nation. We can agree to disagree, but we cannot afford to be unkind to one another. Jesse liked everyone, as I saw firsthand. Maybe didn’t always agree, but there was respect. That’s the point. It’s not at all about partisanship; it’s about decency. Respect. Keeping Hope Alive is not a joke. It’s a fact. Now more than ever.

Rest in peace, Reverend. America owes you a massive debt of gratitude. And I owe you as well. Thank you for changing my view, for influencing me, and for your work to make our nation better.

Read more …

Too much conversation, not enough logic.

• Mr. Wonderful Destroyed CNN’s Anti-SAVE Act Narrative in 30 Seconds (Margolis)

Entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary was on CNN’s NewsNight Monday, where he wiped the floor with the panel over the SAVE Act. This bill does two simple things: It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to vote. But you know how this goes — the usual suspects on the panel called it “voter suppression.” O’Leary cut through the noise with clean, clear logic, essentially making the point that it is stupid the United States hasn’t already implemented this before. Leigh McGowan, a podcaster you’ve probably never heard of, sparked the debate by declaring, “I think the thing is that the SAVE Act is a voter suppression act wrapped up as a Voter Protection Act. That is not what we’re doing here. We are trying to make it incredibly difficult for certain people to vote.”


She went on about “nationalized elections” and the “federal government taking over what is a state’s job,” invoking “states’ rights,” and lamenting that bills like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act had failed (even though those were actual efforts to nationalize elections). “What we’re doing here is not that,” she said. “We’re talking about having ICE around voting places. We’re talking about taking people and making them afraid.” That has nothing to do with the SAVE Act, but I digress.

Eventually, Kevin O’Leary stepped in and did what leftists dread: He brought up facts. “This narrative has to be bipartisan by every metric,” he began. “Every 24 months, we go through this debate over and over again when every country — in the Nordic countries, in Europe, France, Switzerland, Canada, Australia — solved this problem decades ago.” He broke it down to the basics. “You’ve got to be a citizen to vote. You got to prove it. We all agree at the table on that one.”Then he landed the blow. “There’s such advancement in technology to make sure there’s no cheating. We should implement it here and get all this crapola over with. It’s getting almost boring. Every 24 months, ‘Oh, the election’s rigged!’ ‘Oh, this guy’s doing this, this guy’s doing that.’ No other country has this narrative.”

McGowan tried to defuse it with a half-joking concession. “Kevin, I agree with you. It is getting incredibly boring.” “It’s ridiculous,” O’Leary told her. McGowan, likely realizing the hole she’d dug, tried again: “We talk about this all the time. It’s incredibly boring. But it’s also not an actual problem. Like when you look at the statistics, voting — illegals voting — is not an actual problem in this country. You do need to show ID to be able to vote.”That’s not actually true. Only a handful of states actually require a photo ID to vote. Nevertheless, O’Leary replied, “But you agree, if you’re not a citizen, you can’t vote.” That forced McGowan into agreeing with the core principle of the SAVE Act. “I would agree with that,” she said, “but that’s not what the problem is.

The problem is that we have 0.001% of people that are illegally voting.” She rattled off statistics from the Heritage Foundation and the Brennan Center, trying to reduce the whole issue to a rounding error and claim that the SAVE Act is somehow unnecessary. Abby Phillip broke in again, perhaps realizing O’Leary had shifted the debate onto plain common sense. “It’s already illegal,” she reminded. McGowan echoed, “No one is doing that.”“So why don’t you just say if you cheat and steal and you’re illegal, you go to jail?” O’Leary asked. It’s a fair question. The left claims that fraudulent voting isn’t an actual problem, yet they fight like hell to ensure we don’t pass laws to enforce what they claim isn’t even happening. You can’t have it both ways.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

SKY

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 23 2025

Aug 232025
 
 August 23, 2025  Posted by at 9:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The glass of wine c 1658-1660

 

• FBI Raids Home of John Bolton As Patel Says “NO ONE Is Above The Law” (ZH)
• Turley: John Bolton Could Face Years in Prison (Salgado)
• Bill Clinton Was Ready To Consider Russia In NATO – Declassified Docs (RT)
• Anchorage – A Light At The End of The Tunnel? (Andrianov)
• Trump Laments Stalled Ukraine Peace Talks, Urging New Attacks On Russia (ZH)
• Russia Ready To ‘Show Flexibility’ On Trump’s Ukraine Proposals – Lavrov (RT)
• Putin Vetoed Oreshnik Strike On Kiev – Lukashenko (RT)
• Gabbard Bars Intel Sharing On Russia-Ukraine Talks – CBS (RT)
• The Neutrality Fraud: The West Is About To Trick Ukraine Again (Bobrov)
• More War Is On Its Way (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Engoron’s Half-Billion-Dollar Miscalculation: Court Tosses Trump Fine (Turley)
• By the Batch (James Howard Kunstler)
• Ghislaine: Father Was Intel Asset, Trump ‘Never Inappropriate’: Transcripts (ZH)
• Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself – Maxwell (RT)
• Maxwell Claims Epstein Had No ‘Client List’ (RT)
• Why Would We Want Bad People Here? (Ben Shapiro)
• JD Vance Extensive Interview with Laura Ingraham (CTH)

 

 

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/1958897498262581308


 

 

https://twitter.com/JesseBWatters/status/1958690745189376151

GDP

 

 

Orlov – Ukraine is dying

 

 

 

 

Inevitably, CNN et al are talking almost exclusively about Trump seeking revenge when something like this happens. We’ll have to wait and see what it is about. An interesting detail is that they went to the trouble of asking a judge to sign off on the warrant. Which he did. That indicates there is at least something credible here.

• FBI Raids Home of John Bolton As Patel Says “NO ONE Is Above The Law” (ZH)

In a bombshell of a development, federal agents conducted a raid on the Maryland residence of former National Security Advisor John Bolton on Friday morning, according to various breaking sources. One source connected to the investigation has described that the search was aimed at locating potentially classified documents that authorities suspect Bolton may still have in his possession. nThere are no indicators as of yet that Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, has been arrested or taken into custody. “NO ONE is above the law,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted to X Friday morning, but without giving direct reference to the Bolton house raid. “FBI agents on mission.”

According to NY Post, which first revealed the raid: Federal agents went to Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., at 7 a.m. in an investigation ordered by FBI Director Kash Patel, a Trump administration official told The Post. …The probe — which is said to involve classified documents — was first launched years ago, but the Biden administration shut it down “for political reasons,” according to a senior US official. The FBI are reportedly sorting through papers and boxes: rump has been a longtime fierce critic of Bolton, after Bolton had long ago started going after Trump. Just this week, Bolton was on CNN and prime news shows blasting Trump’s dealings with Putin and the Ukraine negotiations. “I don’t think there’s a peace deal anywhere in the near future,” he said while criticizing the commander-in-chief’s tactics while recently speaking to CNN.

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/1958857350435029104?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1958857350435029104%7Ctwgr%5Ee0853c47c85c9ebfcb96432e5680a2a02ec194db%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Ffbi-raids-maryland-home-john-bolton-patel-says-no-one-above-law

Back in January Bolton had been among former top officials, and Trump adversaries, to get their costly security protections stripped. Axios also recalls that Bolton wrote in a foreword to his memoir that was published last year the words: “a mountain of facts demonstrates that Trump is unfit to be President.” Publication of the book had been delayed so that the White House could review its content for any potential security breaches or disclosure of sensitive information. Mainstream media is being quick to suggest the house raid is an act of retribution. “Bolton was vocal in his criticism of the president after working in the first Trump administration. Trump has aggressively used the power of the presidency to punish political foes,” Axios observes.

Read more …

“We really don’t know if something that has occurred most recently, whether they uncovered something that they believe is sort of evergreen, that this is still a viable criminal case.“

• Turley: John Bolton Could Face Years in Prison (Salgado)

After the FBI raided John Bolton’s house on Friday, legal expert Jonathan Turley noted that the allegations against Bolton could potentially result in years of prison if they are true. The Donald Trump-Kash Patel FBI reportedly raided Bolton’s home and office in search of classified documents. As my colleague Kevin Downey Jr. reported, Trump and co. have yet to confirm the report officially, but Patel and his deputy co-director Dan Bongino hinted on X that it was true and the raid was part of enforcing the law. Turley, when he commented, noted that allegations such as those leveled against Bolton could, if proved in court, lead to decades in prison.

Speaking to Fox News, Turley — who, after all, is left-leaning — would not commit to saying whether he thought the raid was justified, but he did explain how serious the crime is that Bolton seemed to indicate he had committed in a previous book. “It is intriguing here because these are long standing allegations that the book indicated were referenced classified material that he may have acquired while he was in the administration. We’re not clear as to what that is, but it would suggest that is could be national defense information,” Turley said. “The reason that’s important is that creates a heightened potential penalty. So you can have penalties that range from five to 20 years.” Bolton previously and briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser before turning on the president during his first term and becoming an aggressive and persistent critic.

Significantly, Turley continued, “20 years tends to be the sentences for concealing information, obstructing justice — simply having classified information can weigh in at about 10 years, and there are often multiple counts, because each of those documents could be charged separately. So there is a strange history here.” Of course, the raid is particularly interesting to Trump supporters because Bolton pontificated so self-righteously about the outrageous Biden FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, saying that no one is above the law. That is exactly what Patel posted on X Friday after the report came out of the raid on Bolton‘s home and office.

Turley added on Fox, “So you had these allegations coming out as early as the first Trump administration. Then there was an allegation that the Biden administration essentially scuttled a further look at this case, and now we have this new development.” Interestingly, Turley believes there might be a fresh reason to investigate Bolton, which the public has yet to see. He said, “We really don’t know if something that has occurred most recently, whether they uncovered something that they believe is sort of evergreen, that this is still a viable criminal case.“

Bolton – Turley starts right before 10 min mark

Read more …

“NATO has expanded six times since the two leaders’ conversation in 2000, adding 12 more countries during this time.”

• Bill Clinton Was Ready To Consider Russia In NATO – Declassified Docs (RT)

Former US President Bill Clinton promised Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would consider membership for Russia in NATO, according to newly declassified documents. Clinton also claimed that the military bloc’s expansion would not threaten Moscow, the files show. The statements were made during a meeting between the two leaders in the Kremlin on June 4, 2000, according to White House minutes published on Thursday by the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University. “From the outset of the NATO enlargement process, I knew that it could be a problem for Russia. I was sensitive to this, and I want it understood that NATO enlargement does not threaten Russia in any way,” Clinton is quoted as saying.

“I am serious about being ready to discuss NATO membership with Russia.“ He added that he understood that “domestic considerations inside Russia” prevent this, but over time the country “should be a part of every organization that holds the civilized world together.” According to the documents, Putin said he “supported” the idea. Last year, in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin said he had brought up the subject with Clinton. While Clinton agreed at first, he later dismissed the idea after talking to his team, the Russian leader said. Had Clinton agreed, it would have led to a new period of “rapprochement” between Moscow and the military bloc, Putin added. NATO has expanded six times since the two leaders’ conversation in 2000, adding 12 more countries during this time.

After “wave after wave of expansion… we were constantly told: ‘You shouldn’t fear this, it poses no threat to you’,” Putin said in June, adding that “they simply dismissed our concerns, refusing to acknowledge or even consider our position.” “We know better than anyone what threatens us and what does not,” he said. Moscow has cited Kiev’s ambition to join NATO as one of the core causes of the current conflict, which it views as a proxy war being orchestrated by the military bloc against Russia.

Read more …

“One would like to believe so, but for now this tunnel looks more like a maze, one that the United States and Russia still have to find their own way out of – while also leading others out.”

Paul Craig Roberts reposts this article from Ivan Andrianov, Founder and CEO of IntellGlobe Solutions (https://igs.expert/), a “strategic consulting firm specializing in geopolitical risk analysis, international security, and political forecasting”. It is endlessly long, this is just a small part, but it’s interesting. The first mention I see of Exxon Mobil being allowed back in to Russian oil and gas. Putin and Trump have more on their minds than just Ukraine, namely economic cooperation.

• Anchorage – A Light At The End of The Tunnel? (Andrianov)

Before turning to the high politics discussed at the summit in Anchorage, Alaska, it seems appropriate to point to two seemingly positive moments that somehow passed almost unnoticed. First, at the post-talks press appearance, Vladimir Putin read from a prepared text. Moreover, he skipped four pages, setting them aside. And second, Russia allowed America’s ExxonMobil to reclaim its stakes in the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project. The Russian president’s decree was published on August 15, the day of his meeting with Donald Trump. The document supplemented a decree that in October 2022 transferred the Sakhalin-1 operator into Russian jurisdiction; at that time, instead of ExxonMobil, the operator became LLC “Sakhalin-1”.

What does this tell us? Despite many media claims, one can state that not only the summit, but also the visit to Moscow by U.S. President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff – after which the decision for a personal meeting of the two leaders was announced – was preceded by serious preparatory work that simply cannot be done in a few days. Nor can one prepare a speech text in the thirty minutes that elapsed between the end of the talks and Trump and Putin walking out to the press. As for the return of the American energy giant’s stake in the oil project, given all the bureaucratic and legal formalities, I will venture to say it took more than a month.

So all that remains is to congratulate the negotiators of our two countries, who not only managed to set up this meeting, but also avoided premature leaks that could have given opponents of the Russian-American dialogue a chance, if not to derail the Alaska summit, then at least to complicate it. Such concerns existed on both the Russian and the U.S. sides. Now to how Russia’s expert and political circles assess the outcome of this meeting, which has already been called historic in both Washington and Moscow. I hope what is meant is that it will become a point of reference from which relations between our countries begin to return to normal.

As for the results of the summit, the prevailing view in Moscow is that they should be assessed as successful for both sides. The fact there were no sensations or “breakthroughs” is a sign of the seriousness of what occurred – an acknowledgment by both parties of the complexity of the situation. The sides’ positions have been laid out (to each other and, in fact, to everyone) and, I hope, are not subject to reversal. That is a result. The presidents of the two countries accomplished the minimum tasks they set for this meeting. Trump showed that he is, in effect, the only Western leader who can, in principle, conduct a constructive dialogue with Russia. At the same time, the U.S. president demonstrated to his Euro-Atlantic partners that the outcome of the West’s interaction with Russia depends on him – and on no one else.

Moscow demonstrated that its demands are recognized and that its security must be taken into account in all variants of a peaceful settlement. This is a fundamental breakthrough. Everything before this proceeded from the simple idea that the West would present Russia with certain conditions to which it was supposedly to agree. The conditions shifted, but the approach remained. Moscow has now achieved that a resolution is possible only through dialogue and with due regard for Russian interests. Another important point – voiced for the first time by both sides – is that European countries bear responsibility for pushing the Ukrainian conflict to a high level of escalation. More importantly, it was finally stated in earnest – not only by Russia – that achieving a long peace is far more significant than the terms for a short-term ceasefire, under cover of which the West will try to rearm the Ukrainian army. Trump said as much in a tough phone call with Zelensky and EU leaders.

In this context, two scenarios are forecast for the future development of relations between the Kremlin and the White House. The first – call it the optimal one – is that Russia and the United States resolve the central problem in their bilateral relations and reach an acceptable settlement on Ukraine. Then the remaining issues, including strategic stability, Arctic cooperation, and strategic arms reductions, can be handled quickly and easily. And cooperation in hydrocarbons would be arranged in the spirit of Trump’s favored deal-making. Putin opened the road toward resolving the hydrocarbons question with a decree on potential foreign stakes in the “Sakhalin” project.

The second option is that the conflict goes unresolved due to the actions of European countries and their destructive policies. In that case Trump will try to “jump out” of the conflict, but with serious political losses and without any noticeable economic dividends. And Russia will continue grinding down the Ukrainian army, pursuing by military means the objectives announced at the outset of the special military operation (SMO) and reaffirmed by Putin in June of last year.

Read more …

“Putin will only sit down with Zelensky if they are already at the goal line of having worked out a permanent peace deal.”

You see the Exxon Mobil deal, and then there would be new attacks?

• Trump Laments Stalled Ukraine Peace Talks, Urging New Attacks On Russia (ZH)

Now, merely a week out from when Presidents Trump and Putin met in Alaska, the White House’s admirable peace efforts seem to be unraveling and even hopelessly stalled. Many independent-minded analysts had from the very start said that this conflict will ultimately be settled on the battlefield. The Wall Street Journal too seems to be coming around to this view: On Monday, President Trump boasted about quickly brokering peace to end the bloody Ukraine conflict. By Thursday, he was saying that Kyiv had no chance of winning the war without new attacks on Russia. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense,” Trump posted on social media. “Interesting times ahead!!!” His turnaround underscored the fading optimism about Trump’s latest push to end the war.

Indeed this is another example of the West trying to have its cake and eat it too, as Trump strongly hints that Ukraine must take the offensive while simultaneously lamenting that Putin and Zelensky are not getting together in a hoped-for summit. Trump is essentially saying Ukraine cannot win the war unless it launches attacks on Russia. “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country,” Trump had explained further in his Truth Social statement. The WSJ in its analysis then turns to one of the big factors which is sure to stymie talks from Moscow’s point of view: security guarantees for Ukraine: U.S. and European officials are still negotiating the makeup of a peacekeeping force that would aim to deter future Russian attacks against Ukraine if a peace deal was reached. Even that idea was quickly rebuffed by the Kremlin and raised questions about Trump’s willingness to commit to a major role for the U.S. military.

With much of his plans still unrealized, Trump is confronted with the uncertainties that have dogged him for the past seven months: How willing is he to pressure Putin, and how far is he willing to go in backing Zelensky? As we highlighted before, the ‘logic’ of this is contradictory and will lead nowhere. Why would Russia agree to end its military operations if in the end NATO-like ‘security guarantees’ are to be given to Ukraine as a reward?…to quote Moon of Alabama. Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reminded the US and its Western allies on Thursday that President Putin has “repeatedly said that he is ready to meet, including with Zelensky, if there is understanding that all issues that require consideration at the highest level have been worked out thoroughly” by experts and ministers.

To translate, Putin will only sit down with Zelensky if they are already at the goal line of having worked out a permanent peace deal. This has been reiterated in a Friday foreign ministry statement: LAVROV: PUTIN-ZELENSKY MEETING NOT PLANNED YET — KREMLIN SAYS SUMMIT POSSIBLE ONLY AFTER AGENDA IS AGREED. And as RT outlines further, “Moscow maintains that any lasting settlement must eliminate the root causes of the conflict, address Russia’s security concerns, and recognize current territorial realities, including the status of Crimea and the four former Ukrainian regions that voted to join Russia in 2022.” This means there must be the permanent neutrality of Ukraine, the formal ceding of territories, and that the Russian neighbor cease being militarized by NATO.

Reuters also describes, “Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine give up all of the eastern Donbas region, renounce ambitions to join NATO, remain neutral and keep Western troops out of the country, three sources familiar with top-level Kremlin thinking told Reuters.” And per Bloomberg: “A full ceasefire or peace agreement in Ukraine remains unlikely this year, with even the prospect of a partial truce fading, according to JPMorgan emerging market and policy strategists.”

Read more …

“President Trump suggested after Anchorage several points which we share, and on some of them we agreed to show some flexibility…”

• Russia Ready To ‘Show Flexibility’ On Trump’s Ukraine Proposals – Lavrov (RT)

Moscow has agreed to consider a number of US President Donald Trump’s proposals to resolve the Ukraine conflict, but Vladimir Zelensky has rejected them all, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with NBC News on Friday. Trump put forward the initiatives following his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, Lavrov said. “President Trump suggested after Anchorage several points which we share, and on some of them we agreed to show some flexibility,” Lavrov told NBC. According to the top diplomat, Trump brought up the proposals in his meeting with Zelensky and some of his Western European backers in Washington on Monday.

He clearly indicated, it was very clear to everybody that there are several principles which Washington believes must be accepted, including no NATO membership, including the discussion of territorial issues, and Zelensky said no to everything. Lavrov added that the Ukrainian leader has also refused to rescind “legislation prohibiting the Russian language.” “Putin is ready to meet with Zelensky when the agenda would be ready for a summit,” he said, but added that as things stand, “there is no meeting planned.” Trump suggested that the next stage of peace negotiations should be a one-on-one meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders before a potential trilateral peace summit. Zelensky “has to show some flexibility,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.

On Thursday, however, Lavrov said that Kiev is showing no interest in a sustainable peace with Moscow. He pointed to statements made by Zelensky aide Mikhail Podoliak, who said that Ukraine would seek to regain any territories “de facto” left to Russia in a peace deal, and that Kiev would seek to join a military alliance, even if not NATO. According to Lavrov, these goals are at odds with the joint peace efforts being undertaken by Putin and Trump. Moscow has long insisted on a peace agreement that eradicates the underlying causes of the conflict. It has demanded that Ukraine maintain neutrality, stay out of NATO and other military alliances, demilitarize and denazify, as well as accept the new territorial reality.

Read more …

“..unnamed figures in Russia had suggested using the system against Kiev’s “decision-making centers,” but Putin refused. “Absolutely not,” was the Russian leader’s response [..] if such a strike had taken place, “there would have been nothing left.”

• Putin Vetoed Oreshnik Strike On Kiev – Lukashenko (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin vetoed a proposal to strike the administrative center of Kiev with Moscow’s new Oreshnik missiles, his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko has said. The Oreshnik, Russia’s newly developed medium-range hypersonic missile system which can travel at speeds of up to Mach 10, has already entered serial production. The system, which analysts claim cannot be intercepted, can carry nuclear or conventional warheads, and release multiple guided warheads. Speaking to reporters in Minsk on Friday, Lukashenko claimed that unnamed figures in Russia had suggested using the system against Kiev’s “decision-making centers,” but Putin refused.

“Absolutely not,” was the Russian leader’s response, according to the Belarusian president, who added that if such a strike had taken place, “there would have been nothing left.” Putin has previously said that the West has been trying to provoke Russia into using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but noted that there has been no need for such measures. “I hope it won’t be necessary,” he said in May. The Oreshnik was first battle-tested in November 2024 when it struck Ukraine’s Yuzhmash defense facility in Dnepr. Its destructive power in conventional form has been compared by Russian officials to a low-yield nuclear strike.

Lukashenko stressed that Moscow is committed to a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine conflict, recalling that Putin refrained from striking civilian targets in Kiev when Russian forces reached the city’s outskirts in early 2022, later withdrawing forces altogether. At the time, Moscow described the move as a goodwill gesture ahead of a potential peace deal, which Kiev declined to sign after being urged by the UK to continue fighting. Russia and Ukraine resumed direct talks in Istanbul in May 2025 and have since held three meetings. While no settlement has yet been reached, Moscow has maintained that it is open to negotiations. Officials stress, however, that any agreement must address the root causes of the conflict and reflect the new realities on the ground.

Read more …

“Gabbard has been critical of the West’s hawkish approach to the Ukraine conflict, suggesting that it was caused by NATO’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”…

• Gabbard Bars Intel Sharing On Russia-Ukraine Talks – CBS (RT)

US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has ordered all information about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace negotiations be withheld from US intelligence partners, CBS News reported on Thursday, citing sources. Several unnamed US officials familiar with the matter told the outlet that the memo, which is dated July 20, directed intelligence agencies to classify all relevant data and subject analysis as NOFORN – not to be shared with foreign partners, including members of the Five Eyes intelligence framework, which includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. nThe reported memo strictly limits the distribution of such materials to the agency from which they originated.

However, it does not appear to bar the sharing of diplomatic or military operational intelligence collected outside the US intelligence community, such as security information shared with Ukrainian forces. CBS also cited several former US officials who warned the directive’s sweeping scope could erode trust between Washington and its allies built on open intelligence sharing. Others, however, disagreed, pointing out that such a move is not unprecedented in US practice and that withholding information in areas of diverging interests is common among Five Eyes partners. Gabbard has been critical of the West’s hawkish approach to the Ukraine conflict, suggesting that it was caused by NATO’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s “legitimate security concerns” regarding Ukrainian membership in the bloc.

The reported directive preceded the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump in Alaska on August 15. That meeting – to which neither Ukraine nor any of the US allies were invited – concluded without an agreement on a ceasefire or a peace deal, although both leaders praised the talks as constructive. In the days following the Alaska talks, Trump hosted Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and European leaders at the White House. Talks focused on finding a path to settling the conflict and security guarantees for Ukraine. Trump later told Zelensky that he had to “show flexibility” and reiterated that Kiev would not join NATO.

Read more …

Finland’s WWII history is not pretty. Not a great example. But everybody much prefers to ignore it, and that’s a bad idea.

• The Neutrality Fraud: The West Is About To Trick Ukraine Again (Bobrov)

At the Washington summit on Monday, one guest stood out. The extended session of Euro-Atlantic leaders – hastily convened at the White House right after Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Zelensky – brought together the usual heavyweights: the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the heads of NATO and the EU. Yet seated at the same table was someone who, at first glance, hardly seemed to belong in that club of power brokers: Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb. To an outsider, it might have looked odd. Why was the Finnish leader invited when the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic states were not? The answer lies not in protocol courtesy but in the role Stubb now plays. His presence was a nod to a man whose career embodies the whole project of “Euro-Atlantic solidarity” – a project now under strain since Trump’s return to the White House.

Stubb is a cosmopolitan in every sense: a Swedish Finn, married to a Briton, educated in South Carolina, Bruges, Paris, and London. A golfer who bonded with Trump on the green, but also a seasoned foreign minister in the late 2000s, Stubb has become a rare kind of adviser – someone Trump listens to on European security in an administration where career diplomats are almost absent. It is telling that the Washington summit did not produce a US ultimatum forcing Ukraine into a peace deal with Moscow. Instead, the focus was on designing security guarantees for Kiev – an alternative to NATO’s Article 5, since membership in the alliance is no longer on the table. And behind that shift, many suspect, stands Stubb. He is quietly becoming the architect of a new Western security system, built on an openly anti-Russian foundation.

In Washington, Stubb framed his vision in a phrase that quickly went viral: “We found a solution in 1944 – and I believe we can find one in 2025.” He was alluding to Finland’s peace treaty with the USSR after World War II, and suggesting that Ukraine could follow a similar path. But here’s the catch: Stubb’s version of “Finlandization” bears little resemblance to the original concept. In his model, Ukraine would follow Finland’s supposed example – joining the EU and NATO structures, becoming part of the Western economic and military infrastructure, and, in practice, turning itself into a forward operating base against Moscow. That vision assumes a militarized society, stripped of industrial potential, and defined by an ethnonational identity designed to fence out Russian influence through the Russian-speaking population.

This is not Finlandization. It is its opposite. The original model, coined during the Cold War, described something very different: a small country leveraging its geography to live in peace with its powerful neighbor. Finland, after 1944, accepted tough compromises – ceding 10% of its territory, declaring neutrality, abandoning the dream of ethnic exclusivity. The payoff was stability, prosperity, and the chance to serve as a bridge between East and West. Helsinki became a symbol of détente in 1975 when it hosted the CSCE Final Act, a milestone in Cold War diplomacy. Finland’s economic boom – from Nokia to Valio, from Stockmann to Tikkurila – was rooted in precisely that balancing act: trading and cooperating with both blocs, and especially with nearby Leningrad. Neutrality allowed Finland to spend less on guns and more on butter, and that choice paid off.

Could such a model have worked if, back in 1944, the Finnish leadership had doubled down on nationalism? Almost certainly not. It took Marshal Mannerheim’s pragmatism – and his readiness to compromise – to give Finland a viable future.

Read more …

Inside countries’ borders.

• More War Is On Its Way (Paul Craig Roberts)

For decades the British and European governments regardless of party in power have allowed millions of unassimilable people of color to walk into the countries and abuse the white women while white taxpayers are given the responsibility for their housing and upkeep. The governments, and the professors of course, call what are in fact immigrant-invaders “migrants.” “Migrants” has a legal connotation to it, but there is nothing legal about the entry. You try it, white person. Try to walk into the UK or a European country without a passport and, if required, a visa, and visible means of support. So why is it OK for immigrant-invaders to do it?

In 1973 Jean Raspail described in The Camp of the Saints the total collapse of the French belief system and that of other white ethnicities that left the leadership classes in the West without the will to protect their peoples and their cultures. The same has occurred among Democrats in the US. The Democrats would not permit President Trump during his first term to close the border with Mexico. The Obama and Biden regimes not only left the border open, they also used taxpayers money to recruit immigrant-invaders and finance their trek into America. Very quickly white American business people created businesses that made money by providing upkeep at taxpayers’ expense for the immigrant invaders. These private profit-making operations are called “asylum accommodation programs.” In the US the pretense that the immigrant-invaders are just doing Americans a favor by rushing to fill jobs Americans would not take was put to the lie by the bus stations, airports, and hotels filled with immigrant-invaders living off the taxpayers’ wallet.

Some American communities have been overwhelmed by Democrat regimes depositing huge numbers of immigrant-invaders in their communities. This is also the story in Britain and Europe. The ongoing and increasing rapes and crime have finally sparked a rebellion in a number of British communities. The UK government is being forced to disperse the large numbers of young male immigrant-invaders warehoused in hotels into the wider community. The UK government is trying to commandeer thousands of residential houses so the immigrant-invaders can be dispersed and made less visible than the current concentrations. The rent, utilities, council tax, and repairs will all be paid for by taxpayers. And, of course, the provision of homes for the 109,343 “asylum seekers” who entered Britain in the year ending last March, a 15% increase from 2024, drives up rents and house prices, thus further burdening ethnic British. And still the UK government has no inclination to stop the overrunning of Britain by immigrant-invaders.

Yet this same government is so very concerned that Ukraine’s borders be protected by British taxpayers that the government has agreed to purchase billions of dollars of American weapons to send to Ukraine at British taxpayers’ expense to protect Ukrainian borders. It is the same all over Europe. How can this mindlessness of British and European governments be understood and explained? The only answer I can give is that the intellectual class destroyed the belief system. For decades white people have been denounced in university classrooms as racist exploiters. More recently these denunciations have entered the elementary schools. Affirmatory statements in support of Western civilization have disappeared from Western education. Today the program is multiculturalism, which means the replacement of white values and white culture with a tower of babel. And that is what every European country, the UK, Canada, and the US have become.

A tower of babel cannot be united and has no common purpose. It is these towers of babel that now find themselves arrayed against three powerful countries with far more homogeneous populations and, perhaps, enough self-belief to resist. In the US the only unified Americans are Trump’s MAGA-supporters. They are ordinary people fed up with the denigration and decay of their country. Hillary Clinton dismisses them as “Trump Deplorables.” In the UK and Europe anyone who represents the ethnic basis of the countries is dismissed and harassed as a “fascist.” Only France has a political party based on national ethnicity, and the leader of the party has been banned by the French establishment from running for office for five years. She was convicted on orchestrated charges that she embezzled European Union funds. If the conviction had failed, some other bogus charge would have been pulled out of the hat.

The British, European, and American societies are the weakest possible societies before dissolution. In the US the establishment is more opposed to Trump than to Russia and China. Societies as weak as the West cannot prevail in war. The cause that is driving the West to disastrous war is the agenda of the Zionist neoconservatives. This cause is known as the Wolfowitz doctrine of American hegemony. By American they mean Israel’s hegemony, for which American lives, money, and reputation have been used blatantly during the first quarter of the 21st century resulting in the destruction of five countries for Greater Israel, six if we include Palestine. Iran, number seven, is in waiting. For the neoconservatives, Iran is a more desirable target than Russia. Iran stands in Israel’s way, whereas Russia does not. What the so-called “Ukrainian peace process” is probably about is Trump’s withdrawal of the US as a direct participant so that Trump can focus the US on Iran for Netanyahu. If this is a reasonable interpretation, than progress in the Ukraine negotiations simply means more and wider war.

Read more …

Very strong from law professor Turley.

• Engoron’s Half-Billion-Dollar Miscalculation: Court Tosses Trump Fine (Turley)

In New York, a court revealed that a leading citizen had cooked the books by inflating questionable figures without any support in reality. Moreover, his wild overvaluation was widely viewed as motivated by his self-aggrandizement. The final reported figures are so absurdly inflated that they were rejected in their entirety. In the end, he was off by over half a billion dollars. That man is Judge Arthur Engoron. After a New York appellate court unanimously threw out Engoron’s absurd half-a-billion-dollar judgment and interest against President Donald Trump, the irony was crushing. It was Engoron who seemed, as he characterized Trump witnesses, as having “simply denied reality.” It made his notorious reliance on an assessment of Mar-a-Lago as worth between $18 million and $27.6 million seem like good accounting. In the end, he could not get a single judge to preserve a single dollar of that fine.

For some of us who covered that trial, the most vivid image of Engoron came at the start. He indicated that he did not want cameras in the courtroom, but when the networks showed up, Engoron took off his glasses and seemed to pose for the cameras. It was a “Sunset Boulevard” moment. We only need Gloria Swanson looking into the camera to speak to “those wonderful people out there in the dark!” and announcing “all right, [Ms. James], I’m ready for my close-up.” The close-up was not a good idea, and, on appeal, it was perfectly disastrous. The court found little legal or factual basis for his fine. The purported witnesses not only did not lose a dime, but they testified that they made money on the loans and wanted new loans with the Trump administration. That did not move Engoron. From the start, he was speaking to those “wonderful people out there.”

You did not have to go far. In both the civil and criminal trials of Trump in New York, there was a carnival atmosphere in the street outside the courthouse. It was really not derangement as much as delirium. Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James had injected lawfare directly into the veins of New Yorkers. Pledging in her campaign to bag Trump (without bothering to name any crime or violation), James was elected based on her recreational rather than legal appeal. Yet, James could not have succeeded if she had not had a judge willing to ignore reality and cook the books on the fines. She needed a partner in lawfare. She needed Engoron. Even for some anti-Trump commentators, the judgment was impossible to defend and some acknowledged that they had never seen any case like this one brought in New York.

Judge David Friedman gave Engoron a close-up that would have made Swanson wince. He detailed how the underlying law “has never been used in the way it is being used in this case – namely, to attack successful, private, commercial transactions, negotiated at arm’s length between highly sophisticated parties fully capable of monitoring and defending their own interests.” He accused Engoron of participating in an effort clearly directed by James as “ending with the derailment of President Trump’s political career and the destruction of his real estate business.” Other judges said that Engoron’s fine was so off base and engorged that it was an unconstitutional order under the Eighth Amendment, protecting citizens from “cruel and unusual” punishments. So, Engoron not only inflated the figures but shredded the Constitution in his effort to deliver a blow against Trump.

Trump can now appeal the residual parts of the Engoron decision imposing limits on the Trump family doing business in New York. Some of those limits could be moot by the time of any final judgment. Ironically, if Engoron had shown a modicum of restraint, he might have secured a victory. During the trial in New York, I said that he would have been smart to impose a dollar fine and limited injunctive relief. That, however, required a modicum of judicial restraint and judgment. Instead, Engoron chose to walk down the stairway into infamy. He was off by half a billion dollars, which could put him in the Bernie Madoff class of judges. In other words, if he wanted to be remembered on that first day, Arthur Engoron succeeded.

Read more …

“The problem with the future is that it is both unpredictable and inescapable.” — Tarik Cyril Amar

• By the Batch (James Howard Kunstler)

Please everybody, extricate yourselves from the mud-wallow of cynicism. Naysayers arise and open your eyes! Sleepwalkers and black-pillers, smell the coffee and wake up! Sob-sisters dry your tears! We are marching into a promised land of accountability after all. Our country, you well know, has been sore beset under a long-running seditious coup orchestrated by an ever more insane Bolshevik-Jacobin syndicate of political reprobates seeking to erase every boundary between the real and the unreal since 2016, a year that now lives in infamy. All their malice and roguery has been focused on the odd figure who somehow rose to lead the opposition to their burgeoning color revolution, Mr. Trump, who, through some alchemy of fortitude, managed to evade their many-footed depredations — to get re-elected.

Of course, you’ve also noticed that psychological projection is the heart of the seditionists’ game. Whatever ploy or subterfuge they accuse you of, is exactly what they are doing. Their mainstay is the phrase conspiracy theory. Whenever one of their many turpitudes is carried out — such as a rigged election — your notice of it is labeled a conspiracy theory. In fact, their long train of activities to turn the country upside-down and inside-out has been one drawn-out seditious conspiracy. And that is liable to be precisely one of the charges lodged against them — but surely not the only charge.

You have seen news (anywhere but in The New York Times) that grand juries are being convened here and there to scrutinize a whole lot of bad behavior by a whole lot of officials who recklessly wielded their power, who betrayed the nation, who broke institutions, destroyed lives, careers, and households, and, as an added insult, attempted to make you swallow one patent absurdity after another — a Potemkin president, drag queens in the schools, a massive invasion of alien mutts across an open border, Saint George Floyd and “mostly peaceful protests,” math is racist, boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms — all in their campaign to destroy American cultural coherence while they seized totalistic political control and sniped their adversaries off the game board. (Just look how they destroyed Rudolf Giuliani, a heroic figure who saved New York City in the 1990s.)

Grand juries are a sign that something serious is up. Evidence is being gathered by a new FBI, no longer dedicated to just covering-up its past crimes. A sign of how serious this effort is: the hiring last week of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as Co-Deputy FBI Director. Mr. Bailey, you may recall, presided over the Missouri v Biden lawsuit (2022) about the “Joe Biden” White House’s efforts to coerce social media into censorship. The SCOTUS killed the case on spurious grounds for “lack of standing to sue.” But the government censorship crusade was a hallmark affront to the Constitution in the years’ long seditious conspiracy against the American people. It could even return as a criminal— not a civil — case this time, since censorship was so central to the overall coup.

Read more …

Plausible?

• Ghislaine: Father Was Intel Asset, Trump ‘Never Inappropriate’: Transcripts (ZH)

The DOJ has just released transcripts and audio from two days of interviews last month with Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who said that President Trump was “never inappropriate with anybody” while he and Epstein were associates, and that her father was an intelligence asset. “Did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world?” asked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in Tallahassee, Florida last month. “Absolutely never, in any context,” Maxwell replied. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way,” Maxwell said in another segment. Maxwell also said her father, the late Robert Maxwell, was an intelligence asset…

Robert Maxwell, a media tycoon and former Labour MP, was notably given a state funeral in Jerusalem after ‘accidentally’ falling off his Yacht, the “Lady Ghislaine.” He was long speculated to have been a secret agent for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence office that is equivalent to the CIA. By proxy, that suspicion has led to speculation that the intelligence agency Epstein was associated with was the Mossad as well. “It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Epstein had connections to the [Israeli intelligence community],” said Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, whose investigative reporting was the reason that the Epstein case was reopened after it was buried by federal prosecutors in 2008. “Robert Maxwell certainly had those kinds of connections, and Epstein had a close relationship with Robert Maxwell.” Ghislaine, however, said that her father and Epstein never met.

She also does not believe Epstein killed himself. She also provided some tricky answers about Mossad… “I do not believe he died by suicide,” said Maxwell, who added that she has no idea who might have killed him. Also interesting is that Ghislaine admitted to being “part of the beginning process of the Clinton Global Initiative.”

Read more …

“If that is what they wanted, they would’ve had plenty of opportunity when he wasn’t in jail.”

• Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself – Maxwell (RT)

Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante Ghislaine Maxwell has said she does not believe the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender committed suicide behind bars. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for trafficking women to Epstein, was interviewed by the Department of Justice last month due to renewed interest in the case. According to a transcript released Friday, Maxwell told investigators, “I do not believe he died by suicide, no.” She dismissed the idea that an outside party could have ordered a “hit” on Epstein, adding, “If it is indeed murder, I believe it was an internal situation.” When asked if Epstein could have been targeted because he possessed damaging information on powerful figures, Maxwell said, “I do not have any reason to believe that. And I also think it’s ludicrous.”

She added, “If that is what they wanted, they would’ve had plenty of opportunity when he wasn’t in jail.” Maxwell also denied that Epstein engaged in blackmail or kept a “client list” linked to sex trafficking. Epstein was found dead in 2019 in his cell at a Manhattan correctional facility while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Democrats, along with some conservative figures, have accused President Donald Trump of a coverup after FBI and DOJ reviews denied the existence of an “Epstein list.” Trump, who has said he ended his friendship with Epstein long before his 2008 conviction, described the accusations as part of a Democrat-led discreditation campaign.

Read more …

“I’m not aware of any blackmail. I never heard that. I never saw it and I never imagined it..”

• Maxwell Claims Epstein Had No ‘Client List’ (RT)

Jeffrey Epstein’s confidante Ghislaine Maxwell has denied that the late financier and convicted sex offender blackmailed his powerful associates. On Friday, the US Department of Justice released audio and a transcript of Maxwell’s interview last month with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for trafficking women to Epstein, was questioned amid renewed speculation that Epstein kept a “client list” of individuals he was accused of trafficking women to. Asked whether Epstein maintained “a black book or a client list,” Maxwell replied: “There is no list that I am aware of.”

According to her, the claims originated in 2009 from Brad Edwards, a lawyer representing several of Epstein’s victims. “I’m not aware of any blackmail. I never heard that. I never saw it and I never imagined it,” Maxwell said. She also denied that President Donald Trump engaged in any improper conduct during his friendship with Epstein. “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” she said. Trump has maintained that he cut ties with Epstein long before his 2008 conviction and was previously unaware of the allegations against him.

Read more …

“Multiculturalism, as a philosophy, can only survive if effectuated by a state that subsidizes fragmentation.”

• Why Would We Want Bad People Here? (Ben Shapiro)

This week, news emerged that the Trump administration has been setting new standards with regard to incoming immigrants. According to Axios, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will now take into account the “positive attributes” of migrants entering the country; such attributes can include community involvement and educational level. Instead of simply seeking to rule out those with records of misconduct, the new system seeks to screen for better immigrants — immigrants who will enrich America. Along the same lines, the CIS will now disqualify applicants who engage in or support “anti-American activity.” As USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser explained, “America’s benefits should not be given to those who despise the country and promote anti-American ideologies. … Immigration benefits — including to live and work in the United States — remain a privilege, not a right.”

Metrics for anti-Americanism include “circumstances where an alien has endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused the views of a terrorist organization or group, including aliens who support or promote anti-American ideologies or activities, antisemitic terrorism and antisemitic terrorist organizations, or who promote antisemitic ideologies.” Shockingly, there are those who are concerned about such standards. Presumably, America can’t be truly free unless we allow in those who support terrorist groups; one day, if we’re lucky, they can even run for mayor of New York or Congresswoman of Michigan. Such are the supposed blessings of liberty bestowed on foreigners by the free speech clause of our Constitution. Professor of sociology Jane Lilly Lopez of Brigham Young University told the Associated Press, “For me, the really big story is they are opening the door for stereotypes and prejudice and implicit bias to take the wheel in these decisions. That’s really worrisome.”

This, of course, ignores that there are evidentiary standards for any allegations of anti-Americanism; skin color or country of origin wouldn’t presumably be enough to bar someone on grounds of anti-Americanism. But for the left, the only excuse for a pro-American ideology must be some form of subtle racism. Meanwhile, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, objected that the new standards were reminiscent of McCarthyism. This ignores the fact that during the Cold War, America did in fact screen for membership in the Communist Party under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, and that refugees and immigrants were screened by American law enforcement agencies to ensure that they were not agents of a foreign power or sympathetic to America’s enemies.

Undergirding all of these objections is a simple and ugly proposition: that becoming an American requires no actual investment in America, and that America ought to be a gigantic agglomeration of disassociated populations. Such a proposition would have been de facto impossible before the rise of the welfare state; people immigrating to the United States generally left places with greater security for an America without security but with grand opportunity, which meant that new immigrants had to learn English, learn a trade, and embrace the Anglo-American cultural and legal traditions of the country in order to succeed. With the rise of an enormous and durable social safety net, the math suddenly changed: People could immigrate to the United States without assimilating in any serious way, and could maintain their pre-American cultures in toto. Multiculturalism, as a philosophy, can only survive if effectuated by a state that subsidizes fragmentation.

That process must now be reversed. And that can only be done by raising the bar to admission. Good immigrants make America stronger. Bad immigrants make it weaker. Treating all immigrants similarly isn’t just foolish; it’s dangerous. And the Trump administration is right for recognizing that root reality.

Read more …

“Palantir founder Peter Thiel has invested in JD Vance since 2013, and the PayPal mafia which includes Elon Musk have never diverged.”

• JD Vance Extensive Interview with Laura Ingraham (CTH)

The social media conversation was triggered by an article in the Wall Street Journal which claimed Elon Musk was reconsidering, actually setting aside the third-party option, and was likely to back JD Vance as his 2028 presidential nominee instead. Factually, for those in the minority who are intellectually honest non-pretenders, the framework of the subsequent online discussion from that WSJ article was laughable. Personally, I wanted to ridicule anyone who was buying into the nonsense that Musk and the Tech alliance (Ellison, Thiel, Sacks, Andreesen, et al) had another option in mind other than Vance.

Silicon Valley is a singular organism when it comes to their collective interests. Palantir founder Peter Thiel has invested in JD Vance since 2013, and the PayPal mafia which includes Elon Musk have never diverged. There is no way Thiel, Musk and the Tech alliance are going to support anyone other than Vance. By the time we get to 2028 they will have a total investment of money and time that spans 15 years in Vance. JD Vance will be the Silicon Valley candidate. JD Vance knows this. As the conversation about bringing Elon Musk back into the Trump camp is triggered, it is not coincidental that JD Vance becomes the conduit. If JD Vance wants to be the presidential nominee in 2028, he will rely on Musk and crew; there is no other candidate for Silicon Valley.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Comet

SuperMoon

Bridge
https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1958823961984475259

Nose
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1958917981661974986

Baby
https://twitter.com/buitengebieden/status/1958882816554303986

Church

Wallace line

Ring of fire

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 27 2025

Jul 272025
 
 July 27, 2025  Posted by at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  121 Responses »


René Magritte La belle captive 1946

 

• Devin Nunes Discusses the DNI Revelations Released by Tulsi Gabbard (CTH)
• Trump Goes There: Calls Out Bill Clinton in Epstein Scandal (Margolis)
• Obama’s CIA Chief ‘Knowingly Used False Intelligence’ To Undermine Trump (Margolis)
• Team Obama Is Running Scared as Russiagate Cover Story Collapses (Margolis)
• Democrats Let California Burn While Aid Went Missing – Trump (RT)
• From Hero to Zero (Ian Proud)
• Kiev Kleptocracy… Stench of Corruption Fouls NATO Regime’s Endgame (SCF)
• Zelensky Thought He Was Killing It. He Was (Loginov)
• The Kremlin Hates von der Leyen About As Much As EU Lawmakers Do (Marsden)
• Hungary Opposes Turning EU’s Budget Into Ukraine’s (RT)
• Ukraine’s Accession Will Bring War To EU – Orban (RT)
• EU Secretly Pressures US Firms To Censor Immigration Criticism: House GOP (JTN)
• Ghislaine Maxwell Gets Limited Immunity, Gives DOJ ‘100 Different People’ (NYP)
• Rubio Shares Trump’s Feelings About Russia-Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• Destroy Russia. Fail? No Problem: Let’s Destroy China! (Pepe Escobar)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1948832714456793580

https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1948791933859508340

https://twitter.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1948855003319591176

debt
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1949108419891225023

 

 

 

 

Little things. Devin Nunes is the former chairman of the House Intelligence Commitee, head of Trump Media, and now Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Through him, Sundance describes a March 2022 lawsuit filed by Trump vs a large group of individuals and entities. Only, it didn’t look like a lawsuit, lots of details were missing. Sundance figured out that it wasn’t meant as a lawsuit, it was “a legal transfer mechanism”. Trump needed evidence available to lawyers somewhere, things needed to be “on the record”, but ‘because of the construct of the lawfare being deployed against Trump, any lawyer would need a “reason* to review the evidence. The Trump -v- Clinton et al lawsuit becomes that ‘reason.’

Great conversation with Gaetz and Nunes.

• Devin Nunes Discusses the DNI Revelations Released by Tulsi Gabbard (CTH)

Former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes appears on OAN with former Congressman Matt Gaetz to discuss the information released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. As noted by Nunes, why did it take this long for the information to surface? That question showcases how corrupt the DC system -the Intelligence Community- is in its effort to protect itself from accountability. Nunes also points to the raid on Mar-a-Lago as a possible entry point for investigative accountability.

Let me refresh on something that could potentially be a revelation down the road. In 2022 a Florida judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by President Trump against Hillary Clinton. [65-page Ruling Here] The media enjoyed ridiculing Trump using the words of the judge who dismissed the case. As noted by the Washington Times, “Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks, a Clinton appointee, said Mr. Trump’s filing was too lengthy, detailing events that “are implausible because they lack any specific allegations which might provide factual support for the conclusions reached.” When I originally read the 108-page Donald Trump lawsuit filed in March 2022, it took me a few moments, and then I realized this was not a lawsuit; this was a legal transfer mechanism created by lawyers to establish a proprietary information silo.

Here’s a totally different take on the issues surrounding the Trump -v- Clinton lawsuit, which -from the outset- I always believed was going to be dismissed because suing all of those characters under the auspices of a civil RICO case was never the objective. In the aftermath of the filing, the silo created by the lawsuit is grounded upon attorney-client privilege, a legal countermeasure to a predictable DOJ-NSD lawfare maneuver, which unfolded in the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid and the subsequent Jack Smith targeting operation. In March 2022 President Trump filed a civil lawsuit against: Hillary Clinton, Hillary for America Campaign Committee, DNC, DNC Services Corp, Perkins Coie, Michael Sussmann, Marc Elias, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Charles Dolan, Jake Sullivan, John Podesta, Robby Mook, Phillipe Reines as well as Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, Nellie Ohr, Bruce Ohr, Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, Neustar Inc., Rodney Joffe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Andrew McCabe. [108-Page Lawsuit Here]

When I was about one-third of the way through reading the lawsuit, I initially stopped and said to myself this is going to take a lot of documentary evidence to back up the claims in the assertions. Dozens of attachments would be needed and hundreds of citations to the dozens of attachments would be mandatory. Except, they were not there. After reading further, while completely understanding the background material that was being described in the filing, I realized this wasn’t a lawsuit per se’. The 108-pages I was holding in my hands was more akin to legal transfer mechanism from President Trump to lawyers who needed it. The lawsuit filing was contingent upon a series of documents that would be needed to support the claims within it. Whoever wrote the lawsuit had obviously reviewed the evidence to support the filing. However, the attachments and citations were missing. That was weird.

That’s when I realized the purpose of the lawsuit. In hindsight, things became clear when the FBI later raided the home of Donald Trump, and suddenly the motive to confiscate documents, perhaps the missing lawsuit attachments and citations, surfaced. With the manipulative, and I said intentional, “ongoing investigation” angle created by the John Durham probe essentially blocking public release of declassified documents showing the efforts of all the lawsuit participants (Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax), in 2021 President Trump needed a legal way to secure and more importantly share evidence.

Think of it like the people around Trump wanting to show lawyers the evidence in the documents. However,because of the construct of the lawfare being deployed against Trump, any lawyer would need a *reason* to review the evidence. The Trump -v- Clinton et al lawsuit becomes that ‘reason.’ The “documents” (classified or not) were likely reviewed by lawyers in preparation for the lawsuit. This is their legal justification for reviewing the documents. In essence, the lawsuit was a transfer mechanism permitting the Trump legal team to review the evidence on behalf of their client, former President Donald Trump.

Read more …

Why does Trump go there? “Clinton flew with a known predator, when to his island, and is seen in photographs with Epstein victims… yet the press won’t ask why..”

• Trump Goes There: Calls Out Bill Clinton in Epstein Scandal (Margolis)

In a political world where Democrats are scrambling to memory-hole every scrap of the Jeffrey Epstein disaster that is damaging to their own party, and trying to make it a Donald Trump scandal, the media is more than happy to help them rewrite history. And President Trump has had enough. After all the fake news and the bogus accusations, on Friday, Trump decided he’d had enough, and barreled right into the hornet’s nest and started torching it with a flamethrower. Reporters asked about the pervert financier’s infamous sex trafficking operation—and Trump didn’t dodge or deflect. He unloaded, pointing the finger straight at former President Bill Clinton. “You ought to be speaking about [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about some of, uh, his friends that are hedge fund guys. They’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.”

When a reporter followed up by asking whether he had written a letter for Epstein’s birthday party, Trump flatly rejected the claim. “I don’t even know what they’re talking about,” he said. “Now, somebody could have written a letter and used my name, but that’s happened a lot. All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier.” He continued attacking Democrats, accusing them of spreading misinformation and fabricating evidence: “Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about, about the dossier.” Repeating the theme, Trump added, “Everything is fake. They’re a bunch of sick people.”

https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1948743571495899323

Clinton has spent years denying he ever visited Epstein’s island. In his 2024 memoir, he repeats the same tired line, pretending he barely knew Epstein, however, it’s public record at this point that Bill Clinton hobnobbed with Epstein, jetted off to his notorious island over and over. But the media has turned a blind eye to Bill Clinton’s deep, well-documented relationship with Epstein. Clinton wants America to take his word that he was just there for the sunshine and cocktails. However, Johanna Sjoberg, an Epstein accuser who testified under oath in 2016, says Epstein once told her “Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.” Meanwhile, Clinton’s team refused to answer questions about a birthday letter he reportedly sent to Epstein, and instead recycled the same tired statement that he cut ties with Epstein “more than a decade before” Epstein’s 2019 arrest—and supposedly knew nothing about his crimes.

Trump, meanwhile, has said plainly he never set foot on the island—and there’s no evidence to the contrary. But the press keeps hounding him, while running cover for Democrats. Working-class Americans see the double standard. Clinton flew with a known predator, when to his island, and is seen in photographs with Epstein victims… yet the press won’t ask why. There’s no outrage, no wall-to-wall coverage—just more selective silence, buried like the Hunter Biden laptop. The hypocrisy is obvious. If Trump sneezes, it’s a crisis. But Democrats can cozy up to monsters and never be called out for it. Well, Trump’s calling them out now.

Read more …

“Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe obstructed the House Intel Committee by prohibiting interviews with more than 30 FBI employees involved in supporting Brennan’s notorious “fusion cell.”

“Brennan “knowingly used false intelligence” to try to undermine President-elect Trump, a federal offense that constitutes outright fraud against the American government..”

[..the Steele Dossier]: “When senior officers called out its obvious flaws in a Dec. 2016 Langley meeting, Brennan stubbornly insisted, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?”

• Obama’s CIA Chief ‘Knowingly Used False Intelligence’ To Undermine Trump (Margolis)

If you thought the Russian collusion hoax couldn’t get any uglier, think again. The circus orchestrated by Obama’s intelligence brass is unraveling in spectacular fashion, and John Brennan finds himself squarely in the crosshairs, not for a political dispute, but for criminal prosecution. This latest chapter, now marked by damning revelations, reeks of a conspiracy to subvert not only a presidency, but the very core of American democracy. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s recent confirmation hit like a thunderbolt: Barack Obama, the architect of this mess, has been named in an official criminal referral to the Justice Department. Brennan, Obama’s CIA chief and a man whose fingerprints are found all over this operation, is most likely staring down an indictment. James Comey isn’t far behind, either; both he and Brennan are already under extreme scrutiny by the FBI. It’s as if each turn yields another layer of deception and abuse of power. Even hardened law professors like Jonathan Turley recognize Brennan as a high-profile trophy for prosecutors—he’s now the “30-point buck out in the open,” primed to fall.

The scope of misconduct here borders on the surreal. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) dropped a 46-page bombshell report that systematically destroyed Brennan’s ICA (Intelligence Community Assessment), which Obama ordered up as a final act of sabotage against Donald Trump. According to Paul Sperry, an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations, the findings were so relentlessly damning that the CIA refused to cooperate, went as far as obfuscating evidence, and sabotaged committee investigators: Shockingly, two key developments torpedoed any last defense for Brennan.

First, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe obstructed the House Intel Committee by prohibiting interviews with more than 30 FBI employees involved in supporting Brennan’s notorious “fusion cell.” Not a single FBI analyst connected to the ICA was allowed to testify; they were all silenced. Second, DNI Gabbard revealed that Brennan “knowingly used false intelligence” to try to undermine President-elect Trump, a federal offense that constitutes outright fraud against the American government. But perhaps the most grotesque twist in this saga is the beating heart of the Russian collusion hoax: the Steele Dossier. Long debunked, thoroughly discredited, and condemned by the same CIA Russia analysts Brennan himself supervised, the dossier was forcibly embedded in Obama’s handpicked ICA.

When senior officers called out its obvious flaws in a Dec. 2016 Langley meeting, Brennan stubbornly insisted, “Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?” In other words, narrative trumped evidence for Obama’s CIA. Despite heated objections, the ICA’s drafters, chosen by Brennan himself, followed marching orders to weaponize dubious rumor and produce a document that served political ends, not reality. As we’ve noted before, the original assessments from Obama’s own intelligence community found no evidence that Russia altered the outcome of the 2016 election. But that didn’t suit the narrative Obama wanted. So he ordered the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) to be rewritten—pressuring John Brennan and his allies to force their preferred conclusion into the official record.

It wasn’t about accuracy or national security. It was about sabotage. They leaked their distortions to a compliant media and set out to delegitimize a duly elected president. The damage they caused to the American republic was—and still is—immeasurable. Now, the truth tumbles out into the open. Brennan’s strategy of “just making it ring true” has collapsed. Those responsible must be held accountable—not because of partisanship but because weaponizing U.S. intelligence agencies to undermine the will of the people is one of the gravest threats imaginable. Americans deserve justice, and the reckoning for Brennan and his Obama-era co-conspirators cannot come soon enough.

Read more …

“The legacy media is once again doing damage control—this time by rolling out anonymous Obama allies to accuse Trump and Gabbard of fabricating “treason” claims to distract from the Epstein scandal..”

• Team Obama Is Running Scared as Russiagate Cover Story Collapses (Margolis)

Team Obama is panicking. You can see it in every flailing move, every desperate media blitz, and every attempt to deflect from the deep, unresolved questions about the origins of Russiagate. The architects of the infamous hoax—Barack Obama, John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey—have all been exposed, thanks to the tenacity of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who recently dropped declassified documents implicating the Obama-era intelligence cabal in concocting and perpetuating the false Russia narrative that hounded President Donald Trump throughout his first term. The stakes are real. Gabbard’s release didn’t just shine a light on the feverish efforts to smear Trump; it laid bare how these intelligence heavyweights cobbled together artificial intel on Trump while deliberately concealing explosive evidence that raised grave concerns about Hillary Clinton’s fitness for office.

Yeah, we’re not forgetting about that. The legacy media is once again doing damage control—this time by rolling out anonymous Obama allies to accuse Trump and Gabbard of fabricating “treason” claims to distract from the Epstein scandal. It’s a transparent attempt to spin the narrative and pressure Republicans into ignoring the growing pile of evidence. I previously wrote about how former State Department spokesperson Ned Price, an Obama White House veteran and ex-CIA analyst, wrote a panicked op-ed for Fox News, lashing out at Tulsi Gabbard, accusing her of pushing revisionist history and dangerously inflating the 2016 Russia collusion narrative. Remarkably absent from his piece is any substantive defense of the narrative he once championed, namely, that Russia tried to influence the election. Of course, he’s not alone.

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has not only hit the media circuit but has also revealed he’s lawyered up. Former CIA Director John Brennan slammed the Trump administration’s findings about the 2016 Russia assessment as “unsurprising, very troubling, and very dangerous.” He called the administration’s defense “ludicrous,” comparing it to “a third-rate lawyer who realizes she has nothing to defend her client and is going to put together an absurd brief that’s laughable on its face.” Brennan claimed the original report was “very carefully worded, meticulously done,” and “stands up to scrutiny,” and continued to lean on the claim it showed Russia acted “at President Putin’s direction” to influence the election in favor of Trump. Susan Miller, a retired CIA officer who helped craft the 2017 intel assessment on Russian election interference, is accusing Gabbard and the Trump White House of “lying” about the intel report’s findings.

Speaking to NBC News, Miller claims the intelligence clearly showed Russia aimed to help Trump win in 2016—though she acknowledged there was no evidence of collusion between Trump’s team and Moscow. Her remarks appear to be a defensive pushback against growing scrutiny of the intel community’s role in shaping the now-discredited Trump-Russia narrative. Team Obama’s panic is nothing short of palpable. The exposure of their manufactured narrative is unraveling before their eyes. Each frantic appearance, each attempt to discredit their critics, only serves to confirm what the American public is starting to see: The hoax was real, and its architects are running out of places to hide. The more they scramble, the more obvious it becomes—Obama’s team is scared, and for the first time, genuinely unsure of what awaits them next.

Read more …

$100 million dollars was raised through a FireAid concert for victims of California’s January wildfires. $100 million dollars is missing.

• Democrats Let California Burn While Aid Went Missing – Trump (RT)

US President Donald Trump has accused Democrats of mishandling $100 million raised through a FireAid concert for victims of California’s January wildfires, calling the initiative “a total disaster” and alleging the money has not reached those affected. Wildfires broke out in early January across Southern California, killing at least 31 people, destroying more than 18,000 structures, leaving tens of thousands displaced, and causing total property losses between $76 billion and $131 billion. The FireAid concert, held January 30, was said to have raised approximately $100 million for wildfire relief. During the broadcast, host Samuel L. Jackson told viewers that “all the money will go directly to people who need help.”

However, in a Truth Social post published on Friday, Trump slammed FireAid as a “total disaster” and “another Democrat inspired scam.” “100 million dollars is missing. Was supposed to go to the Los Angeles fire victims, fires that, with proper management, would never have even happened,” Trump wrote. His comments come after several investigations found that the FireAid funds never reached the wildfire victims. David Howard, who lost two homes in Pacific Palisades, told Fox News, “I have not seen any benefit from the FireAid money, and I am very involved here and neither have my neighbors.” Another victim, Mark Jones, said he expected help after the concert but was never contacted.

FireAid has since stated that it does not distribute funds directly to individuals and has reported that $75 million has been granted so far to 188 nonprofits, with the remaining $25 million scheduled for release in August for long-term recovery, environmental resilience, and rebuilding. While no evidence of fraud has been disclosed, Trump has said that he would be referring the case of the missing funds to the US attorney general, telling reporters that “I think they are going to act very strongly.” Trump has repeatedly blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom and his policies for the fires, accusing him of restricting access to water in the state. Newsom has repeatedly denied the allegations, calling the claims “pure fiction.”

Read more …

Zelensky is losing “it”. The tide is turning.

“He has been completely immune from any criticism in the west, with all allegations dismissed and labelled as Kremlin talking points. Yet, in an instant, that illusion has been shattered.”

• From Hero to Zero (Ian Proud)

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, in February 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky has been elevated to the status of a hero King, pure in thought and deed, interested only in saving humble Ukraine from the onrushing hordes of Russian Orcs. Like Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, but short, thin-skinned and with a gravelly voice. He has been completely immune from any criticism in the west, with all allegations dismissed and labelled as Kremlin talking points. Yet, in an instant, that illusion has been shattered. For the first time since February 2022, Zelensky has been revealed as, in practical terms, no different from other Ukrainian Presidents who have preceded him since the country gained independence in August 1991; corrupt and authoritarian. This comes as no surprise to most realists, but will be a devastating blow to the neo-liberal true-believers who have invested their reputations and cash into defeating Russia.

This week, President Zelensky signed a law that strips two important anti-corruption bodies – the National Anti-Courrption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) of their independence, making them report to the Prosecutor General, who he appointed. Let’s be clear, corruption is and has been a hugely totemic issue in Ukraine, right back to the onset of the Maidan protests in late 2013. During my visits to Ukraine, while posted to Russia, it was absolutely clear that young people believed tackling corruption to be a top priority for the government. This formed part of their desire for Ukraine to move towards European Union membership, for their country to integrate into a community more clearly governed by democracy and the rule of law.

Whether they might consider the European Union to be democratic today, as unelected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen centralises ever more powers, is another question. But that European and anti-corruption aspiration was very real back in 2013. Yet scant progress has been made in tackling corruption since that time. In February 2015, one year after the heigh of the Maidan protests, the British Guardian newspaper published a long piece entitled ‘Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe’. The Ukrainian Prime Minister, Arseny Yatseniuk, who had been personally selected by Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department, was forced to resign in April 2016 in the face of allegations of widespread corruption within his government.

In 2021, the European Court of Auditors produced a report entitled Reducing Grand Corruption in Ukraine: several EU initiatives, but still insufficient results. It defined Grand Corruption as ‘the abuse of high-level power that benefits the few, and causes serious and widespread harm to individuals and society’. In January 2023, an article in the Hill remarked on the need to defeat corruption as Ukraine’s ‘other enemy’. Shortly after that article, a piece, again in the Guardian, discussed the challenges faced by the Head of Ukraine’s National Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP), which works closely with the now de-clawed NABU and SAPO.

That report in particular talked about specific examples of corruption in President Zelensky’s inner circle. Occasionally, Zelensky has purged his cabinet, to show his commitment to governmental reform, for example, sacking his former Defence Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, in the face of widespread accusations that the Ukrainian Defence Ministry was siphoning off foreign donations on an industrial scale. But the occasional show trial has never taken the whiff away that Zelensky’s administration is every bit as corrupt as those that preceded it. And President Zelensky was voted into office in 2019 on a platform to eradicate corruption in Ukraine. In truth, he has done nothing to tackle it.

Read more …

“The Washington Post reported: “Ukrainians protest as Zelensky cracks down on corruption watchdogs.” Ditto, among others, The New York Times, Time, CNN, France 24, The Economist, BBC, and even the usually supportive CIA-run Radio Free Europe. With remarkable uniformity, the Western media were condemning their erstwhile favorite “Churchillian figure”..

• Kiev Kleptocracy… Stench of Corruption Fouls NATO Regime’s Endgame (SCF)

Previously, any observer who had pointed out the rampant corruption that is endemic in the Kiev regime was automatically denounced by Western governments and media as a peddler of Russian disinformation. Hilariously, though, this week, the Kiev kleptocracy burst open in such a spectacular way that even the American and European apologists for the regime could no longer maintain the worst-kept secret of their charade. The fiasco exploded after the self-appointed President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, passed a law that stripped two anti-corruption agencies of their independent powers. Citizens took to the streets of Kiev and other cities in furious protest against what they openly lambasted as an autocratic regime trying to prolong its corrupt racketeering. The demonstrations were the largest seen on the streets of Ukraine despite the country being at war with Russia for over three years.

As the Wall Street Journal reported: “The protests exposed long dormant divisions between the government and society.” Zelensky, whose official presidential mandate expired last year, was stunned by the upsurge in public anger. By the end of the week, he was backtracking on the move to close the anti-graft agencies and was claiming, somewhat unconvincingly, that he was drafting a new bill to return the investigative powers. It was damage-limitation mode and largely prompted by the alarm of his Western backers. It is not clear if the U-turn will appease the Ukrainian public, who appear to have reached a pivotal level of disgust with the Kiev regime, not just over its endemic corruption but also over the grinding war with Russia and forced mobilization of reluctant military recruits.

Significantly, the Western governments and media also reacted with extraordinary contempt towards Zelensky and his ruling circle. Western media headlines highlighted the problem of corruption in Ukraine and Zelensky’s brazen attempt to curb the anti-corruption organizations. The Washington Post reported: “Ukrainians protest as Zelensky cracks down on corruption watchdogs.” Ditto, among others, The New York Times, Time, CNN, France 24, The Economist, BBC, and even the usually supportive CIA-run Radio Free Europe. With remarkable uniformity, the Western media were condemning their erstwhile favorite “Churchillian figure”. Even the slavishly supportive U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham rebuked Zelensky. Were they all of a sudden drinking Russian Kool-Aid?

The Wall Street Journal reported: “Ukrainians ramp up protests as Zelensky tries to find a way out.” Likewise, the BBC headlined: “Zelensky backtracks on law over anticorruption bodies after protests.” There are signs that the scandal has gone too far for Zelensky to now try to put the stench back in the bottle. This is what the staunchest backers of the Kiev regime are really worried about. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were among the European leaders who vigorously remonstrated with Zelensky over the corruption debacle. Von der Leyen chided Zelensky that anti-corruption was key to the country’s path towards eventually joining the EU, if it ever does, which, like its aspiration to join NATO, is doubtful.

What worries the NATO sponsors of the proxy war against Russia is that the corruption in Kiev will hasten a disorderly collapse of the regime. And with that, their long-term geopolitical game to confront and weaken Russia is over. The news of corruption is hardly new, and the Western governments know that. Pentagon auditors have long noted the vast amount of money that has disappeared unaccountably under Zelensky.

The racketeering has become even more brazen since Zelensky declared martial law and cancelled elections last year, making him a self-appointed president indefinitely. The Ukrainian people have had it with his crony rule, while thousands of men are killed and maimed every week on the front lines. Adding to the public anger and resistance are the goon squads that the regime dispatches to drag men off the streets to be sent to the front lines and certain death. Videos increasingly show Ukrainian communities standing up to snatch squads who are terrorizing them.

Read more …

“Over time, it became clear that Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies served not only their official mission but also the political interests of a specific faction – namely, the US Democratic Party.”

• Zelensky Thought He Was Killing It. He Was (Loginov)

Ukrainians have had plenty of reasons to take to the streets: the cancellation of elections, forced mobilization, the refusal to demobilize soldiers who’ve been on the front lines for over three years, the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, corruption in the construction of fortifications, the state’s failure to have the bodies of fallen soldiers returned, and – above all – the complete absence of a plan for ending the conflict with Russia. This list could go on. And yet, none of these issues has triggered large-scale protests. What we’ve seen instead are isolated outbursts: in towns and villages, women block draft officers from entering their neighborhoods; churchgoers physically defend their parishes; the wives and mothers of Ukrainian soldiers stage small rallies to draw attention to their plight.

And yet, even in this atmosphere of fear and suppression, Vladimir Zelensky has managed to ignite a political crisis. The hasty passage of Bill No. 12414 – which stripped the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) of their independence – sparked a wave of demonstrations that haven’t let up for days. It’s the first major popular protest since the start of Russia’s military operation, and it poses a serious challenge to Zelensky’s grip on power. Rallies have broken out in Kiev, Lviv, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Rovno, and Nikolayev. While officials have tried to frame them as spontaneous, local expressions of concern about anti-corruption institutions, the scope and coordination suggest otherwise. The message to Zelensky is simple: the pressure is just beginning.

To understand why the anti-corruption issue struck such a nerve, we need to go back to the beginning. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) were established in 2015 with active backing from the United States – just a year after the coup in Kiev. At the time, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin openly stated that the idea for NABU came directly from then–Vice President Joe Biden. From the outset, these agencies functioned as tools of external oversight over the post-Maidan Ukrainian government. President Petro Poroshenko, who was still consolidating power and ideology, did not resist Washington’s involvement. NABU’s early targets included oligarchs like Igor Kolomoysky and Rinat Akhmetov, who controlled major media holdings. This suited Poroshenko, whose own business interests, notably, remained untouched.

Over time, it became clear that Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies served not only their official mission but also the political interests of a specific faction – namely, the US Democratic Party. A prime example is the Paul Manafort case. In 2016, The New York Times, citing NABU sources, published claims that Manafort – then campaign chairman for Donald Trump – had received undisclosed payments from Ukraine’s Party of Regions under President Viktor Yanukovych. These claims prompted a US investigation into possible Ukrainian interference in the American election. In 2019, the Senate ultimately found no evidence – but the episode left a lasting impression. That same year, NABU played a role in deflecting scrutiny from the Burisma scandal – the energy company whose board included Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

Over time, the link between these anti-corruption institutions and the US Democratic Party became apparent to many Ukrainians. And with Republicans now back in power in Washington, Zelensky appears to have decided it was time to free himself from external control. Zelensky likely assumed that the new American administration wouldn’t go out of its way to defend the Democratic Party’s proxies in Ukraine. Judging by Washington’s muted response, that calculation may have been correct. What he failed to consider, however, was the level of domestic resistance to his growing concentration of power.

Ukraine today is full of pressure points. Discontent is widespread – but scattered and disorganized. Zelensky’s opponents simply lack the means to unseat him. Moreover, Zelensky remains the centerpiece of the West’s anti-Russian strategy – a leader willing to accept any domestic cost in service of that agenda. Even policies that threaten the foundations of Ukrainian statehood are tolerated, so long as the broader project of an “anti-Russia” continues.

Read more …

“If there are extraterrestrials somewhere out there, they may not know much about Earth, except for the fact that von der Leyen is obsessed with Russia – a phenomenon easily visible from space.”

• The Kremlin Hates von der Leyen About As Much As EU Lawmakers Do (Marsden)

Apparently, trying to hold Ursula von der Leyen accountable is now a Russian op, reports Der Spiegel, citing a new NATO-linked think tank report. The study treats elected oversight and European lawmakers whose job, ideally, involves more than clapping like trained seals every time an unelected Eurocrat lights public money on fire, like elements of some kind of Russian infiltration plot. “Massive support for this effort was also found by pro-Kremlin media outlets, bloggers, and online influencers, as the Lithuania-based organization Debunk.org specializes in analyzing disinformation and Russian propaganda, which is seen as part of Russia’s hybrid warfare against the EU,” Spiegel wrote, describing Russian-linked media “fueling” a recent von der Leyen non-confidence vote in the EU Parliament. “Among the larger portals were those of the Russian propaganda channel RT…”

According to the advance copy of this report seen by Spiegel, the study reviewed 284 articles from Russian-linked media. Exactly how many of those articles expressed something like only von der Leyen’s ouster could save Europe? 90%? 75%? Maybe half? Nope, just 35%. Roughly the same percentage of voting EU lawmakers who favored ejecting her (32.7%). So by this logic, the Kremlin is about as supportive of Ursula as Brussels is. Awkward. Spiegel said that was the most common so-called Kremlin-backed narrative that the study found. Others included the suggestion that von der Leyen is part of a corrupt elite that robbed citizens to fill Big Pharma’s pockets. Because apparently, saying that hey, maybe EU contracts shouldn’t be inked via disappearing text messages with the CEO of a company, means that you’re doing Putin’s bidding. Real democracy means that you shut your mouth when you see your overlords doing shady stuff.

Another alleged Kremlin line? That Ursula, despite her presidential title, was never elected. As someone who personally refers to her as “Queen Ursula,” I’m actually surprised that one didn’t rank higher. It’s not like she won a popular vote or anything. She was handpicked in shady backrooms and then subjected to a simple confirmation by EU lawmakers. Her sole opponent in this so-called “election” was literally just “not Ursula.” Only the EU, in all its dystopian delusion, would call that an “election”. Then there was the claim that she’s obsessed with confronting Russia. Which is just, uh, objectively true? I mean, come on. If there are extraterrestrials somewhere out there, they may not know much about Earth, except for the fact that von der Leyen is obsessed with Russia – a phenomenon easily visible from space.

Even right before the vote, she accused the lawmakers subjecting her to democratic accountability of being Kremlin stooges just because they wanted her to explain herself. “There is ample proof that many are supported by our enemies and by their puppet masters in Russia or elsewhere. What we hear from you are movements fueled by conspiracies, from anti-vaxxers, to put in apologists and you only have to look at some of the signatories of this motion to understand what I mean,” she pleaded.

Let’s back up here. Why exactly did she face this no-confidence vote? Because no one who’s elected and accountable at the EU has actually been able to provide concrete details of contract terms for the tens of billions of euros in Covid jabs that she strong-armed European governments into paying for. Jabs that are now so useless they’re being dumped in landfills all over Europe, where one-eyed stuffed animals, soggy pizza boxes, and a moldy futon just got their third booster, courtesy of the EU taxpayer. One of those contracts followed a flurry of text exchanges between Ursula and Pfizer CEO, Robert Bourla, which she bragged about to the New York Times right before they pulled a Houdini.

The courts have so far politely asked her to explain herself. And that’s where we’re stuck right now. So frustrated lawmakers figured that they could at least make her publicly squirm with a non-confidence vote in an attempt to get her to cough up at least some of the answers for taxpayers. The result? Ursula’s interpretive song and tap-dance routine in Parliament: “Putin Did It: Paranoia in Three Acts.” She ultimately survived the vote thanks to some budget crumbs thrown at the lefties who were otherwise saying that they would have voted against her. But even they told Politico that it was her “absolute last chance.”

Read more …

“The €2 trillion ($2.17 trillion) 2028–2034 [budget].”

“..analysts who estimate up to 25% of the budget could end up being spent on Kiev.”

That’s $500 billion. Fool’s gold.

• Hungary Opposes Turning EU’s Budget Into Ukraine’s (RT)

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has slammed the European Commission’s proposed seven-year EU budget as a “budget for Ukraine,” in an interview with RIA Novosti published on Friday. The €2 trillion ($2.17 trillion) 2028–2034 spending plan published by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, which includes around €100 billion in aid for Ukraine and funds for potential EU accession, is “unacceptable,” according to the top Hungarian diplomat. The budget must be approved unanimously by all 27 member states, giving Hungary the power to block it. “We will not give it support or consent,” Szijjarto told RIA Novosti, adding, “this isn’t even the budget of the European Union – it’s a budget for Ukraine.”

Budapest has also warned that the draft shifts funds from cohesion policies and agricultural subsidies, which are vital to Central Europe. The proposal could undermine EU food security by forcing farmers out of business and increasing import reliance, Hungarian officials have said. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also denounced the draft budget, warning it could “destroy the EU” and claiming its only purpose is “to admit Ukraine to the EU.” He has also cited analysts who estimate up to 25% of the budget could end up being spent on Kiev.

Germany has likewise rejected the plan, calling it “unacceptable” amid efforts by EU members to reduce their national deficits. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has noted that Ukraine is unlikely to even join the bloc before 2034, when the current budget cycle ends. Ukraine has designated EU accession as a national priority. While Brussels has suggested Kiev could join by 2030, all existing members must approve its entry. Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland remain opposed, citing concerns about Ukraine’s readiness and its potential financial burden on the bloc. While the Kremlin initially said Ukraine had the sovereign right to join the EU, Russian officials have since hardened their stance, accusing the bloc of undergoing “rabid militarization” and becoming an offshoot of NATO.

Read more …

“He argued that Kiev’s full membership would come with “war risks.” “Ukraine is a buffer state, and we do not wish to share its fate. We understand what that means, having once been on the western periphery of the Soviet Union..”

• Ukraine’s Accession Will Bring War To EU – Orban (RT)

Ukrainian membership in the European Union would threaten Hungary’s security and raise the risk of war in the region, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. Ukraine, which was granted EU candidate status in 2022, has made joining the bloc a national priority. While Brussels has floated 2030 as a possible accession date, all current member states must approve the move. Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland remain opposed, citing concerns over the country’s preparedness and the financial strain its membership could place on the EU. Warsaw has additionally insisted that Kiev come to terms with war crimes committed by Ukrainians during WWII. In an interview with Kossuth Radio on Friday,

Orban said that Hungary, which shares a border with Ukraine, would be especially vulnerable to any escalation resulting from the EU’s expansion. He argued that Kiev’s full membership would come with “war risks.” “Ukraine is a buffer state, and we do not wish to share its fate. We understand what that means, having once been on the western periphery of the Soviet Union,” he said. “If Ukraine’s membership is accepted, then we will become the battlefield. The war will geographically affect the neighboring region. This is unacceptable. A lot of young Hungarians would also die. This is not a tactical issue, but an existential one,” Orban added. He proposed a strategic partnership with the EU as an alternative to full accession.

Earlier this week, Orban – a frequent critic of EU leadership – rejected the European Commission’s proposed seven-year budget, warning that it could “destroy the European Union.” He claimed the proposal was designed primarily to finance Ukraine’s membership, citing estimates that up to 25% of the budget could be allocated to Kiev. Budapest has blocked multiple EU military aid packages for Kiev and has repeatedly called for an immediate ceasefire with Russia. Hungary has also warned that the financial and security implications of Ukraine’s integration could outweigh any potential benefits, framing the issue as a matter of national survival rather than political preference.

Read more …

Trump will not like this one bit.

• EU Secretly Pressures US Firms To Censor Immigration Criticism: House GOP (JTN)

The European Union is secretly leaning on tech platforms to censor routine political speech and even jokes as a legal obligation under its Digital Services Act, according to an interim staff report Friday by the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee, which has also probed Brazil’s censorship, Biden administration jawboning and ideological advertiser boycotts. Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said it was prompted by then-EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton’s threat against X last summer, later disavowed by the European Commission, that owner Elon Musk’s scheduled livestream with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump might constitute “illegal content” under the DSA. Though Breton resigned “under pressure from EU President Ursula von der Leyen” after Jordan demanded a briefing from Breton on his threats, his successor, Henna Virkkunen, “remains strongly supportive of the DSA’s censorship provisions and continues to enforce them against American companies,” the report says.

“Camouflaged as a regulation to increase online safety,” the DSA lets European regulators “suppress speech globally” by threatening fines up to 6% of global revenue against platforms, based anywhere, that refuse to censor “humor, satire, and core political speech” that offends bureaucrats and align content moderation with EC preferences, it says. The law empowers them to “temporarily shut down platforms within the EU” if “extraordinary circumstances lead to a serious threat to public security or public health in the Union.” Platforms must allow “certified third-party arbitrators to resolve content moderation disputes,” who “do not need to be independent from the European regulators who certify them, incentivizing arbitrators to heed regulators’ censorship demands,” the report says.

Because “platforms bear the cost when they lose at arbitration,” they are also incentivized to censor flagged content “before arbitration begins.” The DSA has an “arbitrary threshold” of 45 million monthly users to qualify as a strictly regulated “very large online platform,” seemingly chosen to “sweep in major American companies while carving out Europe’s top tech companies,” with only Booking.com and “pornography websites” qualifying, the report says. The EC “invented workarounds” to exempt other European companies from VLOP classification, for example Spotify, which gets to split its products between music and podcasts “for the purpose of counting EU users,” the report says. It cites a critic that alleges a “clear discrepancy” between “self-declared” monthly users and “reality.”

“Absolutely nothing in the DSA requires a platform to remove lawful content,” EC spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Politico EU in response to the staff report, claiming freedom of expression is “a fundamental right in the EU” and “at the heart of our legislations.” Regnier said “content removals based on regulatory authorities’ orders to act against illegal content account for less than 0.001 percent” of the content moderation decisions, with platforms “proactively” deciding the rest based on their own terms and conditions. ‘I’m not racist, but …’ is ‘coded language to express anti-Muslim sentiment’

The committee’s subpoenas revealed content from the EC’s May 7 workshop with DSA stakeholders, which unlike its “contemporaneous” Digital Markets Act workshops was closed to the public and operated under the Chatham House Rule, banning participants from describing “exercise scenarios” or naming or quoting participants without permission. It also obtained emails between EC staff and tech companies on purportedly “voluntary” codes of conduct on hate speech and disinformation, showing “regulators repeatedly and deliberately reached out to pressure reluctant platforms to join” and retaliated against resisters, opening a probe of X for refusing to use purported fact-checkers. “The censorship is largely one-sided, almost uniformly targeting political conservatives,” the report’s press release says.

Read more …

“The proffer immunity granted to Maxwell allowed her to answer questions without her responses later being used against her in a criminal case..”

• Ghislaine Maxwell Gets Limited Immunity, Gives DOJ ‘100 Different People’ (NYP)

Notorious sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell answered questions from Justice Department officials about “100 different people” linked to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, an attorney for the disgraced socialite claimed Friday following two days of interrogation led by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche during which she was reportedly granted limited immunity. David Oscar Markus told reporters that his client, currently serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in Manhattan of federal sex trafficking and conspiracy charges in December 2021, was “asked about every possible thing you could imagine – everything.” “This was the first opportunity she’s ever been given to answer questions about what happened,” Markus added. “The truth will come out about what happened with Mr. Epstein and she’s the person who’s answering those questions.”

Blanche had “every single question” answered during the sitdown, Maxwell’s attorney also said, with the British-born convict declining to plead the Fifth Amendment. “If she lies they could charge her with lying,” Markus noted. “They did charge her with lying,” a reporter challenged him, referring to two perjury counts that Markus noted were dropped by the feds after her conviction. “No one is above the law — and no lead is off-limits,” Blanche posted on X Tuesday in announcing he would speak with Maxwell. Maxwell, 63, is appealing her conviction and sentencing, and legal observers have speculated her willingness to answer questions is tied to a potential clemency grant by President Trump. Her attorney described the commander in chief Friday as “the ultimate dealmaker” and claimed his client had “been treated unfairly for the past five years” and “didn’t get a fair trial.”

“We hope he exercises that power in a right and just way,” Markus added. Trump, 79, told reporters after landing in Glasgow, Scotland that “I don’t know anything about the conversation” between Blanche and Maxwell because “I haven’t really been following it.” “This is no time to be talking about pardons,” the president added after saying hours earlier while leaving the White House that “I haven’t thought” about the idea. Maxwell reportedly initiated the sitdowns with the DOJ and answered questions for roughly nine hours, according to ABC News. The proffer immunity granted to Maxwell allowed her to answer questions without her responses later being used against her in a criminal case, sources told the outlet. Proffer immunity is typically granted to individuals prosecutors want cooperation from in a criminal case.

In 2022, the Department of Justice expressed doubts that Maxwell could be truthful, writing in court filings that she displayed a “significant pattern of dishonest conduct” and failed to take responsibility for her heinous crimes. Court papers the prior year revealed that prosecutors never seriously entertained the prospect of offering the women dubbed “Epstein’s madam” a plea agreement after the financier was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting his own federal trial on Aug. 10, 2019. According to Markus, Epstein’s attorneys had been informed that “no potential co-conspirators would be prosecuted” as part of his talks with government lawyers following his July 2019 arrest on sex trafficking charges. “I don’t think President Trump knows that the Justice Department took the position that that promise should not be upheld,” he claimed.

Read more …

Go to Moscow. Leave the European and US warmongers alone.

• Rubio Shares Trump’s Feelings About Russia-Ukraine Conflict (RT)

US President Donald Trump is growing impatient with Russia over resolving the Ukraine conflict, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said. Moscow maintains it is open to diplomacy, but has said any settlement must take into account its security concerns. Speaking to Fox News on Saturday, Rubio claimed that while Trump is focused on peace and has done his best to bring hostilities to a close, his overtures to Russia appear to be yielding little result so far. “He’s done everything possible to bring it to an end. I think he is growing increasingly frustrated,” he said. According to Rubio, despite “good interactions with [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and phone calls, it never leads to anything.”

“He is losing patience, losing his willingness to continue to wait for the Russian side to do something to bring an end to this war that wasn’t his, but he wants to see it come to an end,” Rubio added, accusing Moscow of using “delaying tactics.” His comments come after Trump imposed a 50-day ceasefire deadline on Moscow, warning of “very severe” new sanctions, including 100% “secondary tariffs” on countries buying Russian oil.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that the sanctions threat would be interpreted by Kiev as a “signal to continue the war” rather than to seek peace. He has also described Trump’s style as “rather harsh,” while confirming that “Moscow intends to continue dialogue with Washington” and follow “a line of repairing the significantly broken bilateral relations.”

Earlier this week, Russia and Ukraine held a third round of direct talks in Istanbul, with Moscow proposing short ceasefires for retrieving wounded and fallen soldiers. Additionally, the Kremlin offered to continue prisoner exchanges and return the remains of fallen soldiers. However, the two sides remain far apart on a potential peace settlement, with Moscow insisting that Ukraine should recognize the loss of five of its former regions that joined Russia in public referendums, withdraw its forces from them, commit to neutrality, and limit its own military capabilities. Kiev has dismissed the terms as an “ultimatum.”

Read more …

“China is encouraging BRICS nations and partners to use the yuan “for trade settlement, thereby creating a self-sustaining cycle” driven by “real trade demand.” This is the system those clowns want to regime-change.”

• Destroy Russia. Fail? No Problem: Let’s Destroy China! (Pepe Escobar)

[..] On the American ability to maintain the US dollar’s reserve currency status, Miao points to two factors: “whether the United States can continue to lead the technological revolution”; and “whether it can preserve the advantages of its financial system, such as the Federal Reserve’s independence and the self-regulating and corrective capabilities of its financial markets.” Yet what’s accelerating now is rather the “fragmentation of the international monetary system”. So we should expect increased use of yuan in payment settlements and as “a store of value”; that’s already happening all across BRICS. Miao points to the key vector: the yuan is now “a low-interest currency, while the US dollar is high-interest.” Trump 2.0 tariffs “on all countries have contributed to the appreciation” of the yuan.

This high-speed train is now leaving the station: “By leveraging China’s manufacturing strengths in sectors such as machinery, electronics, and new energy equipment”, China is encouraging BRICS nations and partners to use the yuan “for trade settlement, thereby creating a self-sustaining cycle” driven by “real trade demand.” This is the system those clowns want to regime-change. Well, they did not learn anything out of the collective West humiliation in the proxy war in Ukraine. A top old school hand of the Deep State, now retired, and familiar with the glory days of the OSS, sums it all up. Relevant excerpts of our conversation: “The US and Europe are already at war with Russia and they are losing it. The US has 20,000 armed troops in Europe to face Russia. NATO forces are largely a figment of the imagination.

Ukraine is nothing but a front in the US battle for control of the Eurasian land mass a la Mackinder. The US cannot supply both Israel and Europe at the same time. It has overstretched itself. As for Europe, it has no army of any consequence and most of its equipment is antiquated. All of it is pure bluff.” He adds, “the Europeans are waking up to the fact that the US has a moat around it so that it can be reached only by ICBMs and submarine missiles but Europe is in itself indefensible as short range conventional missiles can destroy it. Nukes are not required to destroy Europe in one day but a rain of Russian missiles.” Now compare that with Russia’s top negotiator in the Istanbul kabuki, historian Medinsky, when asked whether Moscow fears new sanctions by the EU and the US:

“This is not a question for us, not for the negotiating group. I can tell you this. After the revolution and civil war in 1920, again, another historical reference, we had not only sanctions, we had an absolute diplomatic and economic blockade of Soviet Russia from everyone. Everyone! It did not prevent us from winning World War II (…) Nothing will prevent Russia from winning now, The only question is the price of victory and the time it takes to achieve it.” This is something that will never sink in amongst Think Tankland in D.C. As much as the technological accomplishments – now visible – of the Made in China 2025 plan will never sink in. Enter bluster, hubris, the regime change obsession – and worse. Because if the US ruling class psycho killers finally conclude they cannot maintain their unilateral world hegemony even via war, they will abandon their cherished Think Tankland “reports” for good and even resort, in despair, to a Samson option.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

vibrate


NY
https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3/status/1948995283410374806

foal

scott

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle January 2 2024

Jan 022024
 
 January 2, 2024  Posted by at 9:44 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  50 Responses »


Joan Miro The tilled field 1924

 

• How Congress May Select Our Next President In 2024 (Laura Loomer)
• Secretary Of State That Kicked Trump From Ballot Wants ‘Better Leaders’ (ZH)
• Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part One (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Jack Smith: Trump’s Immunity Defense Could Allow President To Murder (JTN)
• Jack Smith Disputes Trump’s Claims in Appeals Court (ET)
• Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (Chris Hedges)
• Israeli Supreme Court Strikes Down Bibi’s Judicial Overhaul Law (Axios)
• How Russia and The Arab World Defied Western Pressure In 2023 (Sadygzade)
• Zelensky is ‘Scum’ – Medvedev (RT)
• Congressional Nincompoops Saddle The US With NATO Forever (CP)
• Britain’s Arms Stockpile Reduced To ‘Nothing’ – The Times (RT)
• Pushback to Tyranny & Control Increases in 2024 – Catherine Austin Fitts (USAW)
• Bill Clinton To Be Identified Over 50 Times In Jeffrey Epstein Doc Dump (PM)
• The Great Clarification (Kunstler)
• 10 Vital Quotes From The Late John Pilger (Vitacchi)

 

 

 

 

John Oliver
https://twitter.com/i/status/1741677557810880580

 

 

 

 

 

 

Count the vote

 

 


January is named after the Roman god Janus, protector of gates and doorways. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking into the past, the other into the future.

 

 

 

 

X thread. ” If there are more than two candidates and no one hits 270, that triggers a contingent election..[..] where the House of Representatives selects a president and the Senate selects a vice president.”

• How Congress May Select Our Next President In 2024 (Laura Loomer)

Did you know that a winner of the 2024 Presidential election may not come to fruition due to a “contingent election”, which would then let Congress select the next President and Vice President? This is what @RobertKennedyJr is trying to accomplish by running as an Independent. He’s trying to create a contingent election in which neither candidate gets 270 electoral votes. RFK’s plan is to create a contingent election, as was admitted by his own PAC. An article outlining the PACs $15 million plan said, “A statement outlining the new plan also said it’s confident that Kennedy could win a contingent election, a possible scenario where no presidential candidate gets 270 electoral college votes.” This is why RFK switched from running as a Democrat to an Independent.

Recently, it was announced that “American Values” @AmValues2024, a Super PAC which was created to support RFK’s presidential campaign, is planning to spend $15 MILLION to get him on the ballot in 10 key states that collectively carry 210 electoral votes that are needed to win the 2024 election, including: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Texas. If RFK is able to pick up enough electoral votes to the point where neither Trump or Biden gets 270, then under the US Constitution, we would have what is called a “contingent election”, which is what happens if no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College. To win the Electoral College, a candidate needs a majority — at least 270 electoral votes. If there are more than two candidates and no one hits 270, that triggers a contingent election, a fallback process created by the Twelfth Amendment where the House of Representatives selects a president and the Senate selects a vice president.

HOW WOULD THIS HAPPEN? House members vote as state delegations. Each state delegation gets a single vote, and a candidate becomes president with the support of a majority (26) of state delegations. If no candidate wins 26 state delegations by January 20th, then the vice president-elect becomes acting president. And if the Senate fails to select a vice president, then under the Twentieth Amendment and the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the next eligible person in the presidential line of succession (potentially the speaker of the House) becomes acting president.

This could be disastrous, given the fact that Republicans only hold a 1 seat majority in Congress right now with the early retirement of @SpeakerMcCarthy, several other GOP members of Congress, and the ousting of George Santos @MrSantosNY. It will only take one more House GOP rep to retire early, and then Dems will have control of the House again before the 2024 election. I predict Dems take control of the House by March, and when they do, we will be one step closer to having a contingent election. This is all part of their plan to make sure Trump and Biden aren’t the next President. Congress would then be able to install their own President and Vice President if this happens. Hopefully you now see why @RobertKennedyJr is so dangerous. This could very well happen.

Read more …

“Isn’t it the job of the American public to decide what leaders are “better leaders?”

• Secretary Of State That Kicked Trump From Ballot Wants ‘Better Leaders’ (ZH)

The precedent being set by states like Colorado and Maine could change the political landscape of America forever if allowed to go unchallenged. Removing presidential candidates from the ballot based on unilateral opinion rather than any kind of legally arbitrated decision or criminal conviction is the most slippery of slopes for a number of reasons. The most dangerous implication being that a handful of officials can decide for the entire population of their states (or the entire population of the country) what leaders they are allowed to vote for based on a “guilty until proven innocent” ideology. Meaning, all they have to do is make accusations of criminal behavior or criminal intent and then remove a candidate based on those accusations alone. No person or group should have that power.

“One could argue that this is already the case and that the two party system filters out candidates on a regular basis. However, the notion of state ballot removal is a decidedly leftist/Democrat affair clearly engineered to benefit the progressive power structure for many years to come. It’s not only about Donald Trump – Woke bureaucrats could use this trend in the future to deny ballot access to any conservative candidate on the grounds that they “might” represent a “threat to Democracy.” This is essentially the message conveyed by Secretary of State Sheena Bellows, now well known as the person responsible for single-handedly removing Trump from the 2024 election ballot in Maine. She argues “better leaders” must be put in positions of power to prevent “election sabotage” and the end of Democracy. The hypocrisy is mind blowing, and of course we have to ask: Isn’t it the job of the American public to decide what leaders are “better leaders?”

Bellows laces her argument with social justice platitudes about protecting minority voting rights, which she insinuates are under threat from “white supremacy.” This is a common claim among Democrats when referencing Republican efforts to require proof of citizenship for voters, which has nothing to do with “intimidation” or race. The diatribes of woke officials are not as random as they seem. Each buzzword is carefully chosen to elicit an emotional knee-jerk response and to create false associations. In this case, Bellows is falsely associating voter suppression with Republicans while Democrats are, in fact, engaging in voter suppression.

Not only that, but she is connecting Republican election suppression (which isn’t happening) to racial motivations (that don’t exist). It’s not surprising to discover that this effort is being headed by people with career ties to far-left organizations like the SPLC and ACLU. It has become exceedingly obvious in recent years that progressive institutions are a driving force behind national division, but they are also directly attempting to manipulate election outcomes. It’s no longer a matter of influencing citizens with arguments or propaganda, they want to dictate the mechanics of the system; elevating themselves as the arbiters of who is acceptable as a candidate and who is not.

Read more …

X thread. “Bellows has no law degree. She was appointed by a majority vote of the Democratic-controlled Maine legislature, not through a popular ballot.”

• Who Are the Real Insurrectionaries? Part One (Victor Davis Hanson)

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows just ordered Trump’s name removed from the primary ballot in May. She claimed he is guilty in her view of “insurrection”—a crime Trump has never been charged with, much less convicted of. Her evidence, mostly gleaned from popular news accounts and video reports, would not stand up in a court of law. Bellows has no law degree. She was appointed by a majority vote of the Democratic-controlled Maine legislature, not through a popular ballot. Her legal expertise seems to be derived from years of political activism with the ACLU. We can see where the ultimate trajectory of this usurpation is going—once a single official decides to remove the leading primary and general election candidate of the opposition from the ballot by fiat. Tit-for-tat will likely follow and would unwind the republic.

Take Bellows’ action and then apply it to any future candidacy of Hillary Clinton. And by these new rules she surely would fail to qualify to have her name on a state ballot. Remember, in 2016 Hillary Clinton illegally hired a foreign national (by law forbidden to work in presidential campaigns), Christopher Steele, to create a “dossier” of smears and fake-news accounts, aimed at destroying her presidential opponent Donald Trump by extra-legal means. Clinton hid her illicit payments to Steele behind the paywalls of the DNC, the Perkins-Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS. Her leftwing associates and partisans in the waning Obama administration, the DOJ, State Department, FBI, and CIA worked hard to brand the slurs as credible, as they variously passed them off and leaked to the media on the eve of the election.

They and Democrats in congress later engineered the appointment of a special counsel, whose investigations consumed two years of the Trump administration’s term, before finding no “collusion”. Even three years after the election in 2019 and the special counsel’s findings, Clinton could still persist that Trump was an “illegitimate” president: “He knows he’s an illegitimate president”. She also declared that year that the 2016 election had been “stolen”: “I think it’s also critical to understand that, as I’ve been telling candidates who have come to see me, you can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you”—de facto asserting the balloting was fraudulent. She was prepping the battlefield for 2020. So Clinton continued her denialism right up to the eve of the 2020 election, further claiming the 2016 election was rigged, “There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level.” To be continued…

Read more …

Two articles on the same topic, but very different.

• Jack Smith: Trump’s Immunity Defense Could Allow President To Murder (JTN)

Allowing former President Donald Trump to use the presidential immunity defense could pave the way for a president to claim immunity from numerous charges such as murder and the sale of nuclear secrets so long as it was done under the claim of official activities, according to special counsel Jack Smith. Trump has argued that he is immune from criminal prosecution for activities that fall under his official presidential responsibilities, but Smith’s office, which charged Trump with allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 election in his favor, vehemently denied such claims in an 82-page court filing Saturday.

Trump’s “approach would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a President who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a President who instructs the FBI Director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a President who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a President who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary,” Smith argued. Prosecutors said that in all of those examples, “the President could assert that he was simply executing the laws,” and thus be immune from prosecution. Smith made the filing in the D.C. Court of Appeals after the Supreme Court earlier this month rejected his request to rule on Trump’s immunity claims before an appeals court made a decision on the arguments.

If Trump prevailed on presidential immunity claims, the case against him still should not be dismissed because the charges against him fall beyond his official responsibilities, Smith also argued. “Even if a former President could claim immunity from criminal prosecution commensurate with his immunity from civil damages liability for official conduct, dismissal would be unwarranted because the indictment contains substantial allegations of a plot to overturn the election results that fall well outside the outer perimeter of official Presidential responsibilities,” prosecutors wrote.

Read more …

The double jeopardy claim is crucial.

• Jack Smith Disputes Trump’s Claims in Appeals Court (ET)

Special Counsel Jack Smith Saturday urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reject President Donald Trump’s immunity and double-jeopardy claim that he will be retried for similar charges on which he has already been acquitted. President Trump is not entitled to immunity in the election case and the criminal charges against him also didn’t violate the principle of double jeopardy, the prosecutors argued. Immunity for a U.S. president applies to civil liability only and not criminal, the special counsel’s office claimed. “The defendant, a former President, does not enjoy immunity from federal prosecution for the offenses charged in this case. Under separation-of-powers analysis, the President’s unique constitutional status provides immunity from civil liability for official conduct … but it does not render a former President immune from criminal liability when charged with violations of generally applicable federal criminal statutes,” reads the filing.

Meanwhile, although President Trump has been acquitted after being impeached over an event connected to Jan. 6, the special counsel’s office argued that its criminal charges filed against him don’t violate the principle of double jeopardy because the only remedies in an impeachment proceeding are removal from the office and disqualification. Mr. Smith argued those likely don’t meet the term “jeopardy.” Even if President Trump was put into jeopardy during the impeachment proceeding, the indictment charges filed by his office are different from what President Trump was impeached for, the special counsel argued.

Accordingly, Mr. Smith asked the appeal court to reject President Trump’s immunity and double-jeopardy defenses and affirm the district court’s ruling. Mr. Smith also pushed the court to rule on this promptly. “For the foregoing reasons, the Court should affirm the district court’s order denying the defendant’s motions to dismiss on Presidential-immunity and double-jeopardy grounds,” the prosecutors wrote. “The Government respectfully requests the Court to issue the mandate five days after the entry of judgment. Such an approach would appropriately require any party seeking further review to do so promptly.”

Read more …

“..In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation..”

• Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust (Chris Hedges)

Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastrutrue, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation – for those who want to live – will be the only option.

Danny Danon, Israel’s former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I’m talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.” The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we’re working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members. In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.”

“The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created. This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it. The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin.

The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters. The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.

[..] The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children. “Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.” Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”

Read more …

Raw power fight.

• Israeli Supreme Court Strikes Down Bibi’s Judicial Overhaul Law (Axios)

Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday narrowly struck down a controversial law that’s part of the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul and limited the court’s ability to review government decisions. The dramatic ruling could thrust Israel back into a constitutional and political crisis amid the war in Gaza and concerns about a potential war with Lebanon. A strong reaction by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical right-wing political allies could push former Defense Minister Benny Gantz to leave the emergency unity government that was formed after the Oct. 7 attack. If Gantz, who is part of the opposition National Unity alliance, left the war cabinet, it would leave Israel with a radical right-wing government to make decisions about the war, which could have implications for U.S. support of the war in Gaza.

Netanyahu’s Likud Party said in a statement that it is “unfortunate” that the court decided to publish a ruling that deals with a central disagreement in Israeli society amid the war in Gaza. “The court’s ruling is opposed to the people’s will for unity, especially in times of war,” the party said. Gantz said in a statement that everyone must abide by the court’s ruling. “There are no winners and losers today. We have one mutual goal – to win the war,” he said. “After the war we will need to settle the relationship between the different branches of power through dialogue and broad consensus.”. Opposition leader Yair Lapid said the court upheld its duty to protect the citizens of Israel. “If the government resumes the fight over the Supreme Court it will show they didn’t learn anything from Oct. 7,” Lapid said

The legislation the court struck down was passed last July. It limits the Supreme Court’s oversight of government actions and policies and ends the court’s ability to strike down government decisions and appointments on the basis of “reasonability.” The law was the first piece of legislation of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul — a plan that destabilized Israel’s economy, military and foreign relations. The Supreme Court struck down the law in an 8-7 vote. The court ruled that the law should be canceled because it seriously and unprecedentedly damages Israel’s democratic character. Twelve out of 15 Supreme Court judges ruled that the court has the authority to conduct judicial oversight on basic laws and intervene in extreme cases when the Knesset oversteps its legislative authority.

A draft ruling was leaked a few days ago to Israel’s Channel 12 in an unprecedented way that resembled the leak of the 2022 Roe v. Wade ruling in the U.S. After the leak, Netanyahu and his political allies called on the court not to publish the ruling, claiming it would be divisive if it happened in the middle of the war in Gaza. Some also hinted that they believed the ruling would be illegitimate because two of the judges who supported striking down the law had already retired. President Biden called for the Israeli government to come to a broad consensus on judicial reform instead of pushing the plan unilaterally.

Read more …

“..at the global level the situation is aggravated by the fact that the escalation in Gaza has become another fault line in the confrontation between the West and the world majority..”

• How Russia and The Arab World Defied Western Pressure In 2023 (Sadygzade)

On October 7, media around the world reported on Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, which was initiated by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade, a radical paramilitary group affiliated with Hamas. The horrific attack on Israeli territory left many civilians dead and more than 250 others taken hostage. In response, the Israeli government announced the launch of a ground anti-terrorist operation in Gaza, which was aimed at completely eliminating Hamas and other groups in the Palestinian exclave. This new escalation in the Middle East is still ongoing, and judging by the statements of Israeli officials and the scale of the clashes, the conflict will be long. Already the number of dead in Gaza has exceeded 21,000, while on the Israeli side the death toll is around 1,200.

The military action has shaken the already troubled region, disrupting the emerging normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as leading to a diplomatic “cooling” of relations between the Jewish state and Türkiye, as well as a number of other states in the region. Russia, which has traditionally been a mediator and a member of the quartet on Middle East settlement together with the EU, US, and UN, has not stood aside. Since the first days of the escalation, Moscow has been calling on the parties to stop the violence and resume diplomatic negotiations on the basis of UN General Assembly resolutions. Moscow believes that a solution to the conflict is possible only through the establishment of an independent Arab state of Palestine and full recognition of the Jewish state of Israel by the Palestinians and other Arab states.

While Western countries and representatives of the Kiev authorities blamed Russia for instigating the hostilities, Moscow was actively consulting with the parties to the conflict and the main regional players. Russian diplomacy was also active within the UN, trying to initiate in the Security Council a resolution on the situation and calling for an immediate ceasefire, but all such attempts were blocked by Western countries. The conflict is still not over – there will be many more casualties on both sides – but at the global level the situation is aggravated by the fact that the escalation in Gaza has become another fault line in the confrontation between the West and the world majority. Moscow’s actions are viewed positively by the Arab Street and states that consider Russia to be the most unbiased and decisive player in the case. There are not many opportunities for settlement in the current situation, but Russian diplomacy will continue to try to bring the parties to the negotiating table one way or another.

Read more …

“.. probably some scum like Zelensky is dreaming of our armed forces turning Kiev city center into some semblance of the Gaza strip.”

• Zelensky is ‘Scum’ – Medvedev (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is “scum” who would love to see his own civilian population killed, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed. The official, who currently serves as deputy chairman of the Security Council, was commenting on a deadly strike on Belgorod, insisting that Moscow’s forces only hit military targets, in contrast to Kiev’s army. On Saturday, Ukraine unleashed an artillery barrage on the Russian city, which is located around 40km from the border. The attack came shortly after a Russian bombardment of multiple Ukrainian cities, and left 24 people dead and 108 injured, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported. In a post on the Russian VK social media platform on Saturday, Medvedev wrote: “It is obvious that the terrorist strike on Belgorod and the death of our citizens is a bloody crime at the hands of the Banderite bastards [caused by their] powerlessness to change anything on the front line.”

He went on to say that “probably some scum like Zelensky is dreaming of our armed forces turning Kiev city center into some semblance of the Gaza strip.” Medvedev suggested that the Ukrainian leadership might be secretly wishing for such an attack by Moscow, as it would make it easier for them to “beg their masters” for more weapons. The office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the Ukrainian strike as a “violation of international humanitarian law,” as quoted by RIA Novosti. An anonymous Moscow security source told RT’s Russian-language service that Zelensky had personally ordered his forces to target the Russian city.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday that “Britain is behind the terrorist act,” with the US and EU also bearing responsibility. Ukrainian defense officials claimed that their forces had targeted exclusively military facilities, with any destruction of civilian infrastructure resulting from the “inefficient work of Russian air defenses.” Apart from condemning Kiev’s actions on Saturday, Medvedev wrote in his VK post that a day before, the “Russian army inflicted considerable damage on the Nazi regime’s military and other infrastructure.” According to the Ukrainian authorities, the Russian bombardment of several major cities, including the capital, Kiev, left 39 people dead and nearly 160 injured. The Russian Defense Ministry insisted that its drones and missiles strictly targeted “military facilities and infrastructure.” Any civilian casualties were attributable to the unprofessional performance of Ukrainian air defense forces, Moscow explained.

Read more …

This made it through a GOP controlled House…

“..It’s aimed at Trump and one of the few decent things he might do if elected president..”

• Congressional Nincompoops Saddle The US With NATO Forever (CP)

Nobody in their right mind wants to be obliged to send their kid off to war in Eastern Europe if Romania and Moldova start bombing each other. Yet NATO membership requires just that. And courtesy of the best congress money can buy, now power to withdraw from NATO has been removed from the U.S. president and enshrined in the well-greased palms of our legislators. More specifically, on December 16 congress approved a bill barring the president from unilaterally exiting NATO without legislative approval. This is a disaster. It’s aimed at Trump and one of the few decent things he might do if elected president, namely ditch that trouble-making albatross, NATO. Naturally president Joe Biden did not delay signing the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes this new NATO provision; so we’re stuck with it.

You doubt this is bad news? Just look at NATO’s track record: bombing Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and currently the abattoir NATO has made of Ukraine – or rather the disaster caused by NATO’s promise to absorb Ukraine. In Afghanistan, NATO performed with its usual, incomparable mediocrity, so the U.S. withdrew, convinced its puppet regime could hold off the Taliban for months. After all, the U.S. and NATO had bombed the country and the Taliban to smithereens – right? Well, it turned out our puppet couldn’t restrain the Taliban long enough for retreating U.S. jets to lift off from the tarmac. And what was NATO doing in Afghanistan for 20 years anyway? Don’t ask any of our military geniuses like David Petraeus, who kept telling us victory was just around the corner, and who even argued in the Atlantic, August 8 2022, that “we could have won.” Ha!

As for NATO’s 2011 military intervention in Libya, that was a debacle that transformed Africa’s most prosperous nation into a stone-age pit with open-air slave markets. The NATO 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia wasn’t much better, in that it should never have happened and arguably the only reason it did was so then President Bill “NATO Uber Alles” Clinton could distract the public from the lurid details of a sex scandal and impeachment. Thus the noble enterprises in which NATO has engaged, spreading mayhem, misery and murder across the globe in the name of freedom and democracy. What has NATO learned from these fiascos, seriatim? Arguably nothing.

Take NATO’s plans for the South China Sea and for Finland, plans which slate Taiwan for the cemetery and leave Finland bristling with U.S. bases from Helsinki in the south to Utsjoki in the north. You disagree that Taiwan’s headed for the grave? Well, numerous U.S. bigwigs have bandied about the notion of bombing Taiwan’s computer chip industry, rather than letting it fall into China’s hands. That’s American homicidal love for Taiwan. Meanwhile, back in July, NATO infuriated Beijing by portraying China as a major challenge to…you got it, NATO! What is NATO doing in the China Sea, you ask? Whatever Washington tells it to do. Lately, that means stirring up trouble and painting Beijing in the garish colors of a supervillain. NATO did so by announcing, according to Al Jazeera July 12, that China “challenged the alliance’s interests, security and values with its ‘stated ambitions and coercive policies.’”

Read more …

The industry is salivating..

• Britain’s Arms Stockpile Reduced To ‘Nothing’ – The Times (RT)

Britain’s weapons stockpiles have been nearly completely emptied out by almost two years of deliveries to Ukraine, The Times has claimed. The British newspaper also reported that the UK, together with other European nations, is scrambling to ramp up arms production ahead of the 2024 presidential election in the US. While London has spent more than £4.6 billion ($5.7 billion) on arming Kiev since February 2022, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander for Europe, Gen. Tim Radford, warned in July that the UK was running the risk of losing its status as a major power within the US-led bloc. The general cited personnel shortages, among other issues. In its article on Sunday, The Times quoted an anonymous Ukrainian military source as saying that Britain had “nothing” left in terms of weapons it could donate.

The unnamed official added, however, that London was still playing a crucial role in persuading other nations to ship their own arms to Kiev. According to the newspaper, citing an unnamed staffer from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office, Britain and several other European countries are “cranking through the gears” to make sure Ukraine has enough military supplies to fall back on in case a new US administration decides to withhold or drastically diminish defense aid. Britain and other Western nations are allegedly seeking to extend the conflict into 2025, and possibly beyond, the source said, in the hope of stretching Russia’s resources and forcing it to eventually relent. The Times also claimed that a growing number of Ukrainians are becoming weary of the conflict, with the idea of sealing a truce with Russia presumably gaining traction among the population.

This sentiment is in part fueled by the political impasses in the US and the EU, which have left a massive amount of aid for Kiev hanging in limbo, the paper reported, citing an anonymous Ukrainian military source. A similar report was published back in early October by the Telegraph, which at the time quoted an unnamed senior British military official as warning that the UK had “given away just about as much as we can afford.” Meanwhile, back in August, British MP Andrew Murrison, who serves as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence People and Families, floated the idea of allowing the British military to recruit candidates with such conditions as autism, Asperger’s, and ADHD. The lawmaker cited “serious” staffing shortages, adding that to tackle the problem London may also want to extend the retirement age for military personnel.

Read more …

“..We have to push back because there is no going along with this. They are trying to kill us, number one. Then they are trying to take all of our stuff, and we can’t let them..”

• Pushback to Tyranny & Control Increases in 2024 – Catherine Austin Fitts (USAW)

Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report, financial expert and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), says the top story (out of 20 top stories) of 2023 was massive, documented pushback to tyranny and control by the evil Deep State globalists. CAF explains, “Our top story of 2023 is ‘The Year of Pushback.’ It was so long, and it was so big, we had to make a special page and move the other 19 top stories to a whole different section on another page.” Just a few of the 2023 stories that documented this massive pushback, according to CAF, are, “Stories on Constitutional protections, different litigations on the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, and we have one on information sovereignty and infrastructure. We have stories on all the pushback against the media, including litigation to hold people accountable and stopping emergency powers. We have culture wars about saying no to international organizations.

Woke capital controls and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance investing) is toast. The state AGs have gone after ESG and Larry Fink (BlackRock CEO), and he’s had to publicly backpedal. They are steamrolling him. We had another story about taking it to the streets and have a whole section on ‘Pushback Heros.’ . . . In 2023, people started to realize that it is kill or be killed. We have to push back because there is no going along with this. They are trying to kill us, number one. Then they are trying to take all of our stuff, and we can’t let them. CAF also talks about what she calls “massive collateral fraud.” CAF goes on to say, “The collateral fraud is enormous, and we have talked about the money (trillions of dollars) that has gone ‘missing’ for years from the federal government.

This is what’s been going on in the United States and around the world for years. You issue debt, you get a whole bunch of money, and then the money disappears. . . . So, there is an extraordinarily fraudulent system going on around the debt markets. The reality is if you are going to run a bubble like that, you need very strict control of the collateral. This is what “The Great Taking” is all about. 2024 is the year the pushback can put us over the top.” CAF thinks gold is a “must have” investment for the coming years. The US dollar is being weakened, but it is still “dominant and dangerous.” In closing, CAF says, “I think we are going see collisions at a spiritual, legal, financial and physical level increasing all over the planet. This is a real war, and we are in World War III now. The US is going to defend the dollar. . .”

Read more …

“..Clinton has denied ever being on the island..”

• Bill Clinton To Be Identified Over 50 Times In Jeffrey Epstein Doc Dump (PM)

In an upcoming release of court documents related to the late Jeffrey Epstein, former President Bill Clinton will reportedly be identified as “John Doe 36,” as disclosed in a recent report by ABC News. The documents, pertaining to a 2015 lawsuit filed by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, mention Clinton over 50 times, with speculations suggesting that these references are linked to Giuffre’s efforts to compel the ex-president to testify against Epstein and his alleged accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Some mentions of Clinton are also anticipated to involve joint endeavors by Maxwell and Giuffre to press Epstein to disclose information in 2016, following his repeated invocations of the Fifth Amendment during a deposition in the same lawsuit.

“U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled earlier this month there was no legal justification for continuing to conceal the ex-president’s name and more than 150 names other ‘John and Jane Does’ mentioned in the records. Preska ordered the unsealing to begin after Jan. 1” ABC reports. Individuals mentioned in the documents have already had their connections to Epstein and his abhorrent sex-trafficking network revealed. The forthcoming release is anticipated to disclose the identities of numerous accusers, alleged victims, former associates of Epstein, members of his inner circle, and individuals purportedly involved in his criminal activities. Among those mentioned is Prince Andrew, who, according to allegations, Giuffre was instructed by Maxwell and Epstein to engage in sexual activities with on multiple occasions.

Giuffre sought to issue a subpoena for Clinton’s testimony in her legal proceedings, asserting that she encountered the ex-president on Epstein’s secluded Caribbean island, Little St. James. Clinton has denied ever being on the island. The impending release is set to unveil the identities of more than 170 individuals, previously known as John and Jane Does, connected to Epstein. Judge Preska ruled for the unsealing of these documents just before Christmas, and they are slated to be made public starting January 2, after the New Year’s Day holiday.

Read more …

“..The election of 2024, whether it is actually allowed to happen or not, will probably commence the extinction of the DC blob..”

• The Great Clarification (Kunstler)

I’m already liking 2024. Consequence is itching to return to the American scene. Somewhere around 2016, cause and effect got a divorce. After that, things just happened or unhappened with no further orders of effect, like some brute existence without purpose, meaning, or even awareness, except for the feeling of the lash on your back. After a long journey through a dark place, treading ever-deeper into the unknown, knowing you are in the presence of demons from one footstep to the next, worrying incessantly that God has abandoned you. . . the alarm bell is ringing, the light is shining through, your eyes roll up like window-shades, and it’s time to get your mind right! Yes, even nations have bad dreams. Welcome to the Great Clarification.

We are waking to the stupefying criminality of public life, to the immersive obvious bullshit of people in charge who don’t deserve your respect or compliance. How they got into these positions is only another feature of that totalistic criminality. What was hidden in plain sight will be revealed to those suffering mere hysterical blindness. It was fitting that the last extravagant political act of ’23 was Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows chucking Mr. Trump off the ballot there because. . . she felt like it. To save our democracy, you understand. That might be the terminal absurdity of the derangement we are leaving behind, the signature for much that has gone down in this country the past three years: women on the verge of a nervous breakdown throwing the crockery of law around the room at Daddy.

All this accomplishes, of course, is to disgrace authority in general and to turn America into one big broken home, making us a population of frightened runaways clinging desperately to a few square feet of ground, alone under the freeway ramp in the rain. That is no way to live. The way to live is to make yourself useful to your fellow humans and to get paid for it, and to find some joy and meaning in that human fellowship based on fair, consensual transactions — a pretty simple formula that has been supplanted by the evil idea that life is nothing but a shakedown. The election of 2024, whether it is actually allowed to happen or not, will probably commence the extinction of the DC blob. This entity has made itself malignantly inimical to the proper functioning of self-governing people, and everybody knows it. The blob will die of irrelevance and impotence as the “trust horizon” devolves downward and we are thrust back into the awesome task of reconstructing our local communities. There is so much to do.

Read more …

X thread.

“Journalism is nothing if it’s not about humanity – it has to be about people’s lives.”

• 10 Vital Quotes From The Late John Pilger (Vitacchi)

John Pilger, the investigative anti-war journalist who spoke up for China and humiliated the western corporate media, had died—and every single report on this in the western media I have seen has carefully omitted this fact. Here are ten things he said that the world needs to know about the legendary journalist who died in London on Saturday, at the age of 84.

1) The west demonizes China to punish it for being good at business, Pilger said in a documentary, The Coming War Against China. Standing in modern Shanghai, he says to the camera: “Today, China has matched America at its own great game of capitalism – and that is unforgivable.”

2) After his film was shown in 2016, he said: “The true story of China and America needs to be told, especially in Australia, where, fuelled by America, an anti-China propaganda campaign seems to be inviting a military reaction.” However, the western corporate media refused to follow his lead, instead choosing to double down on their part in what he saw as a global scam in which the US stirs up conflicts in places such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Seas, while the western media makes sure China is blamed for everything.

3) The Sinophobia of journalists and politicians in the global west was rooted in racism, he said. “The elite salivates for a deeply racist war against China,” he tweeted on a visit to Australia in March, 2023.

4) His main message in recent years has been about the importance of people developing scepticism about the narrative that the world is fed, and instead, realise we are being taught to hate the people America wants us to hate. “The United States dominates the Western world’s media. All but one of the top ten media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media – Google, Twitter, Facebook – are mostly American owned and controlled,” he told a conference audience in Norway on 6 September, 2022. Pilger regularly said that it was vital that the world’s public abandoned the western corporate media and turned to the new, small, independent voices rising up, using the internet to tell the truth about the world.

5) The Australia-born journalist was a major supporter of Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks organization in 2011 revealed a set of diplomatic cable messages which showed that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989. While fighting occurred elsewhere in the city, the protesters left the square peacefully, diplomats on site reported to their masters. Pilger regularly reminded the world how western leaders reacted when Assange revealed a series of important truths that punctured the “official” narrative. “Vice President Biden called him a ‘hi-tech terrorist’,” Pilger noted. “Hillary Clinton asked, ‘Can’t we just drone this guy?’”

6) In the 2022 speech, Pilger explained how the real China, an industrious community focused on itself, had been turned by the media into a fantasy-based monster trying to take over the world. “In less than a decade, a ‘good’ China has been airbrushed and a ‘bad’ China has replaced it: from the world’s workshop to a budding new Satan.”

7) He warned that journalists were leaving the most important elements out of their reports about China. “News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’,” Pilger said.

8) The independent Australian journalist railed against the fact that the astonishing story of China’s successful battle to lift its people from extreme poverty was almost never mentioned in the mainstream narrative, a fact that left him disgusted. “Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is,” Pilger said in his 2022 speech in Norway. He told a UK radio interviewer: “Journalism is nothing if it’s not about humanity – it has to be about people’s lives.”

9) The problem was not just that the media was pushing a false narrative about countries in the east, like China and Russia, but that it was doing so at the behest of the world’s most dangerous nation. “In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies,” he told a conference audience. “It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenceless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries. It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.” And yet the western corporate media still shoehorns every story to reinforce the “west is best” narrative.

10) In one of his last major speeches, in Sydney in March 2023, Pilger railed against the ridiculous diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars of Australian public money to the US war machine to protect the country against a non-existing invader. “China as the Yellow Peril fits Australia’s history of racism like a glove,” he said. True to form, the very western media groups he condemned for leaving out key facts, are this week printing obituaries about his death—and leaving out the very insights that made him respected by the public as a man not afraid to speak truth to power.

John Pilger will be missed. But his mission will be carried on by a thousand independent voices.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Rad
https://twitter.com/i/status/1741749165481173214

 

 

DNA

 

 


Kudu

 

 

Perspectives
https://twitter.com/i/status/1741789828348256611

 

 

Bottle cage

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 24 2019

Aug 242019
 
 August 24, 2019  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Frank Walton Crows on a beach 1884

 

• World Needs To End Risky Reliance On US Dollar: BoE’s Carney (R.)
• China Strikes Back At US With New Tariffs On $75 Billion In Goods (R.)
• Trump Heaps Another 5% Tariff On Chinese Goods In Latest Escalation (R.)
• Majority Of Americans Don’t Want Trump Impeached, Removed From Office (USAT)
• CNN Hires Former FBI #2 Andy McCabe, Who Was Fired For Leaking And Lying (ZH)
• Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (Webb)
• Bill Barr And Bill Clinton (Webb)
• Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies (Vos)
• Psychologist Approved Jeffrey Epstein’s Removal From Suicide Watch (R.)
• France Launches Rape Inquiry in Jeffrey Epstein Case (BBC)
• Lost at Sea (Kunstler)
• Tulsi Gabbard Victimized by DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria (Tracey)

 

 

“Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” sounds creepy to me.

• World Needs To End Risky Reliance On US Dollar: BoE’s Carney (R.)

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney took aim at the U.S. dollar’s “destabilizing” role in the world economy on Friday and said central banks might need to join together to create their own replacement reserve currency. The dollar’s dominance of the global financial system increased the risks of a liquidity trap of ultra-low interest rates and weak growth, Carney told central bankers from around the world gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the United States. “While the world economy is being reordered, the U.S. dollar remains as important as when Bretton Woods collapsed,” Carney said, referring to the end of the dollar’s peg to gold in the early 1970s. Emerging economies had increased their share of global activity to 60% from around 45% before the financial crisis a decade ago, Carney said.

But the dollar was still used for at least half of international trade invoices – five times more than the United States’ share of world goods imports – fuelling demand for U.S. assets and exposing many countries to damaging spillovers from swings in the U.S. economy. Carney – who was considered a candidate to be the next head of the International Monetary Fund but failed to secure backing from Europe’s governments – said the problems in financial system were encouraging protectionist and populist policies. [..] Carney warned that very low equilibrium interest rates had in the past coincided with wars, financial crises and abrupt changes in the banking system. As a first step to reorder the world’s financial system, countries could triple the resources of the IMF to $3 trillion as a better alternative to countries protecting themselves by racking up enormous piles of dollar-denominated debt.

“While such concerted efforts can improve the functioning of the current system, ultimately a multi-polar global economy requires a new IMFS (international monetary and financial system) to realize its full potential,” Carney said. China’s yuan represented the most likely candidate to become a reserve currency to match the dollar, but it still had a long way to go before it was ready. The best solution would be a diversified multi-polar financial system, something that could be provided by technology, Carney said. Facebook’s Libra was the most high-profile proposed digital currency to date but it faced a host of fundamental issues that it had yet to address. “As a consequence, it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies,” Carney said.

Read more …

Globalization is dead.

• China Strikes Back At US With New Tariffs On $75 Billion In Goods (R.)

China said on Friday it will impose retaliatory tariffs against about $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, putting as much as an extra 10% on top of existing rates in the dispute between the world’s top two economies. The latest salvo from China comes after the United States unveiled tariffs on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, including consumer electronics, scheduled to go into effect in two stages on Sept. 1 and Dec. 15. China will impose additional tariffs of 5% or 10% on a total of 5,078 products originating from the United States including agricultural products such as soybeans, crude oil and small aircraft. China is also reinstituting tariffs on cars and auto parts originating from the United States.

Read more …

Dead as a doornail.

• Trump Heaps Another 5% Tariff On Chinese Goods In Latest Escalation (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday lashed back at a new round of Chinese tariffs by heaping an additional 5% duty on some $550 billion in targeted Chinese goods in the latest tit-for-tat trade war escalation by the world’s two largest economies. Trump’s move, announced on Twitter, came hours after China unveiled retaliatory tariffs on $75 billion worth of U.S. goods, prompting the president earlier in the day to demand U.S. companies move their operations out of China. The intensifying U.S.-China trade war stoked market fears that the global economy will tip into recession, sending U.S. stocks into a tailspin, with the Nasdaq Compositedown 3%, and the S&P 500 down 2.6%. U.S. Treasury yields also declined as investors sought safe-haven assets, and crude oil, targeted for the first time by Chinese tariffs, fell sharply.


Trump’s tariff response was announced after markets closed on Friday, leaving potentially more damage for next week. “Sadly, past Administrations have allowed China to get so far ahead of Fair and Balanced Trade that it has become a great burden to the American Taxpayer,” Trump said on Twitter. “As President, I can no longer allow this to happen!” He said the United States would raise its existing tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to 30% from the current 25% beginning on Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China. At the same time, Trump announced an increase in planned tariffs on the remaining $300 billion worth of Chinese goods to 15% from 10%.

Read more …

Don’t take Nadler’s hobby away.

• Majority Of Americans Don’t Want Trump Impeached, Removed From Office (USAT)

A majority of Americans oppose impeaching President Donald Trump, according to a new poll by Monmouth University released Thursday. The data point – with 59% of those surveyed responding that Trump should not be impeached and compelled to leave office – comes as Trump’s approval rating remains at 40% in the same poll. In the poll, there is a clear partisan divide on whether the House Judiciary Committee should pursue an impeachment inquiry. While 72% of Democrats believe such an inquiry is a good idea, only 39% of independents and 8% of Republicans share that belief. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y. confirmed the launch of an impeachment inquiry by his House panel earlier this month in an interview on CNN.

Additionally, Nadler sent a letter Thursday asking four other Democratic House committee chairs currently leading investigations into Trump to share documents to aid his committee’s investigation into possible obstruction and other abuses, which could lead to potentially filing articles of impeachment against the president. Nadler wrote to Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Oversight and Reform Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. He asked for “documents and testimony, depositions, and/or interview transcripts that you believe may be relevant to the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing impeachment investigation relating to President Trump.”

The Monmouth University poll surveyed 800 adults in the U.S. via telephone from August 16-20, 2019. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Read more …

Neither Orwell nor Bizzarro World have anything on this: CNN just hired the FBI’s former no. 2, who was fired for lying to his own employer/agency. For which he should obviously be in jail, but he’s not. Want to guess where you would be if you lied to the FBI? Ask George Papadopoulos. His lie was superficial slash meaningless at best, but he served time. McCabe’s lies are a whole different universe.

• CNN Hires Former FBI #2 Andy McCabe, Who Was Fired For Leaking And Lying (ZH)

Another Ex-Obama official has joined the ranks of anti-Trump cable news punditry, this time disgraced FBI #2 Andrew McCabe, who was fired for leaking information to the media – then lying about it at least four times, including under oath. Now, McCabe – who is suing the DOJ and FBI over what he claims was a “politically motivated” firing just days before he was set to retire with full benefits,” will join former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at CNN. Succinctly put by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemmingway: “Andrew McCabe, one of the central figures of the “Russia collusion” hoax, who was fired from the FBI for lying about his leaks to the media, has been hired by CNN, one of the media outlets that did the most to perpetuate the damaging hoax.” – Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 23, 2019

McCabe authorized an FBI spokesman to tell the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett – just days before the 2016 US election, that the FBI hadn’t put the brakes on an investigation into the Clinton Foundation – at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton associate, Terry McAuliffe. As noted above, McCabe then lied about the leak at least four times and was subsequently fired over it. McCabe claimed that his boss, also-fired former FBI Director James Comey, was well aware of the leaks. Comey shot back on ABC’s The View, calling McCabe a liar.

Comey was asked by host Megan McCain how he thought the public was supposed to have “confidence” in the FBI amid revelations that McCabe lied about the leak. “It’s not okay. The McCabe case illustrates what an organization committed to the truth looks like,” Comey said, adding “Good people lie … I still believe Andrew McCabe is a good person but the inspector general found he lied,” noting that there are “severe consequences” within the DOJ for doing so.

Read more …

Part 4 of Whitney Webb’s incredible series on sexual blackmail.

“Of particular importance are Epstein’s relationship to the Clinton Foundation and the alleged role of Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based hedge fund and the Clinton Foundation in money laundering activity.. [..] It is this tale of intrigue that fully reveals the extent to which this decades-old alliance between organized crime, the CIA, and Israeli intelligence has corrupted and influenced politicians of both political parties, both through the use of sexual blackmail and through other means of coercion. ”

• Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein-Bill Clinton Relationship (Webb)

[..] these sexual blackmail operations proliferated during the Iran-Contra affair, which involved this same dark alliance between U.S./Israeli intelligence and organized crime. Though this series has thus far largely focused on the ties of Republican officials to those operations and associated crimes, the final installment of this series will focus on Democratic politicians, namely the Clinton family, and their ties to this same network as well as Jeffrey Epstein. The Clintons’ own involvement in Iran-Contra revolved around the covert activities at Arkansas’ Mena Airport, which involved the CIA front company Southern Air Transport and occurred while Clinton was governor.

Just a few years into the Clinton presidential administration, Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein would play a major role in Southern Air Transport’s relocation to Columbus, Ohio, leading to concerns among top Ohio officials that both men were not only working with the CIA, but that Wexner’s company, The Limited, sought to use the CIA-linked airline for smuggling. During that same period of time, Epstein had already forged close ties to important Clinton White House officials and prominent Clinton donors like Lynn Forester de Rothschild and made several personal visits to the official presidential residence.

Some of these ties appear related to Epstein’s shady financial activities, particularly involving currency markets and offshore tax havens — activities he began to perfect while working for prominent Iran-Contra figures in the early 1980s, several of whom were tied to the CIA-linked bank Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and had known relationships with Israeli intelligence, namely the Mossad. The nature of Epstein’s work for these individuals and other evidence strongly suggests that Epstein himself had a relationship with BCCI after leaving Bear Stearns and prior to the bank’s collapse in 1991.

Of particular importance are Epstein’s relationship to the Clinton Foundation and the alleged role of Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based hedge fund and the Clinton Foundation in money laundering activity, a relationship still under investigation by MintPress. It is this tale of intrigue that fully reveals the extent to which this decades-old alliance between organized crime, the CIA, and Israeli intelligence has corrupted and influenced politicians of both political parties, both through the use of sexual blackmail and through other means of coercion.

Read more …

From the same Whitney Webb article. This part warrants attention.

• Bill Barr And Bill Clinton (Webb)

After Clinton’s half-brother Roger was busted for cocaine smuggling (Clinton would later pardon him while president) the CIA sought to move Contra operations out of Arkansas, hoping to put a damper on the increasingly public and sloppy Arkansas-based operation. According to Terry Reed in his book Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, co-written with John Cummings, a hushed meeting was held in a bunker at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock, Arkansas. During the meeting, William Barr, who represented himself as the emissary of then-CIA Director Bill Casey told Clinton: “The deal we made was to launder our money through your bond business but what we didn’t plan on was you and your n****r here start taking yourselves seriously and purposely shrinking our laundry.”

Barr chastised Clinton for his sloppy handling of the delicate operation and his half-brother’s very public fall from grace. He would later tell Clinton, according to Reed, “Bill, you are Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy … You and your state have been our greatest asset. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job that you’ve always wanted. You and guys like you are the fathers of the new government. We are the new covenant.” Attempts to investigate Clinton’s role in the Mena operations and more broadly in the Iran-Contra affair were allegedly axed by Clinton’s own confidantes, who consistently denied he played a role in the scandal.

According to the Wall Street Journal, former IRS investigator William Duncan teamed with Arkansas State Police Investigator Russell Welch in what became a decade-long battle to bring the matter to light. In fact, of the nine separate state and federal probes into the affair, all failed. Duncan would later say of the investigations, “[They] were interfered with and covered up, and the justice system was subverted,” and a 1992 memo from Duncan to high-ranking members of the attorney general’s staff notes that Duncan was instructed “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney general’s office.” The attorney general, serving under George H. W. Bush, at that time was William Barr, who is currently attorney general under Trump.

Read more …

This stuff is so institutionalized, so deeply engrained in our societies, that is will be very hard to get rid of.

• Long Before Epstein: Sex Traffickers & Spy Agencies (Vos)

In the U.S., the New York State Select Committee On Crime in 1982 investigated nationwide networks of trafficking underage sex workers and producing child pornography. Dale Smith, a committee investigator, noted that call services using minors also profited from “sidelines,” besides the income from peddling prostitution. Smith said they sold information “on the sexual proclivities of the clients to agents of foreign intelligence.” Presumably, this information could be used to blackmail those in positions of power. Smith added that one call service sold information to “British and Israeli intelligence.”

Another U.K. scandal included allegations that Sir Peter Hayman, a British diplomat and deputy director of MI6, was a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Police discovered that two of the roughly dozen pedophiles in his circle had been writing to each other about their interest in “the extreme sexual torture and murder of children,” according to the The Daily Mail. In 2015, The Guardian reported that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been “adamant that officials should not publicly name” Hayman, “even after she had been fully briefed on his activities….formerly secret papers released to the National Archives shows.”

Still, Hayman was unmasked as a subscriber to PIE in 1981 by M.P. Geoffrey Dickens, who also reportedly raised the national security risk of Hayman’s proclivities, implying they were a potential source of blackmail sought by intelligence agencies. The British tabloid The Mirror reported that intelligence agencies, including the KGB and CIA, kept their own dossiers on U.K. establishment figures involved with PIE and the abuse of minors, to blackmail the targets in exchange for information.

Read more …

Makes very little sense. Suicide watch is a serious thing, and all it takes is one psychologist?

• Psychologist Approved Jeffrey Epstein’s Removal From Suicide Watch (R.)

A psychologist at the federal detention center in New York City where financier Jeffrey Epstein was jailed on sex-trafficking charges had approved his removal from suicide watch before he killed himself, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday. The disclosure came in a letter dated on Thursday from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd and addressed to the leaders of the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, seeking details about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death earlier this month. Epstein, who was 66, was found dead Aug. 10 in his cell inside a segregated housing unit of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. An autopsy concluded that he hanged himself.


His death triggered investigations by the FBI, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which runs the detention facility. The Boyd letter, provided to Reuters on Friday, confirmed that Epstein had been placed on suicide watch in July, a status under which the designated prisoner is held in a special cell under constant observation by staff or “inmate companions.” Epstein was “later removed from suicide watch after being evaluated by a doctoral-level psychologist who determined that a suicide watch was no longer warranted,” Boyd wrote in the three-page letter. The letter did not state precisely why a suicide watch had been ordered for Epstein. But Epstein in July had been found unconscious on the floor of his cell with marks on his neck, and officials had been investigating that incident as a possible suicide attempt or assault.

Read more …

Maybe it takes the French to dig deep enough. Certainly wouldn’t bet on Bill Barr doing the job.

• France Launches Rape Inquiry in Jeffrey Epstein Case (BBC)

French prosecutors have opened an inquiry into rape allegations against the late US financier Jeffrey Epstein. [..] He had an apartment in Paris, and French gender equality minister Marlène Schiappa had called for an inquiry into any abuses committed on French soil. On Friday Paris prosecutors launched a probe for “rape” and “sexual assault”. [..] Epstein spent plenty of time in Paris and owned a luxury apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Investigations “will focus on potential crimes committed against French victims… and on suspects who are French citizens”, Paris Prosecutor Remy Heitz said in a statement.


A French advocacy group for child sex abuse victims, Innocence En Danger (Innocence at Risk), said this week it had received 10 witness statements involving Epstein regarding alleged sex crimes committed against minors on French soil. Epstein was also friends with French modelling tycoon Jean-Luc Brunel, who was accused in US court documents of procuring young girls for Epstein, along with allegations of rape. Mr Brunel has denied the accusations.

Read more …

“The Democratic contest may be peaking way too early. And Joe Biden hasn’t even had a chance to claim he is the out-of-wedlock grandson of W.C. Handy.”

• Lost at Sea (Kunstler)

Elizabeth Warren set the stage for anointing herself America’s Race Hustler-in-Chief by addressing the niggling matter of her former claim to be a Cherokee Indian, since disproven by a DNA test. There was loose talk, you see, that she used the Cherokee ruse to bamboozle her overseers on the Harvard Plantation, where she got to work in the Big House known as the Harvard Law School based on her “diversity” bona fides — a “minority hire!” The claim was so transparently idiotic and dishonest that she was desperate to walk it back as delicately as possible, in order to keep up with the race hustling of her fellow pols chasing the nomination. A rain dance was arranged in the aptly-named heartland town of Sioux City.

“Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes,” said Ms. Warren, who was met with a standing ovation when she took the stage [The Times reported]. “I am sorry for harm I have caused. I have listened and I have learned a lot, and I am grateful for the many conversations that we’ve had together.” Was a more disingenuous political statement ever contrived? A bundle of devious platitudinous promises of the sort that white people always offered the indigenous folk at a thousand crooked treaty councils? It would have been a little more satisfying, perhaps, if Ms. Warren had specified the mistakes made, e.g. I was falsely claiming a racial identity for career advancement. Now that’s an apology!

“Listening and learning?” I dunno… sounds a little like groveling and pandering. Anyone can choke down a few bites of humble pie but please don’t make me eat that shit sandwich! The Democratic contest may be peaking way too early. And Joe Biden hasn’t even had a chance to claim he is the out-of-wedlock grandson of W.C. Handy. There are indications that the political center is already a little tired of the Everything-Is-Racist trope that the party ran up the flagpole this summer. For The New York Times, it became the publicly acknowledged official editorial slant when newsroom chief Dean Baquet announced that the paper needed a replacement for the shredded gonfalon of RussiaGate.

Read more …

Is the DNC secretly working for Trump?

Gabbard torpedoed Kamala Harris’s shot at the job. That won’t be forgiven.

• Tulsi Gabbard Victimized by DNC’s Dubious Debate Criteria (Tracey)

Tulsi Gabbard is on the verge of being excluded from the next Democratic presidential debate on the basis of criteria that appear increasingly absurd. Take, for instance, her poll standing in New Hampshire, which currently places Gabbard at 3.3% support, according to the RealClearPolitics average as of Aug. 20. One might suspect that such a figure would merit inclusion in the upcoming debates — especially considering she’s ahead of several candidates who have already been granted entry, including Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, and Andrew Yang. But the Democratic National Committee has decreed that the polls constituting this average are not sufficiently “qualifying.”

What makes a poll “qualifying” in the eyes of the DNC? The answer is conspicuously inscrutable. Months ago, party chieftains issued a list of “approved sponsoring organizations/institutions” for polls that satisfy their criteria for debate admittance. Not appearing on that list is the Boston Globe, which sponsored a Suffolk University poll published Aug. 6 that placed Gabbard at 3%. The DNC had proclaimed that for admittance to the September and October debates, candidates must secure polling results of 2% or more in four separate “approved” polls – but a poll sponsored by the newspaper with the largest circulation in New Hampshire (the Globe recently surpassed the New Hampshire Union Leader there) does not count, per this cockamamie criteria.

There has not been an officially qualifying poll in New Hampshire, Gabbard’s best state, in over a month. The absurdity mounts. A South Carolina poll published Aug. 14 by the Post and Courier placed Gabbard at 2%. One might have again vainly assumed that the newspaper with the largest circulation in a critical early primary state would be an “approved” sponsor per the dictates of the DNC, but it is not. Curious.

Read more …

 

Cerberus, the early days.

 

 

 

 

 

Epstein, or How Your News is Cooked

Aug 092019
 
 August 9, 2019  Posted by at 8:09 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Prince Andrew, Virginia Roberts Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001

 

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unsealed a batch of documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case today, as announced recently. Actually, it’s a case brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s madam and main procurer of little girls. Giuffre bought the case after Maxwell accused her of lying about the whole thing.

There’s still much more of this to come, and given the VIP status of many people mentioned in the case, and the documents, there’s no saying what exactly will be revealed.

But I thought I’d pick out a few bits, if only to show you to what extent your opinion on cases like this is being manufactured for you, without you realizing it of course. And if you think you DO realize it, chances are you are the sucker at the poker table.

First, the Guardian’s take:

Jeffrey Epstein: Large Tranche Of Files Released In Ghislaine Maxwell Lawsuit

A large tranche out of 2,000 pages of potentially explosive documents in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell – the British socialite and daughter of former media tycoon Robert Maxwell accused of acting as a recruiter of girls and women for disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – have been made public. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s many accusers, filed a Manhattan federal court lawsuit against Maxwell in 2015, alleging defamation.


Giuffre, née Roberts, claimed Maxwell defamed her by calling her a liar over her allegations against Maxwell and Epstein. Giuffre has alleged that Maxwell recruited her to work as a masseuse for Epstein when she was 15 and had been working as a locker-room attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Giuffre had previously alleged that Epstein, who had political connections, forced her into sexual encounters with Prince Andrew.

That’s an introduction in case you still needed it. And the best the paper can do after that is regurgitate a bunch of Trump quotes, along with a two decades old photo of Trump and Epstein:

Epstein, a financier whose net worth is now thought to be some $560m, also associated with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. Trump, who was pictured partying with Epstein and women in the 1990s, has recently attempted to distance himself from the financier. In the wake of Epstein’s arrest last month, Trump told reporters he “knew [Epstein], like everybody in Palm Beach knew him”, but added: “I had a falling out with him. I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years. I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”


However, in a 2002 profile of Epstein from New York magazine, Trump was quoted as saying: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Clinton also distanced himself from Epstein in a statement issued by his press secretary, saying he had “not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade” and “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he had been recently charged in New York”.

Now, if you turn these two quotes around, and you start with the 2002 one and follow it with the morse recent quote, what you end up with is Trump at first being unaware of who Epstein is and upon finding out, distancing himself from the man. There’s also the alleged fact that Trump threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago some 15 years ago for forcing himself upon an underage girl.

I’m not trying to exonerate Trump, and may he burn in the same hell Epstein is going to if he’s guilty of the same depraved behavior, it’s just that I haven’t seen any proof, merely another endless tempest of innuendo, such as we’ve seen about Trump for 3 solid years now. Anybody remember Russiagate?

And you know, this is from the Guardian, whose simplistic worldview is everything Trump=BAD and everything Putin=BAD. But it’s still a bit puzzling. If they assigned a reporter, or more, to the story, how is it possible that the reporter(s) didn’t pick up on the one thing that is actually newsworthy about it? I think I know how that is possible: Trump=BAD.

I hadn’t seen any reports of Trump being on an Epstein plane to date, but CNBC’s coverage of the unsealed documents lifts a little piece of the veil. He WAS on an Epstein plane, albeit over 22 years ago, but it wasn’t the Lolita Express that flew underage girls and VIPs from various US locations to Epstein’s private Caribbean island. It was just Palm Beach to Newark.

That is something I’ve been wondering about for a while: We know that Bill Clinton was on that Lolita Express at least 26 times, yet there are no reports of Donald Trump having been on it even once. But just about any article that deals with Epstein has a 20-year-old photo of him with Trump.

Giuffre names names, 5 in particular, as CNBC found out from the docs. Wait, but the Guardian did not find these names?! What was the Guardian looking for then?

Court Documents About Jeffrey Epstein, Accused In Sex Traffic Case, And His Alleged Procurer Ghislaine Maxwell

The documents include one containing flights records showing that President Donald Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane in January 1997, from a Palm Beach, Florida, airport to Newark, New Jersey. In another document, one of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Giuffre, says Maxwell directed her to have sex with a former governor and other prominent people.

The files released Friday are part of a defamation lawsuit that Giuffre filed against Maxwell several years ago. The suit accused Maxwell of calling Giuffre, a liar for claiming that Maxwell and Epstein sexually abused her when she was underage. Giuffre had also alleged that she was sexually abused while in Epstein’s circle by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executive, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister and other world leaders,” as well as noted lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law professor.

[..] On Friday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Maxwell’s request to have the full circuit review an earlier decision by a three-judge appeals panel that had denied Maxwell’s effort to keep the entire case sealed. The circuit court sent the case back to the district court, where a judge will decide how much of the remaining documents will be unsealed. It also unsealed documents that included pleadings in the defamation case, depositions, and other material.

Among the documents unsealed is deposition of Giuffre, in which she says that Maxwell directed her to have sex with Prince Andrew of Britain, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, hedge funder Glenn Dubin, late MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, modeling company founder Jean Luc-Brunel, the owner of large hotel chain, and another prince. In that deposition, when asked if she was angry at Epstein, Giuffre answered, “Furious.” Asked if she was angry at [Alan] Dershowitz, Giuffre said, “Absolutely.”

But all the above, the Guardian and CNBC, is only an lead-in to what made me take this up. The first I read about the unsealing was from Adam Klasfeld at CourtHouseNews via Zero Hedge. And there is not one iota of doubt about what is the main take-away from the first batch of unsealed docs. None. How did the Guardian miss this then, and CNBC? Is it incompetence? You be the judge.

Epstein Documents Hit; Accuser Says Trump ‘Didn’t Partake In Any Sex With Any Of Us’

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ordered the partial release of what is expected to be approximately 2,000 pages of documents related to convicted pedophile sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The document release stems from a 2015 defamation lawsuit in New York brought by Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre against Epstein’s ‘Madam’ – Ghislaine Maxwell.

Giuffre says Maxwell helped Epstein traffic herself and other underage girls to sex parties at the billionaire pedophile’s many residences. The case was settled in 2017 and the records were sealed – leading to an appeal by filmmaker and author Mike Cernovich, who was later joined by the Miami Herald and several other parties including lawyer Alan Dershowitz – who has sought to clear his name in connection with Epstein’s activities.

[..] While Epstein’s ties to former President Bill Clinton and other famous figures are well known – all of whom have tried to distance themelves in recent weeks, much has been made about the relationship between President Trump and the pedophile financier.

Following a 2011 article by journalist Sharon Churcher claiming that Donald Trump was a “good friend of Jeffrey’s,” Giuffre was asked to clarify Churcher’s possible misquote that “Donald Trump was also a good friend of Jeffrey’s,” and that Trump “Didn’t partake in any” of — “any sex with any of us but he flirted with me.” “It’s true that he didn’t partake in any sex with us, and but it’s not true that he flirted with me. Donald Trump never flirted with me,” said Giuffre.

That main take-away, the Big Kahuna, which concerns the President of the United States, is that Giuffre fully exonerates Trump. At least for what she has witnessed of Epstein’s behavior. And Giuffre, if you follow the story, was a pretty central figure in the Epstein/Maxwell depravity. And she was that for many years. So you would think that must be the Guardian’s big fat headline tomorrow morning. Yeah, good luck.

The Guardian wrote the story for you long ago -and you don’t get a say-: Trump=BAD and Putin=BAD and Julian Assange=BAD and Jeremy Corbyn=an antisemite, so also BAD.

Here are the docs:

 

And:

 

And I keep on asking myself: how is it possible that Ghislaine Maxwell is still walking around free? Does she have something on every single DA in the US?

Also, the news out of those unsealed docs is that the President of the United States is exonerated by perhaps the no. 1 victim in Jeffrey Epstein’s cabal, and the media just “forget” to report on that?

 

 

 

 

Why Trump Will Win In 2020, And Easily

Jul 072019
 
 July 7, 2019  Posted by at 7:02 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The geographer 1668-69

 

July 7 2019, just another tequila Sunday. There are elections here in Greece, and the right wing will take over. Bad idea, because it will bring out the left wing resistance that have remained subdued while Syriza reneged on all their promises, but they were left wing, and how does left protesting left work exactly? They didn’t know. Better lay low. No more.

From now on in, it’s women and children first. And there are so many pent up grievances. Youth unemployment is still at 40%. While ever more Greeks are evicted from their homes through Airbnb alone. This ain’t gonna go well. That strong economy the right promises will be there exclusively for their own richer supporters, at the ever-increasing cost of the poor.

 

The US women’s soccer team just became World Champions again. That’s the last time in a very long time. Because traditional soccer countries now also have women’s teams. There’s a very peculiar division at the bottom of this. In Europe and South America and Africa, soccer is a men’s game.

In the US, baseball, hockey, basketball and American football have spent millions making sure soccer was turned into, and perceived as, a girly sport. Just so the best male athletes would not turn there. So the US, colleges, universities, have this decades-long tradition of women’s soccer. But they have no such tradition for men, while almost the entire rest of the world does.

That’s why the US women’s soccer team will never win again, and it’s also why the men’s team never will. No culture, no tradition, even as they easily could have them. This was very obvious to me in my Montreal days. In summer, in just about every city park, there were community and family gatherings of South- and Central Americans, and they were all playing soccer.

Still, Canada stinks at the game on an international level. Why? Because the hockey people don’t want the competition for male athletes. They cut it down wherever they can. All they would have to do is take the most promising 100 10-year old kids just playing in the parks in one city, and get them into a program. Within 10 years they’d have a national team that’s an international contender. Kids from Peru, Chili, Brazil, 100 different countries, and throw in the European kids that are there anyway. But no.

 

Still, I was going to talk about Trump again. Just to piss off the people some more who -stupidly- accuse me of supporting Trump. Though it is sort of the same thing: Greek PM Tsipras is set to lose (no results yet as I write this) because he never did what he promised. US soccer is set to lose because other domestic sports don’t want it to be successful. People are -mostly- blind.

First I saw this UK ambassador to Washington, one Sir Kim Darroch, has sent “secret” cables (memos) to his government about how Trump’s administration is supposedly “inept, insecure and incompetent”, as well as “uniquely dysfunctional” and “divided”. “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”

“Differences between the US and the UK on climate change, media freedoms and the death penalty might come to the fore as the countries seek to improve trading relations after Brexit, the memos said.” Oh, fcuking yeah, the UK is such a shining light on climate change and press freedom, right?! Who’s holding a certain journalist, one Julian Assange, in a maximum security prison again?

“Mr Trump’s publicly stated reason for calling off an airstrike against Tehran with 10 minutes to go – that it would cause 150 casualties – “doesn’t stand up”, Sir Kim said. Instead, he suggested the president was “never fully on board”. When I read that line, I thought Sir Kim was not-even-so secretly in favor of attacking Iran. Was that just me?

Oh, and earlier today I was wondering if they ever hand out these Sir and Dame titles to people who are poor or even destitute but who work 25 hours a day for the people around them, to make sure they can alleviate the suffering in their communities as much as they can. Or does that mummified “Queen” of theirs only bestow that “honor” on the upper classes? No, I do not care, I think I know the answer. Inglan is a bitch.

And if I’ve ever seen a dysfunctional, “inept, insecure and incompetent” government, it’s the one that these secret memos were sent to. From Cameron to May to soon Boris Johnson, let get real.

 

Then also today there were all these news reports about Jeffrey Epstein on how he’s finally being charged with abusing dozens of underage on his planes and his estates. This has been going on for decades (who was in charge during those years). What is the media focus? Trump, of course. But Epstein was thrown out of Mar-A-Lago I think 12 years ago for hitting on an underage girl. Does that mean we know for sure Trump was never involved? Nope.

But we do know that Bill Clinton flew 26 times in a few years on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ bringing helpss girls so faraway places. So maybe he should be the main focus here, not Trump. Then again, it’s too late in the game now, isn’t it? US -and UK- media have bet all their money on the anti-Trump game. They have lost everything so far, and then they double down, everything on red style.

I’m thinking: guys, you lost, time to find a new game plan. But they don’t have the flexibility nor the intelligence required. Aaron Maté wrote another scathing -must read- essay on the Mueller Report , putting its credibiltiy at the same level as the Steele dossier, but one half of America doesn’t even want to see that. It only wants to see more damning reports, damn evidence, about their favorite orange piñata.

And no, talking about that does not make me a Trump supporter. Let’s say I’m looking at that like it were a game of soccer, and I point out to you that the other team has absolutely nothing while they’re already 10-0 down (that’s a very big score in soccer).

 

But a third thing i saw today really made me think Trump can’t lose in 2020. The Guardian of all places had a review of a book entitled American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War by Politico writer Tim Alberta, in which Trump effusively praises Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among other things by comparing her to Evita Peron.

“Trump says he first saw Ocasio-Cortez during her primary against Crowley, while watching TV with political advisers. “I see a young woman,” he says, “ranting and raving like a lunatic on a street corner, and I said: ‘That’s interesting, go back.’” Alberta then says Trump “became enamored” and “starstruck” by Ocasio-Cortez. “I called her Eva Perón,” Trump says. “I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.”


[..] Trump does row back on his praise, telling Alberta: “She’s got talent. Now, that’s the good news. The bad news: she doesn’t know anything. She’s got a good sense, an ‘it’ factor, which is pretty good, but she knows nothing. But with time, she has real potential.”

 

I still remain convinced that the one dimensional Trump haters, the same people who would accuse me of supporting him, don’t understand how or why that means he will win easily in 2020. Well, that, and they have nobody to put up against him. Joe Biden is not just a joke, he’s an old and stale joke. Kamala Harris is an attempt to cross Obama with Hillary. Bernie Sanders is a wonderful man, but he should be the campaign manager for a younger prospect, but who isn’t there.

And Tulsi Gabbard is being actively suppressed by the DNC, like Bernie Sanders four years ago. All the rest of the field are mere bystanders. It’s the exact same feeling of the GOP ‘contestants’ standing against Trump in 2016. They’re there to fill up space, and to create the illusion there’s an actual conversation or dialogue or contest happening.

 

Personally, I think it would be great if the Democrats have a valid candidate next year, at the level of Trump or better. The Donald should have stayed in real estate. But instead he’s the President, and now everybody has to deal with that. And you don’t do that by continuing to blame him for everything that happens under the sun. That ‘tactic’ has failed for three years.

Those past 3 years of media bias against him, plus the Mueller report debacle, should have made this clear. But what we see today is that neither the Democrats nor the press that supports them have anything to fight Trump with. While he compliments their main future asset for her talent, and for her likeness to a world-famous tragic actress-turned-politician and Broadway darling.

That’s why he’ll win.