Nov 262023
 
 November 26, 2023  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  25 Responses »


Giorgio de Chirico Piazza d’Italia 1913

 

The Gaza Truce Is A Sign That Hamas Can’t Be Defeated (Inlakesh)
Hamas ‘Remains Strong’ After 49 Day Fight: Israeli Media (Cradle)
Biden Endorses Israel’s War To Eliminate Gaza (Aaron Maté)
The Thanksgiving Truce (Lauria)
Second Nakba; Same Israeli Lies; Same Western Narrative (Cook)
Israel Receives Third List Of Hostages To Be Released From Gaza (Az.)
US-German ‘Peace Talks Plot’ Shows West on Brink of Losing Ukraine (Sp.)
Ukraine Will ‘Strengthen EU’ – Baerbock (RT)
Germany Today Could Do What Hitler Did But Faster – Hungary’s Top MP (RT)
The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign (NYMag)
The Invisible Hand Just Slapped Disney (Turley)
Bill Gates, Jeffrey Epstein and a Global Health Investment Fund (BB)
Jeffrey Sachs Says COVID About ‘Massive Government Lying’ (NM)

 

 


Some pictures do not need a caption.
– Banksy

 

 

Saudi Arabia Leaders Warns U.S To Stop Israel Or Face Its Wrath

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Middle East Will Cause WW3! Iran will ENTER Israel!!

 

 

Inevitable victory for Russia | Ukraine is crushed – Douglas Macgregor

 

 

Fed

 

 


2005. Not guilty.

 

 

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

 

 

 

 

“At this time, it appears that the idea that “Hamas must go” is no more than a pipe dream.”

The Gaza Truce Is A Sign That Hamas Can’t Be Defeated (Inlakesh)

After repeatedly rejecting a truce with Hamas and labeling the idea “ridiculous”, Israel agreed to a four-day cessation of hostilities in Gaza and a prisoner exchange. Six weeks of death and destruction, which Israeli and Western leaders declared should have led to the destruction of Hamas, have now bolstered the Palestinian movement’s image throughout the Arab world and beyond.The four-day truce that was implemented this Friday provided a sigh of relief for those most affected by the war in the Gaza Strip, but has in many ways spelled disaster for the Israeli government. As women and children, held captive by both Hamas and Israel, are being reunited with their families, the threat of further warfare looms. Although the loved ones of those released are now celebrating, the next steps will be crucial in determining the final outcomes of the 46-day battle that has now been placed on pause. At this time, it appears that the idea that “Hamas must go” is no more than a pipe dream.

On October 27, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to the sound of overwhelming applause, calling for a truce to stop the fighting in the Gaza Strip. Although the non-binding resolution passed with a majority of 120 votes in favour, Israel and the United States outright rejected it. Tabled by Arab nations, the call for a truce was labeled as a “defense of Nazi terrorists” by Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN. This came after Hamas released four Israeli civilian hostages without conditions, for what the group said were humanitarian reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others in his emergency war government, have repeatedly stated their goal of crushing Hamas and allied Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, refusing to negotiate with them. The six-week-long aerial bombardment of densely populated civilian areas in the besieged Palestinian enclave, which also morphed into a ground war, has claimed over 20,000 lives according to some estimates, but failed to eliminate Hamas. In fact, Israeli forces have not been able to show a single significant military achievement against the Palestinian armed groups. While Hamas claim to have struck 355 Israeli military vehicles during the past two weeks of fighting, publishing video evidence of dozens of attacks, Israeli forces have failed to assassinate senior leaders of Hamas, to free hostages by force, uncover major tunnel networks, or even publish proof that they have killed a significant number of Hamas fighters on the battlefield.

According to the Calcalist financial newspaper, the Gaza war was estimated early on to cost around $50 billion, roughly 10% of Israel’s GDP. In addition to this, the Israeli military has reportedly suffered losses in intelligence and monitoring equipment along their northern border, due to attacks carried out by the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Yemen’s Ansarallah also seized a ship in the Red Sea, owned by an Israeli businessman, which has severely impacted trade through the southern port city of Eilat. This is not factoring in the inevitable long-term effects on things like Israel’s tourism sector or investment in its high-tech industry.

Palestinian Ambassador to UK

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“..the Military Oversight Authority is refusing to allow Israeli media to show an action map of its progress in Gaza, fearing that it will show how little the army has achieved..”

Hamas ‘Remains Strong’ After 49 Day Fight: Israeli Media (Cradle)

Following the implementation of a four-day truce in Gaza, the Israeli media is flush with reports that Hamas remains strong after 49 days of fighting, and that the Israeli military is losing the war. Following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements surrounding the Gaza strip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to eliminate Hamas. But despite Israel’s horrific bombing campaign and ground operation in Gaza that has killed some 15,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, the Israeli media is reporting that Hamas remains in control of the conflict. Following the release of the first batch of Israelis held captive by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hebrew language Channel 12 said that on 25 November, “Whoever is in a hurry to mourn Hamas should look at this day to understand that this is not the reality.

“After 49 days of fighting, Hamas has proven that it is still strong, and that it still controls the Gaza Strip.” The channel noted that Hamas successfully completed the exchange of captives, including one held by another Palestinian faction, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, despite claims it had lost control over its fighters and cells. “After all this, the scene of Hamas kneeling is still a long way off,” the channel added. The Israeli channel’s military affairs correspondent, Nir Dvory, said that the Hamas movement “has not collapsed yet,” noting that the Israeli army “failed to liquidate the movement’s officials” whom it declared targets of its operations. Hours after the temporary truce took effect between the Israeli occupation and the resistance in Gaza on Friday, criticism began to appear for not achieving the declared goals of the war on the Gaza Strip.

According to Channel 12, the Military Oversight Authority is refusing to allow Israeli media to show an action map of its progress in Gaza, fearing that it will show how little the army has achieved. Israeli media reported as well that Reserve Major General Israel Ziv stated that if Hamas currently succeeds in stopping the continuation of the fighting, “it has emerged victorious.” At the same time, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported the intelligence capabilities of the Palestinian resistance are much more sophisticated than previously known. The newspaper’s military affairs analyst, Yossi Yehoshua, revealed the Israeli army found documents in a Hamas base in Gaza that included details of the structure and social composition of Israel’s Paratroopers Brigade, as well as pictures of the former brigade commander and other officers who had ended their service.

The extent and complexity of Hamas’ tunnel system also surprised Israel’s military,Yedioth Ahronoth reported. An officer admitted that the resistance tunnels in the northern Gaza Strip, those closest to the border with Israel, were “deep, long, and operational in a way that was fundamentally different from what Israeli intelligence estimated.” The Israeli officer said, “No one imagined that this is what we would find there.”

Tapper

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“.. it will be difficult to continue with a ground maneuver in the southern Gaza Strip should public anger over what will be perceived as abandoning women and children increase.”

Biden Endorses Israel’s War To Eliminate Gaza (Aaron Maté)

In rationalizing his continued support for Israeli aggression, Biden echoed the Netanyahu government’s claim that its attacks have forced Hamas to negotiate the captives’ release. “I don’t trust Hamas to do anything right,” Biden told reporters during his Thanksgiving vacation. “I only trust Hamas to respond to pressure.” The available evidence shows otherwise. As Mohammad Alsaafin notes, the thousands of Palestinians – and an unknown numbers of Israeli and other foreign captives — killed by Israeli bombings “did not have to die—not just because Israel could have refrained from targeting civilians, which it has clearly refused to do, but because the contours of the deal announced Wednesday have been on the table for weeks.” On Oct. 26th, Hamas official Ali Barakeh laid out the terms for a proposed hostage exchange similar to those reached this week.

“We are ready to let them all leave,” Barakeh told the Washington Post. That same day, senior Qatari negotiator Mohmmed al Khulaifi said that he believed “all civilian hostages” could be freed if Israel would pause its bombardment of Gaza. Rather than engage with these overtures, Israel launched a ground invasion the following day. According to Western and Arab officials interviewed by the New York Times, Israel’s Oct. 27th ground invasion thwarted the release of up to 50 captives in exchange for a bombing pause. The talks were additionally “stymied” by Israel’s decision to cut off Gaza’s telecommunications network, which meant Qatari officials and Hamas “struggled to make quick, consistent contact.” Another obstacle was Israel’s initial refusal of Hamas’ demand to free Palestinian “women and minors held without charge” from Israeli prisons — the captives that Western audiences are not supposed to care about.

After undermining a hostage deal with its ground invasion of Gaza, Israel thwarted another opportunity with last week’s attack on Al-Shifa hospital. On Nov. 14th, Israel relayed its acceptance of a similar offer to Hamas’ original. But hours later, after Israeli forces stormed Al-Shifa, Hamas made clear that “[t]he deal was off,” according to the Times. “It had looked like towards the end of that day … that we were closing in and [then] everything stalled,” a senior US official told the Washington Post. According to one source familiar with the talks, Hamas was “concerned about the evacuations of patients, including premature babies, and attacks on other hospitals.”

According to Israeli military correspondent Amos Harel of Haaretz, Israel’s decision to accept a deal this week stemmed from “not only… the terms of the deal,” which “improved somewhat,” but a more important imperative: sustaining the Gaza assault over the long-term. The Israeli “security establishment,” Harel writes, has developed the “understanding that the outcry of the hostages’ families is arousing broad public support, and that it will be difficult to continue with a ground maneuver in the southern Gaza Strip should public anger over what will be perceived as abandoning women and children increase.” In other words, to keep killing Palestinian women and children caged in Gaza, Israel decided that it must finally stop abandoning the Israeli women and children held hostage in Gaza.

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“..ultimately, both Israel and U.S. politicians depend on the support of the American people..”

The Thanksgiving Truce (Lauria)

Israel has long depended on American military aid and diplomatic support to pursue its interests in the Middle East. Without such backing, especially in a time of open warfare, it is doubtful that Israel could for long pursue its goals in Gaza. American politicians likewise depend on support from Israel and its lobby in the United States to pursue their political careers. But ultimately, both Israel and U.S. politicians depend on the support of the American people. There was already a trend, especially among young Americans, many of them Jews, to no longer lend unconditional support to Israel. This became evident with the growing popularity of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement among American youth, causing individual states to pass laws outlawing the movement.

The trend towards rejecting the mainstream media’s whitewashed history of Israel and Palestine, and the growing understanding that Israel was established in 1948 largely through the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their ancestral homes and land, has only intensified with Israel’s current onslaught against Gaza.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden know that if they lose the American people they are both in serious trouble. Biden is already feeling the heat from American voters because of his handling of Gaza. He can pretty much kiss the swing state of Michigan goodbye with its large Arab population. But polls show many Democrats across the entire country also strongly disapprove.

Palestinian Americans sued in federal court on Nov. 16 to immediately force Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to stop providing additional weapons, money and military and diplomatic support to Israel. A motion from the Center for Constitutional Rights’ for preliminary injunction charges that: “Defendants have been on notice of the risk of genocide since at least October 9, if not already on October 7, through the public and widely circulated statements and actions by Israeli officials with whom they were in close, regular contact and consultation, as well as by warnings of indicators of genocide from United Nations officials and other sources that have only increased since then.”

Israel understands that to maintain U.S. government support, without which it cannot continue its genocidal goals, it needs to keep the U.S. public on side, lest it bring pressure on Biden and Congress to finally cut off aid to stop the massacres. Right now Netanyahu sees Americans dangerously turning against Israel and the Biden administration. Weekly protests and American Jews taking over Grand Central Station (which the New York governor called “a major incident”) are clearly alarming Washington and Tel Aviv, (not to mention London, Berlin and Paris where it’s illegal to support the Palestinians.) Is it therefore a coincidence that a 4-day ceasefire allowing cameras to show food trucks delivering aid to Gazans coincides with the 4-day U.S. Thanksgiving holiday?

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“The final destination is clearly in view, as, in truth, it has been for more than seven decades..”

Second Nakba; Same Israeli Lies; Same Western Narrative (Cook)

After its mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, Israel tried to manage the remaining Palestinian population through the traditional apartheid model of herding the natives into reservations, as its predecessors did with the remnants of the “locals” who survived their efforts at extermination. Any caution on Israel’s part derived from the different political climate it had to operate in: international law became more central after World War II, with clear definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The West wilfully mischaracterises Israel’s process of dispossessing and ghettoising these remaining Palestinians as a “conflict” because they refuse to submit quietly to the apartheid, ghettoisation model. Now, Israel’s management approach to the Palestinians has broken down completely — for two main reasons.

First, the Palestinians, aided by new technologies that have made it more difficult to keep them out of view, have attracted ever widening popular support – and most problematically, among Western publics. The Palestinians have also managed to bring their cause to international forums, even gaining recognition as a state by a majority of members of the United Nations. Potentially, they even have redress in the West’s international legal institutions, like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. As a result, subduing the Palestinians — or maintaining “calm”, as Western establishments prefer to call it — has become more and more difficult and expensive. And second, on Oct. 7, Hamas proved that Palestinian resistance cannot be contained even under a siege enforced by drones, and an Iron Dome interception system protecting Israel from retaliatory rockets. In such circumstances, Palestinians have shown they will seek surprising and creative ways to break out of their confinement and bring their oppression into the spotlight.

In fact, given the West’s dulled sensitivities to Palestinian suffering, militant factions are likely to deduce that headline-grabbing atrocities — mirroring Israel’s own historic approach to the Palestinians — are the only way to gain attention. Israel understands that the Palestinians are going to continue being a thorn in its side, a reminder that Israel is not a normal state. And the struggle to correct Israel’s decades of dispossessing and brutalising Palestinians will become ever more a defining moral cause among Western publics, as the fight against apartheid South Africa once was. So Israel is taking advantage of this moment to “finish the job”. The final destination is clearly in view, as, in truth, it has been for more than seven decades. The crime is unfolding step by step, the pace quickening. And yet senior politicians and journalists in the West, like their predecessors, continue to be blind to it all.

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Qatar is trying hard to extend the truce.

Israel Receives Third List Of Hostages To Be Released From Gaza (Az.)

Israel has received a list of hostages to be released in the third stage of the implementation of a ceasefire agreement, the Kan radio station noted, Report informs referring to TASS. According to the Times of Israel newspaper, the Israeli prime minister’s office has notified the families of those on the list handed over by Qatar. The third group of hostages may be released on Sunday. The Palestinian movement Hamas announced on November 22 that an agreement on a four-day humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip had been reached through the mediation of Qatar and Egypt. The agreement stipulates the release of 50 women and children under the age of 19 who are held in Gaza in exchange for the release of 150 women and children under the age of 19 from Israeli prisons.

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“..Kiev now faces the last moment when it can lay claim to more or less acceptable terms of a truce with Moscow…”

US-German ‘Peace Talks Plot’ Shows West on Brink of Losing Ukraine (Sp.)

Washington and Berlin have reportedly kicked off a plot to push Ukraine for negotiations with Russia by slashing military supplies to Kiev and leaving Volodymyr Zelensky with little if any options, according to the German publication [Bild]. According to Bild, there is also a plan B envisaging a frozen conflict that would solidify a new quasi-border between Ukraine and Russia along the contact line. “First, [this report] should be seen in a specific temporal context,” Dmitry Evstafiev, a political scientist and High School of Economics (HSE) University professor, told Sputnik. “This is not a statement, of course, this is a publicity stunt. It appeared in the media almost immediately after the end of the meeting of the notorious Ramstein group that has made an essential decision to create the [Ground Based] Air Defense coalition to strengthen air defense.

“Moreover, it is quite obvious that they will strengthen not so much the air defense of Ukraine, but the air defense of the countries bordering Ukraine. Therefore, this is a kind of first proposal that it is necessary to take certain political steps that would indicate that Ukraine is ready for negotiations.” The second aspect is an interview given by the leader of the Servant of the People faction, Davyd Arakhamia, which is “clearly synchronized with the West.” According to Evstafiev, it is “even more indicative against the backdrop of problems at the front.” Speaking to Western journalists, Arakhamia noted that Russia’s main condition during the March 2022 peace talks with Kiev was Ukraine’s neutrality and guarantees that the Eastern European country wouldn’t join NATO. (It was Arakhamia who headed the Ukrainian delegation during the negotiations with Russians in Belarus and Türkiye in 2022.)

In addition, he debunked the Western media narrative that Russia does not want to negotiate peace with Ukraine by saying that Moscow is open to talks and it may start them when Kiev is ready. “At the moment, [Western] support to Kiev is becoming more and more politically expensive/costly, or whatever you want to call it, for the key countries that provide assistance, these are, first of all: Germany and the United States,” said Evstafiev. “The United States has already almost halted aid [to Ukraine]. Of course, there will still be a revaluation through the Pentagon, but one can no longer expect large packages.”

“Assistance from the European Union will be largely aimed at maintaining the functionality of the public administration system and some kind of social support, but not so much for military support. Therefore, the first point is that support for Kiev has become toxic in terms of politics. “The second point, which is absolutely clearly visible from the statements of Western sources, is that Kiev now faces the last moment when it can lay claim to more or less acceptable terms of a truce with Moscow. (…) The third point – which Westerners do not conceal – is that Russia will agree to any starting conditions for these negotiations. Arakhamia speaks about this directly, openly and without hesitation.”

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What a drama that woman is.

Ukraine Will ‘Strengthen EU’ – Baerbock (RT)

The EU and NATO will continue to back Ukraine because they view such support as geopolitically critical, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has said. Speaking at the Green Party Conference in Karlsruhe on Saturday, Baerbock argued that the European Union has to accept Kiev, as it can no longer afford any gray areas in Europe. “It’s in our own geopolitical interest that Ukraine joins the European Union, which is why we will not only continue our support for Ukraine, but also strengthen it in the EU and NATO,” she said, stressing that “Europe is our life insurance and that’s what is important and geostrategically crucial.” “Today it is clear that Ukraine will strengthen the EU in the foreseeable future,” she stressed.

Last month, Baerbock said that Ukraine’s future “lies in” the EU, including regions that were incorporated by Russia in 2022 but are still claimed by Kiev. “[The EU] will soon stretch from Lisbon to Lugansk,” Baerbock told journalists on the sidelines of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting in the Ukrainian capital. Reiterating Berlin’s stance that Ukraine should join the EU, Baerbock said the same applies to Moldova, Georgia and potentially the Western Balkans, so as to leave no “gray areas” in Europe. However, earlier in November, she admitted that the bloc itself would have to undergo “tedious” reforms to properly function with so many members. Germany is Ukraine’s second-largest donor of military aid behind the US, and Baerbock has become one of the most vocal advocates of Kiev since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Berlin recently pledged to “expand and increase” its support for Kiev in the coming years. Berlin is planning to provide another air-defense system and electricity generators as part of the so-called “winter protection umbrella” scheme.Having spent some $18.2 billion providing military assistance to Kiev, Germany still trails far behind the US, which has spent around $45 billion, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Russia has stated that Western arms supplies to Ukraine have failed to have a significant impact on the frontline. In early November, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said that “despite the supply of new kinds of NATO weapons, the Kiev regime is losing.” The Russian military has also regularly published photos and videos of destroyed Ukrainian heavy armor, including German-made Leopard tanks.

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Sink Germany, that is.

Germany Today Could Do What Hitler Did But Faster – Hungary’s Top MP (RT)

Germany is destroying itself faster than under Adolf Hitler’s rule, while the UN is nothing but a front company for propaganda, Hungarian parliamentary speaker Laszlo Kover has said. The senior MP, well-known for repeatedly making various controversial statements, produced a flurry of inflammatory remarks on Thursday when he spoke at a sovereignty-protection forum held in the central Hungarian town of Jaszapati. The speaker launched a bitter attack on Germany, comparing its current leadership to that of the Hitler era.“We have no reason to be happy that the Germans are destroying themselves and are doing so with a whirlwind speed, perhaps faster than Hitler did,” Kover asserted.

Hitler needed 12 years to accomplish this, those who are now [in Berlin] do not even need 12 years to send Germany to the ground in every sense, economically and socially. Apart from obliterating German leadership, the top MP was also highly critical of the EU, as well as the UN. He blasted the United Nations as a mere “front company” without any weight and being used only for propaganda purposes. Kover, who is a co-founder of Hungary’s Fidesz party, compared the European Union to the Warsaw Pact, a long-defunct Cold War-era security system established by the USSR and its Eastern European satellites, including Hungary. Nowadays, Brussels effectively plays the same role as Moscow used to play at the time, the MP suggested, insisting that Budapest was at war only with the Eurobureaucracy rather than with the EU itself. “The Union is us,” he stressed.

Kover’s speech at the forum also included a personal touch, as he launched a bitter attack on the US ambassador to Hungary, David Pressman, stating the top diplomat actually meant that little to him, he literally considered Washington’s envoy in Budapest a “non-existent” person. “He is not persona non-grata, but rather a non-person,” the speaker stated. “For me, for example, he’s a non-existent person who sometimes appears. I don’t know who he is, what he wants, he’s supposed to be an ambassador, but he doesn’t act like one.” It “doesn’t matter” what the US diplomat relays to the Hungarian government – and otherwise – given that Pressman apparently came to the country with a firm belief he was actually sent to govern it, Kover explained.

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“Theoretically, any of these candidates earning just a small percentage in one key state could be enough to fuck up the whole map for the major parties — much less all of them..”

The Mind-Bending Politics of RFK Jr.’s Spoiler Campaign (NYMag)

“Kennedy” and “Democrat” had become practically synonymous since the family landed in America in 1848. “I have a strong emotional connection to the party,” he said. He didn’t want to leave. “I was very resistant to it.” But it was the way forward: “Life is a series of separations … I feel like I didn’t really have a choice.” The choice he did make landed like a Big Bang, its impact immediately redefining the contours of presidential politics. The general election is now projected to be a three-way race between Biden, Trump, and their mutual, Kennedy, with a cluster of less popular third-party candidates filling out the constellation. Deep polarization to a near evenly divided electorate means major-party candidates are super-vulnerable to external threats.

Much was made of a recent New York Times–Siena College poll that showed Trump beating Biden in several key swing states. The reality is more like, in a reliably unreliable estimate of how people will behave on Election Day a year from now, you have two likely nominees so unlikable that they are tied for historic unlikableness with the 2016 nominees (only one candidate has been a historically unlikable constant across elections). Then factor in the margin of error of 1.8-to-4.8 points across the dataset. Then rerun the poll with Kennedy in the mix, as Times–Siena did, and you get a chaotic and scarcely recognizable race with Kennedy in striking distance at 24 percent. As CNN polling savant Harry Enten put it, “A clear Trump polling lead became a jumbled mess with no clear favorite to win in the Electoral College thanks to Kennedy. Both Biden (34 percent) and Trump (36 percent) were south of 40 percent in an aggregate across the six states.”

It’s true that in the 1992 election, Ross Perot was often outright beating Bush and Clinton in the polls, and he didn’t become president. But Kennedy doesn’t have to win to sabotage Biden or Trump. He doesn’t even have to come close. In 2000, when Democrats won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College, Ralph Nader scored 97,488 votes in Florida, where Al Gore lost by 537 votes. In 2016, when Democrats again won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College, Libertarian Gary Johnson got 172,136 votes in Michigan, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 51,463. Clinton lost by 10,704 votes. Johnson got 106,674 votes in Wisconsin and Stein 31,072. Clinton lost by 22,748. Not only is Kennedy polling more competitively now than any independent since Perot, but he has backup. Celebrity academic Cornel West is also running as an independent. Stein has risen from the dead to haunt the Dems once more on a Green Party ticket.

From retirement, Senator Joe Manchin threatens to run with No Labels, which has already secured ballot access in the swing state of Arizona. Theoretically, any of these candidates earning just a small percentage in one key state could be enough to fuck up the whole map for the major parties — much less all of them. In the face of this reality, Biden plans to argue that Kennedy is a closet conservative. Trump is already arguing that Kennedy is a closet liberal. (If either likely nominee has more sophisticated messaging planned to fight off Kennedy, it is not yet apparent.) That both claims are sort of true and sort of not true in equal measure is, sort of, the basis of Kennedy’s appeal. According to the Times, Democratic lawyers across the country are mobilizing to suppress third-party challenges through initiatives to further limit ballot access, the central obstacle for an independent candidate. “We’ll get on the ballot in every state,” Kennedy told me.

RFK

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Go woke go broke.

The Invisible Hand Just Slapped Disney (Turley)

This year marks the 300th anniversary of Adam Smith, the iconic figure behind the theory of free markets, or of what we have since come to call “capitalism.” Born in June 1723, Smith went on to explain how the “invisible hand” of the market worked as people exercised their choices between certain products. It can shape economies and challenge whole governments. One company in particular appears to be learning that lesson. In recent filings, Disney appears to acknowledge that Smith’s invisible hand is giving the “House of Mouse” the middle finger. In a new corporate disclosure, Disney acknowledges that its controversial political and social agenda is costing the company and shareholders.In its annual SEC report, Disney acknowledges that “we face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment, travel and consumer products.”

In an implied nod to Smith, the company observes that “the success of our businesses depends on our ability to consistently create compelling content,” and that “Generally, our revenues and profitability are adversely impacted when our entertainment offerings and products, as well as our methods to make our offerings and products available to consumers, do not achieve sufficient consumer acceptance. Further, consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.” Disney and other companies have previously ignored consumer backlash over corporate campaigns such as Disney’s opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law. Corporate officials once avoided political controversies and focused on selling their products and services rather than viewpoints.

Disney has reportedly lost a billion dollars just on four of its recent “woke” movie flops, productions denounced by critics as pushing political agendas or storylines. Yet until now, the company has continued to roll out underperforming movies as revenue has dropped. What’s more, Disney stars persist in bad-mouthing its fabled storylines and undermining its new productions. The company admits that it has suffered a continued slide in “impressions” (that is, viewership) by 14 percent. For shareholders, it may seem counterintuitive that corporate executives would trade off profits for political or social agendas. However, it does serve as a rationale for individual corporate executives who are professionally advanced when they champion such causes.

For example, when Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, pledged to drop Bud Light’s “fratty reputation and embrace inclusivity,” she was heralded by colleagues, even though her move went on to tank that brand as a whole. Indeed, Bud Light has still not recovered from the loss of billions in profits, market share, and overall market value. The same trend is playing out in the media. Public trust in journalists has fallen to a record low. Yet media executives continue to push advocacy journalism, abandoning objectivity. As former New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones declared, “all journalism is activism.”

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“..Epstein worried that saving lives by curing diseases would not lower population growth rates..”

Bill Gates, Jeffrey Epstein and a Global Health Investment Fund (BB)

Over time, Gates and JPMorgan established an investment fund that sought to profit from the development of vaccines and other health technologies. Epstein wanted a piece of the action, and Staley brought Epstein into the Gates partnership. The Gates-JPMorgan partnership was called the Global Health Investment Fund (GHIF) and was created circa 2011. At the time, Staley managed the Epstein relationship for the bank, and Epstein was a valuable client who brought JPMorgan a lot of business. Epstein was an adviser to billionaires like Victoria’s Secret mogul Leslie Wexner and Wall Street legend Leon Black and the “family offices” which manage their fortunes. Wexner and Black deny any involvement in Epstein’s criminal activities.

The GHIF partnership brought in a host of other powerful investors, including The Pfizer Foundation, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, as well as entities funded by the governments of Sweden, Canada, and Germany. There would also be private support from “qualified individuals and family offices.”The GHIF’s purpose was to give “individual and institutional investors the opportunity to finance late-stage global health technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives in low-income countries.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency committed to help offset any potential GHIF losses. As the GHIF was getting started, Epstein began pitching other business ideas to Gates and his foundation staff. They met “many times,” according to the New York Times, and Gates flew on Epstein’s Gulfstream plane from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to a March 2013 flight manifest.

It turned out that Gates and Epstein had mutual interests in the areas of global health and funding scientific breakthroughs. Both men also had a deep interest in genetic tinkering projects. Epstein reportedly wanted to “seed the human race” with his own DNA by impregnating scores of women. Ironically (or perhaps hypocritically), Epstein was concerned about overpopulation. Likewise, Gates has long been worried about overpopulation and has stated repeatedly that he wants to mass vaccinate the third world, specifically for the purpose of curbing population growth. In a 2010 TED Talk, Gates succinctly explained his rationale for funding vaccines and birth control to curtail population growth worldwide.

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion,” Gates warned. “Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, ten or fifteen percent.” But Epstein worried that saving lives by curing diseases would not lower population growth rates. He “criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation,” the New York Times reported. Bill and Melinda Gates apparently do not see curing diseases in the same way.

Meet Bill Gates

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And I began to really see close up that there was so much lying coming out of NIH [National Institutes of Health], coming out of Fauci, coming out of, unfortunately, the government protecting all of this and now it’s spilling out..”

Jeffrey Sachs Says COVID About ‘Massive Government Lying’ (NM)

A prominent “lifelong Democrat” scholar and economist who chaired a COVID-19 commission blasted Dr. Anthony Fauci and others for promoting “massive government lying” regarding the coronavirus, and accused Senate Democrats of refusing to investigate the virus’ origins. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who chaired a COVID-19 commission set up by “The Lancet” medical journal, said he has since left the Democratic Party after seeing how government officials have behaved around the origins of the virus. “The sad part of this, not with respect to the vaccine per se, but with respect to the origin of the virus, is that it’s yet another case of massive government lying,” Sachs said during an appearance on The Hill’s “Rising” show. “We have since discovered from the start that what the government told us about ‘natural origins’ of this virus were hokey, and really amounting to scientific fraud.”

Sachs said that even the scientists who wrote “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in the spring of 2020 “didn’t even believe that as they were writing it because they knew that there were so many hints that this could well have come out of a U.S. lab, or out of Chinese lab, or out of a U.S.-China partnership in the research.” Sachs admitted he, too, bought into the mainstream media’s COVID-19 reporting at the beginning of the pandemic, especially after a major scientific journal, “Nature,” said there was overwhelming evidence the origin was natural.He then credited reporting by The Intercept, U.S. Right to Know, and whistleblowers for helping to change his thinking.”[They] started letting us in on what was really said inside, was shocking,” said Sachs, who added that after requesting a certain document he had been refused by a fellow commission member.

Rancourt

“I said, ‘Well, you can’t be on the commission. We’re a transparent commission,” Sachs said. “And I began to really see close up that there was so much lying coming out of NIH [National Institutes of Health], coming out of Fauci, coming out of, unfortunately, the government protecting all of this and now it’s spilling out.” Sachs insists his desire to investigate COVID-19’s origin has more to do with present-day and future research. He credited Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for focusing on gain-of-function research and for trying to persuade Democrat colleagues to probe the issue. “It’s shocking to me that Democratic senators can’t understand this is not a partisan issue,” Sachs said. “This is a life and death issue. What kind of research is going on? What kind of laboratory manipulation’s going on? What is going on under what we euphemistically … call our biodefense research? Because who knows what it really is?

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X files

 

 


First, Estonia, then New Zealand. Now, Slovenia?

 

 

Grocery shopping

 

 

 

 

Starlings

 

 

Sleep dog

 

 

Impossible

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jun 172023
 
 June 17, 2023  Posted by at 8:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Paul Klee Sicilian Landscape1924

 

Putin Predicts Fate Of F-16 In Ukraine (RT)
Kiev ‘Facing Tough Resistance’ From Russian Troops – Zelensky (RT)
Putin: Kiev Has Lost 186 Tanks, 418 Armored Vehicles, Losses Mounting (Sp.)
Orban Claims Only Trump Can Stop Ukraine Conflict (Sp.)
Zelensky ‘A Disgrace To The Jewish People’ – Putin (RT)
The World Will Be Different When The Ukraine Conflict Ends – Lavrov (RT)
Russia’s New Roadmap for Multipolar World (Pepe Escobar)
Anglo-Saxons Control Collective West – Lavrov (RT)
Poland Covets Western Ukraine – Putin (RT)
Zelensky Offers Zero Flexibility To African Leaders (RT)
Some Peace Proposals On Ukraine Have Ideas That Could Work – Zakharova (TASS)
Putin and What Really Matters in the Chessboard (Escobar)
China’s Xi Jinping Welcomes ‘Old Friend’ Bill Gates in Beijing (Sp.)
Germany Has No More Money For EU – Finance Minister (RT)
Unprecedented Funding Crisis: UN To Cut Food Aid For 2.5 Million In Syria (MEE)

 

 


RIP Daniel Ellsberg

 

 

Ellsberg
https://twitter.com/i/status/1669804346668720128

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milley

 

 

 

 

The F-16s will have to be stationed in Germany and Poland. And Russia will not wait till they show up in Ukraine airspace. Dangerous development.

“In case Kiev gets some F-16s and stations them at bases outside Ukraine, “we will need to look at how and where we can hit those assets..”

Putin Predicts Fate Of F-16 In Ukraine (RT)

Any F-16 fighters the West sends to Kiev will be destroyed just like the tanks they have already delivered, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. In case they are based outside of Ukraine, that may lead to open war with NATO, he added. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Putin described how the much-heralded Ukrainian offensive, using Western heavy equipment delivered for the purpose, was actually going. “Tanks are burning. Among them are the Leopards. They burn. So will the F-16s. There is no doubt,”the Russian president said.

Kiev has repeatedly demanded F-16s from the US and its allies. Ukrainian pilots are already being trained on the fourth-generation jets, though none have yet been delivered. The US-made fighter requires very specific airfield conditions, however, which Ukraine may not be able to provide. In case Kiev gets some F-16s and stations them at bases outside Ukraine, “we will need to look at how and where we can hit those assets used in combat operations against us,” Putin said at SPIEF. “This is a serious danger of further dragging NATO into this armed conflict.”

Moscow has repeatedly warned NATO that sending weapons to Kiev only prolongs the conflict and risks open confrontation. The US and its allies insist they are not a party to the hostilities, but only supplying Ukraine with money, weapons, ammunition, equipment, intelligence and advice in order to “defeat Russia.” Though the F-16s do not pose a serious challenge to the Russian air force, Moscow has raised concerns with the UN Security Council over their possible deployment because the planes are capable of carrying tactical nuclear bombs. Earlier this month, one influential US think-tank advocated giving such weapons to Ukraine.

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aka we’re getting butchered.

Kiev ‘Facing Tough Resistance’ From Russian Troops – Zelensky (RT)

Russian troops are responding fiercely to Ukrainian attempts to break through their defenses amid Kiev’s long-anticipated counteroffensive, President Vladimir Zelensky admitted in an interview aired on Thursday. Speaking to NBC News, the Ukrainian leader said Ukrainian troops “are facing very tough resistance” and claimed that “for Russia to lose this campaign to Ukraine… actually means losing the war.” Despite the apparent difficulties, Zelensky attempted to put an optimistic spin on the battlefield situation, describing the news from the front line as “generally positive, but it’s very difficult.” The Ukrainian president also reiterated calls for supplies of F-16 fighter jets to Kiev, arguing that deliveries are being hindered by bureaucracy.

“We are losing time, we are losing people, and, the most important thing, we are losing our advantage,” Zelensky said, insisting that without Ukraine being given modern Western aircraft, “Russia is controlling the air.” Zelensky’s remarks came as the Washington Post cited officials in Kiev as saying that Ukraine was reluctant to delay its attacks on Russia. According to the outlet, Ukraine wants to demonstrate real battlefield progress before the winter, in order to assure its Western backers that it can prevail. However, the Post’s sources warned that offensive action would result in heavy losses in personnel and equipment, which they claimed would be exacerbated by the lack of Western-made jets and long-range artillery needed to attack Russian targets far from the front line.

Ukrainian forces launched a large-scale offensive on June 4, repeatedly attempting to breach Russian lines in several sections of the front. Their efforts have been to no avail, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. On Wednesday, Moscow estimated Ukrainian frontline losses to be 7,500 soldiers killed or wounded since the start of the offensive. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin also claimed that Ukraine was “taking heavy casualties,” which he said were greater than Russia’s by a factor of ten. He claimed that Kiev had failed to gain any ground and had lost up to 30% of its Western-supplied equipment.

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Tough Resistance. How tough?

Putin: Kiev Has Lost 186 Tanks, 418 Armored Vehicles, Losses Mounting (Sp.)

Ukrainian forces launched a long-awaited counteroffensive earlier this month after stocking up on NATO weapons, including Leopard heavy tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. The offensive has stalled after running into well-prepared Russian defensive lines, with even Kiev’s Western backers expressing concerns about Ukraine’s heavy losses. Ukraine has failed to reach any strategic objectives amid its ongoing counteroffensive, losing 186 tanks and 418 armored vehicles to date as losses continue to mount, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. “In some places Ukrainian forces manage to reach the first line of defense, in some places not. That’s not the question,” Putin said, speaking to reporters during the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday.

“The question revolves around the fact that they are using their so-called strategic reserves, which consist of several components. The first is meant to be used to break [Russian] defenses, the second to use forces to entrench their foothold over territory. They have not reached their goals at a single section of the front. This is what is important,” he said. “Their losses are indeed very large, even more than ten to one compared to the Russian army. This is a fact. In terms of equipment, losses are mounting daily. As of today, this includes 186 tanks lost and 418 armored vehicles of various classes,” Putin said. Russia’s defense enterprises are working round-the-clock to supply the military with weapons, working double or even triple shifts, Putin said. “We have increased the output of military production by 2.7 times, and when it comes to the most needed equipment – by 10 times.”

As for Ukrainian forces, Putin predicted that “soon they will stop using its own equipment” entirely because it’s being systematically destroyed. “Everything they’re using to do battle, and everything they’re using is coming from abroad. One can’t fight that way for long,” he said. Putin also once again took the opportunity to delve into the root causes of the present crisis, saying “the war in Ukraine, in southeastern Ukraine, was started by the Kiev regime with the support of their Western sponsors in 2014. But everyone in the West tries not to speak about this. I am forced to remind them that aviation, tanks, artillery were used used against the Donbass [back then]. What is this if not a war?”

Kiev “refused” to entertain an end to the Donbass crisis using peaceful means, Putin said, “forcing us to use our armed forces to attempt to put an end to this war.” It wasn’t Russia that led its Western partners “by the nose” between 2015 and 2022 by signing the Minsk peace deal for Donbass, “without any plans to implement it, as they publicly admitted recently,” he added, referring to recent revelations by the former Ukrainian, German and French leaders that they only signed the Minsk deal to give Kiev time to rearm and prepare for war with Russia.

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“..Hungary is interested in seeing a supporter of peace as the head of the United States..”

Orban Claims Only Trump Can Stop Ukraine Conflict (Sp.)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban once again voiced his support for Donald Trump on Friday and argued that only the former US president could stop the conflict in Ukraine. “If there is a person in the Western world who can stop this war and make peace, it is former US President Donald Trump, and Hungary is interested in seeing a supporter of peace as the head of the United States,” Orban said on Kossuth Radio After the conflict, “the truth will remain with the supporters of a peace settlement,” including Hungary, whose position has “moral righteousness,” the Hungarian prime minister added.


Trump has claimed on numerous occasions that had he been the US president he would have settled the conflict in Ukraine within 24 hours. Ukraine’s Western donors have repeatedly called on Russia to hold peace talks, while Ukraine has enshrined its refusal to negotiate in law. Moscow said it would be open to peace talks as long as Ukraine recognizes the territorial changes that have taken place in the course of the conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace plan, on the other hand, insists on the restoration of Ukraine’s full territorial integrity.

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“..the current Ukrainian authorities openly celebrate Nazi figures, most notably supporters of Stepan Bandera..”

Zelensky ‘A Disgrace To The Jewish People’ – Putin (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky brings shame on the entire Jewish people, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday, pointing to Kiev’s turning a blind eye to neo-Nazi ideology. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), the Russian leader was asked to comment on the criticism of Russia’s stated goal to “denazify” Ukraine, with Western experts arguing that such an aspiration is ridiculous because Zelensky himself is Jewish. Putin responded by saying that his friends in the Jewish community do not share this view. “They say that Zelensky is not a Jew, he is a disgrace to the Jewish people. I’m not joking, this is not irony,” Putin said. He pointed to the fact that the current Ukrainian authorities openly celebrate Nazi figures, most notably supporters of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the Third Reich during World War II.


The Russian leader recalled that out of six million Jews killed during the Holocaust, 1.5 million were from Ukraine, with Ukrainian nationalists being heavily involved in mass executions. However, nobody wants to hear about Bandera being an anti-Semite, because Zelensky himself is a Jew, Putin said. “But with his actions, he provides cover for this scum,” the Russian leader said. On Tuesday, Putin blasted Kiev’s decision to remove Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin – who he says basically founded Ukraine – from public squares and replace him with Bandera, whom he referred to as “a scoundrel and a fascist.” At the time, he said he was “surprised” by the move, pointing to Zelensky’s Jewish roots.

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“..autonomy and independence of any structures on the global arena that are related to the West are becoming the main trend today.”

The World Will Be Different When The Ukraine Conflict Ends – Lavrov (RT)

By the time the conflict in Ukraine is resolved, Kiev will respect the loss of its former territories, and Western-led globalization will be dead, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT Arabic on Friday. Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Lavrov described the West’s proxy war with Russia as “a geopolitical conflict,” in which the US was attempting to eliminate a powerful competitor and “preserve its hegemonic position by all means.” “The attempt is futile, and we all know this,” Lavrov stated, adding that Ukraine and its backers will be forced to accept new “concrete realities” before a ceasefire is reached.

Firstly, Kiev must accept that any potential peace agreement will need to take into account the loss of the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye Regions, which voted to join the Russian Federation last year. Before sending its military into Ukraine, Moscow offered more generous terms, and Lavrov warned on Friday that “the longer they put off talks, the more difficult it will be for them to reach an agreement with us.” Ukraine and its European backers have admitted that the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements – under which Kiev promised to grant limited autonomy to Donetsk and Lugansk – were a ruse to buy Ukraine time to prepare for war with Russia. This situation will never be repeated, Lavrov told RT. “We won’t be prepared to let security guarantees be based on more pledges and promises or even documents the West may offer us,” he said. “We must guarantee our national security on our own.”

“We fully understand that we can only rely on ourselves and build relations only with countries open to an equal and mutually beneficial partnership,” Lavrov continued. “This is not what we see in the West these days.” Lastly, Lavrov declared the era in which the US and its allies control the institutions of globalization – primarily development banks and multilateral organizations – will come to a close. Aside from hosting the SPIEF, which drew thousands of delegations from more than 100 countries this week, Russia plays a leading role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Greater Eurasian Partnership, as well as the expanding BRICS group. “Today, there is an understanding that growth processes need to be regionalized and this vision prevails,” Lavrov said. “All the countries of this vast continent should use their God- and nature-given advantages to develop mutually beneficial logistic, financial, and transport chains.”

The foreign minister added that Russia would “leave all doors open” for partnership with European countries who realize that their interests are better served by cooperation with Russia rather than by playing Washignton’s “ideological and geopolitical games.” “The world will be different,”Russia’s top diplomat concluded. “And the processes we see unfolding today were whipped up by the West’s response to Russia’s Special Military Operation, when we accepted the challenge that they flung at us. These processes clearly show that autonomy and independence of any structures on the global arena that are related to the West are becoming the main trend today.”

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“The West chooses itself as the only subject. It holds a system of values deemed to be universal – that everybody else must follow.”

Russia’s New Roadmap for Multipolar World (Pepe Escobar)

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is not only the premier platform for discussing everything that matters in business and geoeconomics concerning Russia and the wider Eurasia. It’s a privileged space where trends of the past, present and future are explored in detail: a microcosm of multipolarity at work. The business program is usually an intellectual feast. It’s impossible to convey its breadth and reach in only a few lines, not to mention the exhilarating atmosphere of jumping from room to room in search of the perfect expose. What follows could be regarded as a sort of incomplete Greatest Hits of the Thursday, June 15 sessions – packing enough punch to drive multipolarity-heavy debates for weeks if not months ahead.

The heavyweight-laden panel How The Russian Economy Will Develop featured Governor of the Russian Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina, Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov and top Putin aide Maksim Oreshkin. The unflappable Nabiullina stressed now “inter-operability” will help “the Russian paying system to be integrated in the global system”. She remains in favor of “selected privatization”, keeping “confidence in capital markets”, and low inflation. Siluanov was keen on the “need to change the paradigm”; the importance of the State creating demand; and the need to reduce subsidies. Macro-stability is important – “but we should not overdo it.” Oreshkin agrees: the government should get rid of assets “it does not really need”. A De-Dollarization panel debated the plausibility of transitioning from the US dollar towards a “fundamentally new supranational currency, overseen by a broad consortium of states operating on principles of partnership”. That’s essentially what’s being discussed at the heart of both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and BRICS.

The future of Russia was at the center of the Horizon 2040 debate. Andrey Bezrukov, president of the Technological Sovereignty Exports Association and a professor at MGIMO, stressed how in 2024 Russia holds the chairmanship of BRICS: it’s time, right now, to “turn it not only into an alliance of equal partners but also a financial, technological and economic force.” Alexander Dugin engaged in a stunning presentation, explaining paths towards development in parallel to how Russians should understand identity. That led to an inevitable critique of ethnocentrism: “The West chooses itself as the only subject. It holds a system of values deemed to be universal – that everybody else must follow.” That’s “the West as the whole of humankind”, coupled with a drive to “de-subjectify the rest. The global subjectivity of the West is built in”. Dugin described it as “a virus”, developed “over centuries.”

Integration in the Global West, according to Dugin, “leaves Russia without a future.” Rather, Russia should declare the West to be “one force among several. Not an existential threat.” Russia can “proclaim itself as a sovereign state. Exercise a “mental de-colonization of society.” That’s how a “civilization-state that defines its own goals” should act. Showing a diagram in three steps, “between red and lilac”, Dugin illustrated how Russia can perform the transition from “understanding itself in the Western world” towards “sovereign development.”

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“..saying that Western values are being protected in Ukraine is the same as saying that Nazism is your mode of existence..”

Anglo-Saxons Control Collective West – Lavrov (RT)

London and Washington run the show in the “rules-based world order,” trying to dictate policy to their own allies as well as countries outside the West, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT on Friday. Russia fully understands that building relations with other countries needs to be based on mutual benefits and equal partnerships, Lavrov said in an interview with RT at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). “This is not what we see in the West these days. The Anglo-Saxons are basically running the show, controlling the rest of the collective West. They are using the current situation, which they created through Ukraine – this war against Russia – to remove competition,” Lavrov elaborated.

“They see us as a competitor, they see China as a competitor. Their doctrinal documents clearly state that. But they are also removing their competition in continental Europe. It’s obvious. The economic and social processes in Germany are grim. Other countries are not much better off,” the Russian foreign minister added. The only Western state benefiting from the current situation is the US, Lavrov said, “and the UK is always somewhere around, helping America reach its selfish goals.” According to Lavrov, the “Anglo-Saxons and their allies” are currently trying to pressure countries around the world to side with them against Russia, including the Arab world, using methods he can only describe as “rude.”

“You see, when they talk about these ‘rules’ on which the international order must be based, what they really mean is their diktat,” Lavrov told RT. “Colonial instincts – live at the expense of others. Nothing else.” Lavrov took particular exception to Western proclamations that their support for Kiev is “defending democracy” and that Ukraine is fighting for “Western values” in the conflict with Russia. “First of all, if they really see it that way, I cannot but be convinced that they are holding on to Nazi views. Because saying that Western values are being protected in Ukraine is the same as saying that Nazism is your mode of existence,” the diplomat told RT. As for democracy, he added, “they only speak about democracy when they teach others how to live,” but not when it comes to respecting the sovereign equality of other states, per the UN Charter.

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“..Warsaw is considering submitting restitution demands to Kiev for the 1943 Volhynia massacres, which saw over 100,000 Poles killed..”

Poland Covets Western Ukraine – Putin (RT)

Poland has its own ambitions in the Ukraine conflict and is seeking to claim parts of the country’s territory, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed during a discussion at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday. “The Poles have their own goals, they sleep and dream of seeing the return of western Ukraine, and, apparently, they are gradually moving towards this,” the Russian leader told participants of the forum, noting that Poland has still not forgotten the genocide of its people by Ukrainian ultranationalists during World War II. The president’s comments come after several Russian officials have suggested that Warsaw is secretly planning to annex parts of western Ukraine, primarily the so-called ‘Eastern Borderlands’, which were controlled by Poland between the two world wars and include four regions of modern Ukraine: Lviv, Volyn, Ivano-Frankovsk, and Ternopol.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as the deputy chairman of the National Security Council, claimed back in January that Poland’s decision to send Western main battle tanks to Ukraine was a secret ploy to partition the country. Last year, the director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, suggested that Polish President Andrzej Duda had already instructed the “relevant services” to come up with a justifiable basis to claim those territories. He also stated that he had received intelligence suggesting that Warsaw is considering submitting restitution demands to Kiev for the 1943 Volhynia massacres, which saw over 100,000 Poles killed by the Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists led by Stepan Bandera. Kiev currently considers the Nazi collaborator a national hero.

Warsaw, however, has repeatedly denied claims that it plans to take over Ukrainian territory, dismissing it as a Russian disinformation operation. Nevertheless, Duda has expressed hope that a time will come when both Poland and Ukraine will live “together on this land, building and rebuilding our common happiness and common strength that will allow us to resist every danger.” In early March of 2022, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky stated that “effectively, we no longer have a border with Poland, with a friendly Poland,” referring to how welcoming Warsaw had been to Ukrainian refugees.

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Remarkable: “According to Zelensky, Russia “deceived” the world for years with the Minsk process and is trying to do so again..”

Zelensky Offers Zero Flexibility To African Leaders (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky brushed off the African Union peace initiative on Friday, insisting there can be no negotiations with Russia. The high-ranking delegation, led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, visited Kiev and is headed to Moscow next. “I have said clearly and many times during our meeting today that allowing any talks with Russia while the occupiers are still on our land means freezing the conflict, the pain and the suffering,” Zelensky said at the press conference afterward. According to Zelensky, Russia “deceived” the world for years with the Minsk process and is trying to do so again. For peace to happen, he argued, “Russian troops need to leave our entire independent territory.”

The Franco-German proposal Ukraine had agreed to in 2015 was supposed to bring peace in the Donbass, but former German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted last year that its true intent was to buy time for NATO to arm Ukraine. Former French president Francois Hollande has confirmed Merkel’s account. Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted with disappointment, saying he believed for years that Berlin and Paris had been sincere. Zelensky also told reporters that Ukraine was greatly helping African nations with food security and setting up “grain hubs” on the continent “with our partners,” accusing Russia of using hunger and social instability as a tool of political pressure. The grain Kiev exported under the terms of the Black Sea Initiative, however, has mostly gone to the EU and ended up as animal feed.

Meanwhile, the UN has failed to unblock the export of Russian food and fertilizer to Africa, which used to account for a far greater share of the continent’s needs. The African Union mission got off to an inauspicious start in Warsaw, when Polish authorities held up Ramaphosa’s security detail. While in Kiev on Friday, the visitors were reportedly told to take shelter from incoming “Russian missiles.” Ukrainian authorities later claimed to have shot down six Russian hypersonic rockets. “There’s obviously some deliberate misinformation being spread here,” Ramaphosa’s spokesman Vincent Magwenya later told South African media, adding that the delegation didn’t hear any explosions or see anything out of the ordinary.

Zelensky has previously turned down the Vatican’s offer to mediate a ceasefire as well, telling the papal envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi earlier this month that he would only accept the terms of his own Ukrainian “peace formula.” The list of ten demands includes Russia’s withdrawal from all territories Kiev claims as its own, payment of reparations, war crimes trials and NATO membership for Ukraine. Moscow has dismissed it as delusional and said that any peace talks will be with Zelensky’s “masters” in the West, rather than their puppet.

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“They [Washington] also humiliate and cause problems for the European Union as much as they can while considering them [EU] as reliable partners, allies and dear friends..”

Some Peace Proposals On Ukraine Have Ideas That Could Work – Zakharova (TASS)

Peace initiatives on the Ukrainian conflict settlement proposed by various countries contain ideas that could work, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in an interview with TASS. Asked by a TASS correspondent at the 2023 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) whether there were viable ideas in the peaceful settlement plans proposed by other countries, Zakharova replied “of course there are.” “I reiterate that we are thankful to every country, every state or every public figure – because many initiatives were personally proposed by prominent figures, internationalists; we are grateful to everyone, who speaks about peace, who speaks about [peaceful] settlement and, who wants to be useful regarding this issue,” she said.

“There are interesting ideas, which may work. There are ideas that are in sync with our approaches, and, for instance, it includes the Chinese initiative,” she continued. Zakharova stressed that the main problem is that such initiatives are being blocked “by the Kiev regime, which banned itself” from holding any negotiations with Russia. “All of it was blocked by [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky, because this concept was laid out by Washington. Washington pursues the concept of ‘kill as many Russians as possible.’ This concept was voiced by prominent representatives of the US political establishment including [ex-US President] George Bush Jr and Senator [Lindsey] Graham,” Zakharova said. The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman added that that Washington adhered to the concept of utter domination in the world and strategic defeat of Russia.

“They used to speak about it and documented it as dismemberment. But now, they are somehow trying to publicly rewind it back – I mean previously voiced statements and concepts of US diplomats – as they now say that this is not dismemberment of Russia, but some kind of punishment for Russia,” she stated. “Although it may seem not to be important, they have shaped it up with a precise formulation,” Zakharova said. “This is why this issue is not about the essence of the proposed initiatives, but about the inability of Ukraine to move towards the peace because of the block set by political scientists from Washington. They [US political scientists] have a totally different view of Ukraine’s future,” she continued.

According to her, the United States has no interest in the flourishing and, moreover, independent Ukraine as they view this country as a tool of influence upon Russia and the region on the whole.”Therefore, we see its relevant projection on China and the European Union,” she continued. “It’s because Russia is not the final aim at all for Washington in this game. Their aim is definitely China, and they [Washington] go insane over their [Chinese] rate of their economic growth, with their technological development, with their independent course, with their capabilities, with their determination, with their inked partnership with other countries,” Zakharova said. “They [Washington] also humiliate and cause problems for the European Union as much as they can while considering them [EU] as reliable partners, allies and dear friends,” Zakharova added.

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“Putin clearly sees how the chessboard has been laid out. And he also sees how “Ukraine” does not even exist anymore..”

Putin and What Really Matters in the Chessboard (Escobar)

It’s been a long way since Putin examined the chessboard in the early 2000s and then unleashed a crash missile program for defensive and offensive missiles. Over the next 23 years Russia developed hypersonic missiles, advanced ICBMs, and the most advanced defensive missiles on the planet. Russia won the missile race. Period. The Hegemon – obsessed by its own manufactured war against Islam – was completely blindsided and made no material missile advances in nearly two and a half decades. Now the “strategy” is to invent a Taiwan Question out of nothing, which is configuring the chessboard as the ante-chamber of no holds barred Hybrid War against Russia-China.

The proxy attack – via Kiev hyenas – against Russophone Donbass, egged on by the Straussian neocon psychos in charge of US foreign policy, murdered at least 14,000 men, women and children between 2014 to 2022. That was also an attack on China. The ultimate aim of this Divide and Rule gambit was to inflict defeat on China’s ally in the Heartland, so Beijing would be isolated. According to the neocon wet dream, all of the above would have enabled the Hegemon, once it had taken over Russia again as it did with Yeltsin, to blockade China from Russian natural resources using eleven US aircraft carrier task forces plus numerous submarines. Obviously military science-impaired neocons are oblivious to the fact that Russia is now the strongest military power on the planet.

In Ukraine, the neocons were hoping that a provocation would cause Moscow to deploy other secret weapons apart from hypersonic missiles, so Washington could better prepare for all-out war. All those elaborate plans may have miserably floundered. But a corollary remains: the Straussian neocons firmly believe they may instrumentalize a few million Europeans – who’s next? Poles? Estonians? Latvians? Lithuanians? And why not Germans? – as cannon fodder as the US did in WWI and WWII, fought over the bodies of Europeans (including Russians) sacrificed to the same old Mackinder Anglo-Saxon power grab.

Hordes of European 5th columnists make it so much easier to “trust” the US to protect them, while only a few with an IQ over room temperature have understood who really bombed Nord Stream 1 and 2, with the connivance of the Liver Sausage German Chancellor. The bottom line is that the Hegemon simply cannot accept a sovereign, self-sufficient Europe; only a dependent vassal, hostage to the seas that the US control. Putin clearly sees how the chessboard has been laid out. And he also sees how “Ukraine” does not even exist anymore. While no one was paying attention, last month the Kiev gang sold Ukraine to $8.5 trillion-worth BlackRock. Just like that. The deal was sealed between the Government of Ukraine and BlackRock’s VP Philipp Hildebrand.

They are setting up a Ukrainian Development Fund (UDF) for “reconstruction”, focused on energy, infrastructure, agriculture, industry and IT. All remaining valuable assets in what will be a rump Ukraine will be gobbled up by BlackRock: from Metinvest, DTEK (energy) and MJP (agriculture) to Naftogaz, Ukrainian Railways, Ukravtodor and Ukrenergo. What’s the point in going to Kiev then? High-grade toxic neoliberalism is already partying on the spot.

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Xi is interested in the WHO and its new lockdown plans. And Gates=WHO.

China’s Xi Jinping Welcomes ‘Old Friend’ Bill Gates in Beijing (Sp.)

US billionaire Bill Gates met with China’s leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday. “On June 16, President Xi Jinping met the American Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-chairperson Bill Gates in Beijing,” Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported. “You are the first American friend I have met in Beijing this year. We have always placed our hopes on the American people, and hoped for continued friendship between the peoples of the two countries,” Xi reportedly told Gates. Gates was cited as saying he was “very honoured to have this chance to meet”. The Microsoft co-founder is believed to have last met with the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2015, on the sidelines of the Boao forum for Asia in Hainan province.


[..] The visit by Bill Gates to China comes against the backdrop of spriralling geopolitical tensions that have brought Washington-Beijing ties to one of their lowest points in decades. However, the world’s second-largest economy has been making efforts to attract foreign investors to reinvigorate the economy post-lockdowns. A flurry of stopovers have been made in China by tech bosses. Apple CEO Tim Cook was in the country to attend the China Development Forum.The CEO of CEO of JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank in terms of assets, Jamie Dimon, also recently went to China. Most recently, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk visited China, meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, and vowing that his electric carmaker would continue to expand operations in the world’s largest EV market.

At this point it is worth noting that the China visits feed into the rivalry between Gates and Musk. The owner of Twitter met in person with three senior government officials: China’s foreign, commerce and industry ministers, and reportedly conferred with Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang.” However, Bill Gates scored a major win over the South African-born American entrepreneur by wecuring a sit-down with the Chinese leader, Xi Jingping. “It is worth noting that on my recent trip to China I went to senior leadership there. I think we had some very productive discussions on artificial intelligence risks, and the need for some oversight or regulation,” Elon Musk said on Twitter Spaces on June 5.


The two tech gurus who have been vying for the role of the world’s richest man (according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk recently regained the title, surpassing LVMH’s Bernard Arnault) have been recently verbally sparring on Twitter. Musk slammed the fellow billionaire for holding a short position on Tesla shares worth around $2 billion. After a series of viral exchanges, in an interview with a French YouTuber, Gates spoke of his record on climate change philanthropy and questioned the benefit of electric vehicles. In response, Musk tweeted, ‘Sigh.”

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But we stand with Ukraine…

Germany Has No More Money For EU – Finance Minister (RT)

Germany cannot afford to pay more money into the EU budget, Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the newspaper Die Welt on Friday. Although Germany is the bloc’s largest contributor, it has been forced to make cutbacks as its economy contracts. “In view of the necessary cuts in our national budget, we are currently unable to make any additional contributions to the budget of the European Union,” Linder told reporters in Brussels, adding that other member states have come to the same realization. Lindner explained that the EU has maxed out its long-term budget through 2027, largely as a result of the bloc’s lavish aid packages to Ukraine.

According to the latest figures from Brussels, the EU has given Kiev €72 billion ($79 billion) in economic, military, and humanitarian aid since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began last February. Despite this unprecedented outflow draining its coffers, the European Commission is reportedly readying an additional €72 billion financial aid package to keep the Ukrainian economy limping along to 2027. According to Lindner, the commission will release a report next week asking member states for more money to cover the bill. Germany is the EU’s largest net contributor, giving €21.4 billion ($23.4 billion) to the bloc’s budget in 2021. Its next-door neighbor, Poland, is the largest net drain on the budget, receiving €12.9 billion ($14.2 billion) in 2021.

Once regarded as Europe’s industrial powerhouse and the EU’s most resilient economy, Germany is currently experiencing deindustrialization as a consequence of its decision to cut itself off from cheap Russian gas and transition to more expensive green energy. The German economy fell into recession in the first three months of this year, and Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government is planning to reveal around €20 billion ($21.8 billion) in budget cuts later this month. However, a vote on the budget may be delayed, as Scholz and Lindner’s coalition partners in the Green party argue for tax hikes instead of spending cuts.

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The west wants Syria to be off balance and suffer..

Unprecedented Funding Crisis: UN To Cut Food Aid For 2.5 Million In Syria (MEE)

The UN has warned that due to an unprecedented funding crisis, it will be cutting food aid to at least 2.5 million Syrians. More than 5.5 million Syrians rely on the UN World Food Programme (WFP) for their basic food needs. The WFP is in the process of drawing up plans to prioritise the remaining three million Syrians who are unable to make it from one week to the next without food assistance. The UN body warned that if it continued to provide aid to all the 5.5 million people in need it would run out of food completely by October. “Instead of scaling up or even keeping pace with increasing needs, we’re facing the bleak scenario of taking assistance away from people, right when they need it the most,” said WFP Representative and Country Director in Syria, Kenn Crossley, in a statement. Finding hard cash for Syrians amid the war in Ukraine, a growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan, and a long-simmering one in Yemen might be difficult.


The amount of money needed to feed Syrians alone is staggering, with the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently pleading for more money. “We are asking for $11.1 billion, our largest appeal worldwide. We have no time to spare,” he warned. “There are nutritional supplies which are distributed exclusively by the WFP,” said Dr Mahmod Asaad, the nutritional officer at the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), speaking to Middle East Eye. If there is a reduction in support then “we should expect a high incidence of malnutrition from pregnant and lactating women and high rates of anaemia in women in general, which is currently 53 percent and is classified as phase five which is very critical or catastrophic. “High incidence of malnutrition in children and an increase in the incidence of children stunting, which currently reached 28.6 percent and is classified as phase four critical or severe,” he added.

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Tesla

 

 

 

 

Eagle

 

 

Humming

 

 

extroverts vs introverts

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Sep 162022
 


Pablo Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar 1939

 

Fall Like A Thunderbolt (Schryver)
Don’t Listen To Those Asking To Stop Supporting Kiev, EU’s Borrell Says (RT)
US Openly A Party To Ukraine Conflict – Russia (RT)
Zelensky Guard Appears To Wear Nazi Insignia (RT)
A Turning-Point Once Every 500 Years (Batiushka)
American Patience With Germany Wearing Thin – Media (RT)
Pentagon Finds Hypersonic Research Partner (RT)
Moscow Responds To UN Nuclear Watchdog Resolution On Ukrainian Plant (RT)
Special Master Appointed, DOJ Bid To Delay Mar-a-Lago Ruling Rejected (Pol.)
Democrats Are Trying To Trump-Proof The Government (Lucas)
How Bill Gates And Partners Took Over The Global Covid Response (Pol.)
Tucker Carlson Notices the Missing Jubilation in Martha’s Vineyard (CTH)
Illinois Governor Declares Emergency Disaster As Migrants Bused In (JTN)
Switching To Renewable Energy Could Save Trillions (BBC)

 

 

 

 

 

 

BBC reporting on DPRK (North Korea) overlaid on queen funeral procession
https://twitter.com/i/status/1570314755167997952

 

 

 

 

Ode to King

 

 

Lowkey @Lowkey0nline
“The British Crown legally owns 6.6 billion acres of land across the world. That is a sixth of the earth’s surface. Charles is now the world’s largest landowner, but I am sure that has nothing to do with colonialism…”

 

 

 

 

“Maskirovka is a Russian word meaning literally “masking” or “disguise”..”

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Fall Like A Thunderbolt (Schryver)

[..] as the true nature of the events of the past two weeks comes into clearer focus, it is now possible to see that the Russians acted deliberately to provide the NATO commanders of this reconstituted Ukrainian force with some low-hanging fruit to blood their untested army, and provide it with a victory that would not only bolster its battlefield confidence, but more importantly serve essential political purposes at a time when western public support was flagging to a very discernible degree.More importantly, from the Russian perspective, providing NATO commanders a temptation they could not resist would draw this fresh army into the open field of battle where it could then be isolated and ultimately destroyed.

Therefore the Russians commenced, several weeks ago, to withdraw all but a token force from the area containing the towns of Balakliya, Kupyansk, and Izyum – thereby presenting an irresistible opportunity for the commanders of this NATO-trained, NATO-equipped, and NATO-led force to demonstrate, as they imagine it, the superiority of western combined-arms warfare. The subsequent attack achieved seemingly extraordinary success against the relative handful of Donbass militia and Rosgvardia troops left to defend Balakliya and Kupyansk. The Ukrainians and their “foreign volunteer” shock troops advanced mostly unopposed and occupied a fairly significant piece of real estate extending all the way to the Oskil River.

Relatively little soldier against soldier fighting has occurred. In fact, Ukrainian reports euphorically trumpeted the fact that the Ukrainian advance could not even keep up with the speed of the Russian retreat! The “glorious victory” of this quasi-NATO army has – at least for the time being – launched the western media narrative into an unprecedented spasm of triumphalism. Delusional reports of hundreds of abandoned tanks, thousands of casualties, and tens of thousands of captured Russian soldiers are circulating widely, willingly believed by those whose biases find them pleasing. Western think-tank monkeys and retired-generals-for-hire move from one mainstream news studio to the next spouting fantastical nonsense about next liberating the Donbass, then Crimea, followed by deposing Putin and hauling him before a tribunal at The Hague.

And if that were not enough, many have even begun to openly discuss the long-desired western pipe dream of dismantling Russia altogether; cutting it up into a dozen or more smaller republics that will then obediently fall in line with the rest of the “rules-based world order”. It’s all quite breathtaking to behold.

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Borrell has to go from Brussels, along with Von der Leyen. Their delusions are too costly.

Don’t Listen To Those Asking To Stop Supporting Kiev, EU’s Borrell Says (RT)

The EU must tackle elements of the public that want the Ukraine conflict to be over as soon as possible, and Kiev’s recent offensive in the northeast helped with that, according to Josep Borrell, the top EU official for foreign relations and security. “There is a temptation to abandon [Ukraine] in part of European society,” he told El Mundo newspaper in an interview published on Thursday. People “want to end the war because they cannot bear the consequences, the costs. We have to combat that mentality. The offensive on the northeastern front helps with that.” Borrell was referring to last week’s Ukrainian operation, in which Kiev’s troops pushed Russian forces out of large swathes of Kharkov Region.

Some US officials claimed credit on behalf of the American intelligence community for the advances. According to Borrell, the Ukrainian offensive was a “breath of fresh air” for Brussels since it serves as affirmation that its strategy was “sound.” He has stated on several occasions that Russia had to be defeated on the battlefield for the hostilities in Ukraine to stop. The official told the newspaper that the EU strategy to punish Russia required a long time for sanctions to act, and people should be prepared for it. “It’s like a diet. In a week you may not lose a kilo, but you have to continue,” he said, reiterating the metaphor he used on Tuesday during a speech in the European Parliament.

The EU joined the US in sending military aid to Ukraine and imposing economic sanctions on Russia. It came at a serious cost to European economies, which now have to deal with skyrocketing energy prices and potential shortages of natural gas due to the decision of their governments to decouple from Russian supplies. Borrell downplayed grim predictions that the upcoming winter could become a disaster for the EU. “There are political opposition forces that say we are going to freeze to death. Some of those people who say that are not ideological radicals, they insist that the way we are going is a crazy one,” he said. He suggested that the EU government had to do a better job of “educating” people about the situation.

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“Only naive, short-sighted politicians who know history poorly can talk about victory over Russia on the battlefield.”

US Openly A Party To Ukraine Conflict – Russia (RT)

It is cause for “deep concern” that the US government is “openly boasting” that Ukraine’s battlefield successes were achieved with the Pentagon’s direct involvement, the Russian ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Against this background, Washington’s statements that the US is not a party to the conflict sound absolutely ridiculous and unfounded,” Antonov told RIA Novosti. “Facts and interviews of former and current politicians and generals say otherwise.” “Videos currently shown on Western channels clearly demonstrate that soldiers and officers who speak fluent English, many with pronounced British and American accents, are fighting against us,” the ambassador added.

The US has done everything to turn Ukraine into a dumping ground for its obsolete weapons, but also a testing range for new NATO equipment, Antonov said, pointing out the insatiable appetite of the US military-industrial complex for profits. By the Pentagon’s own admission, the US has sent Ukraine “more than $17.2 billion in security assistance” since 2014, and another $14.5 billion since February. Kiev’s patrons are “hungry for power and money” and not interested in peaceful solutions, said Antonov. There is little to no talk in the West about negotiations, only about sending more weapons to Ukraine, he added. “Their main main goal is to defeat Russia by any means, and subsequently prevent it from playing a key role in the international arena. And if possible, break it into pieces,” the ambassador said.

“They will not stop pushing Ukraine into further suicidal adventures, such as the ‘offensives’ that were doomed from the start.” Ukraine has claimed its recent advances in the Kharkov region are a “turning point” in the conflict. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the US and UK had been involved in planning the operation, including the admission by the Pentagon’s policy chief Colin Kahl that the US military “did do some modeling and some tabletop exercises,” which it shared with Kiev. “The current situation of Washington inciting Kiev against us is an indisputable, obvious fact,”said Antonov. If the Americans go along with Ukraine’s “insane” demands for long-range rockets, he added, “such a scenario would mean direct involvement of the US in a military confrontation with Russia.”

Even so, this will “not lead to real change on the frontline,” Antonov said, “Only naive, short-sighted politicians who know history poorly can talk about victory over Russia on the battlefield.” Russia’s mission is to “lay down the foundations of a multipolar world order and send the American ‘rules-based world order’ into the dustbin of history,” and Moscow’s diplomats “have no doubt that we will achieve victory,” he concluded.

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His own office published the photo. It appears to be gone now.

Zelensky Guard Appears To Wear Nazi Insignia (RT)

One of the armed guards of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been spotted with insignia resembling a symbol of Nazi Germany unit used during World War II. The image shared by the office of the leader was made during his visit to the recently re-captured town of Izyum on Wednesday. The controversial skull-and-bones image was featured on the back of a heavily armed Ukrainian trooper, who appeared to be part of Zelensky’s security detail during the trip. It can be seen in one of the photos, which the president’s office released on social media. The symbol was the insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbande units, the part of the Nazi paramilitary Schutzstaffel responsible for security at the death camps.

It was also adopted by the elite Panzer Division ‘Totenkopf’ of the Waffen-SS, which was formed from the death camp guards and fought on the Eastern front and committed multiple war crimes. In modern times, it was adopted by various far-right and nationalist groups in Ukraine, which got their inspiration from Ukrainian nationalist forces that collaborated with the Nazi Germany during World War II and fought against the Soviet Union. Organizations monitoring extremists consider it a hate symbol. In May, Zelensky’s office included a photo of a Ukrainian artillery trooper wearing a similar ‘death head’ patch on his chest in a selection posted on social media on the occasion of the Allied victory in the European theater of war. The same photo was also shared by the country’s defense ministry that day.


Russia cited the influence that extremists groups have in the Ukrainian national guard and military as one of the reasons for sending troops into the country in late February. Zelensky was elected president in 2019 on a platform of reconciliation with rebel forces in the east and normalization of ties with Russia. His initial attempts to deliver on the campaign promises were met with fierce criticisms and street protests by nationalist groups, which called for tougher policies and suppression of Donbass. The Ukrainian president has since reinvented himself as an uncompromising political figure seeking a complete defeat of Russia and its allies and rejecting any calls for peace talks.

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I cannot do Batiushka, the Orthodox priest, justice in the aggregator format. But I can point you to him.

A Turning-Point Once Every 500 Years (Batiushka)

I recall some forty years ago meeting an elderly English lady, a farmer’s wife called Mrs Dove, who had been present as a schoolgirl at the funeral of Queen Victoria. ‘When the old Queen died all those years ago’, she reminisced nostalgically, ‘everything was draped in black and everyone was dressed in black’. Now Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, the new ‘old Queen’, is dead, the news announced beneath a rainbow over Windsor Castle. This is the town whose name the Queen’s grandfather, George V, had adopted as the family name, instead of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The Windsor name was officially adopted on 17 July 1917, just after the British-orchestrated Russian ‘Revolution’ of 1917, one year to the day before the Tsar and his Family were murdered in Ekaterinburg, on the very frontiers of Europe and Asia. The Russian Tsar had been betrayed by his look-alike cousin, King George V.

Whatever you say about Queen Elizabeth II, she personally had modesty, she had dignity, she had presence, she actually believed in something, she had all that her descendants seem utterly to lack. Perhaps her end was hastened by the behaviour of her son Prince Andrew, her grandson Prince Harry and the imbeciles who inhabit 10 Downing Street, the latest of whom she had to appoint Prime Minister only two days before she died. Why live any longer? She must have been fed up with it all. This is the final, final end of the Protestant Empire of Great Britain (1522-2022) (1), whose collapse began exactly three generations ago in 1947 in India. Perhaps the decline will go swiftly now under the disliked King Charles III (called in Russian Karl III) (2), who finds himself without Queen Diana, the only one who could have saved him. Expect the break-up of the UK to be rapid.

The 96 year-old Queen Elizabeth II died in Scotland, in Victoria’s castle at Balmoral, a relic of the 19th century and its British Empire. Her curious, clipped Germanic accent – no English people talk like that – betrayed the Queen’s foreign origins as the last of the rulers shaped by German Protestantism, imported by the City of London merchant and financial class just over 300 years before. However, it is not only her, it is the other leaders of the Western world, relics of the 20th century, who are dying out too. They are gerontocrats. In the USA Biden, born in the first half of the 20th century and soon to be 80, should really be in an old folk’s home. It is cruel to keep parading him in front of the media like that and asking him to remember things. As for Pope Francis, aged 85, he can hardly walk and says that he too might go early, like his predecessor, still alive at 95, a relic forced to serve in the Hitler Youth.

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“Washington has “doubts” about Germany’s fundamental loyalty to Kiev, questioning whether it wants Ukraine to “win” or just “not to lose.”

American Patience With Germany Wearing Thin – Media (RT)

Berlin appears to be increasingly out of step with its allies across the pond when it comes to arming Ukraine, Germany’s Die Welt daily reported on Thursday, adding that the issue is impacting relations between the NATO allies. The US allegedly wants Germany to take a more resolute approach towards military assistance for Kiev, it said. Last Sunday, the US ambassador to Berlin, Amy Gutmann, told the German broadcaster ZDF that she expects Germany to “take on a greater leadership role.” She acknowledged Berlin’s military assistance to Kiev, but said her expectations are “even higher.” “So far, Germany has done what we asked for,”a US official told Die Welt on Thursday, adding that Berlin could be moving “faster.”

The paper reported that Washington has “doubts” about Germany’s fundamental loyalty to Kiev, questioning whether it wants Ukraine to “win” or just “not to lose.” On Tuesday, the German tabloid Bild claimed that US officials allegedly sent a diplomatic note to Berlin, in which Secretary of State Antony Blinken supposedly said Washington would “welcome” a decision by Germany to send battle tanks to Ukraine while stopping short of directly asking for such a step. A spokeswoman for the US embassy in Berlin, however, denied this claim, telling Bild that no such outreach was made. “It is not true that we told Germany that they had to supply tanks,” a US official also told Die Welt on Thursday, adding that the US would rather see Germany take a greater leadership role, which now “means helping Ukraine.”

Last week, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht told journalists that Berlin would not be the first to send Western-made tanks to Ukraine when no other nation had done so. The reports of Washington’s dissatisfaction with Germany’s response came as Lambrecht announced a fresh weapons package for Kiev. The new batch will include two Mars II multiple rocket launchers and 200 missiles for them, as well as 50 Dingo armored personnel carriers, she told journalists on Thursday.

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I still haven’t seen anyone explain how the US got so far behind on hypersonics. Spending 10x what Russia spends, and still be 10 years behind.

Pentagon Finds Hypersonic Research Partner (RT)

The Pentagon has agreed to work with Japan to find new ways to defend against hypersonic weapons, as the US rushes to produce a missile to compete with similar platforms under development in China, and already deployed by Russia. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Japanese counterpart, Yasukazu Hamada, at the Pentagon headquarters on Wednesday, where they discussed future military coordination between the two nations and focused on China’s “coercive actions” toward Taiwan in recent weeks. “The ministers concurred that Japan and the United States would further accelerate cooperation in the area of equipment and technology to ensure technological edge of the alliance,” including “joint analysis on counter-hypersonic technology,” the Japanese Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The ministry noted that Washington and Tokyo would “cooperate closely and seamlessly” to prevent any “unilateral change in the status quo” in the Indo-Pacific region, where American warships frequently conduct ‘freedom of navigation’ missions through contested waters claimed by Beijing. Both Austin and Hamada “strongly condemned China’s ballistic missile launches in early August,” with Tokyo claiming some of the projectiles landed within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The two also accused Beijing of provocative military drills near Taiwan – which China considers part of its own territory – following a visit to the island by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month. In the Pentagon’s readout of Wednesday’s meeting, Austin vowed to “modernize the US-Japan alliance, bolster integrated deterrence, and further cooperate with like-minded partners to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific,” though the release made no mention of hypersonic technology.

While various hypersonic missile designs have long been under development by the US defense establishment, no platform has been adopted into service. Following a test of the hypersonic AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) last May, the Air Force declared it a “major accomplishment,”though the missile failed to reach its theoretical top-speed of Mach 20 (or 20 times the speed of sound). China, too, is working on a hypersonic munition, which it has test-fired on a number of occasions, while Russia’s hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal has been in service for several years, seeing its first real-world operational deployments during the conflict with Ukraine.

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The IAEA cannot choose sides. But it does. Next they’re going to call for Russia to withdraw from the plant, though they know that will never happen.

Moscow Responds To UN Nuclear Watchdog Resolution On Ukrainian Plant (RT)

Russia has criticized the resolution adopted by the UN nuclear watchdog on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant. The document passed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is “anti-Russian” and does not say a single word about the Ukrainian shelling of the facility, Russian diplomats have said. The facility, the largest of its kind in Europe, is located in Ukraine but currently controlled by Russian forces. On Thursday, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted a document demanding Russia “immediately cease all actions against, and at, the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and any other nuclear facility in Ukraine.” The text also said the board “deplores the Russian Federation’s persistent violent actions against nuclear facilities in Ukraine.”

Russia’s mission to the IAEA responded by saying that the document was “pushed through” by the West, while “the majority of humanity refused to support it.” The resolution passed with 26 votes in favor. Russia and China, which are also on the board, voted against it, while seven nations – Egypt, South Africa, Senegal, Burundi, Vietnam, India, and Pakistan – abstained. Those supporting the document mostly consisted of the US and its allies in Europe and elsewhere. The Russian diplomats also blasted the fact that the resolution fails to mention the shelling of the station, the evidence for which Moscow had provided several times. The officials also accused Western nations of “supporting and shielding” Kiev in “every possible way,” while blaming Ukraine for the attacks.

The document was passed in the wake of the IAEA mission that visited the Zaporozhye plant in early September. On Wednesday, in a phone call with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the IAEA’s work, which is contributing to the safety of the facility. This was the second resolution adopted by the IAEA amid the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The first one was passed in March before Russian forces had taken control of the power plant. The documents are similar in nature and in both cases were introduced by Canada and Poland on behalf of Ukraine, which is not on the agency’s board, according to Reuters. Moscow has repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of shelling the grounds of the plant. Kiev has denied the accusations and instead blamed Russia for the incidents, despite the area already being under Moscow’s control.

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George Webb – Investigative Journalist @RealGeorgeWebb1: “Dearie is Special Master. yep, the Carter page FISA guy.”

Special Master Appointed, DOJ Bid To Delay Mar-a-Lago Ruling Rejected (Pol.)

U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon on Thursday rejected a Justice Department demand to let federal prosecutors continue their review of records marked classified that were recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. In her ruling, Cannon refused to accept department officials’ contention that the records they are trying to review as part of an ongoing criminal investigation remain highly classified or contain extraordinarily sensitive defense information that could damage national security if released. “The Court does not find it appropriate to accept the Government’s conclusions on these important and disputed issues without further review by a neutral third party in an expedited and orderly fashion,” Cannon, a Trump appointee, wrote in her 10-page ruling denying the Justice Department’s request to essentially exclude about 100 documents marked classified from the special master process.

Cannon instead appointed Raymond Dearie, a senior federal judge in New York, to lead an independent review of the seized materials. He was one of two potential special masters proposed by the Trump team, and prosecutors said they found him acceptable even though he was not one of their initial picks. In a signed filing released by the court on Thursday night, Dearie accepted the task. Cannon urged him to complete his review by Nov. 30 — more than a month after the Oct. 17 deadline the Justice Department had most recently asked Cannon to set. While Cannon’s timeline appears to extend Dearie’s review well past the November midterm elections, she did instruct him “to prioritize review of the approximately 100 documents marked as classified (and papers physically attached thereto),” meaning it’s possible prosecutors could regain access to some or all of those materials before they get another look at the other records seized in the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the Trump’s Florida estate.

Last week, the Justice Department appealed Cannon’s order to appoint a special master and indicated it would seek relief from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals if she did not agree to delay aspects of her ruling by Thursday night. The ruling is another setback for federal prosecutors, who have expressed alarm at the extraordinarily sensitive records they found in boxes intermingled with Trump’s personal items in his Mar-a-Lago storage room, as well as some recovered from his office. The Justice Department has warned that Cannon’s Sept. 5 order — which enjoined the department from furthering its criminal review of the documents seized by FBI agents — had also disrupted a parallel risk assessment of those documents by the intelligence community. Though Cannon allowed that review to continue, the Justice Department emphasized that her order had sown confusion within the executive branch.

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“The silliness of it all is that Trump might be the only Republican–at least top tier Republican–who could lose to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in 2024.”

Democrats Are Trying To Trump-Proof The Government (Lucas)

Trump Derangement Syndrome is clearly real. To be clear, it’s not necessarily better or worse than Trump sycophancy. Americans–whether serving in public office or everyday working stiffs–should never base their life around idolatry of or seething hatred for one prominent leader. But, of course, that has happened with Trump. I suppose polarizing is a shorter way to put it, but that term seems so trite. Anyway, the anti-Trump side is presently being more ridiculous and pettier. If Trump sycophancy becomes a legislative agenda, I’ll reconsider that judgment. The silliness of it all is that Trump might be the only Republican–at least top tier Republican–who could lose to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris in 2024.

While that’s questionable, House Democrats are advancing bills through committee as if they think he’s a sure thing come January 2025 – or water down a second Trump term as much as possible by weakening presidential authority. Also, some of the bills are based on silly anti-Trump conspiracy theories. The bills would effectively politicize executive branch agencies that shouldn’t be. HR 8326, dubbed the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act would make it more difficult for a president to fire a Census Bureau director, while also granting the director broad new authorities to conduct statistical sampling. It would expand the number of Census Bureau employees with civil service protections. It also constrains future censuses from inquiring about citizenship–which could favor Democrats for enumeration and apportionment.

When the oversight committee advanced the bill in July, committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., complained about the “Trump administration’s illegal efforts to weaponize the Census Bureau for political gain.” House Oversight Committee Democrats Reps. Gerald Connolly of Virginia and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania co-sponsored H.R. 302, dubbed the Preventing a Patronage System Act. The theory is that if Trump is elected, he would eliminate the civil service system and return to a spoils system. The press release for the bill references Trump’s final months in office, when he signed an executive order creating a “Schedule F” category of federal employees.

The order determined that career employees with civil service protections involved with “policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” positions that are “not normally subject to change as part of a presidential transition” could be more easily removed for insubordination, which was a problem during the Trump administration. This would affect a maximum 50,000 federal employees out of the 2.2 million federal workforce. That’s far from a patronage system. The Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act, or H.R. 2988, certainly is a more innocuous sounding name, since many Republican lawmakers love whistleblowers that rat out Democrats. But this bill practically encourages bad actors in the federal workforce to simply engage in meritless accusations–thus abuse the legal whistleblower protections.

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Filling a vacuum with money.

How Bill Gates And Partners Took Over The Global Covid Response (Pol.)

When Covid-19 struck, the governments of the world weren’t prepared. From America to Europe to Asia, they veered from minimizing the threat to closing their borders in ill-fated attempts to quell a viral spread that soon enveloped the world. While the most powerful nations looked inward, four non-governmental global health organizations began making plans for a life-or-death struggle against a virus that would know no boundaries. What followed was a steady, almost inexorable shift in power from the overwhelmed governments to a group of non-governmental organizations, according to a seven-month investigation by POLITICO journalists based in the U.S. and Europe and the German newspaper WELT.

Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments. While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan for the dissemination of those Covid tools to needy nations, though it would ultimately fail to live up to its original promises.

The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

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Martha’s Vineyard finally gets diversity.

Tucker Carlson Notices the Missing Jubilation in Martha’s Vineyard (CTH)

A strange thing happened. After lecturing the nation on the virtues of mass migration, the white liberal democrats on Martha’s Vineyard did not celebrate the arrival of the non-white immigrants they have been demanding for years. Fox News host Tucker Carlson noted in his monologue that Martha’s Vineyard famous nimby residents, including former President Barack Obama, did not welcome the people of color as one would expect. Instead of celebrating the new diversity, oddly the residents quickly moved to find alternate off island locations to accept the arriving immigrants.

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“Border officials have seen more than 4 million encounters with foreign nationals attempting to cross the southern border since Biden first took office.”

Illinois Governor Declares Emergency Disaster As Migrants Bused In (JTN)

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Wednesday issued an emergency disaster proclamation in response to several hundred foreign nationals being bused to the state from the southern border by Texas’ governor. Pritzker activated about 75 members of the Illinois National Guard “to ensure all state resources are available to support asylum seekers arriving nearly daily to Chicago from the state of Texas,” the governor’s office said in a news release. It also “enables the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) and other state agencies, in close coordination with the City of Chicago, Cook County, and other local governments, to ensure the individuals and families receive the assistance they need. This includes transport, emergency shelter and housing, food, health screenings, medical assessments, treatments, and other necessary care and services.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began busing foreign nationals who crossed the border into Texas illegally to Washington D.C. in April, to New York City this summer, and then to Chicago beginning late last month. All three cities are so-called “sanctuary cities” that proclaim to welcome illegal immigrants and not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. “Today, I signed a disaster proclamation allowing the state to speed up the procurement of the immediate resources needed to help Chicago, Cook County, and other jurisdictions provide humanitarian assistance to the asylum seekers who are being sent to our state with no official advance notice by the Governor of Texas,” Pritzker said in a statement. “Let me be clear: while other states may be treating these vulnerable families as pawns, here in Illinois, we are treating them as people.”

Abbott argues the crisis at the southern border was created by President Joe Biden’s open border policies and has called on the mayors of these sanctuary cities to demand that Biden enforce U.S. immigration law. Border officials have seen more than 4 million encounters with foreign nationals attempting to cross the southern border since Biden first took office. Texas has had to deal with the majority of them. The administration has released hundreds of thousands of them into Texas and other border state communities.

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“probabilistic” modelling..

Switching To Renewable Energy Could Save Trillions (BBC)

Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could save the world as much as $12tn (£10.2tn) by 2050, an Oxford University study says. The report said it was wrong and pessimistic to claim that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources was expensive. Gas prices have soared on mounting concerns over energy supplies. But the researchers say that going green now makes economic sense because of the falling cost of renewables. “Even if you’re a climate denier, you should be on board with what we’re advocating,” Prof Doyne Farmer from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School told BBC News. “Our central conclusion is that we should go full speed ahead with the green energy transition because it’s going to save us money,” he said.

The report’s findings are based on looking at historic price data for renewables and fossil fuels and then modelling how they’re likely to change in the future. The data for fossil fuels goes from 2020 back more than 100 years and shows that after accounting for inflation, and market volatility, the price hasn’t changed much. Renewables have only been around for a few decades, so there’s less data. But in that time continual improvements in technology have meant the cost of solar and wind power have fallen rapidly, at a rate approaching 10% a year. The report’s expectation that the price of renewables will continue to fall is based on “probabilistic” modelling, using data on how massive investment and economies of scale have made other similar technologies cheaper.

“Our latest research shows scaling-up key green technologies will continue to drive their costs down, and the faster we go, the more we will save,” says Dr Rupert Way, the report’s lead author from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

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Water man

 

 

 

More hands
https://twitter.com/i/status/1570035223013855233

 

 

 

 

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May 252022
 


Vincent van Gogh Pietà (after Delacroix) 1889

 

America’s Ukraine Policy Is On A Collision Course With Reality (Moloney)
The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again (Orlov)
Ukraine Official Blasts Kissinger Over Comment on Ceding Territory (Celente)
NATO vs Russia: What Happens Next (Escobar)
No Way Out but War (Chris Hedges)
Finland, Sweden Send Teams To Turkey After Erdogan’s ‘Don’t Even Bother’ (ZH)
Comey’s FBI Lied To Its Own Agents In Russia Hoax Cover-Up (Jarrett)
‘Fired Up’ FBI Leadership Pushed Trump Probe Despite Flimsy Evidence (JTN)
Individual Carbon Footprint Tracker (CTH)
Bill Gates Poured Millions into Dark Money Fund Attacking Elon Musk (BB)
One Billion People At Risk Of Power Blackouts As Global Grids Stretched
Biden Underwater On Almost All Issues Except Handling Of Covid (Hill)
Bayer Deploys Big Ag Buddies to Push Biden on Roundup Cancer Lawsuit (CHD)

 

 

 

 

Ricky Gervais is an absolute treasure
https://twitter.com/i/status/1529025826712391681

 

 

“..the holes in the upbeat Ukraine narrative have reached a point where the mainstream media no longer can credibly deny them..”

America’s Ukraine Policy Is On A Collision Course With Reality (Moloney)

If we accept the mainstream media narrative about Russia’s war in Ukraine, we are witnessing the emergence of the Biden administration’s greatest triumph to date. Under this roseate scenario, the Ukrainians are doing wonderfully well in their fight against Russia; the Russian troops are failing badly almost everywhere; NATO is enjoying a renaissance of unity not seen since the Cold War; and President Biden is being lauded globally for bold leadership and for proving once again that the United States is the world’s indispensable nation. Perhaps best of all is the narrative that Biden is delivering his long-promised bipartisan unity among Americans, as large numbers of Republicans sign onto his requests for more money and more weapons for Ukraine.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are among the luminaries who paraded to Kyiv for coveted photo-ops with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In stark contrast to these upbeat perspectives about the war, however, a far less pleasant reality is forcing its way to the forefront of American consciousness: The U.S. economy is reeling through a historic crisis in the direction of an almost certain recession, with inflation far outpacing wage gains; income inequality soaring, as elites continue to prosper and the working class is crushed by the cost of living; frightening levels of violent crime plague large cities; and unprecedented numbers of illegal migrants are surging across America’s southern border.

In light of these less palatable realities, it cannot be surprising Biden’s approval rating and that of his Democratic Party are plummeting to new depths — including among bedrock elements of the Democratic coalition such as Hispanics, Black voters and, perhaps, educated suburban women. Traditional liberals such as Democratic strategist James Carville clearly see the looming electoral disaster of this fall’s midterms, but it’s being ignored by Pelosi and the party’s progressive wing, which continues to influence Biden’s policy initiatives. The disconnect between these two realities has become evident as new complications arise in Ukraine and America’s domestic disorders worsen. In particular, the holes in the upbeat Ukraine narrative have reached a point where the mainstream media no longer can credibly deny them, as John Walsh described in a recent Asia Times article, “NY Times shifts pro-war narrative.” Walsh draws attention to two items appearing recently in the Times: a front-page story about Russia seizing much of the East, and an opinion piece entitled, “America and Its Allies Want to Bleed Russia. They Really Shouldn’t.”

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“After the Soviet collapse, very little was needed to speed along the collapse of Russia itself. But none of these steps have been taken, and the steps that were taken (with the ostensible goal of weakening and destroying Russia) have done the exact opposite.”

The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again (Orlov)

It is generally a good idea to avoid ascribing nefarious intent to actions explained by mere stupidity. But this is a case where mere stupidity cannot possibly explain the long, steady procession of foreign policy errors spanning three decades, all of them specifically aimed at strengthening Russia. It is not possible to argue that a surplus of hubris, ignorance, greed and political opportunism and a deficit of competent foreign policy analysts can produce such a result, for that would be essentially the same as arguing that some monkeys armed with drills, mills and lathes can produce a Swiss watch. But the only alternative would be to claim that there is a network of Kremlin’s agents ensconced deep within the bowels of the American Deep State and that they are all working in concert to advance Russia’s interests while meticulously maintaining plausible deniability all the while and at all levels of the operation.

Ostensibly, the plan was to weaken and destroy Russia; but then, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was weakening and destroying itself very well all by itself, no intervention needed. What’s more, every US effort to weaken and destroy Russia has made it stronger; had there existed even a most rudimentary feedback mechanism, so vast a discrepancy between policy goals and policy results would have been detected and adjustments would have been made. Superficially, this may be explained by the nature of America’s sham-democracy, where each administration can blame its failures on mistakes made by the previous administration, but the Deep State remains in power throughout, and it would simply be forced to admit to itself that there is a problem with the plan to weaken and destroy Russia after a few cycles of this unfolding fiasco. The fact that it hasn’t detected any such problem brings us full circle, back to the suspicion that there are Putin’s agents toiling tirelessly deep within the Deep State.

But that’s pure conspiracy theory and we shouldn’t want to go anywhere near that. Suffice to say, there is at present no adequate explanation for what happened. After the Soviet collapse, very little was needed to speed along the collapse of Russia itself. But none of these steps have been taken, and the steps that were taken (with the ostensible goal of weakening and destroying Russia) have done the exact opposite. Why? Below are listed 10 of the most successful initiatives of what appear to be a US Deep State MRGA campaign. If you have an alternative explanation, I’d like to hear it. b

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Turns 99 on Friday. Terrible legacy. But today’s crop are far worse.

Ukraine Official Blasts Kissinger Over Comment on Ceding Territory (Celente)

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said Monday what The Trends Journal has been advocating since the start of the Ukraine War: President Volodymyr Zelensky should negotiate for a peaceful resolution and prevent thousands more from dying needlessly. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome,” Kissinger told the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante.” The 98-year-old said pursuing the war “beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself.” He said Ukraine should be willing to cede territory in the peace process. Ukraine has said it will not stop fighting until Russia retreats from the country.

Kissinger saw some success during his time as the U.S.’s top diplomat with the Soviet Union and played a role in arms control treaties like the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He told the audience in Davos that it would be “fatal” for Western countries to disregard Russia’s position of power within Europe. “I hope the Ukrainians will match the heroism they have shown with wisdom,” Kissinger said. Kissinger’s comments were mocked on social media by “journalists” who -two months ago- didn’t know the difference between Kyiv and a quiche. One even suggested that he should die. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, was critical of Kissinger’s remarks and said he would as easily “allow to take Poland or Lithuania away,” Newsweek reported.

[..] Kissinger’s comments follow nonagenarian Noam Chomsky’s earlier statements about the dangers of a prolonged conflict in Ukraine. Chomsky, correctly, stated earlier this month that Ukrainian leadership’s cry for more heavy weapons is actually the Western “propaganda system.” Chomsky was criticized after saying in an interview that former President Donald Trump is the “one Western statesman of stature” who laid out a “sensible” solution for Ukraine. He said Trump spoke about facilitating negotiations instead of “undermining them and moving towards establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe in which there are no military alliances and mutual accommodation.”

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“Herr Schwab stressed that an actor impersonating a president defending neo-Nazis is supported by “all of Europe and the international order.”

NATO vs Russia: What Happens Next (Escobar)

Three months after the start of Russia’s Operation Z in Ukraine, the battle of The West (12 percent) against The Rest (88 percent) keeps metastasizing. Yet the narrative – oddly – remains the same. On Monday, from Davos, World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab introduced Ukrainian comedian-cum-President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the latest leg of his weapons-solicitation-tour, with a glowing tribute. Herr Schwab stressed that an actor impersonating a president defending neo-Nazis is supported by “all of Europe and the international order.” He means, of course, everyone except the 88 percent of the planet that subscribes to the Rule of Law – instead of the faux construct the west calls a ‘rules-based international order.’

Back in the real world, Russia, slowly but surely has been rewriting the Art of Hybrid War. Yet within the carnival of NATO psyops, aggressive cognitive infiltration, and stunning media sycophancy, much is being made of the new $40 billion US ‘aid’ package to Ukraine, deemed capable of becoming a game-changer in the war. This ‘game-changing’ narrative comes courtesy of the same people who burned though trillions of dollars to secure Afghanistan and Iraq. And we saw how that went down. Ukraine is the Holy Grail of international corruption. That $40 billion can be a game-changer for only two classes of people: First, the US military-industrial complex, and second, a bunch of Ukrainian oligarchs and neo-connish NGOs, that will corner the black market for weapons and humanitarian aid, and then launder the profits in the Cayman Islands.

A quick breakdown of the $40 billion reveals $8.7 billion will go to replenish the US weapons stockpile (thus not going to Ukraine at all); $3.9 billion for USEUCOM (the ‘office’ that dictates military tactics to Kiev); $5 billion for a fuzzy, unspecified “global food supply chain”; $6 billion for actual weapons and “training” to Ukraine; $9 billion in “economic assistance” (which will disappear into selected pockets); and $0.9 billion for refugees. US risk agencies have downgraded Kiev to the dumpster of non-reimbursing-loan entities, so large American investment funds are ditching Ukraine, leaving the European Union (EU) and its member-states as the country’s only option.

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“It will signal the death of Pax Americana.”

No Way Out but War (Chris Hedges)

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses.

No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon. The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

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Arms embargo.

Finland, Sweden Send Teams To Turkey After Erdogan’s ‘Don’t Even Bother’ (ZH)

Finland and Sweden on Tuesday confirmed they are sending delegations to Ankara in hopes of resolving issues surrounding Turkey’s publicly voiced vehement opposition to the two countries’ bids to join NATO. They formally submitted their applications in a ceremony attended by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg last week, which Turkey immediately sought to block. Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said the delegations will begin meetings with Turkish counterparts on Wednesday, even after days ago President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Finnish and Swedish diplomatic teams “shouldn’t bother coming” if they aren’t prepared to halt support for PKK terrorists.

Speaking during a panel discussion of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Haavisto acknowledged, “We understand that Turkey has some of their own security concerns vis-a-vis terrorism.” He added: “We think that these issues can be settled. There might be also some issues that are not linked directly to Finland and Sweden but more to other NATO members.” US Secretary Antony Blinken and the Biden administration say they’re “confident” the issues will be smoothed over, despite Ankara officials still showing no sign of stopping the denunciations. Turkey has also demanded that Sweden extradite “terrorists” being hosted in its midst, along with the Nordic countries immediately lifting an EU arms embargo which took effect in 2019 in response to the Turkish military’s anti-Kurdish operations in northern Syria.

According to the latest statements from Turkey’s foreign ministry, Ankara is waiting on both countries to take concrete steps. “Sweden, which has applied for membership, is expected to take principled steps and provide concrete assurances regarding Turkey’s security concerns,” a statement said. “Since 2017, our country has requested the extradition of PKK/PYD and FETO terrorists from Sweden but has yet to receive a positive response,” it added in reference referring to Syria’s main Kurdish party PYD and the Gulenist group FETO.

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“Testimony has shown that the FBI opened its probe of Trump because Hillary’s lawyer warned the Bureau that the media was about to report on it.”

Yeah, because “Hillary’s lawyer” fed them the story. That’s how it becomes a story. And then a probe.

Comey’s FBI Lied To Its Own Agents In Russia Hoax Cover-Up (Jarrett)

As if the FBI’s gross misconduct couldn’t get any worse, we learned Monday in court that top bureau officials actively concealed from their own field agents that it was Hillary’s lawyer, defendant Michael Sussmann, who was peddling phony Trump-Russia collusion claims to the FBI. Instead of telling their agents the truth of the information source, FBI brass lied by wrongly attributed it as coming from the “Department of Justice,” thus giving it the imprimatur of greater credibility than it deserved. As Monday’s testimony showed, had agents been told that Hillary’s campaign lawyer was behind it they would have recognized it for what it was –a politically motivated smear and immediately discounted it as a lie.

Monday’s testimony also revealed that the FBI eventually concluded as early as January of 2017 –just as the new president was about to take office– that the so-called “Alfa-Bank secret back-channel communication” between Trump and the Kremlin was a hoax. Yet, Comey hid that critical information from Trump, congress, and the American people. As a consequence, the media kept up its false reporting in the same way it continued to flog the fabricated “dossier.” Comey and others at the FBI like Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok knew that “dossier” funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign was a collection of exaggerations and made-up stories that originated from her own people. Comey could have told the truth and refuted all of the false media stories, but he didn’t. He and his acolytes exploited it as a pretense to escalate their investigation of Trump to drive him from office.

It’s not surprising that CBS, NBC, ABC, and MSNBC have refused to report any of the stunning revelations in the Sussmann trial. They are shameless cowards. They spent the better part of three years obsessed with the collusion story with their non-stop coverage portraying Trump as a Russian asset. They were reckless and wrong. But now, they don’t want to draw attention to just how wrong they were by reporting on the trial. The Washington Post is worse. On Monday, the newspaper published a “news analysis” with the title, “Again: There’s no evidence Hillary Clinton triggered the Russia probe.” Like much of the Post’s reporting, it is completely untrue. Declassified CIA documents show that Hillary invented the hoax by approving a plan on July 26, 2016 to frame Trump. She also gave her personal approval to leak it to the media, according to her own campaign manager’s testimony in court on Friday. Testimony has shown that the FBI opened its probe of Trump because Hillary’s lawyer warned the Bureau that the media was about to report on it.

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“..not opening an investigation was not an option..”

‘Fired Up’ FBI Leadership Pushed Trump Probe Despite Flimsy Evidence (JTN)

In explosive testimony Tuesday in the Michael Sussmann trial, an FBI agent said “fired up” senior FBI leadership insisted on continuing the investigation into now-debunked allegations of a secret Trump back channel to Moscow via a Russian bank despite learning the story was unsubstantiated. FBI agent Curtis Heide was the co-case agent on the investigation into the allegation that there was a secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. He testified on Tuesday in the Sussmann trial that the bureau’s top brass pushed for the investigation.

Heide was told in an instant message from FBI Agent Joe Pientka, who was the supervisor leading the Crossfire Hurricane investigation regarding Trump-Russia collusion allegations, that senior leadership was “fired up” about the Alfa Bank and Trump Organization email servers and not opening an investigation was not an option. He received this message two days after Sussmann met with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker to give him the underlying, allegedly pretextual data. Sussmann, a 2016 Clinton campaign lawyer, is on trial for allegedly lying to the FBI in his September 2016 meeting with Baker by saying he was not representing any clients in sharing information purportedly substantiating a Trump Organization back channel to the Kremlin through Alfa Bank.

Special Counsel John Durham has provided evidence that Sussmann was representing clients at the meeting — both the Clinton campaign and then-Neustar tech firm executive Rodney Joffe. Heide testified that he concluded the allegation was unsubstantiated based on the analysis by the FBI cyber division, review of the internet data logs, cybersecurity company Mandiant’s independent assessment corroborating the FBI’s findings, discussions with Spectrum Health about a TOR (The Onion Router) exit node, and his own training regarding previous Russian cyber investigations. By Sept. 26, 2016, Heide believed the allegation was a bunk report. In an Oct. 3 email, he asked to interview the anonymous source who relayed the allegation because he believed the investigation was reaching a logical endpoint as the claims appeared unfounded.

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“The 5G telecommunications network is designed to use geolocation and behavioral tracking that will connect your digital identity to your individual behavior and facilitate the carbon footprint tracing process..”

Individual Carbon Footprint Tracker (CTH)

It is important to remember the ultimate goal of the ‘climate change’ promotors (World Economic Forum) is not an energy system that changes the global climate. The goal of the ‘climate change’ group is to create a carbon trading system; a new financial mechanism (a global tax program) to control human activity on a world-wide basis. This system also needs a digital identity in order to work {hint-hint}. You cannot tax, or trade, things you cannot track. As a result, there was always going to be a need for an individual tracking and monitoring system that would connect to the global digital identity and determine the carbon footprint. The carbon taxing and trading system will be more financially lucrative than any stock exchange or monetary banking system. It is the ultimate human control mechanism, and the preferred way to redistribute wealth under the guise of global equity.


Of course, the system will beta test as a consumer demand product until the government steps in to take over the allocation and distribution equity part. In this video segment, Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans boasts at the 2022 World Economic Forum about the development of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor what you buy, what you eat, and where/how you travel.

The individual carbon tracker is the baseline for a global carbon trading system that involves everyone; at least, everyone connected to the outlook of western government. Carbon allocation creates the financial metric that replaces currency. You buy and sell carbon credits allowing you to engage in specific functions within society, like dining, traveling, home ownership and type, vehicle or transportation type, even the clothes you can purchase. Hence, “carbon trading” is the term most people are familiar with. In essence, you are a parasite to earth; therefore, you must offset your derogatory footprint on the planet by paying a fee to exist. If you cannot pay for the carbon credits needed to engage in the transaction (travel, home ownership, cooling, heating, etc.) you cannot engage in the regulated activity.


The carbon exchange process is at the end of the slippery slope created by a digital identity. The 5G telecommunications network is designed to use geolocation and behavioral tracking that will connect your digital identity to your individual behavior and facilitate the carbon footprint tracing process. We are already passed the “if” stage.

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“..a shape-shifting nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.”

Bill Gates Poured Millions into Dark Money Fund Attacking Elon Musk (BB)

Research exclusively shared with Breitbart News identifies hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from Bill Gates’ foundation to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed an open letter last month urging Twitter advertisers to boycott the company if Elon Musk restores free speech on the platform. Breitbart News’ report, based on research and analysis from the newly-formed Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), analyzed public filings to trace hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from the letter signatories back to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In total, 11 of the 26 anti-Musk organizations received funding from a Gates-backed entity.

[..] The open letter’s connection to the billionaire Microsoft founder is significant, as Gates is in the middle of a public feud with free speech advocate Musk. Last month, Gates revealed his $500 million short position against Musk-owned Tesla, prompting Musk to call Gates a “b*ner” killer alongside a meme of Gates as a pregnant man emoji. Gates is also an outspoken censorship proponent, frequently calling on tech companies to do more to stop “health misinformation” spreading online. Musk threatens to reverse Gates’ strongly desired censorship policies — and now faces the wrath of Gates-funded NGOs. Recently, Musk asked his 94 million Twitter followers to uncover the funding behind the 26 NGOs who signed an intimidation letter threatening to destroy the company’s advertising revenue if Musk reversed its censorship policies.

Musk followed up his request by highlighting one particular shadowy group, Accountable Tech, musing: “I wonder who funds them”. His curiosity was prompted by a Washington Free Beacon investigation into Accountable Tech, which sought to get to the bottom of the nonprofit’s financial sponsorship. The Free Beacon visited Accountable Tech’s corporate office in Washington and concluded the organization doesn’t “actually exist.” Rather, “Accountable Tech” was merely a “registered trade [name] for the North Fund, a shape-shifting nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.”

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A crisis created for the good of mankind.

One Billion People At Risk Of Power Blackouts As Global Grids Stretched

This summer, power grids worldwide won’t produce enough electricity to meet the soaring demand, threatening more than one billion people with rolling blackouts. Grids are stretched thin by fossil fuel shortages, drought and heatwaves, commodity disruptions and soaring prices due to the war in Ukraine, and the failed green energy transition where grid operators retired too many fossil fuel generation plants. Combine this all together, and a perfect storm of blackouts threatens much of the Northern Hemisphere. The power crisis, affecting a large swath of the world and top economies, could be less than a month away when summer begins on June 21. Regions that concerned Bloomberg are Asia, Europe, and the US, where there’s not enough power to go around when cooling demand is set to surge as households crank up their air conditions to escape the sweltering heat.

“Asia’s heatwave has caused hours-long daily blackouts, putting more than 1 billion people at risk across Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India, with little relief in sight. Six Texas power plants failed earlier this month as the summer heat just began to arrive, offering a preview of what’s to come. At least a dozen US states from California to the Great Lakes are at risk of electricity outages this summer. Power supplies will be tight in China and Japan. South Africa is poised for a record year of power cuts. And Europe is in a precarious position that’s held up by Russia — if Moscow cuts off natural gas to the region, that could trigger rolling outages in some countries.” –Bloomberg

BloombergNEF analyst Shantanu Jaiswal says the combination of “war and sanctions” disrupting commodity markets, “extreme weather,” and “an economic rebound from COVID boosting power demand” is a “unique” situation that he “can’t recall” the last time a “confluence of so many factors” happened together. As we noted in the beginning, it’s a perfect storm of factors.

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Ha ha ha!

Biden Underwater On Almost All Issues Except Handling Of Covid (Hill)

President Biden’s approval rating continues to be underwater on virtually every issue, with the exception being on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new survey from Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. Biden’s overall approval rating sits at 41 percent in the survey, and the numbers are not much better when broken down by each issue. Only 35 percent of registered voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, 44 percent approve of his efforts to stimulate job growth and just 33 percent approve of his handling of inflation. Thirty-eight percent of respondents say they support his handling of immigration, and his approval rating on foreign affairs sits at 40 percent.


However, 52 percent of registered voters said they approve of his handling of COVID-19, the lone bright spot in the survey for the White House. Yet overall, his sagging approval ratings portend a political atmosphere this midterm cycle that will heavily favor Republicans — and warn that a 2024 reelection bid could be a slog. “Biden continues to struggle with the job and is particularly being slammed by the voters over inflation and immigration. No president has been reelected with numbers like these on job performance,” said pollster Mark Penn.

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Monsanto has real power.

Bayer Deploys Big Ag Buddies to Push Biden on Roundup Cancer Lawsuit (CHD)

Two weeks after a top Justice Department official advised the U.S. Supreme Court there was “no sound reason” for the high court to review a loss by Monsanto owner Bayer AG in nationwide Roundup cancer litigation, a coalition of large agricultural groups is demanding that President Joe Biden withdraw the opinion. Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has looked to the high court as its last, and best, hope for putting an end to the ongoing litigation. Bayer has asked the justices to take up the case, which centers on allegations that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).

But Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar advised the court in a May 10 brief that Bayer’s arguments for seeking Supreme Court review were “misconceived,” and said there was no valid dispute for the high court to consider. The agricultural groups responded Monday with a blistering letter to Biden, alleging Prelogar’s brief established a “new policy” that “poses great risks to our science-based regulatory system and global food systems.” The letter urges Biden to withdraw Prelogar’s brief and “consult with the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding the implications of this decision for food production, environmental sustainability, and science-based regulation.”

[..] Bayer filed its petition to the high court in August, asking the justices to review the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s May 14, 2021, decision that affirmed a district court’s judgment in Monsanto’s 2019 trial loss to plaintiff Edwin Hardeman. The jury, in that case, agreed with Hardeman’s attorneys that exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide was a cause of Hardeman’s NHL and that Monsanto failed to warn of its product’s health risks, despite decades of science showing links between the herbicide and cancer. Hardeman was awarded approximately $80 million by the jury, though the award was cut by the trial court judge to roughly $25.2 million.

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May 102022
 
 May 10, 2022  Posted by at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


René Magritte The muscles of the sky 1927

 

Sen. Graham Pushes To Designate Moscow a State Sponsor of Terror (Antiwar)
Dems Ditch COVID Funds To Rush $40 Billion To Ukraine (ZH)
The Rise of the New Normal Reich (CJ Hopkins)
Xi Urges Europe To Promote Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks (ZH)
Rebranding Nazism (Keenan)
Won’t Get Fooled Again (John Tierney)
Germany Admits Covid ‘Vaccine’ 40 Times Deadlier Than Previously Known (RAIR)
Ron Johnson Opens Probe Into CDC Tracking Americans Through Phone Data (JTN)
Bill Gates Wants To Build A Dystopia (Unherd)
Florida At Center Of Bid To Slow Musk’s Purchase Of Twitter (JTN)
Durham Prosecution and Sussmann Defense Outline Trial Witnesses (CTH)
FBI Panicked After Trump Tweet Accusing Obama Of Spying On Campaign (ET)
Got the Heebie-Jeebies? (Jim Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Graham boldly called on the US to “take out Putin” and said the Russian leader no longer had an “off-ramp.”

Sen. Graham Pushes To Designate Moscow a State Sponsor of Terror (Antiwar)

Senator Lindsey Graham said the US must pursue an even more aggressive strategy against Russia. While appearing on Fox News Sunday with Brett Baier, the hawkish Senator advocated for a barrage of actions targeting Moscow. Graham promoted a new piece of legislation he co-authored with Senator Richard Blumenthal that calls on the White House to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Senator Graham published an op-ed Friday, arguing the designation will allow the US to conduct more legal and economic warfare against Russia. However, Graham does not link Russia to a terrorist group. Rather, he compares the invasion of Ukraine to the Nazi military campaign during World War Two and claims Vladimir Putin is a “megalomaniac wanting to rewrite the map of Europe and recreate the former Russian Empire.”

The Senator also urges the passing of the $33 billion aid bill for Ukraine, prosecuting Putin for war crimes through the International Criminal Court, and putting “more weapons in theater that can target the Russian military offensively.” On Saturday, the Speaker of the Russian State Duma claimed the Western intervention in Ukraine amounted to direct attacks on Russia. “Washington essentially coordinates and develops military operations, thereby directly participating in the hostilities against our country,” Vyacheslav Volodin said.

Baier posed two questions to Graham, asking if he was concerned that increasing military involvement in Ukraine could lead to direct confrontation with Russia. The Senator was dismissive of the potential conflict between nuclear powers saying, “we can’t let him [Putin] win in Ukraine.” Graham boldly called on the US to “take out Putin” and said the Russian leader no longer had an “off-ramp.”

Abrams tanks
https://twitter.com/i/status/1523887945022939136

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A two-party system, you said?

“..Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top House Republican Kevin McCarthy begging for the funds..”

Dems Ditch COVID Funds To Rush $40 Billion To Ukraine (ZH)

Congressional Democrats are rushing forward to whip up $39.8 billion in additional Ukraine aid, after agreeing to drop a a proposal for additional COVID-19 related funding they planned to combine. The package, which tops President Joe Biden’s $33 billion request in April, could receive a House vote as soon as Tuesday, with Senate Democrats indicating that they are prepared to move swiftly according to Reuters. “Biden on April 28 asked Congress for $33 billion to support Ukraine, including more than $20 billion in military assistance. That proposal was a dramatic escalation of U.S. funding for the war with Russia. The new proposal includes an additional $3.4 billion for military aid and $3.4 billion in humanitarian aid, the sources said.” -Reuters

While emergency aid for Ukraine has had bipartisan support for weeks, disputes over domestic funds for pandemic relief, or whether stiffer immigration controls should be included, have delayed the process. “We cannot allow our shipments of assistance to stop while we await further congressional action,” read a statement from President Biden, who called on lawmakers to expedite the funding so he could sign it within the next few days. The urgency comes after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top House Republican Kevin McCarthy begging for the funds, which they said would run out in two weeks.

“We need your help” wrote Austin and Blinken, who said there was ‘only’ $100 million left from a presidential authorization of weapons (which required no congressional approval). “We expect to exhaust that authority no later than May 19, 2022,” the letter continues. “Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters he was pleased the Ukraine assistance was decoupled from COVID-19 aid. He had advocated for a “clean” Ukraine bill repeatedly in speeches in the Senate”. -Reuters

Sky News

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“..the official history of the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic is being written and the actual history being memory-holed in real time, right before our eyes.”

The Rise of the New Normal Reich (CJ Hopkins)

I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. I didn’t think it would get to the point where the Wall Street Journal would go full Buck Turgidson and call on the United States to “show it can win a nuclear war,” but I wasn’t entirely off the mark either. Back in January (i.e., a million years ago), in The Last Days of the Covidian Cult, I wrote: ” … we are getting dangerously close to the point where GloboCap will need to go full-blown fascist if they want to finish what they started. If that happens, things are going to get very ugly. I know, things are already ugly, but I’m talking a whole different kind of ugly. Think Jonestown, or Hitler’s final days in the bunker, or the last few months of the Manson Family.”

I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel like the threat of global thermonuclear war qualifies as a “different kind of ugly.” And, OK, before you accuse me of exaggerating the danger of the ungodly mess that GloboCap has made in the Ukraine, I’d like to point out that even Thomas Friedman is starting to sound the alarm. Thomas fucking Friedman, folks … a man with no moral conscience whatsoever, who has never met a GloboCap war of aggression that he could not support, and who has justified the gratuitous barbecuing of millions of men, women, and children without so much as a second thought throughout his long and lucrative career as an A-List mouthpiece for the ruling classes. When The Stash gets nervous, I start to get nervous.

Also, there’s the GloboCap Nazi thing. I’m not exactly a hothouse flower, but I have to admit that watching my liberal friends and colleagues go goo-goo for actual swastika-tattooed, Sieg-heiling Nazis has rattled my nerves a little bit. OK … I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to call them “Nazis.” I believe “defenders” is the term du jour. Seriously, here’s an actual screenshot from The Guardian featuring the leader of the neo-Nazi Azov Detachment …

Oh, and meanwhile, as the rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem, and the former fanatical Covidian Cultists turned fanatical Ukrainian Cultists scream for “more weapons” and “more direct engagement,” and revel in their anguish for the wives of neo-Nazis, the official history of the 2020-2021 Covid pandemic is being written and the actual history being memory-holed in real time, right before our eyes.

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Our next big enemy is asking for peace talks. Can’t trust that.

Xi Urges Europe To Promote Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks (ZH)

During a Monday virtual meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Xi stressed that Europe must play an active role in promoting peace talks, and in “building a balanced, effective and sustainable European security framework,” according to China’s state media. Xi said “all efforts must be made to avoid the intensification and expansion of the Ukraine conflict, and China welcomes all efforts that are conducive to promoting peace talks,” according to a translation. “China welcomes all efforts of the international community that facilitate the ceasefire and negotiations, the relevant parties should support Russia and Ukraine in reaching peace through negotiations,” the Chinese leader said further.

Since nearly the start of the conflict, Washington has charged that Beijing is providing behind-the-scenes support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, something which Chinese officials have consistently denied. China has also come under fire for appearing to provide political cover in its criticisms of NATO which echo the Russian position. Cui Heng, an assistant research fellow from the Center for Russian Studies of East China Normal University, was featured in China’s state-run English daily Global Times as describing Beijing’s perspective that time is running out on Washington’s muscular efforts at arming and propping up Ukrainian forces amid the Russian onslaught. This is why new pressure has been put on America’s European allies to step up and do more, even as China argues they must get serious about negotiations and compromise.

“Cui said the growing pressure and sanctions by the US and its allies showed that the West was anxious to defeat Russia, especially as the Biden administration is facing huge pressure over a weakening domestic economy and hefty financial aid for Ukraine, knowing that getting deeper into the mire of the Russia-Ukraine conflict would harm its domestic midterm election prospects,” GT states. “On the other hand, Wang said with its support for Ukraine stretched to the limit, the US was in urgent need of its allies to demonstrate their commitment to the cause, and help its military sector continue making money from sending weapons to Ukraine,” the report adds.

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“..the perennial Western purveyors of fake news, such as The New York Times, CNN and the BBC, declare themselves to be gatekeepers of truth, integrity and morality. ”

Rebranding Nazism (Keenan)

As a teacher of history, the topic of Nazi Germany is always one which generates numerous questions from students. How were the Nazis able to convince the public to vote for them? How did they convince the people to go along with their fascist agenda and barbaric policies? How was the Holocaust allowed to take place? Despite discussing the role of propaganda and censorship, as well as the fear of opposing the Nazi regime, one still finds students often somewhat bemused. Moreover, many invariably argue that nowadays, due to social media, the Internet, and other methods of communication, the evils of Nazism could never succeed in flourishing again.

However, that is about to change. One only has to look at the manner in which the Azov Battalion, a fully-fledged Ukrainian Nazi militia, with significant influence, has been whitewashed in the space of ten weeks. Whereas prior to February 24th 2022, they were recognised as a neo-Nazi battalion, these fascists are now being portrayed as valiant defenders of an oppressed people, fighting bravely against insurmountable odds. In the past, we have become only too well aware of the role played by the media and big tech in propagandising and manufacturing consent. Whether it’s the mainstream media parroting establishment talking points, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube censoring dissenting views, or Paypal denying media outlets access to their own accounts apparently due to their political stances, Western disinformation full-spectrum dominance appears to be at its zenith.

Yet, the perennial Western purveyors of fake news, such as The New York Times, CNN and the BBC, declare themselves to be gatekeepers of truth, integrity and morality. And this, despite their lies which facilitated the slaughter and deaths of over a million men, women and children, in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But still it goes on, right up to the present. From the Ghost of Kiev to Snake Island, the Collective Western media has acted as stenographers for the Western and Ukrainian regimes. The examples are too numerous to mention, but the media coverage of the air strike at a railway station in Kramatorsk provided a striking example of the overt and cynical propaganda role the western media has played throughout this conflict.

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“They assumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound scientific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong..”

Won’t Get Fooled Again (John Tierney)

It’s been a two-year-long version of Hell Week, especially in America’s blue states, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges. Americans obediently donned masks day after day, stood six feet apart, disinfected counters, and obsessively washed their hands while singing “Happy Birthday.” They forsook visits to friends and relatives and followed orders to skip work and church. They forced young children to wear masks on the playground and in the classroom—a form of hazing too extreme even for Europe’s progressive educators. Some Americans refused to submit to these rituals, but their resistance only intensified solidarity among the faithful. The most zealous kept their masks on even after they were vaccinated, even when walking alone outdoors.

The mask became their version of a MAGA hat or a fraternity brother’s ring; some have vowed to keep wearing theirs long after the pandemic. They’ve already called for permanent masking on airplanes, trains, and buses, and they’ll probably clamor for more school closures and lockdown measures during future flu seasons. Facts alone will not be enough to change their minds. To undo the effects of the hazing, we need to ease their cognitive dissonance by showing that they’re not to blame for their decisions. The mental mistakes were not made by citizens who dutifully sacrificed for two years. They assumed that the Centers for Disease Control knew how to control disease and that scientists and public-health officials would provide sound scientific guidance about public health. Those were reasonable assumptions. They just turned out to be wrong.

After a great disaster, the traditional response is to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate it, and a bill has already been introduced in Congress to create a Covid commission. In theory, this could be a worthy public service, allowing experts to sift the evidence impartially and determine which strategies worked, which ones failed, how much needless damage was done—and whom to blame for it. But in practice, which experts would the current Democratic administration or Congress appoint? Presumably, the pillars of the public-health establishment—the same luminaries whose advice was followed so calamitously the past two years.

Aerosols

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Cracks are showing.

Germany Admits Covid ‘Vaccine’ 40 Times Deadlier Than Previously Known (RAIR)

German study: The number of those suffering from serious complications after taking the COVID vaccine is 40 times higher than previously known. Charité in Berlin is carrying out a study on the side effects of receiving corona vaccinations. Professor Harald Matthes is leading the research and is calling for more contact points for those affected. The study “Safety Profile of Covid-19 Vaccines”, which focuses on the effects and side effects of the various vaccines, has been running for a year. Around 40,000 vaccinated people are interviewed at regular intervals throughout Germany. Participation in the study is voluntary and independent of how the vaccines work in the subjects.

One result: eight out of 1,000 vaccinated people struggle with serious side effects. “The number is not surprising,” explains Prof. Dr. Harald Matthes, head of the study: “It corresponds to what is known from other countries such as Sweden, Israel, or Canada. Incidentally, even the manufacturers of the vaccines had already determined similar numbers in their studies.” With conventional vaccines, such as against polio or measles, the number of severe side effects is significantly lower. Serious side effects are symptoms that last for weeks or months and require medical attention. These include muscle and joint pain, heart muscle inflammation, excessive reactions of the immune system, and neurological disorders, i.e., nervous system impairments.

“Most side effects, including severe ones, subside after three to six months; 80% heal. But some last much longer,” reports Professor Matthes. Around 179 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered in Germany so far. “Given around half a million cases with serious side effects after Covid vaccinations in Germany, we doctors have to take action,” emphasizes Prof. Matthes, who, in addition to his work at the Berlin Charité, is on the board of several medical specialist societies and has been systematically examining the effect of medicinal products for years. “We have to come to therapy offers, discuss them openly at congresses and in public without being considered anti-vaccination.”

It is particularly depressing for those affected that their complaints are often not taken seriously. Doctors in private practice would often not associate the symptoms with the vaccinations because they were either not prepared for them or did not want to expose themselves, given the heated political mood. This is also evidenced by the many letters to the head of the study, Professor Matthes. Those affected describe their often months-long search for practical medical help and recognition. In addition, they show that suspected cases are not officially reported. And so, the numbers of severe vaccination reactions at the Paul Ehrlich Institute, at 0.2 reports per 1,000 vaccine doses, are also significantly lower than those in the Charité study.

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CDC=China.

Ron Johnson Opens Probe Into CDC Tracking Americans Through Phone Data (JTN)

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is investigating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for tracking millions of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC paid one company $420,000 to access location data for at least 20 million cell phones a day, a Vice Motherboard investigation revealed last week. While the CDC claimed it needed access to the data to fight COVID, documents show the data was used “to support non-COVID-19 programmatic areas and public health priorities.” Johnson criticized the CDC’s phone tracking efforts Monday on “Just the News – Not Noise.” “Just because data exists, doesn’t mean that the government should be using it to track Americans, I would think that that really raises some very serious constitutional issues,” Johnson noted.


In a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on Thursday, Johnson wrote, “It remains unclear why the CDC tracked millions of Americans during the pandemic and whether it continues to do so. In response to COVID-19, the CDC should have been prioritizing the development of treatments, effective testing, and vaccine safety rather than tracking Americans’ daily lives.” He demanded answers from the CDC on the purchase and use of location data, including whether the agency used other mechanisms to monitor Americans throughout the pandemic. Johnson told editor-in-chief John Solomon, “I think the government is becoming way too big, and way too powerful.”

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“Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%..”

Bill Gates Wants To Build A Dystopia (Unherd)

Now Gates is tired of all the conspiracies. He asks his critics to judge him by his actions. And the best way to do so is by reading the book: does Gates have anything sensible to say about the best way to combat future pathogenic outbreaks? His model for the future is built on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, then remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. He cites Dr Anthony Fauci, who Gates says he spoke to once a month during the pandemic: “Not only should you appear to overreact at first, as Tony Fauci said, but you also have to be careful about relaxing all NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] too soon.”

Meanwhile, you should invest enormous sums in boosting global public health systems, vaccine production in poor and rich countries, and fund a Global Pandemic Emergency Response Unit to monitor potential outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world — twice if necessary — within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen. It all sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? Or it might do to those who haven’t seen the footage of Shanghai’s lockdown circulating on social media, to those who can work online in relative comfort, or indeed to billionaires with comfortable gardens and libraries in which to while away those six months. With the Gates model, a little translation is in order.

The massive investment required to make this vision happen is a good starting point. Where will it come from? Gates is a well-known philanthropist, and makes much of the more than US$2 billion which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have ploughed into fighting Covid-19. Yet this is a small amount compared to the US$6 billion that the US government has invested in the Moderna vaccine alone. As Gates points out, “Most of the world’s greatest talent for translating research into commercial products is in the private sector… It’s the government’s role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, adopt policies that let new ideas flourish.”

Translation: taxpayers invest in developing products through government agencies, and private companies and their shareholders reap the profits. How does this work in practice? Gates does not give what we might call full disclosure. He offers the example of the antiviral Molnupiravir which “Merck and its partners developed”. It was authorised to great fanfare as a Covid treatment in November 2021. Yet Merck did not develop this drug. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug for horses at Emory University, with a US$19 million grant from Fauci’s NIAID and funding from other sectors of the US government. Molnupiravir costs US$17.74 per dose to manufacture, according to an estimate from researchers at Harvard and King’s College London, but is being retailed to the US government for US$712 per course — a profit of 4,000%.

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“..because of an arrangement he reportedly had with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Musk’s financial adviser Morgan Stanley, the plaintiffs argue Musk was an “interested stockholder”..”

Florida At Center Of Bid To Slow Musk’s Purchase Of Twitter (JTN)

Florida is once again at the center of a Twitter war, this time by an Orlando pension fund attempting to slow its purchase after Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state was looking into ways it can potentially “hold accountable” Twitter’s board of directors. The city of Orlando’s Police Pension Fund filed a class action lawsuit May 6 in an attempt to block or slow the sale of Twitter. It argues Delaware law prevents billionaire Elon Musk from immediately purchasing Twitter because it alleges he’s “an invested stockholder.” The lawsuit could hold up Musk’s $44 billion approved purchase of Twitter until 2025 if a judge rules in the plaintiffs’ favor.

The $734 million pension fund, the only plaintiff in the lawsuit, filed in Delaware Chancery Court. Twitter, Inc., Parag Agrawal, Mimi Alemayehou, Jack Dorsey, Egon Durban, Martha Lane Fox, Omid Kordestani, Fei-Fei Li, Patrick Pichette, David Rosenblatt, Bret Taylor, Robert Zoellick, and Elon Musk are named as defendants. On April 25, Twitter agreed to Musk’s terms to purchase its entire stock at $54.20 a share in cash, valued at roughly $44 billion. However, the lawsuit alleges the sale “may not lawfully close until 2025 absent approval by the affirmative vote of 66 2/3% of Twitter’s voting stock not ‘owned’ by Musk,” citing Section 203 of Delaware corporate law.

Section 203 prohibits corporations from engaging in any business with any stockholder for at least three years after the date the stockholder owns at least 15% of the corporation’s outstanding stock. Musk owned 9.6% of Twitter’s outstanding voting stock when its board approved the sale. But because of an arrangement he reportedly had with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Musk’s financial adviser Morgan Stanley, the plaintiffs argue Musk was an “interested stockholder” representing more than 15%. Dorsey owned 2.4%, and Morgan Stanley 8.8%, at the time of the sale.

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“If Sussmann is found guilty it makes the media culpability look even worse. The media was pushing the same false information to the public that Michael Sussmann was pushing into the FBI.”

Durham Prosecution and Sussmann Defense Outline Trial Witnesses (CTH)

With mostly wins and a few losses in the pre-trial evidentiary hearings for Special Counsel John Durham, the case against Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann is scheduled for trial next week. Now the witness lists are coming forth. WASHINGTON – […] “Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias and FBI counterintelligence leader Bill Priestap and former top FBI lawyer James Baker are among those called as government witnesses, said prosecutor Andrew DeFilipiis”. Additionally, Laura Seago, a top tech official at research firm Fusion GPS (she has immunity in exchange for testimony); Deborah Fine, a Clinton campaign lawyer; and a CIA official identified as Kevin B are also on the prosecution list.

[…] Defense attorneys unveiled their own high-powered witness list. It includes Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, former acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau. Depending on preset Perkins Coie leverage and risk exposure, other officials from deep inside the DOJ/FBI small group operation may also be forced to stand as defense witnesses by Sussmann’s team. The lawfare combat teams look interesting. The prosecution calling Marc Elias as a witness looks like a great opportunity for: (1) evidence against him for later use; and/or (2) a perjury trap. The defense planning to call Inspector General Michael Horowitz puts the office of the IG into a suspicious position. Horowitz is a baddie.

Mary McCord is a conniving manipulator for the worst elements of the deep state, so it makes sense she would give testimony to defend Sussmann. McCord was a central figure in how the DOJ National Security Division sought to frame the appearance of the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense, and it was Mary McCord who later coordinated the National Security Council leaks between Alexander Vindman and anonymous CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella. [..] On the prosecution side, Laura Seago (with immunity) has details of the motives inside Fusion GPS by owner/operators Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Her testimony should be interesting and will likely overlap into other prosecutions if there are any.

Bill Priestap was Peter Strzok’s boss and James Baker was FBI legal counsel. If there was anyone who seemed less willing (slightly) to frame Trump you could make an argument that Priestap and Baker were the least corrupt on the scale of internal corruption. From the perspective of criminal conduct they would be the two FBI insiders less willing to take a fall. Keep in mind the media has a strong vested interest in the Sussmann prosecution. If Sussmann is found guilty it makes the media culpability look even worse. The media was pushing the same false information to the public that Michael Sussmann was pushing into the FBI.

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“The FBI also knew that the Alfa Bank story, which claimed that a Trump server was communicating with a Russian bank—information that had been brought to them by Sussmann—was bogus.”

FBI Panicked After Trump Tweet Accusing Obama Of Spying On Campaign (ET)

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI engaged in to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump. The notes were released on May 8 by lawyers representing former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear him on charges of having lied to the FBI. The notes, in reality, appear to do little to exonerate Sussmann but do provide quite a bit of information on the FBI. The meeting at which the notes were taken took place just two days after Trump’s March 4, 2017, tweet in which he accused former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower.

Trump’s tweet panicked FBI leadership, who were unsure exactly how much Trump knew about their efforts to tie him up with Russia collusion allegations. What the notes reveal is that in response to the tweet, they tried to cover their tracks. By March 2017, FBI leadership already knew with near-certainty that the Trump–Russia collusion claims were a hoax. They knew that Clinton’s campaign had a plan to vilify Trump by portraying him as a puppet of Putin. The FBI also knew that not a single claim in the so-called Steele dossier—which was the primary source of allegations of Trump–Russia collusion—had checked out. In fact, at that point, the FBI had already spent three days interviewing Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, who disavowed pretty much every claim in Steele’s dossier.

The FBI also knew that the Alfa Bank story, which claimed that a Trump server was communicating with a Russian bank—information that had been brought to them by Sussmann—was bogus. In short, the FBI knew that all the claims of Trump-Russia collusion had proven to be fake. But things took a sudden and dramatic turn on March 4, 2017, when Trump said on Twitter that he knew that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, a very public claim of spying that set off alarm bells with both FBI and DOJ leadership. Trump’s tweet so alarmed these DOJ and FBI officials that the topic dominated a meeting two days later that included FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and the acting U.S. attorney general, Dana Boente.

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“Are they beset by “disinformation” or is it rather the reality of a cratering nation run by idiots and maniacs?”

Got the Heebie-Jeebies? (Jim Kunstler)

Everyone I know is walking around in a baseline state of nervous agitation. Are they beset by “disinformation” or is it rather the reality of a cratering nation run by idiots and maniacs? Everywhere you look, calamities gather speed while the klaxons of alarm blare from all compass points. Got money? Looks like soon it will be worthless. Wondering if Mr. Putin has had enough of “Joe Biden’s” brainless effrontery to lob some hypersonic Big Ones in our collective face? Relying on that retirement account you have no direct control over while the financial markets wobble? Need to fill up the gas tank of your pickup truck twice a week? Can’t find a new condenser to fix the failing fridge? Entertaining rumors of looming famine. Credit cards maxed out?

Sheriff stapling an eviction notice on your door? Beloved younger brother declaring that henceforward they are your sister? Hearing that all those vaxxes and boosters you obediently submitted to might rearrange your DNA? These are just a few of the concerns zinging through the zeitgeist these late days of the republic. You are correct to be anxious about them, so at least don’t worry about worrying. Just understand that the more events spool out in the direction of danger, the more you will be warned against “disinformation.” The good part is that now we know the identity of at least one person who is officially in charge of that: “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz (NiJank), new chief of Washington’s Disinformation Governance Board. Whose idea was that, by the way?

Homeland Security Sec’y Alejandro Mayorkis (AlMay) didn’t seem to know anything pertaining to disinformation last week when grilled in committee by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), including two of the most notorious cases in recent memory: Did the Steele Dossier include Russian disinformation? AlMay said he was “not equipped” to answer that question. Ditto the question — now definitively settled — as to whether Hunter Biden’s laptop stuffed with grifting memoranda was for-real. Of course, both of those matters were labeled previously as disinformation by his new expert hire, NiJank, who, it appears, is similarly unequipped to discuss the particulars at issue. But all this does raise the parallel issue: how much depraved insolence is the public supposed to tolerate from its public servants?

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WEF

 

 

 

 

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Feb 232022
 


Pablo Picasso Le pigeon aux petits pois (Pigeon with Peas) – stolen May 20 2010 1911

 

Pfizer & Moderna Investors Run for the Exits (Hope)
Multiple Brokerage Houses Now Investigate MRNA Jabs (Paine)
17,000 Physicians and Medical Scientists Declare “COVID National Emergency Over” (GCS)
Bill Gates-Linked Lab Developing Vaccine That Spreads Like a Virus (NP)
The Day Russia’s Patience Ran Out (Orlov)
Blackwater is in Donbass with the Azov Battalion (Dinucci)
Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Tyranny (WSJ Op-ed)
Trudeau Style Tyranny Is Already Here (Kelly)
Conservatives Force Trudeau To Defend And Vote On Emergency Powers Again (TSun)
Pentagon Considers Sending National Guard To DC Ahead Of US Freedom Convoy (DM)
John Durham Sent A Message To The Attorney General And The Country (Hill)
What Canada Means for Crypto (Doomberg)

 

 

 

 

Nawaz: Power gets to define reality
https://twitter.com/i/status/1495922272732950530

 

 

Oz “91% had other health issues on death certificates”

 

 

Find an enemy

 

 

 

 

Justus Hope on Edward Dowd. Who compares the vaccines to the 2008 mortgage crisis, and says the FDA play the same role as the ratings agencies back then. But there is one difference, which I don’t think he stresses enough: ratings agencies are companies, enterprises; the FDA is literally the government. He sort of touches on it, “I believe the fraud has moved on to central banks and governments”, but not enough.

Pfizer & Moderna Investors Run for the Exits (Hope)

Wall Street investors are dumping their Moderna and Pfizer stock faster than the world can drop the mandates. Moderna is down 70 percent from its high, while Pfizer is off 19 percent. Former Blackrock Executive and investment adviser Edward Dowd calls for Moderna to go to zero and Pfizer to end under ten dollars per share. How is this possible given that Pfizer now enjoys record earnings per share and a market capitalization of some $270 billion, making it the 29th largest corporation globally? With nothing but profits in sight for the Pharmaceutical giant, what could be the problem? After all, in December, a Forbes’ headline read, “The Vaccine Maker Can Dominate The Covid Market For Years to Come, Wells Fargo Predicts.” In addition to the enormously profitable mRNA vaccines, Pfizer is rolling out potent antivirals like Paxlovid, which could earn $22 billion in 2022.

Compared to the $81 billion in 2021 revenue, the earnings from the vaccines and the antivirals could top $102 billion for 2022, which is music to shareholders’ ears. However some are hearing shrieks, and these happen to be Wall Street’s finest, the smart money that beats the rest of the herd to the exits like clockwork. These sophisticated investors make it their business to not go with the conventional wisdom but to do their own research, which often pays spectacular dividends. [..] Dowd has sounded the alarm on Moderna and Pfizer as sinking ships that investors need to abandon. So what does the man who foresaw the dot com and the subprime mortgage crisis have to say about Moderna and Pfizer, and what trouble could exist in the paradise of COVID vaccine profits?

Here are Dowd’s words: I want to liken here to what’s gone on in the Great Financial Crisis. We had rating agencies, third-party verification sources that were able to perpetuate the fraud because the money got too big, their institutions became corrupted with the institutional imperative, and they got triple-A ratings which we all know in hindsight were not triple-A ratings – let’s move forward to today. The FDA is the trusted third-party verification of pharmaceutical products. 50% of their budget comes from Pharma…due to the institutional imperative that was in place at the time and the speed with which they tried to approve these unproven products with this unproven technology, fraud did occur, and what’s my proof of that? The FDA, together with Pfizer, were trying to hide the clinical data.

And it’s come out recently…that the all-cause mortality for the Pfizer product failed – that means there were more deaths in the vaccine group than the placebo group. Normally in such a case, you have NO drug approval for such drugs. It’s the gold standard. I’ve been told by all my people in the Biotech Industry they were horrified… And unfortunately, that is not all. Dowd feels that although he has successfully predicted three large frauds in his career, he now expects a global financial market collapse with the debt bubble getting ready to burst. “So I’ve seen three frauds; the corporate fraud of the dot com boom, the bank fraud of the Great Financial Recession, and I believe the fraud has moved on to central banks and governments – because that’s the nature of our monetary system – you have to constantly create credit to keep this thing going.”

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More Dowd. $14 billion hedge fund, former Blackrock. Will make some FDA people nervous, and Pfizer/Moderna too.

Multiple Brokerage Houses Now Investigate MRNA Jabs (Paine)

EXCLUSIVE: Wall Street Taps Pfizer Whistleblower to Help Probe Alarming Details of Fraud During VAX Clinical Trials; Former Blackrock’s Edward Dowd Drops More Bombs as ***MULTIPLE*** Brokerage Houses Now Investigate MRNA Jabs

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Anyone seen Fauci lately?

17,000 Physicians and Medical Scientists Declare “COVID National Emergency Over” (GCS)

After two years of scientific research, clinical data and evidence from frontline medical professionals treating hundreds of thousands of patients, the international alliance of more than 17,000 physicians and medical scientists have concluded that the highly treatable COVID-19 illness, which is better addressed with natural immunity and proven medication, no longer requires national emergency status. Vaccines have failed to reduce spread of COVID-19 and pose several health risks, while natural immunity for children and healthy adults has proven more effective. Moreover, treatment protocols that use well-studied, FDA approved medications are now proven to be effective in preventing severe illness and death from Covid-19.

With the success of treatments and broad natural immunity amidst waning strength of COVID-19 variants, there is no longer a credible need for a national emergency in the U.S. On March 13th, 2020, Donald Trump used an Executive Order under the National Emergency Act to declare a national emergency concerning COVID-19. On February 24, 2021, the order was extended by President Biden. Since then, the constitutional rights of Americans have been trampled on by allowing governments aligned with pharmaceutical companies to exploit its citizens. Biden’s extension of the national emergency on February 18th, 2022 ignores the extensive medical and scientific data, confirming a non-medical agenda by the White House.

The over 17,000 independent physicians and medical scientists, who reject the corporate interests of pharmaceutical companies, are calling on Congress to reject President Biden’s extension of the national emergency that was declared by President Trump, to reinstate our constitutional democracy, restore doctor-patient relationships, medical privacy and personal medical choice, and end coercive tactics and mandates.

Dr. David Martin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1494212959912050697

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To vaccinate anti-vaxxers.

Bill Gates-Linked Lab Developing Vaccine That Spreads Like a Virus (NP)

An international team of researchers are working on an experimental self-spreading vaccine that could stop the virus leaping from rats to humans — a phenomenon scientists call zoonotic spillover. The drive to develope self-spreading vaccines is not without controversy. The DHSC paper notes: ‘Self-spreading vaccines are less lethal but not non-lethal: they can still kill. ‘Some people will die who would otherwise have lived, though fewer people die overall. ‘The other issue is there is no consent (for vaccination) from the majority of patients.’ But some ethics experts say there are parallels for ‘treating’ mass populations for public health issues without first getting individual consent.

For example, the fluoridation of mains drinking water to prevent tooth decay already happens in some parts of the UK and the Government is considering extending it to all of England. ‘Nobody is asked whether they give consent, even those who disagree with it,’ says Professor Dominic Wilkinson, a medical ethics specialist at Oxford University. ‘Instead, we entrust elected officials to examine the likely health benefits and make decisions based on the evidence.

‘I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically different when it comes to the idea of self-spreading vaccines.’ However, some scientists have serious misgivings about the risk that weakened viruses could mutate into a more potent form once they are free to spread in the population. Dr Filippa Lentzos, a senior lecturer in science and international security at King’s College London, warns of a danger that the science behind self-spreading vaccines could be hijacked to make biological weapons. ‘Such a self-spreading weapon may prove uncontrollable and irreversible,’ she says.

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“There were also over two million Donbass refugees in Russia, more than one million in the Ukraine and around 50 thousand in Belarus.”

The Day Russia’s Patience Ran Out (Orlov)

Today’s date, commonly written out as 22.02.2022, will be an easy one for future schoolchildren to remember. Various people will remember it in various ways. The residents of Donetsk and Lugansk, the two formerly Ukrainian, now once again Russian cities that have been subjected to conditions bordering on genocide since the US-instigated government overthrow of 2014 will remember jubilantly dancing in the streets, shooting off lots of fireworks, waving Russian flags and hollering the Russian national anthem. For them, this is the day on which new hope arrived that their eight-year nightmare would soon be over and life would finally return to normal.


The badly informed new German chancellor inadvertently helped to resolve the situation by saying that the idea of a Ukrainian-caused genocide in the Donbass is ridiculous. Given the history of the region, the public spectacle of a German leader using the words “genocide” and “ridiculous” in the same sentence made the moment pregnant with possibilities. Here is the information the seemingly rather dim-witted chancellor was missing. There were 9,282 dead on the Donbass side (70% of them civilians) and 114 children. The dead on the Ukrainian side (the Ukrainian troops and various assorted mercenaries that had been attacking and laying siege to the Donbass since 2014) numbered 20,186. This was prior to the renewed Ukrainian shelling of recent days. There were also over two million Donbass refugees in Russia, more than one million in the Ukraine and around 50 thousand in Belarus.

Most Russians will also remember this day with relief as the day their government finally—finally! after eight literally bloody years!—determined that a negotiated settlement in the Ukraine would simply never happen and that there was no point in waiting any further before going ahead and cleaning it up. It was cathartic for them to hear their president unleash a torrent of truth about the Ukraine, calling it a Bolshevist concoction of mostly historically Russian lands that was simply never intended for independent statehood, pointing out that it never paid its share of Soviet-era foreign debt (Russia paid it off on its behalf), that it refused to turn over Russian assets with which it incidentally ended up, and instead soaked up several hundred billion dollars of Russian subsidies, that it extorted money for the use of its Soviet-built gas pipeline that it got free of charge, and that it has squandered and stolen the rest of its vast Soviet patrimony.


He also mentioned was the Ukraine’s stated ambitions simultaneously to join NATO and to invade Crimea—automatically triggering a world war. He mentioned its stated ambition to use plutonium from its spent nuclear fuel stockpiles and rockets left over from the Soviet times to concoct weapons of mass destruction—a situation that simply had to be dealt with. Finally, he made clear that all of the Ukrainian war crimes of the past eight years have been carefully documented and that all of these war criminals will be brought to justice.

Tucker Putin

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A $10 billion plan. In case you wonder why Putin did what he did.

Blackwater is in Donbass with the Azov Battalion (Dinucci)

The phone call between President Biden and Ukrainian President Zelensky “did not go well”, CNN headlines: while “Biden warned that a Russian invasion is practically certain in February, when the frozen ground makes it possible for tanks to pass through”, Zelensky “asked Biden to lower his tone, arguing that the Russian threat is still ambiguous”. As the Ukrainian president himself takes a more cautious stance, Ukrainian armed forces are massing in the Donbass near the area of Donetsk and Lugansk inhabited by Russian populations. According to reports from the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, obscured by our mainstream which only talks about the Russian deployment, Ukrainian Army and National Guard units, amounting to about 150 thousand men, are positioned here. They are armed and trained, and thus effectively commanded, by US-NATO military advisers and instructors.

From 1991 to 2014, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the U.S. provided Ukraine with $4 billion in military assistance, which was added to by over $2.5 billion after 2014, plus over a billion provided by the NATO Trust Fund in which Italy also participates. This is only part of the military investments made by the major NATO powers in Ukraine. Great Britain, for example, concluded various military agreements with Kiev, investing among other things 1.7 billion pounds in the strengthening of Ukraine’s naval capabilities: this program provides for the arming of Ukrainian ships with British missiles, the joint production of 8 fast missile launchers, the construction of naval bases on the Black Sea and also on the Sea of Azov between Ukraine, Crimea and Russia. In this framework, Ukrainian military spending, which in 2014 was equivalent to 3% of GDP, increased to 6% in 2022, corresponding to more than $ 11 billion.

In addition to the US-NATO military investments in Ukraine, there is the $10 billion plan being implemented by Erik Prince, founder of the private US military company Blackwater, now renamed Academy, which has been supplying mercenaries to the CIA, Pentagon and State Department for covert operations (including torture and assassinations), earning billions of dollars. Erik Prince’s plan, revealed by a Time magazine investigation [1], is to create a private army in Ukraine through a partnership between the Lancaster 6 company, with which Prince has supplied mercenaries in the Middle East and Africa, and the main Ukrainian intelligence office controlled by the CIA. It is not known, of course, what would be the tasks of the private army created in Ukraine by the founder of Blackwater, certainly with funding from the CIA. However, it can be expected that it would conduct covert operations in Europe, Russia and other regions from its base in Ukraine.

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The WSJ editors have had enough.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Tyranny (WSJ Op-ed)

Modern liberals can hurtle from extravagant tolerance to suppression without batting an eye. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dramatizes the tendency.

Every trucker blockade in Canada has been cleared, yet Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal government isn’t giving up the emergency powers it claimed to criminalize the protest movement against vaccine mandates. “This state of emergency is not over,” Mr. Trudeau said, citing the risk of future blockades. This isn’t how a nation of laws is supposed to function. Mr. Trudeau’s new powers rely on defining the disruptive but peaceful truckers as a security threat akin to violent terrorists. His emergency law, a broad prohibition on public assemblies and even indirect support for them, ensnares tens of thousands of Canadians as “designated persons” whose assets must, per another of his new laws, be found and frozen by any financial institution, without due process or court supervision. There isn’t an appeals process in case of error, and so far 200 accounts are frozen.

Pressed for details, Justice Minister David Lametti initially explained that “pro-Trump” big donors “ought to be worried.” Now the government says it is targeting only the truckers, but its power has no limiting principle. Mr. Lametti says, “We took measures that had been applied to terrorism and applied them to other illegal activity.” This is how a trucker who violated traffic laws or committed “mischief” becomes the target of financial tools designed to disable al Qaeda cells. Bank-account freezes weren’t necessary to clear the blockades. That required police only to arrest those blocking traffic and to requisition tow trucks (already authorized by Canada’s criminal code). The asset freezes serve not to end an emergency but to incapacitate and intimidate protesters after the fact.

Parliament declined Monday night to revoke Mr. Trudeau’s emergency. He prevailed with the support of the socialist New Democratic Party, which once prided itself like others on the left as a defender of civil liberties. “We understood absolutely that we do not want to trigger an election,” said leader Jagmeet Singh, cowed by Mr. Trudeau’s threat. “That would be the worst thing to do in this crisis.” The vote captured the left-liberal pas de deux that has led to abuse of emergency powers. Ottawa’s police chief was a progressive and, as progressives do, he let protesters violate the law with impunity—for weeks. This exasperated Canadians who wanted order and commerce restored. The Liberals blamed foreign interference and lambasted the truckers along trendy American lines as racists and insurrectionists. Then Mr. Trudeau stepped in to curtail the rights of political enemies.

Kenney

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“The comparisons are stark.”

Trudeau Style Tyranny Is Already Here (Kelly)

In a recent court motion, Joe Biden’s Justice Department changed the official name of its investigation into the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Originally designated the “Capitol breach” probe, the department just replaced “breach” with a more sinister word: siege. “The ‘Capitol Siege’ refers to the events of January 6, 2021, when thousands of individuals entered the U.S. Capitol and U.S. Capitol grounds without authority, halting the Joint Session and the entire official proceeding of Congress for hours,” Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, wrote in a footnote to a February 10 filing. Graves commended Capitol and D.C. Metro police for “clear[ing] the Capitol of rioters” that afternoon. But courtroom rhetoric isn’t the only thing Graves is heating up.

The Justice Department has opened a “Capitol Siege Section” in the agency’s criminal division and wants to hire at least 20 more lawyers to help prosecute Americans for any involvement in what happened on January 6. Qualified attorneys will be employed on a temporary basis and could earn as much as $176,000 per year. “Capitol siege” prosecutors will complement an army of thousands of Justice Department employees, including FBI agents from 56 field offices across the country, handling what Attorney General Merrick Garland warned is the biggest investigation in the department’s history. More than 730 people have been arrested so far—amounting to more than three times the number of federal arrests related to the 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots that lasted for months and resulted in far more death and destruction—and the first major trial of a January 6 defendant starts next week.

As freedom-lovers justifiably recoil at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on vaccine mandate protesters, Americans worry the same sort of political retribution could happen here. I’m sorry to report, it already has. The scenes from Ottawa are matched or surpassed by the images here, including thuggish cops attacking January 6 protesters with mace and explosive devices. The difference? Instead of mounted police trampling a woman, ours merely shot and killed one woman and beat up a few more. What the Trudeau regime is now unleashing against the truckers and their supporters has been underway in America for more than a year. Using January 6 as a pretext, the Biden regime is brandishing its authority to crush political dissent. Now, it appears Trudeau and his apparatchiks are stealing the U.S. Justice Department’s playbook of power and pain.

The comparisons are stark. Take, for example, the words of Steve Bell, acting chief of the Ottawa police department. He told a reporter over the weekend how the government will hunt down those who stood in defiance of Trudeau’s vaccine mandates. “If you were involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges, absolutely,” Bell said during a press briefing on February 19. “This investigation will go on for months to come. It has many many different streams from a federal level from a financial level from a provincial licensing level to a criminal code level from a municipal breach of . . . court order level. It will be a time consuming and complicated investigation that will go on for a period of time.”

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The NDP holds the balance. And their leader is WEF.

Conservatives Force Trudeau To Defend And Vote On Emergency Powers Again (TSun)

If Justin Trudeau wants to keep the Emergencies Act for the full 30 days, Candice Bergen and the Conservatives are going to make him explain himself to Canadians again next week. Immediately following the vote to extend the federal government’s new powers, Bergen tabled a motion to rescind those very powers. That may seem odd given that she and the Conservatives had just lost the vote 185-151 but it was in fact a very strategic move. Under Section 59 of the Emergencies Act, any group of 10 Senators or 20 members of the House of Commons can sign a request to revoke the government’s emergency powers. By tabling the motion on Monday night immediately after the vote, Bergen has ensured that there will be another debate and another vote next week on the need for these powers.

“Liberal and NDP MPs will need to explain to Canadians why they are continuing to enforce a national state of emergency that gives the federal government far-reaching powers and authority,” Bergen said. Given that the area around Parliament is cleared out, the borders are all clear, there really isn’t the need for the emergency powers to continue. That’s a position held by some in Trudeau’s own Liberal caucus and several New Democrats as well. The government could rescind their powers before we even get to that point but it does put Trudeau on notice that he will have to continue defending his extraordinary power grab. He had trouble doing so on Monday when asked by reporters.

In fact, Trudeau turned to tow trucks as the first reason for needing the act to continue to be used when asked what was so vital in the act that he needed it to continue. Of course, the trucks have all left the Parliamentary precinct and there is no need for tow trucks. His next line of reasoning was that people might come back. Well then, use regular policing powers and stop them. Trudeau then turned to the ability to keep border crossings like the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor clear. That bridge was cleared away before he even invoked the Emergencies Act and existing federal and provincial laws are sufficient to keep border crossings clear and operating. “The Emergencies Act was not necessary to clear the blockades. The government already had all the tools they need under current Canadian law,” Bergen said.

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It’ll be fun.

Pentagon Considers Sending National Guard To DC Ahead Of US Freedom Convoy (DM)

The Pentagon could commission the National Guard to help manage thousands of big rigs expected to descend upon the nation’s capital this week in protest of government mandates. Following the path of a Canadian convoy of anti-vaccine long haulers who congested Ottawa’s streets for weeks this month, a group of fed-up American truckers from throughout the country are setting out Wednesday to launch their own mass protest in Washington, D.C., and plan to congest popular thoroughfares – including the Capitol Beltway. The Pentagon has been asked to help manage the protests by deploying the National Guard, according to Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.

‘The Department is analyzing a request for assistance from the U.S. Capitol Police and the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency,’ Kirby said in a statement. ‘Those agencies have asked for National Guard personnel to provide support at traffic control points in and around the District to help the USCP [U.S. Capitol Police] and D.C. government address potential challenges stemming from possible disruptions at key traffic arteries.’ Although it’s not clear how many people will participate in the protests, it could number in the thousands, Fox News reported. Those leading the movement have requested a National Park Service permit that could accommodate up to 3,000 truckers in D.C., according to the report. This comes as officials also plan to reinstall the fencing that surrounded the Capitol complex last year ahead of Biden’s March 1 State of the Union address.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1496280231040393218

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“He has provided hope that accountability in D.C. — rare as a MAGA sticker on a Prius — actually might happen.”

John Durham Sent A Message To The Attorney General And The Country (Hill)

John Durham has been a special prosecutor for almost a year and a half — not a long time, but plenty of time for a drumbeat to begin that he was showing little progress against his orders to examine the origins of the debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative that convulsed a presidency. His few indictments so far have been directed against peripheral players, feeding a fear among Donald Trump’s supporters that elites higher up the stack are going to get away with their chicanery. The problem for Durham is that these perceptions were providing the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) with increasing political top cover to shut down the special prosecutor’s office as an unproductive, politics-driven exercise in futility that is wasting taxpayer dollars.

If Durham were to be terminated, the American people might not even push back much since no one had a clue whether his investigation was bearing meaningful fruit. Attorney General Merrick Garland already had undercut Durham’s investigation once by taking steps to rehabilitate the reputation of fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a key figure in the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion debacle. The Biden DOJ is not friendly to the goals of Mr. Durham. Durham couldn’t hold a news conference or pen an op-ed touting progress; that’s just not done by investigators in the middle of an investigation. So, he turned to a readily available vehicle — a routine, fairly innocuous motion filed with the court — to embed an explosive message to the DOJ and the American people. It landed like fireworks at a funeral. No one saw it coming.

Tucked inside the court filing, John Durham laid out a good chunk of the case he’s building, and it was stunning. Durham revealed the outlines of a corrupt conspiracy by operatives linked to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The exposed conspiracy allegedly made a contrived, fraudulent and shocking attempt to entice the FBI and CIA to use their powers against the rival Trump campaign and presidency. This recent filing by Durham was designed to have two effects. First, and most important, he has now made any decision by the president or attorney general to dump him much more difficult to undertake. The last time a president fired a special prosecutor who was making significant progress, he lost his presidency.

Second, Durham has signaled to the American people that his investigation has legs, despite perceptions of plodding inertia. He has provided hope that accountability in D.C. — rare as a MAGA sticker on a Prius — actually might happen.

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Can Justin destroy bitcoin?

What Canada Means for Crypto (Doomberg)

The digitization of currency ties each individual directly – transparently – to their money and empowers the state with decision power on whether any particular citizen is allowed to transact in modern society. Your money no longer represents stored wealth that can be exchanged for goods and services. Rather, it represents stored wealth that can be exchanged for goods and services as permitted by the state. Mostly gone is the anonymity that comes with transacting in physical cash – the ultimate manifestation of a decentralized currency. (Just try booking a hotel room with nothing but cash and a valid passport.) In its place we find myriad extrajudicial procedures and complex regulations that strip away our freedoms and, if left unchecked, will ultimately make way for the displacement of our representative democracies with totalitarian states.

In a staggering 56-part Twitter thread that recently went viral, an anonymous account by the name of @punk6529 drives home this point brilliantly. A link to the full thread is here. The core thesis is that one cannot have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion without the freedom to transact. Robbing a citizen of his or her ability to transact is a devastating punishment, and for the government to claim it has the ability to do so without judicial review or any reasonable recourse is the functional equivalent of totalitarianism. The 18th and 19th tweets in the thread are particularly compelling:

As we described in our last piece, Justin Trudeau has crossed the Rubicon in this regard, and if his actions become normalized, the entire edifice of Western democracy will undoubtedly collapse. Lest our readers think this is hyperbole or that Trudeau’s behavior will be contained to Canada, we point you to an excellent piece called In Praise of Bitcoin written by Dr. Ben Hunt . In it, Hunt correctly likens the US Treasury to the Eye of Sauron. Here’s a critical passage (emphasis added):

“If there’s a Western governmental institution that is more unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality than the US Treasury, I am unaware of what that institution might be. But unlike Wall Street, which is motivated by Flow, the US Treasury has an entirely different (but highly compatible!) goal. The goal of the US Treasury is to see all of the money in the world. That’s really all it is. That’s what Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations are all about. That’s what Know Your Client (KYC) regulations are all about. That’s what Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) regulations are all about. That’s what the Treasury-led Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) is all about. That’s what the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is all about. None of these programs are really about taxes. None of these programs are really about catching crooks or fighting terrorists. All of these programs are really about information for information’s sake regarding the greatest source of power in the world and the raison d’etre of every government on Earth: money.”

It is through a related lens that we have written skeptically about crypto in the past. We’ve marveled as US regulators allowed the crypto ecosystem to evolve, warned crypto participants that a crackdown is inevitable, and questioned how the “value” of one’s crypto holdings could be effectively transmitted back to the fiat world. Many have filled our Twitter feed and Substack comments section expressing the view that Trudeau’s descent into totalitarianism validates the need for cryptocurrencies. While we don’t doubt the demand for such exposure will increase because of his actions, we draw a more sobering conclusion. Trudeau’s actions destroy the concept that cryptocurrencies will ever be an effective medium of exchange. We recently summarized this view on Twitter:

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Dr. Lee Merritt ft. Dr. Tom Cowan

 

 

 

 

 

 

RFKjr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1496113233287168005

 

 

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

 

Jan 032022
 


Albert Bierstadt Storm in the Mountains c1870

 

 

In my first article of the year, I must thank everyone who has followed us, and read us, and commented, especially those of you who have made donations both to the Automatic Earth, and to the Monastiraki kitchen for the homeless in Athens, Greece. Both don’t reach millions of people, but the thousands we do connect with, we reach them well. Every reader who learns something is a win, and every homeless person who gets a good meal, well, that’s obvious.

Thank you so much. You are the ones who make this happen.

 

 

If I say that 2020 was the year of the virus, and 2021 the year of the vaccine, most people would probably agree. But 2021 was so much more than that; it was also the year of propaganda, media capture and narrative control at levels beyond anything we’ve ever seen. Even if many -most- people haven’t experienced it that way.

And that has likely had more negative impact on us than the vaccine itself. A close call perhaps, I know. The good thing that has come out of this is that so much of it has been exposed. Much of the underlying tendencies towards authoritarianism, and disregard for truth, and blind desire for profit, for a Great Reset, population control, abandonment of freedoms and human rights, it’s all there now for us to see.

We need to act upon that exposure. Get rid of Fauci, Walensky, Pfizer, CDC, and their peers across the planet, of the WHO, of all health “experts” that receive income from/via Pfizer et al (which is the vast majority), put a halt to the influence of money (Bill Gates) on health policy. A society, a country, need to be their own boss over their own fundamental policies. And that means paying for it ourselves.

And not have policies easily changed by a group of politicians and unelected officials (“experts”) who happen to have grabbed power at a particular point in time. A society needs roots, and ours have been uprooted. From principles, from laws, from rights. This will not be easy, we already gave them a 2 year advantage, but if we don’t use this time when the spotlights are directed at them, we will lose even much more than we have already lost. We’ve let them play their games, virtually uncontested, and we cannot afford that.

This appears to culminate in Twitter’s handling of Joe Rogan and Robert Malone recently, and that’s fine, Twitter is not big enough to tackle Rogan, while CNN and MSNBC audiences are drops in the ocean compared to Joe’s. They bit off one too big for them to chew.

But that’s just the US, and that’s just one podcaster, one voice. The control virus that has come with the corona virus has delved much deeper into the world’s various societies. Just yesterday, we saw video from my country of birth, Holland, where police set attack dogs on peaceful elderly protesters, and say what you will, but that country is neither free nor a democracy. That claim is 100% obsolete.

That it is accepted regardless gives credence, and a lot, to Matthias Desmet and his “Mass Formation Syndrome” theories, but we should not really need his analysis, useful as it may be, to figure out what is going on. All we need to do is take a step back and wonder what the hell is going on. To ponder how we saw our societies 2+ years ago, how we ourselves would have seen these recent developments in the light of back then. We can’t have forgotten all of it?!

 

 

That Anthony Fauci is still in his job is absolutely insane. He became head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), 40 years ago, he’s 81, older than Joe Biden. He’s been building ties to Big Pharma, especially Pfizer, all that time, in the shadows, the best place for such deals.

He was in his position when Pfizer received the biggest criminal fine in US corporate history in 2012, of $2.3 billion, for lying and cheating and more. Now, a few years later, Fauci works with Pfizer and the rest of Big Pharma, and makes their owners billionaires and their shareholders very rich. He is the very last person who should have been in his where he is, both 2 years ago and now.

Fauci is not the best doctor in the US, he’s just the best connected to the pharma industry. That guarantees Americans the worst deal they could get, not the best. And of course anyone else at the upper echelons of the NIAID, CDC, FDA, they need to go too. Fauci et al put them there.

In the US and elsewhere, any politician, individual or through their party or otherwise, and any health experts, individual or through their organization or company, who have received funds from Big Pharma or Bill Gates, should be discarded, put out by the curb. We should be able to figure this out, because it’s NOW that they stand exposed. Perhaps not TO Covid, but certainly BY Covid.

It’s the only way we can cleanse the system. Which is needed if we want to survive, with our health, our conscience, and our freedoms and rights. We have let an enormous amount of mold, rot, grow at the pillars of our societies, and we should be glad we can see it now, because this allows us to exterminate it.

We cannot allow Pfizer to gain even more influence over our health systems. Which will be a very hard fight, because our politicians and experts handed them $100s of billions, which they are using as we speak to buy more politicians and lobbyists and influence, and profit.

You can’t stop this by voting for another party. Pfizer probably has more lobbyists on K Street than all of Big Oil put together. And they have them in party and every every country that matters, in every strategic position that matters, and they will soon have many more. No, you must cut their entire voice out of the politics and health care of your society. Yes, very difficult, sure. But today, you can at least see them. For a short time. That won’t last.

 

 

Along with all that the World Economic Forum, and their Great Reset, it will have to go. They don’t do anyone any good but themselves. A big club that we ain’t in. Which reminds me:

The Automatic Earth has shifted a lot towards Covid over the past 2 years, and surely many readers are not 100% happy with that. But the financial world is still captive to central banks that won’t allow price discovery, which makes “markets” just fake pantomimes that former investors get rich in while the poor suffer.

While the climate issue has been captured by the likes of COP 26, a toy for the rich who want to make you pay to “go green”, in accordance with Davos and the WEF. I feel sorry for the well-meaning people who expect anything from that set-up. Nobody who owes their money or their power to fossil fuels will voluntarily give up either, but they will make you fork over for windmills and solar cells whose energy dynamics you don’t actually understand.

Just like with Covid, if you want to free yourselves from the narrative, you will have to open your eyes and go to battle. An untested vaccine won’t set you free, and neither will an electric car. Those two are just things you are being sold by the narrative.

But believe you me, the no. 1 issue today is the vaccines. We need to stop those, before all of our children grow up with timebombs in their bodies. Every jab means more spike proteins, and boosters are worse because they come after your immune system has learned, and prepared for, how to attack those proteins, who by then may be in every organ in your body. And attack them it will, because they are toxic agents.

I don’t want to tell people to get a vaccine or not, but I do want to tell them to be very careful, to get informed well, and only then give their consent, if they decide to get jabbed. It’s just that you have to be confident that your immune system is strong enough to defend you from the effects of the vaccine, and that’s the opposite of what 99% of people understand is happening to them.

So, 2020 year of the virus, 2021 year of the vaccine, and 2022 year of the adverse effects of the vaccines?! And/or a grand awakening?

 

 

 

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Aug 222021
 
 August 22, 2021  Posted by at 9:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  76 Responses »


Salvador Dali Elephants 1948

 

Dr Reveals Stunning Truth About Covid Vaccine (RAV)
Simply Put: **** YOU (Denninger)
Moderna Knows Their Vaccine Has Caused Over 300,000 Injuries, Hides Info (DE)
No Test, Just Get Vax Card (RAV)
We Have ‘Leaky Vaccines’ (RAV)
Why Are Regulatory Agencies Hiding COVID Vaccine Safety Signals? (CHD)
There’s An Alternative And Ethical Strategy To The Jab (RAV)
What’s The Best Way To Top Up Our Immunity? (BBC)
Why Testing COVID Immunity is as Important as Vaccination (WA)
Bill Gates Has Major Shares In Pfizer, BioNTech, Is Primary Funder Of MHRA (DE)
Police Say Melbourne Anti-lockdown Protest ‘Most Violent In Nearly 20 Years’ (G.)

 

 

 

 

Karl Denninger, from his comments section:

There are two mechanisms for ADE, both related but distinct. The first is where the antibodies simply are all binding either due to mutational mismatch or simply the nature of the virus in question. This was what derailed attempts to produce both RSV and coronavirus vaccines in the past, and has bedeviled attempts at Dengue as well. The reason the vax makers used only the “S” protein was their BELIEF that this would evade the problem. They had no proof of that and in fact scant animal and in-vitro evidence, but that’s what they went with and then looked for signals in the (short) trials. That part looked good at the time.

But there’s a second, nasty way that ADE happens. As antibody titers wane they may not do so evenly. Mutational mismatch makes this dangerous because the neutralizing portion may wane faster than the binding portion. At some point there’s enough binding antibody remaining that you get ****ed because the neutralizing titer is too low to help, but the binding enhances the infection. This is almost as bad as the first form but it’s very hard to detect without extensive trials over time against the wild virus, and challenge trials in humans are never approved because if you do them and get hit with this you will kill a huge percentage of the subjects, thus you’ll never get ethical approval to do them.

There is ANECDOTAL evidence that this is showing up RIGHT NOW in a small percentage of people who got jabbed. It’s not conclusive but the signal is there, and it’s alarming as Hell. Figuring out WHO is in that bucket and potentially at risk, and whether there is stratification we can predictively use, had better be done — FAST — because there are over 150 million Americans who are potentially at risk of this happening to them.

 

 

Yes, good question:

What happens when the FDA approves Pfizer on Monday? Is that the end for all the other vaccines?

A series of short clips of Robert Malone on Bannon’s show.

Dr Reveals Stunning Truth About Covid Vaccine (RAV)

Read more …

“If it turns out that said person did in fact build a proper immune response then these cases are either OAS or ADE-enhanced disease..”

Simply Put: **** YOU (Denninger)

I believed I might have had Covid-19 in January of 2020, even though I tested negative for antibodies several months later. As it turns out my later antibody testing (negative) was correct and not a defective test; whatever I had in January of 2020 it was not Covid-19. But now having had Covid-19 (almost-certainly Delta too) and knowing damn well it was Covid-19, and surviving it, it is a clearly-distinct infection that I could not possibly mistake for anything else. Having had the infection and now having found IgG antibodies by test I am now known robustly immune to any and all variants; the immunity built from natural infection is conserved across the various epitopes of the virus in all cases because the “N” portion of the virus, which has to remain more-or-less intact for it to be able to be a virus, forms the backbone and bulk of the immune response built following natural infection.

This is not true for any of the vaccines, it was a critical error in what we did and it is why we are now seeing escape. It is not breakthrough folks, it is escape due to mismatch between the coded antibodies and circulating virus and it will both continue and accelerate as the match inexorably continues to degrade between what circulates and the original “wild type” out of Wuhan, which is what’s coded in ALL the jabs and which is long extinct. What’s worse is that if OAS or ADE really come out to play on top of it then if you have not been naturally infected and have been jabbed you are in for a world of **** if you get challenged by the virus in the wild. Even very, very small enhancement percentages from ADE-style reactions can completely overwhelm any sort of treatment possibility at all.

We do not yet know if this is happening as we are deliberately not autopsying and investigating cases where someone was vaccinated, got infected anyway and then rapidly crashed going from being moderately ill to in an ICU or dead within 72 hours. There are multiple reports of this happening already. If this was someone who had a defective immune response then that’s very unfortunate but it does happen. We had damned well better prove that, however, and we’re not going the pathology work to do so. If it turns out that said person did in fact build a proper immune response then these cases are either OAS or ADE-enhanced disease and while this outcome is clearly not universal in those who got jabbed if it is happening even once in a while we had better figure it out right ****ing now or there is going to be a pile of dead bodies this fall and winter and it will be the direct responsibility of those who advocated for and in fact are trying to, in many cases, FORCE mass-jabbing of the population that caused it.

Read more …

They have a special service to do it for them.

Moderna Knows Their Vaccine Has Caused Over 300,000 Injuries, Hides Info (DE)

A leaked report from Moderna’s data collection company reveals that the Moderna Covid-19 vaccines have caused upwards of 300,000 vaccine injuries in a three-month time span – dwarfing the number of vaccine injuries Moderna actually reported to VAERS in that time frame. Moderna is new to the vaccine industry, and they are part of a global effort to introduce new mRNA spike protein replication technology to the field of vaccination. The company is also new to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), a government reporting database that collects incidences of vaccine injury and death. The CDC and the FDA manage VAERS and are well aware of the widespread injuries and deaths caused by these vaccines.


VAERS is required to make these injuries public each and every week, even as the medical establishment continues to yawn and turn the other way. The VAERS database has published hundreds of thousands of vaccine injury reports in 2021, but the CDC and the FDA haven’t done anything significant to address the wide-scale medical malpractice and wrongful death perpetuated by this experimental gene gtherapy. The CDC and the FDA refuse to take the vaccines off the market, and only warn young adults that the vaccines “rarely” cause heart problems, anaphylactic shock, and blood clots. Moderna is legally required to forward all vaccine injury reports directly to VAERS, but they apparently aren’t doing their part and are concealing massive amounts of vaccine injury data.

If this data was shared in a timely and transparent manner, it would further corroborate the numerous, wide-scale injuries already being reported to VAERS. According to the most recent data from VAERS, Moderna has only reported 110,500 adverse events reports from January through March for their SpikeVax COVID-19 vaccine. Most of these injuries occurred in the United States. VAERS also reports another 78,000 reports of vaccine injury from SpikeVax from April through June, with 71,400 of those injuries coming from the United States. Of these 188,500 vaccine injuries reported to VAERS, Moderna themselves only reported a fraction of them. Most of the reports came from patients, physicians, and other health care providers, who documented the adverse events in a medical report filed with VAERS.


Most shocking yet, a data collection service that works for Moderna sent out an internal memo highlighting up to 300,000 adverse events that occurred in a three-month span in 2021. Moderna’s data collection company is called IQVIA. This company helps drug-makers manage clinical trials. IQVIA employs 74,000 people and grossed $ 11 billion in sales last year. The company’s President for Research and Development Solutions sent out a Quarter Two update that was labeled “Confidential – for internal distribution only.” The report includes upwards of 300,000 incidences of vaccine injury reported directly from injured consumers. The memo states that IQVIA applied more than 12 automation’s to drive greater efficiencies and quality “to ensure regulatory compliance for the Moderna pharmacovigilance program.”

Read more …

Homer the pathologist.

No Test, Just Get Vax Card (RAV)

Read more …

And leaky vessels.

We Have ‘Leaky Vaccines’ (RAV)

Read more …

“..more and more people recognize that the premise that vaccine adverse events are “one in a million” is an utter fiction.”

Why Are Regulatory Agencies Hiding COVID Vaccine Safety Signals? (CHD)

A few months before the first COVID-19 vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in late 2020, a global vaccine safety expert cautioned the rushed circumstances made it essential to “get [safety monitoring] right” by “intensively” and “robustly” scrutinizing adverse events following the experimental rollout. As this expert stated, “Deploying any new vaccine based on data from expedited clinical trials into a population without a functioning safety monitoring system in place is reckless and irresponsible given the tools that are available.” Moreover, she added, any investments needed to beef up safety monitoring would be “inexpensive in comparison” to the massive funding allocated to COVID-19 vaccine development and scale-up.

In theory, the U.S. has had a national vaccine safety monitoring system in place since 1990 — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — intended to function as an “early warning system.” VAERS and its U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) counterpart FAERS (FDA Adverse Event Reporting System) constitute the principal data sources that regulators rely on when pulling drugs or vaccines from the market for safety reasons. Not only has VAERS never lived up to its promise, but there can be little doubt its glaring failures are largely, and malignantly, by design.

For example, when a government-commissioned study highlighted VAERS inadequacies in 2010 — estimating more than 99% of vaccine adverse reactions were going unreported and that one of every 39 doses of vaccine administered was linked to adverse events corroborated in vaccine package inserts — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) simply shut the project down. Now, in less than a year, more than half a million reports of injuries have flooded into VAERS following experimental COVID jabs, including thousands of deaths. Yet a deafening regulatory silence has greeted this record-setting volume of adverse reactions, which accounts for nearly a third of all reports accumulated by VAERS over its entire three-decade lifespan.

Statistical tricks (and conflicts of interest) are not new to the vaccine or pharmaceutical industries, which have used them for decades to successfully mask the “chasm between vaccine rhetoric and reality.” Even when drug warning systems seem to “work,” the lag time between reports of harm and regulatory action is, on average, 20 years. In that light — with FDA speeding toward full approval of the Pfizer injection, Moderna gaining fast-track designation to test other experimental mRNA vaccines in children and adults and CDC benignly maintaining that the results of COVID vaccine safety monitoring are “reassuring” — it is not hard to be discouraged about the agencies’ continued ability to get away with misusing and abusing safety data from VAERS and other sources.

However, the safety narrative started imploding in a big way in late 2019, when the world’s top vaccine experts gathered at the World Health Organization and admitted, almost to a person, that vaccines are sometimes fatal and that safety monitoring is failing to capture the dangers. COVID may have provided these worried experts with a temporary and convenient reprieve, but more and more people recognize that the premise that vaccine adverse events are “one in a million” is an utter fiction. With injuries from COVID vaccines occurring on an unprecedented scale — and credible doctors and scientists issuing urgent warnings about short-term and longer-term damage — it may become increasingly difficult for the vaccine establishment to shove its problems under the statistical carpet.

Read more …

IVM.

There’s An Alternative And Ethical Strategy To The Jab (RAV)

Read more …

The BBC can’t say “Stop Mass Vaccination”. So they try a way around it. And get lost.

What’s The Best Way To Top Up Our Immunity? (BBC)

There are marked differences in your immune system after a natural infection with coronavirus and after vaccination. Which is better? Even asking the question bordered on heresy a year ago, when catching Covid for the first time could be deadly, especially for the elderly or people already in poor health. Now, we’re no longer starting with zero immunity as the overwhelming majority of people have either been vaccinated or have already caught the virus. It is now a serious question that has implications for whether children should ever be vaccinated. And whether we use the virus or booster shots to top up immunity in adults. Both have become contentious issues. “We could be digging ourselves into a hole, for a very long time, where we think we can only keep Covid away by boosting every year,” Prof Eleanor Riley, an immunologist from the University of Edinburgh, told me.

Prof Adam Finn, a government vaccine adviser, said over-vaccinating people, when other parts of the world had none, was “a bit insane, it’s not just inequitable, it’s stupid”. We need to understand a little bit about the key building blocks of both our immune system and the virus it is attacking. The power-couple of the immune system that clears the body of infection are antibodies and T-cells. Antibodies stick to the surface of the virus and mark it for destruction. T-cells can spot which of our own cells have been hijacked by the virus and destroy them. For all the trouble the virus has caused, it is spectacularly simple. It has the famous spike protein, which is the key it uses to unlock the doorway into our body’s cells. And 28 other proteins that it needs to hijack our cells and make thousands of copies of itself. (For comparison it takes about 20,000 proteins to run the human body).

[..] There is clear evidence that adults who have not had any vaccine dose will have stronger immune defences if they do get vaccinated, even if they have caught Covid before. But there are two big questions: 1/ do vaccinated adults need to be boosted, or is exposure to the virus enough? 2/ do children need vaccinating at all, or does a lifetime of encountering build a good immune defence? The idea of regularly topping up immunity throughout life is not radical in other infections, such as RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) or the four other coronaviruses that infect people and cause common cold symptoms. Each time you’re exposed, the immune system gets a little bit stronger, and this continues until old age, when the immune system starts to fail and the infections become a problem again.

“This isn’t proven, but it could be a lot cheaper and simpler to let that happen than spend the whole time immunising people,” said Prof Finn, who warns we could end up “locked into a cycle of boosting” without seeing if it was necessary. However, he said the argument in children had “already been won” as “40-50% have already been infected and most weren’t ill or particularly ill”. There are counter-arguments. Prof Riley points to long-Covid in children, and Prof Openshaw to nervousness around the long-term effects of a virus that can affect many of the body’s organs. But Prof Riley said there was potential in using vaccines to “take the edge off” Covid, followed by infection, to broaden the immune response.

Read more …

“..we’re not testing antibodies, because they’re worried that a substantial number of people are going to find out that the vaccine didn’t work for them.” – Dr. Holman Noorchashm”

Why Testing COVID Immunity is as Important as Vaccination (WA)

Antibody testing is the gold standard for determining immunity, says immunologist and physician, Dr. Hooman Norchashm. Yet, the CDC and FDA are actively deterring people from testing their immunity. Why? Dr. Noorchashm suggests that the answer to this could lie partly in the phenomena of vaccine spoilage. “It’s a medicine, just like any other medicine. It’s got a failure rate…, and we should accept that.” “They’re worried that a substantial number of people are not going to find out that the vaccine didn’t work for them.” Currently, the delta variant of COVID-19 is being used by the Government to explain the high occurrence of breakthrough infections. However, Dr. Noorchashm suggests, vaccine spoilage is a more likely explanation. While a strong believer in vaccination, Dr. Noorchashm argues that determining individual immunity rather than blanket vaccination is the ‘Achilles heel’ to overcoming COVID-19.

Read more …

Owning shares is one thing, but funding the goverment?!

Bill Gates Has Major Shares In Pfizer, BioNTech, Is Primary Funder Of MHRA (DE)

An investigation has revealed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are the primary funders of the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and that the Foundation also owns major shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech. The Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) extended the emergency authorisation of the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA jab in the UK to allow it to be given to children between the ages of 12 – 15 on the 4th June 2021. At the time, the Chief Executive of the MHRA, Dr June Raine said the MHRA had “carefully reviewed clinical trial data in children aged 12 to 15 years and have concluded that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective in this age group and that the benefits outweigh any risk”.

We are left wondering if Dr June Raine and the MHRA have even read the results of the extremely short and small study. If they have then they would have seen that 86% of children in the study suffered an adverse reaction ranging from mild to extremely serious. Just 1,127 children took part of the trial, however only 1,097 children completed the trial, with 30 of them not participating after being given the first dose of the Pfizer jab. The results do not state why the 30 children did not go on to complete the trial. The information is publicly available and contained within an FDA fact sheet which can be viewed here (see page 25, table 5 on-wards).

There was never any doubt that the MHRA would give emergency authorisation for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine to be used in children when you consider that a certain Mr Bill Gates owns shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech and is the primary funder of the MHRA. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bought shares in Pfizer back in 2002, and back in September 2020 Bill Gates ensured the value of his shares went up by announcing to the mainstream media in a CNBC interview that he viewed the Pfizer jab as the leader in the Covid-19 vaccine race.

“The only vaccine that, if everything went perfectly, might seek the emergency use license by the end of October, would be Pfizer.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also “coincidentally” bought $55 million worth of shares in BioNTech in September 2019, just before the alleged Covid-19 pandemic struck. The MHRA received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 to the tune of £980,000 for a “collaboration” with the foundation. However, a Freedom of Information request which the MHRA responded to in May 2021 revealed that the current level of grant funding received from the Gates Foundation amounts to $3 million and covers “a number of projects”.

Read more …

“They don’t care about their freedom, they’re just looking for trouble…”

Police Say Melbourne Anti-lockdown Protest ‘Most Violent In Nearly 20 Years’ (G.)

An anti-lockdown protest held in Melbourne on Saturday was one of the most violent the city has seen in 20 years, Victoria’s top police officer says. Chief commissioner Shane Patton said his officers had no choice but to use non-lethal weapons to defend themselves from an angry mob that came armed and appeared intent on attacking them. It is the first time during a lockdown protest, police have used such tactics that included rounds of pepper spray projectiles and canisters. At least nine officers ended up in hospital after being pelted with projectiles, punched and kicked by some members of a 4,000 strong crowd who turned out to protest the city’s Covid-19 lockdown. The mostly unmasked protesters let off flares, yelled slogans and blasted music as they moved through the CBD.

More than 700 extra Victorian police officers were deployed to contain the lockdown protest. Patton said he was nothing short of disgusted with the conduct of some in the crowd. “What we saw yesterday … was probably one of the most violent protests we’ve seen in nearly 20 years,” he told reporters on Sunday. More than 200 people were arrested including some on remand for previous crimes. At least 19 will be taken to court rather than issued with fines in excess of $5,000. Two people will face assault charges. He said many in the crowd came armed with projectiles that were hurled at police and it was clear they were there not to protest for personal freedom but to “confront and attack”.

[..] “I just hope it doesn’t result in the mass spread of Covid-19. The risk that those people have now posed to the rest of the community, by their conduct yesterday, was disgraceful and selfish.” Patton also revealed 48 people have been fined almost $5,500 each over an illegal engagement party in Caulfield North, including the future bride and groom. That number is expected to rise with eight other attendees yet to be interviewed. The rest of the people at that party were children. They’ve been warned and won’t receive fines..

Read more …

 

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Golden oldie.

 

 

 

 

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Jul 262021
 
 July 26, 2021  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  134 Responses »


Henri Matisse Reading woman in violet dress 1898

 

CDC Withdraws PCR Tests: “They Can’t Tell SARS-CoV-2 from Influenza” (GN)
Bill Gates Primary Funder Of MHRA, Owns Major Shares In Pfizer & BioNTech (DE)
Little Known Osteopath In The Spotlight As An Anti-vaxx Superspreader (NYT)
CDC ‘Actively’ Considering Face Cover Advisory For Vaccinated: Fauci (RT)
The Other Side of the COVID Vaccination Argument (CTH)
159 Dead, 593 Hospitalized in Illinois Breakthrough COVID Cases (NBC)
Biden DOJ Drops Civil Rights Probe Of Gov. Cuomo Over Nursing Homes (NYP)
UK Economy Growing At Fastest Rate In 80 Years (G.)
Judge Refuses To Identify 5 Market Participants In VIX Manipulation (ZH)
The Insect Apocalypse: ‘Our World Will Grind To A Halt Without Them’ (G.)
CNN Airs Hour-Long Public Service Message On Dementia (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Seneff long term effects

 

 

Lee Merritt – Synthetic Spike Protein Affects Every Cell
– start at 50 min

 

 

In case you were wondering why there are no flu cases left.

Google translated.

Note: Bill Gates and George Soros bought UK testing firm Mologic just days ago.

CDC Withdraws PCR Tests: “They Can’t Tell SARS-CoV-2 from Influenza” (GN)

On 21 July 2021, the 18 lines that rewrite the history of the Covid-19 pandemic were published. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) of the USA, the highest health authority of the American government for monitoring diseases and in particular infectious ones, has launched an alert that assumes the range of a nuclear missile against the rubber wall of the international narrative on the emergency caused by the SARS-Cov-2 virus ( believed to have been built in the laboratory by many scientific researches now ).

“After December 31, 2021, the CDC will withdraw the application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the test first introduced in February 2020 for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC provides this notice in advance to clinical laboratories to allow sufficient time to select and implement one of the many alternatives authorized by the FDA.”

This is the “Lab Alert” launched by the Division of Laboratory System (DLS), the specialized section of the CDC ( link at the bottom of the article ). Alone, it would already be enough to confirm all the investigations carried out in recent months on 97% unreliable tampons, as claimed by various scientific researches and international judicial authorities . But the official communication of the CDC (branched body in all the confederate states) states between the lines something already shocking, anticipated by Gospa News already last year: that is the risk that the nasopharyngeal swabs PCR, subject to cycles of variable amplifications , may not distinguish Covid-19 from a simple flu.

Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-cleared molecular methods with an FDA reference panel. In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have used the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay to select and begin transitioning to another FDA-cleared COVID-19 assay. The CDC encourages laboratories to consider adopting a multiplex method that can facilitate the detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.Such tests can facilitate the continuation of testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save time and resources as we head into the flu season. Laboratories and test sites must validate and verify the selected test within their facility before starting clinical trials. ”

The Real time PCR – also known as Quantitative PCR , abbreviated qPCR – is a method that simultaneously amplifies (polymerase chain reaction or PCR) and quantifies the DNA , similar but not to be confused with the RT-PCR method (Reverse Transcriptase -PCR ) . DNA is amplified by DNA-polymerase chain reactions. After each round of amplification, the DNA is quantified. Common methods of quantification include the use of fluorescent stains that intercalate with double-stranded (ds) DNA and modified DNA oligonucleotides (called probes) which are fluorescent when hybridized with a DNA. Real-time PCR is often combined with Retro Transcriptional PCR (RT-PCR) to quantify the expression levels of specific RNA: retro-transcription (or reverse transcription) produces single-stranded complementary DNA called cDNA (complementary DNA) keeping the relative concentration ratios of the different RNA species unchanged. In this way it is possible, for example, to measure the relative expression of a gene at a particular time, either in a cell or in a particular type of tissue.

Read more …

Fully impartial.

Bill Gates Primary Funder Of MHRA, Owns Major Shares In Pfizer & BioNTech (DE)

An investigation has revealed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are the primary funders of the UK’s Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, and that the Foundation also owns major shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech. The Medicine & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) extended the emergency authorisation of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA jab in the UK to allow it to be given to children between the ages of 12 – 15 on the 4th June 2021. At the time, the Chief Executive of the MHRA, Dr June Raine said the MHRA had “carefully reviewed clinical trial data in children aged 12 to 15 years and have concluded that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective in this age group and that the benefits outweigh any risk”.

We are left wondering if Dr June Raine and the MHRA have even read the results of the extremely short and small study. If they have then they would have seen that 86% of children in the study suffered an adverse reaction ranging from mild to extremely serious. Just 1,127 children took part of the trial, however only 1,097 children completed the trial, with 30 of them not participating after being given the first dose of the Pfizer jab. The results do not state why the 30 children did not go on to complete the trial. The information is publicly available [..] There was never any doubt that the MHRA would give emergency authorisation for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be used in children when you consider that a certain Mr Bill Gates owns shares in both Pfizer and BioNTech and is the primary funder of the MHRA.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bought shares in Pfizer back in 2002, and back in September 2020 Bill Gates ensured the value of his shares went up by announcing to the mainstream media in a CNBC interview that he viewed the Pfizer jab as the leader in the Covid-19 vaccine race. “The only vaccine that, if everything went perfectly, might seek the emergency use license by the end of October, would be Pfizer.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also “coincidentally” bought $55 million worth of shares in BioNTech in September 2019, just before the alleged Covid-19 pandemic struck.

The MHRA received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 to the tune of £980,000 for a “collaboration” with the foundation. However, a Freedom of Information request which the MHRA responded to in May 2021 revealed that the current level of grant funding received from the Gates Foundation amounts to $3 million and covers “a number of projects”.

Read more …

“More than 97% of people hospitalised for COVID-19 are unvaccinated..”

Because the vaccinated are no longer tested.

NYT going after Mercola big time. Who’s next? They’ll pick them off one by one.

Little Known Osteopath In The Spotlight As An Anti-vaxx Superspreader (NYT)

The article that appeared online February 9 began with a seemingly innocuous question about the legal definition of vaccines. Then over its next 3400 words, it declared coronavirus vaccines were “a medical fraud” and said the injections did not prevent infections, provide immunity or stop transmission of the disease. Instead, the article claimed, the shots “alter your genetic coding, turning you into a viral protein factory that has no off-switch”. Its assertions were easily disprovable. No matter. Over the next few hours, the article was translated from English into Spanish and Polish. It appeared on dozens of blogs and was picked up by anti-vaccination activists, who repeated the false claims online. The article also made its way to Facebook, where it reached 400,000 people, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool.

The entire effort traced back to one person: Joseph Mercola. Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Florida, has long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved treatments. But most recently, he has become the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to researchers. An internet-savvy entrepreneur who employs dozens, Mercola has published more than 600 articles on Facebook that cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines since the pandemic began, reaching a far larger audience than other vaccine sceptics, an analysis by The New York Times found. His claims have been widely echoed on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

The activity has earned Mercola, a natural health proponent with an Everyman demeanour, the dubious distinction of the top spot in the “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of 12 people responsible for sharing 65 per cent of all anti-vaccine messaging on social media, said the nonprofit Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Others on the list include Robert F. Kennedy jnr, a longtime anti-vaccine activist; and Erin Elizabeth, founder of the website Health Nut News, who is also Mercola’s girlfriend. “Mercola is the pioneer of the anti-vaccine movement,” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. “He’s a master of capitalising on periods of uncertainty, like the pandemic, to grow his movement.”

Some high-profile media figures have promoted scepticism of the vaccines — notably, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News, though other Fox personalities have urged viewers to get the shots. Now Mercola and others in the “Disinformation Dozen” are in the spotlight as vaccinations in the United States slow, just as the highly infectious delta variant has fuelled a resurgence in coronavirus cases. More than 97% of people hospitalised for COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. President Joe Biden has blamed online falsehoods for causing people to refrain from getting the injections. But even as Biden has urged social media companies to “do something about the misinformation,” Mercola shows the difficulty of that task. Over the last decade, Mercola has built a vast operation to push natural health cures, disseminate anti-vaccination content and profit from all of it, said researchers who have studied his network. In 2017, he filed an affidavit claiming his net worth was “in excess of $US100 million”.

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In religion, credibility is not a factor.

CDC ‘Actively’ Considering Face Cover Advisory For Vaccinated: Fauci (RT)

White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) could soon reconsider its guidelines, recommending vaccinated Americans to mask up again. Top health officials have reportedly been having preliminary talks about revising mask recommendations for vaccinated Americans due to a rise in cases and concerns over the more infectious Delta variant of Covid-19. According to current guidance, those vaccinated against the virus do not need to wear masks in most public spaces. The revision of the mask guidance is indeed “under active consideration,” Fauci confirmed to CNN on Sunday. The infectious disease expert did not give a timeframe for when the federal guidance could change, but he praised those state officials who had already rushed ahead to reinstate local mask mandates in response to rising coronavirus cases.


“If you look at what’s going on locally in the trenches, in places like L.A. County,” Fauci said, “the local officials have the discretion, and the CDC agrees with that ability and discretion capability to say, you know, you’re in a situation where we’re having a lot of dynamics of infection, so even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.” Fauci and other White House officials have used the uptick in cases to continue pushing unvaccinated Americans to get inoculated. Recent polling, however, has signified that those who have refused getting vaccinated thus far have little to no interest in changing their minds.

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Great video.

The Other Side of the COVID Vaccination Argument (CTH)

There is a lot of incoming information from government and the private sector promoting the vaccine. Recently, there has been a significant uptick in compulsory demands for taking the COVID vaccine. This forced vaccination approach has made many people start to question why this coordinated pressure campaign has increased with such ferocity. As a result of such one-side information, people are increasingly skeptical. In this video below you can review the counter-position for why people do not want to take the vaccination shot.


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Very rare.

159 Dead, 593 Hospitalized in Illinois Breakthrough COVID Cases (NBC)

More than 150 people have died and nearly 600 have been hospitalized in Illinois due to COVID-19 in “breakthrough” cases after they were fully vaccinated, according to state health officials. According to data updated Wednesday by the Illinois Department of Public Health, 159 people in Illinois have died due to COVID-19 or complications after being fully vaccinated. That figure equates to 2.3% of COVID-19 deaths in the state since Jan. 1, officials said. At least 593 fully vaccinated people have been hospitalized in Illinois, IDPH said. The state only reports breakthrough infections among those who have been hospitalized or died, following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, IDPH said.


Those totals mean eight more fully vaccinated individuals have died and 30 more have been hospitalized in the past week since the state last updated its reported numbers. The state does not publicize the number of residents who tested positive after being fully vaccinated but did not die or require hospitalization in order to “help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” IDPH’s website reads.

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He’s a made man.

Biden DOJ Drops Civil Rights Probe Of Gov. Cuomo Over Nursing Homes (NYP)

The Department of Justice has decided not to investigate whether the civil rights of residents in New York’s government-run nursing homes were violated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s controversial admission policy related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a letter Friday, the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs told US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), ranking member of that House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, that New York was off the hook in connection with potential violations of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. In August, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division requested information from New York in connection with a March 25, 2020, order from the state Department of Health that required nursing homes to admit “medically stable” COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals.

It also sought records from Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey, which adopted similar rules that the DOJ said “may have resulted in the deaths of thousands of elderly nursing home residents.” “We have reviewed the information provided by these states along with additional information available to the Department,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joe Gaeta wrote Friday. “Based on that review, we have decided not to open a CRIPA investigation of any public nursing facility within New York, Pennsylvania, or Michigan at this time.” In a prepared statement, Scalise called it “outrageous that the Department of Justice refuses to investigate the deadly ‘must admit’ orders issued by governors in New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan that resulted in the deaths of thousands of senior citizens.”

“Where is the justice for nursing home victims and their grieving families? These deadly orders contradicted the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s] guidance, and needlessly endangered the most vulnerable among us to the deadly COVID-19 virus,” Scalise said. “Even worse, Governor Cuomo in New York intentionally tried to cover up the true death toll resulting from his mandate. Grieving families deserve answers and accountability. It’s unconscionable that Biden’s Department of Justice refuses to investigate the deadly actions that went against CDC’s medical guidance taken in these states.”

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Oh sure. As the media scream Armageddon.

UK Economy Growing At Fastest Rate In 80 Years (G.)

The British economy is growing at its fastest pace in 80 years and could recover its pre-pandemic size by the end of this year, according to a leading economic forecaster. Buoyed by the vaccine rollout and a bounce back in consumer spending, the EY Item Club said it now expected GDP to grow by 7.6% – which would be the fastest annual growth in national income since 1941. The UK economy shrank by 9.8% in 2020, the worst performance in the G7. The optimism comes despite the chaos caused by widespread staff shortages as workers self-isolate en masse after being pinged by NHS test and trace. The “pingdemic” is affecting the running of shops, restaurants, factories and even railway services as bosses struggle to find staff to cover shifts.

Although the economy has proved increasingly resilient through lockdowns, the EY Item Club report came with the health warning that the “future pattern of the pandemic and any renewed pandemic-related restrictions will have a significant bearing on whether the forecast is achieved”. The UK economy is more dependent on consumer spending on services, such as recreation and leisure activities, which meant that the lockdowns had a greater economic impact than in other countries, said Martin Beck, the EY Item Club’s senior economic adviser. The reopening of these “face-to-face parts of the economy means the UK should have a correspondingly faster recovery”, he said. In the spring, the group of economists, which is the only non-government forecasting organisation to use the Treasury’s modelling of the economy, pencilled in growth of 6.8%.

This is the second time this year it has upgraded its forecast, putting the economy on track to attain its pre-pandemic peak by the end of 2021. That milestone would now be reached some six months sooner than when it last crunched the numbers in April, with the UK’s successful vaccine programme a key factor. Recent surveys of economic activity have, however, been less encouraging, leading to concerns that the recovery is stalling. The IHS Markit and the Cips survey showed growth at its slowest since March, which was attributed to wide-ranging staff shortages, rising Covid cases and thousands of workers having to isolate owing to the pingdemic. It also highlighted a new mood of caution among the public triggered by the rapidly rising infection rates.

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Because the Fed is one? Because the market makers are?

Judge Refuses To Identify 5 Market Participants In VIX Manipulation (ZH)

[..] on Feb 5, 2018 the steamroller woke up with a vengeance, and shortly after the close, the infamous volmageddon event took place when a handful of the most popular inverse VIX strategies crashed from near record highs to zero in a manner of minutes as ETN liquidation triggers were activated, sending the VIX briefly to record highs and wiping out billions in value and leaving countless retail investors stunned and facing total losses. Yet while to retail investors losses were in the hundreds or, at most, thousands of dollars (recall this was in the pre-stimmy stage when people cared about their money), some hedge funds got completely wiped out. One among them was LJM Partners, a Chicago-based fund that lost $446.8 million in one day from the market moves, wiping out 86.5% of its assets in seconds.

And so LJM and more than two dozen other investors and fund managers sued over the next year to recover losses, claiming unidentified market participants that rigged the index “repeatedly posted and immediately canceled” tens of thousands of quotes for S&P 500 options, whose prices are used to calculate the VIX. The plaintiffs, understandably furious at the events of Feb 5, claiming that unidentified market participants manipulated the VIX by posting S&P 500 options quotes that only stayed in the order book for milliseconds, not long enough for anyone to trade against but enough time for them to be incorporated into the value of the VIX.

That technique, known as “flashing” and popularized back in 2009 first by this website, was unrelated to any legitimate positions the unidentified market participants held or wished to hold, but successfully manipulated the price of S&P 500 options and futures contracts, LJM claimed, even though the CBOE which is the Chicago-based owner of the VIX and the exchange where S&P 500 options trade, has repeatedly dismissed claims of manipulation of the index. And while LJM has yet to recover any funds, on Friday the defunct fund suffered another setback, when a federal judge refused to identify five market participants accused in the lawsuit of manipulating the VIX index.

US District Judge Manish S. Shah, during a telephone conference Friday in Chicago, said the plaintiffs had failed to provide enough evidence of actual manipulation to justify revealing the names of the market participants, who were identified only by code names in exchange records. “Plaintiffs have not demonstrated good cause” for the disclosure, said Shah, who had earlier authorized the release of exchange data to help them make their case. “Rather than specific allegations of manipulation, plaintiffs’ complaints offer a menu of what they characterize as potentially manipulative conduct that may have occurred on February 5 and 6, 2018,” the market participants said in a court filing.

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Many people asking where the bugs on their windshields went. Which is a typical “connection” with nature.

The Insect Apocalypse: ‘Our World Will Grind To A Halt Without Them’ (G.)

In 2015 I was contacted by the Krefeld Society, a group of entomologists who, since the late 1980s, had been trapping flying insects on nature reserves scattered across Germany. They had amassed insects from nearly 17,000 days of trapping across 63 sites and 27 years, a total of 53kg of insects. They sent me their data to ask for my help in preparing it for publication in a scientific journal. In the 27 years from 1989 to 2016 the overall biomass (ie weight) of insects caught in their traps fell by 75%. In midsummer, when in Europe we see the peak of insect activity, the decline was even more marked, at 82%. I thought initially that there must have been some sort of mistake, because this seemed too dramatic a drop to be credible. We knew that wildlife in general was in decline, but for three-quarters of insects to have disappeared so rapidly suggested a pace and scale of decline that had previously not been imagined.

In October 2019 a different group of German scientists published their findings from a study of insect populations in German forests and grasslands over 10 years from 2008 to 2017. The study’s results were deeply troubling. Grasslands fared worst, losing on average two-thirds of their arthropod biomass (the insects, spiders, woodlice and more). In woodlands, biomass dropped by 40%. What about elsewhere? Is there something peculiar going on in Germany? It seems highly unlikely. Perhaps the best-studied insect populations in the world are the UK’s butterflies. They are recorded by volunteers as part of the Butterfly Monitoring Scheme, the largest and longest-running scheme of its kind in the world. The trends it reveals are worrying. Butterflies of the “wider countryside” – common species found in farmland, gardens and so on, such as meadow browns and peacocks – fell in abundance by 46% between 1976 and 2017.

Meanwhile, habitat specialists, fussier species that tend to be much rarer, such as fritillaries and hairstreaks, fell by 77%, despite concerted conservation efforts directed at many of them. Worldwide, although the bulk of insect species – the flies, beetles, grasshoppers, wasps, mayflies, froghoppers and so on – are not systematically monitored, we often have good data on population trends for birds that depend on insects for food, and these are mostly in decline. For example, populations of insectivorous birds that hunt their prey in the air (ie the flying insects that have decreased so much in biomass in Germany) have fallen by more than any other bird group in North America, by about 40% between 1966 and 2013. Bank swallows, common nighthawks (nightjars), chimney swifts and barn swallows have all fallen in numbers by more than 70% in the past 20 years.

In England, populations of the spotted flycatcher fell by 93% between 1967 and 2016. Other once-common insectivores have suffered similarly, including the grey partridge (-92%), nightingale (-93%) and cuckoo (-77%). The red-backed shrike, a specialist predator of large insects, went extinct in the UK in the 1990s. Overall, the British Trust for Ornithology estimates that the UK had 44m fewer wild birds in 2012 compared with 1970. All the evidence above relates to populations of insects and their predators in highly industrialised, developed countries. Information about insect populations in the tropics, where most insects live, is sparse. We can only guess what impacts deforestation of the Amazon, the Congo, or south-east Asian rainforests has had on insect life in those regions. We will never know how many species went extinct before we could discover them.

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“The strawberries. The strawberries. The strawberries. That’s what makes it work! Airplanes!”

CNN Airs Hour-Long Public Service Message On Dementia (BBee)

As part of a campaign to raise awareness and improve public knowledge on treatment options, CNN aired an hour-long public service announcement on the warning signs of dementia Wednesday night. The PSA, which ran over an hour, showed tragic footage of an old man ranting and making nonsensical, confusing statements. CNN says they hope the footage will encourage family members of the elderly to get them tested for the early warning signs of dementia. The cable news channel displayed a phone number for a hotline people can call if they believe someone they know might be suffering from symptoms of the condition.


“If you or a loved one act like this man,” said Don Lemon, “please, we beg you, get help. Slurred speech, inaccurate statements, an inability to remember where you are—these are all signs that your loved one might be suffering from dementia, whether he’s retired or the president of the United States.” “… and we’d take the rhubarb and we’d put it in the pie, right in the ol’ pie,” the old man said suddenly, in a rare moment of lucidity. “It was incredible. You wouldn’t think rhubarb would taste good, but it’s the sweetness. The strawberries. The strawberries. The strawberries. That’s what makes it work! Airplanes! Airplanes are neat, you know, but they’re a myth. How do they get them up there? They don’t—d-d-don’t even have feathers.” Many of the attendees were touched by both the PSA and the old man.

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Vincent van Gogh Avenue of Poplars at Sunset 1884

 

Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots (ZH)
Fauci’s Upcoming Book Scrubbed On Amazon, Barnes & Noble Amid Backlash (JTN)
Wuhan Lab Chief To NIH Conference: ‘No Regulation’ On Virus Manipulation (NP)
Israel: Likely Link Between Pfizer Vaccine And Myocarditis In Young Males (RT)
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett To Build New Kind Of Nuclear Reactor In Wyoming (R.)
Why The US Isn’t Going To Nuke Anyone From Orbit Anytime Soon (RT)
The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun (Greenwald)
Daniel Ellsberg Wants The US To Prosecute Him Under The Espionage Act (IC)
‘Dying for an iPhone’ (Chris Hedges)
China Rushes To Pull Back The Yuan From A Three-Year High (CNBC)
Olympics Will Go Ahead, Says Tokyo Games Chief (G.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tucker Berenson

 

 

An anagram for Dr Anthony Fauci is China Fraud Tony

 

 

“Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.”

Tucker Carlson Levels Fauci After FOIA Emails Connect The Dots (ZH)

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson ripped “the utter fraudulence of Tony Fauci” Wednesday night, after BuzzFeed and the Washington Post obtained thousands of pages of emails through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, revealing that the nation’s top virologist was telling the public one thing, while furiously working on damage control and narrative-shaping as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. According to Carlson, Americans assumed “that the man in charge of protecting the US from COVID must be rational and impressive,” adding “We also assumed he must be honest. But we were wrong.

“It soon became clear that Tony Fauci was just another sleazy federal bureaucrat – deeply political and often dishonest. More shocking than that we then learned that Fauci himself was implicated in the very pandemic he’d been charged with fighting.” “Fauci supported the grotesque and dangerous experiments that appeared to have made COVID possible.” -Tucker Carlson. Fauci’s emails collectively show that “from the beginning, Tony Fauci was worried that the public might conclude COVID had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” “Why would he be concerned that Americans would conclude that?” Tucker asked. “Possibly because Tony Fauci knew that he had funded gain-of-function experiments at that very same laboratory.”

“The emails prove that Fauci lied about this under oath,” said Tucker, who highlighted an email from scientist Christian G. Anderson to Fauci, saying that he and his fellow scientists felt the virus looked ‘potentially’ engineered, and that members of his team “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Fauci then sent an urgent email to his deputy – Hugh Auchincloss – with the subject “IMPORTANT,” and which read “Hugh, it is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on … You will have tasks today that must be done.”

Tucker Fauci

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Wonder why. Can’t be the negative publicity, there hasn’t been enough of that.

Fauci’s Upcoming Book Scrubbed On Amazon, Barnes & Noble Amid Backlash (JTN)

White House coronavirus adviser and long-time U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci’s upcoming book has been scrubbed from and altered on online listings, amid criticism that he is profiting from the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. The book, “Expect the Unexpected,” was earlier pegged for a November release, according to its Amazon listing. As of Wednesday morning, the book’s listing had been entirely scrubbed from Amazon. However, a cached version of the listing, still displayed the book’s promotional description and preorder status. A cached website also shows the book’s listing on Barnes & Noble’s website, though by Wednesday morning that listing was no longer live anymore. The book appeared to still be available for preorder on some lesser known vendors such as Booktopia.


The scrubbing of the book comes after backlash from critics who accused Fauci of profiting off of the deadly pandemic the U.S. response to which he has overseen. Among those criticizing Fauci is Fox News Channel contributor Joe Concha, who compared him to New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signing a seven-figure book deal about his efforts during the pandemic, which resulted in a high number of death among assisted-living residents. “If you look at the numbers again, you had Cuomo profiting off a pandemic, a government official,” said Concha, also a media reporter for The Hill newspaper. “Now we have Fauci doing it as well. I think this is appalling.”

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Why go to Wuhan? Well…

Wuhan Lab Chief To NIH Conference: ‘No Regulation’ On Virus Manipulation (NP)

The National Institutes of Health hosted Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers at a 2011 conference focusing on scientific research that could pose a “significant threat” to human health – including manipulation of bat coronaviruses. At the event, the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Deputy Director repeatedly asserted that his controversial lab had “no regulation” on this form of risky research, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal. The 2011 event – Continuing the Global Dialogue with the Scientific and Science Policy Community with a Focus on Asia and the Western Pacific – was sponsored by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) and sought to provide participants with a “greater understanding” of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC).

Defined by the NIH as research “that could be directly misapplied to pose a significant threat with broad potential consequences to public health and safety,” DURC encompasses gain-of-function studies, which have come under increased scrutiny due to their role in potentially spawning COVID-19. Among the event participants were Wuhan Institute of Virology Deputy Director Yuan Zhiming, NIH Associate Director for Science Policy Amy Patterson, and top American researchers and scientific advisory board members. The NIH’s unearthed role in hosting the event follows National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci denying his agency’s relationship to the Wuhan lab.

While speaking at the event via telephone, Yuan Zhiming repeatedly emphasized that his lab and China lacked any meaningful regulation of dual-use research. “There’s no regulation in China, there’s no regulation on the identification of some dual-use research, and there’s no regulation on the classification of research or the classification of information,” he explained. “Even China, the biosafety and biosecurity philosophy is regulated by Chinese scientific community, but the dual-use research is not totally regulated. So we need to have some measure or some special program to raise the concern of principal investigators through training.”

Yuan reiterated the sentiment in his closing remarks to the conference, commenting “there’s no regulation on the dual-use identification and classification of some sensitive information, and I think maybe later the Chinese government and the Chinese scientific community will focus on the discussion in this matter.” Since the outbreak of COVID-19, however, Yuan has made rounds on American and Chinese state-run media outlets to discredit the possibility of the virus leaking from his lab.

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“The number of cases reported after the second shot was four times greater than those recorded after the first..”

Israel: Likely Link Between Pfizer Vaccine And Myocarditis In Young Males (RT)

A specially appointed epidemiological team has found “a likelihood of a link” between receiving the second dose of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine and the onset of myocarditis in young men, Israel’s Health Ministry said in a statement. The ministry says the team was set up following reports of cases of heart inflammation, known as myocarditis, among males aged 16 to 30 shortly after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine was administered. The link was found to be stronger in people aged 16-19 relative to other age groups, and weakens as the age of the recipients increases. Most patients who experienced the problem spent up to four days in the hospital, and 95% of the cases were classified as mild, according to the ministry.

The Health Ministry commissioned the study after 275 cases of myocarditis were reported in Israel between December 2020 and May 2021. Nearly 150 cases were recorded after the vaccine was administered. The number of cases reported after the second shot was four times greater than those recorded after the first, the ministry said. Myocarditis is a condition characterized by chest pain, shortness of breath, or palpitations, and can be caused by Covid-19, according to the ministry. While the type of vaccine in question is not directly mentioned in the statement, Israel relies almost exclusively on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and it’s the only product mentioned on the vaccination information page of the Health Ministry website.

Pfizer said in a statement cited by Reuters that it has not recorded a higher rate of myocarditis than would normally be expected in the general population. The pharma giant added that it was aware of the Israeli observations of myocarditis but has not established a causal link to its vaccine. The Israeli Health Ministry says that given the findings, it will review the 12-15-year-old population’s eligibility for the vaccine. The shot was recently approved in the EU for people aged 12 and older.

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Oh, just lovely.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffett To Build New Kind Of Nuclear Reactor In Wyoming (R.)

Power companies run by billionaire friends Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have chosen Wyoming to launch the first Natrium nuclear reactor project on the site of a retiring coal plant. TerraPower, founded by Gates about 15 years ago, and power company PacifiCorp, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, said on Wednesday that the exact site of the Natrium reactor demonstration plant was expected to be announced by the end of the year. Small advanced reactors, which run on different fuels to traditional reactors, are regarded by some as a critical carbon-free technology than can supplement intermittent power sources like wind and solar as states strive to cut emissions that cause climate change. “We think Natrium will be a game-changer for the energy industry,” Gates told a media conference to launch the project in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

“This is our fastest and clearest course to becoming carbon negative,” Wyoming’s governor, Mark Gordon, said. “Nuclear power is clearly a part of my all-of-the-above strategy for energy” in Wyoming, the country’s top coal-producing state. The project features a 345 megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with molten salt-based energy storage that could boost the system’s power output to 500MW during peak power demand. TerraPower said last year that the plants would cost about $1bn. Late last year the US energy department awarded TerraPower $80m in initial funding to demonstrate Natrium technology, and the department has committed additional funding in coming years subject to congressional appropriations.

Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s president and chief executive, said the demonstration plant would take about seven years to build. “We need this kind of clean energy on the grid in the 2030s,” he told reporters. Nuclear power experts have warned that advanced reactors could have higher risks than conventional ones. Fuel for many advanced reactors would have to be enriched at a much higher rate than conventional fuel, meaning the fuel supply chain could be an attractive target for militants looking to create a crude nuclear weapon, a recent report said. Levesque said that the plants would reduce proliferation risks because they reduce overall nuclear waste.

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Not even the US is that crazy.

Why The US Isn’t Going To Nuke Anyone From Orbit Anytime Soon (RT)

Low-orbit space planes have been named as a possible carrier of American nuclear warheads. While theoretically possible, at current technology levels such weapons would be significantly more trouble than they are worth.
According to the director-general of Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey, Yan Novikov, the US has orbital bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Variants of the Boeing X-37 orbital test vehicle, launched in 2010 and officially used for scientific purposes, can theoretically carry up to six warheads, Novikov claimed during a virtual educational forum in Russia in May. In the words of Kyle Mizokami, who wrote an article on this for Popular Mechanics, “this isn’t even a good idea”.

While Mizokami’s take is titled “Don’t believe Russia”, and its main thrust is apparently that Mr. Novikov is hyping up the US orbital nukes threat to boost the sales of Almaz-Antey’s surface-to-space missiles, he does have some good points that explain why the dangers of orbital bombing are more than a little exaggerated. First off, putting nukes on an X-37 to then launch them from orbit will require extensive modification to the weapons, which will only allow two or, at best, three, to be taken on board – not nearly enough for an effective surprise attack. And to carry an element of surprise, it would have to approach Russia from a very specific direction to avoid the radars of early-warning systems – and even so, it won’t be able to hide from visual detection.

Aside from the lack of surprise, there is a long list of problems associated with space planes carrying nuclear payloads. “The idea of placing strategic nuclear weapons in low Earth orbit isn’t new. It emerged with the first successful launches of the Earth’s artificial satellites,” ex-chief of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces, Honored Military Pilot, Colonel-General of Aviation Igor Maltsev says. According to him, for a number of reasons, space projects like this never went beyond concept or, at best, preliminary design. Why was that the case? Technically, the goal of putting these weapons in space is achievable, says Igor Maltsev. Anything can be launched to space. But when the idea is to create a strategic weapons system in orbit, there are a number of challenges that have, so far, prevented any significant progress along these lines.

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“..ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized.”

The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun (Greenwald)

The Department of Homeland Security on Friday issued a new warning bulletin, alerting Americans that domestic extremists may well use violence on the 100th Anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre. This was at least the fourth such bulletin issued this year by Homeland Security (DHS) warning of the same danger and, thus far, none of the fears it is trying to instill into the American population has materialized. The first was a January 14 warning, from numerous federal agencies including DHS, about violence in Washington, DC and all fifty state capitols that was likely to explode in protest of Inauguration Day (a threat which did not materialize). Then came a January 27 bulletin warning of “a heightened threat environment across the United States that is likely to persist over the coming weeks” from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” (that warning also was not realized).

Then there was a May 14 bulletin warning of right-wing violence “to attack higher-capacity targets,” exacerbated by the lifting of COVID lockdowns (which also never happened). And now we are treated to this new DHS warning about domestic extremists preparing violent attacks over Tulsa (it remains to be seen if a DHS fear is finally realized). Just like the first War on Terror, these threats are issued with virtually no specificity. They are just generalized warnings designed to put people in fear about their fellow citizens and to justify aggressive deployment of military and law enforcement officers in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country. A CNN article which wildly hyped the latest danger bulletin about domestic extremists at Tulsa had to be edited with what the cable network, in an “update,” called “the additional information from the Department of Homeland Security that there is no specific or credible threats at this time.”

And the supposed dangers from domestic extremists on Inauguration Day was such a flop that even The Washington Post — one of the outlets most vocal about lurking national security dangers in general and this one in particular — had to explicitly acknowledge the failure: Thousands [of National Guard troops] had been deployed to capitals across the country late last week, ahead of a weekend in which potentially violent demonstrations were predicted by the FBI — but never materialized. Once again on Wednesday, security officials’ worst fears weren’t borne out: In some states, it was close to business as usual. In others, demonstrations were small and peaceful, with only occasional tense moments.

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“The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China.”

Daniel Ellsberg Wants The US To Prosecute Him Under The Espionage Act (IC)

“The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” Gen. Thomas Power, commander of America’s nuclear forces from 1957 to 1963, once said about the use of atomic weapons. “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.” The hold this nuclear lunacy had on the top of the U.S. government is terrifyingly illuminated in a top-secret study of U.S. war plans newly publicized by famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The document, produced by the RAND Corporation and copied by Ellsberg at the same time he exfiltrated the Pentagon Papers from RAND, examines the U.S. response to the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The study’s contents were first reported on May 22 by the New York Times.

The crisis, now completely forgotten, began when China attempted to seize several small islands off its coast from Taiwan. The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China. It is not simply that the officials looked with equanimity on the possibility of killing millions; rather, many seemed frustrated that there were any delays forced upon them by the rest of the government. If China had not changed course, civilization could have ended then and there. Ellsberg is now speaking out about the study, he said in a phone interview, for a straightforward reason: “I got scared.” The issues that led to the 1958 crisis between the U.S. and China have never been resolved; both countries are now ramping up confrontational rhetoric; and most importantly, the strategic rationale that led the U.S. to consider nuclear war then remains exactly the same today.

“You shouldn’t be confident that the current calculations are any less crazy,” Ellsberg said. His apprehension about the potential use of nuclear weapons is intimately linked to another of his key concerns: the Justice Department’s accelerating use of the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute leakers. Its chilling effect on potential whistleblowers makes it less and less likely that Americans will even know what their government is doing, much less be able to do anything about it. Ellsberg hopes his latest revelation will prompt a cultural and perhaps legal reckoning for the Act.

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“Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.”

‘Dying for an iPhone’ (Chris Hedges)

Global capitalists have turned back the clock to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons. In fashionable liberal circles there are, as Noam Chomsky notes, worthy and unworthy victims. Nancy Pelosi has called on global leaders not to attend the Winter Olympics, scheduled to be held in Beijing in February, because of what she called a “genocide” being carried out by the Chinese government against the Uyghur minority.

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof in a column rattled off a list of human rights violations overseen by China’s leader Xi Jinping, writing “[Xi] eviscerates Hong Kong freedoms, jails lawyers and journalists, seizes Canadian hostages, threatens Taiwan and, most horrifying, presides over crimes against humanity in the far western region of Xinjiang that is home to several Muslim minorities.” Not a word about the millions of workers in China who are treated little better than serfs. They live separated from their families, including their children, and housed in overcrowded company dormitories, which sees rent deducted from their paychecks, next to factories that have round-the-clock production, often making products for U.S. corporations. Workers are abused, underpaid and sickened from exposure to chemicals and toxins such as aluminum dust.

The suffering of the working class, within and outside the United States, is as ignored by our corporatized media as the suffering of the Palestinians. And yet, I would argue, it is one of the most important human rights issues of our era, since once workers are empowered, they can fend off other human rights violations. Unless workers can organize, here and in countries such as China, and achieve basic rights and living wages, it will cement into place a global serfdom that will leave workers trapped in the appalling conditions described by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” or Émile Zola‘s 1885 masterpiece “Germinal.”

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Small moves so far, more like virtue signalling.

China Rushes To Pull Back The Yuan From A Three-Year High (CNBC)

China is trying to rein in the yuan as it surges to three-year highs against the U.S. dollar. A stronger yuan makes Chinese goods relatively more expensive to buyers overseas, and has spurred concerns about the competitiveness of Chinese exports — a major contributor to national economic growth. The Chinese yuan traded little changed against the U.S. dollar Thursday after the People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s daily midpoint at 6.3811 versus the greenback. That marked the second-straight day of weaker fixings, reversing six straight trading days of stronger fixings since May 24, according to data from Wind Information.

The PBOC has tried to allow the market to play a greater role in deter mining the yuan’s exchange rate. But the central bank retains some control through daily midpoint fixings against the dollar, allowing the yuan to move 2% higher or lower from that level. The weaker fix followed the central bank’s announcement late Monday that beginning June 15, financial institutions must increase the ratio of their foreign exchange deposits by 2 percentage points — to 7% from 5% currently. The hike forces banks to retain more of their foreign currency holdings, reducing the amount that could be used to influence foreign exchange rates.

It is the first such hike in 14 years since the previous change in May 2007 — before the financial crisis — economists pointed out. They estimate the move will reduce the amount of foreign currency available for long-term trading by $20 billion. Analysts said the exact dollar amount is less significant than the central bank’s message that the yuan will not move in a single direction of continued strengthening against the U.S. dollar.

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With 80% of Japanese against.

Olympics Will Go Ahead, Says Tokyo Games Chief (G.)

The president of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics organising committee, Seiko Hashimoto, has said the Games will go ahead as planned, soon after the Japan’s most senior medical adviser said holding the event under current coronavirus conditions was “not normal”. “We cannot postpone again,” Hashimoto said an interview published on Thursday in the Nikkan Sports newspaper. Shigeru Omi, head of a panel of experts that has been advising the Japanese government on its Covid-19 response since the start of the pandemic, issued his strongest warning yet of the potential risks of holding the Games. “It’s not normal to have the Olympics in a situation like this,” Omi told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, adding that organisers should explain to a sceptical public why it was pushing ahead with preparations.

Most Japanese people do not want Tokyo 2020 to be held this summer, according to recent opinion polls. Medical journals have questioned the wisdom of allowing 90,000 athletes, media, sponsors, officials and support staff to enter the country in July, while medical unions say the Games will place additional pressure on health services. The public broadcaster NHK reported that about 10,000 of the 80,000 volunteers who signed up to help during the Games have quit, but organisers said the lower numbers would not be “particularly problematic” since the decision had already been taken to ban spectators from overseas. “There’s no mistake that concerns over the coronavirus could have been a factor,” as well as scheduling conflicts due to last year’s postponement, the Nikkei business paper quoted Tokyo 2020 chief executive Toshiro Muto as saying.

[..] Tokyo and several other regions are under a state of emergency that is due to end on 20 June. While the rate of infections is falling in the capital, there is concern about the risks posed by new variants and Japan’s slow vaccine rollout. The vaccination programme has gathered pace in recent days, but only 2.7% of Japan’s 126 million population has been fully vaccinated. In an attempt to speed up the process with just 50 days to go before the opening ceremony, the government has said large companies and universities will be able to start inoculating staff and students from 21 June. Japan has avoided the large-scale infections suffered by many other countries, but serious cases have risen during the latest outbreak. It has reported more than 750,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, and about 13,200 deaths, a relatively high number among Asian countries.

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