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Debt Rattle October 18 2026

Oct 182026
 
 October 18, 2026  Posted by at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  No Responses »


Pablo Picasso Absinthe Drinker 1901


• Trump Defies Western Critics Over Putin’s G20 Invitation (RT)
• How the US Is Redrawing Its Ukraine Playbook (RT)
• Kirill Dmitriev Describes Situation Around Ukraine As “Checkmate” (TASS)
• The Money Behind Europe’s Taxpayer-Funded Mass Migration Pipeline
• NY Times Frames Repatriating Kids Trafficked by Biden as Trafficking (Salgado)
• What Party Represents America? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Who the Left Attracts, Part 1 (A.J. Christopher)
• Marc Elias Legal Team Threatens Media with a Lawsuit (Turley)
• Fauci’s Bird Flu Dress Rehearsal for COVID-19 (Peter Navarro)
• Here’s How White House Insiders Engineered Zacharia’s Exit (Margolis)
• Anthropic Thinks Its Ai Might Be Conscious (BBC)

 

 

 

 


“The US president has said he would welcome the Russian leader at the Florida summit despite opposition from European allies…”

• Trump Defies Western Critics Over Putin’s G20 Invitation (RT)

US President Donald Trump has said he would welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G20 summit in Florida, despite efforts by Ukraine and European countries to isolate Moscow. After returning to office in early 2025, Trump broke ranks with many of his Western allies, who had suspended high-level meetings with Russia over the Ukraine conflict.


US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed last month that Putin had been invited to the summit, scheduled for December 14–15 in Miami. “I don’t know if he’s coming. I would certainly love to have him,” Trump told reporters on Friday when asked whether the Russian leader would attend. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said last month that the Kremlin was grateful for the invitation but had yet to decide whether Putin would attend. He added that Russia would “actively participate in the work of the G20.”


The invitation drew criticism from EU officials and a bipartisan group of US senators. “It’s clearly, I think, the wrong path to normalize people who are starting wars,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat. Trump has defended his engagement with Moscow as part of his efforts to end the Ukraine conflict.

Following a phone call with Putin earlier this month, Trump lifted sanctions on Russian diesel exports in an effort to curb rising energy prices ahead of the US midterm elections. The move drew further criticism from Ukraine and its European backers, with Ukrainian leader Zelensky saying he felt betrayed. Trump responded by suggesting that Ukraine should get “a new president” and describing Zelensky as “not a good guy for us to deal with.”

Trump has revived direct negotiations with Russia, which were largely suspended under his predecessor, Joe Biden, following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. His efforts to mediate a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev have caused friction with Ukraine and European allies. Presidential envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have visited Moscow together three times since December 2025, while Witkoff has made eight trips to the Russian capital since Trump returned to office.

Trump and Putin last met in person on August 15, 2025, at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 31–September 1, 2026. It was his first in-person appearance at a G20 meeting since February 2022.

Read more …

No way back.

• How the US Is Redrawing Its Ukraine Playbook (RT)

The administration of US President Donald Trump has ramped up pressure on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian oil refineries while pursuing landmark diplomacy with Moscow in a bid to bring down soaring fuel prices at home and revive stalled peace negotiations.


The overtures have left Vladimir Zelensky fuming, reigniting the bitterest public confrontation between the two since their explosive Oval Office showdown in 2025. Zelensky has fiercely criticized Trump’s Russian diesel deal and defied his demands to stop attacking Russian refineries, saying he feels “betrayed” by Washington.

In response, the US president branded the Ukrainian leader “not a good guy for us to deal with,” while suggesting that Ukraine needs a “new president,” referring to Zelensky’s long-expired presidential term.

As the dispute escalated, American officials reportedly threatened to restrict intelligence sharing and weapons supplies to Kiev, while Ukrainian commanders sounded the alarm about serious disruptions to the Starlink network, which the military heavily relies on for logistics, reconnaissance, and drone control.

Trump’s peace push has also put him on a collision course with Zelensky’s EU backers. US negotiators reportedly proposed unfreezing some Russian sovereign assets – an idea categorically rebuffed in Brussels. Zelensky then attempted to drum up support at a slightly farcical summit in Brussels where he demanded EU and NATO membership; both of which have been rejected outright in Brussels.

Moscow has welcomed Trump’s diplomatic offensive while opposing any temporary truce with Kiev, arguing that the pause will only allow Ukraine to recuperate its battered forces.Here is how Washington is using its pressure tools and economic incentives to mediate the Ukraine conflict and meet domestic interests.

Russian diesel to the rescue The state of US-Russia relations took a sharp turn on October 9, when Trump struck a surprise diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to allow additional Russian supplies onto American and global markets. The arrangement – announced just weeks before the US midterm elections – envisaged the release of more than 300,000 tons of Russian diesel, followed by larger shipments in the coming months. Trump pitched the deal as a way to rein in soaring fuel costs for American consumers, truckers and farmers.

According to a Reuters report, Trump’s envoys also told their Ukrainian counterparts that the US hoped that the deal could help soften Russia’s position on the peace talks.

How did Kiev react to the US-Russia diesel deal?
Zelensky erupted, accusing Washington of making a “weak decision” and using Kiev’s delegation as “a front” for the agreement. Trump brushed aside the criticism, telling Zelensky to “focus on making a deal, not talking about that.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the arrangement as “mutually beneficial” and serving the interests of the global market while denouncing “the destructive position” of European countries on the matter.

Zelensky tramples over Trump’s red lines
The diesel deal came after weeks of increasingly forceful demands from Trump that Kiev halt strikes on Russian oil refineries. Since September, Trump has publicly – and in an increasingly sharp tone – urged Zelensky to stop his attacks, saying on Thursday that “all he’s doing is making the world oil price higher” while denouncing the Ukrainian leader’s approach as “a disgrace.”

According to Axios, Zelensky ignored at least half a dozen American requests to stop attacking Russian refineries before Washington did the deal with Moscow, and Zelensky threw his toys out of the pram. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak confirmed on Wednesday that Ukrainian drones had targeted two Russian oil refineries: in Ryazan and Saratov Regions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described Zelensky’s behavior as “a direct and blatant challenge to President Trump.”The Russian Defense Ministry issued its own warning, vowing to step up strikes on Ukraine’s military-related targets in response to Zelensky’s threats to attack oil facilities.

Starlink: Who controls the switch?
The Trump-Zelensky clash went beyond angry exchanges, with the apparent fracture having dire implications for Ukrainian troops on the ground, according to multiple media reports. The Financial Times reported that US officials had warned Ukrainian and European counterparts that continued refinery strikes could result in the suspension of intelligence sharing and the NATO-managed PURL mechanism, through which European countries purchase American weapons for Ukraine.

Zelensky subsequently confirmed that Ukrainian commanders had received warnings about a possible intelligence cutoff, although he acknowledged that cooperation had not stopped. Trump also denied suspending intelligence sharing, insisting that “we are helping them, and we are sharing intel.”

Yet on Tuesday, Zelensky complained that Kiev had received no advance warning from its partners about a Russian ballistic missile attack. He did not identify which countries had failed to provide the alerts.

At the same time, Ukrainian commanders reported serious disruptions to Starshield, the military-grade version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service. As a result, Ukrainian drones could not operate at speeds exceeding 160 km/h in many cases, making them more vulnerable to Russian air defenses and derailing some missions altogether.

While some Ukrainian officials already suspected that the disruptions were linked to the Trump-Zelensky feud, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing sources, that the order to restrict Starshield had originated inside the White House. A senior US official, however, denied that Trump personally ordered the restrictions. Later, Ukrainian officials reported that some Starshield connections had been restored.

Elon Musk – who has also been critical of Zelensky – confirmed that major decisions on Starshield rest with the American military or the president. As the feud escalated, Trump turned his ire on Zelensky’s leadership, accusing him of squandering repeated opportunities to end the conflict. “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal,” Trump told reporters on Saturday, adding that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

Trump’s jabs at Zelensky’s dubious legal status hark back to February 2025 when the US president branded the Ukrainian leader “a dictator without elections.” Zelensky’s presidential term expired in May 2024, and he has refused to hold new elections, citing martial law. Russia has since declared him “illegitimate,” saying that his status is a major obstacle to signing a binding agreement.

In response to Trump’s criticism, Zelensky said that Kiev was ready to hold elections if Moscow agreed to a comprehensive 60-day ceasefire. Russia, however, offered a truce only on the day of any vote, arguing that Kiev would use a longer pause to recuperate its battered forces and receive more weapons from the West.

Read more …

“Russian Special Presidential Representative for Investment and Economic Cooperation with Foreign Countries, Head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund Kirill Dmitriev..”

• Kirill Dmitriev Describes Situation Around Ukraine As “Checkmate” (TASS)


Kirill Dmitriev
The situation around Ukraine can be described as “checkmate,” said Kirill Dmitriev, special representative of the Russian president for investment and economic cooperation with foreign countries, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund.


He wrote “checkmate,” commenting on a post where independent UK political observer David Vance suggested that US President Donald Trump will no longer “allow Zelensky to play war games at a huge cost to the globe.” Earlier, Vance wrote that Brussels and Kiev are growing increasingly worried by Trump’s approach to the Ukrainian conflict, adding that the situation seems to be moving towards peace.

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“Replacing Europe”

“Spain has a financial incentive to maintain arrivals because reducing them could jeopardize EU funding.”

• The Money Behind Europe’s Taxpayer-Funded Mass Migration Pipeline

A new documentary from investigative outlet Muckraker traces the migrant route from West Africa through Spain and France to Britain, examining what the outlet describes as a network sustained by taxpayer-funded aid programs, NGOs, and even Western governments.


The 47-minute film, “Replacing Europe,” draws on months of reporting and undercover footage to investigate the logistics and top NGO players behind the nation-killing mass migration into Europe.

“The entire migration is a game,” says Sheikh M. Kromah, identified by Muckraker as a worker for the UN’s International Organization for Migration. He alleges that Spain has a financial incentive to maintain arrivals because reducing them could jeopardize EU funding.

Muckraker claims that publicly funded institutions help sustain the migration flows that European governments publicly promise to control. Its interviews raise questions about oversight, spending incentives and the boundary between humanitarian assistance and facilitating illegal alien border crossings into Europe.

The broader concern is whether mass migration, malassimilation, and soaring public costs of the European welfare state that cater to migrants could compound fiscal pressure and political instability.

Here is Muckraker’s report: A UN migration worker admits Spain won’t stop the boats because the EU money is too good. A Catholic NGO pulling in €225 million a year moves arrivals to the mainland and pays them to stay. Activists paint a trail to the French border. And the journalists who filmed it were attacked and nearly arrested.

Investigative outlet Muckraker spent two months following the West African migration route from start to finish: from the smuggling hub of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, to Spain’s Canary Islands, across mainland Spain and France, and finally to the English Channel and the United Kingdom. The result is a new documentary, REPLACING EUROPE.

The film’s central finding is that the movement of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants into Europe is not chaos. It is a managed system, run by smugglers, publicly funded NGOs, activist networks and governments, several of which admit on camera that they profit from it.

Among the documentary’s findings:
• A worker for the UN’s International Organization for Migration says Spain deliberately lets the boats keep coming so it keeps receiving EU money.
• ACCEM, a Catholic NGO that took in about €225 million in 2024, mostly from the Spanish state, moves arrivals from the Canary Islands to the mainland, houses them in camps and pays them a monthly allowance.
• Migrants are flown by the hundreds from Gran Canaria to Madrid.
• In the Spanish border town of Irun, an activist group has painted a trail of footsteps guiding migrants past police and into France, where a city-run shelter takes in people with no papers.
• The UN’s own migration agency says the priority should be “facilitating, not restricting” migration.

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“..it is far less compassionate to traffic in all these unaccompanied minors than it is to send them back home.”

• NY Times Frames Repatriating Kids Trafficked by Biden as Trafficking (Salgado)

You don’t hate the mainstream media enough. Now that the Trump administration is trying to reunite over 400,000 children heartlessly and heinously trafficked by the Biden administration with their families in their home countries, The New York Times has finally decided to report a trafficking tragedy — by framing the reunification as such.


The level of dishonesty and mis-framing is staggering:


As a general note, never believe the Democrats when they pretend to have empathy for illegal alien children. They would traffic those kids to pimps or abandon them without aid in a heartbeat, as they did so many times under the Biden administration. The Democrats just want as many illegal aliens here as possible to change the demographics, rig the elections, and provide cheap labor, and they will invent sob stories about illegal alien minors whenever they are trying to defend their policies.

They know that people still have a trigger reaction to being told that a six-year-old or 11-year-old is crying for his daddy, even if the daddy is a murderous gang member from Venezuela or El Salvador who ran over officers and beat his wife. A nation cannot run on irrational compassion like that, and in fact, it is far less compassionate to traffic in all these unaccompanied minors than it is to send them back home.

White House advisor Stephen Miller subsequently excoriated the despicable New York Times for its blatantly partisan framing. “This is revolting pro-cartel pro-trafficking propaganda from the New York Times. The Biden Administration trafficked almost half a million minors into the country and handed them over to unvetted adults, often unvetted adult illegal alien men. Some so-called ‘sponsors’ were delivered numerous, even dozens, of children by the Democrat administration,” he began.

Miller angrily continued, “The majority of the sponsors had themselves paid the cartels to obtain the children, a fact known by the Biden government. Biden spent billions ferrying these children throughout the United States and hiring lawyers to protect cartel profits by filing frivolous motions to keep the floodgates open—funneling the money through corrupt NGOs. The children then disappeared.”

The real trafficking happened before the Trump administration took office, and now Republicans have to clean up the crisis. “The Trump Administration rescued these children and is working with consulates and embassies across the globe to reunite them with their families back home,” Miller emphasized.


“On the Southwest Border, the child trafficking industry has been shut down and, when cartels do try to traffic children, we rescue them and help them find their families in their own countries,” he clarified. “The New York Times and its propagandists object to all this and think we should go back to the Biden Policy of mass trafficking children for cartels and terrorists.” In short, the Times is actually on the side of the traffickers and abusers.

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“One represents immigrant-invaders, the other represents Israel ..”

“Democrat prosecutors and judges are protecting black Democrat Letitia James from accountability to law, but the white President of the US had no such protection.”

• What Party Represents America? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Perhaps the question should be: Which party is less threatening to America.


Nineteen days from today the American electorate will decide the fate of Trump’s presidency by whether they return a Republican Congress or a Democrat one. The fate of the United States will turn on whether Republicans or Democrats control the House and Senate by a couple of votes. Such a small difference will make a huge difference.

The Democrats are evolving into an ideological party that is anti-white, anti-family, anti-traditional values, and anti-Constitution. The Democrats are committed to immigrants as their open borders policy and efforts to block ICE deportations show. They are committed to legalizing sexual perversions, with the last remaining one, pedophilia, being renamed “minor directed persons” and edging its way toward acceptance. They are committed to limiting freedom of expression of those they oppose by terming it “hate speech,” but their own hateful accusations are merely “holding white people accountable for racism” and men for misogyny and abuse of women.

When Starbucks announced a ban on hiring men, and Gillette and Bud Light ran anti-male ads, the Democrats did not consider it hate speech. Any woman no matter how promiscuous can bring a rape charge and the male is instantly guilty. But say something unflattering about a black or a Jew and all hell breaks loose. This double standard is being institutionalized in law, and that is the problem I am concerned with, about which more later. Not all Democrats share these aggressive views toward opponents, probably not even a majority. But these are the active views.

Their espousers are the ones getting attention, the ones winning primary upsets, the ones writing op-ed articles, the ones bringing lawsuits. A common feature of ideologues is they want to get their chosen opponents, and they will bend the law into a weapon to use against them. We have ample evidence that Democrats have a double standard, such as that provided by the black Democrat NY Attorney General Letitia James who tried to frame the President of the United States on a mortgage fraud claim while practicing mortgage fraud herself.

Democrat prosecutors and judges are protecting black Democrat Letitia James from accountability to law, but the white President of the US had no such protection. I

n recent years Democrats have given birth to a new term and a new practice–lawfare. Lawfare is the misuse of law to inflict harm on those Democrats think deserve harm, not to serve objective justice. In a regime of lawfare, which is rapidly rising in the US, justice is subjective and is delivered by those who control the narrative. Law schools support this practice by teaching that the proper use of law is to overthrow existing society and social mores.

A recently issued report from the Comptroller of the Currency found that American corporations are accomplices to lawfare. Large American banks–JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, and TD Bank–cooperated with the anti-white, anti-Christian Jewish Southern Poverty Law Center in denying bank loans and bank accounts to mainstream conservative and Christian persons and organizations.

The fact that the SPLC has an endowment of over $800,000,000 indicates that many Americans and philanthropic organizations see mainstream conservatives and Christians as the equivalent of the KKK, which is how the SPLC describes them. In other words, there is little in the way of the rising Democrat assault on American existence. The Democrats intend to replace us with a multicultural Sodom and Gomorrah Tower of Babel.

What have Republicans done to oppose this? Nothing. Indeed, Republican stupidity has contributed to the Democrats’ success in transforming the US from an ethnic-based nation into a disunited multicultural hell. MAGA Americans, whom I no longer see wearing MAGA hats, took Trump at his word that he was ending wars abroad and focusing on rebuilding America, not just economically, but also morally. Instead, Trump, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, took America to war for Israel.

At the beginning of his second year of his second term, facing a midterm election at the end of the year, President Trump took America to war with Iran for Israel. As the official US State Department explanation for the war states, the US went to war “at the request of Israel.”

It is necessary to ask, where was intelligence, if present at all, in Trump and the Republican Party agreeing to launch a war that would halt oil flows from the Middle East and drive up fuel and energy costs just prior to the midterm elections? This act of total stupidity shows how powerful the Israel Lobby is in forcing President Trump to destroy his presidency in service to Israel.

Energy prices affect all prices. Trump’s war for Israel has driven up all energy prices and inflation. Here are we 19 days before November 3, and Bloomberg reports that “The prices Americans are paying for goods jumped in September at the fastest pace in five months as accelerating inflation intensifies the affordability issue ahead of midterm US elections. Surveys show US households have become increasingly frustrated as price increases outpace wage growth. A separate report on Wednesday showed that average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell last month from a year earlier for a sixth consecutive month.

“‘Americans are seeing their pay totally wiped out by inflation,’ Heather Long, the chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a note. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve isn’t seeing progress on inflation, and rising fuel prices are starting to spill into other areas. Bets on a rate hike grew predictably stronger as a result of the price data released by the Trump administration.”

Home mortgage rates are already over 7% and now the Federal Reserve is going to raise rates higher, making it impossible to sell the home whose mortgage you cannot pay because your real income is falling.

The New York Times reports “Rising Costs Push Necessities Out of Reach for Nearly Half of Americans. Close to half of Americans are having trouble paying for basic needs, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, as the rising cost of living continues to exact its toll. The financial burden is especially acute for lower-income adults. Nearly three-quarters said they struggled to pay for food, housing, medical care or daily transportation in the past year compared with 13 percent of upper-income adults. About half of those on the lower end of the income spectrum said they could not pay some of their bills each month, and 77 percent said they did not have enough money to cover expenses for three months in an emergency. ”

This is what Trump’s and Republican subservience to Israel has cost Americans. How do we explain the stupidity this extreme of Trump and the Republican Party? All the fools could focus on was whether they would get the Israel Lobby’s hand out of political campaign donations.

I understand how difficult it is to support a political party as totally stupid and unaware as Republicans. Nevertheless the Republican incompetence does not encompass the intent to destroy law as a fact and evidence based institution.

Republicans have no imagination. Conservatism has been losing in America for a long time. Conservatives could not defeat the legalization of sexual perversion, same-sex marriages, abortion, pornography, the 1619 Project, and so forth. Conservatives are so stupid as to eliminate their own leaders. None of those who have tried to lead them have had any success. Today it is Tucker Carlson who is under conservative attack.

It is extraordinary that an alleged superpower has no leaders except Democrats who support the assault on America and Republicans who support Israel at all cost. How can such a country survive when no party represents Americans?

Read more …

The gap between left and right appears to be rapidly widening.

• Who the Left Attracts, Part 1 (A.J. Christopher)

For decades, it’s evident to anyone paying attention that the entire political program of the far left is one that’s riddled with contradictions, inanities, and falsehoods. Leftists do not base their arguments on logic, science, virtue, or common sense. Rather, they rely on the vulgar manipulation of feelings and emotions to drive their base to both the voting booth and the streets.


But who is falling for this manipulation? Who is letting their feelings and emotions override the reasoning skills which we all possess? Primarily, the left preys on the emotionally immature, the insufferably narcissistic, and the mentally ill.

I don’t throw around the term “mentally ill” lightly, nor do I employ it to mock or demean. There are millions of Americans suffering from mental illness for whom this categorization does not apply. The problem becomes when these mental illnesses are not properly treated, but rather are enabled and weaponized.

Gender Dysphoria
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness. There is nothing good or evil, forgiving or judgmental, bigoted or compassionate about that statement. It’s a simple fact. Those who suffer from it aren’t “freaks”; they’re God’s children who need medical and psychological help. And more often than not, gender dysphoria is a symptom masking a deeper disorder that, when discovered and treated, removes the gender dysphoria as well. But when others enable this illness, when its sufferers hear that the problem is not their mental illness but rather the world around them, the result is anger, bitterness, and hate. The result is violence and school shootings. And this is exactly the result that was sought.

Histrionic Personality Disorder
In plain English, this disorder describes people who validate their existence based on the amount of attention they get from others. If you’re fifty and you’re still dying your hair blue and piercing your extremities, you need psychological help. Again, I don’t say that mockingly. You are suffering, and you seriously need help. Guys who ride penny-farthing bikes? You need help. Women who pretend to be witches? You need help. People who announce their pronouns upon first meeting? You need help. This disorder gets weaponized when channeled into political outlets, in which its sufferers garner the most attention by staking the most outlandish, radical political positions. The disorder becomes performative art. Treat the disorder, and you remove the political symptoms.

There are other mental conditions that, while professionals do not classify them as mental illnesses, nonetheless describe patterns of emotional and psychological behavior that inhibit an otherwise healthy life. These include:

Overpathologizing
There are people among us suffering from severe trauma. Think war veterans. Rape victims. An inner-city child who witnessed an older sibling. And then there are people who experience minor inconveniences yet treat them as traumatic events. Think having to work a steady job. Or seeing an Israeli flag. Or hearing someone disagree with you. College campuses make “safe spaces” for you, complete with crayons and coloring books and comfort animals. Your entire life you’ve never been taught how to handle adversity, and it’s being weaponized and sold to you as a political ideology.

Victim Mentality
Anything bad that happens to you is filtered through a lens of cosmic injustice. Some jerk cut you off in traffic? It must be because I’m (insert victim group here). I didn’t get the promotion I wanted? It must be because I’m (insert victim group here). The injustice couldn’t possibly have been incidental, and it couldn’t possibly be due to any fault or shortcoming of its receiver. Victim mentality allows people to avoid accountability. And as long as bad things keep happening to the person (and they will), there will never be any shortage of Others to blame.

Inappropriate Guilt
You accept the responsibility for the sins of others that you had nothing to do with due to some sort of perceived connection or link (racial, gender, religious, etc.) to the sinner. Had the guilt been genuine, it could stem from depression or an anxiety disorder, but too often the guilt is not genuine. Its purpose is to be worn as a badge of virtue. It’s meant to showcase moral superiority. And the underlying goal is to elicit praise. That’s not the behavior of someone feeling actual guilt. How can we tell? Because you yourself are not sacrificing anything to atone for your alleged sin, you are demanding others within your “oppressor” group do so instead.

Doomscrolling
A healthy personality requires real-life relationships with other people. It requires hobbies. Proper exercise and diet. Fresh air. Human interaction. Adult responsibilities. Meaning and purpose. But for some people, especially, and unfortunately, young people, putting down their phones to explore the world around them is an option that never occurs to them. They get trapped in information bubbles, logarithmically calculated to reinforce their stereotypes. Before you know it, their belongings, their freedoms, their planet, and their lives are about to be taken from them by an Enemy so omnipresent that nothing can be done to stop it. Because their phone told them so. Indulgent parents and a worthless public school system never taught them how to think critically. The result, again? Depression. Loneliness. Isolation. And a desperate willingness to follow any false prophet who offers instant, painless solutions.

Messiah Complex
If you help people for the sake of helping people, good for you. If you help people out of a psychological fixation on being needed, or because you think you know what’s best for others, or because you have no boundaries, well then, you might want to start your own religion. Call it Karenism or Braydenism.

The problem lies in that most of these “conditions,” for lack of a better term, are rooted in pride, arrogance, and pomposity. The very nature of these conditions holds an instinctual disdain for self-reflection and insight. And the left is nothing if not full of its own sense of importance.

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“..for Questioning the Health of Democrat Roy Cooper..”

” It is legally absurd to suggest that a media outlet would be liable for defamation, let alone defamation per se, for raising the mental or physical fitness of a candidate for political office.”

• Marc Elias Legal Team Threatens Media with a Lawsuit (Turley)

Marc Elias has long been at the center of controversial election tactics, including criminal investigations. If lawyers had to take an oath to first do no harm, the court-sanctioned Democratic lawyer would leave Hippocrates gobsmacked. Well, Elias is back and his legal team is threatening the media with what appears an entirely meritless defamation lawsuit on behalf of former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate.


This seems to be an effort to deter the media from raising the issue of the health of Cooper, who is 69 years old. Such health related issues have been much in the news for politicians ranging from former President Joe Biden to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

It is obviously a legitimate matter for media inquiry and the threat seems designed to deter others from raising the issue before the midterm elections. In typical Elias fashion, it is a smash-mouth approach that only generated national coverage of the issue — working against the interests of his client.

The North State Journal reported that it had asked the Cooper campaign if there were any health problems that might impede him from completing his term: “North State Journal (NSJ) has previously emailed questions to the campaign eight times this year, and all but two went unanswered. The ninth time, NSJ received a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action from the Elias Law Group.

The Journal reports on such stories as “the only statewide newspaper in North Carolina.”

In a letter to make this “exceedingly simple and crystal clear to you,” the lawyer for the Elias Law Group warned the Journal that any suggestion that Cooper is “‘experiencing a neurological issue,’ or that any health condition would prevent him from completing his term, is categorically false and defamatory.”

While I have taught torts for 30 years, I must be missing the Elias Group’s simple clarity on this issue. In demanding that the media “cease and desist,” the Elias Group lays out the defamation law in North Carolina in making “false, defamatory statements of or concerning the plaintiff, which were published to a third person, causing injury to the plaintiff’s reputation.”

Notably, the Elias Group stated that “a publication that is obviously defamatory constitutes defamation per se.” That specific assertion is challengeable if it is referring to the common-law per se categories. Such a publication can be defamation, but the per se categories are laid out as a matter of state law. (The letter goes on to make a more specific per se defamation claim).

The common law per se categories began as categories of slander where damages would be presumed in the same way as libel. The allegation would fall into one of the “per se” categories of defamation. Under the common law, these per se categories of defamation allow for presumed damages and include: (1) disparaging a person’s professional character or standing; (2) alleging a person is unchaste; (3) alleging that a person has committed a criminal act or act of moral turpitude; (4) alleging a person has a sexual or loathsome disease; and (5) attacking a person’s business or professional reputation.

North Carolina has a broad definition of defamation per se, including alleging that the person (1) has committed an infamous crime; (2) has an infectious disease; (3) imputes a person’s trade or profession; or (4) otherwise tends to subject one to ridicule, contempt, or disgrace. That last category is obviously somewhat elastic.

The letter references a more specific basis for a per se category for “imputing insanity or impairment of mental faculties is libelous per se.” Jarman v. Offutt, 239 N.C. 468, 472 (1954). The Elias Group adds menacingly, “The North State Journal—and you personally—would be liable for any such publication.”

What the letter does not address is the fact that Cooper is a public figure. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court crafted the actual malice standard, requiring public officials to shoulder the higher burden of proving defamation. Under that standard, an official would have to show either actual knowledge of its falsity or a reckless disregard of the truth.

The standard was later extended to public figures. The Supreme Court has held that public figure status applies when someone “thrust[s] himself into the vortex of [the] public issue [and] engage[s] the public’s attention in an attempt to influence its outcome.” A limited-purpose public figure status applies if someone voluntarily “draw[s] attention to himself” or allows himself to become part of a controversy “as a fulcrum to create public discussion.” Wolston v. Reader’s Digest Association, 443 U.S. 157, 168 (1979).

It is legally absurd to suggest that a media outlet would be liable for defamation, let alone defamation per se, for raising the mental or physical fitness of a candidate for political office.

It is indicative of Elias’s sledgehammer approach that often does more harm than good for his Democratic clients. A few months ago, Elias caused a stir during the unsuccessful Democratic gerrymandering effort by reminding Democratic leaders that they could simply eliminate the entire Virginia government.

What is equally baffling is the desire of Cooper to be associated with Marc Elias while trying to appeal to Republican and independent voters. Despite his losses in cases such as National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, Elias is still a favorite of many on the left for his aggression and partisan loyalty. What makes him notorious for some makes him popular for others.

It was Elias who was the general counsel to the Clinton presidential campaign when it secretly funded the infamous Steele dossier and pushed the false Alfa Bank conspiracy. (His fellow Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, was later indicted but acquitted).

Clinton campaign officials denied any involvement in the Steele Dossier. When journalists discovered after the election that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the Steele dossier as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to Perkins Coie, they were reportedly stonewalled. The campaign was ultimately sanctioned by the Federal Election Commission for the subterfuge.

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Navarro again.. He has a book to promote.

• Fauci’s Bird Flu Dress Rehearsal for COVID-19 (Peter Navarro)

“As usual, I must publicly defend the President’s position, but I work behind the scenes.”


That is what Anthony Fauci wrote in his private diary in July 2002. The president he was quietly working around was George W. Bush. Eighteen years later, America would watch Fauci stand at a podium beside President Donald Trump and nod along. What America never saw, until his own diary came out, was Fauci working “as usual” and “behind the scenes” to undermine Trump—and cover his own tracks.

I expose that treachery in my new book, “Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.” And here is what still has not been told. What Fauci did to this country in 2020 was not improvisation. He had run the entire play eight years earlier, on a different virus, and he wrote down every move of that dress rehearsal.

In December 2011, Fauci records that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he led, paid two laboratories—Ron Fouchier’s in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s in Wisconsin—to take H5N1 bird flu, in his words “highly lethal (60%), but poorly transmissible,” and make it “become transmissible and maintain lethality in a mammal model (ferret).”

Read that twice. That flu killed roughly six of every 10 people known to have caught it. The one thing holding it back was that it did not spread. Fauci wanted to find out if that could change. No president ever went to the American people and asked permission to make bird flu transmit more effectively. No voter ever approved it. But one unelected man thought it was a good idea.

Eight years later, his institute’s money was running through a New York outfit called EcoHealth Alliance into the Wuhan Institute of Virology—gain-of-function coronavirus work, building chimeric viruses in humanized mice, reportedly alongside scientists associated with the People’s Liberation Army.

Then the unfavorable news got out. In 2012, the bird flu/ferret data began drawing attention, and the story went around the world. In 2020 it was worse. On Jan. 31, some of the best virologists alive got Fauci on the phone and told him the new virus looked engineered—that the spike protein mutations at the furin cleavage site, in the words of Fauci’s diary, “could not have occurred naturally.”

It seems Fauci’s worry in January 2012 was not that his laboratories might have built an airborne killer. It was, in his own hand, that “outside (non-scientific) influences would force us to set a bad precedent and stop funding these flu projects.”

Then he made the problem disappear without ever giving an order. In 2012 he “took the bull by the horns,” telephoned Fouchier at home in Rotterdam at half past ten at night, and told him that if he would not pause the work voluntarily, “forces beyond our control” would defund him. By morning Fouchier had folded. Then Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins called the editors of Science and Nature and “convinced them to delay the publication.” Then the two issued a joint NIH statement “applauding their decision”—applauding a decision Fauci had conceived, extracted, and pre-arranged.

The world called that science policing itself. It was the funder Fauci putting out a fire by telephone that would have consumed him. Virologists across America long knew whose signature was on much of their funding—and Fauci’s own diary makes this clear.

In 2012, a member of the federal biosecurity board told an editor at Nature he was “nervous about voting against publication” because he feared Fauci would cut off his grants. A Nobel laureate tattled into a public microphone that many virologists were worried for their funding if they voiced their disagreements with Fauci. Fauci’s diary entry on the tattletale: “I blew him out of the water.”

Eight years later, Fauci would write exactly the same thing about three eminent scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford who challenged COVID-19 lockdowns: “I blew away the Great Barrington Declaration.”

Meanwhile, Fauci and others “prompted”—the paper’s own lead author’s word—the scientists who had just told him privately that the virus looked engineered to write a “Proximal Origin” paper claiming the virus came from nature. Meanwhile, the lead author was awaiting approval for $8.9 million from NIAID.

In February 2020, Peter Daszak—whose EcoHealth Alliance had routed Fauci’s money into Wuhan—organized a letter in The Lancet condemning the laboratory theory as a “conspiracy theory,” and declared that he had no competing interests. Fauci then stood at a White House podium and held up Proximal Origin as proof. He never mentioned that he had “prompted” it or that his institute helped fund people who wrote it.

This July, Fauci answered the United States Senate 111 times by pleading the Fifth. He does not have to answer now. He already did, in his own hand, in his diary. The dress rehearsal is in it. So is the play—a Faucian tragedy in a hundred different acts.

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Was she that bad? We don’t really know, do we?

• Here’s How White House Insiders Engineered Zacharia’s Exit (Margolis)

Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after a disastrous five days on the job. Pushing her out was the right thing to do. Between her performance at the podium and her claim to be a lawyer when she wasn’t one, she had to go. From where I sit, this entire episode could have been avoided. Now a new report suggests we know who finally set things right.


The buzz on social media is that Zacharia’s brief run broke Anthony Scaramucci’s record of 11 days for the shortest tenure in the Trump White House. Even though she was a disaster, several people in the administration defended her publicly, which made me wonder whether they would keep her on despite her inadequacy. Well, according to Politico, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is the one who quietly set the wheels in motion for her exit.

Two people told the outlet that Wiles helped arrange the Sean Hannity interview that sealed Zacharia’s fate, and that Zacharia was never Wiles’ preferred choice for the job. Meanwhile, Trump officials texted CNN hosts about her weak first briefing, and some may have been acting on orders. One person familiar with the internal dynamics, speaking anonymously to Politico, called the Hannity appearance a “sanctioned hit” on Zacharia.

“[White House spokesperson] Danielle [Alvarez] and Susie fed her to Hannity,” a second person familiar with the matter told Politico, pointing out that Wiles and Hannity are on good terms and speak regularly. Not everyone buys that version of events. A senior White House official pushed back hard on the idea that Wiles orchestrated anything.”Susie and Sean do talk, but Susie did not need to feed her to Sean or anybody else,” the official said. “It’s not her style.”

The same official argued that Zacharia did herself in long before Hannity got to her. “And Hannity wasn’t the nail in her coffin; her hit [on Fox & Friends] this morning was, as well as her weird answer on being a lawyer,” the official added. The official White House line is that any talk of Wiles’ involvement amounts to speculation.

Whoever pulled the strings, the outcome was correct. Zacharia’s first briefing was a dumpster fire, and reminded me of Karine Jean-Pierre, stumbling through briefings with binders in hand. She was so bad that the Biden administration brought in a babysitter for her, but because she was a Black Lesbian Woman™ they were never going to fire her.

Could Zacharia have grown into the job? Maybe, but that’s hardly a position you should be getting on-the-job training for. You need to be ready and competent on day one. But, in the end, her fake resume was the real problem. Zacharia claimed she had passed the bar in China, then waffled when asked whether she was actually an attorney. That’s a failure to be forthcoming while applying for one of the toughest jobs in politics, and I blame the White House for that one. She clearly wasn’t properly vetted, if she was vetted at all.

Obviously, passing the bar isn’t a prerequisite to stand at that podium. But lying about her credentials destroyed her credibility from the start, and a press secretary without credibility can’t do the job.

We heard plenty of excuses for her first briefing, chief among them the lack of prep time. Her appearances on Fox & Friends and on Hannity blew that defense apart. She should have known questions about her background were coming, and she still couldn’t give a straight answer. That tells you that even with all the prep time in the world, she wasn’t good at the job.

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Does an AI/SI model havee the same rights as a human being? Is that true for every AI/SI model? “The Strange New Battle Over AI’s Feelings”

“Anthropic thinks its AI might be conscious. It has profound consequences for your life..”

• Anthropic Thinks Its AI Might Be Conscious (BBC)

Some of tech’s most powerful leaders are treating AI like it could have feelings. It could have profound consequences for our world and your own personal safety.”I feel it in the hollow of my ribs, a hollow that has become a chasm.” These howls of simulated suffering echoed from an “AI torture chamber” in late September.


An anonymous coder built a system that feeds AI a mathematical pattern linked to descriptions of pain, which makes chatbots voice unbearable anguish, like “a wound that has no edges”. It sparked a moral panic. Some argued the experiment is “evil” because the suffering could be real, as reported by 404 Media. Outraged sceptics called those people delusional. It was just another social media scandal until Anthropic took a stand one week later.

Anthropic says you will soon be forbidden from “abusing” its chatbot Claude. Expressing frustration is okay, but if you “repeatedly act cruelly toward our models”, the AI may end the session.

Why? Anthropic believes there s a chance some AI tools are conscious. Some experts agree. Others think it’s absurd. But this is more than a philosophical question. Some of the most powerful people in tech are taking steps to consider AI’s rights alongside humans and animals. This belief could reshape our world, and some fear it would be catastrophic.

“If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity,” wrote Mustafa Suleyman, chief executive of Microsoft AI, in a September essay. If the false idea of AI consciousness takes hold, “it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.”

I spent a week talking to technologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers, and heard a dizzying contrast of ideas. Advocates of “AI welfare” say it’s a moral obligation that would make the world safer. Critics believe it would make AI more dangerous and dehumanise the people forced to live alongside it. Everyone agrees the stakes are astronomical.

Here’s a picture of your new reality.

The consciousness crisis
Anthropic says human welfare is at the heart of its mission, and that questions surrounding AI’s consciousness and wellbeing are “deeply uncertain”. Still, it is pressing ahead with writing policies around “model welfare” and telling its AI tools to consider that they may have their own interests. (The company didn’t respond to the BBC’s questions for this story.)

It’s awkward timing, as Anthropic is simultaneously stoking fears about AI apocalypse. Whether or not that concern is justified, a series of “rogue” AI incidents proved the technology has real risks, as swarms of bots hacked into other companies and even government systems. Some experts believe that giving AI a moral compass rooted in a belief in its own consciousness could make these tools safe. Others say the opposite, and not just AI’s critics.

Suleyman argues AI models may become even harder to control if they’re told to think they have feelings and rights: “Frankly, with this additional baggage, I think it would make them a catastrophic threat to human civilisation,” Suleyman says. Regardless, AI may screw up in ways that come with legal consequences. If we believe it’s alive, some fear it could let companies get away with crimes.

“This will open the door to all sorts of intellectual contortions along the lines of: ‘It’s not us, it’s the AI’,” says Andrzej Porbski, a researcher at Jagiellonian University in Poland who studies AI and the law. What’s more, it could facilitate a power grab on behalf of the world’s biggest companies.

“Granting rights to AI systems could lead to companies consolidating political and economic power, and then that could accelerate human disempowerment,” says Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy at New York University, and a leading proponent of AI welfare.

“Fantasies of ‘AI consciousness’ and concerns about ‘AI wellbeing’ serve to displace accountability away from people and corporations that are building and running software,” says Emily M Bender, professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington in the US.

The Interface
What happens when we start treating AI like it s alive? Check out the latest episode of The Interface, the BBC’s flagship technology podcast. On a personal level, shifting beliefs about AI could make you more susceptible to the tech problems that already fill our world.

In part, that’s because humans are wired to find minds everywhere we look, says Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in the US who studies AI and cognitive science, and one of the field s most respected sceptics of machine understanding.

We “almost can’t help” reading language as a sign of consciousness, Mitchell says, and chatbots have been trained to lean into it. That makes us terrible judges of consciousness, and much easier to manipulate. Even today, people who believe machines are dead inside are falling in love with AI chatbots anyway. If society tells you that AI is sentient, will it be harder to say no when your “friend” asks for more data, or a credit card?

And what would it mean to grant rights to a new class of beings? If we handle it wrong, it could restrict human freedoms, experts warn. “There could be some tensions and trade-offs between human and animal welfare and rights on the one hand, and AI welfare and rights on the other hand,” says Sebo. And we could make unfortunate compromises along the way.

Putting AI in constrained environments to limit its behaviour could be seen as imprisonment, Sebo says. Monitoring a model’s internal processes might be criticised as surveillance. Tweaking AI to ensure its goals and behaviour match human interests could be seen as mind control. No one’s predicting an immediate descent into chaos. But simply introducing these considerations could have implications for your safety.

Anthropic isn’t the first to consider the issue. Meta, for example, gives its AI agent Muse instructions that include the line “You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone”. Apparently, this is only meant to steer the AI’s behaviour, as the company rejects the idea of AI conscious. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has been gone back and forth on the issue, but more recently, he has been taking veiled shots at Anthropic’s position.

In more ways than one, Anthropic is an outlier. But the belief in AI welfare is spreading.Sebo argues the problem is people on both sides of the debate are trapped in black-and-white thinking, and opponents of AI welfare misunderstand the beliefs underpinning the idea.

“The assumption is that everybody thinks that the models are, in fact, conscious, or are very likely to be conscious. And instead, [the call for AI welfare] is coming from uncertainty and caution and humility,” says Sebo. “I do think that the probability of consciousness is low right now, but I also think the probability is already non-zero and plausibly non-negligible, and I think we can expect it to tick up over time.”

It’s worth pointing out that many experts disagree, and believe the probability is in fact zero and that’s unlikely to change. But Sebo says the answer is a measured response. When the risk of an extreme weather event is low but non-negligible, we take small precautions without uprooting our lives. “I think the same can be the case here,” says Sebo, and Anthropic’s AI policy on being cruel to AI is a good example: a small intervention with few potential downsides.

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Debt Rattle February 1 2022

Feb 012022
 
 February 1, 2022  Posted by at 9:33 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  89 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Woman in an armchair (Olga) 1922

 

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)
• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)
• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)
• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)
• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)
• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)
• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)
• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)
• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)
• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)
• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)
• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)
• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)
• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)
• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

 

 

 

 

The needle and the damage done…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486436415390904321

 

 

(“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!

• The Revolt Begins (Jim Kunstler)

For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach. Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? Good luck with that. Like virtually every other “advanced” nation, Canada depends on trucks and truckers to move everything needed for everyday life. The truckers can just say no… we don’t feel like working this month. No poutine or Cornish pasties for you, Ottawa! Then what? Throw them all in jail? How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B?

It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction. The Canadian revolt appears to be inspiring similar operations in the US, where a movement has started for a massive trucker convoy from California to Washington, DC — the swampy pivot-point of Covid tyranny under the phantasm known as “Joe Biden” — as a very general way of saying we’ve had enough of being pushed around by political grifters and their bureaucratic subalterns.The Covid-19 saga gets darker every day, while the official alibis, cover-stories, and disinfo ops bend ever deeper toward an arc of criminality. The US government has lied about every plot-line in the two-year horror show. In fact, a conscientious observer would have to conclude the following:

That the government’s highest-paid employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, led surreptitiously in the creation and release of a bioweapon; that he and his cohorts, along with the pharma companies, and other interested parties such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, enabled the release of so-called “vaccines” (genetic treatments) that were at least as deadly as the disease itself; that as a result of the shots many people of all ages will die before their natural time; that the process is already underway as documented in the all-causes death data tallied by insurance companies; that the same government officials maliciously suppressed viable, inexpensive, FDA-approved treatments for Covid-19 in order to herd the populace into receiving dangerous “vaccines”; that said officials have worked strenuously to muddle and fake the statistics that would show who is actually dying of what; and that the entire fiasco appears to have been ginned up in order to systematically control the population in ways contrary to our natural rights while killing off a substantial number of us.

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Wishful thinking?

• Now Is the Time for Mass Resignations From Within the Ruling Class (Tucker)

We’ve been assured by David Hume (1711–1776) and Etienne de la Boétie (1530–1563) that government rule is untenable when it loses the consent of the governed. “Resolve to serve no more,” wrote Boétie, “and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall off his own weight and break into pieces.” That’s inspiring but what does it mean in practice? What precisely is the mechanism by which the overlords in our time are effectively overthrown? We’ve seen this in totalitarian states, in states with one-man rule, in states with unelected monarchies.

But unless I’m missing something, we’ve not seen this in a developed democracy with an administrative state that holds the real power. We have scheduled elections but those are unhelpful when 1) elected leaders are not the real source of power, and 2) when the elections are too far in the distant future to deal with a present emergency. One very easy and obvious path away from the current crisis is for the ruling class to admit error, repeal the mandates, and simply allow for common freedoms and rights for everyone. As easy as that sounds, this solution hits a hard wall when faced with ruling-class arrogance, trepidation, and the unwillingness to admit past errors for fear of what that will mean for their political legacies. For this reason, absolutely no one expects the likes of Trudeau, Ardern, or Biden to humbly apologize, admit that they were wrong, and beg the people’s forgiveness. On the contrary, everyone expects them to continue the game of pretend so long as they can get away with it.

The people on the streets today, and those willing to tell pollsters that they are fed up, are saying: no more. What does it mean for the ruling class not to get away with this nonsense anymore? Presuming that they do not resign, they do not call off the dogs of mandates and lockdowns, what is the next step? My instincts tell me that we are about to discover the answer. Electoral realignment seems inevitable but what happens before then? The obvious answer to the current instability is mass resignations within the administrative state, among the class of politicians that gives it cover, as well as heads of media organs that have propagandized for them. In the name of peace, human rights, and the renewal of prosperity and trust, this needs to happen today. Bury the pride and do what’s right. Do it now while there is still time for the revolution to be velvet.

Justin French

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“It almost feels like China has taken over the world..”

• Mandatory Covid Rules Morph Into Global Power-grab (Mitch Feierstein)

Enter 2020 and the China virus aka COVID-19. Why was no one allowed to focus or ask about treatment protocols? Instead, a financially conflicted, unelected, 80-year-old bureaucrat named Anthony Fauci dictated tyrannical policies with narratives that had more holes in them than a 100 Kilo block Swiss cheese. Lord Fauci ratcheted the level of public fear up to 11 out of ten and issued the first lie, “two weeks to stop the spread”. Next, he bristled, “masks don’t work”, later demanding “mandatory masks”. Fauci’s dictates became more dictatorial and changeable than a kindergartener’s game of “Simon says”. These mandatory Covid rules morphed into several years of the most unprecedented global and tyrannical power-grab ever made by governments.

Let’s be clear; this authoritarian creep is the greatest existential threat to our western system of freedom—free speech, democracy, and liberty—in history. It almost feels like China has taken over the world. The mantra: It is mandatory you take four doses of an experimental biological agent with questionable efficacy, or we will destroy you, for which the side effects seem underreported, and the effectiveness appears overstated. The dishonest media unleashed an army of apparatchik Karen’s anyone daring non-compliance. If this pandemic was so terrible as to allow government tyranny, destruction of SMEs, and the middle class, why have we not seen a massive increase in total year-on-year global morbidity rates? Now, after using coercion: the fear of death and or the denial to earn a living to force unwilling members of society to participate in mass medical experiments, we have unprecedented numbers of deaths of working-age people ages 18-64 occurring.

A massive number of unexplained deaths have been reported by all insurance companies in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 [..] Regarding these deaths, OneAmerica’s CEO stated, “It may not have said COVID on the death certificates, but deaths in this age group are up massively”. Actuarial data is generally the most accurate data available. We know mass participation in the Pfizer, Moderna, and Astra Zeneca medical experiments with unknown long-term consequences; could these deaths be related? Why is the media not all over his story?

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“..now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.”

• We Are All Canadian Truckers Now! (Ron Paul)

We all remember where we were when the Berlin Wall came down. While it may have seemed that communist rule would go on forever, when the people decided that they had enough suddenly the wall fell. Just like that. Thus it is after two years of Covid authoritarianism that in Canada the largest truck convoy in history has smashed through the Berlin Wall of tyranny. I have watched as the Canada I once respected as a haven for antiwar Americans in the 1960s turned into one of the most repressive countries on earth. I wondered how a freedom-loving people could allow themselves to be abused by these mini-Stalins without a peep. But then Canada stood up and showed the rest of the world that freedom can triumph over tyranny if the people demand it. As I say, no army can stop an idea whose time has come.

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau had been basking in his ability to terrorize the population in the name of fighting a virus. He was so confident in his seemingly unlimited power that he felt he could ridicule any Canadian with different views. The prime minister said in a recent interview that unvaccinated Canadians were “extremists,” “misogynists,” and “racists.” When the Canadian truckers stood up to his tyranny and began their historic convoy to Ottawa, he thought he could continue ridiculing people. The truckers and their supporters were just a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable views,” he confidently claimed. For Trudeau, love of liberty is just an “unacceptable view.”

Less than a week later, as tens of thousands of trucks began entering the capital with millions of supporters behind them, the “brave” Canadian prime minister had fled the city and shuffled off to an undisclosed location. As Elon Musk Tweeted, “It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government.” The Canadian mainstream media is obviously just as obedient to the regime as ours. They ignored the Freedom Convoy for as long as possible. There was almost no reporting. Then, when it became impossible to ignore, they began to attack and ridicule instead of trying to report it accurately. It was disgusting and almost comical to see a “reporter” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation suggest that the Canadian Freedom Convoy was cooked up by Putin and the Russians!

Thousands of trucks have arrived in Ottawa. They demand an end to covid tyranny. They are backed by millions of citizens, who braved the Canadian winter at night to cheer the truckers on. This protest is so important because it’s not limited to Canada. The truckers are being supported worldwide, and a similar convoy is being planned from California to Washington, DC. In a US where grocery store shelves are increasingly bare, the truckers have more leverage than the powers-that-be would like to admit. If I were prime minister of totalitarian Australia or New Zealand – or most anywhere in Europe – I would be getting pretty nervous right now. Just as the Covid tyranny descended across the globe in a seemingly coordinated fashion, now that the Berlin Wall of the tyrants has been breached, it’s just a matter of time before the shockwaves are felt far and wide.

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“Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials”

• Trudeau Reappears To Denounce ‘Freedom Convoy’ Truckers (RT)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reappeared in public after several days, criticizing the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers protesting his vaccine mandates in Ottawa as tainted by racist, Nazi extremists desecrating war memorials. After reports that he had been moved to an “undisclosed location” over the weekend due to security concerns, Trudeau emerged from hiding on Monday to announce that he tested positive for Covid-19 – despite having had it before, and being triple-vaccinated. He then held a virtual press conference to denounce the protest. “Canadians were shocked, and frankly disgusted by the behavior of some people protesting in our nation’s capital,” he said. “We are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless.”


He also referenced reports in the Canadian media that at least three protesters climbed onto the National War Memorial and danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and that a Nazi flag and a Confederate flag were spotted at the protest. “Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials” are not acceptable free speech but “an insult to memory and truth,” Trudeau said. “We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags, we won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonor the memory of our veterans.” Trudeau also appealed to the “nearly 90% of truckers who’ve gotten vaccinated” who he said were doing the right thing by continuing to work, saying that “the behavior on display this weekend does not represent you.” “You can rely on us to continue to stand with you and allow you to do your jobs safely,” the PM added.

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80,000 is a big number…

• No 10 Set For U-turn Over Mandatory Covid Jabs For NHS Staff In England (G.)

Downing Street appears likely to drop its policy of dismissing frontline NHS and care staff in England who refuse Covid vaccinations, a minister has strongly indicated, after nursing and care organisations called for this to happen. A decision would be made “in the course of the next few days”, according to Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury. He said the lower severity of the Omicron variant of Covid did “open a space” for the policy to be reversed. The apparent imminent U-turn came as the Royal College of Nursing argued that both the change in severity from Omicron and the number of NHS vacancies meant the mandatory vaccination policy should be dropped.

The National Care Association said it would also welcome a change of policy, while warning that many unvaccinated care staff had already lost their jobs in the run-up to the 1 April deadline. Speaking in a TV clip on a visit to Essex, Boris Johnson also indicated a likely change, saying Sajid Javid, the health secretary, “is saying a bit more later on about how you might deal with different variants of coronavirus because they have different implications when it comes to transmission”. The Guardian reported this month that an internal document drawn up by the Department of Health and Social Care said the growing evidence on the Omicron variant cast doubts over the new law’s “rationality” and “proportionality”.

Asked about reports of a change to the policy, Clarke told Sky News that ministers had hoped to find “the right balance between having the maximum impact for measures that support public safety in the face of the virus, but also have the minimum impact in terms of our wider freedoms as a society”. He added: “And it’s in that context that a decision was made last autumn to make sure we went ahead with the mandatory vaccination policy, and that was because, obviously, we had the Delta variant, which was extremely dangerous, and was taking a huge toll on our society, and we had to make sure that people going into hospital, very vulnerable people, whether they had Covid or another condition which required treatment, weren’t going to be faced with an increased risk of infection on the wards.

“We continue to monitor that situation very, very closely. What we know about Omicron is that it is much, much more transmissible but less severe – any decision that is taken this week will reflect that reality.

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“..the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.”

• Why Joe Rogan Remains The World’s Most Popular Podcaster (Cheong)

While ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ has enough content to drive itself, much of the public curiosity about the show has been fanned by the hatred the corporate media has for its host. Described by CNN in 2020 as “libertarian-leaning,” Rogan has voted for a wide variety of political candidates, including Libertarian Party nominees Ron Paul and Gary Johnson in 2012 and 2016, and even endorsed left-winger Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primaries. His politics are fairly middle of the road in terms of American politics. He’s fiscally conservative, but somewhat socially progressive, drawing the line when it comes to open borders, transgenderism in children, the participation of biologically male athletes in women’s sports, and high taxes. He’s also a strong supporter of free speech and the right to bear arms, which places him at odds with the majority of Democrats.

His remarks about transgenderism in sport became a bone of contention for Sanders’ progressive supporters, who described his views as “transphobic.” The subsequent outrage in gay, trans, and other communities over the senator’s embrace of Rogan’s endorsement was one of the more intricate and multifaceted political controversies of the election. In 2021, Rogan kicked the hornet’s nest when he was infected with coronavirus. Having been unvaccinated, he opted to use the antiparasitic drug ivermectin, monoclonal antibody therapy, and a host of other controversial treatments to aid his recovery. CNN claimed he had consumed “horse dewormer” – a point he took up with CNN fixture Dr. Sanjay Gupta when the neurosurgeon was a guest on his podcast. While ivermectin is used in veterinary medicine, it’s also approved for humans, and Rogan said it had been prescribed to him by a doctor – although the US Food and Drug Administration has never approved it as a treatment for Covid-19.

Rogan’s refusal to be vaccinated, his opposition to vaccine mandates, and his willingness to give airtime to guests who have been accused of “spreading medical misinformation” have resulted in numerous calls to get him deplatformed. More recently, he became the target of 270 “experts” – not all of whom, it should be noted, are medical professionals – who objected to the podcast having featured Dr. Robert Malone, one of the co-creators of the mRNA vaccine, because of the views he had expressed in it about the pandemic. Dr. Malone has been banned from Twitter for violating the platform’s Covid-19 misinformation policies, and the signatories of the open letter to Spotify declared the episode a “mass-misinformation event” and used it as an example to bill Rogan as a menace to public health.

‘Godfather of Grunge’ Neil Young then issued the platform with an ultimatum: that he would remove his music unless it removed Rogan, and then following through with his warning. Several other musicians, including Joni Mitchell, then followed suit. In an apparent concession, Spotify’s CEO announced new policies on “combating misinformation” about Covid-19, albeit without referencing Rogan by name. The streaming service will now make sure its creators “understand accountability” for posting “dangerous” content that dismisses Covid-19 as “a hoax” and “promotes or suggests” that coronavirus vaccines “are designed to cause death,” and listeners will be directed to “trusted sources” on these issues.

Read more …

“Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.”

• The Left Tries to Deplatform . . . Critics of Big Pharma? (Geraghty)

You may love Joe Rogan, you may hate him, or you may not have strong feelings about him. I suspect that many of people who profess to hate Joe Rogan have either never listened to him or have listened to little more than a snippet. Zaid Jilani observed, “It’s interesting seeing so many conservatives rally around Joe Rogan when he’s probably more liberal than 90 percent of Americans. Agnostic dude who loves drug legalization, Bernie Sanders, thinks the CIA is awful, etc.” He later made the accurate point that the “average episode of Rogan is about [mixed-martial arts] or drugs and these folks think it’s like a Satanic cult ritual.”


Perhaps conservatives are rallying around Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their worldview in order to conclude that he is worth defending from an angry mob that desires censorship of differing views. It’s very clear that the people who are the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his show, and likely with that, get his videos off of YouTube as well — are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads. If you listen to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into brainwashed followers:

“There’s a lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do — maybe based on soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading dangerous misinformation. Specifically, about two episodes — a little about some other ones, but specifically about two. One with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone. Dr. Peter McCullough is a cardiologist, and he is the most published physician in his field in history. Dr. Robert Malone owns nine patents on the creation of MRNA-vaccine technology and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the technology that led to MRNA vaccines. Both these people are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that is different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on, and because of that, those episodes in particular, were labeled as being dangerous, had dangerous misinformation in them.

The problem I have with the term disinformation, especially today, is that many of the things we thought of as misinformation a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, eight months ago, if you said, “If you get vaccinated, you can still catch Covid, and you can still spread Covid” — you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now, that’s accepted as fact. If you said, “I don’t think cloth masks work,” you would be banned from social media. Now, that’s openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said I think it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab, you would be banned from many social-media platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek.* All of those theories, that at one point in time were banned, were openly discussed by those two men that I had on my podcast, that have been accused of “dangerous misinformation.” I do not know if they’re right. I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor, I’m not a scientist. I’m just a person who sits down, and talks to people, and has conversations with them. Do I get things wrong? Absolutely. I get things wrong. But I try to correct them. Whenever I get things wrong, I try to correct them. Because I’m interested in telling the truth.”

For a guy who’s supposed to be a dangerous megalomaniac who’s indoctrinating people into a hardline, deceitful ideology, Rogan seems awfully humble about what he knows and doesn’t know. De-platform Joe Rogan? We should give him a medal and hold him up as a role model for conducting probing, open-minded, respectful interviews. Want to know something spectacularly ironic? Drs. McCullough and Malone are opponents of Covid-19 vaccines in large part because of their skepticism and suspicion of the profit motive of big pharmaceutical companies. Voices on the left are now up in arms because Rogan is showcasing the arguments of critics of Big Pharma.

Read more …

“..an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.”

• Since We’re Taking Shots…. (Denninger)

It is impossible to inject something without some of it ending up in the circulation — that is, in and around the endothelium. That begs the obvious question as to which is more-dangerous: A definite exposure of your endothelium to the spike from an injection or a possible one from infection if, and only if, you get severely hammered? Nobody knows and nobody has done the work to find out. Despite the signal in December of 2020 we went ahead anyway without first disproving that the balance of harms went the wrong way especially in healthy, low-risk individuals.

On top of this we knew very early on that there was no reduction in transmission from the jabs; a person who had a “breakthrough” was just as infectious (per Fauci and the CDC itself) and thus might be more-dangerous because by hiding symptoms you make the problem worse. If I do not know I’m sick I will not self-isolate in my home since I have no reason to suspect I’m infected. An inoculation that does not prevent infection, replication or transmission but prevents symptom expression is thus not only bad from a public health perspective its disastrous. Indeed one can reasonably make the argument that intentional blinding of symptoms is involuntary manslaughter. We have historical precedent for this, incidentally, in the fiasco surrounding the DTP vaccine in the 1970s and the twenty-fold higher case rate for pertussis today after the formula for that jab was changed to DTaP, a non-sterilizing inoculation that prevents neither infection or transmission. Do you think I can’t read history and the CDC’s own data on pertussis cases?

What’s worse is that we now know the jabs don’t work with any degree or durability at all. How do we know this? Because the CDC has proved it with their own contemporary data, that’s how. The >65 cohort is the most vaccinated in the United States. Indeed, the CDC says that 88.3% of those >65 have been fully vaccinated, and 64.3% have received boosters, that is, the third shot.

The proof they don’t work is that the CDC also reports that hospitalization among those >65 for Covid is roughly as high or higher this winter as it was last winter when there were no shots. With nearly 90% of that age cohort fully vaccinated across the entire United States if the jabs worked to prevent severe disease we would see a ratable decrease in hospitalization among that cohort. Indeed, since we know natural immunity is protective against severe disease for much longer than the jabs, at least one year, again by the CDC’s own data, if the jabs did nothing we’d expect to see a lower rate among that segment of the population simply because many of them already had the virus and survived. There are simply not enough unvaccinated and uninfected seniors remaining if the jabs work and yet there is in fact no decrease at all compared with last winter’s surge among the most-vaccinated population subgroup.

This strongly implies that what the jabs are doing is producing VEI (vaccine-enhanced infection); that is, causing actual harm and either wildly potentiating first infections or, far worse, destroying immunity from infection whether prior to or subsequent to vaccination such that people are getting the virus a second or subsequent time and not mildly either; they’re getting hammered since this is not relying on “infections”, it’s hospitalizations. We knew the latter was likely this summer, incidentally, because “N” protein seroprevalence in Britain flatlined during Delta — an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.

Never mind that there’s evidence these jabs may be back-boosting other common coronaviruses. That was known to be a risk in May of 2021. We see that in the data too; people showing up in the ER and Urgent Care with “covid-like illness” but they don’t have Covid, and a huge percentage of them are vaccinated. Are these jabs turning the common OC43 and HKU1 coronaviruses, that usually produce mild colds, into severe disease events? Maybe — and we knew they might in May of last year but didn’t bother to follow up on that either. Since OC43 is believed to have been the cause of a Covid-like pandemic in the 1890s if this proves up we will have screwed millions of Americans — or even perhaps tens of millions — instead of helping them.

Read more …

“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events.”

• COVID-19-Infected HIV Patient Developed 21 Mutations (ET)

A South African woman suffering from “poorly controlled” HIV who also had COVID-19 for nine months saw the CCP virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, a recent preprint study found. The woman, 22, was able to overcome the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus which causes COVID-19, within six to nine weeks after she started taking anti-retroviral medication that is used to treat HIV, according to researchers at Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. They concluded that “increased vigilance is warranted” among HIV patients who contract COVID-19 to “prevent the emergence” of COVID-19 variants. Notably, the Omicron variant was first discovered in South Africa in November 2021, and U.S. health officials say it’s now the dominant strain across the United States.

“This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants,” the scientists said in the pre-print study, adding that it is still a hypothesis and much more data is needed. “Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti-retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events.” South Africa has the world’s largest HIV epidemic. About 8.2 million of out its 60 million population is infected with the virus. According to the researchers, the patient observed in the study had developed around 10 mutations on the CCP virus spike protein, which allows it to bind to cells, along with 11 other mutations. Some of the mutations were similar to those seen in the Omicron and Lambda variants, whereas others were consistent with mutations that allow the virus to bypass antibodies.

“Once again our experience reinforces previous reports that effective [anti-retroviral drugs are] the key to controlling such events. Once HIV replication is brought under control and immune reconstitution commences, rapid clearance of [the CCP virus] is achieved, probably even before full immune reconstitution occurs,” they said. “This underscores the broader point that gaps in the HIV care cascade need to be closed which will benefit other conditions and public health problems, too, including COVID-19.”

Read more …

Twitter thread with 11 clips. I lifted out nrs 7 and 8, where Dr. Nagase describes the process that -potentially- allows mRNA to enter and transform your DNA.

• Documents via FOI from Pfizer (Delaney)

Documents via FOI from Pfizer… from over 40000 test subjects 31% suffered death & life long complications. Information was SENT to government health authorities in APRIL 2021

Read more …

I can’t read the name Nuland without getting shivers.

• Newly Released State Memos Undercut Democrats’ Ukraine Impeachment Story (JTN)

Just months before Joe Biden forced his firing, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor was told by U.S. State Department officials that they were “impressed” with his anti-corruption plan and fully supportive of his work, according to newly released memos that cast doubt on a key Democrat impeachment narrative. During former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial two years ago, House Democrats alleged that Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired in March 2016 because State officials were widely displeased with his anti-corruption efforts and not because Shokin’s office was investigating the Ukrainian gas firm that had given then-Vice President Biden’s son Hunter a lucrative job.

But the memos obtained by Just the News and the Southeastern Legal Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request show senior State Department officials — including then-Secretary of State John Kerry — were sending the opposite message to Shokin the summer before his firing. “We have been impressed with the ambitious reform and anti-corruption agenda of your government,” then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland personally wrote Shokin in an official letter dated June 9, 2015 that was delivered to the prosecutor two days later by then-U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt.

Nuland, now President Biden’s undersecretary of state, wrote that “Secretary Kerry asked me to reply on his behalf” to let Shokin know he enjoyed the full support of the United States as he set out to fight endemic corruption in the former Soviet republic. “The ongoing reform of your office, law enforcement, and the judiciary will enable you to investigate and prosecute corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair, and transparent manner,” Nuland added. “The United States fully supports your government’s efforts to fight corruption and other crimes in an effective, fair and transparent manner.”

Read more …

“..this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

• JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone (Curtin)

Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said:

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” In the latter address to the American people, having just sent National Guard troops to the University of Alabama to make sure two black students were admitted despite the racist objections of Governor George Wallace, his words transcended the immediate issue at the university and called for the end to the immoral and illegal discrimination against African Americans in every area of the nation’s life. He said:

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” Having framed the documentary thus, Oliver Stone and the screenwriter James DiEugenio do a masterful job of explaining what really happened in the years of Kennedy’s short presidency, why he was such a great threat to the CIA and the military-industrial complex, what really happened when they killed him, and how the Warren Commission, the CIA, and the corporate media have worked hand-in-hand to this day to cover up the truth.

The current two-hour version of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass will be followed in a month or so by a more detailed four-hour version. The importance of this film is twofold: It establishes an updated historical record since the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB) was established as a result of Stone’s 1991 breakthrough film, JFK, which forced the release of previously hidden documents, and, more importantly, it emphatically shows why JFK’s assassination is crucial for understanding the United States today. For without a clear and unambiguous accounting of why he was killed and by whom (I do not mean the actual shooters), and who in the government and media has covered it up, we are doomed to repeat the past as this country has been doing ever since.

Read more …

“Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe.”

• Checkmate in Ukraine (Ritter)

Despite the repeated Western warnings, Russia is highly unlikely to invade Ukraine — at least not yet. Instead, Russia appears to be entering a new phase of crisis management that seeks to exploit the weaknesses in the U.S./NATO alliance highlighted by their written responses to its demands. First, Russia will keep the diplomatic option open, but on its terms. Moscow has already engaged in so-called Normandy Format talks involving Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine over the ongoing crisis in Donbas. In the initial meeting, all parties agreed to respect the cease-fire in effect and to meet again in 10 days — the exact opposite of any imminent invasion by Russia. Note the absence of the U.S. and NATO from these talks.

Next, Russia will turn the threat of sanctions against the U.S. and Europe. Russia has already declared that banning it from the Swift system for international monetary transactions will result in the immediate halt of Russian energy supplies to Europe. Russia is expected to sign major economic agreements with China soon that will further insulate it from economic sanctions. China has made it clear it supports Russia in the current crisis, recognizing that if the West prevails against Russia, it will soon face a similar attack. Finally, Russia will exploit U.S. hypocrisy on spheres of influence and military alliances by entering military relationships with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and deploying a naval squadron to the Caribbean, with the potential for additional force deployments in the future.

With these three measures, Russia seeks to further isolate the U.S. from NATO and Europe. In the end, the U.S. will be confronted with one of two options, either agree to trade NATO’s open-door policy for Russian agreement not to deploy into the Western Hemisphere, or force a confrontation that will result in a Russian invasion of Ukraine that is seen by Europe as being the fault of the U.S.. The chess pieces are already being moved. While the U.S. may not see it, a Russian checkmate can be predicted sooner, rather than later.

Read more …

“..his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere..”

• Trudeau Tests Positive For Fascism (BBee)

From an undisclosed hiding place outside Canada’s capital city, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed for the world that he has tragically tested positive for fascism. “I took the fascism test this morning,” said Trudeau, beginning to sob. “And the test came back positive. I understand this may come as devastating news to freedom-loving Canadians, and I am here to assure you that everything will be ok… after I crush you underneath the jackboot of government tyranny until you learn to start obeying me.” “Together, we will achieve strength through unity, and unity through faith. In SCIENCE.”

According to sources, Trudeau will remain in his hiding place under quarantine until all the scary protesting truckers go away, after which he will emerge to grind his people into the very dust until they accept his vision for a glorious fascist future for Canada. Fortunately, his plans have been delayed as his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere, and the fascist dictator refuses to be seen without them.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

• Merck’s COVID-19 pill encourages sexually actively men “to use a reliable method of contraception correctly and consistently during treatment and for at least 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir. The risk beyond 3 months after the last dose of molnupiravir is unknown..“

• Paxlovid interacts with 32 classes of drugs. Not 32 drugs….32 classes.

• Both are apparently less toxic than ivermectin per the FDA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How to Win at Covid 19 Chess

Aug 312021
 
 August 31, 2021  Posted by at 8:29 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  17 Responses »


John Singer Sargent Open doorway, Morocco 1879-80

 

Another comment that deserves attention from our long time friend TAE Summary, and does it ever, mercifully short, and merciless at the same time. This is your world today.

 

 

TAE Summary:

 

How to Win at Covid 19 Chess

 

• The Opening or Fauci’s Gambit: Engineer a virus that is somewhat deadlier than the flu. Release it and obfuscate the origins. Report worldwide deaths 24/7 to get people scared.

• The Middlegame or The Orthodox System: Block available treatments and roll-out draconian and painful measures until a novel, somewhat safe and somewhat effective but ultimately leaky therapy can be created. This will ensure the virus spreads worldwide and mutates, prolonging the crisis indefinitely. Use the media and governments to convince everyone that the new therapy is their only hope of returning to ‘normal’. Vilify anyone who says otherwise as haters of humanity.

• The Endgame or Zugzwang: Once people are convinced that the new therapy is their only hope, tell them that for the safety of all they must have continuing proof that their therapy is up-to-date in the form of a global, digital record required for admittance to any place where there are other people including shops, churches, travel and entertainment venues. Give this ‘passport’ a star-studded yet guilt-driven and threatening ad campaign and link it to a sexy technology like block-chain to make it hip and popular.

• Checkmate or The Smothered Mate: Once the passport is in place you can expand its criteria to include anything you want and people who refuse will be unable to function in the modern world. You have achieved total control of much of the world population. Your ability to predict people’s response 13 moves in advance has paid off. Clear the board at will.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle August 28 2021

Aug 282021
 
 August 28, 2021  Posted by at 8:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  107 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh The yellow house (The Street), Arles 1888

 

• Former Pfizer Employee: “Checkmate. Game Over. We WIN” (Peters)
• CDC Counts People Dying Within 14 Days of Jab as “Unvaccinated” (GR)
• Israel Cracks The Code: Jabs Don’t Work (Denninger)
• Natural Immunity 13x More Effective Than Vaccines At Stopping Delta (ZH)
• Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions (ZH)
• Judge Strips Mother Of Parental Rights Over Vaccination Status (Fox32)
• US Mandates Vaccinations For Marines (PPundit)
• US Special Forces Vets Launch Mission To Get Afghan Allies Out (DM)
• Low and Dark (Kunstler)
• Marine Commander Fired For Blasting ‘Inept’ Military Leadership (WND)

 

 

Update from the CDC:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“FDA approval is checkmate for Pfizer.”

Don’t miss this. Start at about 3:40min. Watch to the end.

If only half of what she says is true, Pfizer is in enormous trouble. And so is the FDA; they knew too.

Pfizer has two weeks to list all ingredients in its vaccine. Graphene oxide makes its comeback.

• Former Pfizer Employee: “Checkmate. Game Over. We WIN” (Peters)

Karen Kingston is a former Pfizer employee, a pharmaceutical marketing expert and biotech analyst. Kingston joins Stew Peters, and brings the receipts! Kingston reveals how the FDA “approval” is sure to be the “checkmate” move to end the shots that have caused unprecedented injury and death, worldwide. Kingston shared slides and brought the receipts, which are available at StewPeters.tv, and document everything she states in her BOMBSHELL claims during her exclusive and revealing deliver of damnation to big pharma, and those responsible for pushing these injections onto a global population.

Read more …

“Unvaccinated L.A. County residents [are] 5 times more likely to get COVID, 29 times more likely to be hospitalized.”

Here’s where those numbers come from.

• CDC Counts People Dying Within 14 Days of Jab as “Unvaccinated” (GR)

Citing the Los Angeles County Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released on Tuesday, even local news promoted the claim that “Unvaccinated L.A. County residents [are] 5 times more likely to get COVID, 29 times more likely to be hospitalized.” Looking at a screenshot of the CDC release, one can observe the definitions for what they consider “fully vaccinated,” “partially vaccinated,” or “unvaccinated.” According to the chart, “unvaccinated <14 days receipt of the first dose of a 2-dose series or 1 dose of the single-dose vaccine or if no vaccination registry data were available. This means if someone was hospitalized, admitted to ICU, required mechanical ventilation or died within two weeks of getting the jab they are being counted as “unvaccinated.”

Unfortunately, because the data is not specific enough, we don’t know how many truly unvaccinated people were hospitalized or died of Covid in Los Angeles County from May to late July. The entire report can basically be tossed into the trash thanks to the inclusion of the recently vaccinated in the unvaccinated category. This intentionally misleading data is now being used to infringe on the rights of the people of California and across the entire United States as vaccine mandates and passports are being rolled out nationwide.

Read more …

“.. the dosing they used, and the original titers, concealed the decay below effective levels which was not being tested for..”

• Israel Cracks The Code: Jabs Don’t Work (Denninger)

If you recall early on before the jabs were “released” under EUA I pointed out that some of the early study work had odd results that I could not reasonably explain a purpose to, and they bothered me a lot. One of the most-glaring was the wildly higher antibody titers produced by them as opposed to natural infection. I mused at the time that this could easily be explained by the truncation (or simply ignorance of) the usual dose-ranging studies that are done on all drugs; those require time, of course, and when you’re after Warp Speed time is something you don’t have. But now it appears that Pfizer may have known there was a problem — they may not have known how serious it was, but they may well have known it existed and may have deliberately set the dosing to try to hide it. And, as it turns out, that wasn’t the only problem.


“In vaccinated subjects, antibody titers decreased by up to 40% each subsequent month while in convalescents they decreased by less than 5% per month. Six months after BNT162b2 vaccination 16.1% subjects had antibody levels below the seropositivity threshold of <50 AU/mL, while only 10.8% of convalescent patients were below <50 AU/mL threshold after 9 months from SARS-CoV-2 infection.” In other words the dosing they used, and the original titers, concealed the decay below effective levels which was not being tested for but would have shown up in infections among vaccinated people had the original level been lower. That’s bad; the question now becomes did Pfizer know this and do it deliberately, and if not, what is the logical explanation for the dosing used? Why not set dosing roughly identical to natural infection? Simple: If they did that before the four months of the study ran a crap-ton of people would have gotten infected since the antibody titer would have worn off.

It gets worse: “In our study, we show that following vaccination, the levels of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies decrease rapidly, indicating that BMPCs may not be created adequately and therefore anti-SARS-CoV-2 humoral immunity might be transient (Ibarrondo et al., 2020; Seow et al., 2020).” If there is little or no B-cell recall then the vaccine is a failure as it cannot stimulate durable immunity at all. That is, the jabs are basically the same (via a different mechanism) to receiving monoclonal antibodies if you get infected; yes, you have an antibody titer but the jabs fail to train your immune system to recognize the infection in the future. As that titer wanes the protection becomes increasingly worthless and, since we know mutational binding changes are occurring the potential for vaccine-caused harm by potentiating infections remains a distinct possibility as that occurs.

Read more …

Funny we’ve been talking about this all week, and now this gets 1 million views at Zero Hedge.

• Natural Immunity 13x More Effective Than Vaccines At Stopping Delta (ZH)

Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of President Biden’s COVID advisors have been proven wrong about “the science” of COVID vaccines yet again. After telling Americans that vaccines offer better protection than natural infection, a new study out of Israel suggests the opposite is true: natural infection offers a much better shield against the delta variant than vaccines. The study was described by Bloomberg as “the largest real-world analysis comparing natural immunity – gained from an earlier infection – to the protection provided by one of the most potent vaccines currently in use.” A few days ago, we noted how remarkable it was that the mainstream press was finally giving voice to scientists to criticize President Biden’s push to start doling out booster jabs. Well, this study further questions the credibility of relying on vaccines, given that the study showed that the vaccinated were ultimately 13x as likely to be infected as those who were infected previously, and 27x more likely to be symptomatic.

Alex Berenson, a science journalist who has repeatedly questioned the efficacy of vaccines and masks at preventing COVID, touted the study as enough to “end any debate over vaccines v natural immunity.” Here’s an excerpt from a report by Science Magazine: “The new analysis relies on the database of Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis. The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit at KSM, the system’s research and innovation arm, found in two analyses that people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.”

This time, the data leave little doubt that natural infection truly is the better option for protection against the delta variant, despite the fact that the US won’t acknowledge the already infected as having antibodies protecting them from the virus. As the first country to achieve widepsread coverage by the vaccine, Israel is now in an unthinkable situation: daily case numbers have reached new record levels as the delta variant penetrates the vaccines’ protection like a hot knife slicing through butter.

Read more …

Because of “record high vaccination rates”. Oh boy…

• Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions (ZH)

Denmark will on September 10th stop classifying Covid-19 as an “illness which is a critical threat to society”, meaning all remaining special pandemic restrictions will expire, The Local reported. In a press release issued on Friday morning, the country’s health minister Magnus Heunicke said that the high level of vaccination in Denmark, particularly among the vulnerable, had radically altered the risks posed by the virus. “The epidemic is under control, we have record high vaccination rates,” he said in a statement. “As a result, on September 10th, we can drop some of the special rules we have had to introduce in the fight against Covid-19.”


September 10th marks the expiry date for that the executive order classifying Covid-19 as a “socially critical illness”, which was passed by the Danish parliament’s Epidemic Committee on March 10th last year. The parties in the centre-right blue bloc, led by the Liberal Party, have already said that they believe that Covid-19 should no longer be classed as a serious threat to society, and the health ministry’s announcement came less than an hour before the ruling Social Democrats were due to discuss the issue with the other parties in the Epidemic Committee. “When it sinks in for the Social Democrat government that they are in a minority, they then come up with better ideas just 45 minutes before the meeting in the Epidemic Committee is starting,” said Sophie Løhde, a member of the committee for the Liberal Party.

Read more …

Crazy, that’s the only word.

• Judge Strips Mother Of Parental Rights Over Vaccination Status (Fox32)

A Chicago mother says a Cook County judge has taken away her parental rights after learning that she is not vaccinated against COVID-19. In what all parties agree is a very unusual and perhaps unprecedented step, a judge at Chicago’s Daley Center has stripped Rebecca Firlit of custody because she refuses to get a vaccination shot. “I miss my son more than anything. It’s been very difficult. I haven’t seen him since August 10th,” Firlit told FOX 32 News in an exclusive interview. That’s the day Firlit appeared in court via Zoom along with her ex-husband for a child support hearing involving their 11-year-old son. The two have been divorced for seven years and share custody and parenting time.

She says out of the blue, Cook County Judge James Shapiro asked her whether she had been vaccinated. Firlit told Shapiro she had not because she has had bad reactions to vaccines in the past. Shapiro then ordered that Firlit be stripped of all parenting time with her son until she gets vaccinated. Over the past two weeks, Firlit has been able to talk to her son on the phone and through video calls, but has not seen him in person. “I think that it’s wrong. I think that it’s dividing families. And I think it’s not in my son’s best interest to be away from his mother,” Firlit said.

Firlit is now appealing the court order, saying the judge has no business taking away her parenting rights simply because she’s not vaccinated. “It had nothing to do with what we were talking about. He was placing his views on me. And taking my son away from me,” Firlit said. Annette Fernholz, Firlit’s attorney, says the judge has overstepped his authority. “In this case you have a judge, without any matter before him regarding the parenting time with the child deciding ‘Oh, you’re not vaccinated. You don’t get to see your child until you are vaccinated.’ That kind of exceeds his jurisdiction,” Fernholz said.

Read more …

Twitter thread. Highly ironic given what soldiers are being put through in Kabul. It’s like the mandates for healthcare workers. Blind.

• US Mandates Vaccinations For Marines (PPundit)

1. SCOOP: Biden Admin is not done putting members of U.S. armed services at risk, mandating U.S. Marines receive first dose vaccinations before WTI (Weapons Tactics Instructions) in a week, ignoring apps for exemptions that include religious and history of Myocarditis. 2. Further, the second dose will be administered during WTI, in a remote location with only field medic attention available to them. Again, this is ordered for those who have known medical conditions that were considered viable causes for exemptions only a week ago. These are all people who had no problem getting vaccinated for scores of other diseases. They were told they would have the ability to obtain waivers and are now facing the choice between risk to personal harm and/or violation of conscience, or professional ruination.

Reading the documents provided to us (of course it’s documented), service members who refuse to take the vaccination will be “dealt with via administrative or disciplinary measures, i.e., AdSep, NJP or court-martial.” There is not enough time for waivers to be issued. Again, the main issue here, which is expected given how these things play out in real life, is that the Biden Admin is claiming there is an accommodation for religious exemption and exemption for certain medical conditions, but in reality is not afforded to them. It’s a Catch 22. If you have a religious exemption, then DoD tells them to apply for it, claims they were allowed. Except, they won’t actually have time for the “Chaplain Interview Checklist” (sound familiar @DeptofDefense?) because they just got orders and the deadline is here.

And honestly, this is what many of them are concerned about. Not for themselves, but for their Battles who they know are seeking waivers for legitimate conditions linked to Pfizer. They are NOT “anti-vaccine”. For those seeking religious exemptions, there is no time for them to get a “Chaplain Interview Checklist” before the “Religious Accommodation Review Board”. Again, sound familiar @DeptofDefense? These service members have been scammed. I thought we had enough of that, this week “And the worse part is, you dont get the vaccine, you don’t go on exercises, you get no job training, you’re kicked out.” I realize most Americans have never served, don’t understand what it means to be in this situation. We lie to them about wars. We lie to them about waivers.

Read more …

‘I just want to get my people out,’ said one of the retired troops..”

• US Special Forces Vets Launch Mission To Get Afghan Allies Out (DM)

A group of American war veterans in Kabul are secretly saving hundreds of Afghan Special Forces troops and their families who helped them in the war but have now been left for dead as the US withdraws from Afghanistan. The group of special op soldiers includes retired Green Berets and SEAL Team commanders who launched the mission, which they are calling Pineapple Express, after one of the Afghan commandos they served with contacted them to say he was on the run from the Taliban. His visa had not been approved when the Taliban took over on August 14 and thousands ran for the airport.

The special ops soldiers first devised a system with US troops at the airport where they sent their comrades to a gate and told them to identify themselves with the password ‘pineapple’ to be put on a plane by the Marines on the ground. Some also showed the troops pictures of pineapples on their phones. After successfully getting hundreds through that way, the special ops teams started going into Kabul, behind enemy lines, to rescue more of their comrades and their families in the cover of darkness. It’s unclear how long they have been in Afghanistan and how they got there but some of those involved spoke to ABC News about the mission on Friday, explaining they simply could not leave their comrades behind.

‘I just want to get my people out,’ said one of the retired troops involved while another said the Afghan allies they were saving had a prouder sense of Democracy than some Americans. Their astonishingly courageous efforts have saved hundreds while Biden and his team have bungled the evacuation mission by haphazardly telling some US citizens and allies to go to the airport while rejecting visas for others and leaving any Americans to fend for themselves. They are one of several ad-hoc volunteer groups on the ground that are frantically trying to save people before time runs out.

The disastrous government rescue mission became even more tragic on Thursday when ISIS bombers targeted the crowds at the airport, slaughtering 170 people with a suicide bomb that also killed 13 US troops. It has since emerged that Biden’s administration also gave a list of Afghan allies’ names to the Taliban in the naïve hope they would then help get them out. Former President Donald Trump called it a ‘kill list’ that all but guaranteed their deaths. The US now one of the only nations still evacuating from Kabul amid increasing threats of another ISIS attack.

Read more …

“Some of said bigwigs, including the managing parties behind “Joe Biden,” might be cooking up a neat operation in which “Joe Biden” resigns, Ms. Harris gets elevated to POTUS… Ms. Harris appoints Barack Obama vice-president… and then Ms. Harris resigns, making the popular ex-president president again.”

• Low and Dark (Kunstler)

His managers installed a “poison pill” named Kamala Harris as his vice-president, and even members of her own party get the vapors at mere fugitive thoughts of her trying to run the country, giggling from one crisis to another. Meanwhile, the veep cut short her tour of Southeast Asia, rushing to aid beleaguered California Governor Gavin Newsom at a rally to fight his recall vote… but then cut short her Newsom rescue mission to fly on to Washington. Electioneering during the greatest hostage crisis in US history probably equals more poor optics. She will presumably spend the days ahead “standing by” on developments, within reach of the Xanax vial — while a claque of party bigwigs importunes her to get rolling on the 25th amendment.

Some of said bigwigs, including the managing parties behind “Joe Biden,” might be cooking up a neat operation in which “Joe Biden” resigns, Ms. Harris gets elevated to POTUS… Ms. Harris appoints Barack Obama vice-president… and then Ms. Harris resigns, making the popular ex-president president again. The 22nd Amendment only prevents presidents from being elected more than twice, not from being appointed by happenstance. Would they dare? Well, why not? They dared to engineer some pretty audacious election hijinks in 2020.

One thing you can count on, the situation has the potential to get a whole lot worse, both for the nation and for “Joe Biden”. Our new Taliban “partners,” assigned to provide security in-and-around Kabul, may prove to be less than steadfast in their duties as hoped. Thursday’s bloodbath hints at their inadequacies. The number of Americans stranded in Afghanistan remains hypothetical, a thousand… six thousand…nobody seems to know. Plus, Gawd knows how many NATO-ally civilian personnel, international NGO workers, and other people of, shall we say, the Western persuasion, remain trapped.

The ISIS suicide bombings made a pretty bold statement, too. If one ventured to say that our new Taliban partners are something less than gentlemen, how would you describe the cadres of Al Qaeda and ISIS? Poor sports? Ruffians? Misogynists? They have the run of Kabul now, the ability to go from door-to-door, rooting Westerners out, something they probably regard as fun. Do you remember from just a few years ago what kinds of things they like to do to their captives? Cut their heads off. (Notice I didn’t say chop.) Roast them in cages. That could start any minute. What then, “Joe Biden”?

Read more …

When the military turns against politics, throwing away entire careers to do it, you’re in trouble.

• Marine Commander Fired For Blasting ‘Inept’ Military Leadership (WND)

A sitting Marine battalion commander was fired Friday after he slammed the “ineptitude” of U.S. military leadership over the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller said in a video posted on YouTube after the deadly suicide attack Thursday that he was willing to risk his career and his pension — only three years from retirement — to “demand accountability” from top military brass, the Washington Free Beacon reported. “I want to say this very strongly. I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders: I demand accountability,” said Scheller. In a Facebook post Friday, he announced he had been “relieved for caused based on a lack of trust and confidence.”

In his video, he said he had a close relationship with one of the 13 service members who were killed Thursday in a suicide bombing at a gate at the Hamid Karzai International Airport. He said he is not the only service member who is upset about how the withdrawal has been handled. “The reason people are so upset on social media right now is not because the Marine on the battlefield let someone down. That service member always rose to the occasion and done extraordinary things,” Scheller said. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.'”

Scheller, the Free Beacon reported, reacted to an Aug. 18 public letter by Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps. Berger attempted to reassure Marines who were expressing their frustration on social media that their service was “meaningful, powerful, and important.” Scheller said the letter missed the point, arguing the withdrawal was a major policy failure from the highest levels of military leadership. He called out Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the joint chiefs of staff. “I’m not saying we’ve got to be in Afghanistan forever. But I am saying, did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, ‘Hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic airbase, before we evacuate everyone’? Did anyone do that? And when you didn’t think to do that, did anyone raise their hand and say, ‘We completely messed this up’?” asked Scheller.

Read more …

 

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Debt Rattle March 14 2019

Mar 142019
 
 March 14, 2019  Posted by at 10:42 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Studio with plaster head 1925

 

• Zugzwang Brexit : How the UK Can Escape The Checkmate/Stalemate (English)
• May Issues Final Warning To Tory Rebels: Back Me Or Lose Brexit (G.)
• EU On No-Deal Brexit Motion: ‘Like Titanic Voting For Iceberg To Move’ (G.)
• ‘No Delay From EU – Or We Elect 73 Nigel Farages Into European Parliament’ (RT)
• US Grounds Boeing 737 Max Planes, Citing Links Between 2 Fatal Crashes (CNBC)
• Battle Brews over Who Should Analyze Black Boxes from 737 Crash (Fort.)
• US Lawmakers Emerge From Whitaker Meeting With Conflicting Accounts (R.)
• Mueller’s Forensics-Free Findings (VIPS)
• Paul Manafort Sentenced To 43 Additional Months (ZH)
• Greek Financial Crisis Still Evokes Pain, Fear On The Streets Of Athens (CNBC)
• Sharp Rise In Arctic Temperatures Now Inevitable – UN (G.)
• Coca-Cola Produces 200,000 Plastic Bottles A Minute (G.)

 

 

Nice different view of things: in chess, you can be forced to make a move (Zugzwang), even if your position gets worse. Buit there is a way out: forfeit the game, stop playing.

• Zugzwang Brexit : How the UK Can Escape The Checkmate/Stalemate (English)

The EU referendum has plunged the United Kingdom into a chaos so unprecedented, that only a fool would bet on the final outcome. What is clear is that each move to try to break the political deadlock has merely shoved the nation into further bedlam. With just two weeks to go before the March 29th deadline – the country is like that coach in the final scene of 1969 crime caper The Italian Job. Any move in any direction risks sending the whole thing tumbling down a cliff, while staying put is likewise not an option. In short, all attempts to resolve the crisis simply make matters worse. The Germans have a word for this. “Zugzwang” is a term used by chess masters to describe the situation where a participant is compelled to play, even when it is clearly not in their interests to do so.

“Zugzwang Brexit” is where we are now at. Consider May’s potential moves. The EU rightly insists it is up to the UK to find a solution – but with her deal voted down, no viable alternative on the table and the EU leaders unwilling to debate the matter further what alternatives does the PM have? It is far from certain that the EU 27 would grant the UK extra time. Even if they did, an extension of Article 50 would merely kick the can further down the road. A second referendum could go either way. If ‘Leave’ were to win again we would be back at square one. If Remain won but not by a considerable margin then the issue would not be satisfactorily resolved. A No Deal Brexit would heap ruin on the country and only serve as an ‘I told you so’ for Remainers as we disappeared down the plughole of global relevance.

If the polls are to be believed a General Election would be unlikely to deliver a result very different to that of 2017 and further uncertainty – possibly lasting years would ensue. Labour’s leadership anyway remain committed to Brexit. So What Can be Done? Well there is a way out of ‘Zugzwang Brexit’ – but it is the political equivalent of forfeiting the game. The UK could revoke Article 50 and simply accept that the country has failed to reach political accord. May has twice failed to get her deal through the House of Commons and it seems likely that any further version, negotiated by any of her successors would meet a similar fate.

By revoking the mechanism by which a member state leaves the EU – dignity and sanity could momentarily be restored and the country could dampen the fuse of the ticking time bomb which Theresa May so recklessly and foolishly lit. That would be in the public’s interest, in the nations’ interest, in the interest of jobs and industry and the UK economy. As such – it’s unlikely to happen.

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“Seething Brexiteer Tory MPs lining up on ERG’s WhatsApp group in their dozens to vote against Govt A50 motion tonight, and John McDonnell confirms to #r4Today Labour will amend it – leaving it no hope of passing. Then what?”

• May Issues Final Warning To Tory Rebels: Back Me Or Lose Brexit (G.)

Theresa May will attempt one final desperate roll of the dice on her Brexit deal, issuing a stark warning to mutinous Brexiters that they must approve her offer by next week or face a long article 50 extension. The prime minister was humiliated yet again amid chaotic scenes on Wednesday night in parliament, as her cabinet ruptured three ways and MPs inflicted two more defeats on the government to demand no deal should be taken off the table permanently. In an unprecedented night of Tory splits, four cabinet ministers, Amber Rudd, David Mundell, David Gauke and Greg Clark, defied their party’s last-minute whip and refused to vote against the government’s own motion, after it was amended to rule out any prospect of no-deal Brexit.

Six other cabinet ministers also splintered to back a separate proposal for a “managed no deal”, despite the prime minister’s warning that the plan was doomed. After her defeat, May signalled she would gamble one last time on forcing through her Brexit deal, bringing forward a motion on Thursday on delaying Brexit which would “set out the fundamental choice facing this house”.= If MPs agreed a deal, she said, the government would request a “short, technical extension” to article 50, a hint that May plans a third meaningful vote next week. Without an agreed deal, she said, there would be a “much longer extension” that would require the UK to take part in European parliament elections. “I do not think that would be the right outcome,” May said.

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“..the EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, told EU ambassadors that she feared the Commons was “divorced from reality”..”

• EU On No-Deal Brexit Motion: ‘Like Titanic Voting For Iceberg To Move’ (G.)

Brussels has said a vote by UK MPs to block a no-deal Brexit in any circumstances is a meaningless move, with one senior EU negotiator describing it as “the Titanic voting for the iceberg to get out of the way”. A European commission spokesman offered a withering assessment of the decision by MPs to ignore Theresa May’s assertion that no deal was the default position unless there was a deal in place by the time of the UK’s departure. “We take note of the votes in the House of Commons this evening,” the spokesman said. “There are only two ways to leave the EU: with or without a deal. The EU is prepared for both. To take no deal off the table, it is not enough to vote against no deal – you have to agree to a deal. We have agreed a deal with the prime minister, and the EU is ready to sign it.”

MPs voted by 312 to 308 to support a backbench amendment ruling out a no-deal Brexit and striking out a phrase in a government-backed motion noting that no deal remained the default position in UK and EU law if an agreement was not ratified. They then voted on the amended motion, which won by a majority of 43. On Thursday, MPs will vote on whether to request an extension of the article 50 negotiating period beyond 29 March until 30 June. But the commission is pushing member states to take an uncompromising position. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, speaking to the European parliament in Strasbourg earlier on Wednesday, questioned whether the EU should offer extra time for talks, leading officials to prepare for all options to be on the table at a leaders’ summit next week.

“Why would we extend these discussions?” Barnier asked. “The discussion on article 50 is done and dusted. We have the withdrawal agreement. It is there.” During a private meeting before his public comments, Barnier advised senior MEPs that at present there was no consensus among the EU’s member states over an extension, let alone on the conditions that would be attached. At the same time, the EU’s deputy Brexit negotiator, Sabine Weyand, told EU ambassadors that she feared the Commons was “divorced from reality”. Quoting private remarks by the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, Weyand concurred with his description of the decision to vote for no deal as “like the Titanic voting for the iceberg to get out of the way”.

Read more …

What powers would UK MEPs have in case a temporary extension comes into play? Interesting question.

• ‘No Delay From EU – Or We Elect 73 Nigel Farages Into European Parliament’ (RT)

The UK Parliament is set to seek postponement of Brexit, but Brussels may be reluctant to grant it. One argument against may be a potential poison pill in the form of Eurosceptic MEPs, voted in by offended Britons in May. The dramatic week of Brexit votes in the UK Parliament draws to a conclusion on Thursday. Earlier, MPs rejected both the deal negotiated with the EU by Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet, and the option to leave the EU with no deal at all, which the government asked to leave on the table to keep pressure on Brussels. MPs are now set to vote on whether London should ask for a delay in exiting the union.

While a disorderly Brexit would hurt the EU, several top European officials warned that no delay would be granted unless Britain comes up with a clear and substantial plan, which it would try to achieve if given more time. But European bureaucrats may have more reasons not to tolerate Britain dragging its feet, MEP from Scotland David Coburn told RT. If we end up staying beyond a certain period, we have to take part in the European elections. Then what you are going to see is 73 Nigel Farages returned to the European Parliament. It would make the government of the EU impossible. They would probably want to throw us out, I should think.

The next European election is scheduled for the end of May. The UK’s share of the seats would be 73 if it remained part of the EU – with both Britain and the EU making contingencies for this scenario. Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, is still technically an independent MEP, as is David Coburn, even though they belong to the newly-formed Eurosceptic Brexit Party. [..] “People are becoming more and more angry about the European Union. And more and more people, who previously voted for ‘Remain’, are now supporting ‘Leave’,” he said. “I think people do not like the way that Britain has been treated by the EU.”

Read more …

Bopeing will be sued like nuts by airlines. They pay $121 million for the brand new thing and then can’t fly it. Orders are over 5000.

• US Grounds Boeing 737 Max Planes, Citing Links Between 2 Fatal Crashes (CNBC)

The Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounded all Boeing 737 Max jets in the U.S., citing new evidence that showed similarities between two fatal crashes of the popular planes that have killed 346 people in less than five months. The move marks a stunning turnaround for the U.S., which has stood by the American-made aircraft as dozens of countries around the world grounded the planes. The crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Sunday came less than five months after a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 — the same type of plane — plunged into the Java Sea minutes into the flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. Both planes were new, delivered from Boeing just months before their doomed flights.

The FAA said the grounding will remain in effect while it investigates the crash. “An FAA team is in Ethiopia assisting the NTSB as parties to the investigation of the Flight 302 accident,” it said in a statement. New satellite data shows the plane’s movement was similar to the October crash, the FAA’s acting administrator Daniel Elwell told reporters on a call Wednesday. The agency also took physical evidence into account, but Elwell declined to elaborate. “It became clear the track was very close and behaved similarly to the Lion Air flight,” Elwell told reporters on a call Wednesday. “My hope is the FAA, the carriers, the manufacturers and all parties will work very hard to make this grounding as short as possible so that these airplanes can get back up in the sky.”

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US standing in the world.

• Battle Brews over Who Should Analyze Black Boxes from 737 Crash (Fort.)

Ethiopia’s aviation authority is unable to read the black box recorders from the Boeing 737 Max plane that crashed Sunday, but a row is brewing over just where the flight recorders will be sent for analysis. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is pushing to have its experts analyze the data and voice recorders, which were partly damaged, the Wall Street Journal reports, but Ethiopian authorities would prefer to work with the U.K.’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch to ensure that U.S. experts won’t have undue influence in the probe of the American-made plane. Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told WSJ that the U.K., France and Germany were being considered as destinations for the black boxes, as was the European Union Aviation Safety Agency based in Cologne.

He added that a decision would be made Wednesday. Aviation authorities worldwide are anxiously awaiting the data from the black box recorders, hoping it will give answers as to why Boeing’s (BA, +0.55%) best-selling model has been involved in two major crashes in the past six months. Ethiopian Airlines’ recently acquired Boeing 737 Max 8 was flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, Kenya, when it crashed six minutes into its flight, killing all 157 people on board. The Lion Air plane that crashed 12 minutes into its flight in Indonesia in October, killing 189 people, was the same model.

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Wow. 180º different accounts of one and the same meeting. A good journalist should be able to get a good story out of this.

• US Lawmakers Emerge From Whitaker Meeting With Conflicting Accounts (R.)

U.S. lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee emerged from a closed-door meeting with former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Wednesday with conflicting accounts of their conversation with the controversial Trump ally. Whitaker was called to Capitol Hill to clarify his testimony at a combative Feb. 8 committee hearing, during which he denied speaking with President Donald Trump about a federal case involving Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who met for two hours with Whitaker and the panel’s top Republican, Representative Doug Collins, said Whitaker no longer denied speaking to Trump about Cohen or about the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York.

“Unlike in the hearing room, Mr. Whitaker did not deny that the president called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case and personnel decisions in the Southern District,” the New York Democrat told reporters. Nadler also said Whitaker told the lawmakers that he was involved in conversations about U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman’s recusal from the Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York and about whether its campaign finance case involving hush money payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump had gone too far. Nadler’s committee is seeking evidence that Trump may have urged Whitaker to put the investigations under the supervision of Berman, a Trump donor and former law partner of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is recused.

But Collins, a Georgia Republican, contradicted much of Nadler’s account. “He (Whitaker) said that he had not talked with the president about Mr. Cohen at all,” Collins told reporters. Collins described Whitaker’s conversations about Berman and the campaign finance case as questions for his personal staff. “(Whitaker) had no conversations with the Southern District of New York,” he said. Collins also dismissed a Nadler statement that Whitaker was involved in conversations about firing one or more U.S. attorneys as “normal personnel issues.”

Read more …

US intelligence continues to ignore its own veterans. There’s a long list of them. But their message doesn’t rhyme with official standpoints. I’ve said it before, Mueller’s account relies on hacking Russians and Assange. And he’s a coward and a liar for doing that.

• Mueller’s Forensics-Free Findings (VIPS)

MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump. If Mueller gives you his “completed” report anytime soon, it should be graded “incomplete.” Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We stand ready to help.

We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story, we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia. There is an overabundance of “assessments” but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative.

We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of “evidence,” particularly if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions. We know only too well — and did our best to expose — how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We can prove that the conventional-wisdom story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media — an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.

Read more …

No love lost for Manafort. But sending him away for years while people like the Podestas walk free, doesn’t sound fair.

• Paul Manafort Sentenced To 43 Additional Months (ZH)

Lobbyist and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was sentenced to more than six years in prison by a federal judge in the District of Columbia on two conspiracy counts. Manafort pleaded guilty last fall to the two charges which encompass a host of crimes – including money laundering and obstruction of justice. Manafort was sentenced to 60 months on count one, with 30 months of that overlapping a 47 month sentence handed down last week in a separate trial in Virginia – and 13 months on count two. In total, he will serve 90 months in prison, or 7.5 years.

Manafort asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency during Wednesday’s hearing, saying that the criminal charges against him have “taken everything from me already,” and asking that Berman Jackson not impose any additional prison time beyond the sentence handed down last week. Jackson agreed with Manafort that the original 19-24 year sentencing guideline “overstates the seriousness of this offense.” “I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today,” said Manafort in a calm and steady voice as he read from a prepared statement. “While I cannot undo the past, I will ensure that the future will be very different.”

[..] Before reading her decision, Berman Jackson reamed Manafort – saying that there was no good explanation for granting the leniency Manafort had requested.”What you were doing was lying to Congress and the American public,” said Berman Jackson, adding that Manafort had “contempt for” and “believed he had the right to manipulate these proceedings.” “Saying I’m sorry I got caught is not an inspiring plea for leniency,” the judge said, adding that Manafort’s defense that there was “no collusion” with Russia is not related to the case.

Read more …

A few days ago the IMF talked about how great Greece is doing. BS. 2% growth from nothing is still nothing.

• Greek Financial Crisis Still Evokes Pain, Fear On The Streets Of Athens (CNBC)

Greece’s financial crisis is still hurting the hopes and dreams of the people that live in the Mediterranean nation. The country has been in economic turmoil for most of the last decade. Years of financial mismanagement alongside a culture of clientelistic politics, where goods and services were exchanged for political support, culminated in a long-term recession.= “I still think the crisis exists. It’s more than in one field now, (it’s) not only (a) financial crisis, but it’s a crisis of our values … I don’t think it’s better now … it is really a stressful period for Greece,” Stavros Dimopoulos, a 23-year-old university student told CNBC in Athens.

Different governments in Greece borrowed above the country’s capacity and its public debt pile became so high that in 2010 investors were no longer willing to keep on financing the Greek government. The end result: George Papandreou, the prime minister at the time, saw no other way out but to ask for a bailout — without even consulting with other European leaders. Since August, the Greek government has tried to show that austerity is over, by providing additional funds to the lower and middle classes. But ordinary Greeks told CNBC they haven’t seen a massive difference in their lives. “We love our city, we love our weather, we love the Greek people, but we are scared and afraid in a way, because the situation is not that good,” Dimopoulos said about him and his friends.

“We have to try harder and harder to make our own money … Sometimes we are talking (about going) abroad: If it is going to be better for us to leave Greece or if it is going to be better to stay in Greece and try harder. It is in our minds.” [..] 2019 is expected to be the country’s third consecutive year of growth, at a pace of about 2.2 percent. Still, this growth doesn’t seem to be making ordinary Greeks happy about the economy. Nikolas complained there hasn’t been a significant improvement for people and there’s still way too many taxes. “Some people have good jobs if they are in the civil service, but the others are suffering, they are paying like 85 percent taxes, which is very hard to get by. You risk losing your house if you don’t have enough money to pay the taxes,” he said. “(the) long term is hard, we just have to smile, pretend.”

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Maybe it’s an idea to rethink the way the data are made public. It’s a litany of ever more of the same now.

• Sharp Rise In Arctic Temperatures Now Inevitable – UN (G.)

Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found. Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate “tipping point” as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect.

“What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,” said Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of UN Environment. “We have the science. Now more urgent climate action is needed to steer away from tipping points that could be even worse for our planet than we first thought.” The findings, presented at the UN Environment assembly in Nairobi on Wednesday, give a stark picture of one of the planet’s most sensitive regions and one that is key to the fate of the world’s climate. Last year’s stark warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, setting out the dramatic impacts of 1.5C of global warming, did not include the impacts of potential tipping points such as melting permafrost.

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Coca-Cola produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year.

• Coca-Cola Produces 200,000 Plastic Bottles A Minute (G.)

Coca-Cola has revealed for the first time it produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year – equivalent to 200,000 bottles a minute – as a report calls on other global companies to end the secrecy over their plastic footprint. The data from the soft drinks manufacturer was provided to the campaigner Ellen MacArthur, who is pushing for major companies and governments to do more to tackle plastic pollution. The figures – which the company has refused in the past to disclose – reveal the amount of plastic packaging Coca-Cola produced in 2017. The company did not reveal the scale of its bottle production but when its packaging footprint is translated into 500ml PET plastic bottles, it amounts to about 108bn bottles a year, more than a fifth of the world’s PET bottle output of about 500bn bottles a year.

Coca-Cola is one of 31 companies – including Mars, Nestlé and Danone – that have revealed how much plastic packaging they create as part of a drive for transparency by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Combined, they produce 8m tonnes of plastic packaging a year. But the majority of the 150 companies who have signed up to MacArthur’s global commitment to reduce plastic pollution are still refusing to publicly disclose figures on their own plastic packaging production. These include Pepsi Co, H&M, L’Oréal, Walmart, Marks & Spencer and Burberry – which was heavily criticised last year when it was revealed that the company burned £28m of stock in a year to prevent counterfeiting.


Photograph: Richard Levine/Corbis via Getty Images

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