Apr 032024
 
 April 3, 2024  Posted by at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  38 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Field with Irises near Arles 1888

 

Moscow Condemns Assassination Of Iranian Generals (RT)
Israel Attack on Iranian Consulate And Netanyahu’s Pending Defeat in Gaza (Sp.)
Shia Army: How Iran Formed A Ring Of Enemies Around Israel (Juma)
Trump Posts $175 Million, Preventing Seizure of Buildings in Civil Fraud Case (ET)
It’s This Election That’s The Referendum On Democracy (Tucker Carlson)
Just 8% of Ukrainians Ready To Take Up Arms Against Russia (RT)
Kiev Has Lost More Than 80,000 Troops Since January – Russian MoD (RT)
West to Use Hypothetical Russia-Ukraine Talks to Supply Arms to Zelensky (Sp.)
Ukraine’s Defeat May Help EU Establishment (RT)
Stop Covering Up Kiev Role In Bucha Events – Zakharova (TASS)
Why ISIS Is Now Targeting Geopolitical Enemies Of The West (Ma Xiaolin)
Biden a ‘Threat To Democracy’ – RFK Jr (RT)
Biden Sinks To New Lows Over Moscow Bombing And RussiaGate Fake News (Jay)
Judge Denies Hunter Biden Motions to Dismiss Tax Charges (Turley)
“#arrestme”: JK Rowling Dares Scotland to Enforce Anti-Free Speech Law (Turley)

 

 


Trump post on Truth Social April 1

 

 

Lies about Trump

 

 

 

 

J6
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774734557998162397

 

 

 

 

Netflix
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775194637377974655

 

 

 

 

Targeting consulates and embassies is a road to nowhere good.

Moscow Condemns Assassination Of Iranian Generals (RT)

Russia has rebuked Israel after an airstrike that demolished the Iranian consulate in Damascus on Monday evening. The attack reportedly killed several Iranian diplomats as well as seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including two generals – Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi. Tehran has vowed to avenge their deaths. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday that Moscow views as unacceptable any attack on diplomatic missions, which are protected under the Vienna conventions on diplomatic and consular relations. It noted that bombing of the building, located in a residential area, posed a high risk to Syrian civilians.

“We consider it necessary for all responsible members of the international community to declare their positions clearly and give their legal assessments of this action,” the statement said. It warned that Israel could trigger a major regional escalation with its attacks in Syria and other nations in the region. Israel has not commented on the strike, which its usual practice with such operations. Israeli officials have previously acknowledged targeting Iran-linked forces in Syria, with dozens of such raids attributed to the Jewish state over the years. The White House did not immediately comment on the incident. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday that Washington was “looking into it”. A national security spokesperson quoted by Axios said the US “had no involvement in the strike and we did not know about it ahead of time.” A senior US official told the news outlet that Washington “has communicated this directly to Iran”.

Israel notified its key ally minutes before the strike took place, when its fighter jets were already in the air, the Axios article said. The Israelis allegedly said they were going to kill General Zahedi, but did not offer details of their operation, such as his location at the Iranian consulate. General Zahedi was a senior commander with the Quds Force, the IRGC unit responsible for operations on foreign soil, while General Rahimi was his deputy. Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in a US drone strike during a visit to Iraq in January 2020, was the commander of the same division.

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“So I think Iran’s response would be two-fold in a manner that is not satisfying the Israeli aim of widening the war..”

Israel Attack on Iranian Consulate And Netanyahu’s Pending Defeat in Gaza (Sp.)

Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria suggests that it is trying to “widen” the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip by drawing Iran into it, said Foad Izadi, an associate professor at the University of Tehran’s Department of American Studies. “They have been trying to start a military confrontation between the United States and Iran for many years. And they think that they have an opportunity to have this done fighting Iran using American soldiers,” he told Sputnik, apparently suggesting that the US would be quick to leap to Israel’s defense if the latter were threatened by Tehran. Izadi also remarked that Israel displayed a blatant disregard for international law by attacking a diplomatic compound, which is a violation of the Vienna Convention. “That is what Israelis are trying to do. Netanyahu realizes that he has lost the war in Gaza. He has managed to kill more than 30,000, mostly women and children, without achieving any goals except killing these people and ruining their homes,” Izadi said.

“They say that they want to destroy Hamas, but that’s not a goal they can achieve. Obviously, they would have done that if they could. That’s why criminal acts and genocide in Gaza continue. And Netanyahu realizes that sooner or later this war needs to end. And that would be the end of his prime ministership. And so he’s trying to prolong the war, he’s trying to widen the war,” Izadi added. Noting that Iran’s attempt to seek justice via the UN Security Council may be unsuccessful due to the likelihood of the US vetoing a resolution critical of Israel, Izadi suggested that Tehran may opt to “cause pain for the Israelis so that these types of actions are not repeated.” “Because Iranian officials realize that if there is no pain in engaging in this type of activity, then they will continue,” he elaborated. “So I think Iran’s response would be two-fold in a manner that is not satisfying the Israeli aim of widening the war. I think that’s what Iranian leaders will do.”

WCK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775063630494720093

Gaza

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Did they form it or was it already there?

Shia Army: How Iran Formed A Ring Of Enemies Around Israel (Juma)

On Monday, the Israeli Air Force struck a building near the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital. As a result of the attack, the consulate building was destroyed and the commanders of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) unit, Generals Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Mohammad Hadi Haji Rahimi, were killed. President Ebrahim Raisi has already warned that “this unfair crime won’t go unanswered.” “Zionists must know that they will never achieve their sinister goals with such inhumane actions and, day by day, the resistance front and the disgust and hatred of free nations against their illegitimate nature are being strengthened, and this cowardly crime will also not go unanswered,” he said. What the answer will be is still unknown. However, in recent years, Tehran has managed to become a full-fledged superpower in the region, with support in many countries in the Middle East.

The escalation of the conflict in Gaza, which started with the Hamas-led invasion of Israel last October (“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”) and the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) subsequent military operation that claimed tens of thousands of lives, gave rise to much speculation about the weakness and short-sightedness of the Israeli leadership and the exceptional military training of Israel’s opponents. And it’s not just Hamas that we’re talking about, but Iran. Iran was immediately accused of being involved in the Hamas attack. The WSJ reported that Iran had trained the Palestinians and instructed them on how to break through the Israeli border. Moreover, it was said that Tehran had green-lighted the attack. The detailed coordination of the operation allegedly took place during a meeting between senior members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and two other Iran-backed militant groups in Beirut shortly before October 7. Officers of the IRGC also attended the meeting.

Later, the IRGC stated that the Hamas attack had been planned as revenge for the 2020 murder of the head of the Quds Force (part of the IRGC), General Qassem Soleimani. However, rumors about Iran’s direct involvement in the anti-Israeli operation haven’t been verified. On November 3, 2023, the secretary general of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, publicly stated that Iran had not been involved in operation Al-Aqsa Flood. “The decision behind this operation was 100% Palestinian, and its implementation was 100% Palestinian. [It was launched] in order to draw the attention of the whole world to this problem. Its planners hid it from everyone, even from the movements of the Axis of Resistance,“ he said. “Absolute secrecy is what ensured the brilliant success of the operation through the element of astonishing surprise. The Islamic Republic of Iran publicly supports the resistance movements but it does not exercise any guardianship over them [or] over their leaders.”

Ritter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774948467191767045

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“..the judge and attorney general had access to his finances because of the monitorship requirement, saw a figure close to $464 million cash, and decided that was what they were going to make him pay..”

Trump Posts $175 Million, Preventing Seizure of Buildings in Civil Fraud Case (ET)

Former President Donald Trump has posted $175 million in his New York civil fraud case, meeting the 10-day deadline given on March 25 and staying execution of judgment in the case. The payment prevents any seizure of President Trump’s assets as his appeal of the case is heard. “As promised, President Trump has posted bond. He looks forward to vindicating his rights on appeal and overturning this unjust verdict,” the president’s attorney Alina Habba said in a statement. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the 45th president in 2022, accusing him of inflating his net worth and defrauding insurers and banks, and therefore the public, in Trump Organization annual statements of financial condition. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg and comptroller Jeffrey McConney, and several Trump Organization holding companies were named codefendants in the case presided over by New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron in a three-month bench trial.

The judge ultimately ordered $363 million disgorgement with 9 percent backdated interest, totaling $464 million, with the lion’s share to be paid by President Trump; as well as prohibiting the defendants from holding director positions in any business or legal entity in New York for a period of time, and a minimum three-year monitorship of Trump Organization after which there may be additional penalties. The posting of the judgment amount was not required in order for President Trump to appeal the case, but had been a requirement to stay enforcement of the judgment in the meantime. “I’ll fight this all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary,” President Trump told Fox News days before the deadline. “They can’t take away your property before you’ve had a chance to appeal the decision of a Trump-hating, incompetent judge who has been overturned more than any judge in the state.”

Days before President Trump posted bond, he said on social media that he had nearly $500 million in cash but intended to use much of it on his presidential campaign. He accused his political opponents of trying to make him spend that cash fund on legal battles rather than on his campaign for president. State law would have required President Trump to post the full judgment amount within 30 days in order to stay the execution of judgment, but the appellate court lowered the $454 million requirement to $175 million on the last day of the deadline. It gave him a 10-day window to post the new amount, and did not comment on the underlying reasons for the change. President Trump said the appellate division’s ruling was further evidence that the original bond requirement was unreasonable.

“This is a confrontation between a Judge and those that rule above him – A very bad situation in which to place New York State and the Rule of Law!” President Trump stated of the appellate decision. “This is the 5th time in this case that he has been overturned, a record. His credibility, and that of Letitia James, has been shattered.” Justice Engoron, who presided over the bench trial and issued the massive disgorgement figure. The attorney general had asked for $250 million in disgorgement before trial, and changed that number to $370 million near the end of the trial. President Trump claimed in a press conference that the judge and attorney general had access to his finances because of the monitorship requirement, saw a figure close to $464 million cash, and decided that was what they were going to make him pay. He told reporters he did have the cash necessary to stay judgment, but wanted to use it to campaign and not satisfy who he described as “crooked” officials.

Putting all his cash into an escrow account where neither he nor the state could touch it for the duration of the appeal was one option to stay judgment. A bond was another, and would not have required President Trump to move his cash reserves, but would have required him to have higher amounts of cash to serve as collateral—$577 million, by his attorneys’ estimates, after negotiations with 30-plus surety companies fell through. For weeks, defense attorneys argued in the appellate division that securing a $464 million bond was “impossible.” Surety companies just don’t issue bonds that big, they argued. A second problem was that for them to consider doing so they would have needed 120 percent in cash as collateral plus a high premium or two. This came out to be far more cash than Trump Organization had, as a real estate company.

Watters

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X thread. “If Joe Biden gets reelected, democracy is a freaking joke..”

It’s This Election That’s The Referendum On Democracy (Tucker Carlson)

Lex Fridman: You said some degree the election was rigged. Was it stolen?
Tucker Carlson: It was a hundred percent stolen. Are you joking?
Lex Fridman: It was rigged to that large of a degree?
Tucker Carlson: Yeah. They completely change the way people vote right before the election on the basis of COVID, which had nothing to do with-
Lex Fridman: So in that way it was rigged, meaning manipulated.

Tucker Carlson: One hundred percent. Then you censor the information people are allowed to get, anyone who complains about COVID… Which is like, by the way, it might’ve hurt Trump. But I mean it’s like whatever. I mean you could play it many different ways. You can’t have censorship in a democracy by definition. Here’s how it works. The people rule. They vote for representatives to carry their agenda to the capitol city and get it enacted. That’s how they’re in charge. And then every few years they get to reassess the performance of those people in an election. In order to do that, they need access, unfettered access to information. And no one, particularly not people who are already in power, is allowed to tell them what information they can have.

They have to have all information that they want, whether the people in charge want it or don’t want it or think it’s true or think it’s false, it doesn’t matter. And the second you don’t have that, you don’t have a democracy. It’s not a free election, period. And that’s very clear in other countries, I guess. But it’s not clear here. But I would say it’s this election that… It took me a while to come to this, but it’s this election that’s the referendum on democracy. Biden is senile. He’s literally senile. He can’t talk, he can’t walk. The whole world knows that, leave our borders. Everybody in the world knows it. A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud, period. Who would vote for a senile man? He literally can’t talk. And nobody I’ve ever met thinks he’s running the US government because he’s not. And so I think the world is looking on at this coming election and saying… And a lot of the world hates Trump. Okay, it’s not an endorsement of Trump, but it’s just true. If Joe Biden gets reelected, democracy is a freaking joke. That’s just true.

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“The Institute “has been trying to avoid surveys directly related to the military action” because mobilization is a “sensitive issue” of state policy..”

Just 8% of Ukrainians Ready To Take Up Arms Against Russia (RT)

Most Ukrainians expect their country to win in the armed conflict with Russia, but just 8% are willing to fight to further their cause, the head of a leading Kiev-based polling agency has claimed, in an interview published on Tuesday. The Ukrainian leadership has said that it is seeking to boost the military’s ranks by up to 500,000. Additional troops are required to relieve forces on the frontline, some of which have not been properly rotated in years, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has claimed. Vladimir Paniotto of the International Institute of Sociology discussed how the Ukrainian people’s worldview is reflected in research conducted by his organization with local news outlet Ukrainskaya Pravda.

They tend to “wish for conflicting things,” he mused, such as capitalist liberalization alongside robust social support by the state, or democracy as well as the “strong arm” of the government. The conundrum is present in what Ukrainians are willing to do to defeat Russia – an outcome that they overwhelmingly believe will end the ongoing hostilities. ”Certainly, many people are willing to act, to send donations or work as volunteers,” Paniotto said. “But facing a direct risk to life and taking part in military action – that is much harder… We estimate that the share of those willing to take arms is roughly 8% across all categories.” The figure may be overestimated, since the pollster takes the responses at face value without conducting follow-up studies to confirm the respondents’ true intentions. The Institute “has been trying to avoid surveys directly related to the military action” because mobilization is a “sensitive issue” of state policy, he explained.

The Ukrainian parliament is considering a major reform of the military system, which would facilitate the draft, including by imposing serious penalties for evasion. Fighting-age Ukrainian men residing in foreign nations, for example, would not be able to replace their expired passports without the consent of a conscription officer after the bill goes into force, MP Fyodor Venislavsky told the media last week. The lawmaker is a member of the parliamentary Committee for National Security, Defense and Intelligence. The Russian military said on Tuesday that Ukrainian frontline losses since January have surpassed 80,000.

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No wonder there are few volunteers.

Kiev Has Lost More Than 80,000 Troops Since January – Russian MoD (RT)

Ukrainian forces have lost more than 80,000 troops since the beginning of the year, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said on Tuesday, adding that the Russian military is continuing to reduce “the enemy’s combat potential.” More than 14,000 units of military hardware have also been destroyed by Russian forces since January, including 1,200 tanks and other armored combat vehicles. During the same period, Moscow has liberated some 403 square kilometers of Russia’s new territories, Shoigu said. Despite Kiev’s lack of success on the battlefield, the Ukrainian leadership “is still trying to convince its Western sponsors of its ability to resist the Russian Army,” he said. To do so, Kiev has resorted to terrorism and long-range strikes on Russian territories, targeting the civilian population, the minister added.

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Not the first time..

West to Use Hypothetical Russia-Ukraine Talks to Supply Arms to Zelensky (Sp.)

The West will use hypothetical negotiations between Moscow and Kiev to supply weapons to Ukraine and to regroup its forces, Konstantin Gavrilov, the head of the Russian delegation at the talks in Vienna on military security and arms control, told Sputnik. “Even if we imagine the hypothetical possibility of resuming negotiations, it is clear that the [Kiev] regime’s curators will use them to give the Ukrainian armed forces time to rest, pump them up with weapons, and complete a regrouping of troops,” Gavrilov said in an interview dedicated to the 75th anniversary of NATO marked on April 4. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C. on April 4, 1949.

A repeat of a scenario that emerged after the March 2022 talks in Istanbul when the Ukrainian armed forces received time to rest is unacceptable for Russia, Gavrilov added. Gavrilov also said that the West will use hypothetical negotiations between Moscow and Kiev to supply weapons to Ukraine and to help Kiev regroup its forces. “We have been through this before after the Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022, and the repetition of such a scenario is unacceptable to us. Therefore, at the moment, the future of the Ukrainian conflict is being decided on the battlefield, where our troops hold the initiative along the entire front line,” Gavrilov said in an interview dedicated to the 75th anniversary of NATO marked on April 4.

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“If Ukraine’s position weakens, there may be a ‘rallying behind the flag effect’ more favorable to the forces in place..”

Ukraine’s Defeat May Help EU Establishment (RT)

With polls showing ‘nationalist’ parties surging in popularity ahead of the upcoming European Parliament election, Kiev’s worsening situation could prove useful to the bloc’s powers that be, according to a new book by French investigative journalist Charles Sapin. Most of the EU has been outspoken in supporting the Ukrainian government in the conflict with Russia, sending an estimated €77 billion ($83 billion) worth of weapons, equipment, ammunition and even cash to Kiev. Sapin’s analysis, however, implies that bad news from the battlefield could bolster the European People’s Party (EPP) and the second-largest group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) in upcoming elections. “If Ukraine’s position weakens, there may be a ‘rallying behind the flag effect’ more favorable to the forces in place,” he was quoted as saying by Politico EU on Monday.

Sapin is a reporter for the weekly Le Point who spent six years researching what he calls the “nationalist” parties that form the Identity and Democracy (ID) bloc in the European parliament – such as Hungary’s Fidesz, Portugal’s Chega, Spain’s Vox, France’s National Rally, Brothers of Italy and the Sweden Democrats. The final result was the book called ‘Les Moissons de la Colere’ (The Harvests of Wrath), presented as a deep dive into “nationalist Europe.” One major weakness of the parties in the ID grouping, according to Sapin, is that they have different opinions on the Ukraine conflict. Nationalists’ numbers might be rising but they are “isolated” in Brussels because of their particularism, he contends. Their victories in the upcoming election would move the needle to the right, but to the benefit of the EPP, currently the majority group. This may help explain why French President Emmanuel Macron brought up Ukraine at a recent brainstorming session about the upcoming elections.

Amid the strategy discussions the French leader suddenly voiced a concern that Ukraine “could fall very quickly,” according to sources that spoke with Politico. He then set up a ‘New Europeans’ coalition, an alliance of liberal parties from France, Denmark, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – long the sole dissenter when it came to aiding Kiev – doubled down on calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine and a negotiated peace. According to Sapin, parties like Orban’s have gained power thanks to semantic tricks and ideological acrobatics, converting “old bourgeois” voters by talking about immigration, identity and the environment and abandoning calls for leaving the EU. His book includes insights from both the closest political advisers to Orban, from Italian PM Giorgia Meloni and French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen – and from their political enemies.

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“Bucha” has become a curious narrative.

Stop Covering Up Kiev Role In Bucha Events – Zakharova (TASS)

Russia is calling upon international organizations to stop covering up for the Kiev regime and its role in perpetrating the events almost two years ago in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, and instead to push for a thorough investigation, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a comment ahead of the second anniversary of what she called the staged incident in Bucha. “Once again, we demand that international organizations stop covering up for the Kiev regime and instead work toward conducting a thoroughgoing investigation that will, at long last, disclose the names of those killed, the time and cause of their deaths <…> as well as of those responsible for that terrible crime committed by the Kiev regime,” Zakharova said.

Meanwhile, numerous previous calls by Russia for international organizations, including agencies of the United Nations, to conduct a serious investigation of precisely what transpired in Bucha two years ago have to date remained unanswered, the Russian diplomat added. “Multiple Russian calls on international organizations, including appeals to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, to investigate every detail of what happened <…> in Bucha or [reveal] other information remain unanswered,” Zakharova lamented. “It shows that the organizers of that deadly operation have something to conceal,” she said. According to Zakharova, this year, Ukrainian officials will be pursuing the goal of preventing the international community from focusing too much on the dire situation in Ukraine and along the line of engagement.

Russian Investigative Committee Chairman Alexander Bastrykin said in April 2022 that a criminal investigation had been launched under Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Public Dissemination of False Information about the Use of the Russian Armed Forces”) following a Ukrainian false flag operation in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev. He noted that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry had provided video footage purportedly taken in Bucha to Western media outlets, describing it as proof of mass killings of civilians, in a bid to discredit the Russian Armed Forces. However, statements made by the mayor of Bucha on March 31, 2022, combined with other reports, have substantiated the fact that the Russian Army pulled out of the town on March 30. Moreover, a video filmed by Ukrainians that surfaced on social media immediately after the withdrawal of Russian troops made no mention at all of the alleged killing of civilians in the town.

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X thread by Arnaud Bertrand.

Why ISIS Is Now Targeting Geopolitical Enemies Of The West (Ma Xiaolin)

[..] a top Chinese international relations scholar (Ma Xiaolin, director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at Zhejiang International Studies University) shares his view on why ISIS is now targeting geopolitical enemies of the West. I translated his article in full (original in Chinese here: https://tidenews.com.cn/news.html?id=2754250) below:

“On March 26th, a commuter vehicle for the Dasu Hydropower Project in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Pakistan, was attacked by terrorists, resulting in the deaths of five Chinese personnel and one Pakistani staff member. This was the second such suicide bombing attack on the project in three years, with “Islamic State Khorasan Province” (ISKP) being a major suspect. Prior to this, on March 22nd, a serious terrorist attack occurred near Moscow, killing 143 people and injuring nearly 200, with ISKP claiming responsibility. On January 3rd, a series of suicide bombings in Kerman, Iran, killed nearly a hundred people, with ISKP also claiming responsibility. Within three months, Iran, Russia, and China became targets of terrorist attacks, indicating that the Islamic State, which had long considered the US and Europe as enemies, is changing its attack direction, increasingly targeting countries considered adversaries by the US and Europe.

This represents a new trend of turning enemies into friends and shifting disaster eastward, along with submitting a declaration of intent to traditional foes. Following the Moscow attack, Russian security agencies arrested eight suspects, confirming them to be Tajikistan nationals hired for the attack. This atypical “Islamic State” terrorist attack, which involved fleeing instead of a suicide mission, was immediately claimed by ISKP, which also released on-site video evidence. Before the end of 2017, the Islamic State was essentially defeated as a territorial entity, suffering a fatal blow and being forced to disband and go underground, with its focus shifting from West Asia to Central Asia. The Khorasan branch, active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, became the main force, taking up the banner of terrorism and frequently acting, gradually adjusting its survival rules and strategic direction.

Over the years, there have been signs that the Islamic State’s targets for revenge have clearly shifted to Eastern countries, no longer viewing the US and Europe as primary enemies, and completely deviating from its original goals of ending US global dominance and “liberating Palestine”. In the past six months, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has caused heavy casualties. The Iran-led “Axis of Resistance” has pressured Israel in various ways, with China and Russia also actively promoting a ceasefire. However, the Islamic State has launched attacks on Iran, Russia, and even China, leading some to speculate that it may have aligned with the United States or even come under control of Israel’s Mossad.

Despite the US indirectly or directly warning Iran and Russia of Islamic State attacks, suspicions remain. The defeat of the Islamic State in the Middle East was a collective achievement of the international anti-terrorism alliance, credited to both the US-led 62-nation coalition’s continuous airstrikes and the close cooperation of the “Shia Crescent” led by Russia and Iran, especially in ground combat and siege warfare. However, the continuous attacks by Islamic State remnants on Iran and Russia, ignoring the reality of “Israel killing people with American knives,” indicate their use of complex geopolitical conflicts to adjust policies and directions, seeking survival by allying with former enemies.

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“President Biden is the first candidate in history – the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

Biden a ‘Threat To Democracy’ – RFK Jr (RT)

President Joe Biden could be a bigger danger to US democracy than former president and presumptive 2024 election rival Donald Trump, another presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has said. Biden is the first president in US history to mobilize federal agencies to silence his political opponents, the politician stated. Speaking on CNN on Monday, Kennedy Jr pointed to his being blocked on various social media platforms during Biden’s term in office and branded this as an effort to “censor political speech” that violated the First Amendment of America’s constitution. He also attributed the ‘censorship’ to pressure from the White House. Pressed by CNN’s Erin Burnett on who he believes poses a bigger threat to democracy, Kennedy stated that he still views Biden as a bigger danger, even though Trump played a role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.

“The question was, who is a worse threat to democracy? And what I would say is … I’m not going to answer that question. But I can argue that President Biden is, because the First Amendment, Erin, is the most important,” the candidate told presenter Erin Burnett. “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history – the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.” The politician’s Instagram page was suspended in 2021 over what its parent company, Meta, described as “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” The account was reinstated in 2022, shortly after Kennedy announced his election campaign. In December, the Supreme Court barred him from joining a challenge to a case dealing with the Biden administration’s communication with social media platforms over posts the government considered disinformation. The politician also had a similar case pending in a lower court.

Last year, Kennedy testified before the House Judiciary’s subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, where he spoke as part of a House Republicans’ inquiry into alleged social media censorship against conservatives. The politician also made freedom of speech a focus of his presidential campaign. Kennedy, 70, is the son of former US Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the nephew of former US President John F Kennedy, each of whom was assassinated during the 1960s. He has gained notoriety recently for being a prominent critic of vaccines, in addition to calling for an end to “proxy wars” conducted by the US – but some of his critics have dismissed many of his positions as being conspiratorial in nature. The former Democratic Party candidate is now campaigning as an independent ahead of the November vote.

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1774977436561670316
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775338106398372288

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“The crafted fake news narrative of everything starting from the day of the Russian invasion will no longer wash once Russian forces overthrow the Zelensky government and the West will be humiliated beyond its wildest nightmares..”

Biden Sinks To New Lows Over Moscow Bombing And RussiaGate Fake News (Jay)

Are we all preparing for the inevitable? Trump returning to the White House? It would seem that certainly the Biden administration is doing just that given recent events. Moscow’s terror attack has taken centre stage of world news in recent days yet not one western journalist seems able to call out the ISIS warning from the U.S. for what it was: sham. And not only the warning was disingenuous but the sheer bad taste vitriol of Washington which was on a level only matched by the suspicious outright and swift rejection that Kiev had no part in the attack. Bad taste seems to be the hallmark of the Biden administration with a failed foreign policy which trails in second place. If Americans didn’t know before that the U.S. could not control two proxy wars on two separate fronts, now they know. As the aid parcels which drop onto Palestinians – sometimes even killing them – makes a statement in itself, it’s interesting to see how Biden is always looking in the past in almost everything he does.

Even RussiaGate has been dragged out of its dank grave and had new life breathed into by Biden’s press people who are now preparing the American public for a Biden failure in December. The biggest fear for Biden is the “hack and leak” attack which pushed many democrats over a line with Hillary Clinton when her emails revealed what an utterly morose political figure she is. Who could forget that “there are terrorists there [in Syria] but they’re on our side” comment when talking about the early days of the Syrian crisis which started in 2011? For Biden, there must be many troves for the Russians to leak at the given moment, with corruption in Ukraine being at the top of the list. But one salient question might be, does Putin even need to worry about “election interference”? This comical expression, coined by the Americans and slung at Moscow is done in such a fashion as to trick the humble observer that it was a dirty Russian invention despite the Americans practically inventing the practice and using it to their own means for the last 70 years in Latin America.

The reality is that Putin doesn’t need to interfere. He’s on a win-win ticket as, if Biden is re-elected the then senile U.S. president will be defeated in Ukraine and the American people will not only see all of the corruption stories emerge from that country but also the link between the Obama administration’s election meddling in 2014 to overthrow a Russian-aligned leader and today’s war. The crafted fake news narrative of everything starting from the day of the Russian invasion will no longer wash once Russian forces overthrow the Zelensky government and the West will be humiliated beyond its wildest nightmares into signing whatever is handed to them. This, in part, explains how the NATO press machine – and most European governments – are going into overdrive on the subject of the need to beef up Europe’s military capabilities. This is entirely a ruse to act as a distraction for when Kiev falls and western elites are ready with their soundbites. The Russians are coming. We told you so.

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“As the Court stated at the hearing, Defendant filed his motion without any evidence..”

Judge Denies Hunter Biden Motions to Dismiss Tax Charges (Turley)

Despite hours of argument by the counsel for Hunter Biden, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Scarsi denied his eight motions to dismiss tax charges with a stringing rebuke that the defense omits one thing from its argument: actual evidence. Hunter Biden has been arguing that he is the victim of selective prosecution despite a documented history of receiving special treatment as the son of the President. However, he has proven a key witness against himself in swatting down defenses raised by his counsel and publishing self-incriminating facts in his book. The filings also did not address the fact that the Justice Department not only allowed the statute of limitations to run on major crimes, but sought to finalize an obscene plea agreement with no jail time for Hunter. It only fell apart when a judge decided to ask a couple of cursory questions of the prosecutor, who admitted that he had never seen an agreement this generous for a defendant.

Special Counsel David Weiss noted in his filing that they filed new charges only after Hunter’s legal counsel refused to change the agreement and insisted that it remained fully enforceable. One only has to look at the series of superseding indictments against Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to see how Hunter continues to receive special treatment. Rather than the four original counts, Menendez now faces 18 counts with his wife, Nadine Arslanian Menendez, and alleged co-conspirators Wael Hana and Fred Daibes. What is most notable is not the proliferation of counts but the lack of comparative charges in the pending case against Hunter Biden. Some of us have long raised concerns over the striking similarity in the alleged conduct in both cases, but the absence of similar charges against the president’s son. Judge Scarsi made fast work of the Biden filings as entirely insufficient to dismiss these charges. Abby Lowell and the defense team seem to be doubling down on the same claims despite the uniform rejection by courts.

The judge noted: “As the Court stated at the hearing, Defendant filed his motion without any evidence. The motion is remarkable in that it fails to include a single declaration, exhibit, or request for judicial notice. Instead, Defendant cites portions of various Internet news sources, social media posts, and legal blogs. These citations, however, are not evidence.” Lowell disagreed with the court’s order and pledged “to vigorously pursue Mr. Biden’s challenges to the abnormal way the Special Counsel handled this investigation and charged the case.” In truth, the “abnormal” treatment of Hunter was giving him advance notice of attempts to interview him and searches of Biden property. It was allowing the statute of limitations to run despite having an agreement on the table to keep potential felonies alive. It was trying to secure a plea agreement that even the prosecutor admitted in court was like nothing he had ever seen in his career.

The court even makes reference to Schrödinger’s cat, a paradox suggested by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935 that a cat in a thought experiment could be viewed simultaneously both alive and dead: “The Court understands that its decision rests on an interpretation of the agreement neither party advocated—that the Diversion Agreement is a binding contract but performance of its terms is not yet required. The Court, therefore, invites the parties to stipulate to further pretrial motion practice to the extent there are additional disputes that arise from the Court’s Schrödinger’s cat-esque construction of Defendant’s immunity under the Diversion Agreement.”

Bobulinski

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“April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

“#arrestme”: JK Rowling Dares Scotland to Enforce Anti-Free Speech Law (Turley)

We have previously discussed the growing anti-free speech movement in Scotland with the expanding criminalization of political and religious speech. The new Scottish law is a perfect nightmare for free speech, expanding the potential of a jail sentence for merely insulting language. In response, author JK Rowling has taken a stand and dared the Scottish police to come and arrest her for criticizing transgender status. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 illustrates how these laws create a slippery slope of speech criminalization as more and more speech is banned. We previously discussed the law when it was first introduced. The new crime covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything reasonably “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.”

It is enough that a person is found to have likely understood that the comments would be abusive or insulting as opposed to intending to be abusive or insulting. For that ill-defined crime, you can be sent to jail for seven years. Police officers are currently being given a two-hour training program to enforcing the law. Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign. Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns. On April 1, Rowling posted a reference to various trans campaigners and other individuals as women. She then ended the thread with “April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”

She stated “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.” Even if meant as a joke, Scottish censorship laws have never been a laughing matter with comedians raising objections. That could clearly fall within the law. The law is so broad that it allows arbitrary enforcement. To that end, Rowling made it plain: “I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.#arrestme.” The law is a disgrace, but hardly new. Free speech has been in a free fall in the United Kingdom as well as other Western countries. I discuss this trend in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.

The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates. A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers. Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.” Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.” We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crackdown on free speech. Scotland has now pulled ahead in the race to the bottom of speech criminalization. The home of David Hume and Adam Smith is now imposing laws as stringent as those founds in Iran, Russia, and China. It is a shocking denial of a right that once defined Western Civilization

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Legend

 

 

Hitchens

 

 

VdB
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775285512426660206

 

 

1903

 

 

 

 

Baby owl

 

 

Alien

 

 

Catfish

 

 

Baby elephant

 

 

Faa Sai
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775051957352235364

 

 

 

 

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Apr 092022
 
 April 9, 2022  Posted by at 9:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Head and guitar 1927

 

“The Russians” Commit Yet Another “Atrocity” (Saker)
US Oil Imports From Russia Increase By 43% (AMD)
US Lawmakers Welcomed Georgian Warlord Who Boasts Of War Crimes In Ukraine (GZ)
Leviathan Floundering (Kunstler)
Worsening Food Price Increases Gain Global Attention (CTH)
833 Athlete Cardiac Arrests and Serious Issues, 540 Dead, Following Jab (DE)
Shanghai Reports 7th Day Of Record Cases
Billionaires Are Backing Bitcoin Over “Fiat Fraud” (ZH)
Durham Seeks to Force Clinton Campaign and DNC to Turn Over Evidence (Turley)
Hunter Biden Makes Watergate Look Like ‘Tiddlywinks’ – Rep. Tenney (NM)
French Elections: Marine Le Pen Gains Ground On ‘Feverish’ Macron (Exp.)
The Death of Representative Democracy (ITT)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These things have numbers written on them. Should be easy to find out.

“The Russians” Commit Yet Another “Atrocity” (Saker)

The big news today is that those evil Russkies have fired a Tochka-U missile with a cluster warhead at the city of Kramatorsk, killing scores of innocent civilians. The “entire civilized world” is disgusted and immediately announced even MORE sanctions, MORE condemnation and MORE anti-Russian virtue signalling. Minor problem: Russia does not have Tochka-U missiles, which are 30 year old Soviet missiles which have been far surpassed by modern Russian missiles (of which Russia has plenty enough). How do we know that it was Tochka-U which was used? Because of the tail section which separates from the warhead during the flight. Here it is:

No Russian tactical missile in service with such a tail section, and only the Ukrainian Tochka-U have.


Tochka-U tail and control surfaces

How much of a problem is that for the Empire of Hate and Lies? Very minor, really. Remember that their PSYOPS are directed at two kind of people: • Those with low intelligence • Those who don’t care about the truth. Russia did not have the old-model Buk which allegedly shot down MH-17 either, which did not stop the Empire of Hate and Lies to instantly blame the shooting down on Russia. And Russia has long liquidated her chemical weapons stores, unlike the US or the UK, by the way. But who cares about that when hating Russia and Russians is all which really matters? In fact, this is straight out of the western PSYOPs book:


• Execute a false flag, then • INSTANTLY blame Russia and lean on all your colonies to do the same in the name of western “solidarity” Thereby make absolutely certain that no real investigation can take place or, if it does, it will be so far down the road that nobody will care. So we have a major false flag in Bucha, and now we have that Tochka-U in Kramatorsk. What will come next? God only knows, but the goal is to associate “Russians” with “atrocities” in what is left of the mind of the eagerly scatophaging serfs in Zone A.

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When you weren’t looking….

US Oil Imports From Russia Increase By 43% (AMD)

According to the Deputy Secretary of the Russian Security Council Mikhail Popov on Sunday, the US increased its imports of Russian oil by 43% in the last week, totaling 100,000 barrels a day. Popov told Komsomolskaya Pravda news that “the US forced Europeans to introduce anti-Russian sanctions, while not only continuing to import oil from Russia but increasing volume of [oil] deliveries for the past week by 43% up to 100,000 barrels per day!” The Deputy Secretary also detailed that Washington imported fertilizers from Russia while listing them as essential goods. The US last month announced a ban on Russian oil, natural gas, and coal imports as a response to the Russian operation in Ukraine.


Former US colonel and Eurasia Center Vice President, Earl Rasmussen, said the European Union’s latest sanctions and economic retaliation against Russia will backfire and cause a massive recession in Europe. Rasmussen, who previously said that US troop deployment to Ukraine deters efforts to solve the conflict, said the European sanctions against Russia will throw Europe into a “historical recession”. The colonel stated that despite repeated assurances from Biden, Washington is in no condition to replace Russia’s plentiful and cheap supplies of natural gas to Europe with any alternative energy supply that is remotely comparable in either scale or cost.

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2017.

US Lawmakers Welcomed Georgian Warlord Who Boasts Of War Crimes In Ukraine (GZ)

Having taken up arms against Russia for a fifth time, Georgian Legion commander Mamuka Mamulashvili has bragged on video about his unit carrying out field executions of captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine. While Western media pundits howled about images of dead bodies in the city of Bucha, echoing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy’s accusation that Russia is guilty of “genocide,” they have largely overlooked the apparent admission of atrocities by an avowed ally of the United States who was welcomed on Capitol Hill by senior lawmakers overseeing congressional foreign policy committees.

Having fought in four wars against Russia, and despite allegations that he played a leading role in the massacre of 49 protesters in Kiev’s Maidan Square in 2014, Mamulashvili has taken multiple trips to the United States, where he received a warm welcome from members of Congress, the New York Police Department, and Ukrainian diaspora community. In an interview this April, Mamulashvili, was asked about a video showing Russian fighters who had been extrajudicially executed in Dmitrovka, a town just five miles from Bucha. Mamulashvili was candid about his unit’s take-no-prisoners tactics, though he has denied involvement in the specific crimes depicted.

“We will not take Russian soldiers, as well as Kadyrovites [Chechnyan fighters]; in any case, we will not take prisoners, not a single person will be captured,” Mamulashvili said, implying that his fighters execute POWs. “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner,” Mamulashvili emphasized Executions of enemy combatants are considered war crimes under the Geneva Convention. Western governments continue to block a Russian request for a United Nations investigation into alleged massacres in Bucha, where scores of corpses were photographed following the Russian withdrawal from the city, some with hands bound and shot execution style – as Mamulashvili described doing to prisoners.

While the events in Bucha have become a source of outrage and heated contention, a clear case of war crimes by Ukrainian forces which took place just five miles down the road on March 30 as Russian troops withdrew has received a more muted response despite coverage by the New York Times. The macabre footage shows Russian paratroopers dead or bleeding out in the road, some with their hands clearly bound — reportedly the handiwork of the Georgian Legion.

Zelensky Azov

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“..our broke-down Bretton Woods fiat money system becomes the new “barbarous relic” of global finance..”

Leviathan Floundering (Kunstler)

Is it true, as is hotly rumored now, that the mRNA shots lead uniformly to autoimmune deficiency syndrome? Ditto the alarming rise in cancer cases among the vaxxed… ditto heart damage, organ damage, grievous neurological damage? We’ll know a lot more about this in May and June, and it’s hard to imagine what the collective emotional reaction will be if all that turns out to be true. Never in history will so many face the prospect of an untimely death, and at the hands of such banal bureaucratic villainy. Will they just compliantly check out of this world, the same way they lined up for their vaxxes and boosters, or finally rage against that machine?

The latest venture in unreality these days spills out of Russia’s operation in Ukraine. The mind-fuckery over it sure seems advantageously amplified here as a cover for the tragic developments in the Covid-19 vaxx melodrama and other domestic torments. All the evidence suggests that our country’s leadership wanted this war to happen in the worst way. We set up the provocations in Donbas and let’er rip. Now we posture on the sidelines, crying crocodile tears, pretending to help while sabotaging peace talks. What’s followed in our attempts to punish The Evil Putin (the source of all our problems) is the most feckless fiasco of unanticipated consequences since Kaiser Wilhelm gave the go-ahead to Austria to punish Serbia over the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Voila: a World War. Only in this case it’s looking more like a suicidal economic war by Western Civ on itself.

How are those sanctions working out? No fuel for German industry… no fertilizer for Iowa farmers… no nickel and other metals to make machine parts for Europe and America…. And suddenly, having kicked Russia out of the international trade payment clearing system (SWIFT), we’ve provoked them to resort to backing the ruble with gold, meaning that our broke-down Bretton Woods fiat money system becomes the new “barbarous relic” of global finance, leaving the West to pound sand down a rat hole, while the other two-thirds of the world do actual business for commodities that modern life can’t do without. The result of all that? America and its partners in Western Civ resign from modern life and go medieval. Everything about America is looking more and more medieval — our rough living conditions, our lawlessness, our violent entertainments, our Hobbesian racketeering, our occult sexual preoccupations, our depraved elites, our quack science. Our center has not been holding for so long that hardly anyone even remembers where the center used to be. And now the bottom is falling out.

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This is what topples governments.

Worsening Food Price Increases Gain Global Attention (CTH)

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported on Friday they are recording the highest Food Price Index since they started recording thirty years ago. With record highs in prices for cereals, vegetable oils, dairy and meats. This issue has been a slow burning fuse toward the biggest powder keg in modern history, and it is about to get very serious. We have been warning about it since last fall {Go Deep}. In the most deliberate and painstaking ways possible, we have been urging everyone to take this issue seriously. The background cause is complex and started with the 2020 government response to the pandemic. U.S. and international government intervention in the food supply process has been FUBAR from the beginning.


Every action taken since early 2020 has been one bad policy after another; building failure upon failure, crisis upon crisis, bad decision upon bad decision, bringing us to a precipice summed up by saying “the absence of food will change things.” Some will say the food prices we are about to experience –and the crisis it will create– was deliberate. Others will say this was the cumulative outcome of major failures on the part of the government. At this point the former makes more sense, and the latter looks like a justification and excuse, because if government entities were really serious about food prices and shortages, they would be taking pragmatic steps to mitigate the problem; they are not.

There are simple things government could do, such as helping farmers offset targeted fertilizer costs, providing relief for diesel fuel and energy costs, and taking other simple steps that would help the agricultural industry. Instead of responding with the urgency this would demand, the collective government action has been to ignore the problem (talk soundbites), and give speeches about using subsidies to offset the end result (consumers) – without ever addressing the root cause. All this while fueling conflict in Ukraine and chasing radical energy policies under the guise of global climate change.


The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) keeps track of food prices and projections using a global index. What they are calculating, and what they are projecting based on the current calculations, is a major increase in food prices combined with a major increase in food scarcity due to the unaffordability of food products. The baseline of 100 is the monthly rate of change for a basket of food products using the period from 2014 to 2016. The current rate of change is indexing at 159.3, meaning the monthly increases in price are almost 60% higher than the base period. Trying to chart this rate of index is almost impossible, as it seems literally exponential. (red line in graphic) In 2020, the monthly rate of change increased to an index of around 110. In 2021, the monthly rate of increase went from 110 to around 135. In the first three months of 2022, the index has jumped from 135 to almost 160 (in three months), and there is no end in sight.

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“We’re doing this anonymously because we’ve seen people viciously attacked and threatened for doing things like this, so we’re not going to open ourselves or any of our contacts to that.”

833 Athlete Cardiac Arrests and Serious Issues, 540 Dead, Following Jab (DE)

A total of 15 players were unable to finish the Miami Open 2022 tennis tournament, including the male and female favourites. All of the players must be “fully vaccinated” to compete, the Liberty Daily wrote, “just as we’ve noted for several months, most major sports have been hit with ‘inexplicable’ medical conditions popping up in young and otherwise healthy athletes, including our report that three cyclists fell in March alone.” The so-called health professionals running the Covid “vaccine” programs around the world keep repeating that “the Covid vaccine is a normal vaccine and it is safe and effective.” But as of the end of last month, Good Sciencing has recorded 833 athletes, worldwide, who have had cardiac arrests or other serious issues, with 540 dead, post-Covid injection.

Post-vaccination injuries in athletes include cardiac arrest; blood clots or thrombosis; stroke; irregular heartbeat; arrhythmia; neuropathy; and, death. With most of the post-injection injuries being cardiac arrests. Good Sciencing is a small team of investigators, news editors, journalists, and truth seekers. They state on their website: “It doesn’t really matter who we are. What really matters is that we care carrying on an investigation and we’re presenting the evidence we’ve found, almost all of it documented in mainstream media publications. We’re doing this anonymously because we’ve seen people viciously attacked and threatened for doing things like this, so we’re not going to open ourselves or any of our contacts to that.”


As well as receiving new cases and updates from alert readers, they note that they are also receiving hate mail and death threats. Good Sciencing has a non-exhaustive and continuously growing list of mainly young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021/2022 after receiving one or more Covid injections. You can view the list HERE. “Initially, many of these were not reported. We know that many people were told not to tell anyone about their adverse reactions and the media was not reporting them. They started happening and ramping up after the first Covid vaccinations. The mainstream media still are not reporting most, but sports news cannot ignore the fact that soccer players and other stars collapse in the middle of a game due to a sudden cardiac arrest. Many of those die – more than 50%.

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“..the city reported more cases on Thursday than the entire country saw earlier in the week.”

Shanghai Reports 7th Day Of Record Cases

The better part of a week has passed since local authorities announced on Monday that they would be extending the lockdown in Shanghai “indefinitely”. But despite authorities’ best efforts (or perhaps, because of them) COVID case numbers have continued to climb at a record pace, with Shanghai recording another 20K+ COVID cases on Thursday, topping the 20K mark for the second day in a row. Authorities reported 21,222 new cases in Shanghai alone on Thursday, marking a 7th straight daily record. For context, the city reported more cases on Thursday than the entire country saw earlier in the week. The number of symptomatic cases has also increased substantially. Shanghai, the new epicenter of China’s latest coronavirus outbreak, has recorded more than 131,000 cases since the flare-up started on March 1.


According to the latest developments reported by the SCMP, the city has converted conference centers and public facilities into temporary quarantine and treatment facilities with tens of thousands of bunks, adding to the 77,000 hospital beds already set aside in the city of 25 million residents. Meanwhile, rumors have emerged on social media – sourced from unwittingly leaked military documents – that the military is taking over the city……and that the lockdown will persist at least until May. Should the lockdown persist for the entirety of April, China’s GDP could suffer a hit of more than one percentage point, as Goldman analysts determined that every four weeks of lockdown in the city would shave 1 percentage point off the country’s GDP, given Shanghai’s importance to the Chinese economy.

The city has recorded more than 131,000 COVID cases since the flare-up began on March 1. Health authorities are taking no chances, even if the vast majority of the infections – daily symptomatic cases were in triple digits – showed no symptoms, and there had been no fatality in the current wave. “The battle against the outbreak is still very tough,” according to a Thursday speech by Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who had been overseeing the anti-pandemic work in Shanghai since last weekend. “Any sign of relaxation or complacency is unacceptable.”

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“Unfortunately, it’s curtains for the US. Sell your shitcoins, and buy bitcoin.”

Billionaires Are Backing Bitcoin Over “Fiat Fraud” (ZH)

[..] while many crypto enthusiasts belong to the younger generation, millennials and Gen X, billionaires like Mexico’s third-richest man, Ricardo Salinas, have visceral memories of the failures of fiat – namely, hyper-inflation. And they shared this experience with his audience. “I have a big grudge against fiat, I call it the fiat fraud,” Salinas, the owner of Mexico’s Banco Azteca, said on Thursday. He then shared a story about how his salary as a young business school graduate in Mexico during the 1980s declined from around $2,000 a month to just $20 during a period of six years. “That’s hyperinflation,” he said. Echoing Peter Thiel’s controversial comments, Salinas also spoke to the religiosity of its high priests in his keynote address.

“This fiat religion has its high priests, and you can see them right there. And their religion is not tolerant,” Salinas explained. “They hate anyone who is a heretic. There’s a lot of heretics in this room right now.” Closing his thoughts, Salinas warned the crowd of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). “If the CBDC is issued these people will have full control over how you can spend your money,” he cautioned. Why does Salinas think they are so bad? Because you lose all sovereignty in the use of your funds. “They think it’s a bad idea, they close your capacity to spend your money,” Salinas predicted. That being said, Salinas noted that not all crypto is created equal: “Unfortunately, it’s curtains for the US. Sell your shitcoins, and buy bitcoin.”

Salinas added that 60% of his investment portfolio is now in bitcoin or bitcoin-linked equities. According to Bitcoin Magazine, that’s up from 10% in 2020. Salinas also denounced bonds as toxic and a “terrible investment” that he wouldn’t “touch with a 10-foot pole.” Of course, he’s not the only high-profile investor to say as much about bonds in the era of inflation (short-dated Treasuries just endured one of the rockiest first quarters in modern history).

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“..using attorney-client privilege to withhold evidence in a case where the former partner is accused of using his status of counsel to conceal information from the government.”

Durham Seeks to Force Clinton Campaign and DNC to Turn Over Evidence (Turley)

It is always good to have a “lawyer acquaintance” when things get tough. In “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the character Stanley Kowalski famously assures to Blanche DuBois that he has “a lawyer acquaintance” who will protect her. The same appears to be true for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. Special Counsel John Durham is fighting to get access to evidence related to his prosecution of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The documents are being withheld by the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Fusion GPS, and Perkins Coie. There are 1,455 withheld documents, but only 18 reportedly involved a lawyer. However, they are arguing that their “lawyer acquaintances” shield their communications from disclosure to the Special Counsel.

Sussmann’s defense recently took a body blow from Durham after the Special Counsel revealed that Sussmann did not just conceal the role of the Clinton campaign in pushing a debunked Russian collusion allegation but put that same alleged lie into writing. In both a text message and the later meeting, Sussmann is accused of lying about not representing any client despite billing the time to the campaign. Sussmann faces a single charge under 18 U.S.C. 1001 for lying to the FBI in a meeting with the then-FBI General Counsel James Baker. In the indictment, Sussmann is accused of “mak[ing] a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement or representation” in conversations with Baker. Durham argued that “the defendant provided the FBI General Counsel with purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel between the Trump Organization and a Russia-based bank.”

That institution was Alfa Bank and Sussmann’s effort paralleled the work of his partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, in pushing the Steele Dossier in a separate debunked collusion claim. The Federal Election Commission recently fined the Clinton Campaign and the DNC for hiding the funding of the dossier as a legal cost by Elias at Perkins Coie. The Clinton Campaign’s Alfa Bank conspiracy was found to be baseless but the FBI did not know that it was being offered by someone being paid by the campaign to spread the claim. Had they known, Durham alleges the department might have been able to avoid the investigation costs and effort spent on the Alfa matter.

Durham told the court that these sources (and tech executive Rodney Joffe) have refused to turn over documents as protected by attorney-client or work product privilege. Durham can use the crime/fraud exception to compel disclosure but he is first asking the court to review the documents in camera. Attorney-client privilege is generally raised by clients but can be raised in some circumstances by third parties under some circumstances. However, the exchange must be “for the purpose of obtaining legal advice from the lawyer.” Likewise, the work product doctrine protects documents that were “prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial” by third parties on behalf of the client.

[..] the campaign and Perkins Coie are using attorney-client privilege to withhold evidence in a case where the former partner is accused of using his status of counsel to conceal information from the government.

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“This is about the president of the United States potentially being involved in money laundering and RICO claims..”

Hunter Biden Makes Watergate Look Like ‘Tiddlywinks’ – Rep. Tenney (NM)

The revelations coming out about President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, reveal a pattern of corruption that makes “Watergate look like a game of tiddlywinks,” and censorship of the story by Big Tech and the mainstream media cost former President Donald Trump the 2020 election, Rep. Claudia Tenney said in a Newsmax interview Friday. “This is about the president of the United States potentially being involved in money laundering and RICO claims,” the New York Republican said on Newsmax’s “National Report.” “[He is] the ‘big guy’ as is defined in some of these authenticated emails, even by The New York Times.”

“Even Tony Bobulinski, who was a partner with the Bidens, said this is who it is, the big guy,” she added, referring to a story in The New York Post in 2020 when Bobulinski called Biden a liar and said he was the “big guy” referred to in one of his son’s emails that discussed payments. “Joe Biden got 10% laundered through his son,” Tenney maintained. “[That] was millions of dollars held by Hunter Biden so that they wouldn’t implicate Joe Biden, the president of the United States, the leader of the free world. This has to come out.” Biden has denied that his son has done anything wrong, and the White House is standing behind him on that claim, reports The Hill.

Meanwhile, Tenney on Friday said that after The New York Post broke the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, where the incriminating emails were discovered, Facebook and Twitter censored the story, which came out shortly before the 2020 election. “Incredibly 51 former intelligence agents, people who are involved in inside information with our federal government, claimed that this was a clear case of rushing this information and they signed a letter saying that this should not be put out for public consumption, which is a bit of a form of censorship,” said Tenney. She added that, according to a Media Research Center poll, at least 10% of Biden’s supporters had said they would not have voted for him had they known about the allegations about his son.

“This election came down to about 42,000 votes when you look at the key swing states,” she said. “Big Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg put over $419 million in key swing state areas to prime the pump to move voters in the direction of Joe Biden enough to change the results of this election.” It’s critically important, she added, that such censorship not be allowed to happen through “Big Tech and Big Tech oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg to prevent us from knowing the truth before we get to an election as critical as 2020 was.”

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First round on Sunday.

French Elections: Marine Le Pen Gains Ground On ‘Feverish’ Macron (Exp.)

Voters in France will go to the polls on Sunday to elect a president for the next five years with the election taking place over two rounds. On the last day of campaigning before voters go to the ballot boxes, a poll had Marine Le Pen just two points behind Emmanuel Macron. Ms Le Pen was runner-up to Emmanuel Macron in 2017, and this time, she is once again his closest rival. There are 12 candidates taking part in Sunday’s election, eight men and four women. Of the six main contenders, three are from the right of French politics and two are from the left. A month ago, Marine Le Pen was trailing President Macron by 10 points and fighting for a place in the second round against him.


Now she’s seen as the clear favourite to challenge him for the presidency ahead of Sunday’s first round. If she does make it through to the 24 April run-off, opinion polls suggest for the first time that a Le Pen victory is within the margin of error. “Nothing is impossible,” President Macron has warned, as polls suggest his far-right rival is closer than ever before to winning the presidency. On Friday, Ms Le Pen took to the streets in Narbonne as she completed the final leg of campaigning. When asked by The Telegraph what she thought of her main rival Emmanuel Macron likening the chance of her victory to Brexit, the 53-year old nationalist reiterated a mantra from her final rally the previous night: “When the people vote, the people win.”

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History lesson.

The Death of Representative Democracy (ITT)

Democracy has nothing to do with voting to elect representatives. Democracy does not require that citizens are represented by anyone because the people make all political decisions themselves. Many national governments pretend that they value democratic principles. They often claim a right to defend democracy or promote democracy in other countries. None of the governments that make such claims are democratic. Their pretensions often result in war. Democracy isn’t currently practised in any nation state. Instead, we suffer something called “representative democracy.” In a democracy the people are the government and protect themselves, from their own potential errors and excesses, through the checks and balances inherent to the rule of law, which again, is judged solely by the people.

In a representative democracy the government claims the authority to “govern” the people, forming autocratic states. So-called representative government “allows” the people to select their political leaders once every 4 or 5 years. In the intervening years this tiny group of “representatives” exercise executive power and rule over everyone else. This is called an oligarchy and it is the antithesis of a democracy. Nonetheless, the people have been “educated” to believe that the oligarchy is a democracy and have become attached to the idea. The oligarchy, or “representative government,” supposedly honours some foundational principles which are, in and of themselves, worthy. These are often referred to as democratic ideals.

Democratic ideals have been shaped, over thousands of years, by political leaders, reformists and philosophers. In their modern form they were described by the British sociologist T. H. Marshall in his 1949 essay Citizenship and Social Class. Marshall described these ideals as a functioning system of rights. While democratic ideals are far from an adequate substitute for democracy, in a representative democracy they do at least suggest some protection for the citizen from the whims of the oligarchy they are permitted to elect.

Democratic ideals include the right to liberty, to free speech, freedom of thought and expression, the right to peaceful protest, to justice and equal opportunities. Apparently, these rights are essential because, without them, representative democracy cannot function. The oligarchs govern to protect and promote the interests of the establishment. This ensures that the wealthiest individuals and families, the multinational corporations they own, the non-governmental organisations they fund and the banks they control can rule.

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Callender

 

 

Pilots

 

 

 

 

Elon Musk

 

 

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Apr 082022
 
 April 8, 2022  Posted by at 8:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  60 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Femme nue couchée (Marie-Thérèse Walter) 1932

 

Ukraine Foreign Minister Demands More “Weapons, Weapons, Weapons” From NATO (ZH)
The True Importance Of The Bucha False Flag (Saker)
Israel, Russia Clash Over Ukraine (Lauria)
Azov Fighter Video Overshadows Zelenskyy’s Address To Greek Lawmakers (R.)
Ukraine War Frenzy Proves: It’s Still John McCain’s GOP (Tracey)
US Air Force Delays Hypersonic Missile Program Over “Flight Test Anomalies” (ZH)
The Dollar Devours the Euro (Michael Hudson)
Despite Sanctions The Ruble Is Stronger Than Before The War (OffG)
Sit Back And Watch Europe Commit Suicide (Escobar)
Two-Star General Warns Hunter Biden Laptop Witness About His Safety (CTH)
BLMs LA Mansion Bought For 3.1M Sold 6 Days Later For 5.8M (DM)
Peter Thiel Blasts Buffett, Dimon, & Fink As “Finance Gerontocracy” (ZH)
The Spike Protein Is The “Amyloid” Being Deposited (Chesnut)
Nearly $300 Million To Wokify The Canadian Military (CS)
Priti Patel Part Of CIA-linked Lobby Group With Husband Of Assange Judge (DUK)

 

 

 

 

Disinformation

 

 

Wow, this sounds stupid

 

 

“The more weapons we get and the sooner they arrive in Ukraine, the more human lives will be saved.”

Uh, no.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Demands More “Weapons, Weapons, Weapons” From NATO (ZH)

“Weapons, weapons, weapons” is what Ukraine’s government is still demanding of NATO countries, even after the Biden-approved $800 million package last month. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba issued the plea after meeting with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in Brussels, stating on Twitter that the “three most important things” for Ukrainians are “weapons, weapons, weapons.” “Met with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at NATO HQ in Brussels. I came here today to discuss three most important things: weapons, weapons, and weapons,” Kuleba wrote. “Ukraine’s urgent needs, the sustainability of supplies, and long-term solutions which will help Ukraine to prevail,” he added.

Already the Pentagon has agreed to send more Javelin anti-armor systems, also as Stinger anti-aircraft missiles are being supplied, which Moscow sees as a huge provocation, with the war entering its sixth week. During a press conference in Brussels, Kuleba said his agenda in meeting with NATO leaders remains “simple”… “We know how to fight. We know how to win. But without sustainable and sufficient supplies requested by Ukraine, these wins will be accompanied by enormous sacrifices,” Kuleba said. “The more weapons we get and the sooner they arrive in Ukraine, the more human lives will be saved.”

Previously, CNN had documented that Kiev is increasingly pushing Washington for more advanced battlefield weapons, especially to take out Russia’s superior tanks and aircraft: The Defense Department plans to accelerate production of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles so it can refill its own depleted stocks as it continues to send the vital systems to Ukrainian forces fighting the Russian invasion, according to defense officials. Ukraine wants 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles delivered from the US daily, according to a recent military assistance wish list. CNN viewed the document that details the items Ukraine believes it needs from the US.

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“Russia needs to flush the EU down her “mental toilet” and only deal with sovereign countries which have retained enough agency to defend their own interests.”

The True Importance Of The Bucha False Flag (Saker)

[..] the leaders of the Empire of Hate and Lies have fully opened the “Hate and Lies” valve and it appears that they are seriously “losing it”. Remember how in the Skripal and MH-17 cases EU countries joined in the sanctions out of “solidarity”? I personally would call that cowardice and submissiveness, but “solidarity” works too. Well, the Eurolemmings have solidarized themselves into their own grave and now there is no undoing what they did to themselves. From the Russian point of view, it is rather straightforward: Russia tried to encourage EU countries to use their own judgment and act in their own interests.

It is now quite clear that as long as they get to brown-nose Uncle Shmuel the Eurolemmings are quite content with their fate. Russia needs to flush the EU down her “mental toilet” and only deal with sovereign countries which have retained enough agency to defend their own interests. In the EU that means Hungary and, to a much lesser degree, Serbia (not the people, of course, but the government which remains subservient to the Eurolemmings). The Bucha massacre itself will go down Zone A’s collective memory hole, that’s where all the previous false flags of the Empire of Hate and Lies have gone. Once a demonization operation has served its use, it can be forgotten.

So what are the purposes of the Bucha false flag: • Change the narrative from the (non-existing) Ukronazi “victories” to “stop the Russian atrocities” • Obfuscate the DELUGE of evidence (witnesses and forensic) showing that it was the Ukronazis who engaged in mass atrocities in Mariupol. Remember – Ukrainian victims are sacred, Russian victims are simply irrelevant. In fact, a Russian CAN NOT be a victim unless he is anti-Putin, then it’s okay. • To condition (I mean that in the psychological sense) the TV watching serfs of the Empire of Lies and Hate to hate anything Russian with a searing, explosive, hated. • Declare that Putin is now the “New Hitler” (though Putin has been Hitler pretty much since 2000, it’s just that now he is even MORE Hitler than before) and Russia some kind of broken, poor, and otherwise horrible Mordor.

• Use this pretext to try to eject Russia and Russians from as many locations and organizations on the planet as possible. That means all of Zone A for sure, but also plenty of locations and organizations in Zone B where the comprador ruling set the tone and don’t give a damn about their own people and country. • Try to scare Putin with the same fate as Gaddafi, Milosevic, and Hussein who were all demonized and later murdered. • If you think about it, I think that it is fair to say that these are all clear signs that the Empire of Hate and Lies has now declared total war on Russia, just short of overtly actually attacking Russian forces or Russia, of course. In fact, Russia and the Empire of Hate and Lies have been at war since at least 2013..

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“Serious politicians, especially at such a high level as Minister Lapid, have no right to talk idly..”

Israel, Russia Clash Over Ukraine (Lauria)

From the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Israel has refused to join the West’s economic war against Moscow, maintaining a neutral stance that as positioned it as a possible broker to end the conflict. But all that appears to have changed with remarks by Israel’s foreign minister in a Twitter post on Sunday, the day the massacre at Bucha was revealed and before any investigation could be conducted. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid wrote: “It is impossible to remain indifferent in the face of the horrific images from the city of Bucha near Kyiv, from after the Russian army left. Intentionally harming a civilian population is a war crime and I strongly condemn it.” Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine also implied that Russia had committed a war crime. “Deeply shocked by the photos from #Bucha. Killing of civilians is a war crime and cannot be justified,” Ambassador Michael Brodsky tweeted on Sunday.

Earlier, on March 13, during a visit to Romania, Lapid had tweeted: “… like Romania, Israel condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s without justification, and we call on Russia to stop its firing and attacks, and to resolve this conflict around the negotiating table.” The Israeli foreign ministry tried to distance itself from the ambassador’s remarks. Haaretz reported: “Asked if the Foreign Ministry’s official position was that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine, a spokesman replied: ‘No. It’s a tweet by the ambassador regarding the photos. He didn’t blame Russia.’” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who flew to Moscow on March 5 to meet with President Vladimir Putin (and was condemned for it), has made no comment about the Bucha incident.

Israel is trying to maintain a balancing act between Moscow and Washington, which cannot be pleased with Israel not joining the economic war. Russia and Israel have long maintained good relations, with Moscow even allowing Israel to conduct bombing raids on Syria. But years of goodwill have now been put on the line with Foreign Minister Lapid’s remarks. And now Russia has struck back. Sergey Ivanov, head of the department of diplomacy and consular service at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, wrote a scathing critique of Israel on Wednesday, posted on the ministry’s Telegram page. It holds nothing back, openly condemning Israel for a variety of sins, including its treatment of the Palestinians.

Ivanov wrote that many Western journalists and political analysts have opportunistically become overnight “Ukraine experts” just as Western politicians, such as Lapid, are making rash statements to boost their popularity. “Serious politicians, especially at such a high level as Minister Lapid, have no right to talk idly,” Ivanov warned. “They should be aware of the possible consequences of what they say, including with regard to relations with Russia.”

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Bring your nazi to work. Just how stupid are these people?

“Ukraine’s Zelensky faces criticism in Greece after bringing a Neo Nazi member of the Azov battalion alongside him during his address to the Greek Parliament.”

Azov Fighter Video Overshadows Zelenskyy’s Address To Greek Lawmakers (R.)

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy’s address to the Greek parliament on Thursday caused an outrage from opposition parties after a man who identified himself as an ethnic Greek member of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov battalion appeared on a video. Zelenskyy spoke about the destruction of the Russian-besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol – home to thousands of ethnic Greeks – and appealed to Athens for help. During his speech he showed a video with a message by a man who identified himself as a member of the Azov battalion, a far-right militia now part of Ukraine’s National Guard. “I address you, as a Greek by origin. I am Mikhail, my grandfather fought against the Nazis… I participate in the defence of Ukraine through the Azov Battalion,” he said.

Zelenskyy, who was invited to address the Greek parliament by conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, received a standing ovation from lawmakers present in the room. But the video caused a backlash on social media and an angry reaction from leftist parties. Shortly after the speech, the head of the leftist SYRIZA party Alexis Tsipras said the incident was a provocation. “Solidarity with the Ukrainian people is a given. But the Nazis can not have a say in parliament,” he tweeted. A Greek government spokesman responded that the message of a member of the Azov Battalion was “mistaken and inappropriate.”

Western countries say Moscow’s invasion, the biggest assault on a European country since World War Two, was entirely unprovoked. Russia says it is carrying out a “special operation” to disarm and “denazify” its neighbors. Ukraine’s embassy in Athens said the Azov regiment, set up as a far right group in 2014, has been reformed and integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine. “For many years Russia tried to ‘plant’ into Greek minds the myth that “Azov” Regiment is a paramilitary independent unit operating in Mariupol,” it said.

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Given the average age, no wonder that things move very slowly.

Ukraine War Frenzy Proves: It’s Still John McCain’s GOP (Tracey)

“The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin,” fumed John McCain back in March 2017. His target: Rand Paul, who had committed the unforgivable offense of momentarily delaying the latest round of NATO expansion. Montenegro, a tiny country in southeastern Europe that most Americans have never heard of, was about to join the sprawling military alliance — and McCain was determined to see the final ratification ritual proceed with as little debate as possible. So he hurled the time-honored “working for Putin” accusation, and sure enough, Paul quickly withdrew his minor procedural objection. The glorious ascension of Montenegro to NATO membership status was thereby assured.

Since that episode, a lot has transpired regarding the public perception of McCain. He delighted liberals by feuding regularly with Donald Trump — even going so far as to denounce Trump for engaging in “disgraceful” and “pathetic” flattery of Putin. “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” McCain raged. He undermined Congressional Republicans’ legislative agenda during the brief window in Trump’s presidency when the party had unified control of government — famously delivering a dramatic thumbs-down gesture to derail GOP hopes of repealing Obamacare, as a chagrined Mitch McConnell watched powerlessly on.

McCain had returned to his most natural state. After annoying Democrats by running against Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and being surly about his defeat for some time afterwards, he had once again resumed playing the “maverick” role he so relished — reviled by “his own side,” and loved by the “other side.” His death in 2018 brought forth the most effusive display of state-sanctioned grief that any US political figure had received since Ronald Reagan died in 2004, with all the universal media adulation that entails. Trump’s exclusion from the funeral proceedings, at McCain’s posthumous direction, was just the icing on the cake. But nowadays, if you bring up McCain in certain GOP circles, it will often be claimed that his influence has mercifully dissipated. The Republican Party experienced a bonafide ideological upheaval under Trump, they’ll say, and the McCain worldview — defined mainly by his unwavering commitment to a hyper-interventionist US foreign policy — has since fallen starkly out of favor.

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“Western countries have yet to field a hypersonic weapon while the old world order crumbles as a multipolar world emerges..”

US Air Force Delays Hypersonic Missile Program Over “Flight Test Anomalies” (ZH)

While Russia launched hypersonic air-to-ground missiles during the invasion of Ukraine and China flew a hypersonic weapon around the world late last year, the US continues to fall behind the hypersonic curve as a new round of delays were announced by the US Air Force (USAF), according to Bloomberg. The AGM-183 Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) was expected to be declared “early operational capability” by Sept. 30. However, according to a USAF statement, those timelines have been pushed back to the next fiscal year. ARRW, expected to be the Pentagon’s first hypersonic weapon, suffered three consecutive failed tests last year. ARRW’s latest hurdle was two upcoming ground-based booster motor tests by June 30.

But, it appears “due to recent flight test anomalies,” the missile test would be shifted out to as late as December with additional tests planned next fiscal year, according to the USAF statement. “The ARRW production decision remains event-driven and will occur after operational utility is demonstrated through successful system end-to-end flight tests,” the service continued. Lockheed-Martin’s ability to manufacture and deliver the new weapon appears to be a 2023 story. Western countries have yet to field a hypersonic weapon while the old world order crumbles as a multipolar world emerges, pushing Russia and China closer together. Perhaps that’s why President Biden is set to unveil a new trilateral security hypersonic pact with the UK and Australia to advance the development of hypersonic weapons.

On Wednesday, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama sounded the alarm at the House Armed Services Committee hearing that China has “more troops, ships, and hypersonic missiles than the United States.” Republican Rep. Michael Turner of Ohio said the US needs to increase its hypersonic development.

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“..why not simply throw in the financial towel and adopt the U.S. dollar, like Ecuador, Somalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands?”

The Dollar Devours the Euro (Michael Hudson)

European trade and investment prior to the War to Impose Sanctions had promised a rising mutual prosperity between Germany, France and other NATO countries vis-à-vis Russia and China. Russia was providing abundant energy at a competitive price, and this energy was to make a quantum leap with Nord Stream 2. Europe was to earn the foreign exchange to pay for this rising import trade by a combination of exporting more industrial manufactures to Russia and capital investment in developing the Russian economy, e.g. by German auto companies and financial investment. This bilateral trade and investment is now stopped – and will remain stopped for many, many years, given NATO’s confiscation of Russia’s foreign reserves kept in euros and British sterling, and the European Russophobia being fanned by U.S. propaganda media.

In its place, NATO countries will purchase U.S. LNG – but they will need to spend billions of dollars building sufficient port capacity, which may take until perhaps 2024. (Good luck until then.) The energy shortage will sharply raise the world price of gas and oil. NATO countries also will step up their purchases of arms from the U.S. military-industrial complex. The near-panic buying will also raise the price for arms. And food prices also will rise as a result of the desperate grain shortfalls resulting from a cessation of imports from Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and the shortage of ammonia fertilizer made from gas. All three of these trade dynamics will strengthen the dollar vis-à-vis the euro. The question is, how will Europe balance its international payments with the United States?

What does it have to export that the U.S. economy will accept as its own protectionist interests gain influence, now that global free trade is dying quickly? The answer is, not much. So what will Europe do? I could make a modest proposal. Now that Europe has pretty much ceased to be a politically independent state, it is beginning to look more like Panama and Liberia – “flag of convenience” offshore banking centers that are not real “states” because they don’t issue their own currency, but use the U.S. dollar. Since the eurozone has been created with monetary handcuffs limiting its ability to create money to spend into the economy beyond the limit of 3 percent of GDP, why not simply throw in the financial towel and adopt the U.S. dollar, like Ecuador, Somalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands? That would give foreign investors security against currency depreciation in their rising trade with Europe and its export financing.

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“The price of oil is going up and the ruble is worth just as much as it was before the war.”

Despite Sanctions The Ruble Is Stronger Than Before The War (OffG)

It’s official, as of right now the Russian ruble is worth more US dollars than before the invasion of Ukraine. On the 22nd of February this year, one US dollar would exchange for just over 79 rubles. As of the time of writing, it is now 78. The same is true of the British pound (around 108 rubles before, 102 now), and the Euro (88 rubles before, 84 now). Across the board, the ruble is stronger than before the war. So, how has this happened? Aren’t NATO, the EU and the rest of the “international community” meant to be crippling the Russian economy with biting sanctions? The media are claiming that the strength of the ruble “may be illusory” or that Russia has exploited a “loophole” in the sanctions and used “financial alchemy” to “rescue the ruble”.

Reminder: In 2014, when the west sanctioned Russia over the Crimean referendum, the ruble lost almost half its value. It recovered slightly in 2016, and has since stabilized, but has never come close to its pre-Crimean worth. So, presumably the earlier sanctions didn’t have a “loophole” in them, and/or the Russians either weren’t aware of this “financial alchemy” back then, or simply decided not to use it. Of course there is one key difference between 2014 and 2022 – the oil market. As we have written before, in 2014/15 the US and Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil and crashed the price. Russia (and Iran, and Venezuela) all suffered huge economic damage from this move.

But far from repeating this tactic, Saudi Arabia has increased their prices. The Western press claims that the US asked Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and they refused. They claim Saudi Arabia “sided with Russia”, and that they should be “punished”. Meanwhile, Turkey has just suspended the trial of the Saudi citizens alleged to have murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a move that should please the Saudi government no end. The West seems as bad at “punishing” their misbehaved allies as they are at tanking the value of the Russia’s currency. To sum up – The price of oil is going up and the ruble is worth just as much as it was before the war.

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“..next winter energy bills packing a mean punch; products disappearing from supermarkets; holiday bookings almost frozen; Le Petit Roi Macron in France – maybe up to a nasty electoral surprise – announcing “food stamps like in WWII are possible”.

Sit Back And Watch Europe Commit Suicide (Escobar)

The stunning spectacle of the EU committing slow motion hara-kiri is something for the ages. Like a cheap Kurosawa remake the movie is actually about the Empire of Lies-detonated demolition of the EU, complete with subsequent rerouting of some key Russian commodities exports to the US at the expense of the Europeans. It helps to have a 5th columnist actress strategically placed, in this case astonishingly incompetent European Commission head Ursula von der Lugen, with a brand new vociferous announcement of an extra sanctions package: Russian ships banned from EU ports; road transportation companies from Russia and Belarus prohibited from entering the EU; no more coal imports (over 4.4 billion euros a year).

That translates in practice into the Empire of Lies shaking down its wealthiest – Western – clients/puppets. Russia of course is too powerful militarily. The Empire badly needs some of its key exports – especially minerals. Mission Accomplished in this case amounts to nudging the EU into imposing more and more sanctions and willfully collapsing their national economies, allowing the US to scoop everything up. Cue to the coming catastrophic economic consequences felt by Europeans in their daily life (but not by the wealthiest 5%): inflation devouring salaries and savings; next winter energy bills packing a mean punch; products disappearing from supermarkets; holiday bookings almost frozen; Le Petit Roi Macron in France – maybe up to a nasty electoral surprise – announcing “food stamps like in WWII are possible”.

We have Germany facing the returning ghost of Weimar hyperinflation; BlackRock President Rob Kapito saying, in Texas, “for the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want”; farmers in Africa not able to afford fertilizer at all this year, reducing agricultural production by an amount capable of feeding 100 million people. Zoltan Poszar, former NY Fed and US Treasury guru, current Credit Suisse grand vizir, has been on a streak, stressing how commodity reserves – and here Russia is unrivaled – will be an essential feature of what he calls Bretton Woods III (yet, in fact, what’s being designed by Russia, China, Iran and the Eurasia Economic Union is a post-Bretton Woods). Poszar remarks that wars, historically, are won by those who have more food and energy supplies, in the past to power horses and soldiers, today to feed soldiers and fuel tanks and fighter jets. China, incidentally, has amassed large stocks of virtually everything.

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“..so that people can see the scale of depravity and Biden family corruption within the evidence..”

Two-Star General Warns Hunter Biden Laptop Witness About His Safety (CTH)

Emerald Robinson has a great interview with Jack Maxey from Switzerland. Maxey was the first person to receive a full hard drive copy of the Hunter Biden laptop from Rudy Guliani. After media, Senate and U.S. government officials refused to take action, Maxey went to Switzerland in order to complete a full forensic audit of the laptop content in a neutral jurisdiction. Previously, Maxey outlined his intent to share the full contents of the original files, and all of the retrieved deleted files, with the public so that people can see the scale of depravity and Biden family corruption within the evidence. In this interview with Emerald Robinson, Maxey states the full and searchable email archive will likely be completed early next week.


Additionally, in this interview Maxey goes into greater detail about the larger issues surrounding impediments to the release of information, including how the laptop contained access certificates to enter the Defense Department database. Maxey tried to get the DoD to address the issue without success, until he found a direct conduit to a two-star general who took the certificate codes, deactivated the access and thanked him for his diligence. Unfortunately, that same general then told Maxey he needed to focus on securing the safety of himself and his family, as the full weight of the U.S. interests, including the intelligence apparatus and defense apparatus, will likely target him. In my opinion, it is Maxey’s forensic review of the data and statements about making it all public, that triggered/pressured the collective western media to begin admitting the laptop issues were real and start covering the details.

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What an insane story.

BLMs LA Mansion Bought For 3.1M Sold 6 Days Later For 5.8M (DM)

A Los Angeles mansion frequented by Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart was bought by a real estate developer working for BLM founder Patrisse Cullors and her partner for $3.1 million, and then purchased by BLM’s foundation just six days later for $5.8 million in cash, it has emerged. The rapid price inflation ‘raises serious questions,’ ethics experts said. The purchase of the 6,500 square-foot, six-bedroom property in Studio City was first revealed on Monday by New York Magazine, amid growing questions about BLM’s finances. The organization in February 2021 said it had taken in more than $90 million in 2020 and still had $60 million on hand, but it remains unclear how that money is being managed or even where it is.

Cullors, the co-founder of the organization, resigned in May 2021 as director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), amid scrutiny of her property empire. She has written best-selling books, and has a contract with Warner Brothers to produce content. On Wednesday, Cullors, 38, angrily hit back at the questions over cash purchase of the Studio City mansion, describing the criticism as ‘racist and sexist’. She insisted that the expansive property was bought as a ‘safe space’ for black creatives, activists and thought leaders, and its purchase was never disclosed because it needed renovating. Cullors called the New York Magazine investigation ‘a despicable abuse of a platform that’s intended to provide truthful information to the public’, and said that the author had ‘a proven and very public bias against me and other Black leaders’. She did not address the discrepancy in the home’s cost.

The property was purchased on October 21, 2020 by Dyane Pascall, a real estate developer who worked for the firm run by Cullors and her partner, Janaya and Patrisse Consulting. Pascall is president of Conscious Capital Investment Enterprises, according to LinkedIn, which describes it as ‘Real Estate Investment company in South LA that provides affordable housing in low income communities in the face of rapid gentrification.’

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“today all the gold in the world is worth $12 trillion, while global equities are worth $115 trillion. In 1980, the ratio was one-to-one..”

Peter Thiel Blasts Buffett, Dimon, & Fink As “Finance Gerontocracy” (ZH)

At Bitcoin 2022, Thiel started his speech with a video from him in the past, talking about the future of digital infrastructure. His predictions regarding cell phone usage, which may have sounded odd at the time, were quite accurate. He also mentioned the dollar hegemony and even the potential for digitalization of the dollar, all of which we are seeing today. The speech that followed was, in the words of Bitcoin Mag, “quite incredible” – he started by pulling out a wad of $100 bills, and presenting them to the crowd. He said, “It’s a mysterious thing, what is money?” He followed by offering the money to a random person in the crowd, a gesture to which many people responded. “It’s kind of crazy that this still works,” Thiel said. While he is a billionaire, he had a point.

He went on about how PayPal began, bitcoin’s placement in terms of velocity and more — and then he began talking about enemies of Bitcoin. “If bitcoin is going to replace gold, the question is, why is it so undervalued?” he said. “Bitcoin is always the most honest market in the world, the most efficient market and it was the canary in the coal mine.” Thiel went on to point out that “today all the gold in the world is worth $12 trillion, while global equities are worth $115 trillion. In 1980, the ratio was one-to-one, with all the gold in the world and global equities having the same value of $2.5 trillion.” And so, while in the 1970s, equities were a bad investment, the great moderation that started in 1980 after Volcker killed galloping inflation, made equities the best investment of the past 40 years.

However, now that inflation is as high as it was in the late 1970s, equities are the enemy and bitcoin is the right investment, according to Thiel. Concluding his musing on valuation, Thiel says that the competitor for bitcoin is not ethereum which is a payment system, nor gold, but equities and asks why shouldn’t there be parity between the $115 trillion value of global equities and the ~$830BN value of bitcoin. “I am still hopeful that bitcoin goes up by a factor of 100x” he said. The Paypal founder then also makes a mockery of all those who say that bitcoin is not an inflation hedge with just one chart – the chart showing how anyone who had a sense of the inflationary tsunami that is coming, made a killing in early 2020 when the could have bought bitcoin at a far lower price.

Saying that it’s hard to know where Bitcoin goes from here, the billionaire said that Bitcoin is the most honest and most efficient market: “Bitcoin is the canary in the coalmine, it was telling us that inflation is coming; it is telling us that central banks are bankrupt; it is telling us that we are at the end of the fiat money regime.” [..] His conclusion: the Financial Gerontocracy has declared war on Bitcoin as a revolutionary youth movement for good reason. It is this time the revolutionary youth should understand their enemies and return fire.

Thiel

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It’s everywhere.

The Spike Protein Is The “Amyloid” Being Deposited (Chesnut)

The spike protein is the “amyloid” being deposited and inducing amyloidoses: a major finding missed severe covid may be due to the added deposition of complement with the spike. The paper “The histologic and molecular correlates of COVID-19 vaccine-induced changes in the skin” made a case for the immune response to the Spike Protein causing self-limited hypersensitivity reactions to the vaccine. However, if you study the paper carefully, you notice that the authors have missed a far more important finding.

The biopsy specimens of normal skin post vaccine and of skin affected by the post-vaccine eruption showed rare deep microvessels positive for spike glycoprotein with no complement deposition contrasting with greater vascular deposition of spike protein and complement in skin biopsies from patients experiencing severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The histology exactly recapitulated perniosis including COVID-19–associated perniosis, which provides evidence that the Spike Protein alone induces COVID-19 pathology. More importantly, the fact that IN NORMAL SKIN, the Spike Protein was found to be deposited in DEEP VESSELS, MICROVESSELS, BLOOD VESSELS AND DEEP ENDOTHELIAL CELLS. Why would one assume that this deposition is only occurring in NORMAL SKIN TISSUE? I believe it is most certainly occurring in NORMAL TISSUE. PERIOD.

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Think they’ll give their lives for him?

Nearly $300 Million To Wokify The Canadian Military (CS)

Nestled deep within the Liberal government’s new 2022 budget is a whopping $100.5 million in taxpayer funding for “gender identity” culture change and training in the Canadian Armed Forces. The sum is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new $58 billion spending bonanza and nested in their $8 billion defence spending boost over the next five years. “Budget 2022 proposes to provide $100.5 million over six years, starting in 2021-22, with $1.7 million in remaining amortization, and $16.8 million ongoing,” the budget report reads. These funds will be put towards “undertaking engagement and consultations on culture change” as it relates to gender identity or sexual orientation discrimination. The Liberal budget also mentions “coaching services.”


Under Trudeau’s watch, Canada’s military has been hit with sex scandals and harassment controversies. Instead of addressing the root causes of the problem and removing bad apples, the Liberals have used the issue as an opportunity to make the military more woke. Another gender-related spending in the defence budget included $144.3 million over five years and an additional $31.6 million ongoing to expand health services and physical fitness programs to “be more responsive to women and gender-diverse military personnel.” “This builds on funding from Budget 2021 of $236.2 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, and $33.5 million ongoing for the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs Canada to support efforts to eliminate sexual misconduct and gender-based violence in the military and support survivors,” the budget claims.

Read more …

One big vicious circle.

Priti Patel Part Of CIA-linked Lobby Group With Husband Of Assange Judge (DUK)

Priti Patel sat on the Henry Jackson Society’s (HJS) advisory council from around 2013-16, although the exact dates are unclear as neither the HJS nor Patel responded to Declassified’s requests for clarification. She has also received funds from the HJS, and was paid £2,500 by the group to visit Washington in March 2013 to attend a “security” programme in the US Congress. Patel, who became an MP in 2010 and was appointed Home Secretary in 2019, also hosted an HJS event in parliament soon after she returned from Washington. After the UK Supreme Court said this month it was refusing to hear Assange’s appeal of a High Court decision against him, the WikiLeaks founder’s fate now lies in Patel’s hands. He faces life in prison in the US.

The HJS, which was founded in 2005 and does not disclose its funders, has links to the CIA, the intelligence agency behind the prosecution of Assange and which reportedly developed plans to assassinate him. One of the HJS’s international patrons is James Woolsey, CIA director from 1993-95, who was in this role throughout the period Patel was advising the group. Woolsey’s affiliation to the HJS goes back to at least 2006, soon after it was founded. In 2014, the group hosted General David Petraeus, CIA director from 2011-12, at a UK parliament meeting from which all media were barred. Three years later, in 2017, the HJS organised another event at parliament with General Michael Hayden, CIA director from 2006-9, to “discuss the current state of the American Intelligence Community and its relationships with foreign partners.”

Hayden described “the relationship within the Five Eyes community as strong as ever, despite potential concerns over recent intelligence leaks between members.” Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. During a visit to the UK in July 2020, then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a roundtable hosted by the HJS with what the Washington Post referred to as a group of “hawkish” members of the Conservative Party. As director of the CIA in 2017, Pompeo had launched a blistering attack on WikiLeaks calling the media organisation a “hostile intelligence service” that makes “common cause with dictators”. Pompeo did not provide evidence but added a threat: “To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”

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Biden family

 

 

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Apr 052022
 


Vincent van Gogh Tulip fields 1883

 

Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion (Antiwar)
Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre (Lauria)
Pentagon Can’t Independently Confirm Atrocities In Ukraine’s Bucha (R.)
Russia Threatens to Limit Exports of Ag Products to ‘Friendly’ Countries (ET)
NATO’s Internal Gold War (Vilches)
A Theory of the Case (Kunstler)
Sri Lanka Inflation and Food Crisis Results in Widespread Social Chaos (CTH)
Clinton, DNC Pay FEC Fines in Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel (ET)
Media ‘Caught in a Coverup’ of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson (ET)
‘Big Guy’ Reemerges In Hunter Biden Grand Jury (WE)
White House Won’t Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden (ZH)
A Generation of Toddlers Struggling With Speech and Social Skills (SN)

 

 

 

 

Musk Twitter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1511209796531281921

Musk Trump

Bring them all back

 

 

 

 

Who are Zelensky’s handlers?

Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion (Antiwar)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected a proposal from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just days before the Russian invasion. The February 19 offer called on Kyiv to renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality. At the time, Zelensky rejected the security plan saying Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to uphold the agreement. Under Berlin’s plan, Putin and American President Joe Biden would sign the deal and jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security. The Wall Street Journal, which initially reported the proposal, said that Zelensky rejecting the offer “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.”


The day after the meeting, French President Emmanual Marcon appealed to Biden in a call between world leaders to make another push for diplomacy. “I think the last person who could still do something is you, Joe. Are you ready to meet Putin?” Macron said to Biden. However, Washington appeared uninterested in a push for diplomacy. While the full details of the German offer are unknown, it appears similar to proposals Zelensky has outlined in recent weeks. Ukraine’s top negotiator David Arakhamia said Russia had “verbally” agreed to several of Kyiv’s positions. On Sunday, Russia’s top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the two sides are not close enough to an agreement for a meeting between Putin and Zelensky. “The draft agreement is not ready for submission to a meeting at the top,” the Russian chief negotiator said.

Read more …

“..photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.”

Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre (Lauria)

Last Wednesday, all Russian forces left Bucha, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. This was confirmed on Thursday by a smiling Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, in a video on the Bucha City Council official Facebook page. The translated post accompanying the video says: “March 31 – the day of the liberation of Bucha. This was announced by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk. This day will go down in the glorious history of Bucha and the entire Bucha community as a day of liberation by the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the Russian occupiers.” All of the Russian troops are gone and yet there is no mention of a massacre. The beaming Fedoruk says it is a “glorious day” in the history of Bucha, which would hardly be the case if hundreds of dead civilians littered the streets around Fedoruk.

“Russian Defence Ministry denied accusations by the Kiev regime of the alleged killing of civilians in Bucha, Kiev Region. Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram. What happened then on Friday and Saturday? As pointed out in a piece by Jason Michael McCann on Standpoint Zero, The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre. Instead, the Times said the withdrawal was completed on Saturday, two days after the mayor said it was, and that the Russians left “behind them dead soldiers and burned vehicles, according to witnesses, Ukrainian officials, satellite images and military analysts.”

The Times said reporters found the bodies of six civilians. “It was unclear under what circumstances they had died, but the discarded packaging of a Russian military ration was lying beside one man who had been shot in the head,” the paper said. It then quoted a Zelensky adviser, who said: “’The bodies of people with tied hands, who were shot dead by soldiers lie in the streets,’ the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter. ‘These people were not in the military. They had no weapons. They posed no threat.’ He included an image of a scene, photographed by Agence France-Presse, showing three bodies on the side of a road, one with hands apparently tied behind the back. The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Podolyak’s claim the people had been executed.’” It is possible that on Saturday the full extent of the horror had yet to emerge, and that even the mayor was unaware of it two days before, though photos now show many of the bodies out in the open on the streets of the town, something that presumably would be difficult to miss.

In Bucha, the Times was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the newspaper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings: “Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that: ‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’

The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.” Ukraintsiva was speaking a day after the mayor had said the town was liberated.

Scott Ritter

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“We have no reason whatsoever to refute the Ukrainian claims about these atrocities..”

Pentagon Can’t Independently Confirm Atrocities In Ukraine’s Bucha (R.)

The U.S. military is not in a position to independently confirm Ukrainian accounts of atrocities by Russian forces against civilians in the town of Bucha, but has no reason to dispute the accounts either, a senior U.S. defense official said on Monday. “We’re seeing the same imagery that you are. We have no reason whatsoever to refute the Ukrainian claims about these atrocities — clearly, deeply, deeply troubling,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The Pentagon can’t independently and single handedly confirm that, but we’re also not in any position to refute those claims.” The Kremlin has denied accusations related to the murder of civilians in the town.

Escobar

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“We will supply food and crops only to our friends (fortunately, we have a lot of them, and they are not at all in Europe and not in North America)”

Russia Threatens to Limit Exports of Ag Products to ‘Friendly’ Countries (ET)

A senior Russian government official has threatened to limit exports of agriculture products to “friendly” countries only amid sanctions from Western nations in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Dmitry Medvedev, who previously served as Russia’s president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of the country’s security council, took to Telegram on April 1 where he warned of the potential move. Medvedev said that many counties depend on supplies of food from Russia, a major global wheat exporter, writing: “It turns out that our food is our quiet weapon. Quiet but ominous,” according to Breitbart. “The priority in food supplies is our domestic market. And price control,” he continued. “We will supply food and crops only to our friends (fortunately, we have a lot of them, and they are not at all in Europe and not in North America). We will sell both for rubles and for their national currency in agreed proportions.”


He then explained that Russia would not supply products and agricultural products to those countries it deems as “enemies.” “And we won’t buy anything from them (although we haven’t bought anything since 2014, but the list of products prohibited for import can be further expanded),” he continued. Russia previously imposed a ban on imports of certain agricultural products from the EU and other Western countries in 2014 after its annexation of Crimea. Russia serves as a major global exporter of several commodities, including sunflower oil, barley, and wheat; the latter of which it mainly supplies to Africa and the Middle East. It is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, having exported $10.1B in wheat in 2020 alone, despite the global COVID-19 pandemic and various supply chain issues.

Lavrov

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Grand theft. Ominous.

NATO’s Internal Gold War (Vilches)

Brexitology focused keenly on UK fish but fully ignored the EU´s gigantic gold reserves supposedly still vaulted in custody at the Bank of England. Adding insult to injury, a UK-EU no-deal financial services crash-out divorce went by almost unnoticed… not only without the bang of the still postponed “financial equivalence” protocol… but also without a mere whimper from specialized media and Remainers. Now, the Ukraine crisis with its new payment requirements for the badly needed Russian oil & gas…overlapping with essential yet unfinished Brexit business…will necessarily evolve into a vicious NATO internal gold war. Paraphrasing James Carville spiced with some traditional British flavor, “It´s the bloody gold, stupid”

Rule Britannia As UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have it, the physical repatriation of the EU gold supposedly still vaulted in London would “mightily” affect the future of Europe with very deep, high-voltage political impact both sides of the English Channel. In this scenario No.10 Downing Street would easily negotiate the EU gold bullion availability only under specific Brexit conditions favorable to the UK. Actually, doing this could turn out to be absolutely necessary and should go far beyond the enormous intrinsic value of the EU gold supposedly still vaulted at the BoE. Let me explain.

NATO gold in London Russia´s new rubles or gold payment requirements for any of its goods or services will necessarily prompt a major gold war between the UK and the EU probably resulting in NATO´s first-ever internal head-on gloves-off confrontation. After WW2 the idea was to keep Europe´s gold bullion safely away from the former Soviet Union and Josef Stalin, just in case. So decades ago current EU member states deposited most of their gold in custody at the Bank of England (BoE) in London. Now, the UK will dare to weaponize the approval of EU gold repatriation requests and other gold-related issues as a very convincing bargaining tool for lots of still unfinished yet most important Brexit business. So, (a) Whitehall could indefinetly delay the EU gold delivery unless Brexit pending issues are agreed in favor of the UK.

(b) Or, quite simply, the BoE would not ever return such EU gold supposedly kept in custody for the past decades because it has been partially or totally sold off or loaned out or compromised as explained below with former UK Prime Minister James Gordon Brown knowing about it all too well. If history is any guide, hostilities will explode the instant the EU member states individually or collectively rightfully demand a yet-non-existant fully independent world-class functionally detailed audit of the EU gold supposedly still in ´custody´ at the BoE. This should take plenty of time and is the perfect excuse for delaying the whole process always under the exclusive perview of London, not Brussels.

Or unmanageable problems would arise as soon as EU nations require immediate repatriation of at least some of such ´theoretical´ bullion, most probably all of them at the same time in view of circumstances. Then, either (1) some gold could possibly slowly be returned here and there (albeit with great delay ) but only under very vague London terms and changing the unfinished Brexit aftermath to levels yet unheard of, or (2) no gold would be returned as it has been sold off or compromised in different ways as explained hereinafter. And the UK better not decide to pay Russia even with a single gold coin as the EU would rightly wonder who owns it.

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“Russia has been the all-purpose hobgoblin that every US agency and many political personages turn to when they are caught doing something nefarious.”

A Theory of the Case (Kunstler)

[..] since the State Department is most of all responsible for the Russian clean-up operation now underway in Ukraine, you can bet that CBS-News is in on the info-grift to protect State, its patron. What Russia had to clean-up was the long-building after-effects of now Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s 2014 engineered Maidan coup against the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. The issue of that bygone day was a tug-of-war between the US and Russia, with Ukraine as the flag in the middle of the rope. Russia wanted Ukraine in the orbit of its economic “customs union” and the US was affecting to pull Ukraine into the Eurozone and NATO — or, at least, use Ukraine as a forward base for NATO, in order to antagonize Russia.

Russia has been the all-purpose hobgoblin that every US agency and many political personages turn to when they are caught doing something nefarious. When Hillary Clinton’s email trove was purloined through her poorly-defended illegal home server, Russia was to blame. That fiasco spawned the multi-year RussiaGate operation that bamboozled half the nation and ended up tainting the FBI, the DOJ, the FISA Court, and both the House and Senate Intel committees. Then, along came Hunter Biden’s laptop, infamously labeled “Russian disinformation” by every retired senior intel spook still drawing a fat pension. The news about the laptop and its lurid contents was strenuously suppressed by every mainstream media company except The New York Post, and its coverage was banished from Facebook and Twitter which so many Americans rely on for news — an obvious and true conspiracy between government, high tech, and the news media.

All this coincided you understand, with the horror-show official response to Covid-19 coming on the scene at exactly the same time: winter of 2019-2020. By then, half the country had already been groomed into a mass formation psychosis over the RussiaGate narrative that declared President Donald Trump was a stooge for Vladimir Putin… thus, Trump derangement.

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“Food inflation in Sri Lanka reached 30%…. things start immediately collapsing.”

Coming soon to a place near you.

Sri Lanka Inflation and Food Crisis Results in Widespread Social Chaos (CTH)

I have stated for the past year ‘the absence of food will change things‘. The inflation and food affordability crisis has now surfaced in Sri Lanka. Global media is paying attention, even sending out warnings about what this might represent for other nations. Sri Lanka has a debt to GDP ratio of 120%, approximately the same as the United States. However, Sri Lanka does not have the benefit of their currency being supported as the global trade currency; therefore, the debt and domestic inflation rate are directly tied together. The rate of food inflation in March has exceeded 30%…. the absence of the public being able to afford food has now surfaced and the government is collapsing. Read the news from Sri Lanka through the prism of what could happen in U.S. cities if we lose the dollar as the global trade currency.

(Via Reuters) – Reuters Breakingviews) – “Sri Lanka’s collapse is front of mind for many. Protesters fed up with crippling shortages of essential food and fuel items are on the streets, prompting multiple members of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s cabinet to offer to resign late on Sunday. Social unrest will probably accelerate a restructuring of some $44 billion of international sovereign debt. Though Sri Lanka’s problems follow years of mismanagement, its speedy unravelling is a warning to sturdier economies from Europe to Asia suddenly grappling with a spike in the cost of living.

A current account crisis read more has intensified after the West fired its sanctions bazooka at Russia as punishment for its invasion of Ukraine. Rolling blackouts and a state of emergency are frightening away remaining tourists, a crucial source of foreign exchange. Food inflation hit an eye-watering 30.2% in March. The currency’s 40% depreciation against the U.S. dollar in one month, including a central bank managed devaluation, is blowing out leverage ratios: Public debt estimated by the International Monetary Fund at 120% of GDP is perhaps some 40 percentage points more than might be deemed sustainable, guesses Citi.

[…] It’s a reminder of the political implications of high prices. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, few Asian countries had consumer inflation in double digits. The standouts were Sri Lanka and Pakistan, whose Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday dodged a no-confidence vote and called fresh elections. Poorer countries are more vulnerable to surging global food prices because their populations spend more on food than discretionary items.” Food inflation in Sri Lanka reached 30%…. things start immediately collapsing. Consider the recent projected rate of food inflation in the United States (wave 2, this summer):

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Admission of guilt?!

Clinton, DNC Pay FEC Fines in Effort to Bury Story: Kash Patel (ET)

The lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 probe into the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion, Kash Patel, said the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is paying a penalty to Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an admittance of guilt. Clinton and DNC are doing so to bury the narrative and prevent more media coverage of these illegal activities, said Patel. “I think the public sees what that is. It’s their way of burying the narrative, because if they contested what happens, more media coverage, more people start looking into these things,” Patel said. “So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting. “It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

The FEC, which is responsible for overseeing federal elections, including the presidential election, found that the Hillary Clinton campaign broke FEC rules about how donations can be used. “What we knew when we ran the Russiagate investigation, Chairman Nunes and I, we exposed that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, an opposition research hit job. We had proven that some years ago,” said Patel. “What the Coolidge Reagan Foundation did … based on our investigation, said ‘wait a second FEC, you as a political campaign cannot spend political dollars launching opposition research, false or otherwise,’” said Patel.

Dan Backer, an attorney who lodged the complaint with the election commission against the Clinton campaign and the DNC, told The Epoch Times that it’s the first time Clinton “has actually been held accountable for misconduct,” calling the fines “a great step for accountability.” “So they fined them, that’s the FEC’s job. And the Hillary Clinton campaign could have said: ‘We disagree with your finding. We’re going to go to court.’ What did the Hillary Clinton campaign do? … They agreed to the finding of probable cause by the FEC, which means they’re basically agreeing that it happened. … Like we’ve always said, ‘follow the money.’”

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Make sure he gets re-elected.

Media ‘Caught in a Coverup’ of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson (ET)

Johnson said that some outlets had participated in “what they call a limited hangout, or in [President Richard] Nixon’s case, a modified limited hangout. You’ve let out just enough information, just enough truth to try to get you by the moment.” A modified limited hangout is a public relations or propaganda technique in which the individual or official involved releases some information that was previously hidden, albeit still retaining important key facts, in an effort to prevent more important details from being exposed. According to former CIA official Victor Marchetti, the technique results in the public being “so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”


“We can’t allow our intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, the FBI, or the media to get away with this,” Johnson said. “This is serious business. This is incredible corruption at the highest levels of government and within our media. “We are all being snookered by them. This has been a—from my standpoint—a massive diversionary operation to, you know, to try to take the American public’s attention away from their wrongdoing, their lies, their cover-ups.” He said that “now we have actual bank records that verify what we reported” and that Hunter Biden’s “laptop is obviously a treasure-trove of additional corroborating evidence as well.”

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Special counsel required.

‘Big Guy’ Reemerges In Hunter Biden Grand Jury (WE)

A grand jury witness was asked to identify the infamous “big guy” mentioned in discussions regarding a Chinese business deal involving the president’s son Hunter Biden, according to a new report. The question came up after this person, who was not identified, was shown a piece of evidence before the grand jury, located in Wilmington, Delaware, a source told the New York Post. The answer that was given was not reported, though some have claimed the “big guy” is President Joe Biden, raising the prospect that the commander in chief could be drawn into a federal criminal investigation. So far, the White House has been adamant in asserting that the president is not involved and that Hunter Biden, 52, did not commit any crimes.

The New York Post has led the charge in reporting on the contents of an abandoned laptop that is believed to have belonged to Hunter Biden. While other major media outlets sought to cast doubt on its authenticity and Big Tech companies even took steps to suppress its spread in the final weeks of the 2020 election, in recent weeks, the New York Times and Politico have come forth with reports saying at least some of the contents on the laptop have been authenticated. At issue is one particular email, dated May 13, 2017, from investor James Gilliar to himself, Hunter Biden’s business associate Rob Walker, and James and Hunter Biden detailing a “provisional” business deal with a Chinese company called CEFC. The email, in part, asks about “10 held by H for the big guy,” as well as “10” for “Jim.” It appears “H” is a reference to Hunter Biden, “Jim” is Joe Biden’s brother, and “10” is a reference to 10%.

Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski, a Navy veteran, corroborated the authenticity of the email in October 2020 and insisted the “big guy” was then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The Washington Post recently reported on “verified emails illuminating a deal Hunter Biden developed with a fast-growing Chinese energy conglomerate, CEFC China Energy, for which he was paid nearly $5 million, and other business relationships.” The elder Biden has distanced himself from his son’s foreign business dealings. Over the weekend, a White House official claimed the president is certain his son did not break the law or do anything unethical as it relates to China.

“Of course the president is confident that his son didn’t break the law,” Ron Klain, the president’s chief of staff, said during an interview on ABC’s This Week. “But most importantly, as I said, that’s a matter that’s going to be decided by the Justice Department, by the legal process. It’s something that no one at the White House has involvement in.”

Solomon Hunter

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No pardon needed without an investigation.

White House Won’t Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden (ZH)

The White House won’t rule out granting pardons to Hunter Biden or James Biden, the son and brother of President Joe Biden, as investigations over their international dealings heat up. “That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told reporters last week when asked during the daily press briefing. “I don’t have anything to add from this podium.” Bedingfield was reluctant to address any aspect of the Hunter Biden story, after CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times recently published stories about the federal tax probe into Hunter Biden and his foreign business deals. When asked additional questions about Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden, Bedingfield would only reply, “I don’t have anything further to add from this podium.” -Breitbart


Two weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop exists, and is legit – and confirmed several previously reported aspects of the story, including correspondence between Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, both of whom served on the board Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. Contained on the laptop were a trove of emails, text messages, photographs and financial documents. Last week, the Washington Post and CNN piled on – with the post reporting on Hunter’s “multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” and CNN running a blistering segment and reporting that the federal investigation into Hunter is ‘heating up.’

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As their parents have their own vaccine related handicaps.

A Generation of Toddlers Struggling With Speech and Social Skills (SN)

Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report. Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities. Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly,” the report found. “Some providers have reported that delays to children’s speech and language development have led to them not socialising with other children as readily as they would have expected previously,” it added.


The restrictions also left toddlers struggling with crawling, using the toilet independently and making friends. Delays in learning had also regressed some children to the stage where they needed help with basic tasks such as putting on their coats and blowing their noses. “I’m particularly worried about younger children’s development which, if left unaddressed, could potentially cause problems for primary schools down the line,” said chief inspector Amanda Spielman. We previously highlighted another study out of Germany which found that the reading ability of children has plummeted compared to pre-COVID times thanks to lockdown policies that led to the closure of schools. Speech therapist Jaclyn Theek said that mask wearing during the pandemic has caused a 364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers. “They’re not making any word attempts and not communicating at all with their family,” she said, adding that symptoms of autism are also skyrocketing.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

French doctor

 

 

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Apr 042022
 


Leonardo da Vinci Vitruvian man c1510 (see comments at link)

 

Bucha (Klarenberg)
New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’ (GZ)
German Retailers To Increase Food Prices By 20-50% On Monday (ZH)
‘Rublegas:’ The World’s New Resource-based Reserve Currency (Escobar)
Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities (Manly)
2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections (ZH)
Russia And Serbia Are Projected To Become The Empire’s White Colonies (Antonic)
Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing (Tucker)
NIH Admits it ‘Suppressed’ Wuhan Lab Data, Disputes ‘Deleted’ Label (ET)
Joe Biden Should Be Removed Before Putin, US Poll Says (Exp.)
Biden’s ‘Absolute’ Defense Of Hunter (Turley)
Biden Wants Attorney General Garland to Prosecute Trump (Turley)
From Maria’s Office … the Fashion Nazi (Zakharova)

 

 

 

 

Zelensky Grammys
https://twitter.com/i/status/1510799460372262917

 

 

 

 

This is an excerpt from the article right below, by Kit Klarenberg (MUST READ). I picked this part because the story of 100s of bodies on the streets of Bucha is everywhere today. Only, the photos used are straight from the Ukraine goverment, and nobody fact checked them. What we do know is that the day before, the bodies were nowhere to be seen.

The role of the “embedded” Associated Press is also interesting.

Bucha (Klarenberg)

Hours before the publication of this article, on April 2nd, claims of Russia’s most hideous alleged war crime to date erupted across social media. Footage and photos of scores of dead bodies – some with their hands tied – littering the streets of Bucha, a small city near Kiev, testified to an apparent massacre of military-aged men by Russian troops, as they retreated from the battered city two days earlier. The gruesome visuals have triggered intensified calls for direct Western military confrontation with Russia. But as with the incident at the maternity ward in Mariupol and numerous other high profile events initially portrayed by Ukrainian authorities as Russian massacres, a series of details cast doubt on the official story out of Bucha.

Within hours of Russia’s withdrawal from the Bucha on March 31st, its mayor announced that his city had been liberated from “Russian orcs,” employing a dehumanizing term widely used by Azov Battalion. An accompanying article noted the Russians had “mined civilian buildings and infrastructure,” but no mention was made of any mass killing of local citizens, let alone scores of corpses left in the street, which one might reasonably expect would be top of any news outlet’s agenda when reporting on the event. On April 2, within hours of the publication of photos and videos purporting to show victims of an alleged Russian massacre, Ukrainian media reported that specialist units had begun “clearing the area of saboteurs and accomplices of Russian troops.” Nothing was said about dead bodies in the streets.

The National Police of Ukraine announced that day that they were “cleaning the territory…from the assistants of Russian troops,” publishing video that showed no corpses in the streets of Bucha and Ukrainian forces in full control of the city.

Brennan

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Staged. An attempt to start WWII. Bucha is the next stage in that attempt. False flags everywhere.

New Witness Testimony About Mariupol Maternity Hospital ‘Airstrike’ (GZ)

A key witness to the widely publicized incident at the Mariupol maternity hospital has punctured the official narrative of a Russian airstrike on the facility, and raised serious questions about Western media ethics. Meanwhile, news of a massacre in the city of Bucha contains suspicious elements. On March 9th, shocking news of a deliberate Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, began spreading widely via social media and news outlets. Fiery condemnation from Western officials, pundits, and journalists was immediate. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, claimed the act was proof of the “genocide” Russia was perpetrating against the civilian population, and urged European leaders to condemn the “war crime” and “strengthen sanctions” to stop the Kremlin’s “evil” deeds in the country.

NPR suggested the attack was part of Russia’s “terrible wartime tradition” of purposefully targeting health facilities and medics during conflicts, dating back to Chechnya. But newly released testimony from one of the incident’s main witnesses punctures the official narrative about a targeted Russian airstrike on the hospital. The witness account indicates the hospital had been turned into a base of operations by Ukrainian military forces and was not targeted in an airstrike, as Western media claimed. Her testimony also raised serious questions about whether at least some elements of the event were staged for propaganda purposes – and with the cooperation of the Associated Press.

The new testimony (watch below) comes on the heels of evidence strongly suggesting that the destruction of a dramatic theater in Mariupol on March 16 was staged by the Azov Battalion, and that nearly all civilians had evacuated a day before. And as we will see below, new reports of a Russian massacre of scores of civilians in the town of Bucha also contain suspicious details suggesting a pattern of information manipulation aimed at triggering Western military intervention. Mariana Vishegirskaya, a pregnant resident of Donetsk who was present at the maternity hospital during the widely reported incident, has evacuated from Mariupol and is now speaking out. Photos showing a bloodied Vishnevskaya fleeing the building with her personal belongings became a centerpiece of coverage of the attack, along with a photo of another woman being carried away pale and unconscious on a stretcher.

In the wake of the incident, Russian officials falsely claimed the pair were the same person, citing Vishegirskaya’s background as a blogger and Instagram personality as evidence she was a crisis actor and the incident a false flag. Though that assertion was not true, as we shall see, the hospital had been almost completely taken over by the Ukrainian military.

Zelensky Azov
https://twitter.com/i/status/1510573197804158980

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Only part of this is due to Ukraine.

German Retailers To Increase Food Prices By 20-50% On Monday (ZH)

Just days after Germany reported the highest inflation in generation (with February headline CPI soaring at a 7.6% annual pace and blowing away all expectations), giving locals a distinctly unpleasant deja vu feeling even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine broke what few supply chains remained and sent prices even higher into the stratosphere… … on Monday, Germany will take one step toward a return of the dreaded Weimar hyperinflation, when according to the German Retail Association (HDE), consumers should prepare for another wave of price hikes for everyday goods and groceries with Reuters reporting that prices at German retail chains will explode between 20 and 50%:

Even before the outbreak of war in Ukraine, prices had risen by about five per cent “across the product range” as a result of increased energy prices, HDE President Josef Sanktjohanser told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung on Friday. With Russia’s invasion hitting economies and the supply chain harder, yet another series of price increases is on the horizon. “The second wave of price increases is coming, and it will certainly be in double figures,” Sanktjohanser warned, cited by The Local. According to the president of the trade association, the first retail chains have already started to raise their prices in Germany – and the rest are likely to follow. “We will soon be able to see the impact of the war reflected in price labels across all the supermarkets,” said Sanktjohanser.

Recently, popular retail chains such as Aldi, Edeka and Globus announced that they would be forced to raise their prices. At Aldi, meat and butter will be “significantly more expensive” from Monday due to price hikes from its suppliers. “Since the start of the Ukraine war, there have been jumps in purchase prices that we have not experienced before,” a spokesperson for Aldi Nord announced on Friday. A fortnight ago, Aldi raised the prices of about 160 items, and a week later 20 more items became more expensive. Other supermarket brands quickly followed suit. In February, Germany’s cost of living rose at the highest level since reunification, with everyday goods increasing by an average of 7.3%. The federal statistics agency Destatis said the jump from January’s figure of 5.1 percent to February’s 7.3 percent reflected the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has sent the price of oil and gas soaring.

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“..the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.”

‘Rublegas:’ The World’s New Resource-based Reserve Currency (Escobar)

Saddam, Gaddafi, Iran, Venezuela – they all tried but couldn’t do it. But Russia is on a different level altogether. The beauty of the game-changing, gas-for-rubles, geoeconomic jujitsu applied by Moscow is its stark simplicity. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential decree on new payment terms for energy products, predictably, was misunderstood by the collective west. The Russian government is not exactly demanding straightforward payment for gas in rubles. What Moscow wants is to be paid at Gazprombank in Russia, in its currency of choice, and not at a Gazprom account in any banking institution in western capitals. That’s the essence of less-is-more sophistication. Gazprombank will sell the foreign currency – dollars or euros – deposited by their customers on the Moscow Stock Exchange and credit it to different accounts in rubles within Gazprombank.

What this means in practice is that foreign currency should be sent directly to Russia, and not accumulated in a foreign bank – where it can easily be held hostage, or frozen, for that matter. All these transactions from now on should be transferred to a Russian jurisdiction – thus eliminating the risk of payments being interrupted or outright blocked. It’s no wonder the subservient European Union (EU) apparatus – actively engaged in destroying their own national economies on behalf of Washington’s interests – is intellectually unequipped to understand the complex matter of exchanging euros into rubles. Gazprom made things easier this Friday, sending official notifications to its counterparts in the west and Japan. Putin himself was forced to explain in writing to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz how it all works.

Once again, very simple: Customers open an account with Gazprombank in Russia. Payments are made in foreign currency – dollars or euros – converted into rubles according to the current exchange rate, and transferred to different Gazprom accounts. Thus it is 100 percent guaranteed that Gazprom will be paid. That’s in stark contrast to what the United States was forcing the Europeans to do: pay for Russian gas in Gazprom accounts in Europe, which would then be instantly frozen. These accounts would only be unblocked with the end of Operation Z, Russia’s military ops in Ukraine. Yet the Americans want the war to go on indefinitely, to “bog down” Moscow as if this was Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have strictly forbidden the Ukrainian Comedian in front of a green screen somewhere – certainly not Kiev – to accept any ceasefire or peace deal.

So Gazprom accounts in Europe would continue to be frozen. As Scholz was still trying to understand the obvious, his economic minions went berserk, floating the idea of nationalizing Gazprom’s subsidiaries – Gazprom Germania and Wingas – in case Russia decides to halt the gas flow. This is ridiculous. It’s as if Berlin functionaries believe that Gazprom subsidiaries produce natural gas in centrally heated offices across Germany. The new rubles-for-gas mechanism does not in any way violate existing contracts. Yet, as Putin warned, existing contracts may indeed be stopped: “If such [ruble] payments are not made, we will consider this to be the buyers’ failure to perform commitments with all ensuing implications.”

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Energy-ruble-gold.

“..if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price.”

Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities (Manly)

By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar. We can see this linkage in action since Friday 25 March when the Bank of Russia made the fixed price announcement. The ruble was trading at around 100 to the US dollar at that time, but has since strengthened and is nearing 80 to the US dollar. Why? Because gold has been trading on international markets at about US$ 62 per gram which is equivalent to (5000 / 62) = about 80.5, and markets and arbitrage traders have now taken note, driving the RUB / USD exchange rate higher.

So the ruble now has a floor to the US dollars, in terms of gold. But gold also has a floor, so to speak, because 5000 rubles per gram is 155,500 rubles per troy ounce of gold, and with a RUB / USD floor of about 80, that’s a gold price of around $1940. And if the Western paper gold markets of LBMA / COMEX try to drive the US dollar gold price lower, they will have to try to weaken the ruble as well or else the paper manipulations will be out in the open. Additionally, with the new gold to ruble linkage, if the ruble continues to strengthen (for example due to demand created by obligatory energy payments in rubles), this will also be reflected in a stronger gold price.

What does this mean for Oil? Russia is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and the world’s third largest oil exporter. We are seeing right now that Putin is demanding that foreign buyers (importers of Russian gas) must pay for this natural gas using rubles. This immediately links the price of natural gas to rubles and (because of the fixed link to gold) to the gold price. So Russian natural gas is now linked via the ruble to gold. The same can now be done with Russian oil. If Russia begins to demand payment for oil exports with rubles, there will be an immediate indirect peg to gold (via the fixed price ruble – gold connection). Then Russia could begin accepting gold directly in payment for its oil exports. In fact, this can be applied to any commodities, not just oil and natural gas.

What does this mean for the Price of Gold? By playing both sides of the equation, i.e. linking the ruble to gold and then linking energy payments to the ruble, the Bank of Russia and the Kremlin are fundamentally altering the entire working assumptions of the global trade system while accelerating change in the global monetary system. This wall of buyers in search of physical gold to pay for real commodities could certainly torpedo and blow up the paper gold markets of the LBMA and COMEX. The fixed peg between the ruble and gold puts a floor on the RUB / USD rate but also a quasi-floor on the US dollar gold price. But beyond this, the linking of gold to energy payments is the main event. While increased demand for rubles should continue to strengthen the RUB / USD rate and show up as a higher gold price, due to the fixed ruble – gold linkage, if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price.

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“We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it’s sure that it can be seen from Brussels..”

I’d be careful about labeling them Pro-Putin. They’re just not pro-Brussels.

2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections (ZH)

In a one-two knockout punch for pro-Russia governments in Europe, on Sunday the government of Serbia’s pro-Russia president Aleksandar Vucic was headed for an avalanche victory in the country’s presidential election with nearly 60% of the vote, a big improvement to this 2017 election result… while Hungary’s Pro-Russia prime minister, Viktor Orban, was on track to clinch a fourth consecutive term, leveraging a message against being dragged into the war in neighboring Ukraine, to reassert himself as the European Union’s longest-serving premier. With roughly half of the vote counted, Orban’s Fidesz party led United for Hungary, a six-member opposition alliance, 57% to 32% in the party list contest, according to the National Election Office, with 63% of the votes counted. That would be sufficient for Fidesz to keep its two-thirds parliamentary majority.

Despite opinion polls forecasting a tighter race, Orban’s Fidesz party won comfortably across much of the country. Opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay even failed to win in his own district, where he had served as mayor. The far-right extremist Mi Hazank party won 6.3%, and was set to enter parliament, further diluting the power of the anti-Orban alliance. “We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it’s sure that it can be seen from Brussels,” Orban said in his speech on Sunday night, making light of his government’s long-running tensions with EU leaders. “We will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents,” Orban said, citing a number of his political enemies including the Hungarian left, “bureaucrats” in Brussels, the international media, “and the Ukrainian president too — we never had so many opponents at the same time.”

The election campaign was dominated by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which put Orban’s lengthy association with Russian President Vladimir Putin under scrutiny. In his victory speech, Orban called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky one of the “opponents” he had to overcome during the campaign. Orban’s unexpectedly strong victory defied polls ahead of the vote that had predicted Orban would face the toughest challenge to re-election in his 12 years in power, according to a report from the anti-Orban Bloomberg News. It almost makes one wonder why anyone – besides liberals of course – still uses polling, which obviously can’t forecast the future and also fails at mere propaganda and influencing election turnouts.

Orban

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History lesson: “..he would frequently refer to the Russians as redskins..”

Russia And Serbia Are Projected To Become The Empire’s White Colonies (Antonic)

In this article I will present the various plans that Germany had with the Serbs and Russians after the expected victory in World War II. Why do I fall back to history? We frequently perceive Hitler and Nazism as an aberration in Western history. But Hitler was, in fact, just openly announcing that in Europe he will do what the West has already done elsewhere. As we’ll see, Hitler took the extermination of the Native Americans as a model for the colonization of Slavic lands, Russia in particular. “It would be best if Serbia just disappeared from the map” —as attested by Hermann Neubacher, that opinion was prevalent within the German leadership in 1941 (see here, p. 89). But we find the same opinion in The Manchester Guardian (as The Guardian was formerly called), in August 1914: “If it were physically possible for Servia to be towed out to sea and sunk there, the air of Europe would at once seem cleaner” (here; here, p. 53).

Actually, the only difference between Hitler and the English was Hitler’s brutally proclaiming to do—and he had done as much as he could—what others in the West were doing slower and more subtly, the things they didn’t yet dare to undertake or weren’t able to accomplish. Unlike the Kaiser, who wanted territorial expansion towards the Middle East and a redistribution of African and Asian colonies, Hitler’s primary goal was to colonize Slavic lands, from the Baltic to the Black Sea for starters and then onward to the Urals. In Mein Kampf he writes that the Kaiser was mistaken in pushing Germany southwards. “When in today’s Europe we speak of new soil and land”, he wrote, “we primarily mean only Russia and the peripheral countries subservient to her. It appears that destiny itself wants to show us the way. […]

The giant Empire in the East is ripe for its downfall.” (here; 44th unabridged German edition, p. 742-3; compare here, p. 118) By the way, Hitler had adopted many concepts from the West. As J. Q. Whitman revealed in Hitlerºs American Model (2017), race laws in the United States were the legal inspiration for the race laws in the Third Reich. In his book Hitler: The Definitive Biography (2014), John Toland showed how impressed Hitler had been with the system of Indian Reservations, the extermination of the indigenous peoples, the epidemics and starvation policies. According to Toland, when speaking to the German leaders, the Fuhrer frequently “extolled the efficacy of the American extermination of the ‘red savages’ by starvation and in unequal combat” (here, p. 802).

“As a passionate reader of Karl May’s novels”, writes John Pool in his book Hitler and His Secret Partners (1997), “he would frequently refer to the Russians as redskins. He saw a parallel between his own efforts to occupy and colonize Russia and the conquest of the American West” (p. 272). He used to say that in the European East the Germans “had one single purpose: Germanization by peopling with Germans and treating the locals as redskins”. He even encouraged military officers to read Karl May and learn about all kinds of combat with the natives.

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“Within days, everything changed.”

Fauci’s United Front Is Collapsing (Tucker)

Last week, medical journalist Katherine Eban posted at Vanity Fair the results of a long and detailed investigation into the lab-leak theory of the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The subject is moving ever more to the front-and-center of efforts to find out exactly what was going on at the highest levels in early 2020 that resulted in the greatest societal, political, and economic upheaval of our lives. How precisely did we move so quickly from the “germ games” of October 2019 – when the virus was already circulating in the US – to full-scale global lockdown by March? Why did Anthony Fauci, who in early February was downplaying the seriousness of the virus, flip to the other side (which we know from emails)?

It was Fauci, according to many reporters, who tapped Deborah Birx to huddle with Trump and convince him that the only way to battle the virus was to “shut down” the economy – as if anything like that was possible much less effective for controlling a respiratory virus. For two years now, and despite endless writing and reflection, this change from the top has puzzled me. Lockdowns contradicted not only a century of public-health practice but even WHO guidelines. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. Within days, everything changed. There were hints of extreme measures in the CDC pandemic planning manuals since 2006 but the idea was hardly orthodoxy in the profession.

It’s also true that there were elite scientists who longed for the chance to try out the new theory of virus suppression. But how did Fauci and Birx, to say nothing of Jared Kushner, become converts of the idea to the point that they were able to convince Trump to betray everything he believed in? This is quite probably where the lab-leak theory comes in. It’s not so much about whether the virus was an accidental or even deliberate leak that matters so much as whether Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrrar of the UK’s Wellcome Trust believed it was possible or even likely. In that case, we have our motive. Did they deploy the chaos of lockdowns as a genuine if wildly misguided attempt to suppress the virus as a way of avoiding culpability?

Or perhaps it was deployed as a kind of smokescreen to distract from a closer examination of the Wuhan’s lab’s funding sources? Or possibly there is a third reason. We have a very long way to go before the full truth is out. But Eban’s article adds tremendous detail about the great lengths to which our Fauci-led cabal of officials worked hard to suppress dissent on the question of lab-vs-natural origin. They kept papers from being posted on preprint servers, held Zoom sessions with authors in an attempt to intimidate them, and spent tremendous energy making it clear that there would be a no-leak “united front” no matter what.

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We hide it, but don’t delete.

NIH Admits it ‘Suppressed’ Wuhan Lab Data, Disputes ‘Deleted’ Label (ET)

A National Institutes for Health (NIH) spokesperson is disputing a nonprofit watchdog group’s claim that the agency “deleted” genetic sequencing data on the CCP virus from a Chinese lab, but the same official acknowledged the data was “suppressed.” “The headline says the sequences were deleted which is inaccurate. They were not deleted. This is a really important point, and I’ve highlighted what did happen from what we provided to you earlier this week,” NIH Media Branch Chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times in a March 31 email. Fine was referring to a March 29 Epoch Times story headlined “NIH Deleted Info Received From Wuhan Lab on CCP Virus Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog’s FOIA Finds.” The information Fine referenced as having been provided to The Epoch Times by NIH earlier in the week was included in the published story:

“’In June 2020, in response to a request by the same [Wuhan] researcher, National Center for Biotechnology [NCBI] gave the sequence data the status of “withdrawn,” which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them. “‘NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to “suppressed,” which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLM’s ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available,’ the spokesperson said.” The biotechnology center, which is part of the institute’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), is the U.S. component of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.

The Epoch Times story was prompted by a report published on March 29 by Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research (EO) that was based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses the group received from the institute. “On June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,’” Empower Oversight said in a statement (pdf) on March 29. “BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission-ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported. SRA refers to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data resource made available by NCBI, and it “stores raw sequencing data.”

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“His counsellors view the Ukraine crisis as a blunt instrument that nonetheless may help the president to dig himself out of his electoral hole.”

Joe Biden Should Be Removed Before Putin, US Poll Says (Exp.)

Just a week after the US president was accused of making a gaffe calling for regime change in Russia, an exclusive poll for the Sunday Express has revealed Americans would rather see his presidency end. Asked which would be better for America, 52 per cent chose “Biden loses power in the US” over 43 per cent for “Putin loses power in Russia”. The findings, in the poll by the Washington-based Democracy Institute, show almost two-thirds of Americans (62 per cent) believe Mr Biden will not be re-elected in 2024. They also appear to confirm an expected bid by Donald Trump in 2024 will see him sweep back to power. While Boris Johnson has seen a rise in public support for his handling of the Ukraine crisis, the error prone US president has not enjoyed a similar bounce.

Of 1,500 polled, who all identify as “likely voters”, 57 per cent disapprove of his presidency, the same as a month ago, while just 39 per cent approve of it. And 70 per cent believe the US is “heading in the wrong direction”. His handling of the war is only approved by 40 per cent while 52 per cent disapprove, and his overall foreign policy has a 55 per cent disapproval rating compared to 42 per cent approval. While a Techne poll for the Sunday Express showed almost a third of UK voters had Ukraine as their top concern, in the US just eight per cent saw it as their main issue, with the key worry being inflation. If Mr Trump does run in 2024, according to the US poll results he would beat Mr Biden by 48 per cent to 43 per cent.

Patrick Basham, Director of the Democracy Institute, said: “Biden’s foreign policy debacles, highlighted by America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, have turned off voters, who mostly disapprove of his handling of America’s global role. “Biden’s political team knows economic pain will continue to weigh down the president’s ratings. So, it puts great stock in Biden’s handling of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “His counsellors view the Ukraine crisis as a blunt instrument that nonetheless may help the president to dig himself out of his electoral hole. “Should the Ukraine crisis end on terms perceived to be favourable to the Ukrainians, and should Vladimir Putin’s Russia be put back in her box, it’s possible that Biden will receive considerable credit and his ratings will improve. If that happens, his party’s candidates may also improve their positions vis-à-vis their Republican opponents.

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“While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain.”

Biden’s ‘Absolute’ Defense Of Hunter (Turley)

“We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China. Those claims appear demonstrably false — and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable. For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of criminal charges against Hunter Biden. Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.

Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other media faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in October 2020. What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.” Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making “an important distinction.”

It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden. Influence peddling has long been the way Washington’s elite enriches itself. This common source of political corruption involves the relatives of powerful government figures who shake down corporations or countries for access and influence. The Bidens would seem to be standouts in this common practice, engaging in a virtual family business. James Biden has been accused of marketing his connection to his brother.

And in the emails discovered on his abandoned laptop, Hunter Biden practically sold timeshares of his father by dangling meetings and dinners for investors. The key in any influence peddling scheme is to protect the principal. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.” Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.

Bobulinski

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But doesn’t know what for yet.

Biden Wants Attorney General Garland to Prosecute Trump (Turley)

President Joe Biden has declared the guilt of individuals or promised punishment before even the commencement of investigations. The latest such example is the leaking of Biden’s desire to have Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecute Trump. [..] Biden is now being widely reported as wanting Garland to prosecute Trump. His close associates made sure that the media reported that the President wants “Mr. Garland to act less like a ponderous judge and more like a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.” This leak was made after a district court judge declared that Trump likely committed a crime, an opinion that I recently criticized over its sweeping language and spotty analysis. Various Democrats are demanding that Garland prosecute Trump, telling Garland to “step up or step out.”

Two years ago, the media heralded the statements of D.C. Attorney General Racine that he was pursuing possible charges. Yet, neither Racine nor the Biden Administration have charged Trump. Why? The reason is that there is not clear evidence of a crime. The leaking of the President’s demand puts Garland in an even more difficult position. The clear intent of the leak is to let Garland know what the President expects from him. Yet, Garland has already been criticized by some of us for refusing to appoint a special counsel in the Hunter Biden scandal. What is most striking, however, is the absence of any concern from the same legal experts who denounced such statements from Trump. These are statements made to aides that were then leaked to the media to get to Garland.

That allows the media to say that Biden never said it directly to Garland, but the message was delivered by the media. For Garland to yield to such pressure would constitute a troubling departure from his predecessor, Bill Barr, who refused to do so on investigations ranging from the Mueller investigation to the election investigation to the Hunter Biden investigation. Absent new evidence of direct culpability, such a prosecution would likely result in either acquittal or an appellate reversal. That would raise concerns over the Justice Department pursuing a political rather than a legal agenda — the very danger that Garland pledged to avoid when he stressed “I am not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’ lawyer.”

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Coco Chanel. Another history lesson.

From Maria’s Office … the Fashion Nazi (Zakharova)

A few bloggers have reported today that official Chanel brand stores abroad are refusing to sell their products to Russian nationals. Allegedly, Chanel customers must sign a form saying that they will not take the items sold by the brand to the Russian Federation, as per some internal document of the boutique chain. We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future. But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle. Seems like those running the legacy of the “great Coco” have found a way to join the Russophobic “cancel Russia” campaign. Weird, right? What’s the link between Russia’s anti-Nazi operation and the French fashion house? But the link is there. We just opened a closet to find some well-preserved 80-year-old skeletons.

During World War II, Coco Chanel herself was a collaborator and a Third Reich agent. She is widely known to have had connections to the occupation authorities in France. Baron Hans Guenther Freiherr von Dincklage, an attaché of the German government in charge of the Nazi propaganda in Paris, was among her dearest friends. Coco Chanel, also known as informer F-7124 as per Abwehr records, supported the German masters of Paris so much that she took part in the attempts to organise secret negotiations between the Reich and the United Kingdom. One should say that the Germans valued Coco and had her live in a luxurious apartment at the Ritz hotel, while ordinary Parisians struggled to make ends meet under the German occupation, while the country’s economy was under enormous strain.

Moreover, the fashion designer accepted the help of the Nazis to reach her business goals. Before the war, she sold her Chanel No. 5 production facility to Jewish manufacturers. Then, she engaged the Germans to try and reclaim the rights to the perfume sale profits. After France was liberated, she was called to answer for all of that. The fashion house does not advertise it but Coco was arrested at the end of the war. She was later released as a favour to Churchill (and here is London again) and was banned from France after the occupation was over, for years, residing in the “neutral” Switzerland. The brand’s management has always emphasised that the Chanel house traditions are as strong as ever. Well, no doubt about that now. Investigative reporter Hal Vaughan wrote about the founder of the fashion house: “The Nazis were in power, and Chanel gravitated to power.”

The brand was never bothered by such things as concentration camps, mass killings and war crimes perpetrated by the SS and Gestapo divisions. We are a very patient and forgiving country. We have forgiven everyone for everything, turned the page and cleared the way for the future. But if the way turns out to be a ring road, we will break the vicious circle. And the Chanel house can get back to square one and support Nazism, just like its founder did. But now everyone will know.

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Buddy Carter

 

 

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