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Debt Rattle February 27 2025

Feb 272025
 
 February 27, 2025  Posted by at 10:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  45 Responses »


El Greco La Pietà c1575

 

• US Relations With Russia Promise Rollback To Pre-Gorbachev Period (Krutikov)
• America as Republic, not as Empire (Alastair Crooke)
• US To Impose Blanket 25% Tariffs On EU – Trump (RT))
• US Can No Longer Subsidize NATO – Rubio (RT)
• Trump Says US Could Lift Russia Sanctions (RT)
• EU Trying To Block Ukraine Peace – Lavrov (RT)
• Lavrov Calls Out Europe’s Peacekeeper Plan As Ploy to Rearm Kiev (Sp.)
• Russian, US Diplomats To Meet In Istanbul On February 27 (TASS)
• Zelensky Now With Only The Dictatorship In London To Support Him (Jay)
• Ukraine Can Forget About NATO, Says Trump (ZH)
• Ukraine Should Get As Much Land ‘As Possible’ – Trump (RT)
• Most Ukrainians Abroad Won’t Come Home – Unity Minister (RT)
• Federal Government Can’t Comply With Judge’s Order To Unfreeze Funds (ET)
• Rubio Cancels EU’s Kallas At Last Minute (RT)
• NATO-Skeptic Romanian Presidential Candidate Arrested (RT)
• Tulsi Gabbard Labels CNN ‘Propaganda Arm’ Of Spies (RT)
• AG Pam Bondi Announces Thursday Release of Epstein Files (ZH)
• Trump Gaza VIDEO With Bearded Belly Dancers Sparks Outcry (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1894796332206039412

Press

Paper ballot

Bongino

ComeyKash

Ron Paul

 

 

 

 

It’s been a busy first 5 weeks of the Trump team. But every single day it feels again like we are just beginning.

John Helmer posts a translation of a piece by Yevgeny Krutikov, which describes the US withdrawing its troops from Europe pretty much entirely, or at least from those parts added after 1997. Let Europe take care of Europe. Problem is, it can’t. It’s pretty much broke, and it’s hopelessly divided. It needs its own Trump and Musk, but none are in sight. I guess we must hope for Brusssels to implode sooner rather than later. But that might take pitchforks.

John Helmer: “An essay by Yevgeny Krutikov, published this week in Vzglyad, the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform, suggests senior officials at the Security Council believe in the possibility of arms withdrawal from the current battlefield and of military deconfliction with Russia – without attempting the impossible, the dismantling of the NATO membership to the 1997 cutoff. At its simplest, this would mean the withdrawal of American troops, long-range missiles and nuclear ordnance (bombs, missile warheads, targeting systems) to the lines of 1997. This would leave in place NATO security guarantees for the post-1997 member states and their territories, combined with Russian non-aggression guarantees.”

• US Relations With Russia Promise Rollback To Pre-Gorbachev Period (Krutikov)

The United States is preparing to eliminate its military presence in Europe, including Poland, the Baltic states and Kosovo, in order to normalize relations with Russia. At first, the news about this in the European media has looked like fakes, but now it appears too logical to ignore them. Is this a bluff or a real prospect of “detente”? Citing an intelligence source in an Eastern European country, Bild claims that the United States is preparing to withdraw troops from Europe. More precisely, from those bases and positions which appeared there after the expansion of NATO to the east. “According to our information, we are talking about the Russian president’s demand for 2021, that is, the withdrawal of American troops from all NATO countries that joined the alliance after 1990,” the German magazine writes. And it wants to believe this.

The facilities from which the Americans are not discussing withdrawal are the bases in Ramstein, Germany, and the United Kingdom, which existed before the collapse of the USSR. But the largest American base in Europe after Ramstein, the Kosovo Bondsteel, is allegedly preparing for liquidation, and the Italian command of the peacekeeping forces in Kosovo (KFOR) inherits its infrastructure. Currently, American military personnel (just over 600 people) in Bondsteel are not part of KFOR, this is a purely American position. In the near-sensational Bild article, it’s not so much the detail that matters as the message. This is the first (!) attempt to link President Trump’s rhetoric and plans with the creation of a new security configuration in Europe that would take into account Russia’s interests.


Map of US forces and their bases in Europe, Jan 2022

Trump himself has been talking about reducing the American military presence in Europe all the time – this has been one of his narratives since his inauguration, interspersed with demands for Europeans to “defend themselves on their own” — for example, to increase their own military spending and bring their armies to a combat-ready state. For now, threats to withdraw the United States from NATO should be regarded as deceitful and frivolous. However, events are developing at such a pace that everything seems possible. This includes the rollback of the US military presence in Europe to the “basic settings” of the pre-Gorbachev period. If the White House is really ready to discuss this with Moscow as part of the process of restoring normal relations between Russia and the United States, this is a truly revolutionary event for American foreign policy. In the light of such normalization, any other pales by comparison, including Trump’s decree that the United States now recognizes only two genders – male and female.

The simultaneous withdrawal of all American troops from Eastern Europe is a “horror story” that can be used for a variety of purposes: from attempts to influence the election campaign in Germany to fueling anti–Russian sentiment. And this “horror story” is being launched against the background of unprecedentedly harsh statements by the US authorities regarding Europe, of which the most memorable is the cavalier speech by Vice President J. D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference. In this context, it is easy to believe the panicky rumours that the United States is abandoning Europe to its fate. For the last month, Europeans have been living uncomfortably under the “American umbrella.” But the fact is that the Italian military in Kosovo are indeed showing strange activity around Bondsteel.


Left: the US Bondsteel base in Kosovo; right, red dot marks the base location on the map.

Serbian sources also confirm the possible transfer of the base under the control of KFOR, which automatically means that the Americans will leave there. The Serbs, of course, are happy; when they are happy, the information coming from them should also be treated with reasonable skepticism. That is, something is definitely afoot in Kosovo, but it is not yet clear what exactly, and in what broader context this idea should be assessed. It is noteworthy that the Bild source referred to a certain demand of Vladimir Putin from 2021. Most likely, this refers to the famous declaration of the Russian Foreign Ministry dated December 2021. No one has canceled or disavowed this document, and in theory it can indeed be on the negotiating table between the Russian Federation and the United States as a certain opening of Moscow’s diplomatic position.

Smolenskaya Square [location of the Russian Foreign Ministry comparable to Foggy Bottom for the US State Department] unequivocally claims that negotiations in Riyadh are underway not only around the Ukrainian issue, but also about the normalization or, if you want, reformatting of bilateral relations. This is not a “conference on Ukraine,” but Russian-American talks about everything. Specifically, the Istanbul agreements may become the basis for negotiations on Ukraine, but in a broader context, we really need to talk about creating a configuration of continental security that would take into account Russia’s interests. The main thing here is to take into account the threats posed to the Russian Federation by the current security organization in Europe, which has developed after the uncontrolled expansion of NATO to the east.

The problem is not only attempts to draw Ukraine or Georgia into the alliance – Trump himself calls this “involvement” a mistake which has worsened the situation on the continent. In a broader context, other examples of NATO expansion have posed a threat to the Russian Federation. The current borders and configuration of the alliance cannot be the basis for lasting peace for many years. Roughly speaking, no one feels safe right now, and the source of these worries was and remains NATO as an outdated and decaying system. In the Smolenskaya Square declaration of December 2021, the first paragraph states that the Russian Federation and the United States should act on the basis of the principles of “indivisible and equal security, without prejudice to each other’s security.” Further, this basic principle is specified in slightly less general terms, but, in fact, this is a proposal to take into account the security threats to the Russian Federation that stem from the expansion of NATO to the east.

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“Europe’s “sound and fury” after jaw-dropping pivots in U.S. policy..”

“..the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020..”

“That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy.”

• America as Republic, not as Empire (Alastair Crooke)

The bits are falling into a distinct pattern – a pre-prepared pattern. Defence Secretary Hegseth at the Munich Security Conference gave us four ‘noes’: No to Ukraine in NATO; No to a return to pre-2014 borders; No to ‘Article 5’ peacekeeper backstops, and ‘No’ to U.S. troops in Ukraine. And in a final flourish, he added that U.S. troops in Europe are not ‘forever’ – and even placed a question mark over the continuity of NATO. Pretty plain speaking! The U.S. clearly is cutting away from Ukraine. And they intend to normalise relations with Russia. Then, Vice-President Vance threw his fire cracker amongst the gathered Euro-élites. He said that the élites had retreated from “shared” democratic values; they were overly reliant on repressing and censoring their peoples (prone to locking them up); and, above all, he excoriated the European Cordon Sanitaire (‘firewall’) by which European parties outside the Centre-Left are deemed non-grata politically: It’s a fake ‘threat’, he suggested.

Of what are you really so frightened? Have you so little confidence in your ‘democracy’? The U.S., he implied, will no longer support Europe if it continues to suppress political constituencies, arrest citizens for speech offenses, and particularly cancel elections as was done recently in Romania. “If you’re running in fear of your own voters”, Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you”. Ouch! Vance had hit them where it hurts. It is difficult to say what specifically most triggered the catatonic European breakdown: Was it the fear of the U.S. and Russia joining together as a major power nexus – thus stripping Europe from ever again being able glide along on the back of American power, through the specious notion that any European state must have exceptional access to the Washington ‘ear’? Or was it the ending of the Ukraine/Zelensky cult which was so prized amongst the Euro-élite as the ‘glue’ around which a faux European unity and identity could be enforced? Both probably contributed to the fury.

That the U.S. would in essence leave Europe to their own delusions would be a calamitous event for the Brussels technocracy. Many may lazily assume that the U.S. double act at Munich was just another example of the well-known Trumpian fondness for dropping ‘wacky’ initiatives intended to both shock and kickover frozen paradigms. The Munich speeches did exactly that all right! Yet that does not make them accidental; but rather parts that fit into a bigger picture. It is clear now that the Trump blitzkrieg across the American Administrative State could not have been mounted unless carefully pre-planned and prepared over the last four years. Trump’s flurry of Presidential Executive Orders at the outset of his Presidency were not whimsical. Leading U.S. constitutional lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and other lawyers say that the Orders were well drafted legally and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue. What’s more, that Trump Team welcome those challenges.

What is going on? The newly confirmed head of the Office of Budget Management (OBM), Russ Vought, says his Office will become the “on/off switch” for all Executive expenditure under the new Executive Orders. Vought calls the resulting whirlpool, the application of Constitutional radicalism. And Trump has now issued the Executive Order that reinstates the primacy of the Executive as the controlling mechanism of government. Vought, who was in OBM in Trump 01, is carefully selecting the ground for all-out financial war on the Deep State. It will be fought out firstly at the Supreme Court – which the Trump Team expect confidently to win (Trump has the 6-3 conservative majority). The new régime will then be applied across all agencies and departments of state. Expect shrieks of pain. The point here is that the Administrative State – aloof from executive control – has taken to itself prerogatives such as immunity to dismissal and the self-awarded authority to shape policy – creating a dual state system, run by unelected technocrats, which, when implanted in departments such as Justice and the Pentagon, have evolved into the American Deep State.

Article Two of the Constitution however, says very bluntly: Executive power shall be vested in the U.S. President (with no ifs or buts at all.) Trump intends for his Administration to recover that lost Executive power. It was, in fact, lost long ago. Trump is re-claiming too, the Executive’s right to dismiss ‘servants of the State’, and to ‘switch off’ wasteful expenditure at his discretion, as part of a unitary executive prerequisite. Of course, the Administrative State is fighting back. Turley’s article is headlined: They Are Taking Away Everything We Have: Democrats and Unions Launch Existential Fight. Their aim has been to cripple the Trump initiative through using politicised judges to issue restraint orders. Many mainstream lawyers believe Trump’s Unitary Executive claim to be illegal. The question is whether Congress can stand up Agencies designed to act independently of the President; and how does that square with the separation of powers and Article Two that vests unqualified executive power with one sole elected official – the U.S. President.

How did the Democrats not see this coming? Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially says that the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.

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“..asked [..] whether EU countries would retaliate in-kind to any US tariffs, Trump replied: “They can’t, I mean they can try, but they can’t.”

• US To Impose Blanket 25% Tariffs On EU – Trump (RT))

US President Donald Trump has claimed that the EU was designed to weaken America and has issued new threats of 25% tariffs on all imports from the bloc. Trump made the remarks on Wednesday at the White House during his first Cabinet meeting of his second term as president. The trade row between the US and the EU has been escalating since Trump announced plans to introduce a wide range of import duties in an effort to tackle what he describes as a trade imbalance. “Look, let’s be honest, the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it,” Trump told the meeting. “And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” He reiterated that his administration plans to impose tariffs on EU imports “very soon.”

“It will be 25%, generally speaking, and that will be on cars and all other things,” Trump said, describing the EU as “a different case than Canada… they’ve really taken advantage of us in a different way.” The US and EU similarly found themselves locked in a trade dispute during Trump’s first term, when he introduced tariffs of 25% on European steel imports and 10% on aluminum, to which the EU responded with countermeasures. Trump also threatened tariffs on European cars, though those never came to pass. In total, the two sides exchanged duties on goods worth over $10 billion. As part of his current tariff push, Trump has imposed 25% duties on all steel and aluminum imports from the EU starting March 4, adding to existing tariffs. He has also directed Howard Lutnick, his nominee for US trade representative and commerce secretary, to propose new levies on a country-by-country basis by April 1 in a bid to rebalance trade.

Since taking office on January 20, Trump has slapped a 25% tariff on all imports from Mexico and Canada and an additional 10% on Chinese goods, citing concerns over illegal immigration and drug trafficking. However, following talks with the Mexican and Canadian leaders, those tariffs have been postponed for 30 days after both nations agreed to bolster border security. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned the latest US tariffs, expressing “deep regret” over the decision. She said earlier this month that the levies on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered.” Asked on Wednesday, whether EU countries would retaliate in-kind to any US tariffs, Trump replied: “They can’t, I mean they can try, but they can’t.”

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Neither can Europe.

• US Can No Longer Subsidize NATO – Rubio (RT)

Washington can no longer allow its wealthy Western European NATO allies to take advantage of US taxpayers to fund their defense budgets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Fox News on Wednesday. The top US diplomat was responding to comments by Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won last week’s elections in Germany. Merz claimed that the US-led military bloc is in “jeopardy” due to Washington’s “indifference” toward Europe’s security. “NATO is not in jeopardy,” Rubio said. “The only thing that puts NATO in jeopardy is the fact that we have NATO allies who barely have militaries or whose militaries are not very capable because they’ve spent 40 years not spending any money on it.” The current US administration considers it unfair that some wealthy Western European member states only spend 1% to 1.5% of their GDP on defense, Rubio added.

“We just can’t keep subsidizing that,” he stressed. “These are rich countries, especially in Western Europe. They have plenty of money. They should be investing that in their national security, and they’re not.” US President Donald Trump has argued that NATO’s current defense spending target of 2% of GDP per year – already a challenge for a number of member states – is too low and should be raised to 5%. During his reelection campaign, Trump said he would “absolutely” consider leaving the bloc if members do not “pay their bills.” The US allocates around 3.4% of GDP to military expenditures, according to a 2023 estimate by the World Bank. In contrast, European NATO members spend an average of 1.9%, less than 60% of the US’ spending, Reuters reported earlier this month, citing S&P Global.

Meeting Trump’s proposed 5% military spending goal would cause France and Germany’s budget deficits to rise to 4.6% and 8.9% in 2025, respectively, compared to the current projections of 1.7% and 6%, S&P estimated. Since 2022, the US and its allies have provided more than $258 billion in aid to Ukraine, including over $134 billion in military assistance, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute. Western nations have depleted their military stockpiles and struggled to increase arms production due to deindustrialization, offshore manufacturing, green policies, and sanctions on Russian energy.

Trump claims that Washington spent up to $350 billion on Ukraine under the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, and has vowed to recover this money. Moscow has warned that NATO’s military aid to Ukraine effectively makes member states parties to the conflict. Trump is the first and only Western leader to acknowledge that one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict was “the previous administration’s ‘pushy’ policy of dragging Ukraine into NATO,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said last week.

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As Europe adopts new sanctions…

• Trump Says US Could Lift Russia Sanctions (RT)

The US could lift sanctions against Russia “at some point” during the Ukraine peace negotiations, President Donald Trump indicated on Tuesday. He noted, however, that no decision has been made so far. The US and other Western nations have placed an unprecedented number of economic restrictions on Russia since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. Moscow considers the sanctions illegal and has consistently demanded their removal. “No, we haven’t lifted any sanctions on anybody… I guess it will be at some point, but right now we haven’t agreed to lift sanctions on anybody,” Trump said at a press briefing, responding to a question on whether the issue has been part of Russia-US discussions so far.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently suggested that Western nations will have to consider lifting sanctions on Russia in order to find an “enduring, sustainable” solution to the Ukraine conflict. Speaking after high-level talks between Moscow and Washington in Saudi Arabia last week, he indicated that in order to bring an end to the conflict, “there has to be concessions made by all sides,” including letting go of sanctions policies. Rubio noted, however, that the EU will have to be “at the table” to discuss sanctions relief as well, as it has also imposed restrictive measures targeting Russia. Brussels has indicated it is prepared to pursue an independent sanctions policy regardless of Washington’s stance. EU Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said last week that the bloc has no plans to lift sanctions against Moscow even if the US decides to do so.

Earlier this week, the EU adopted its 16th package of restrictions, largely targeting Russia’s military-industrial complex and energy projects. It also introduced additional measures against alleged sanctions circumvention, including dual-use export restrictions. Moscow has often noted that sanctions have failed to destabilize or isolate it while backfiring on the countries that imposed them. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that Western sanctions have inadvertently bolstered Russia’s development. Speaking at the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow, he stated that despite the challenges that Russia was forced to overcome due to the measures, they played a “stimulating role,” prompting closer collaboration between Russia’s domestic businesses and science and bolstering the country’s economic and technological sectors.

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“..Europe’s role in fomenting crises and its reputation in this area, which it has acquired over centuries, remains unchanged..”

• EU Trying To Block Ukraine Peace – Lavrov (RT)

The EU is seeking to derail the Ukraine peace process by pushing the country to continue fighting against Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. Speaking at a press conference in Qatar on Wednesday, Lavrov weighed in on a resolution drafted by the US calling for a “swift end” to the Ukraine conflict, which was approved by the UN Security Council on Monday. The document, which was supported by Russia and China, excluded strong language denouncing Moscow. The resolution also came after US President Donald Trump refused to condemn Russia over the Ukraine conflict while blaming Kiev for failing to prevent the hostilities. The Russian foreign minister said that as soon as the political landscape regarding the conflict began to shift, “Europe immediately tries to undermine this trend, announces new large packages of military aid to Kiev, incites it to continue military actions.”

Lavrov went on to state that “Europe’s role in fomenting crises and its reputation in this area, which it has acquired over centuries, remains unchanged,” adding that the EU’s approach to the conflict is “hopelessly outdated and failing.” Last week, Politico reported that the EU is preparing a military aid package worth at least €6 billion ($6.3 billion) for Ukraine, with the magazine’s sources claiming that it could potentially balloon to €10 billion as the bloc’s members “dig into their inventories to see what they can send.” Meanwhile, Trump said on Tuesday that the US is not currently supplying Ukraine with any defense assistance. Russia has condemned the Western arms shipments to Ukraine, warning that they only prolong the conflict without changing the outcome.

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Who’s going to volunteer to be a Russian target?

• Lavrov Calls Out Europe’s Peacekeeper Plan As Ploy to Rearm Kiev (Sp.)

For Russia, any course of action involving the deployment of European peacekeepers to Ukraine is out of the question, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. “No, we cannot consider any such options,” Lavrov told reporters after talks in Doha. The approach being imposed by the Europeans, namely France and the UK, is aimed at further fueling the conflict and “pumping Kiev with weapons again”, Russia’s diplomacy chief added. US President Donald Trump stated that he believes the presence of peacekeeping forces in Ukraine is necessary in one form or another, but the format of this mission must be acceptable to all parties. Russia is not blocking negotiations on Ukraine, Lavrov said, emphasizing that the best way to resolve the conflict is to understand its root causes.

“We are waiting for our European colleagues to stop spreading lies that Russia is blocking the negotiations. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly responded to these false claims, pointing out that the Ukrainian leadership, instigated by Europe, refuses to negotiate,” Lavrov told reporters after his visit to Qatar. Lavrov noted that European politicians assert the conflict in Ukraine should be resolved through military means rather than through negotiations. “We believe that the best help from those who sincerely want to help resolve the conflict is to understand its root causes, as [US] President Trump did recently,” Lavrov added. An upcoming Russian-US meeting that will focus on normalizing the operation of embassies will be held on February 27 in Istanbul, Lavrov said.

“We announced that our high-level diplomats and experts, will meet and consider the systemic problems that have accumulated as a result of the previous administration’s illicit activities to create artificial obstacles to the functions of the Russian embassy, to which we naturally reciprocated and also created uncomfortable conditions for the work of the US Embassy in Moscow. Such a meeting will take place tomorrow in Istanbul,” Lavrov told reporters. Based on the outcome of the talks, it will be clear how fast and efficiently both countries can move, the top diplomat added. Israel’s presence in the south of Lebanon and the south of Syria requires constructive solutions which will not violate security of any party, Lavrov said.

“At present, the Israeli armed forces have entered the south of Syria, just as they decided to stay in the south of Lebanon. All this creates a new situation, which demands not simply understanding, but working out some kind of constructive steps, which take into account the security and development interests of all the countries of the region, including, of course, Israel. But these security problems must not be solved by violating the security and development of other [countries],” Russia’s diplomacy chief said at a press conference. Lavrov also said that Russia is deeply concerned about the fact that day by day the Israeli armed forces take steps that are not envisaged in the Hamas-Israel deals and create situations which contradict the agreements and the resolutions of the UN Security Council.

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No more time to wait or waste. There are major problems to be solved..

• Russian, US Diplomats To Meet In Istanbul On February 27 (TASS)

Russian and US diplomats will hold a meeting in Istanbul on February 27 to discuss issues related to the operation of the two countries’ embassies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced. “Such a meeting will take place in Istanbul tomorrow,” the top Russian diplomat said at a press conference following his visit to Qatar. “We have announced that our diplomats and high-level experts will meet to address the systemic problems that have piled up as a result of the previous [US] administration’s illegitimate activities aimed at creating artificial obstacles for the work of the Russian embassy, to which we clearly responded in kind, also creating uncomfortable conditions for the operation of the US embassy in Moscow,” Lavrov noted.

According to him, the problem of Russia’s frozen assets “has nothing to do with the operation of embassies” because “the asset issue is a state-level one.” Lavrov expects that the Istanbul meeting “will make it clear how capable the parties are of moving forward quickly and effectively.” Earlier, the top Russian diplomat announced that Moscow and Washington had held two rounds of preliminary technical consultations on the issue. Russian and US delegations held talks in Riyadh on February 18, which lasted over four hours. Russia was represented by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Presidential Aide Yury Ushakov, and CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) Kirill Dmitriev. The US delegation consisted of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff.

According to Ushakov, the delegations held a serious talk on all the issues they wanted to discuss, including ways to bring Russian and US positions closer to each other and future consultations on Ukraine. Lavrov described the meeting with Washington officials as very useful. According to him, Russia and the US agreed to make sure that ambassadors to both countries are appointed as soon as possible. Rubio, in turn, said after the talks that the US and Russia had agreed to reestablish embassy staffing. Embassy staff cuts began in both countries after 2014, when Washington adopted a policy aimed at “systemic containment” of Russia.

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“Who could forget Sean Penn giving him his own Oscar, or Ben Stiller chilling with the Ukrainian leader and making small talk? Angelina Jolie is even reported to have been paid 20 million dollars to meet with him..”

• Zelensky Now With Only The Dictatorship In London To Support Him (Jay)

What is the definition of a ‘dictator’? In the days that followed Trump’s social media post calling President Zelensky one, British media seized upon the subject and ran with it for days. Various public figures were asked whether Trump was right to use the word and whether they believed Zelensky was actually one. Two figures from the right, Nigel Farage and Liz Truss both said they thought Trump was both wrong to call him one and that in fact he wasn’t one. This remarkable endearment for Zelensky is really the core of the problem in the west in particular the UK, where its leader Sir Keir Starmer declared that he would be ready to send British troops to Ukraine – a suggestion which was quickly shot down by the elites of Germany and France as preposterous. It’s rare that the giants of the EU put the British government in its place on world affairs but we are living in unprecedented times of sensational stupidity and perhaps ignorance from politicians which we have never seen before.

Farage’s views on the Middle East tell us he is both ignorant of what is happening there and doesn’t have any advisors covering the region. But his views on Ukraine are even more shockingly deranged. Zelensky is a leader who has shut down anything which resembles an ‘opposition’ both politically and media, he has conglomerated all TV stations into one state-owned entity so as to shut down even the slightest criticism or accountability of his own actions, he has had the few dissident voices arrested and thrown into prison, with some predicting that there are thousands of journalists and media workers. Add to that it is rapidly emerging that the level of corruption and embezzlement linked directly to Zelensky is on a scale that even hard line critics in the West could not have even imagined.

In my own investigation in October 2023, where a very angry Ben Wallace insulted me in a WhatsApp interview before blocking me, I outline how the original, more sensational claim that only about a third of all military equipment sent to Ukraine was actually making it to the battlefield was in fact realistic. This analogy was bandied about for some time and was dismissed by Wallace and others like Alecia Kearns MP as nonsense and yet turned out to be more than just realistic but likely. That is to say that 66 percent of what was being sent to Ukraine was being sold on the black market in Libya making Zelensky and his close circle billionaires.

In recent weeks now mainstream journalists and politicians are talking about the arms scandal and it is only a matter of time before we shall see the realities of this. The British government have always turned a blind eye to it, both in Ukraine and further afield. It would cost them nothing to do a study in the Sahel to evaluate how much of the equipment there funding terrorism is coming from the arms bazaars of Tripoli where all of this kit is ending up. I suggested to Wallace that his own government at the time should send some investigators there (Libya) to look at what’s available. I was more or less told to go there myself and do the job for them.

But Zelenksy support structure for so long has been that of a dictator, in particular media. The hundreds of media outlets in Ukraine which were receiving USAID funding is extensive, not to mention the hundreds of civil servants which support him being on the same payroll. If that doesn’t shock Farage and Truss, then consider the same slush fund which paid out around a 100 million dollars to movie stars to go and visit him and fake their adulation, all for the purposes of cheating the humble U.S. taxpayer by raising his profile.

Who could forget Sean Penn giving him his own Oscar, or Ben Stiller chilling with the Ukrainian leader and making small talk? Angelina Jolie is even reported to have been paid 20 million dollars to meet with him but didn’t even manage that and simply mooched about a but in the country before jetting back to the U.S. Of course, the celebrities all dismiss these claims, through the same left-wing woke press which is part of their extended political family. But the question we should be asking ourselves is simply this: if they were not paid, then why won’t they show up now and show support at the precise moment when Zelensky needs it the most? Given that these celebrities supported Biden and are Democrats, this would be the most logical thing for them to do. In reality, the wall of silence is what we see.

Dictators don’t stand over their hired killers and watch their victims in their final moments like Idi Amin did. In reality, they only indicate and hint to the thugs on their payroll what she should do to fix problems. Does Farage and Truss actually believe that dissidents are not rounded up and thrown into jail where they are tortured and in some cases murdered? Now that the vultures are circling over Zelensky and many are wondering how many days in office he has left, more reports are emerging with details of such cases. The story of Gonzalo Lira, the American Chilean blogger whose vlogs were often well-informed and threw a very poor spotlight on Zelensky is a very sad one as he was brutally tortured while in prison and finally died. If the Zelensky cabal can do this to an American citizen, perhaps Farage and Truss will not be too surprised when in the coming weeks we will have the same Damascus prison media moment where it transpires that there are certainly hundreds, possibly thousands of journalists, commentators and political rivals in Ukraine’s prisons.

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“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”

• Ukraine Can Forget About NATO, Says Trump (ZH)

Huge and unprecedented words issued by America’s Commander-in-Chief in a press briefing on Thursday… Trump says Ukraine can “forget about” joining NATO: “That is probably the reason why the whole thing started.” Of course, Vice President J.D. Vance earlier this month voiced this point of view of the administration while addressing a gathering of defense leaders in Brussels. But never before has a US president so forcefully voiced that a path to NATO membership simply won’t happen. This also marks the most directly Trump has ever said NATO expansion is a key reason for the tragic war, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, having started in the first place. Mainstream media fact-checkers have been out in force, decrying this perspective as ‘Russian propaganda’. But is this really the case?

The head of NATO itself in the recent past said the quiet part out loud and fully admitted that constant NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep was a central driving factor: “From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been told that the issue of NATO expansion is irrelevant to the war, and that anyone bringing it up is, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, at worst, apologizing for or justifying the war. So it was curious to see NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this month say explicitly that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine, and the alliance’s refusal to swear it off — not once or twice, but three separate times.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.” “He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.” How much clearer could the then NATO Secretary-General have said it (in the Sept. 2023 comments)?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1706173936025874767

How much clearer could the then NATO Secretary-General have said it (in the Sept. 2023 comments)?Trump also on Wednesday blasted the European Union… “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” Among other things, Europe has lately been accused of seeking to thwart Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine, even offering a rival rare earth minerals deal. The Europeans and Ukrainians have been cut out of direct negotiations with Moscow under Rubio.

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Aka very little.

• Ukraine Should Get As Much Land ‘As Possible’ – Trump (RT)

US President Donald Trump has said he wants Ukraine to regain as much territory “as possible” under a potential peace deal with Russia. He claimed that Moscow will have to make concessions, but that the agreement should ultimately represent the best possible outcome for both parties if finalized. Five formerly Ukrainian regions have voted to join Russia since 2014. While Kiev rejects the territorial changes, Moscow views them as final and non-negotiable. Following a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump was asked if a peace deal that involved Russia maintaining control over Ukrainian-claimed land could send a message to China detrimental to American interests. ”We’re going to do the best we can to make the best deal we can for both sides,” Trump responded, adding that for Kiev that means “they can get as much back as possible.”

Although an agreement is not guaranteed, Trump expressed hope that it would materialize “for the sake of humanity.” If a resolution is reached, Trump stressed that Ukraine “can forget about” joining NATO as this aspiration lies at the heart of the ongoing conflict. He asserted that Russia will “have to” make concessions as well. Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov indicated that Moscow would reject a truce that merely freezes the conflict along the current front line, leaving parts of Russian territory under Ukrainian jurisdiction. ”Some propose maintaining the line of engagement – this section is Russian, that one is Ukrainian… That won’t happen, as we have a Constitution reflecting the will of the people,” Lavrov said, referencing the referendums held in the five former Ukrainian regions.

Trump’s approach marks a departure from his predecessor Joe Biden’s strategy of isolating Russia, as he seeks to normalize bilateral relations. Both Moscow and Washington suggest that this shift provides hope for a swift resolution to the Ukraine conflict. Additionally, the Trump administration aims to recover taxpayer funds spent during Biden’s tenure through a forthcoming minerals deal with Kiev, expected to be signed on Friday. The new US administration has declined to offer security guarantees to Ukraine, arguing that the country holds minimal interest for American priorities and that European nations should address the issue instead.

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There’s nothing left to come home to but a crazed dictator and some neo-nazis in a barren landscape.

• Most Ukrainians Abroad Won’t Come Home – Unity Minister (RT)

The majority of Ukrainians who left the country over the past three years will not return to their homeland even after the military conflict ends, Minister of National Unity Aleksey Chernyshov has said, according to local media reports. An estimated over 5 million Ukrainians are still living abroad, three years since the conflict escalated. Kiev wants them back as it seeks to address the country’s imploding demographics, boost conscription and generate human resources for the post-conflict reconstruction. The minister reportedly claimed on Tuesday that 30% of Ukrainians currently abroad are “seriously considering coming back” when the security situation stabilizes, according to Ekonomicheskaya Pravda. “We also clearly understand that a significant portion of Ukrainians will not return,” the national unity minister said. “They have decided to stay where they are. This is not a catastrophe, it must be acknowledged.”

Chernyshov said that Kiev is developing measures to encourage people to return and cited statistics indicating that Ukraine loses 300,000 people annually for reasons unrelated to the conflict. “For post-conflict recovery and doubling Ukraine’s GDP within 10 years, it will be necessary to attract between 3.1 to 4.2 million repatriates and immigrants,” he noted. A study by the Ukrainian think tank Center for Economic Strategy (CES) published last week found that around 5.2 million Ukrainian refugees remain abroad, of which 60% plan to settle outside their homeland. Meanwhile, the share of those considering returning home had dropped to 43% by the end of 2024, compared to 74% in December 2022. The exodus peaked in March 2022, when around 2.5 million people left the country within weeks. Since then, the outflow has slowed, with around 300,000 people departing Ukraine last year, the CES said.

The agency estimates that up to 2.7 million Ukrainians may choose to remain abroad permanently, even after the conflict ends. The majority of refugees are women and children, while Germany and Poland are the most popular destinations, a Eurostat report published earlier this month showed. The report also revealed that the share of adult men fleeing Ukraine has jumped by nearly 10% over the past year amid the massive mobilization campaign. This prolonged emigration could have devastating consequences for Ukraine’s economy. CES projects it could reduce the country’s annual GDP by 5.1% to 7.8%. According to the think tank, the primary reasons Ukrainians are not currently returning home include the ongoing security threats, destroyed housing, low living standards, and difficulties in securing employment in Ukraine.

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Remember Alastair Crooke: “..the Orders were well drafted legally and with the clear understanding that legal challenges would ensue..”

• Federal Government Can’t Comply With Judge’s Order To Unfreeze Funds (ET)

Federal officials told a U.S. judge on Feb. 25 that they could not comply with his order requiring the release of frozen foreign aid within two days. U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s order, which gave a deadline of Feb. 26 at 11:59 p.m. ET, would mean paying at least $1.5 billion across some 2,000 outstanding and newly created requests for payment to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the official serving as deputy administrator for the agency said in a court filing. It would also require paying at least $400 million to resolve outstanding payment requests to the State Department, Pete Marocco, the official, said. “These payments cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the Court and would instead take multiple weeks,” he wrote.

Earlier on Tuesday, Ali, in a hearing with government lawyers and attorneys representing the groups that sued over the freeze, was told that the groups had not yet been paid despite his multiple previous orders, including one on Feb. 13, mandating that the Trump administration unfreeze the foreign assistance. “I’m not sure why I can’t get a straight answer from you on this: Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13,” the Washington-based judge asked Indraneel Sur, the lawyer for the government, during the hearing. “Are you aware of steps taken to actually release those funds?” “I’m not in a position to answer that,” Sur said. It’s the second time a judge has found the Trump administration did not follow a court order. U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island also found this month that the administration had not fully unfrozen federal grants and loans within the United States after he blocked sweeping plans for a pause on trillions of dollars in government spending.

In the Washington case, plaintiffs recently filed an emergency motion to enforce the judge’s temporary restraining order, saying they’re still owed millions of dollars and that their contracts terminated under Trump’s foreign assistance pause remain terminated. Ali granted the emergency motion during Tuesday’s hearing and ordered the government to comply by Thursday. Marocco’s declaration came with a motion from the government asking the judge to stay his order as a federal appeals court considers overturning it. “Defendants are likely to succeed on appeal from the Court’s order for several reasons,” government lawyers said in the filing. “To start, it is not possible for Defendants to comply,” they said, pointing to Marocco’s declaration. The government has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

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A subtle hint.

• Rubio Cancels EU’s Kallas At Last Minute (RT)

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cancelled a meeting with EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas at the last minute “due to scheduling issues,” Euronews reported on Wednesday. Kallas, who is on an official visit to Washington to discuss the Ukraine conflict and new dynamics in transatlantic relations, intends to meet with representatives from the US Congress and Senate, according to her spokesperson cited by the EU’s news network. The bloc’s top diplomat had been scheduled to meet with Rubio on Wednesday, and news agencies had expected images from the bilateral talks, Euronews wrote. However, a spokesperson for the US official told the outlet that the meeting had been cancelled “due to scheduling issues,” adding that Kallas and Rubio “last met during the Munich Security Conference” earlier in February. According to the report, Rubio’s public calendar for February 26 did not list Kallas as an agenda item.

Former Estonian prime minister Kallas has been critical of the new US administration’s handling of the Ukraine conflict, denouncing President Donald Trump’s call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin earlier this month as a form of “appeasement.” She has accused Washington of adopting a “Russian narrative” and argued that Brussels should “support Ukraine right now more than ever.” Kallas also claimed that Moscow emerged as the winner in the recent US-Russia meeting in Saudi Arabia, stressing that any peace deal concerning Ukraine must involve both Europeans and Ukrainians to be effective. Following the Riyadh talks on February 18, Kallas held a phone call with Rubio, later warning, “Russia will try to divide us. Let’s not walk into their traps.” On Monday, while announcing the now-cancelled meeting with Rubio, Kallas stated “I have been very clear that no deal without us, without Ukraine or without Europe will work in practice – and that is for the US, which also needs to work with us.”

An unnamed EU diplomat commented on the canceled meeting for Politico, saying it “seems that the Trump administration doesn’t miss a chance to show that for them the EU is not a player.” On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that the aggressive stance of Ukraine’s EU backers makes them unfit to participate in the peace process. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov further accused Brussels on Wednesday of attempting to derail peace efforts by encouraging Kiev to continue fighting against Russia. Kallas has recently suggested extending arms deliveries to Ukraine into 2025. The proposed package, worth €10 billion (over $10 billion), has faced resistance from some EU member states and is set for discussion at the March 6 summit of the bloc. Moscow has repeatedly warned against Western arms shipments to Ukraine, arguing that they only prolong the conflict without altering the outcome, while increasing the risk of a direct Russia-NATO confrontation.

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Europe is full of highly unpopular “leaders”. Who target the few that are actually loved.

• NATO-Skeptic Romanian Presidential Candidate Arrested (RT)

Romanian police have arrested Calin Georgescu, the front-runner in last year’s annulled presidential election, and conducted dozens of raids on his supporters and people tied to his campaign, local media reported on Wednesday. A critic of NATO and the EU and an opponent of sending aid to Ukraine, Georgescu made headlines in November last year when he unexpectedly garnered 23% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election in Romania. However, the Constitutional Court annulled the results shortly before the second round, citing intelligence documents alleging ‘irregularities’ in his campaign. Georgescu’s communications team has said on Facebook that he was arrested just as he was about to submit his new candidacy for the presidency.

”The system stopped him in traffic and he was pulled over for questioning at the Prosecutor General’s Office! Where is democracy, where are the partners who must defend democracy,” his team wrote. Prior to his arrest, Georgescu condemned the raids on his supporters in a post on Facebook. “The communist-Bolshevik system continues its odious abuses,” he wrote, accusing the Romanian authorities of trying to “invent evidence to justify the theft of the elections and to do anything to block my new candidacy for the presidency.” The Romanian Prosecutor General’s Office is reportedly investigating Georgescu over allegations of involvement “in a fascist organization and the promotion of controversial ideologies and historical figures in the public space,” G4Media outlet reported, citing sources close to the investigation. According to media reports, police found “weapons, live ammunition, and more than a million dollars hidden in a safe” during the raids.

Following the reports of Georgescu’s arrest, dozens of people gathered in front of the Prosecutor General’s office, chanting his name. The president of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) party, George Simion, said his MPs have also made their way to the Prosecutor General’s office to demand an explanation. Digi24 quoted Simion as saying that he maintains his support for Georgescu and that “until we see undeniable evidence, we suspect that this is political policing.” He added that so far, “not a single piece of evidence” has been presented. Georgescu’s surprise election victory last year and the subsequent annulment over unproven claims of Russian interference in the electoral process sparked controversy in the country. Both conservative and liberal parties have suggested that the establishment parties – the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL) – are trying to hold on to power by pulling strings within the Constitutional Court.

The canceled election over alleged ‘Russian meddling’ has also been criticized by US officials. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, Vice President J.D. Vance suggested that “old entrenched interests” in Romania are “hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” and “don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might… win an election.” Throughout his election campaign, Georgescu repeatedly insisted on Romania’s geopolitical non-alignment and highlighted national sovereignty and self-sufficiency. While expressing skepticism towards Western influence over the country’s policies and criticizing both NATO and the EU, he stated that Romania would respect its commitments to these organizations, but only “to the extent that they will respect theirs” toward Bucharest. He also vowed to halt Romania’s military aid to Ukraine if elected.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1894722137941749825

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Dismissed/disgruntled/disloyal spies.

• Tulsi Gabbard Labels CNN ‘Propaganda Arm’ Of Spies (RT)

Newly confirmed US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard has accused CNN of acting as a “propaganda arm” for disloyal intelligence agents, calling the network’s report on potential retaliation by dismissed spies an “indirect threat” to President Donald Trump’s administration. As part of Trump’s broader effort to downsize and restructure the federal government, the Central Intelligence Agency has recently offered so-called buyouts to its agents. In a report published on Monday, CNN, citing unnamed sources, claimed that some senior CIA officers were “quietly discussing” how the dismissals “risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service.” “I am curious about how they think this is a good tactic to keep their job,” Gabbard told Fox News on Tuesday.

“They are exposing themselves, essentially, by making this indirect threat – using their propaganda arm, CNN, that they’ve used over and over again – to reveal their hand,” she continued. “Their loyalty is not to America, not to the American people or the Constitution; it is to themselves.” She stressed that these disgruntled employees are “exactly the kinds of people we need to root out, get rid of, so that the patriots who do work in this area, who are committed to our core mission, can actually focus on that.” Gabbard also claimed that many within the intelligence community had reached out to her personally, expressing support for Trump’s efforts to “clean house” and refocus on the core mission of serving the American people.

A former US congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard rose to national prominence in 2016 when she resigned as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to endorse Bernie Sanders for president. She later ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, advocating against US military interventions abroad, which she argued are harmful to service members like herself and detrimental to national interests. As tensions with the Democratic Party escalated, Gabbard left the party in 2022. After two years as an independent, she joined the Republican Party and endorsed Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s nomination of Gabbard for the top intelligence role in November sparked criticism from establishment figures, who labeled her a security risk. Despite the backlash, she was confirmed earlier this month by a 52-48 Senate vote, with only one Republican, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, opposing her appointment. In January, the Senate also confirmed another Trump nominee, John Ratcliffe, as director of the CIA in a 74-25 vote. Ratcliffe, a former Texas congressman and ex-director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, is known for his skepticism of intelligence agencies and his criticism of investigations into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

CIA

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“..this will make you sick..”

We’ll see a lot of comments on redactions. Pam better be careful.

• AG Pam Bondi Announces Thursday Release of Epstein Files (ZH)

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Wednesday evening that she’s going to release DOJ files on dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “You said last week that you had the Epstein files on your desk. When can we see them?” asked Fox News’ Jesse Watters. “Jesse, there are well over – this will make you sick, 200 victims. Well over… over 250 actually. So we have to make sure that their identity is protected, and their personal information. But other than that, I think tomorrow Jesse – breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office.” “What kind? Are we going to see who was on the flights? Are we going to see any evidence from what he recorded – because he had all of his homes wired with recording devices,” Watters asked. “What you’re going to see, hopefully tomorrow, is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information… it’s pretty sick what that man did,” Bondi continued.

Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender was found dead in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. While his death was rules a suicide, he was also good friends with the Clintons and several other high-profile figures such as Bill Gates, Britain’s Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Barclays CEO and ‘Disney princess’ aficionado Jes Staley, Larry Summers, Harvey Weinstein, and former Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner. Watters’ question about recordings stems from earlier reporting that the deceased sex trafficker’s homes were wired with recording devices. In late 2019, Jeffrey Epstein victim Maria Farmer alleged that the deceased pedophile had a “media room” on the first floor where high-profile johns were allegedly recorded having sex with women and children.

“So if you’re facing the house, there’s a window on the right that’s barred – that’s the room, the ‘media room’ is what he called it,” Farmer said. “And so there was a door that looked like an invisible door with all this limestone and everything and you push it and you go in and I saw all the cameras.” Maria said: “What it was – was like old televisions basically, like stacked.” “They were monitors inside this cabinet and there were men sitting here and I looked on the cameras and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed. “And I was like I’m never going to use the restroom here and I am never going to sleep here.” -The Sun

The claim was supported in a 2024 lawsuit by two women – Danielle Bensky and Jane Doe 3, who said Epstein employed a sophisticated system involving constant CCTV surveillance within his New York mansion. Bondi’s appearance came hours after the DOJ appeared to give Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) the brush-off, telling her in a Wednesday letter that they are “reviewing your requests and look forward to engaging further to accommodate your oversight and legislative needs.” On the campaign trail, Donald Trump suggested that he would be open to releasing the Epstein list, while Bondi said in November that anyone named in the documents who are “still fighting to keep their names private, Sean, they have no legal basis to do so unless they’re a child, a victim or a cooperating defendant.”

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Opens in new tab/window. No comment needed.Note: Trump did not make this.

• Trump Gaza VIDEO With Bearded Belly Dancers Sparks Outcry (RT)

A video re-envisioning Gaza as a lavish resort complete with bearded belly dancers and dollar bills raining down posted on US President Donald Trump’s social media channel has elicited a backlash from users. The clip, which appears to be AI-generated and comes after the US leader recently suggested turning Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” appeared on Truth Social on Tuesday. The 30-second clip begins with what appear to be current scenes of destruction in Gaza, with barefoot children running between wrecked buildings. The wreckage then morphs into a futuristic-looking Gaza with skyscrapers reminiscent of Dubai, pristine beaches, casinos, and opulent hotels branded “Trump Gaza.” The video depicts an AI-rendered Trump enjoying the local attractions, including sunbathing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Elon Musk, also AI-rendered, is seen dining on the beach, surrounded by what appear to be bearded belly dancers. The video also features larger-than-life golden statues of Trump and kids frolicking under a shower of dollar bills.

The video is accompanied by a jingle with lyrics praising Trump’s supposed vision for Gaza:
“Donald is coming to set you free, bringing the light for all to see,
No more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza is shining bright, a golden future, a brand new light,
Feast and dance, the deed is done, Trump Gaza number one!”

Trump suggested earlier this month that the US was prepared to take control of Gaza and transform it into a resort. He has reiterated the idea several times since, claiming that because the enclave is unsafe to live in, it should be raised completely to the ground and rebuilt. While Israel applauded Trump’s initiative, other regional players and many global powers have strongly opposed it, particularly given that it would mean relocating Palestinians living in the enclave to neighboring countries. Trump’s video has so far drawn significant backlash over its tone and messaging, even from the US leader’s own supporters. Users on Truth Social described the clip as “horrible,” “creepy,” and “in poor taste.”

“I hate this. I love our president, but this is horrible,” one user wrote on Truth Social. “This feels all wrong and actually makes me sick,” another user stated. “I could not be a bigger supporter of President Trump but this particular video is in very poor taste!” another one wrote. Some suggested that the bearded belly dancers and golden statues were excessive, while others questioned whether the video had actually come from Trump’s team. “Something does not add up here??? Really does not feel that this is something Trump would post!! Wonder if someone is messing with his account??!! I surely hope so!! Very creepy!!” a user wrote. Several more suggested that Trump should “strongly re-evaluate” the communications team responsible for creating the video. Neither Trump nor his administration has commented on the video, nor was the clip accompanied by any explanation or caption.

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Catwalk
https://twitter.com/i/status/1894497772797141391

 

 

Owl

 

 

Donkey
https://twitter.com/i/status/1894819783696359446

 

 

Dachs

 

 

Trust

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Godspeed, DJT

Jan 202025
 
 January 20, 2025  Posted by at 6:23 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  28 Responses »


Johannes Vermeer The art of painting 1666-8

 

I was going to write something happy and positive and optimistic, about a future that looks brighter after spending 4 years out in the wilderness. But then I saw that the Democrats have pardoned the worst amongst themselves, and thereby every single one of them, for everything they’ve done over these 4 years, and before it. The entire Democratic party has been placed above the law, along with their Republican friends. The USA is now officially a lawless state.

That is something to think hard about. Because why would you still maintain a judicial system, with courts and judges and prosecutors, if that system doesn’t apply to a large group of people? I can’t think of a good reason. The rule of law in America is now an abstract idea that belongs in the past. What might be good about this is that the Dems have lost any and all future rights to go after any and all Republicans. But it still doesn’t sit well.

You can forgive someone for something they’ve done, but you can’t pardon them for what they might have done, or perhaps even still might do. That is literally a licence to kill. And that has to be illegal. Even if you are the President. It also violates the Constitution, and in too many ways to count. Ergo: the US is no longer a constitutional republic. It’s now all bananas all the way down.

Biden’s pre-emptive pardons have changed the country forever, though of course nobody realizes it at the moment it happens. From now on in, anything goes. Lying to Congress? No problem. Murder? Don’t give it a second thought. Just as long as you get along with whoever is President, or who functions as such, you will be pardoned.

The American people have long seen this coming. We know this because of the Nov. 4 election result, but perhaps even more because of the plummeting “attendance” numbers of the media the Dems use to spread their – often lying- messages. WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, they’re all on their deathbeds. And they owe it to themselves. They all had the option to tell the truth, and they all chose not to. But for them there is no presidential pardon. I’m watching CNN’s coverage of the inauguration as I write this, and they haven’t learned a thing.

Eventually, there will be new forms of “news”. But people won’t place their full trust in one or two sources anymore. Perhaps they will find what they need at X, but it’s too early to tell. What we know for sure is it won’t be at WaPo or MSNBC. And anyway, news about what? A banana republic.

 

So how is Donald Trump going to turn this mess into a viable nation again? Perhaps the only way is to sue Joe Biden for issuing his pardons the way he did. And Joe’s about the only one who’s not yet been pardoned (at the very last moment he just pardoned his entire family as well). But that is not Trump’s style. Still, how do you officially forgive someone for blowing up the Republic?

Yes, Trump at any point in the next 4 years can pardon anyone for anything, but that’s all Biden’s left for him. He didn’t leave him a constitutional republic. This blanket pardon power is handy when you surround yourself with people who habitually break the law, but not if you respect the republic. Then it turns against you.

We all wish Trump all the best. But he doesn’t only need to govern his country better, he has to completely rebuild it, the trust in it. And that’s only if he can, and if it is at all possible.

When you say “God bless the USA”, what exactly are you asking him to bless? The nation the Founders meant to build, or the empty shell the Democrats today left you with?

There are great hopes for Trump and the exceptional team he brings to the tasks ahead, but do they really understand what those tasks are?

 

Godspeed, DJT.

 

 

Debt Rattle December 27 2024

Dec 272024
 
 December 27, 2024  Posted by at 11:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  60 Responses »


Giuseppe Arcimboldo Four elements – Water 1566

 

• Musk Backs Idea That Trump ‘Should Be Able To Fire’ Any Official (RT)
• The Musk-Led Manufacturing Revolution Nobody Is Talking About (ZH)
• Trump Defines A ‘New Geography’ For American Security (JTN)
• ‘Stop Donating To Wokepedia’ – Musk (RT)
• Musk Issues Bankruptcy Warning (RT)
• Putin Reveals Biden Offered To Postpone Ukraine’s NATO Entry (ZH)
• Western Europeans Losing Faith In Ukraine (RT)
• Germany Is Doomed Because Of This Grave Mistake (Romanenko)
• Milei Unveils Ambitious Plan To Make Argentina Global Nuclear Energy Player (ZH)
• A Christmas Prayer (James Howard Kunstler)
• Preservationists Say Wind Energy Is Harming America’s Historic Sites (JTN)
• What Was So Different This Time About Trump’s Election? (VDH)
• Mollie Hemingway Takes House Ethics Report on Matt Gaetz APART (Twitchy)
• CNN Loses Chunks of Viewership as Ratings Dive Into Death Spiral (Sp.)

 

 

 

 

Rogan Vance

Dems

Nvidia

O’Leary

 

 

 

 

It’s Chris Wray who broke neutrality and politicized the FBI director role by turning against Trump. It would be crazy if he stayed on.

• Musk Backs Idea That Trump ‘Should Be Able To Fire’ Any Official (RT)

Elon Musk believes US President-elect Donald Trump should be able to make any personnel changes in the executive branch of the government that he deems necessary, according to a post he made on X on Thursday. Musk’s statement came in response to an idea voiced by Utah Senator Mike Lee, who wrote in an earlier post that “the president of the United States should be able to fire any person employed in the Executive Branch… at any time for any reason,” with the exception of the vice president. Musk seconded the notion, responding “Absolutely.” The executive branch consists of the president, his or her cabinet, as well as various executive departments, independent agencies, and other boards. Lee was commenting on Trump’s plans to make several personnel changes in the government upon returning to the White House that some view as unconventional.

Following his victory in the November election, Trump started naming nominees for senior positions within his administration. However, according to the Washington Times, at least two of the positions are not scheduled to be vacated for several years, including the position of FBI director, currently occupied by Christopher Wray, and IRS commissioner, held by Danny Werfel. According to the New York Times, under Congress rules officials in these and several other posts have fixed terms and do not traditionally change as part of a transition when a new president comes in. Ousting and replacing the heads of these agencies is considered a breach of tradition. However, experts note that the president has the legal power to so. “Historically, there was more of a political constraint on removing someone before their term was over unless there was some bad behavior. The political handbrake is eroding, and it may be no longer functioning,” David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University who studies presidential nominations, told the Washington Times.

Trump repeatedly vowed throughout his presidential campaign to completely remake the US government. He pitched Musk and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy to co-head the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body that will be tasked with reducing government waste and streamlining the federal bureaucracy. Ramaswamy recently unveiled a plan to slash the federal workforce by 75%. Trump’s pick for the next FBI director is his former adviser Kash Patel, an ultra-loyalist who slammed the agency as a “government gangster,” accusing it in his most recent book of being behind the “deep state corruption” in the US. Billy Long, a former Republican congressman from Missouri, was pitched by Trump as the next head of the Internal Revenue Service. Long previously co-sponsored bills to abolish the federal tax authority and replace the federal income tax system with a national sales tax.

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Tesla doesn’t just optimize the -new- product, but also the production process. Seems obvious, but isn’t.

• The Musk-Led Manufacturing Revolution Nobody Is Talking About (ZH)

When most analysts discuss Tesla, they focus on new vehicles or the electric vehicle company’s advancements in autonomy. Yet, according to Launch i/o CEO Jeff Lutz, one of the most significant—and under-discussed—developments at Tesla is happening not in its design studios or on the road, but in its factories. Lutz, a former executive at Google and Motorola, argues that Tesla’s true innovation isn’t just the electric vehicles or robots it’s building, but how those products are being made. The company’s first-principles approach to manufacturing is a radical departure from the industry norm, focusing not just on cheap labor or existing models, but on rethinking the entire production process.

Tesla is creating factories that are the product—designing, testing, and perfecting every element just as they do with their cars. This focus on manufacturing efficiency, Lutz believes, will lead to a dramatic reduction in production costs, potentially bringing them closer to zero. And this shift in how products are built—rather than merely assembled—could set a new standard for the entire manufacturing world.

FARZAD MESBAHI: It’s no wonder that innovation has been lacking so much it’s because we’ve brute forced essentially manufacturing by leveraging globalization because we had that $2 an hour rate in China or Mexico wherever else like we’re not like well we have to just get really good at building stuff to be competitive I was like nah just let him do it like we’ll get get our margins just let them do it.

JEFF LUTZ: The most under-discussed thing in the analyst world about Tesla is not the new vehicles coming, nor the growing discussions about autonomy, but rather Tesla’s next product: their new way of manufacturing. It’s a big deal, a huge step in how products are made today, and I don’t think many investment firms have the right research people actually looking into what this impact is and what it’s going to enable. It’s going to enable the variable cost to build products to shrink further and further, approaching zero.

This is the step function needed for cost reduction to achieve further scale, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it. It’s going to be how the Cybertruck is made, how Optimus will be made. Tesla versions its factories like they version their product. They spend time perfecting it and have design reviews of their factory designs just as they do with their products. They have specs and performance attributes they are trying to meet. This is very different from what happens at other companies at the executive level.

FARZAD MESBAHI: This is such a profound statement because a lot of the stories that I hear are related to, like, say Tesla capitalizing on making manufacturing the product—really just honing in so much on the factory that it becomes the product, the you know, and where we throw around 2 million cars per year, five million cars per year per factory, tens of millions of bots per year sooner than people think. The usual narrative is crazy, pie-in-the-sky; they can’t do that, look at Ford, look at BYD, they can only do so much.

But what we’re missing here is that we’ve had decades of just sitting on our asses, leveraging cheaper labor versus going out of our way to really push the boundaries of engineering and manufacturing. And now that we have a company that’s willing to do that because the leader is viewing that as a first principles approach to manufacturing, right? Instead of like, okay, cheap labor is good, but why aren’t we pushing manufacturing and engineering as much as we can to make this as efficient and as productive as possible?

Of course they’re extremely talented, they’re doing something very unique, but it’s also on the backs of 30-40 years of, I’m going to call it laziness. Like, you’re just taking the easy way out, and I get it, more profits, you’re taking care of shareholders—I get it—but you’re not really pushing the boundaries of manufacturing. I think what this leads to is, if companies and leaders truly take this to heart, we’re going to see an explosion in manufacturing across the board. It’s not just going to be a Tesla thing; I think we’re going to see it all over the place.

JEFF LUTZ: I’m advising companies on this now, you’re going to see massive localization of manufacturing. People think costs just instantly go up when you do that. They do unmitigated, but if you’re a company like Tesla and you’re thinking about it the way they do, they’re actually focused on localizing and making costs go down. Think of it, how many auto factories are expanding in Germany? Just answer that question.

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“Trump’s posts on Christmas Day were intentionally provocative, designed to push Americans to think bigger and to create an environment for deal-making..”

• Trump Defines A ‘New Geography’ For American Security (JTN)

Making Canada the 51st state. Retaking control of the Panama Canal. Buying Greenland. Donald Trump made a series of Christmas pronouncements that legacy media dismissed as classic bravado unworthy of serious consideration, but those who advise the President-elect say there is a more calculating intent behind his recent social media flurry. America’s soon-to-be-47th president is laying the groundwork, they say, for a new strategic map designed to guarantee the security of America and western democracies in an era in which an aggressive China is imposing influence far outside its traditional Pacific region. “I think Trump is looking at the world from a new geography standpoint and asking how do we increase the zone of countries that are truly committed to freedom, and how do we make sure, how do we provide a very deep security belt around the United States,” former Trump State Department policy adviser Kiron Skinner told the John Solomon Reports podcast in an interview slated to be aired Friday.

In that mission, Trump is trying to educate the public with his provocative statements about the need to look at the world in a new light as American influence in Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia has waned under the Biden administration, experts said. The Cold War paradigm that dominated more than a half century is no longer operative. A nuclear North Korea, an aspiring nuclear power in radically Islamist Iran and a Beijing communist government that craftily placed its contractors on the entries and exits of one of the world’s most important shipping passages requires a jarring change to strategic thinking, something the State Department has lacked for years, experts said.

“People forget that this issue has been a key one for President Trump. He has talked about the Panama Canal throughout the campaign, and he repeatedly and correctly noted that this remarkable geostrategic asset was frittered away gratis under Jimmy Carter,” Seb Gorka, who will soon join the National Security Council as Trump’s counterterrorism chief, told Just the News. “The fact that the port facilities at both ends of the canal would fall under the control of entities tied to China was never part of original agreement with Panama,” Gorka added. “The President has been clear that America’s economic might and full pallet of tariffs tools may be used to guarantee that the canal is operated in ways that comport with the economic and national interests of the United States.”

Trump’s posts on Christmas Day were intentionally provocative, designed to push Americans to think bigger and to create an environment for deal-making when he comes president, retired Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said. “He always goes in from a position that gets people’s attention. And then once people kind of flail around … people settle down and they start having a realistic, adult discussion,” Shaffer told Newsmax on Thursday Calling unpopular Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “governor,” suggesting Canada would become America’s 51st state and proclaiming America will buy Greenland from Denmark set the stage for making realistic security gains in the near future, one of Trump’s former advisers predicted.

“These are strategic areas that the United States needs to have dominant influence over,” former Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates told the Just the News, No Noise television show on Thursday night. “Start with the Panama Canal. That was President Reagan originally. That was the hallmark of his 1976 primary campaign. It’s ours. We paid for it, and that is all true. It was President Carter who subsequently just unilaterally gave it back to Panama.” “We pay exorbitant fees. Meanwhile, Panama has gone into agreements with China for special economic zones on either side of the canal. That’s intolerable. All that has to change,” she added.

“As for Canada, which should be a great partner to the United States, hopefully they’ll be under new leadership next month, and … we could really dominate the world energy market.” She predicted Trump’s comments on Greenland might soon expand the U.S. military relations there to an energy and resource collaboration like what America struck in Saudi Arabia with the company Aramco. “Think about Aramco, for example, in Saudi Arabia, how successful that was of a partnership between Saudi and the United States,” she said The “am” in Aramco stands for America, that you can develop resources that way and keep China out. “There are lots of reasons that the former and now President-elect should be talking about these places. These are all direct interests for national security for America, and thank heaven he’s doing it,” she added.

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“..he offered $1 billion to Wikipedia if it renames itself ‘Dickipedia’ for at least a year..”

• ‘Stop Donating To Wokepedia’ – Musk (RT)

Elon Musk has urged internet users to stop supporting Wikipedia over what he sees as disproportionate spending on promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In a series of posts this week, the billionaire owner of Tesla, Space X and X vented his frustration over the online encyclopedia’s financial report, which showed that it spent more than $50 million of its total $177 million – or almost one-third of its 2023-2024 budget – on such goals as ‘Equity’ and ‘Safety and Inclusion’. More than 90% of the platform’s funding comes from donations. Commenting on the report on Tuesday, Musk wrote on X: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.” On Thursday, Musk suggested that Wikipedia “sucks” for spending $50 million on DEI.

DEI, a collection of business practices designed to promote workforce diversity, has faced criticism from conservatives who argue it enforces reverse discrimination against white people and undermines merit-based systems. In recent months, several major corporations, including Boeing, Ford Motor Company, Nissan and Walmart, have scaled back their DEI initiatives.Wikipedia claims it is taking steps to address barriers to free knowledge caused by racial inequality, while also striving to close the gender gap and ensure equal representation of knowledge and people on the platform. It has also sought to “defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation” and other “external threats.” Musk has had a long-running beef with the encyclopedia, which he has called “broken.”

In October, he argued that Wikipedia is overtly promoting a narrative labeling US President-elect Donald Trump – whom Musk endorsed – as a “fascist,” claiming that the website is “controlled by far-left activists.”The same month, he offered $1 billion to Wikipedia if it renames itself ‘Dickipedia’ for at least a year, while accusing it of bias. Last year, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, alleged that the platform is being used by US intelligence community as an instrument of “control” and to further the agenda of the left-liberal establishment. Wikipedia, however, insists that it adheres to a set of core principles, including providing information from a neutral point of view and in a verifiable and balanced manner.

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Not the first time.

• Musk Issues Bankruptcy Warning (RT)

The US government will “go de facto bankrupt” unless it reins in its rising debt, Elon Musk has warned. The billionaire is set to co-lead a new department tasked with curbing spending under President-elect Donald Trump. Musk was reacting to a post by Kalshi, a financial service that allows users to bet on future events and which makes a prediction on how likely these events are to happen. It hailed the fact that the market estimated at 36% the chance of annual federal spending being cut by at least $250 billion under Trump. Kalshi flagged the future Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Musk is set to co-chair with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as the entity that would help slash expenditure.

The US gross federal debt surpassed the $36 trillion benchmark in November, a development that Musk called “terrifying” at the time. Last week, he leveraged his social media influence to weigh in on a debate in the US Congress over a stop-gap spending bill. Musk urged his more than 200 million followers on X who are American citizens to contact their representatives on Capitol Hill and express opposition to a proposed spending bill that he said “should not pass.”

The 1,500-page measure ultimately didn’t proceed, but neither did an alternative proposed by Trump and backed by Musk, which put the US government on the verge of a new shutdown. A compromise 118-page short-term solution was passed after the Friday midnight deadline and was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Saturday. “President Trump will return to DC and to the White House, and we will have Republican control of the Senate and the House,” Speaker Mike Johnson commented on the outcome. “Things are going to be very different around here. This was a necessary step to bridge the gap.”

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Not a chance:

“Ukraine’s admission into NATO would be unacceptable “whether it’s in one year or ten years.”

• Putin Reveals Biden Offered To Postpone Ukraine’s NATO Entry (ZH)

Russian President Vladimir Putin fielded questions from journalists Thursday at the conclusion of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council meeting held outside St. Petersburg. The Russian-led EEU economic bloc includes member states Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Among the more interesting moments was when Putin revealed what President Biden previously offered him in order to avert the Ukraine conflict, regarding the question of Kiev’s NATO membership. The comments came in the context of a question over Trump’s reported peace plan and the idea of freezing the front lines. Putin described that such a plan is nothing new, and added the following per state media translation:

“I know that the current President Biden spoke about this, it’s no secret, back in 2021. He proposed exactly this to me – to delay Ukraine’s admission into NATO by 10-15 years, because [Kiev] is not ready yet,” Putin said, referring to the midsummer meeting he had with the US leader in Switzerland. He stressed that no matter the timeline, Ukraine’s admission into NATO would be unacceptable “whether it’s in one year or ten years.” “We, too, are striving to end the conflict,” Putin added, but stressed that this should happen by achieving all of Moscow’s military and political objectives, according to RT. Toward this end, Putin during the Q&A proposed Slovakia as a ‘neutral’ potential host country for future peace talks:

Last week Putin met with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in Moscow. Fico, who survived an assassination attempt on May 15 of this year, has been blasted by European leaders as cozying up to Putin. But Fico in response has proclaimed that Putin has been “wrongly demonized” by the West. He also characterized the Moscow visit as about defending Slovakia’s sovereignty and energy security. Fico described in the meeting’s aftermath Russia is willing to continue supplying gas to Slovakia, but that Ukraine’s refusal to renew a key gas transit deal with Moscow makes getting the supplies “practically impossible”.

Putin on Thursday reiterated that Russia is willing to sell gas to anyone… Hungary too looks also bear the brunt of the negative consequences resulting from gas transit cutoff through Ukraine. Oil Price explains of both Slovakia and Hungary, “Slovakia has a long-term gas supply contract with Gazprom. The expiry of the transit deal with Naftogaz would interfere with that contract’s terms, which probably led to the visit to Moscow. Landlocked Slovakia and neighbor Hungary have few gas supply options that can compare on price with Russian pipeline gas.” As for Putin’s fresh comments rejecting even the possibility of future Ukraine membership in NATO, this means that in any future dealings with Trump, the Kremlin is certain to press this point hard.

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$100 billion later…

• Western Europeans Losing Faith In Ukraine (RT)

Public support for backing Ukraine “until it wins” the conflict with Russia has fallen dramatically in seven Western European nations, a YouGov poll has found. In four of these, more people now support a peaceful resolution even if it means forcing Kiev to accept territorial losses. The poll was conducted earlier in December in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the UK, and published by The Guardian on Thursday. In Sweden, Denmark, and the UK, 50%, 40%, and 36% of respondents, respectively, said that they would favor supporting “Ukraine until Russia withdraws, even if this means the war lasts longer,” down around 10% in all three countries since February. Meanwhile, 24%, 34%, and 32%, respectively, said that they would “encourage a negotiated end to the fighting, even if Russia still has control of some parts of Ukraine,” figures that are up by a corresponding amount.

In Germany, Spain, France, and Italy, however, support for a Ukrainian victory has tanked, and peace talks are the most favored outcome in all four. Some 28% of Germans want Ukraine to keep fighting, while 45% support a negotiated settlement. Less than a quarter of respondents in Spain, France, and Italy want to prolong the conflict. The gap in public opinion is most stark in Italy, where 55% of respondents support peace talks, and only 15% want to continue arming Kiev. The governments of France and Germany have collapsed between February and December, while Britain’s former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was ousted in a landslide defeat for his Conservative Party in July. Despite reports suggesting that Vladimir Zelensky wants to end the conflict this year, the Ukrainian leader has publicly rebuffed calls to negotiate, and insists on what he calls a “just peace.”

His conditions for this peace are the return of four former Ukrainian regions that joined Russia in 2022, and an invitation to join the NATO bloc – conditions that Moscow deems unacceptable. Russia maintains that any settlement must begin with Ukraine ceasing military operations and acknowledging the “territorial reality” that it will never regain control of the Russian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, as well as Crimea. In addition, the Kremlin insists that the goals of its military operation – which include Ukrainian neutrality, demilitarization, and denazification – will be achieved. US President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly promised that he will end the conflict within “24 hours” of taking office, without explaining how he plans to achieve this.

However, he has said that he intends to speak to both Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and hinted that Ukraine should prepare for a reduction in US military aid. Trump has also suggested that Kiev should abandon its territorial claims, as “there is not a single building in good condition left” in some of the battle-scarred cities under Russian control. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow is open to any deal that respects the national interests of Russia and the “legitimate interests of other countries.” However, he added that he has not seen any “serious, concrete proposals” from the West.

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“Berlin did not just turn against Russia – it forgot what made it successful in the first place..”

• Germany Is Doomed Because Of This Grave Mistake (Romanenko)

For decades, Germany was the envy of the world: a shining example of how a war-torn nation could rise from the ashes to become Europe’s economic powerhouse. This success was no accident. Germany’s prosperity rested on three key pillars: access to cheap Russian energy, unfettered free trade with the United States and other Western allies, and minimal military spending thanks to American security guarantees during the Cold War. These factors allowed Germany to build an unparalleled industrial economy, maintain a generous welfare state, and dominate global markets.

But Germany’s decision to sever ties with Russia following the Ukraine escalation threatens to dismantle this carefully constructed foundation. By aligning itself entirely with the US-led NATO strategy against Moscow, Germany has unwittingly sealed its economic fate. The consequences are already visible, and the worst is yet to come. Germany is doomed because of this grave mistake. The German economy has always been a giant built on energy-intensive industries like chemicals, automobiles, and heavy manufacturing. These industries relied on one key advantage: affordable Russian natural gas. For decades, Berlin fostered a close energy relationship with Moscow, importing vast quantities of cheap gas through pipelines like Nord Stream. This mutually beneficial arrangement kept Germany’s factories humming and its export economy highly competitive.

That relationship is over. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany abandoned Russian energy almost overnight, shutting down Nord Stream and scrambling for alternatives. The result? Soaring energy prices and a manufacturing crisis that is crippling German industry. Without cheap energy, the very sectors that made Germany an industrial giant – automotive, steel, and chemicals – are no longer globally competitive. To make matters worse, Germany’s ideological commitment to a rapid green energy transition has only exacerbated the problem. While renewable energy has its merits, it is nowhere near ready to replace the reliable baseload energy that Russian gas provided. Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy – a reliable and carbon-free power source – further undermines its energy security. The result is an economy that is buckling under the weight of its own short-sighted policies.

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“..blackouts will be just a bad memory..”

• Milei Unveils Ambitious Plan To Make Argentina Global Nuclear Energy Player (ZH)

In a bold move to transform Argentina into a global energy powerhouse, President Javier Milei introduced the “Argentine Nuclear Plan” on Friday, with the goal of harnessing nuclear energy as a core component of the nation’s future. The plan outlines the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), compact nuclear units designed to provide power to commercial sectors and other large-scale operations. “After years of stagnation, nuclear energy is making a powerful comeback, and we are determined to lead, not follow,” Milei declared confidently, emphasizing the country’s abundant natural resources, skilled workforce, and Patagonia’s cold climate, which he described as ideal for housing energy-intensive technologies like AI.

“Nuclear energy is the only source that is sufficiently efficient, abundant and rapidly scalable to cope with the development of our civilization,” he added. The project will have the backing of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi joining Milei and his key advisor, Demian Reidel, during the plan’s official launch. Reidel stressed that the increasing demand for energy, particularly from AI advancements, makes nuclear power crucial to Argentina’s energy strategy, jpost.com reports. The first phase of the plan will focus on the construction of a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) at the Atucha Nuclear Power Plant. The reactor is expected to help meet rising energy demands and alleviate power shortages throughout Argentina.

Reidel emphasized the significant contribution of Argentine nuclear engineers to the initiative. “We will do so with 100% Argentine technology, developed by our nuclear engineers, who are recognized among the best in the world,” he stated, according to Rosario3. He added that the plan “will give us energy sovereignty, will allow us to export this technology to the world,” and assured that “blackouts will be just a bad memory,” according to La Nación. In the second phase of the initiative, Argentina aims to capitalize on its untapped uranium reserves to meet domestic needs and establish itself as a leading exporter of nuclear fuel. The government envisions positioning Argentina as a global leader in the peaceful use of atomic energy, while also advancing its aspirations to become an international hub for AI innovation.

Currently, Argentina operates three nuclear power facilities—Atucha I, Atucha II, and Embalse—which together supply around 9% of the nation’s electricity consumption, according to government data from July 2023. The announcement comes as Argentina has officially emerged from a severe recession, a milestone that marks a major success for Milei and his bold economic reforms. According to data from Argentina’s statistics agency, GDP grew 3.9% in the July-to-September quarter compared to the previous three months. This growth was driven by robust performances in agriculture, mining, and consumer spending, signaling a recovery in key sectors of the economy, the Financial Post reports.

On Monday, Milei eliminated a 30% “inclusive” surcharge tax on foreign currency debit and credit card purchases imposed by the previous socialist government. The now-repealed “Tax for an Inclusive and Solidary Argentina,” or “PAIS” for short, was a temporary surcharge introduced by former socialist President Alberto Fernández. He enacted it in December 2019 during the early days of his administration. “I have more good news, and that is that the lowering of taxes will continue, as is our irrevocable commitment, to return the surplus in the form of relief to the taxpayer, because less taxes is more competitiveness,” the president said in a statement announcing the move.

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“If it’s time for you to go, leave willingly, as you would to accomplish anything that can be done with grace and honor.” — Marcus Aurelius

• A Christmas Prayer (James Howard Kunstler)

The longest and coldest night of the year is upon us with its portents of endings, the death of things, of people like ourselves, and also bodies of thought, movements of culture and politics. And for all the cold and darkness, you feel the stirrings of things waiting to be born. Christmas is the lovely distraction for a brief spell, and after that, the difficult labor of the nation commences for-real in the long night of the year. This moment in the cold and dark is also the climax of the Great Pretending. You knew it would come to this for “Joe Biden,” that he would be found-out. That in the waning days of his woebegone term in office, the people around him in the White House would betray him with the truth: that he was mentally unfit for the job from even before the get-go, from those drear days in the fall campaign of 2020 when he hid himself at home in Delaware while the FBI covered-up the massive bribery-and-treason story concealed in Hunter’s laptop.

And that for four years since then those people around “Joe Biden” have pretended to the world that he was doing his job, that he was okay, when he was absolutely not okay, as they well knew. It was only one big lie among the thousands of lies put over by the conspiracy between that gang in the White House and the perfidious organs of the news, especially The New York Times. If you want to see how stupendously dishonest the employees of that newspaper are, read this “roundtable” column of several Times pundits attempting to chew over the state of their patron, the Democratic party. Forgive me for quoting myself in the comment I posted there a half hour ago:

You’re all quite remarkably clueless and dishonest. Your party is in ruins because your policies are intolerable and often insane: censorship, war, gender lunacy, flooding the country with illegal immigrants – no, not “undocumented” in your parlance, as if it was just some clerical error. And you: Democratic Party aligned journalists are even worse than the politicians, because you’re supposed to make an effort to determine the truth, and you deliberately gaslight the public instead. Shame on you and the Democratic Party. It’s that simple. It’s hard to know for sure, but it looks an awful lot as though these journalists — in fact, the whole elite intelligentsia across America — are gaslighting themselves, still pretending that they didn’t know what went on, a coup against their own country. Everything they have been saying and publishing is the opposite of reality. And now it is about to all spill out because other people are about to take over the levers of power.

For instance: can the CDC and other agencies of public health continue to lie about disastrous Covid-19 vaccines, about the deaths and disabilities they have caused in millions of people? Under “Joe Biden,” there was no other way for the likes of Rochelle Walensky and Mandy Cohen except to lie. And get this: women were chosen to front for the CDC because you’re not supposed to believe that “Mommy” would lie to you, especially in matters of life and death. There was no other way because the crime was so great and they were all in it so deep — not just Rochelle and Mandy but the hundreds of high-ranking bureaucrats in CDC, FDA, and NIH who went along with all this. Of course, it’s hard to know whether the Covid-19 affair was just a venal and insane project by Anthony Fauci and his colleagues to play “hero” while making a ton of money. . . or whether it was actually a deliberate effort by the Intel Blob to queer the 2020 election by forcing a change in the voting procedure that would allow for wholesale fraud, in the service of cancelling Donald Trump. Possibly, it was a mash-up of both.

The truth about all this, and a lot more, is going to come out, whether or not Bobby Kennedy, Kash Patel, and other nominees get confirmed in their jobs, because there are many other figures just as capable behind them who would be nominated and eventually confirmed to run these departments. Those New York Times journalists are gaslighting themselves further if they think that blocking a few nominations is going to save their reputations. This populist revolution is bigger than that. It’s about overturning a paradigm of lies.

We really don’t know if our country is too far gone. The wreckage accomplished under the fakery of “Joe Biden” is prodigious. The financial quandaries alone are enough to sink the Republic in penury, and it will be hard to dodge the truth about that, too, because individual citizens and households know when they are hurting. When they hurt enough, they move to action, visibly, loudly, and you will not miss it. This ought to be a sobering Christmas then. This is the pause at the end of things when we might consider how important it is to tell ourselves the truth. Chew on that with the sugarplums of the season while we wait for that something that is busy being born.

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“..it’s not about the environment, it’s about Joe Biden’s and the elitist eco-left making sure their friends get paid..”

• Preservationists Say Wind Energy Is Harming America’s Historic Sites (JTN)

The Bureau of Land Management earlier this month approved a 241-turbine wind farm near Twin Falls, Idaho, about a two-hour drive from Boise. From the time it was announced, the project was met with opposition from ranchers, environmentalists and Native American tribes. This managed to get the developers to shrink the size of the project down by approximately half its proposed size. Another group of opponents in the fight against the project were historical preservations, a growing voice in the increasing opposition to the buildout of renewable energy across the U.S. The Lava Ridge Wind Project will be constructed near the Minidoka National Historic Site, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Friends of Mindoka, a nonprofit group that seeks to preserve and educate the public about the history of the site, was among the opponents of Lava Ridge.

The group explains on its website that the remoteness of the concentration camp helps visitors experience the sense of isolation felt by those who were incarcerated there by Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942. The wind project, they argue, will minimize “the trauma, loss, and humiliation suffered by American citizens based solely on racial discrimination.” Larry Behrens, communications director for Power the Future, a nonprofit energy advocacy group, told Just the News that the environmental left will fight against any impact on historic sites when it involves oil and gas, but they typically look the other way when it comes to renewable energy projects.

“It’s funny how when it’s a new oil well or gas pipeline the eco-left is quick to cry crocodile tears over claims from select local residents or perceived historic significance. However, when these concerns are legitimate, but there’s billions in green dollars to burn, the green agenda can’t ignore the red lights fast enough. This all proves it’s not about the environment, it’s about Joe Biden’s and the elitist eco-left making sure their friends get paid,” Behrens said. The impacts of renewable energy development on historic sites is a nationwide issue. In September, the Preservation Society of Newport County and Southeast Lighthouse Foundation filed a lawsuit against Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Revolution Wind, LLC, the owner of a wind project under construction 15 miles off the coast of Rhode Island. The project proposes 96 turbines nearly 900-feet tall. The project is part of a trio of offshore wind projects that will place over 200 turbines between Rhode Island and Martha’s Vineyard.

The lawsuit argued that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) failed to properly consider the project’s impact on National Historic Landmarks and other historic properties. “Among other errors, BOEM has reviewed each project separately, effectively minimizing Revolution Wind’s projected harms. BOEM compounded this error by not taking a hard look at cumulative impacts and finding appropriate ways to lessen the harm of those impacts, even though the combined visual impacts of South Fork, Revolution Wind, and Sunrise Wind will harm the context and setting of some of the nation’s most valued NHLs,” the lawsuit stated.

According to the lawsuit, Rhode Island’s coastline is home to multiple historic and cultural resources, including Newport and Block Island. For the past century, the State of Rhode Island and local governments worked to protect and maintain the historic character of the area, which millions of people come to see each year. “Newport is inseparable from the Atlantic Ocean and its uninterrupted views. Known as ‘The City-By-The-Sea’ and for its ‘spectacular assemblages of architecture,’ Newport’s beauty and connections to the sea have inspired not only writers and other artists, but also property owners whose families have treasured their houses and history for hundreds of years…The Preservation Society owns historic properties, operated as museums, within the Bellevue Avenue Historic District, one of the most recognized NHL districts in the country,” the lawsuit explained.

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“The change is welcomed by an electorate exhausted by past presidential stumbling, wandering, incoherence, mind freezes, and angry, “get-off-my-grass” aged fragility..”

• What Was So Different This Time About Trump’s Election? (VDH)

In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Trump was polling between 35 and 40 percent. He would average only about 41 percent approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure. No one knows what lies ahead over the next four years. But for now, Trump already polls at well over 50 percent approval. Trump’s inauguration in a few weeks likely will not resemble his 2016 ceremony. In the 2016-7 transition, Democratic-affiliated interests ran commercials urging electors to become “faithless” and thus illegally reject their states’ popular votes and instead elect the loser, Hillary Clinton. Massive demonstrations met Trump on Inauguration Day. In less than four months after assuming the presidency, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate the hoax of Russian collusion. That wasted 22-month, $40 million investigation found no collusion but did derail the first two Trump years.

What followed the collusion ruse was a consistent effort to undermine the Trump presidency—two subsequent impeachments, the laptop “disinformation” hoax, the COVID-19 nationwide lockdown, and news suppression of any mention of the Chinese lab origin of the virus or questioning the closing of schools. In the Trump administration’s last summer of 2020, 120 days of riot, arson, looting, assault, and murder followed, with the denouement of the January 6 turmoil. In contrast, during the 2024-2025 transition, Trump has all but assumed the presidency. Over 100 foreign leaders have elbowed each other to be invited to Mar-a-Lago or to phone in their congratulations to the newly elected Trump. Remember that in 2016 the left screamed “Logan Act” if a Trump transition appointee even talked with foreign officials. So why is newly elected Trump a veritable cultural hero in 2024 in a fashion unimaginable eight years ago when the media had rendered him a near demon?

One, Trump is now seen as a welcome relief. A departing and unpopular Joe Biden will leave with about a 36 percent approval rating. The prior Biden years are now seen as abnormal, if not disastrous. The left’s cultural revolution championed fringe policies never quite seen before: destroying the border, welcoming in 12 million illegal aliens, nihilist critical race and legal theories, institutionalizing a third sex, and mandating woke/DEI quotas and indoctrination sessions. Yet Biden had inherited from Trump a secure border, an economy rebounding after the COVID quarantines, 1.23 percent inflation, no wars abroad, and cheap energy. Four years later, the outgoing Biden administration is widely unpopular. Almost every one of its policies polls below 50 percent. In response, Trump promises not just to restore his first-term success but to expand it.

Two, Trump personally remains transparent, upbeat, and energetic—eager to meet with anyone, anytime, anywhere, to talk about anything. His energy offers a sharp contrast with the era of the non-compos-mentis Biden. The change is welcomed by an electorate exhausted by past presidential stumbling, wandering, incoherence, mind freezes, and angry, “get-off-my-grass” aged fragility. Three, Trump is grudgingly admired, now even by some of his enemies who once sought but failed to destroy him. He endured two impeachments, five civil and criminal court indictments, incessant lawfare, a 95% negative media, attempts to remove him from states’ ballots, and two assassination attempts. Yet all these unprecedented hostile efforts to end Trump may only have made him stronger—and more empathetic when seen as a target of increasingly fanatical enemies.

Four, Trump has expanded his MAGA base and permanently branded it as an ecumenical movement that welcomes shared class interests rather than fixates on the tired old tribal racial and ethnic chauvinism. Trump also brought in disaffected Democrats, independents, and minorities in a way the Democrats could not with the evaporating and bitter Never Trump dead-enders. Trump’s veritable campaign menagerie of RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Dana White, and Kid Rock made it impossible for the left to demonize MAGA Republicans as right-wing aristocrats, warmongers, or laissez-faire capitalists. Fifth, the endorsements of the Biden-Harris legacy media, calcified Hollywood endorsers, blowhard university faculties, and tech barons proved overrated. It was trumped by more popular and dynamic internet influencers, podcasters, bloggers, and maverick entrepreneurs.

Sixth and finally, Trump himself proved more experienced and reflective than in 2016. His team too was more disciplined and street smart, led by savvy chief of staff Susan Wiles. 2024 saw truly pivotal moments of Trump as everyman—posing for a mug shot after being railroaded by a weaponized lawfare indictment, serving McDonald’s drive-through customers, riding in a garbage truck cab, and raising his fist and yelling “fight, fight, fight”—after having his head near blown off by a would-be assassin. Add all of these once unimaginables up, and the people trusted more—and liked better—the Trump reboot than grouchy Joe Biden or inane, inauthentic Kamala Harris and their shared extremist agendas.

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“..there are so many flags around this report we’re not even sure where to begin … luckily, Hemingway did the work for us..”

• Mollie Hemingway Takes House Ethics Report on Matt Gaetz APART (Twitchy)

As Twitchy readers know, the House Ethics Committee magically decided to release their Matt Gaetz report … the day before Christmas Eve. Yes, the very report even Biden’s own corrupt and weaponized DOJ decided not to act on. Hey, think what you want about Gaetz and whether or not this report is true and his actions unethical (it is certainly not our place to defend or condemn him), but the way this has been done is shady AF. Mollie Hemingway was front and center taking the entire mess apart:

Read that again. “… completely lacked any credibility whatsoever.” BIDEN’S DOJ which would obviously be looking for any reason to go after Gaetz did not believe the evidence was credible. C’mon. She probably feels that way because from what we can tell she WAS the only reporter to look into the details of the Gaetz allegations.

Color us SHOCKED. And ultimately, that’s the point. Whether or not you like a person should not impact or influence their innocence or guilt. Even if you dislike Gaetz, the fact they released this report the day before Christmas Eve, a report Biden’s own corrupt DOJ obviously considered a nothing-burger, tells us all this was sneaky, dirty, and likely all-too-personal. To Hemingway’s point, it’s INSANE that they’d take seriously any sort of testimony from a witness who is currently in prison for making the same false sex-with-minors accusations against someone else. While we’re certainly not experts, this definitely sounds like a red flag. In fact, there are so many flags around this report we’re not even sure where to begin … luckily, Hemingway did the work for us. Sadly, we’ve been seeing this in the ‘elitist’ class for decades.

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Will it survive in 2025?

• CNN Loses Chunks of Viewership as Ratings Dive Into Death Spiral (Sp.)

CNN, just like a bunch of other liberal news networks, has been hemorrhaging viewership at lightning speed since Donald Trump’s electoral victory in November. The Cable News Network (CNN) has seen overall prime-time viewership plummet by 45% scooping up only 394,000 total viewers since November 5, according to Nielsen Media Research. When it comes to the prime 25-to-54 age demographic, CNN suffered a 52% decline, with just an average audience of 77,000 having tuned in after Trump’s win. Overall, CNN witnessed its worst-ever performance among viewers in this key demographic. Audiences feel that CNN “didn’t meet the mark” when covering Trump during the campaign, The Washington Post cited one journalist as saying.

Trump’s campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt had repeatedly criticized the “hostile environment” the network offered to the Republican contender. CNN is also reportedly heading for major layoffs as part of an overhaul by its corporate parent Warner Bros. Discovery, which is up to its eyeballs in debt after its Warner Brothers and Discovery merger deal in 2022. By the end of the third quarter of 2023, WBD’s gross debt stood at $45.3 billion, according to Forbes. MSNBC’s ratings have also collapsed post-election, with the audience down 46% compared with the first 10 months of 2024, according to Nielsen.

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Cars
https://twitter.com/i/status/1871930959505096929

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 12 2024

Sep 122024
 
 September 12, 2024  Posted by at 8:43 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


M. C. Escher Meeting (Encounter) 1940

 

• Debate ‘Was Rigged’ – Trump (RT)
• The Debate Will Backfire Horribly For Both Kamala Harris And ABC (QTR)
• CNN Poll: More Than 60% Think Harris Beat Trump in Debate (Sp.)
• Harris Won – Biden (RT)
• Harris and Trump Debating on Titanic – Zakharova (RT)
• Trump-Harris ‘Kabuki Theater’ Debate Crystalized Candidates’ Position (Sp.)
• We’ll Never Reach Mars If Kamala Wins – Musk (RT)
• Biden Leading US To ‘Nuclear Immolation’ – RFK Jr. (RT)
• Biden Mulls Stepping on Ukraine Long-Range Missile Tripwire (Sp.)
• Ukraine Races To Peace Talks With No Driver, No Breaks And a Dead Satnav (Jay)
• Ukraine Will Join NATO – Blinken (RT)
• Enemies Must Be Sure Russia Is Ready To Use Nuclear Weapons – Karaganov (RT)
• The 23rd Anniversary of September 11, 2001 (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Durov’s Case Is ‘Exemplary’ – Paris Prosecutor (RT)
• Elon Musk ‘Proposes’ To Taylor Swift (RT)

 

 

 

 

Megyn Kelly

 

 

RFK debate
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833707252751995181

 

 

WWIII

 

 

Hoaxes

 

 

Taliban

 

 

Pets

 

 

Greenwald

 

 

Willie Brown
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833539331505770508

 

 

 

 

He walked into a trap -not smart- and got out somewhat OK. Turn the page and move on.

• Debate ‘Was Rigged’ – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has criticized the “dishonest” moderation of his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris by ABC News, saying he would only consider a rematch if it were hosted by “a fair network.” Speaking to Fox’s Sean Hannity immediately after Tuesday night’s debate, Trump claimed that he emerged from the encounter as the victor. Informed by Hannity that Harris reportedly wants a second debate, Trump seemed dismissive of the idea. “She wants it because she lost,” Trump told Hannity. “You know what happens when you’re a prizefighter and you lose, you immediately want a new fight… maybe if it was on a fair network I would do that.”

Harris is widely considered to have won the debate, with Trump struggling to fend off attacks from the vice president, as well as moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. According to a flash poll conducted by CNN on Tuesday night, 63% of viewers felt that Harris had outperformed Trump. Speaking to Fox News on Wednesday morning, Trump slammed the debate as “totally rigged,” and called ABC the “most dishonest news organization.” “So many things I said were debunked, like totally debunked,” he told Fox. “But she could say anything she wanted. My stuff was right, but they would correct you.”

Trump was repeatedly interrupted and fact-checked by Muir and Davis throughout the debate, for instance when he claimed that Haitian migrants are “eating the pets” of people in Ohio. While multiple locals have testified that pet cats and wild birds are being eaten by the migrants, local police say they have received no reports of such incidents. Harris was not fact-checked when she repeatedly tied Trump to ‘Project 2025’, a conservative manifesto explicitly disavowed by the former president. Nor was she corrected when she claimed that Trump once referred to neo-Nazis as “fine people.” In reality, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, but that he was “not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”

“I’d be less inclined to [debate again] because we had a great night,” Trump told Fox on Wednesday, adding again: “We won the debate.” Trump initially asked Harris to agree to three debates: one hosted by Fox News on September 4, another hosted by ABC on September 10, and a third hosted by NBC News on an unconfirmed date. Harris’ campaign only agreed to the ABC debate, although Trump wavered about committing to this showdown, accusing the network of “ridiculous and biased” coverage of him.

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“I reaffirmed to myself my trust in the American people to think for themselves and to see tonight for what it was in hindsight: a set up..”

• The Debate Will Backfire Horribly For Both Kamala Harris And ABC (QTR)

The initial reaction to tonight’s debate is that Kamala Harris held her own, albeit with the help of two ABC moderators, and that Trump was “rattled” and on the defense more than he needed to be. Generally, the debate is being cast as anything but the overwhelming victory for Trump that many predicted. But my guess is that both the dejection from the right and the perceived victory from the left will fade almost immediately as people have a chance to take in everything that really took place tonight. For starters, the times when Trump looked “the worst,” like when moderators tried to debunk him on the Springfield, Ohio, animal/pet killings that were confirmed by 911 calls minutes before the debate, will once again be proven to be factual and on point. The delivery wasn’t fantastic, but over the last three years, the country’s tolerance for being lied to by the media has shrunk significantly, so it won’t take as long as it normally would for people to see past Trump’s delivery.

People are thinking critically now more than ever and doing their own independent fact-checking more than ever. In short, people will quickly realize that Trump’s comments sounded justified. And if Americans need a reminder as to why doing their own fact checking is so important, they only need to look at Kamala Harris’s near admission that COVID came out of a lab in China early in the debate. 3 years ago her side of the aisle would have called you a conspiracy theorist and banned you from social media for saying so. I’ve already written extensively about how the media has lost significant credibility with independent and moderate voters due to their covering for Joe Biden in the midst of his obvious mental decline. I wrote about it in an article a couple of months ago simply called “We Can Be Lied To About Anything”.

After tonight, when the average critically thinking, independent or moderate voter begins to emerge from the visceral reaction of who “won” the debate, the picture will start to come into focus. And it’ll be a picture of a news network that constantly tried to fact-check Donald Trump, despite Kamala Harris repeating multiple debunked conspiracy theories, like Trump’s Charlottesville comments, which were already debunked by Snopes, and his “bloodbath” comment, which was used in the context of talking about the auto industry. When the average critically thinking American looks at the veracity of the lies that Kamala Harris put forth tonight – including lies about Trump’s stance on in vitro fertilization, lies about Trump being associated with Project 2025, and lies about Trump not wanting to secure the border – it’s going to be very difficult to look back on this debate as a victory for her.

And God forbid these same moderate voters were looking for an actual policy stance from Kamala Harris. Despite being well-seasoned in her narrative and her answers and obviously prepared to answer questions she may or may not have received in advance, while benefiting from two friendly moderators and a question format that constantly pinned Trump as the antagonist before David Muir would lead Harris to her answer to reaffirm what the moderators had already decided, she was noticeably devoid of an explanation on her flip-flopping policies. She offered little to no detail on her flip-flops about fracking and her poor performance as border czar, and she failed to take accountability for what happened in Afghanistan, while simultaneously admitting that she approved of how it took place.

Not unlike when she was first crowned the “joy” candidate of the Left, there was a luster to her performance at the debate tonight that is going to wear off very quickly. And in my opinion, tonight will just be another example of a constantly evolving populace seeing the left-wing media for exactly what it is: an arm of the Democratic Party. Despite some mumbles and grumbles from the Republican side of the aisle tonight, as soon as the debate ended, I reaffirmed to myself my trust in the American people to think for themselves and to see tonight for what it was in hindsight: a set up. I honestly believe that the rise of alternative media in this country, and the legacy media’s track record of horrific embarrassments, like covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story and lying to the American people about the mental acuity of President Joe Biden, have built up a bullshit tolerance for media spin in the average American.

More people know today that the left-leaning media has a narrative and lies to them than ever before. This debate will be different from other ones because it’ll eventually be looked at in that context. And when people go back and watch how the moderators constantly argued the merits with Trump while leading Harris in her answers to multiple questions, this debate will be revealed for the biased farce that it was. And then — mark my words — it will do more harm than good for Kamala Harris. Harris has already come out and asked for a second debate with Trump, ostensibly indicating that she thinks tonight was a success. When the debate ended, the scrutinization of ABC’s dirty tricks began — and they will be off the table in any future debates. If I were Kamala, I’d be careful what I wish for in asking to step in the ring for a second debate. Just because the judges saw one round with Trump as a draw doesn’t mean you can go the distance and win by decision.

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Why do a poll when you know beforehand what it will say? Yeah, let’s poll CNN viewers… And it’s still just 63%..

• CNN Poll: More Than 60% Think Harris Beat Trump in Debate (Sp.)

More than half of registered US voters said Democratic candidate Kamala Harris outperformed her Republican rival, Donald Trump, in their first presidential debate, a CNN poll out on Wednesday showed. The survey conducted by SSRS Research found that 63% of 605 debate watchers polled said Harris had turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia, versus 37% who said Trump did a better job. Prior to the debate, the voters were evenly split, with 50% saying Harris would perform more strongly and 50% believing that Trump would. On August 23-27, ABC News and Ipsos conducted a poll among 2,496 respondents. According to the poll results, 43% thought that Harris would beat Trump in the debate, and 37% said that Trump would succeed. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris faced off on ABC News on Tuesday night for the first time since Harris entered the race. The US presidential election will be held on November 5.

Rematch

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He thought he did fine in his own debate too.

• Harris Won – Biden (RT)

US President Joe Biden has claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris clearly won the debate against her Republican rival, Donald Trump, and expressed pride in working alongside her for three and a half years. Biden dropped out of the race against Trump shortly after his own disastrous performance in June. The president, who reportedly couldn’t even remember if he re-watched his own debate, followed Harris closely from a hotel in New York City with family and staff, according to a CNN source. “America got to see tonight the leader I’ve been proud to work alongside for three and a half years. It wasn’t even close. VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward. We’re not going back,” a message posted on Biden’s X account said late Tuesday.

During the debate with Harris, Trump repeatedly attacked her boss for being an embarrassment to the country and the world. “They respect me; they don’t respect Biden. Why would you respect him, for what reason?” Trump asked. “We are playing with WWIII, and we have a president that… Where is our president?” “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog… We have a president that doesn’t even know he’s alive.” Harris countered that Trump is now running against her, not Biden. However, Trump sought to frame a potential Harris presidency as nothing more than a second term for Biden.

“Remember this: She is Biden,” Trump said. “She copied Biden’s plan. It’s like four sentences long: ‘Run, Spot, Run’ – just oh, we’ll try to lower taxes… She doesn’t have a plan.” In his closing statement, the former president questioned Harris’ track record and the new promises she made during the debate. “She just started by saying she’s gonna do this, she’s gonna do that, she’s gonna do all these wonderful things… Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years,” Trump said. “What these people have done to our country… they’re destroying our country. The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country,” he added.

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”Who do you think won? Why would that matter? The iceberg is 15 minutes away..”

• Harris and Trump Debating on Titanic – Zakharova (RT)

The US presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lacked substance and was largely irrelevant considering that their country is going full speed ahead towards disaster, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has argued. Speaking on Radio Sputnik on Wednesday, she said she did not consider it a high-profile event. It mattered as much as the outcome of a hypothetical wrestling match on board the ill-fated Titanic during its trip across the Atlantic Ocean, she claimed. ”Who do you think won? Why would that matter? The iceberg is 15 minutes away,” she said. Extending the metaphor, she said neither Trump nor Harris intended to get to the wheel to change the course of the ship. America is on its way to a “total, global disaster” and the rest of the world is trying to prepare for it, she suggested.

The debate itself, according to Zakharova, was a mixture of “fantasizing about the future” and citing some facts about the past, with the candidates failing to agree on what those facts were. ”We were given the latest show by people who apparently never ever take any responsibility for what they say,” the Russian official said. International audiences paid attention to what happened in Philadelphia on Tuesday night because they want to know which nations “will get punished and how much” during the next US presidential term, Zakharova stated. According to the media, neither candidate had a decisive advantage over the other in the debate, which could be the only one between Trump and Harris before the November election. In a CNN focus group of 13 undecided voters from Pennsylvania, eight said the Democratic candidate won. Meanwhile six out of 10 undecided voters interviewed by Reuters said they were siding with the Republican after the face off.

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“It’s going to perhaps create the perception or help build support for declaring that Kamala won the presidency, because I think there are active measures underway to try to steal the election..”

• Trump-Harris ‘Kabuki Theater’ Debate Crystalized Candidates’ Position (Sp.)

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris held their first (and potentially only) presidential debate on Tuesday ahead of the November election. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson explains how the debate crystalized the candidates’ radically different views on the defining issue of our times: the conflict in Ukraine. From Ukraine and Gaza to China, North Korea and Iran, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris touched on an array of foreign policy matters alongside domestic concerns ranging from the economy and inflation to the energy and migration crises. Trump, who thrashed President Biden at a debate in June so badly that the latter dropped out of the race after showing signs of mental decline, focused much of his ire against Harris on national security matters and what he characterized as the threat of a nuclear third world war.

“With respect to this talk about Ukraine and Russia, the Kamala Harris approach is the Hillary Clinton approach from 2016, that Donald Trump ‘is a tool of Russia’, [that] ‘he’s a surrender monkey’, [that] ‘he’s going to give Vladimir Putin whatever he wants’. And Kamala Harris and the Democrats are ‘going to fight the Russians tooth and nail.’ It just underscores that there is no room in the United States right now for an opposition politician to make the case that we need to talk to Russia, that we need to deal with Russia as adults and have mutual respect,” Johnson said. “The only possible change in policy is if Trump is elected and there will be an effort to stop the war. If it’s the Democrats, then the war will continue. It continues for one good reason – it’s making people a lot of money. If you look at the stock prices of Raytheon, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, they’ve doubled and tripled in some cases since the start of the special military operation.

So we’re talking literally billions, tens of billions of dollars that are being made,” the observer stressed. Commenting on his impressions of the debate overall, Johnson suggested that it was mostly “meaningless,” in the sense that it igno[..] red changes in how people get their information on presidential candidates. “The old debate style, when it started out back in the 19th century with Lincoln-Douglas – the only way people could really get information was by having to hear people talk out in public or maybe read a newspaper. And that was basically the system until 20 years ago. What has emerged over the last eight years is this dramatic spread of social media. So the notion, number one, that there’s an undecided voter out there who was unaware of the positions of Donald Trump or the positions of Kamala Harris is just I think ridiculous. Most people’s minds are made up,” Johnson said.

The former intelligence analyst agreed with other commentators who have suggested that the debate was stacked against Trump, saying the ex-president’s performance was less about debating Harris, and more about debating “biased” media “fact-checking” him while serving Harris “softball questions.” “I don’t think this is going to have a lot to do with shaping people’s votes. It’s going to perhaps create the perception or help build support for declaring that Kamala won the presidency, because I think there are active measures underway to try to steal the election. For example, registering literally millions of illegal migrants that have come into the United States who are not citizens but nonetheless are being signed up to vote. If those votes end up counting in any form or fashion, it could affect the outcome of the election,” Johnson summed up.

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“Biden rarely shows up for work, so she’s basically in charge already.”

• We’ll Never Reach Mars If Kamala Wins – Musk (RT)

Former President Donald Trump would “do a better job” as the next US leader than current Vice President Kamala Harris, according to tech billionaire Elon Musk. The businessman’s comments follow a contentious first debate between the two candidates on Tuesday night, hosted by US outlet ABC. In a post on X, Musk said that while Harris “exceeded most people’s expectations” in the face-off with Trump, she still lacks his ability to produce real results. “When it comes to getting things done, not just saying nice-sounding words, I strongly believe that Trump will do a far better job,” Musk stated. He said that if Harris had the ability to “do great things,” she would have demonstrated it during her tenure as President Joe Biden’s right hand, as “Biden rarely shows up for work, so she’s basically in charge already.”

In a separate post, he explained that the US needs significant government reforms to move forward and “allow great things to be done,” which he said would not come from Harris. “We will never reach Mars if Kamala wins,” concluded Musk, who is well known for his investments in space travel and technology. Tuesday’s debate was widely seen as crucial to the outcome of the election, as polls currently indicate a tight race. Throughout the event, which ran past its scheduled 90 minutes, Trump and Harris clashed with each other on both domestic and foreign policy, including abortion rights, immigration, and trade wars. The two candidates often interrupted one another, and traded accusations over problems with the US economy and the Ukraine conflict.

Musk joined other netizens in observing that the debate hosts, ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis, seemed unfair to Trump. One X user mocked the anchors for paying too much attention to fact-checking Trump and too little with regard to Kamala, while another slammed the entire face-off as “a gang up of 3 against Trump.” Meanwhile, the Harris campaign challenged Trump to another debate in an email immediately after the showdown on Tuesday, reportedly painting the event as a win for the Democrat. Trump told the press he would “think about” the challenge, claiming that Harris wants a rematch because “she didn’t do well” on Tuesday. It is currently unclear whether another debate will take place before voting day on November 5. However, according to Reuters, Fox News has already proposed hosting a second face off in October.

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“Trump makes a point that I hope everyone hears: Russia has nuclear weapons.”

• Biden Leading US To ‘Nuclear Immolation’ – RFK Jr. (RT)

The aggressive policy of the administration of US President Joe Biden towards Russia and its continued attempts to inflict a defeat on Moscow in Ukraine could result in a nuclear conflict, former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said. The comments were made following a debate between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, which took place in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. During a discussion of the Ukraine conflict, Trump noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has got a thing that other people do not have. He has got nuclear weapons. They do not ever talk about that. And eventually maybe he will use them. Maybe he has not been that threatening. But he does have that.” Kennedy took to X to say, “Trump makes a point that I hope everyone hears: Russia has nuclear weapons.”

“The Biden administration’s policy of maximum confrontation, seeking Russia’s humiliating defeat and regime change, is a recipe for nuclear immolation,” he warned. Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign last month and endorsed Trump. A pinned message on his X page which he published on Tuesday reads: “Bottom line: No matter what state you live in, vote Trump. A Trump victory is a Kennedy victory.” During the debate, Trump reiterated that he would settle the conflict between Russia and Ukraine “in 24 hours” if reelected this November, even before being sworn in. “It is in the US’ best interest to get this war finished and just get it done. We need to negotiate a deal because we have to stop all these human lives from being destroyed,” he said.

The conflict between Moscow and Kiev began in February 2022 because Biden and Vice President Harris had “no idea” how to talk with Putin, Trump said. “And it is only getting worse; it could lead to World War III.” In June, Putin announced that Russia will update its nuclear arsenal, given that it is the primary guarantor of national security. He warned that the country would use all means available to defend itself should the nation’s existence ever be at stake. He added, however, that any conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons would have dire consequences for humanity. According to Putin, Moscow is not “brandishing” its arsenal, but instead hopes that “it will never come to” an actual nuclear exchange.

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“..the West, instead of seeking a peaceful way out and talking to Russia, is preferring confrontation..”

• Biden Mulls Stepping on Ukraine Long-Range Missile Tripwire (Sp.)

“Biden has shifted every single position that he said was a red line, so I don’t see why he’s not going to violate this one as well,” retired CIA analyst and counterterrorism expert-turned whistleblower Larry Johnson told Sputnik, commenting on Washington’s threats to lift its missile restrictions. The Biden administration “can’t afford a defeat” in Ukraine before the November vote, and thinks that if it takes the “incredibly dangerous and foolish” step of just okaying the missiles’ delivery and use, that will somehow help Ukraine, Johnson believes. “I appreciate President Putin’s desire to show restraint and keep this as a special military operation. But the West is at war with Russia, and I don’t think people are getting their brains around that.

We keep dancing around the edges pretending that this is not going to happen. It’s going to happen. And it’s not going to change the military situation as far as what Ukraine is facing. Ukraine is facing defeat. They will be defeated. But it gets more to the point that the West, instead of seeking a peaceful way out and talking to Russia, is preferring confrontation,” Johnson warned. Another question is whether Ukraine even has the relevant long-range missiles left, and whether the US is in a state to supply them, according to the observer.

“Because if the United States moves to supply a missile that’s frankly bigger than the ATACMS or if they offer up an ATACMS or a JASSM that has an extended range capability, then I think it’s going to raise the real possibility that the logistics hubs that are outside of Ukraine that are being used to provide these missiles could become targets. Which then is this is going to expand the war,” Johnson warned. In that sense, while the Biden administration may believe the move to free Kiev’s hand on the use of NATO missiles to attack the Russian interior could stave off the Zelensky regime’s defeat, “it may actually have the opposite effect of causing this war to expand and expand in a way that will get the United States involved. And then we’re into some very new and dangerous territory,” Johnson summed up.

Macgregor

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“.. during peacetime he must call presidential elections which he will certainly lose. Trump also knows this. The war itself is Zelensky’s oldest friend and greatest supporter.”

• Ukraine Races To Peace Talks With No Driver, No Breaks And a Dead Satnav (Jay)

The admission was shocking. In an interview with an American journalist Victoria Nuland more or less admitted plainly that the reason why Boris Johnson was flown into Istanbul at the end of the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia was to scupper the deal, so that U.S. arms manufacturers could go ahead with their intended mega deals supplying the country, aligning it to NATO standards. She tells Ryan Grim of DropSiteNews that the peace deal – which gave Ukrainians land back which the Russians held – would have effectively neutered Ukraine blocking massive deals in the pipeline which would have reaped scores of billions of dollars for U.S. arms makers. The admission is important for two main reasons. First it shows just how disingenuous everything that western politicians tell their voters about Ukraine is.

Yes, there is an ideological rationale there of America and its allies wanting to hit Putin but it is not very convincing and at best looks increasingly lame as the months and years pass. Do senators in the U.S. like Lyndsey Graham really hate Russians so much? Or is it that they love money so much more and profit themselves from those megadeals coming together? The second point about the Nuland admission is that it casts a long shadow over western governments and their relationships with the military industrial complex and leaves the observer feeling that we have reached a new peak now with that sector and the ruling elites. The former no longer lobbies or informs the latter but controls it. Completely.

A third point which is possibly a parenthesis to the whole story is that slowly we are seeing the truth emerge, like repugnant liquid excrement oozing out of an old sack. And it stinks. Biden is just one more U.S. president who allowed the military industrial complex to control him and his erroneous so-called foreign policies which can really be summed up in a few words: wherever possible, go to war. We need wars. But we in the West bit off far too much more than we could chew. In the early days of the Russian invasion the euphoria and confidence of Biden and Boris, not to mention Macron, was palpable. They genuinely believed that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. And that Russian sanctions would grind the economy down over a longer period of time bringing Putin to his knees.

Today, nobody acknowledges privately how futile and stupid these notions were more than the Ukrainian president. And nobody appreciates how shallow and self-serving this initial policy to go to war with Russia in the first place is, more than President Zelensky himself. Put yourself in his shoes. He is counting the days now to the U.S. presidential election, wondering if Trump gets in, how many days will pass in January 2025 before the Donald falls out with him? If Trump does get in, the future is unclear as we know from history that Trump is capricious, unpredictable and driven by ideas and values which few can understand but usually relate to him on a personal level. It is likely though after he pulls off a ceasefire in his first week of office – which both sides want but can’t admit it openly – it will be very hard indeed to thrash out a deal that both can agree on, particularly knowing that the martial law, which keeps Zelensky is in office, is over, during peacetime he must call presidential elections which he will certainly lose. Trump also knows this. The war itself is Zelensky’s oldest friend and greatest supporter.

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It would have to beat Russia first. That won’t happen. But the profits will be huge.

• Ukraine Will Join NATO – Blinken (RT)

Washington wants to see Kiev win the conflict against Moscow and join NATO, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said. Blinken is visiting Kiev with his British counterpart David Lammy to reiterate Anglo-American support for Vladimir Zelensky’s government. “At the July summit, we declared that Ukraine’s path to NATO membership is irreversible,” Blinken said on Wednesday, reminding his hosts that the US-led bloc has “established a command dedicated to support Ukraine’s membership.” Blinken has made the case for Kiev’s membership in NATO before. However, the bloc has officially declared, both in Washington this summer and last year in Lithuania, that this could only happen “when allies agree and conditions are met.” Hungary and Slovakia have already said they will not agree under any circumstances, as bringing Ukraine into NATO would mean war with Russia.

During the same speech in Kiev, Blinken painted a rosy picture of Ukraine’s military industry, claiming it had expanded six-fold over the last year. “In the coming years, that’s going to give Ukraine one of the most advanced defense industries in the world, and it will be able to take that to the global market and take global market share away from other countries like Russia, and also supply NATO allies,” he added. Kiev is presently entirely dependent on the West for weapons, equipment, ammunition and even cash infusions to keep its government going. Ukraine is also facing widespread electricity shortages, as Russian missile strikes have degraded power production capacity. Blinken himself announced on Wednesday that the US will send $325 million to help repair the Ukrainian power grid and provide emergency backup generators for critical infrastructure.

Another $290 million has been earmarked for “food, water, shelter, health care and education programs for Ukrainians” both in the country and abroad, with the remaining $102 million designated for landmine removal. “The bottom line is this: We want Ukraine to win,” Blinken declared at another point during his visit, according to AP. This, too, was stated by Western officials before, as a prerequisite for Kiev’s membership in NATO. This effectively means that Ukraine will never join the bloc, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in June. NATO’s 2008 announcement about Ukraine’s possible membership “became the trigger for much of the entire crisis that we are observing today,” Ryabkov said at the time. “If NATO members are ready to fall into the same trap again and history teaches them nothing, then they will get hit again and their bruises will get worse,” he added.

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“It’s high time we stated that any massive strikes against our territory give us a right to respond with a nuclear strike..”

• Enemies Must Be Sure Russia Is Ready To Use Nuclear Weapons – Karaganov (RT)

Russia’s nuclear doctrine urgently needs to be revised to allow a nuclear response to any major military aggression against the country, former Kremlin adviser Sergey Karaganov stated on Wednesday. The former foreign policy adviser to the deputy head of the Russian presidential administration told the Kommersant daily that the existing document is “woefully outdated” and no longer serves as an effective deterrent. Adopted in 2020, Russia’s nuclear doctrine does not provide for pre-emptive nuclear strikes and envisages the use of nuclear weapons only in “exceptional cases” in the face of a “threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of the country. According to Karaganov, this approach has rendered it nearly useless and has effectively “excluded” the nuclear deterrence factor from Russia’s military and foreign policy arsenal.

“We have allowed the situation to deteriorate to a point when our adversaries believe we will not use nuclear weapons under any circumstances,” the political scientist said. “Having nuclear weapons without being able to convince your enemies that you are ready to use them is suicide.” A failure to have an effective nuclear deterrent policy “would plunge the world into a series of wars that would inevitably turn nuclear and end up with the World War III,” Karaganov believes, adding that this could happen “within the span of several years.” “The main goal of a doctrine should be in convincing all current and future enemies that Russia is ready to use nuclear weapons.” His words came amid the continued Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region and Kiev’s attempts to receive permission for the use of Western long-range missiles to strike deep inside the country. “It’s high time we stated that any massive strikes against our territory give us a right to respond with a nuclear strike,” Karaganov insists.

He also called on Moscow to clearly define the “nuclear escalation” steps in the next doctrine to leave Russia’s adversaries no room for doubt about whether it is ready to use its nuclear arsenal and when. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly demonstrated a more reserved position on the issue. Talking to Karaganov at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June, the president said that Russia was “not brandishing” nuclear weapons and expressed hope that “it will never come” to a nuclear exchange between Moscow and the West. Moscow “has no reasons to even think about” using nuclear weapons, he said at the time, calling on Russian officials to not even “touch upon” the subject of nuclear weapons unless absolutely necessary. Later in June, Putin also said that Russia did not “need a preventive strike yet, because the enemy is guaranteed to be destroyed in a retaliatory strike.” He did not rule out changes to the doctrine, though.

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“You can’t pull a building unless it is wired, a time-consuming complex job.”

• The 23rd Anniversary of September 11, 2001 (Paul Craig Roberts)

Time passes. An entire generation has grown up since that day when a few Saudi Arabians armed only with box cutters caused airport safety to fail four times on the same morning, caused the entire US/NATO/Mossad security system to fail, caused the WTC towers constructed to withstand airliner collisions to collapse into dust by flying hijacked airliners into them, and attack the Pentagon using maneuvers of which airliners and pilots are incapable and destroying the section of the Pentagon where the documents were that explained where the Pentagon’s missing billions or was it trillions of dollars had gone. During these hours of activity the US Air Force was unable to get interceptors off the ground, and no evidence has ever been found of the passengers on the four hijacked airliners. But an undamaged passport of one of the alleged hijackers were found in the ruins of two hundred-storied skyscrapers. And Americans fell for this totally unbelievable story. What hope is there for Americans?

It took a year of pressure on the Bush/Cheney regime to get a commission established that instead of an investigation wrote down the official narrative as dictated to them. Later the commission co-chairmen and legal counsel wrote books saying that the government withheld information and set the commission up to fail. It only took 10 minutes for a high school physics professor to demolish NIST’s multi-year computer simulation of the collapse of Building 7, the 47 story WTC building that a BBC reporter stood in front of announcing its collapse 30 minutes ahead of the collapse. They knew the building was slated for destruction, but the word got out prior to the event. Silverstein, who owned or had the leases to the World Trade Center said on live TV that the decision was made to pull building 7. You can’t pull a building unless it is wired, a time-consuming complex job.

It is totally obvious that all 3 buildings were wired for demolition. Building 7 collapsed at free fall acceleration, and the two towers at essentially the same speed. This can only be achieved by controlled demolition. If the alleged Muslim hijackers wired the buildings–an impossibility–what is the point of flying airliners into them? The orchestrated event was used by Washington to launch wars in the Middle East against Israel’s opponents. Norman Podhoretz at Commentary had called for these wars, and US four star general Wesley Clark, NATO’s commander in chief, later confirmed that Pentagon generals showed him war plans calling for the US to overthrow “Seven countries in five years.”Little of this extraordinary evidence had any impression on insouciant Americans who swallowed the false narrative hook, line, and sinker.

Consequently, Washington destroyed Iraq and Libya and was about to destroy Syria, but the Russians intervened. Israel has kept the American gun aimed at Iran, but Putin has said Russia will not tolerate an attack on Iran. You can easily understand why Zionist Jews hate Putin and Russia and why America is at risk from serving the Zionist agenda. But it is difficult to understand Putin’s patience with Israel. Does Netanyahu own the Kremlin like he owns Washington? We don’t yet know how the events unleashed by 9/11 will finish unfolding. They may bring death to all of us. What I have never been able to understand is why Dick Cheney, the neoconservatives, the military/security complex, and the whore media were so determined to turn a few Saudi Arabians into superheroes who were more than a match for the American National Security State. How can Washington possibly deal with Russia, China, and Iran when a few Muslims can deliver the worst humiliation ever delivered to an alleged superpower?

The total humiliation that the official narrative delivered to America on 9/11 is without parallel in history. One would have thought that such a system wide failure would have destroyed Americans’ confidence in Washington. Why explains American fists rising not against Washington but against Muslim countries that had nothing to do with it? If the American population is incapable of paying attention, how does it expect to remain free?

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Paris rules the world.

• Durov’s Case Is ‘Exemplary’ – Paris Prosecutor (RT)

The case against the CEO of Telegram messaging app, Pavel Durov, is “exemplary” with regard to the battle against cybercrime waged by the French authorities, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau has said. Durov was arrested after landing in Paris in late August and charged with multiple offenses ranging from refusal to cooperate with the authorities to administering an online platform allegedly used by organized crime for illegal conduct, such as trafficking and child sexual abuse. The Russian tech entrepreneur, who also has French, UAE, and Saint Kitts and Nevis citizenship, was later released on €5 million ($5.55 million) bail. The 39-year-old billionaire is banned from leaving the country while the case is ongoing. Asked about the investigation into Durov and Telegram in an interview with RTL Radio on Wednesday, Beccuau said, “this case is exemplary in terms of the actions taken by the cybercrime unit of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office.”

She added that her agency previously had issues with the Coco chat website and Sky ECC encrypted messenger, which were both shut down. “Organized crime is spreading in a world that we consider to be virtual,” the prosecutor said. According to the Beccuau, France is reacting to this by amending its legislation and introducing a new criminal offense for administering an online platform that allows illegal transactions – one of the charges Durov faces. Telegram attracted the attention of the Paris Prosecutor’s Office because its cybercrime unit “contacted the platform several times asking it to identify cybercriminals, especially in the area of child pornography. But the platform did not respond to these requests. It did not react,” she explained. Beccuau noted that Durov is fulfilling the terms of his bail, which require him to report to the police twice a week.

Last week, Durov issued a lengthy statement on Telegram, insisting that the claims by some media outlets that his platform “is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue.” Telegram takes down “millions of harmful posts and channels every day,” and publishes “daily transparency reports” about actions taken against the dissemination of illegal content, including child abuse and terrorism, he said. Durov claimed that he has cooperated with French law enforcement in the past and “personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.” He added that the platform remains open to working with state regulators to establish “the right balance between privacy and security.”

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“But if she agrees to have Elon’s baby, she could break even..”

• Elon Musk ‘Proposes’ To Taylor Swift (RT)

Tech mogul Elon Musk has offered to father a child with Taylor Swift and protect her cats, after the songstress announced her endorsement in the US presidential race. In a post to her 280 million Instagram followers, the 34-year-old pop star backed Democrat Kamala Harris, used a photo of herself holding a cat, and signed it “Childless Cat Lady.” That appeared to be a dig at a statement by J.D. Vance, Republican candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, who once said the Democrats are run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies.” “Fine Taylor… you win… I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life,” Musk posted on X on Wednesday. Musk has fathered at least 12 children with three different women since 2000. One died in infancy and another became transgender, after which the tech billionaire famously vowed to “destroy the woke mind virus.”

He has also openly endorsed Trump and signaled he would take the job of “government efficiency czar” in his administration. Swift publicly backed Harris after Tuesday evening’s presidential debate with Trump, calling her “a steady-handed, gifted leader” and arguing that the US could achieve more “if we are led by calm and not chaos.” The endorsement did not exactly come as a surprise, since Swift had backed the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket in 2020.

Her catty post on Tuesday resulted in losing followers on social media, suggesting that there might be some substance to rumors about many ‘Swifties’ now favoring Trump. “Swift’s endorsement of Harris could end up costing her several-hundred-million dollars,” cartoonist and commentator Scott Adams said on Wednesday. He calculated about a 20% cut to her $92 million annual income from losing pro-Trump fans, paying higher taxes if the Democrats win, and facing “insane” unrealized gains taxes on the value of her music catalog, currently estimated at “around $500-600 million” “But if she agrees to have Elon’s baby, she could break even,” Adams quipped.

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Remigration

 

 

Paul Newman
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833615164890911146

 

 

Ohio cats
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833605627928514875

 

 

Noses
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833907267608944930

 

 

Red wolf
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833674414208012666

 

 

Perspective
https://twitter.com/i/status/1833875646390370790

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle September 3 2024

Sep 032024
 
 September 3, 2024  Posted by at 8:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


René Magritte Memory of a voyage 1955

 

• A Vote for Kamala Is a Vote for Tyranny (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Kamala Harris is ‘Clear Underdog’: Campaign Chief (Sp.)
• With Friends Like CNN, Kamala Harris Can’t Fail (Bridge)
• Is Kamala Very Very Afraid? (Jim Kunstler)
• California Bill Banning Voter ID Laws Passes Legislature (ET)
• On a Highway to Hell (Scott Ritter)
• Russia Says Relations With US At All-Time Low (RT)
• 50 Countries United Against Russia Under ‘Nazi Banners’ – Lavrov (RT)
• Lukashenko Prepares His Weapons: Could Belarus Be Drawn Into The War? (Oncan)
• Hungary Can’t Survive Without Russian Oil – FM (RT)
• Soros-Bankrolled Human Rights Watch Tells Mongolia To Arrest Putin (RT)
• US Seizes Maduro’s Plane – CNN (RT)
• RFK Jr: “A Reckoning” For “Immoral, Homicidal” COVID Criminality Needed (MN)
• Why Musk’s Lawsuit Against Media Matters . . . Matters (Turley)
• Kyle Bass Says ‘Green’ War To Blackball Oil Was Doomed To Fail (ZH)

 

 

 

 

RFK Vietnam

 

 

Trump Crooks

 

 

Day one

 

 

Cotton

 

 

Tulsi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830557403848511566

 

 

Elon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830527091126702437

 

 

Reagan
https://twitter.com/i/status/1830240891266564449

 

 

GlennG

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When We Lose the Constitution, We Lose America”

“Probably few heard Kamala Harris say [..] that free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, is impermissible without oversight and regulation and has to stop..”

“How can Kamala possibly take the oath of office and promise to uphold the Constitution?”

• A Vote for Kamala Is a Vote for Tyranny (Paul Craig Roberts)

It is clear that large numbers of Americans have no conception of what is at stake in the November presidential election. Insouciance, being an American trait, is especially high this Labor Day Weekend. Probably few heard Kamala Harris say on August 30 in this video in what seems to be an interview at a CNN event that free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, is impermissible without oversight and regulation and has to stop. Yes, she said that, and in the same 28 seconds said a number of other unbelievably stupid things that demonstrate her incapacity to serve in any political office even at the lowest level. For example, Kamala said “he (Musk) has lost his privileges and it (X) must be taken down.” Kamala is saying that free speech, the bedrock foundation of American freedom is a privilege granted by government, and by refusing to accept government censorship of free speech, Musk has lost his “privilege” to operate a social media company, which “must be taken down.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1829652525315944693

For example, “the bottom line is that you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and a different rule for Twitter” (she means X). There is no such rule. What she is saying is that Facebook’s cowardly or woke management has agreed to censor in order to protect the lies that constitute the official narratives, and Elon Musk, being a person of character and integrity, has not. Kamala Harris is so totally ignorant and so totally uneducated that she is unaware that the US Constitution governs the US government. She thinks our Constitutional rights are subject to regulation by government in order to conform us to official narratives. Kamala says that social media sites “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any oversight or regulation,” but so is she. So is CNN. So is NPR. So is NBC. So is CBS. So is ABC. [..] So is the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Treasury, the Secretary of Homeland security. So is the Supreme Court. So is Congress. So is the President of the United States.

Kamala is so utterly stupid — indeed, she is so stupid as to be unbelievable — that she does not realize that she is sticking the gag into her own mouth. Kamala is so dumb that she does not understand that social media does not speak to millions of people. Instead, millions of people on social media speak to whoever cares to hear, usually a small number. How can a person as stupid as Kamala and as hostile to free speech be a candidate for president of the United States? How can Kamala possibly take the oath of office and promise to uphold the Constitution? The woke progressives don’t care. They hate the Constitution as much as Kamala is ignorant of it. I have often reported that law schools long ago abandoned the US Constitution as an obstacle to a woke society of DEI. Hardly a day passes that a law school dean doesn’t prove the truthfulness of my statement. [..]

On August 30, 2024, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, called for a new constitution, claiming that failing to make changes would cause the U.S. to “drift toward authoritarianism.” If Chemerinsky were competent to be a law school dean, he would understand that the United States is the Constitution. Chemerinsky’s call for a new constitution is a call for the overthrow of the United States. Will he be arrested as a threat to democracy? Without the Constitution, we would be some other country–which is what they want. The goal is a compliant population with no rights, only privileges that can be revoked for non-compliant behavior. They oppose the idea that government is accountable to people. Their goal is a people who are accountable to the government. Once Kamala is in office, the transformation will be complete.

Dear insouciant American, try to pay attention, try to understand, that the Dean of one of America’s largest law schools is claiming that the US Constitution, the embodiment of the rights of free people, is an oppressive document and stands in the way of “justice and equity.” The Berkeley Law School dean has actually written a book about How the Constitution Threatens the United States. When the Constitution is destroyed, America is destroyed. When law schools have deans too stupid to understand this, it indicates that America has been lost. Dear insouciant American, try to understand that the November election is not about abortion rights. It is not about “inclusion.” It is not about any of the issues about which you are being indoctrinated. It is about whether you have any prospect of continuing life in freedom.

Read more …

“The New York Times suggests the memo is “an artful attempt to lower expectations” and boost fundraising..”

• Kamala Harris is ‘Clear Underdog’: Campaign Chief (Sp.)

The Democrats enter the final phase of the election as “the clear underdogs”, Harris-Walz campaign chief, Jen O’Malley Dillon, wrote in a memo titled “The State of the Race 65 Days Out.” Dillon, previously confident in Joe Biden’s victory despite poor poll results, had never made such a statement before. The US mainstream media cites Harris’ rising approval numbers, while questioning Dillon’s newfound caution. What’s troubling the Harris-Walz campaign chief?

• Despite record fundraising, increased volunteer interest, and a spike in voter enthusiasm, Dillon cautions that “Donald Trump has a motivated base of support, with more backing and higher favorability than he has had at any point since 2020.” • The upcoming debate between Vice President Harris and Trump, with the latter described in the memo as “a formidable opponent”, is another note of concern. • Dillon observes, “In 2020, the election came down to about 40,000 votes across the battleground states. This November, we anticipate similarly razor-thin margins.” • Additionally, Trump is “a heavily defined candidate”, whereas American voters are less familiar with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Dillon urges “aggressive campaigning” to “introduce and define [the Harris-Walz] ticket to the voters.”

The New York Times suggests the memo is “an artful attempt to lower expectations” and boost fundraising, while reinvigorating the base. However, Republicans argue that Harris is the underdog, claiming her poll lead results from deliberate oversampling of Democratic voters. They criticize her as economically “illiterate” and point to her controversial record as Joe Biden’s vice president.

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Nobody watches CNN. Ironically, that’s what they count on.

• With Friends Like CNN, Kamala Harris Can’t Fail (Bridge)

How pathetic, how lacking in confidence is this woman, that she is running for president of the United States, the highest office of the land, but won’t agree to an interview with a friendly network without Tim Walz accompanying her. On top of that, the Harris campaign picked the lowest-rated news channel (CNN) to do the interview, hours before a holiday weekend, and on the same night college football season kicked off. In other words, Harris’ handlers were desperately seeking to keep this interview as low key as possible. While CNN’s Dana Bash did ask several substantive questions in this closely watched interview, there was scant critical follow up to Harris’ answers although the vice president has flip-flopped on numerous occasions in the past, most notably on the question of America’s energy resources.

“When you were in Congress, you supported the green New Deal, and in 2019 you said, quote, ‘There is no question, I’m in favor of banning fracking.’ Do you still want to ban fracking?” Bash asked. Harris responded that she no longer wanted to ban fracking and that she had emphasized that position in 2020. Bash reminded that Harris had previously said in a 2019 town hall that she did in fact want to prohibit fracking. When the CNN host went on to ask the vice president why she wanted to change her 2019 position, Harris made vague references to “scientific studies” on climate change, when the real reason for the flip-flop was to secure votes in the swing state of Pennsylvania where fracking is an important part of the economy. In other words, politics as usual.

Bash also questioned Harris for her role as ‘Border Czar’ in the Biden administration. The vice president was asked if she is still of the opinion that border crossings should be decriminalized, a position she took during her 2019 campaign. Harris managed to largely evade the question, simply answering that she believes in “consequence” and that “we have laws that have to be followed and enforced.” The problem is, the Biden administration has done very little to enforce those laws. Conservative estimates report that under President Biden’s watch, there have been over 8.5 million migrant encounters nationwide, 6.7 million of which have been at the Southwest border. Worse yet, 1.7 million known ‘getaways’—illegal immigrants who have evaded Border Patrol— are now living in the interior of the United States without documentation and without having undergone any vetting by immigration officials.

The number of illegal immigrants in the country has roughly doubled under President Biden. The United States had some 10.2 million illegal immigrants in 2020, and another 10 million have entered during Biden’s presidency. In light of this escalating situation, Harris had a lot of answering to do in the interview, which regrettably never happened. Meanwhile, many political commentators fear that a cloud of foul play surrounded the Harris-Walz sit down, and for good reason. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that CNN, a fiercely pro-liberal news channel, did not provide Kamala Harris with the questions prior to the interview.

Suffice it to recall that in the run up to the 2016 presidential showdown between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, former Democratic National Committee interim chair and CNN contributor Donna Brazile was caught sending town hall topics to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. News of the incident was discovered courtesy of leaked emails – a “hack job” conveniently blamed on the Russians, and despite the fact that a DNC employee, Seth Rich, 27, was murdered in cold blood on the streets of Washington, DC shortly after the revelations went public. Police say the young man was the victim of a robbery, although none of his private possessions were taken. Bash also questioned Harris over Biden’s disastrous debate performance that set in motion the effort to remove the president and replace him with Harris.

After Biden stumbled through the June 27 debate against Trump, Harris took to CNN to defend the 81-year-old president’s health and mental acuity. “Do you have any regrets about what you told the American people [about Biden’s health]?” Bash asked. “Not at all,” Harris responded, with a hint of conspiracy. Given Harris’ known inability for articulating complex ideas without the help of a teleprompter, many observers are of the opinion that Biden’s departure at the 11th hour was a deliberate move that protected Harris from having to spend too much time in the public eye before November. We already know from past experience that Harris’ political shelf life is extremely short.

Just four years ago, Harris was forced to withdraw early from the presidential nomination process with poll numbers in the low single digits, yet today she has managed to advance one step from the White House without winning a single vote. All things considered, some might call that very suspicious fortune. The only thing that can explain this surge in popularity is a media industrial complex that is willing to celebrate Kamala Harris as she prepares for her first and possibly last debate against The Donald on September 10. After that it’s anybody’s guess, but given the fact that almost the entire media complex has thrown its hefty support behind Harris, Trump is facing a formidable challenge.

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“Mr. Obama. Voila and fait accompli! If he finds himself appointed rather than elected, he would not be in defiance of the 22nd Amendment..”

• Is Kamala Very Very Afraid? (Jim Kunstler)

Lurking behind her is not only the American intel blob of dark forces and sinister figures, but an international blob made up of malevolent groups within and throughout Western Civ, clearly working to bring it down — the Eurocrats wrecking their own countries’ agriculture and their industrial economies while jailing their opponents for thought crimes; the WEFers pushing the demented climate change agenda and ruinous migrant invasions; the bankers looking to seize the “collateral” (property, chattels, investment portfolios) of a billion everyday citizens when the bond Ponzi scheme blows up, as it must; the WHO steered by Bill Gates seeking to inject unsafe vaccines into everybody in order to greatly and quickly reduce the population; the Soros NGO legions working to subvert the public interest here, there, and everywhere; the NATO warmongers trying like hell to start World War Three. . . . Kamala Harris surely understands — if she understands anything — that she has become their chosen pawn, and is at their mercy (they have none).

She should be afraid especially of the American blob. That combine of higher-ups in the CIA, the DOD, the FBI, the DHS, the State Department, and Gawd knows how many lesser-known agencies and “black op” back offices, knows that it is in great danger if Mr. Trump happens to get elected (despite their best efforts to rig things). After all the trips laid on him, all the way up to attempted assassination, you can be sure that Mr. Trump will be coming after the cabal for committing real and serious crimes. They are running scared now. Despite all the power seemingly at their command, nothing has availed so far — not lawfare, not bullets — to stop Mr. Trump’s implacable march back into the Oval Office, where he could possibly succeed in turning the USA back into a functioning republic

Poor Kamala Harris is the blob’s wholly inadequate instrument to fend off this fate. If she continues to perform badly, the blob might not hesitate to try getting rid of her. That may be the blob’s last chance of stopping the election from happening altogether. The nation has never been in the predicament of having the head of a ticket resign or die in the homestretch of an election campaign. There is no provision in the Constitution for it because there are no provisions in the Constitution for political parties per se. It would all be a kind of improv.

And then, of course, America would be stuck with the unfit and incapable “Joe Biden,” heading the government, at least until something else can be worked out. Maybe that working out would just be the final stage of the coup that has been in motion, really, since 2016 when John Brennan, Barack Obama, and James Comey attempted to oust Mr. Trump with RussiaGate. Some kind of “interim commission” might be formed to “solve” the problem of the cancelled election. They’ll look for someone with “proven ability” to serve as provisional president — maybe, someone who has already been president. . . say, Mr. Obama. Voila and fait accompli! If he finds himself appointed rather than elected, he would not be in defiance of the 22nd Amendment. Okay, now try re-thinking how scared Kamala Harris must be.

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“California is one of 15 states that doesn’t ask for photo ID at the ballot box..”

At what point does this become election interference?

• California Bill Banning Voter ID Laws Passes Legislature (ET)

A California bill that would ban local governments from requiring voter identification in their elections passed the state assembly, and now awaits the governor’s approval or veto. The measure would ban local governments such as Huntington Beach—where voters recently gave the City Council the go-ahead to impose such a requirement—from enacting voter ID laws and makes clear the state has exclusive jurisdiction when it comes to the voter verification process. Senate Bill 1174, authored by Sen. Dave Min, passed the Assembly in a 57 to 16 vote on Aug. 27. “I have repeatedly told the Huntington Beach City Council members pushing this issue that if they were to produce any evidence of widespread voter fraud, I would lead efforts to change California’s voter eligibility rules. They have not produced any such evidence,” the Irvine Democrat said in an Aug. 30 press release following the Assembly vote.

In May the Senate approved the bill 30–8. Min said his bill would protect against a “patchwork of varying election requirements” throughout the state, blocking all cities from requiring voters to present a government-issued identification to vote. The ban would include charter cities, which have more authority than general-law cities over such things as regulating local police and elections. “We cannot have 100 different charter cities making up 100 different sets of voting rules, based on fringe conspiracy theories,” Min said, referring to questions of election integrity in the 2020 presidential election. In a May 21 Senate floor hearing, Min said SB 1174 would create a statewide standard that prevents cities from enacting their own policies, which he said could disenfranchise voters.

In a recent Assembly Local Government bill analysis, Min argued that voter ID requirements only create barriers for voters but don’t protect against fraud, as voters already must verify their identity when they register. He said the state already automatically recounts some ballots, does signature verification checks, and allows voters to track their ballots. “We will not concede to ploys of voter fraud while an overwhelming body of evidence proves our elections are safe, secure, and above board,” he said. Voters in California are required to show identification only if they didn’t provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering, but the secretary of state also accepts credit or debit cards, student IDs, or an ID from a commercial establishment.

[..] Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates told The Epoch Times in a recent interview that Min’s bill is “pure political symbolism” in response to the city’s recently passed measure. He said as a charter city, under Article XI, Section 5 (b) of the California Constitution, Huntington Beach has a right to have voter ID, and the state will lose any legal challenges it brings. “The state is running headlong into another legal clash, which it will lose miserably. Huntington Beach has it right, the state has it completely wrong. And all Californians want election integrity. It’s common sense,” he said in a text message to The Epoch Times.

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“..all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. And then we all die.”

• On a Highway to Hell (Scott Ritter)

[..] the Biden administration is now confronted with the possibility and or probability of a much larger, capable Chinese strategic nuclear force capable of surviving a limited U.S. first-strike and delivering a nation-killing nuclear payload to U.S. soil in retaliation. To adjust to this new reality, the U.S. would need to allocate nuclear warheads currently targeted against Russia onto China. This would require that the U.S. not only develop revised target lists for both Russia and China, but also rethink targeting strategies in general, looking to maximum physical destruction over political impact. More dangerously, the U.S. would have to look at employment strategies that maximized the element of surprise to ensure all targets were hit by their designated weapons. This would require a change in the readiness posture and operational deployment areas of U.S. nuclear forces.

With increased readiness comes the need for vigilance against any preemption efforts by a potential nuclear adversary, meaning that U.S. nuclear forces will be placed on a higher alert status. In short, the risk of nuclear war, inadvertent or otherwise, has become exponentially greater. In March the Biden administration reportedly issued a new Nuclear Employment Guidance document reflecting this reality. Nowhere in this guidance is there consideration for using arms control as a means of managing the nuclear equation, either by extending the New START treaty, or working with China to prevent a Chinese nuclear breakout. Instead, the U.S. appears to be concerned about the erosion of nuclear deterrence that will be brought about by diverting weapons dedicated to non-Chinese contingencies. When seen in this light, the answer to the problem is more, not fewer, nuclear weapons.

This is why the U.S. is going to let the New START treaty lapse in February 2026 — once the treaty goes away, so, too, does the cap on the number of deployed warheads, and the U.S. nuclear establishment will be able to build up the U.S. operational nuclear arsenal so that there are enough weapons for every designated target. The world is becoming a very dangerous place. Nuclear weapons offer the illusion of security. By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. And then we all die. We are, literally, on a Highway to Hell.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1830702703678472650

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“Bilateral relations are now at probably their historical low point with no prospects for entering a growth trajectory to be seen..”

• Russia Says Relations With US At All-Time Low (RT)

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that Russia-US relations are at a historic low, dismissing the idea that the two sides could gradually improve them in the foreseeable future. In an interview with national broadcaster, Russia 1, the top official emphasized that Washington has been consistently trampling on Moscow’s interests and exerting pressure for several decades. Ties between the two states have reached “a cracking-up point” during Joe Biden’s presidency, according to Peskov, who stressed that the US administration is demonstrating an openly hostile position towards Russia by supporting Ukraine. “Right in the middle of Mr. Biden’s presidency all these processes have culminated […] Bilateral relations are now at probably their historical low point with no prospects for entering a growth trajectory to be seen,” he said.

“The US, despite many statements to the contrary, is directly involved in the Ukraine conflict,” Peskov concluded. Bilateral ties between Russia and the US took a nose-dive in 2022 when Washington and its allies attacked Moscow with a barrage of economic sanctions following the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict. Moreover, the White House has been providing Kiev with substantial economic and military aid, drawing reprobation from Russian officials, who have accused Washington of playing a direct role in the conflict. In addition, the US withdrew from two security treaties, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty and the Open Skies treaty, under the administration of Donald Trump. While the White House under President Joe Biden has extended the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) through 2026, last year Moscow suspended its participation, citing the US role in the Ukraine conflict.

Peskov also cast doubt on statements made by former US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly pledged to resolve the Ukraine conflict within 24 hours if elected a second time. The Republican presidential frontrunner has also claimed that he had an excellent relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin while in office, adding that the conflict would have never started on his watch. “I don’t think there is a magic wand, it is impossible to do anything in a day,” Peskov said. “Although, if we assume that the next US president will make a statement during his inauguration speech that the US stands for peace and is therefore ending its support for Ukraine […], then something in someone’s brain will change.”

Mearsheimer

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For decades, the Americans and their allies “sought total control over Ukraine. They funded nationalist and anti-Russian organizations there; they persistently worked to convince Ukraine that Russia was its eternal enemy..”

• 50 Countries United Against Russia Under ‘Nazi Banners’ – Lavrov (RT)

The West has always wanted to dismantle Russia and has gone as far as joining forces with the Nazis in Ukraine in an attempt to achieve this goal, Moscow’s top diplomat Sergey Lavrov has said. The foreign minister made the statement during a meeting with students and educators at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations on Monday, the first day of the new academic year in Russia. The West has always been concerned that Russia is “too strong, too independent,” and has wanted to do something about it, “preferably breaking it up,” said Lavrov. “A very indicative story is repeating itself because today, 50 countries have gathered against Russia under Nazi banners, considering the essence of the [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky regime,” he continued, referring to the military assistance provided by the US and its allies to Kiev amid the conflict with Russia.

The foreign minister noted that Ukrainian troops have on numerous occasions been filmed wearing Nazi patches or carrying banners similar to those used by Adolf Hitler’s forces during the World War II. The “denazification” of Ukraine was identified by Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of the main goals of Moscow’s military operation against Kiev when it was launched in late February 2022. Lavrov asserted that Moscow was not going to play by Western rules and will not “embed itself into various schemes created without our participation and without taking Russia’s interests into account.” However, he said Putin had made it clear that Moscow remains “open to contacts with the countries of the ‘collective West,’ with the understanding, of course, that they will abandon their openly hostile policies towards our country.”

If the US and its allies do not change their ways, “we will continue to respond resolutely to any unfriendly steps,” Lavrov added. Elsewhere on Monday, Putin said the conflict between Moscow and Kiev had broken out because of “the destructive strategy of the West” regarding Ukraine. For decades, the Americans and their allies “sought total control over Ukraine. They funded nationalist and anti-Russian organizations there; they persistently worked to convince Ukraine that Russia was its eternal enemy and the main threat to its existence,” the Russian leader said. Washington and its “satellites” orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, which was driven by “radical neo-Nazi groups” that continue to determine Ukraine’s policies to this day, he added.

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“A nuclear disaster that could occur in the region would be most beneficial to Washington..”

• Lukashenko Prepares His Weapons: Could Belarus Be Drawn Into The War? (Oncan)

The operation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Kursk region was not just a tactical move by Ukraine, but also a step that revealed the West’s intentions in the ongoing war. The acceptance of this demand raises the possibility that the attacks within Russia, beginning with Kursk, will be designated as the “main offensive line” from the perspective of Ukraine and the West. Before the peace negotiations, which are now expected by everyone to take place “someday,” the West intends to sit at the table as strongly as possible, in exchange for Donbass, which is connected to Russia. Recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the removal of restrictions on the use of long-range missiles in attacks on Russian soil, and it was learned that “some NATO countries” have also prepared a statement with the same demand. While developments on the Kursk front remain tense, significant events have occurred in another important country involved in the Russia-Ukraine confrontation: Belarus.

In recent days, some critical developments have taken place in Belarus that have not received much attention in the media. The Kyiv administration recently violated Belarusian airspace with attack drones, and Belarus’s ready air defense system quickly announced that it had destroyed these drones. This marks the largest military engagement Belarus has had with Ukraine in recent times, despite Belarus’s efforts to avoid becoming directly involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. For Ukraine and the West, Kursk, with its nuclear power plant in the region, is a significant leverage against Russia. A nuclear disaster that could occur in the region would be most beneficial to Washington. What about Belarus? The strategic minds in the West will do everything possible to drag Russia’s closest ally into the hot war. This could include a potential leak at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, located just 16 kilometers from the Belarusian border.

Among the various methods of attacking Russia and Belarus, it is no coincidence that the first thought is of a nuclear leak. The easiest way to overcome the “obstacles” to deploying NATO weapons, or even NATO troops, in Ukraine is through a nuclear leak in the region and the creation of a perception that Russia and Belarus are “unable to control the disaster.” Therefore, in military developments like the attack on Kursk, the most critical point to monitor is not which town is controlled by whom, but how close they are to nuclear power plants.In light of the recent developments on the Kursk front, the Belarusian army has decided to strengthen the units in the Gomel and Mazyr regions. Mazyr is a Belarusian region close to the Dniester River and Kyiv, while Gomel is near Kursk via Bryansk. Special operations forces, ground forces, and missile units, including Polonez and Iskander missile systems, have begun new training and exercises in the designated regions.

Similarly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces continue to improve border security systems and defense elements, while also amassing troops along the Belarusian border. Meanwhile, plans to drag Belarus into the Russia-Ukraine conflict are still being pursued in the West and Ukraine. Recently, former commander of the Polish Army’s Ground Forces, General W. Skrzypczak, accused Belarus of conducting a “military campaign” against Poland and called for the establishment of a “Belarusian legion” in his country.

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“..It affects about a third of our imports from Russia.

In Slovakia, the situation is even worse, these supplies account for about 40% there..”

• Hungary Can’t Survive Without Russian Oil – FM (RT)

Hungary cannot survive without Russian oil, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has warned, stressing that Ukraine’s decision to suspend transit poses a serious challenge for Budapest. Kiev halted the transit of crude supplied by Russian energy giant Lukoil via the Druzhba pipeline in June, citing sanctions. The measure has directly hit landlocked Hungary and Slovakia, depriving them of oil previously exported by Lukoil through Ukrainian territory. In an interview with Russian business daily RBK on Monday, Szijjarto said Hungary will be completely deprived of oil without supplies from Russia. “We will not be able to feed the country in a broad sense. We simply will not be able to meet the demand for fuel… because we do not have sufficient alternative infrastructure,” the diplomat said. “You just have to look at the numbers… We do not want to take such risks,” Szijjarto added. “Therefore, the fact that Ukraine has made such a decision is a very serious challenge for us. It affects about a third of our imports from Russia.

In Slovakia, the situation is even worse, these supplies account for about 40% there,” he stressed. Kiev imposed sanctions on Lukoil in 2018, having banned the company from divesting its business in the country, as well as prohibiting trade operations and participation in the privatization or leasing of state property. Lukoil still sent crude via the southern arm of the Druzhba pipeline as EU sanctions did not target these flows. The EU prohibited transport of Russian crude oil by sea in December 2022 as part of far-reaching sanctions on Moscow over the Ukraine conflict. Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic have been granted exemptions by Brussels as they source alternative supplies. Slovakia and Hungary are the only EU member states that have rejected the bloc’s policies on supplying Kiev with military aid amid the conflict with Moscow. Both states have repeatedly called for the crisis to be solved through diplomacy.

Last week, Politico reported that Budapest had proposed a solution for the restoration of halted Russian oil flows by rebranding Lukoil products. That way, the crude shipped via Ukraine could be officially sold to Hungarian energy giant MOL before it crosses the border. The arrangement could reportedly mean paying an additional $1.50 per barrel to secure transit outside of previous agreements. Szijjarto told RBK that a temporary solution to the crisis situation could be found, stressing that “in the long term, we need to look for another, legally significant solution.” The Hungarian diplomat traveled to Russia last week to discuss energy security issues. Budapest is “satisfied with Russian energy cooperation, which is one of the guarantees of the country’s food security,” Szijjarto wrote on Facebook after meeting with the head of Russian energy giant Gazprom, Aleksey Miller.

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ICC, Ukraine, HRW… And Putin got a welcome with all honors.

• Soros-Bankrolled Human Rights Watch Tells Mongolia To Arrest Putin (RT)

The George Soros-funded organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the government of Mongolia to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin during his trip to the country, which would be in accordance with the Asian state’s obligations as a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Putin arrived in Mongolia on Monday at the invitation of the country’s president, Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, to attend a ceremony commemorating the 1939 Battle of Khalkhin Gol, in which Soviet and Mongolian forces defeated the Imperial Japanese Army. Ahead of his visit, HRW, which has received over $100 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, issued a statement on its website warning Mongolia against allowing Putin to enter the country.

“Mongolia would be defying its international obligations as an ICC member if it allows Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit without arresting him,” the HRW’s senior international justice counsel, Maria Elena Vignoli said, claiming that welcoming the Russian President would “undermine the crucial principle that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.” Last year, the ICC issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest, accusing him of “unlawful deportation of population (children)” and “unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine” to Russia amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Russia has rejected the ICC’s accusations as absurd, stressing that the evacuation of civilians from a combat zone is not a war crime. Moscow has also pointed out that it has never signed the Rome Statute, on which the ICC is based, meaning that the court has no jurisdiction in the matter.

Meanwhile, Mongolian authorities, despite having signed the Rome Statute on which the ICC is based, have reportedly said that they have no intention of arresting Putin, according to Bloomberg, which cited two sources familiar with the matter. Putin arrived in the Mongolian capital on Monday and was greeted by an honorary guard at Ulaanbaatar Airport. According to presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, he will have a “rich program” on Tuesday as part of his state visit, which will include a meeting with his Mongolian counterpart, negotiations in various formats dedicated to bilateral relations, as well a signing ceremony of Russian-Mongolian intergovernmental documents. Ahead of the trip, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow had “no concerns” about Putin’s visit and the ICC warrant, stating that “we have excellent relations with our friends from Mongolia,” and that all issues concerning the Russian president’s trip had been “worked out” beforehand.

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They really want the oil.

• US Seizes Maduro’s Plane – CNN (RT)

The US government has confiscated an airplane reportedly used by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, claiming it violates Washington’s sanctions against Caracas, CNN reported on Monday. The Americans have charged Maduro with drug trafficking and refused to recognize his victories in the last two Venezuelan presidential elections. “Seizing the foreign head of state’s plane is unheard-of for criminal matters. We’re sending a clear message here that no one is above the law, no one is above the reach of US sanctions,” an unnamed Washington official told CNN, which first reported the story on Monday. According to CNN, the plane is worth around $13 million and was seized in cooperation with Dominican authorities. The US outlet did not identify the airplane, saying only it was seized in the Dominican Republic and flown to Miami, Florida. The departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, and Justice were involved in the seizure.

The Miami Herald identified the jet as a Dassault Falcon 900EX, a French-built corporate jet that has previously visited Cuba, Brazil and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, “often with Maduro on board.” It appears to be registered in San Marino. The Herald cited records from the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) showing that a Florida-based company sold the plane to a company in St. Vincent, which then resold it to San Marino. The US government alleges that the reseller was a Venezuelan shell company and that the sale violated its sanctions on Venezuela. American officials described the jet as Venezuela’s equivalent of the US “Air Force One,” noting that Maduro has flown it to a number of places. It was unclear how it ended up in the Dominican Republic, as Venezuela suspended commercial air travel with the island after the July 28 presidential election.

According to CNN, the US intends to confiscate the plane through asset forfeiture process. This means Venezuela could theoretically challenge it in court – if it can find a way around the sanctions to do so. This is the second Venezuelan jet to be seized by the US this year. In February, Argentina sent the US a Boeing 747-300M cargo plane confiscated in 2022, because Caracas allegedly bought it from a sanctioned Iranian company. Maduro called the seizure “a blatant theft” on part of Argentinian President Javier Milei’s government. Washington has seized $2 billion worth of Venezuelan bank accounts and assets in recent years, one unnamed official told CNN.

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“..Fauci and others used their positions during COVID to enforce “totalitarian controls that were not science-based.”

• RFK Jr: “A Reckoning” For “Immoral, Homicidal” COVID Criminality Needed (MN)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said that individuals who engaged in “criminal” behaviour during the pandemic still need to be held accountable. Kennedy, who is in line for a health related position in Donald Trump’s administration should he be elected, declared recently that there needs to be a “reckoning” brought upon those responsible. Speaking at the Limitless Expo, Kennedy explicitly referenced Anthony Fauci, noting “I wrote a book about Fauci. It’s a great book. There are 2,200 footnotes in the book… I invited people to find problems with the book… And nobody ever told us any factual error in that book.” He charged that Fauci and others used their positions during COVID to enforce “totalitarian controls that were not science-based.” “It’s a story, really, of people involved in really terrible, immoral, homicidal criminal behavior,” Kennedy urged.

He noted that effective treatments were repressed, stating “Ivermectin was a very, very devastating cure for COVID. It literally obliterated COVID.”“By depriving people of Ivermectin, many, many people, millions of people around the globe, died, and they didn’t need to,” Kennedy added, charging that Fauci and others pressured the FDA to discourage such treatments in favour of relentlessly pushing unproven and untested vaccines. “There were cures for COVID from day one, very effective cures. But they didn’t want that. They wanted the vaccine only,” Kennedy posited, adding “if they admitted that any of [the treatments] were effective, the whole vaccine project would have fallen apart.”

Kennedy added that after the vaccines, myocarditis cases among young people, particularly athletes, exploded. “On average, it was, I think, 29 a month globally, athletes who died on the field. We’re getting down to hundreds a month now,” Kennedy emphasised. He concluded that “the science is out there now, and it’s devastating.” After endorsing Donald Trump last month, RFK Jr. declared that he is ready to help “make America healthy again.”

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“The Media Matters lawsuit directly challenges the ability of media outlets to create false narratives to advance a political agenda..”

• Why Musk’s Lawsuit Against Media Matters . . . Matters (Turley)

[..]But Musk’s lawsuit may be the most defining for our age of advocacy journalism. He is suing Media Matters, the left-wing outlet founded by David Brock, whom Time described as “one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party.” Although Brock is no longer with the site, Media Matters has long been accused as being a weaponized media outlet for the left. After Musk dismantled the censorship system at Twitter, he became something of an obsession for Media Matters, which targeted his revenue sources. The outlet ran a report suggesting that advertisements of major corporations were being posted next to pro-Nazi posts or otherwise hateful content on the platform. As I discuss in my new book, this effort mirrored similar moves by the anti-free speech movement against Musk to force him to restore censorship systems. Companies including Apple, IBM, Comcast and Lionsgate Entertainment quickly joined the effective boycott to squeeze Musk.

The problem is that it is hard to squeeze the world’s richest man financially. Musk told the companies to pound sand and told his lawyers to file suit. The allegations in the lawsuit read like a textbook on advocacy journalism. Media Matters is accused of knowingly misrepresenting the real user experience by manipulating the algorithms to produce the pairing alleged in its story. The complaint accuses Media Matters of running its manipulation to produce extremely unlikely pairings, such that one toxic match appeared for “only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters.” In other words, the organization wanted to write a hit piece connecting X to pro-Nazi material and proceeded to artificially create pairings between that material and corporate advertisements. It then ran the story as news. Indeed, two defendant employees of Media Matters did not deny that they were aware of the alleged manipulation and that they were seeking to poison the well for advertisers in order to drain advertising revenues for X.

Although the media covered another judge blocking an effort by state officials to sue Media Matters over the anti-Musk effort, there has been comparably less coverage of the green light for the lawsuit in Texas. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas rejected an effort to dismiss the case on jurisdictional and other grounds. Musk will be able to continue his claims of tortious interference with existing contracts, business disparagement and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. Musk is also suing the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which also targeted advertisers to choke off targeted sites. Not surprisingly, although the media has heralded lawsuits like the one by Dominion Voting System against Fox News (which led to a large settlement), they are overwhelmingly hostile toward the Musk lawsuits.

It is not hard to see why. The Media Matters lawsuit directly challenges the ability of media outlets to create false narratives to advance a political agenda. As with the CNN and New York Times cases, it can expose how the media first decides on a conclusion and then frames or even invents the facts to support it. While rejecting the longstanding principles of journalism such as objectivity, these media outlets are citing the cases and defenses secured by those now-outdated media organizations. They want to be advocates, but they also want to be protected as journalists. These cases still face tough challenges, including challenging jury polls in places like New York. However, they are exposing the bias that now characterizes much of American journalism. In the age of advocacy journalism, a bill has come due. That is why Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters . . . well . . . matters.

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We don’t need Kyle Bass to tell us that. Moreover, not only does oil “move” our world, at least half of it is built from oil.

• Kyle Bass Says ‘Green’ War To Blackball Oil Was Doomed To Fail (ZH)

Hayman Capital Management founder and CIO Kyle Bass explained in a Bloomberg interview that the mounting backlash against environmental, social, and governance investing in recent years is primarily a response to the extreme demands of radical climate activists, or “green” defenders. Bass argued that these activists were so disconnected from reality that their uncompromising stance on blackballing the fossil fuel industry—without acknowledging that energy transitions can take upwards of half a century—has fueled the backlash. He said plans to moderate fossil fuel usage over decades from the start would’ve possibly prevented the backlash. Bass said the ESG backlash derives from climate activists’ demands that fossil fuels be abandoned immediately. He said the demands were never realistic.

“There were all of these idiots that were just saying, if anyone is doing hydrocarbons, we’re going to blackball them from doing business or from receiving capital,” Bass said, adding, “And so Texas lashed back and said, if you’re going to blackball someone that’s producing hydrocarbons, we’re not going to do business with you either.” He said, “Energy transitions take 40 or 50 years,” pointing out that people “think we can just turn hydrocarbons off and turn on alternative power. But they have no idea how the grid works and no idea how business works.” Bass said the focus should now be on efficiency and electrification. He said the long-term goal should be the energy transition to nuclear. Until then, he noted, fossil fuels and renewable energy sources are “going to coexist for decades and decades to come.”

In a separate interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in 2022, Bass said, “The desire for the world to engage in alternative energy is one that I think we all would love to see happen, but there are certain scientific realities, and there are certain narratives that get pushed by NGOs and teenagers. And I think we’ve been taking policy cues from NGOs and teenagers for a long time.”

Bass pointed out that a proper energy transition takes upwards of a half-century. In the interview with CNBC, he said, “The move from coal to natural gas took forty years. They take a very, very, very long time. We can’t just flip a switch.” In his most recent interview with Bloomberg, Bass said, “Skirting hydrocarbons is like bringing politics into investing,” adding, “If you’re willing to give up returns for that, then so be it. But I think that’s naive and it’s a breach of fiduciary duty.” The latest Bloomberg data shows that about half of the US power grid is powered by natural gas generators. This summer, renewable energy power has slid, with coal now producing more power than wind and solar.

In recent years, ESG policies have discouraged investment by banks, funds, pensions, and other entities in the natural gas and coal industries. The problem with this is that unreliable solar and wind can’t power artificial data centers 24/7. We’ve noted that the financial industry’s initial rush to commit to net zero carbon footprints has hit a reality check in a note titled “ESG Frustration And Backlash In The Banking Sector Continues.” The big takeaway is that anyone who puts their climate crisis or woke religion first ahead of rational decision-making is doomed to fail.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

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Putin’s Grip on Power

Jul 012023
 
 July 1, 2023  Posted by at 12:00 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Albert Bierstadt Storm in the Mountains c1870

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

It was earlier advised to “Be Very Skeptical Of US Intel Claiming That Surovikin May Have Helped Plan Prigozhin’s Coup”, and now two new developments lend even more credence to those suspicions. The “investigative project” of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was designated by Russia as a foreign agent last year due to his operations being funded by Ukraine, shared “documents” with CNN purporting to show that over 30 senior military and intelligence officials are secretly VIP Wagner members.

The outlet reported on these alleged findings around the same time that they published former Vice President Mike Pence’s answer to the question that one of their journalists asked him during his unannounced visit to Kiev regarding his opinion of whether or not President Putin has full command of his military. He claimed that this is an “open question” in light of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt last weekend, thus suggesting that Russian leader is struggling to exert his authority.

These two back-to-back news items were intended to leave their audience with the impression that the President Putin remains at risk of being overthrown by his armed forces, which is nothing but an artificially manufactured information warfare narrative designed to sow doubts about his leadership. It simultaneously attempts to influence him and his circle into carrying out large-scale purges that could adversely affect the special operation while also making the public think that he’s weak if he doesn’t.

The New York Times earlier admitted that “American officials have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Surovikin, whom they view as more competent and more ruthless than other members of the command. His removal would undoubtedly benefit Ukraine, whose Western-backed troops are pushing a new counteroffensive that is meant to try to win back territory seized by Moscow.” It’s with this motivation in mind that the latest reports should be interpreted.

No honest observer on either side of the debate really thinks that an exiled Ukrainian-funded oligarch and one of the US’ previously most powerful neoconservatives have President Putin’s best interests in mind when suggesting that he’s at risk of being overthrown if he doesn’t purge the Russian military. To the contrary, the only reason why these insincerely expressed concerns were publicly shared and then amplified by one of the world’s top Mainstream Media (MSM) outlets was for subversive purposes.

What’s curious to note is that the MSM and their putative competitors in the Alt-Media Community (AMC) are each aggressively pushing weaponized conspiracy theories to their respective audiences in the aftermath of recent events. The first wants folks to think that last weekend’s regime change plot involved high-level military-intelligence collaborators who might soon give it a second shot out of desperation to preempt their supposedly impending purge if President Putin doesn’t remove them first.

At the same time, top influencers in the second have suggested that President Putin colluded with Prigozhin to stage a so-called “false flag coup” to redeploy Wagner to Belarus and/or expose internal enemies, thus implying that he ordered that group’s chief to shoot down Russian pilots. It’s unclear whether those who propagate this totally ridiculous theory actually believe it, but this baseless innuendo is nevertheless anti-Russian to the core by hinting that its leader therefore committed treason too.

The reality is that Western intelligence agencies masterfully manipulated Prigozhin’s rivalry with the Defense Ministry, the paranoia that this provoked, and his delusions of grandeur after Wagner led Russia to victory in the Battle of Artyomovsk to plant the seeds in his mind for carrying out a coup. He therefore functioned as the West’s most potentially destabilizing “useful idiot” in history who risked sparking a civil war that was only narrowly averted at the last minute as was explained here and here.

While it’s possible that senior military-intelligence officials are VIP Wagner members, that can’t be known for sure until the FSB’s investigation concludes, which might even determine that there’s truth to this claim whether in whole or in part but that it isn’t evidence of a deeper and more serious plot. In any case, the speculation of those Ukrainian-backed and US figures like Khodorkovsky and Pence respectively should be seen as meddling since they don’t have innocent intentions in talking about this.

They only want to manipulate the public’s perceptions of President Putin and the state of affairs in Russia, which their MSM allies like CNN are helping them do by maximally amplifying their messages. Likewise, those in the AMC who spew anti-Russian conspiracy theories about Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt such as suggesting that President Putin was in on it and thus colluded to have his own country’s pilots shot down by Wagner are also scheming to manipulate the public, albeit a different segment.

Taken together, they represent complementary efforts of the same destabilization operation that’s actively underway in the aftermath of last weekend’s events, which aims to manipulate perceptions among the MSM’s and AMC’s audiences alike about what recently took place. These weaponized conspiracy theories are being deployed to discredit President Putin, his government, and the Russian security services in the minds of their targets, and those who launder them are these three’s enemies.

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 11 2023

May 112023
 
 May 11, 2023  Posted by at 8:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  31 Responses »


Henri Matisse Flowers 1907

 

• House GOP Identifies 9 Biden Family Members Who Received Foreign Money (NYP)
• FBI Refuses To Give Congress File Alleging Biden Took Bribes As VP (NYP)
• Trump Says He Would Meet With Putin To Settle Ukrainian Conflict (TASS)
• Trump Wants Both Ukrainians And Russians To ‘Stop Dying’ (RT)
• Lula Offers To Act As Go-Between To End Ukraine Conflict At G7 Summit (TASS)
• Borrell Says He Knows How To Stop Ukraine Conflict ‘Immediately’ (RT)
• Ukraine’s NATO Accession Does Not Depend On Stoltenberg – Borrell (TASS)
• Bold Gambits On The West Asian Chessboard (Pepe Escobar)
• NATO ‘s Great New Idea: ‘Let’s Start A War With China!’ (Ron Paul)
• Grain Deal To Be Extended Taking Into Account Russia’s Interests – Turkey (TASS)
• US To Create ‘Free Syria Army’ Of Terrorists Against Damascus – Lavrov (TASS)
• Young Americans Don’t Understand History Of WWII – Kremlin (RT)
• Liechtenstein To Accept Bitcoin For Payments To State (RT)
• Net Zero Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America (Rucker)
• Julian Assange – A Fight We Must Not Lose (Chris Hedges)

 

 

In his CNN townhall last night, Trump left nothing standing of his hostile interviewer. While CNN’s handpicked audience applauded him throughout. They handed him the stage and he took it. All of it.

 

 

 

Nancy Mace

 

 

 

 

Ed Dowd
https://twitter.com/i/status/1656415000859234306

 

 

German farmers

 

 

Webb
https://twitter.com/i/status/1656544051833782273

 

 

 

 

Overpopulation

 

 

McLuhan

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/WinRussiawill/status/1656363220972765184

 

 

 

 

Watters

• House GOP Identifies 9 Biden Family Members Who Received Foreign Money (NYP)

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer identified nine members of President Biden’s family Wednesday who allegedly received foreign income after teasing the bombshell for weeks. “Since you asked, I’ll tell you,” Comer (R-Ky.) told a rapt room of reporters at the Capitol after laying out new bank record evidence showing first son Hunter Biden received $1 million from a corrupt Romanian businessman while his dad was vice president. “Joe Biden’s son [Hunter], Joe Biden’s brother [James], Joe Biden’s brother’s wife [Sara], Hunter Biden’s girlfriend or Beau Biden’s widow [Hallie], however, you want to write that, Hunter Biden’s ex-wife [Kathleen Buhle], Hunter Biden’s current wife [Melissa Cohen], and three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother,” Comer said.

The chairman seemed to indicate that only one of Biden’s grandchildren and two of his brother’s children got the foreign funds. “We’re talking about grandchil — a grandchild,” Comer said at the press conference. “That’s odd, most people that work hard every day’s grandchild doesn’t get a wire from a foreign national.” James Biden has three children, including daughter Caroline, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to making over $100,000 in charges on a stolen credit card. Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show Caroline turned up her nose at an $85,000 job offer that would have allowed her to serve her probationary period near her beloved cousin in California. Caroline’s siblings are James Biden Jr. and Nicholas Biden. The president’s other brother, Frank Biden, has two children, but Comer did not mention him and it’s unclear why Frank’s daughters, who reportedly work for NBC and as a nurse practitioner, would be involved.

A Comer aide told The Post it is possible that additional Biden relatives received foreign money. Bank records indicate $80,000 transferred from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu from 2015 to 2017 went to accounts identified only by the name “Biden,” for example — and a March memo from the committee indicated $70,000 from Chinese company CEFC China Energy did as well. Hunter Biden and first brother James Biden were well-known for years for seeking millions from nations including China, Mexico, Romania, Russia and Ukraine — but the involvement of other family members was only more recently alleged by Comer. The Oversight Committee issued a memo on Wednesday morning saying that Hallie Biden appears to have received $10,000 in early 2017 from Popoviciu — before receiving another $25,000 later that year as part of Hunter and James Biden’s partnership with CEFC China Energy.

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More power than Congress?

• FBI Refuses To Give Congress File Alleging Biden Took Bribes As VP (NYP)

The FBI has refused to give Congress an informant file alleging that President Biden took bribes while he was vice president, The Post has learned — setting up a possible showdown over access to the information. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) issued a legally binding subpoena last week requiring the FBI to turn over the file by noon Wednesday, but the bureau instead replied with a six-page letter raising various objections. “Information from confidential human sources is unverified and, by definition, incomplete,” wrote FBI acting assistant director for congressional affairs Christopher Dunham, who also argued that informant reports must also be kept private to protect sources.

“As is clear from the name itself, confidentiality is definitional to the FBI’s Confidential Human Source program,” Dunham wrote. “Confidential human sources often provide information to the FBI at great risk to themselves and their loved ones. The information they provide also can create significant risks to others who may be referenced in their reporting.” The FBI official concluded: “We … hope this helps you understand that keeping this kind of source information free from the perception or reality of improper influence — and preventing the redirection of this information for non-law enforcement or non-intelligence uses — is necessary for the FBI’s effective execution of our law enforcement and national security responsibilities.”

Comer slammed the FBI’s stonewalling, but he did not immediately announce further steps to acquire the document. Congress has the power to apply financial pressure to agencies and can also use litigation to enforce its orders or attempt to shame officials through contempt votes. “It’s clear from the FBI’s response that the unclassified record the Oversight Committee subpoenaed exists, but they are refusing to provide it to the Committee,” Comer said. [..] The document subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee is an FD-023 informant report that was created or modified in June 2020-months before Biden won the presidency.

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Comer and Grassley wrote last week, “We have received legally protected and highly credible unclassified whistleblower disclosures.” “Based on those disclosures,” the Republicans wrote, “it has come to our attention that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.”

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“If you say he’s [Putin] a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped..”

• Trump Says He Would Meet With Putin To Settle Ukrainian Conflict (TASS)

Former US President Donald Trump said he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Vladimir Zelensky to end the conflict in Ukraine. “I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” he said during a CNN’s town hall program. Trump explained that if he was president, he would resolve the conflict within 24 hours. “Russians and Ukrainians, I want them to stop dying,” the politician said. “And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”


Trump added that he considered Putin to be very smart. However, in former US president’s opinion, “Putin made a mistake” by launching the special military operation. He also pointed out that it was not the time to consider the Russian president a war criminal. “If you say he’s [Putin] a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to make this thing stopped,” Trump said. He also added that it was something that “should be discussed later.”.

Trump

https://twitter.com/i/status/1656538428534652928

Read more …

“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing.” “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people..”

• Trump Wants Both Ukrainians And Russians To ‘Stop Dying’ (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has refused to say whether he favors a particular side in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, stating he would rather focus on ending the bloodshed altogether. Speaking for a CNN town hall in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Trump also insisted that Washington was giving too much ammunition to Kiev. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins if he wants “Ukraine to win this war,” Trump, who is campaigning for a second term in office, replied: “I don’t think in terms of winning and losing.” “I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people and breaking down this country,” the former president said.


When pressed by Collins on the matter, Trump added: “They are dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying.” He criticized the amount of military aid provided to Kiev by the Pentagon. “We don’t have ammunition for ourselves [and yet] we’re giving away so much,” he said. Trump also said he wanted Europe to “put up more money” for Ukraine and “equalize” its financial assistance compared to aid provided by Washington. Trump insisted that he would “have that war settled in one day” if he was president, promising to meet with presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine if he gets elected in 2024.

Trump CNN

Read more …

Plenty offers. But they need to include China.

• Lula Offers To Act As Go-Between To End Ukraine Conflict At G7 Summit (TASS)

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Tuesday that he plans to offer Brasilia’s services as a mediator for settling the Ukrainian conflict on the sidelines of the G7 summit, which is slated to be held in Hiroshima, Japan, later this month. Addressing a joint news conference with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the Brazilian leader said, “The continuation of the war will only cause more deaths. So, we must find someone who would be able to discuss peace, and Brazil is ready for that.” Lula said that, prior to his relevant negotiations with Rutte, he had already discussed the issue with the Chinese president and the British prime minister, and that he would raise it with the president of Indonesia and many other leaders with whom he plans to meet at the G7 summit.

According to the Brazilian president, the situation in Ukraine, energy, battling climate change, economic development and the fight against unemployment are certain to be on the agenda of the G7 meeting in Hiroshima on May 20-21. “We have received multiple requests for bilateral meetings, and I am confident that the Ukrainian issue will be raised at every such meeting,” Lula added. And every side involved in the conflict has its arguments, he believes. While Ukraine is bound to resist what he called the unacceptable occupation of its territory, the EU has its arguments in favor of the decisions it has made, and Brazil and other countries have their reasons for trying to reach a compromise, the Brazilian leader said. Lula recalled that his country had condemned “the Russian military invasion” in a UN vote.

“Now is the time for diplomacy, not for war,” he emphasized. Earlier, Lula called Russia a guarantor of a long-lasting global peace and proposed developing a new international format for a potential dialogue between Moscow and Kiev, saying that he stands ready to mediate any direct negotiations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky.

Read more …

“Stop providing military aid to Ukraine and Ukraine [will] have to surrender in a few days.”

• Borrell Says He Knows How To Stop Ukraine Conflict ‘Immediately’ (RT)

The conflict between Moscow and Kiev that has been dragging on for more than a year can be ended in just several says, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell admitted on Spanish broadcaster La Sexta on Wednesday. It all depends on Western military supplies to Kiev, he claimed. “I know how to end the war immediately,” Borrell told La Sexta’s El Intermedio show. “Stop providing military aid to Ukraine and Ukraine [will] have to surrender in a few days. That’s it, the war is over.” the EU top diplomat presumed aloud. Borrell then said that it is not the outcome the EU and other Western nations would like to see. The bloc’s foreign-policy chief claimed that an immediate end to the conflict on such terms would see Ukraine “occupied” and “turned into a puppet country” that is “deprived of its freedoms.”

“Is this how we want the war to end?” he asked rhetorically. Borrell then blamed the continued hostilities on Moscow, saying that Russia has repeatedly insisted it would not stop until all the goals of its military campaign in Ukraine are achieved. He also criticized the peace efforts by China and Brazil, claiming these are detached from reality. “Everyone, who says they want peace should then say … ‘I want Russia to withdraw from Ukraine,” Brussels’ foreign-policy chief maintained, adding that he has little understanding for anyone thinking otherwise. “Those, who say: ‘I want peace and the best thing to achieve it is for the Europeans to cease helping Ukraine’ … frankly, I do not know what world they live in,” he said. Kiev promptly reacted to Borrell’s words, accusing him of having the “wrong emphasis” in his speech.

Withdrawal of Western military aid “could certainly not end the conflict immediately,” President Vladimir Zelensky’s aide Mikhail Podoliak said on Twitter. It would only lead to further escalation as hostilities would spill over to “other territories,” he claimed, without elaborating on his statement. Borrell’s words came less than a day after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also expressed his skepticism about Brazil and China’s peace efforts. Any mediation efforts would be in vain for now since both parties to the conflict are “fully involved” in the ongoing war, he told Spain’s El Pais on Tuesday.

The Kremlin said in late April it supported international efforts aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the conflict but still maintained that its goals in the conflict should be achieved. Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the need to protect the people of Donbass, as well as Kiev’s failure to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk peace accords, as reasons for launching Russia’s operation against Ukrainian forces in February 2022. He also said Russia was seeking the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Moscow has also accused Kiev of making any potential talks senseless since Ukraine is demanding Russia surrender all the territories that joined it following referendums, including the most recent, in autumn 2022.

Read more …

“Maria Zakharova earlier slammed NATO’s statements about Ukraine’s possible future accession as short-sighted and simply dangerous.”

• Ukraine’s NATO Accession Does Not Depend On Stoltenberg – Borrell (TASS)

A decision on Ukraine’s possible accession to NATO will be made by the bloc’s member states and not by its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said in an interview with the La Sexta TV channel on Wednesday. According to him, Ukraine’s NATO membership “does not depend on the NATO secretary general but the NATO countries.” The EU’s top diplomat also emphasized that the issue “is not under consideration” at the moment. Stoltenberg pointed out earlier that NATO’s doors remained open to Ukraine. He also claimed that all of the bloc’s member states supported Ukraine’s accession but, in his words, it will only be possible to substantially discuss the matter after the conflict is over. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova earlier slammed NATO’s statements about Ukraine’s possible future accession as short-sighted and simply dangerous.

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“The ultimate goal is to demilitarize NATO as a whole rather than just Ukraine, and so far, it appears to be working brilliantly.”

• Bold Gambits On The West Asian Chessboard (Pepe Escobar)

The collective west appears to lack a decisive leader, with the Hegemon currently being “led” by a senile president who is remote-controlled by a pack of polished-faced warmongers. The situation has devolved to the point where the much-hyped “Ukrainian counter-offensive” may actually be the prelude to a NATO humiliation that will make Afghanistan look like Disneyland in the Hindu Kush. Arguably there may be some similarities between Russia-NATO now and Turkiye-Russia before March 2020: both sides are betting on some crucial military breakthrough on the battlefield before sitting at the negotiating table. The US is desperate for it: even the 20th century ‘Oracle’ Henry Kissinger is now saying that with China involved, there will be negotiations before the end of 2023. Despite the urgency of the situation, Moscow does not appear to be in a hurry.

Its key military strategy, as seen in Bakhmut and Artemyovsk, is to use a combination of the snail technique and the mincing machine. The ultimate goal is to demilitarize NATO as a whole rather than just Ukraine, and so far, it appears to be working brilliantly. Russia is in it for the long haul, anticipating that one day the collective west will have an “Eureka!” moment and realize it is time to abandon the race. Now let’s assume, by some divine intervention, that negotiations would start in a few months, with China involved. Moscow – and Beijing – both know they simply cannot trust anything the Hegemon says or signs. Moreover, the crucial US tactical victory has already been conclusive: Russia sanctioned, demonized and separated from Europe, and the EU cemented as a de-industrialized, inconsequential lowly vassal.

Presupposing there is a negotiated peace, it will arguably resemble a Syria 2.0, with a massive “Idlib” equivalent right on Russia’s door, which is something entirely unacceptable to Moscow. In practice, we will have Banderista terror outfits – the Slav version of ISIS – free to roam across the Russian Federation in car bombing and kamikaze drone sprees. The Hegemon will be able to switch the proxy war on and off at will, just as it continues to do in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with its terror cells. The Security Council in Moscow knows very well, based on the Minsk farce acknowledged even by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that this will be Minsk on steroids: the Kiev regime, or rather the post-Zelensky regime will continue to be weaponized to death with brand new NATO gimmicks. But then the other option – where there is nothing to negotiate – is equally ominous: a Forever War.

Read more …

“We can only hope that America will elect a president in 2024 who will finally end NATO’s deadly world tour.”

• NATO ‘s Great New Idea: ‘Let’s Start A War With China!’ (Ron Paul)

NATO’s post-Cold War history is that of an organization far past its “sell-by” date. Desperate for a mission after the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO in the late 1990s decided that it would become the muscle behind the militarization of “human rights” under the Clinton Administration. Gone was the “threat of global communism” which was used to justify NATO’s 40-year run, so NATO re-imagined itself as a band of armed Atlanticist superheroes. Wherever there was an “injustice” (as defined by Washington’s neocons), NATO was ready with guns and bombs. The US military-industrial complex could not have been happier. All the Beltway think tanks they lavishly fund finally hit on a sure winner to keep the money pipeline flowing. It was always about money, not security.

The test run for NATO as human rights superheroes was Yugoslavia in 1999. To everybody but NATO and its neocon handlers in DC and many European capitals, it was a horrific, unjustified disaster. Seventy-eight days of bombing a country that did not threaten NATO left many hundreds of civilians dead, the infrastructure destroyed, and a legacy of uranium-tipped ammunition to poison the landscape for generations to come. Just last week tennis legend Novak Djokovic recalled what it felt like to flee his grandfather’s home in the middle of the night as NATO bombs fell and destroyed it. What a horror! Then NATO got behind the overthrow of the Gaddafi government in Libya. The corporate press regurgitated the neocon lies that bombing the country, killing its people, and overthrowing its government would solve all of Libya’s human rights problems.

As could be predicted, NATO bombs did not solve Libya’s problems but made everything worse. Chaos, civil war, terrorism, slave markets, crushing poverty – no wonder Hillary Clinton, Obama, and the neocons don’t want to talk about Libya these days. After a series of failures longer than we have space for here, DC-controlled NATO in 2014 decided to go all-in and target Russia itself for “regime change.” First step was overthrowing the democratically elected Ukrainian government, which Victoria Nuland and the rest of the neocons took care of. Next was the eight years of massive NATO military assistance to Ukraine’s coup government with the intent of fighting Russia. Finally, it was the 2022 rejection of Russia’s request to negotiate a European security agreement that would prevent NATO armies circling its border.

Despite the mainstream media and US government propaganda, NATO has been about as successful in Ukraine as it was in Libya. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been flushed away, with massive corruption documented by journalists like Seymour Hersh and others. The only difference this time is that NATO’s target – Russia – has nuclear weapons and views this proxy war as vital to its very existence. So now despite its legacy of failure, NATO has decided to start a conflict with China, perhaps to take attention off its disaster in Ukraine. Last week NATO announced that it will open its first-ever Asia office in Japan. What next, NATO membership for Taiwan? Will Taiwan willingly serve as NATO’s newest “Ukraine” – sacrificing itself to China in the name of blundering NATO’s seemingly endless appetite for conflict? We can only hope that America will elect a president in 2024 who will finally end NATO’s deadly world tour.

Read more …

“For President Tayyip Erdogan, extending the deal is a signal to the West that Turkey can be trusted. As a result, the government will do everything in its power to preserve the grain initiative..”

• Grain Deal To Be Extended Taking Into Account Russia’s Interests – Turkey (TASS)

The grain deal is expected to be extended at the talks that started on Wednesday in Istanbul, taking into account Russia’s objections, a source in Ankara close to the talks told TASS. “There is information that the agreement will be extended beyond May 18. That’s why I’m talking about it as a fact. And there are expectations that the export of Russian products will be a part of it,” the source said. According to the source, extending the grain deal is a crucial issue for the Turkish leadership in the run-up to the elections and they will do everything in their power to make it happen. “For President Tayyip Erdogan, extending the deal is a signal to the West that Turkey can be trusted. As a result, the government will do everything in its power to preserve the grain initiative,” the source said.


On July 22, 2022, a package of documents on the supply of food and fertilizers to the international market was signed in Istanbul. Initially, the agreements were concluded for 120 days. On March 18, 2023, Russia announced the extension of the initiative for 60 days. The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that a further extension of the deal would depend on the reconnection of the Russian Agricultural Bank to the SWIFT system and the lifting of a number of restrictions on supplies, insurance and the use of ports. The Turkish side earlier said that the Turkish state bank Ziraat may be ready to carry out operations to pay for Russian grain and fertilizers. The negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the UN on the extension of the grain deal and the implementation of the Russian part of the agreement on the supply of grain and fertilizers will last two days in Istanbul, with May 11 expected to be the key day of the negotiations.

Read more …

Well-known recipe

• US To Create ‘Free Syria Army’ Of Terrorists Against Damascus – Lavrov (TASS)

The United States has set about creating a “Free Syria Army,” consisting of terrorists and militants, to serve as a tool against the legitimate government in Damascus, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday. “It’s no longer enough for the US to support the self-proclaimed Kurdish regions beyond the Euphrates River and flood the illegal armed units that they have formed with weapons,” the Russian foreign minister pointed out during four-party talks on Syria with his counterparts from Syria, Turkey and Iran. “According to our data, the Americans have started to create the so-called Free Syria Army near the Syrian city of Raqqa, engaging local Arab tribes, along with militants from ISIL (the former name of the Islamic State terror group, which is outlawed in Russia – TASS) and other terrorist organizations.


The goal is clear: to use these militants against Syria’s legitimate authorities in order to destabilize the situation in the country,” Lavrov noted. Lavrov emphasized that the Russian and Syrian militaries had recently discussed the issue, agreeing on a model of joint actions in that field. “I hope that all planned steps will be successfully implemented,” the top Russian diplomat added. According to him, Moscow believes that “blatant foreign interference in the region’s affairs is unacceptable, particularly when it involves military force;” and in this case, it is about “deploying foreign military units to Syrian soil.”

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Because 450,000 Americans died vs 28 million Russians.

• Young Americans Don’t Understand History Of WWII – Kremlin (RT)

Younger generations of Americans no longer remember who fought against whom in World War II, and even middle-aged citizens are ignorant of the recent past, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has claimed. Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary said the lack of understanding of history among Americans was not merely “forgetfulness” but a “pernicious line” and warned of the consequences of such ignorance. “Not knowing the horrors of the past, not knowing who saved the world from the brown plague (fascism), means that soon in America there will be a generation that will be unable to soberly assess its present and its future,” Peskov said.

He noted that Russia, on the other hand, continues to do everything it can to keep the memory of the heroism of the Soviet people alive and make sure younger generations are aware of the true details of the war. Peskov also noted the presence of the leaders of former Soviet republics at the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow, suggesting that this demonstrated the political and social will of those countries to protect this history. “We will bring these truths to the people of the world, so that those who want to, can study the real facts [of WWII]” he said. His comments came after White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre attempted on Tuesday to describe Russia as analogous to Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and claimed that the “US and allied forces” were the ones who secured victory in WWII. Jean-Pierre also accused Vladimir Putin of having “promised only more violence” during his address at the May 9 parade in Moscow.

In his speech in Red Square, the Russian president denounced the “disgusting, criminal and deadly” ideology of Western supremacy and the globalists who “pit people against each other, split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia and aggressive nationalism, destroy traditional family values that make human a human.” Putin also claimed that the West had forgotten what “the insane ambitions of the Nazis led to” and who was responsible for defeating “this monstrous, total evil.” The Soviet Union did the lion’s share of the fighting in Europe, at the cost of 8.7 million soldiers and up to 20 million civilian lives. Victory Day marks the day on which the remnants of the Nazi regime officially signed their unconditional surrender to the USSR and Allied forces at the end of World War II. Although the document was signed in Berlin on May 8, due to different time zones, Russia has historically celebrated the event on May 9.

Zakharova
https://twitter.com/i/status/1656315747885547521

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Start small.

• Liechtenstein To Accept Bitcoin For Payments To State (RT)

The government of Liechtenstein is considering accepting Bitcoin as payment for state services, the micro-state’s Prime Minister Daniel Risch told Handelsblatt on Sunday. Risch, who is also Liechtenstein’s finance minister, said that a “Bitcoin payment option is coming.” The official didn’t specify what particular services will become available for payment in the digital currency, or when the announced payment method would become available. Any crypto received will be immediately exchanged for Swiss francs, Liechtenstein’s national currency, Risch said. Although crypto is too volatile to entrust portions of the country’s multi-billion-dollar annual savings, that assessment could change, he added. Bitcoin would not, however, be accorded the same legal status as the franc. Liechtenstein is a German-speaking microstate located in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. It is the world’s sixth smallest nation, with a population of under 39,000 people.


In 2019, the principality became one of the first places in the world to pass dedicated crypto regulations with The Liechtenstein Blockchain Act. Only two nations in the world have currently approved Bitcoin as legal tender – El Salvador and the Central African Republic. However, it was reported last month that the CAR has reversed this decision. There are still no uniform international laws that regulate cryptocurrencies, which are notorious for their high volatility. The most popular crypto, Bitcoin, was worth a fraction of a cent when it was launched in 2009 and shot up to nearly $69,000 per coin in November 2021. The rate has mostly been on a downward spiral since then, with the decline triggered by fraud allegations, government lawsuits and investigations, and general global economic instability. Bitcoin currently trades at nearly $28,000 per coin.

Read more …

Are we to believe they do not know this?

• Net Zero Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America (Rucker)

Science and policy analyst David Wojick calculated that just the batteries needed to back up wind and solar electricity generation in a “net zero” USA would cost $23 trillion — America’s entire 2021 gross domestic product (GDP) — and probably many times that. Energy and technology consultant Thomas Tanton found that battery backup to replace current U.S. fossil fuel electricity — and convert vehicles, furnaces, water heaters, and stoves to electricity — would cost at least $29 trillion in initial outlays. Trillions more would be needed to cover financing, repairs, maintenance, replacements, burying broken and worn out non-recyclable equipment, and building systems strong enough to survive hurricanes.

Professional engineer Ken Gregory determined that grid-backup battery costs could reach $290 trillion (12.6 times the USA’s 2021 GDP), based on actual 2019 and 2020 hourly intermittent electricity generation data, rather than annual average data utilized in the other studies. None of these estimates includes the costs of turbines, panels, transmission lines, or transformers. Energy analyst Francis Menton estimated that New York’s plan to procure 24,000 megawatt-hours of battery storage would provide only 0.2% of what the state would actually need as backup. But even that would require 300,000 Tesla Long Range 80-kilowatt-hour battery modules — before New York mandates electric automobiles and home heating and cooking systems.

Each of those modules weighs over 1,000 pounds and holds 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells. Each one contains 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel; 44 pounds of manganese; 30 pounds of cobalt; 200 pounds of copper; and over 550 pounds of aluminum, steel, graphite, plastics, and other materials, energy analyst Ron Stein reports. To manufacture each module, we must mine 30,000 pounds of cobalt ore (much of it with child labor in the Congo), 5,000 pounds of nickel ore, and 25,000 pounds of copper ore, plus inject and extract 25,000 pounds of brine to get the lithium. Backing up New York’s peak summertime electricity needs for just 45 minutes (those 300,000 battery modules) would require 3,750 tons of lithium, 9,000 tons of nickel, 6,600 tons of manganese, 4,500 tons of cobalt, 30,000 tons of copper, and 82,500 tons of other materials.

Together, we’d need to mine more than seventy-five million tons of ores for those New York grid-backup batteries — after removing at least as much overlying rock to get to the ore bodies. Backing up California’s currently planned wind and solar electricity generation would require nearly 310,000,000 long-range modules. Imagine the batteries, materials, and ores that we’d need for the entire USA — or world!

True cost

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“Julian has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. He is routinely denied access to his lawyers. He has lost a lot of weight, suffered a minor stroke, spent time in the prison hospital wing — which prisoners call the hell wing — because he is suicidal, been placed in prolonged solitary confinement, observed banging his head against the wall and hallucinating.”

• Julian Assange – A Fight We Must Not Lose (Chris Hedges)

The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British, Swedish and U.S. governments are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment.


The legal lynching of Julian, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives. Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did former President Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the C.I.A. violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the embassy and assassinate him?


And Our Flags Are Still There – By Mr. Fish.

The corporate state eviscerates enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy, with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. This is how we have a government — whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens — that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens, such as the Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press which is legally permitted to publish classified information and our generation’s most important publisher sitting in solitary confinement in a high security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.


The psychological torture of Julian — documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer — mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984. The Gestapo broke bones. The East German Stasi broke souls. We, too, have refined the cruder forms of torture to destroy souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is what they are doing to Julian, steadily degrading his physical and psychological health. It is a slow-motion execution. This is by design. Julian has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. He is routinely denied access to his lawyers. He has lost a lot of weight, suffered a minor stroke, spent time in the prison hospital wing — which prisoners call the hell wing — because he is suicidal, been placed in prolonged solitary confinement, observed banging his head against the wall and hallucinating. Our version of Orwell’s dreaded Room 101.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Cold Outside

 

 

 

 

Vet
https://twitter.com/i/status/1656281389346480128

 

 

Pigeon loop

 

 

Mola mola

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle March 7 2023

Mar 072023
 
 March 7, 2023  Posted by at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  64 Responses »


Roy DeCarava Woman walking above, New York 1950

 

• Pentagon Chief Downplays Importance Of Bakhmut (RT)
• Zelensky At Odds With Top General – Bild (RT)
• Zelensky’s Office Says Zaluzhny Supports Further Battles In Bakhmut (TASS)
• About 10,000 Ukrainian Troops Remain In Bakhmut – DPR Advisor (TASS)
• Ukraine Sustains Big Losses In Bakhmut – El Pais (TASS)
• NATO Estimates Russia Lost 5 Times More Soldiers In Bakhmut Than Ukraine (Az.)
• Direct Talks Between Russia, US Needed To Settle Conflict In Ukraine – Hungary (TASS)
• Bulgaria Profiteering From Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• Norway Earns Record Oil, Gas Revenue After Ukraine War (RT)
• Nord Streams’ Fate To Be Decided By Gazprom, Other Shareholders – Kremlin (TASS)
• Medvedev Eyes ‘Final Nail’ In Neocolonialism’s Coffin (RT)
• A Massive Global Restructuring is Underway (IM)
• CNN Boss Ordered Staff Not To Chase Down Covid Lab Leak Theory (Fox)
• America’ COVID Response Was Based on Lies (Scott Atlas)
• Twitter Insiders: We Can’t Protect Users From Trolling Under Musk (BBC)
• Allegorical Intermezzo (Kunstler)
• FDA Pledges to ‘Save Lives’ by Policing Online Content (CHD)
• Those Pesky Savanna Monkeys and Their Dreams of Gold Hydrogen (Ugo Bardi)
• Jan. 6 Footage Shows Capitol Cops Escorting QAnon Shaman To Senate Floor (NYP)

 

 

 

 

Massie
https://twitter.com/i/status/1632923911980474373

 

 

 

 

 

 

RFKjr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1632557264178491392

 

 

Crosstalk Pepe

 

 

 

 

Jaishankar

 

 

 

 

There’s a story here. Germany’s BILD Zeitung reports that Ukraine’s military no. 1, Valery Zaluzhny, called for a withdrawal from Bakhmut weeks ago. Other reports say the US wanted such a withdrawal since late January. Zelensky kept refusing. And now the story has become that everyone agrees to stay in Bakhmut, while at the same time downplaying its importance, either militarily or as a symbol.

It’s PR thing now, pure and simple. NATO can blame Zelensky from here on in, and is scot-free. AND: NATO’s not losing, Zelensky is. If only he’d listened, he’s be winning.

• Pentagon Chief Downplays Importance Of Bakhmut (RT)

The city of Artyomovsk, or Bakhmut as it is known by Ukraine, is of more symbolic than operational importance, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed on Monday, according to Reuters. The battle for the city – a major stronghold and logistics hub for Kiev’s forces in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) – has continued for months, being described by some as the fiercest in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.Yan Gagin, an adviser to the DPR’s acting head Denis Pushilin, said on Monday that Russian forces have encircled the key city, trapping around 10,000 Ukrainian troops inside. The Pentagon chief, however, said he wouldn’t consider it a strategic setback if Ukrainian troops decide to reposition themselves on new defense lines west of the city. “The fall of [Artyomovsk] won’t necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight,” he said. While acknowledging the possibility of a defeat for Ukraine in Artyomovsk, Austin refused to speculate on whether or when it’ll happen.


German tabloid Bild reported on Monday that the city had become a source of internal conflict between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and the commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces General Valery Zaluzhny. Insiders in Kiev told the outlet that Zaluzhny had called for a withdrawal from the city weeks ago. However, Zelensky’s office said on Monday morning that his top generals supported continuing the defensive operation in Bakhmut. According to Western media reports, the US government has been urging Kiev to pull out of Artyomovsk since late January and to prepare instead for future counter-offensives in other areas. However, Zelensky has insisted the city will fight for as long as possible. Senior Biden administration officials told the Washington Post in late February that the Ukrainian leader “attaches symbolic importance” to the city and fears a setback to morale if it’s captured by Russian forces.

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“US officials have assessed that its loss to Russia would not affect the strategic situation..”

• Zelensky At Odds With Top General – Bild (RT)

An internal conflict is underway between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and General Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, according to government sources cited by Bild on Monday. Kiev insiders told the German tabloid that the military commander called for a withdrawal from a key Donbass city weeks ago. Zaluzhny advised the president to abandon Artyomovsk, known as Bakhmut in Ukraine, rather than keep defending it as Russian troops threatened to take control of the city, the newspaper reported. However the Ukrainian leader declared the city a fortress, and refused to pull troops back.

Russian forces have made notable advances in the fight for Artyomovsk this year. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private military company Wagner Group, claimed last Friday that it was “de-facto completely surrounded,” with only one road available for possible evacuation. According to US media, Washington has been urging Zelensky to pull out of Artyomovsk and focus on preparing a major counteroffensive for the spring using Western-supplied weapons, but the Ukrainian president fears a morale hit that such a move would cause. The city is part of a 70km Ukrainian defense line created since Kiev initiated the fighting in Donbass in 2014. US officials have assessed that its loss to Russia would not affect the strategic situation.

Bild sources claimed that Ukrainian troops on the ground in Artyomovsk “do not understand why the city is being held” and believe they should have withdrawn a long time ago. Zelensky recently stated that Ukrainian forces would defend it as long as it “remains reasonable” to do so. The German tabloid also noted that Zaluzhny’s popularity for leading the military campaign against Russia makes him a viable challenger to Zelensky in a potential presidential run. The general has not publicly announced any ambition to run for office, but rumors have been circulating in Ukraine for months regarding Zelensky’s concerns over possible competition.

Read more …

Seniors and teenagers.

• Zelensky’s Office Says Zaluzhny Supports Further Battles In Bakhmut (TASS)

The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, and the commander of the Ground Forces of the Ukrainian armed forces, Alexander Syrsky, have supported further battles in Artyomovsk, a town known in Ukraine as Bakhmut, and efforts to reinforce Ukrainian positions in the town, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s office said on Monday. The statement followed news media reports that Zelensky and Zaluzhny had differences. Zelensky held a meeting of top military officers that, among other things, had an in-depth discussion of the situation in Artyomovsk, and asked Zaluzhny and Syrsky about further plans of Ukrainian forces in the area.

“They [Zaluzhny and Syrsky] spoke in favor of continuing the defense operation and further reinforcement of our positions in Bakhmut,” said the statement that was published on the Ukrainian presidential website.The Bild newspaper earlier reported, citing sources, that the situation around Artyomovsk caused disagreement between Zelensky and Zaluzhny. According to the report, Zaluzhny told Zelensky a few weeks ago that Ukrainian troops needed to be pulled out of Artyomovsk. The Ukrainian president, however, had a fundamentally different view on the issue. Artyomovsk is located in the Kiev-controlled part of the DPR and is an important transportation hub for supplying Ukrainian troops in Donbass.

Fierce fighting has been raging for the town. Denis Pushilin, the interim head of the Donetsk People’s Republic said on February 16 that Russian forces had seized control of all key heights near Artyomovsk. Zelensky said on February 20 that Ukraine would fight for Artyomovsk “while it makes sense.” Additional units continue to be sent to the town. Andrey Marochko, a retired lieutenant-colonel of the People’s Militia of the Lugansk People’s Republic, told TASS that Kiev had sent even underage children to take part in the hostilities. Yan Gagin, an adviser to interim head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Monday that Ukrainian forces in Artyomovsk were trapped just like they were in Debaltsevo in 2015.

Read more …

“..Prigozhin said that tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops were fiercely resisting Russian forces in Artyomovsk.”

• About 10,000 Ukrainian Troops Remain In Bakhmut – DPR Advisor (TASS)

There are currently some 10,000 Ukrainian servicemen in Artyomovsk, known as Bakhmut in Ukraine, Yan Gagin, who is an advisor to acting leader of Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Denis Pushilin, said on Monday. “Quite a large garrison of [Ukrainian troops] is still deployed in Artyomovsk – some 10,000 people or, perhaps, somewhat more. Parts of it have already left the city, and some parts have been attempting to leave it, while our artillery has been trying to hit them,” the expert told Rossya-1 television. Earlier on Monday, Gagin also said that the cauldron in Artymovosk was similar to the one Ukrainian troops got encircled into in 2015. On March 1, founder of the Wagner private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin said that tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops were fiercely resisting Russian forces in Artyomovsk.

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“..the Ukrainian military admits that several of its best-trained army units have been destroyed near Artyomovsk in recent months..”

• Ukraine Sustains Big Losses In Bakhmut – El Pais (TASS)

Ukraine’s armed forces have sustained huge losses in Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine), despite the fact that several of their best brigades were deployed to the city, Spain’s El Pais reported on Monday. According to the newspaper, on Friday Ukrainian troops blew up two small bridges linking the only Ukraine-controlled access road to Artyomovsk and erected a floating bridge instead. The newspaper also reported that several small groups of Ukrainian soldiers arrived in the city as reinforcements. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the Ukrainian military admits that several of its best-trained army units have been destroyed near Artyomovsk in recent months. Although data on Ukraine’s losses are classified, some officers acknowledge the losses on condition of anonymity. Artyomovsk, a major transport hub used as a logistics center for the Ukrainian army in Donbass, is located in the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Fierce fighting continues for control of the city. Acting head of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) Denis Pushilin said on February 16 that Russian forces had taken control of the high ground around Artyomovsk.

Retreat from Bakhmut

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Guys like Col. Macgregor put the ratio at 8:1, and likely worse. NATO claims 1:5. Oh, sure.

• NATO Estimates Russia Lost 5 Times More Soldiers In Bakhmut Than Ukraine (Az.)

NATO intelligence estimates that for every Ukrainian soldier killed defending Bakhmut, Russian forces have lost at least five, a military official with the North Atlantic alliance told CNN on Monday, Report informs. The official cautioned the five to one ratio was an informed estimate based on intelligence.The official spoke to CNN on the condition they remain anonymous because they are not allowed to discuss this intelligence. Despite the favorable ratio, they also said Ukraine was suffering significant losses defending the city. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly claimed they were inflicting heavy losses on Russia as Moscow tried to take Bakhmut.

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And a few actually want peace….

• Direct Talks Between Russia, US Needed To Settle Conflict In Ukraine – Hungary (TASS)

Hungary believes the settlement of the armed conflict in Ukraine requires direct talks between Russia and the US, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in the country’s parliament on Monday. “We would welcome direct talks between the US and Russia” on Ukraine, the minister said. He brought up the brief conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken during a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of 20 countries in India on March 2. “It would be nice if they had more time to talk. With the few minutes they had, it was quite hard to discuss paths to a lasting settlement [in Ukraine],” Szijjarto said.


He also said that most countries support the establishment of peace in Ukraine as soon as possible.”Peace requires peace talks, and for this to happen we must keep the channels of communication open,” the minister said. Earlier, the Hungarian government has repeatedly stated it believed that in order to resolve the Ukrainian conflict, negotiations should go not only between Ukraine and Russia, but also between Russia and the United States, since Washington provides most political and military support to Kiev.

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Two EU countries profiteer from the war: Bulgaria and Norway.

“Last year alone, at least $1 billion in arms was transferred from Bulgaria to Ukraine, mostly through Poland and Romania..”

• Bulgaria Profiteering From Ukraine Conflict (RT)

Bulgarian arms makers exported products worth billions of dollars to Ukraine using third-party countries as intermediaries, EURACTIV revealed in an investigation published on Monday. It had earlier been reported that former prime minister Kiril Petkov claimed credit for the scheme, which circumvented opponents of such transactions in the Bulgarian government. The outlet’s findings indicate that the practice of indirect arms supplies predated the outbreak of Russian-Ukrainian hostilities. However once the conflict escalated in February 2022, Bulgarian manufacturers enjoyed a rapid increase in profits, doubling sales last year. Bulgaria is a major producer of munitions compatible with Soviet-designed weapons, which Ukraine used extensively before the US and its allies supplied it with Western-produced alternatives.

Last year alone, at least $1 billion in arms was transferred from Bulgaria to Ukraine, mostly through Poland and Romania, sources told EURACTIV. No direct arms contracts were signed, the outlet added. The funneling of arms was done through foreign schemes and funded using foreign finance, according to Velizar Shalamanov, the former acting defense minister and a vocal supporter of shipping arms to Ukraine. There is a program with good funding in Great Britain, the United States and Poland. Through this program, the armaments needed for Ukraine are bought, that is, the money is not Ukrainian but British, American, Polish or European. That is why it is bought through other companies,” he told EURACTIV.

The clandestine deliveries were repoerted in January by the German daily Die Welt, which gave credit for the scheme to former Bulgarian prime minister Kiril Petkov and ex-finance minister Asen Vasilev. They are both Harvard University graduates and belong to the same pro-NATO political movement, which they founded together. “We estimate that around a third of the ammunition needed by the Ukrainian Army came from Bulgaria in the early stages of the war,” Petkov said at the time. The prime minister had taken the steps contrary to public opinion, which was overwhelmingly opposed to giving extensive aid to Ukraine, over concerns that their country would be dragged into the conflict, Die Welt reported.

Petkov’s government was backed by a coalition of four parties, and, according to the German paper, he went behind the back of the Socialists – a coalition member that publicly opposed any armament supplies to Ukraine. Petkov lost his position in a no-confidence vote last June. The Bulgarian parliament failed to form a stable government after snap elections in October and is currently preparing for a new national ballot in April. The country approved its first official military aid package to Kiev in December, with President Rumen Radev declining to block the proposal backed by parliament.

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After During Ukraine War.

• Norway Earns Record Oil, Gas Revenue After Ukraine War (RT)

The Norwegian state raked in record oil and gas revenues last year after the war in Ukraine sent energy prices soaring, official figures showed Monday, Report informs via Barron’s. Norway earned 1.5 trillion kroner ($140 billion) in revenues from oil and gas, according to estimates by Statistics Norway (SSB). It was “by far the highest ever recorded in the statistics” and almost three times the 498 billion kroner earned in 2021, according to SSB. Norway became Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas in 2022 as Russia cut deliveries and the Scandinavian country increased its own exports. Oslo’s income was buoyed by record high European gas prices over the summer which have since subsided. The exceptional revenues have sometimes earned Norway the label of “war profiteer”, a label that Oslo rejects. Norway has pledged 75 billion kroner in civil and military aid to Ukraine over the next five years (2023-2027), or 15 billion kroner per year.

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“He answered in the negative when asked whether there would be recommendations from the Kremlin to Gazprom on this matter..”

• Nord Streams’ Fate To Be Decided By Gazprom, Other Shareholders – Kremlin (TASS)

The decision about the future of the Nord Stream pipelines will be made by Gazprom and other shareholders of the project, and there will be no recommendations from the Kremlin on this matter to the company, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. When asked about the future of Nord Streams, the Kremlin official advised to contact Gazprom, which “is a shareholder in this international project.” “Of course, this is a decision that should be made collectively by all shareholders – this is an international project,” Peskov stressed. He answered in the negative when asked whether there would be recommendations from the Kremlin to Gazprom on this matter. “First of all, you need to contact Gazprom,” the Kremlin spokesman repeated.

Earlier, Reuters reported citing sources that the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines are set to be sealed up and mothballed. On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage that occurred the day before on three strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore gas pipelines. On September 26, 2022, Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on the pipeline routes. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office launched a criminal case based on charges of international terrorism. On February 8, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article, which said, citing sources, that US Navy divers had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the cover of the BALTOPS exercise in June 2022, and Norwegians activated the bombs three months later.

According to the journalist, the decision to conduct the operation was made by US President Joe Biden personally, following nine months of discussions with White House security specialists. White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a comment to TASS that Hersh’s account was “utterly false and complete fiction.” At a meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers on March 2, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow will continue to seek a prompt and impartial investigation of sabotage at the gas pipelines. Moscow insists on its participation in this probe, he added. He noted that the call of the Russian Federation to reflect the need for a fair investigation into Nord Stream in the G20 declaration was ignored.

Read more …

“As more and more countries “stop fearing Western diktat” and start to assert their national interests more actively, the former colonial powers are bound to lose their hold on the regions they once thought were theirs..”

• Medvedev Eyes ‘Final Nail’ In Neocolonialism’s Coffin (RT)

Russia is ready to help the world do away with the vestiges of a Western-dominated colonial past, former president Dmitry Medvedev has claimed. The official argued that as a nation “which has never had any colonies,” Russia is well-placed to take part in this process. In an article published on Monday, Medvedev claimed that “geopolitical turbulence has cut open an abscess of the old problems of our world.” The ex-president and now deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, argued that the “malignant tumor of a colonial past” is a problem that calls for “international surgery.” He noted that the Soviet Union played a major role in dismantling the colonial system of the 20th century. “We, together with other countries, can now drive the final nail in the coffin of the Western world’s neo-colonial aspirations,” Medvedev proclaimed in the piece, posted on the United Russia party website.

As an example, the former president cited Argentina’s decision to renounce a 2016 deal with the UK with respect to the disputed Falkland/Malvinas islands in the South Atlantic, which were at the center of a military conflict in 1982. On Thursday, Argentinian Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero said he had notified his British counterpart, James Cleverly, of the move during a meeting in New Delhi, India, on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Buenos Aires “has proposed to resume negotiations on the question of sovereignty” in compliance with the mandate of the UN General Assembly and the world body’s Committee on Decolonization, Cafiero clarified. Medvedev argued that the decisions to show French troops the door last year by two of France’s former colonies in Africa, the Central African Republic and Mali, fit this pattern too.

Medvedev pointed out, however, that there are still a number of dependent territories around the globe ruled by Western powers such as the UK and France. He expressed skepticism that those nations will willingly relinquish control of the remains of their former empires. As more and more countries “stop fearing Western diktat” and start to assert their national interests more actively, the former colonial powers are bound to lose their hold on the regions they once thought were theirs, he concluded. Following the start of Russia’s military campaign against Ukraine last February and amid fierce confrontation with the West, top Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have increasingly advocated the establishment of a “multipolar world” which does not center around the wishes of one single superpower.

Read more …

“If everyone thinks that we are guaranteed to win the war, it seems very unlikely.”

Interesting piece of video of Arestovich.

• A Massive Global Restructuring is Underway (IM)

We’ve long said that Hungary was going to leave the EU. It is just a question of time. The daily news announced that “hundreds of high-ranking military officers sacked in Hungary”. From the article: “Multiple Hungarian media outlets reported that Hungary’s defense minister sacked hundreds of high-ranking military officers. The people concerned have two months to leave and will get 70 percent of their current salaries as a pension-like allowance even if they continue to work. The minister says the move served the rejuvenation and modernisation of the army. The opposition believes the government fired pro-NATO officers.” To be clear, I don’t know if this is true. But as with most things, you piece together multiple bits of information and a picture forms providing probabilities. It is with these probabilities that we begin to price outcomes and assets accordingly.

Where most probable outcomes coincide with cheap or expensive asset classes is where we find asymmetry. So what we do know is that Hungary has been against the Ukraine war from the get go. Orban has been a thorn in the EU’s side, refusing to bow to ever increasing levels of control and mismanagement. He is extraordinarily popular at home and this has the pointy shoes in Brussels in a tizz. How dare he? The article goes on to explain the mass sacking. “The ministry says this move served the aim to modernise the army and pave the way to the rise of a new officer generation. Media reports about more than a hundred generals, colonels and other high-ranking officers sent away. Meanwhile, the former defence secretary and the Democratic Coalition’s MP, Ágnes Vadai, counted around 170 officers on Thursday. She added the officers sent away were pro-NATO.”

What may have prompted this? Well, I did note this…This guy with the dress sense of a circus clown just resigned. He is — or should I say was — advisor to Zelensky’s chief of staff. A recent article announced that Oleksiy Arestovich resigns as advisor to Zelensky’s office. “Oleksiy Arestovich submitted his resignation from the position of external adviser to the office of the president of Ukraine. “I want to show an example of what civilized behavior is: a fundamental error, then resignation,” he wrote on his social media, attaching a photo of his letter.” After his resignation he went on political analyst Yuri Romanenko’s Youtube channel and had this to say. “I’m an unofficial person already, I can say what I want.” Then having said that, spat this out… “If everyone thinks that we are guaranteed to win the war, it seems very unlikely.”

This is particularly interesting since the former actor (I know right, it’s like the entire cabinet are actors) coined the name. I’d say propagandist but whatever. His job, as far as I can tell, was to run a Youtube channel, which earned him the nickname “Therapist-in-Chief” and was devoted to assuring Ukrainians that the situation was under control, Ukraine had the upper hand, and that the war would be over soon. So basically a professional liar. A Ukrainian version of the BBC and CNN. So as you can see, quite a turnaround for the “everything’s under control” kid. I guess the cocaine dwarf didn’t funnel enough of the Western taxpaying serfs’ money through Europe’s laundromat to him in order to keep up the charade. Or he quite possibly actually fears for his life because at some point a Russian bullet may exit the back of his head. Who knows?

Read more …

“CNN bent over backwards to knock down what former President Trump and members of his administration said lending credibility to the lab-leak theory..”

• CNN Boss Ordered Staff Not To Chase Down Covid Lab Leak Theory (Fox)

CNN has long referred to itself as “the most trusted name in news” and famously launched its “Facts First” campaign during the Trump era, but like many other outlets, that sentiment fell by the wayside when it came to the COVID lab-leak theory. In recent days, the theory that COVID originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been embraced by FBI Director Christopher Wray and a bombshell report indicated that the U.S. Energy Department believes the virus likely started in the lab, a sentiment expressed by top Trump administration officials nearly from the outset. But in the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a well-placed CNN insider.

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”Throughout Zucker’s tenure as CNN’s chief, he pulled what was once widely seen as a straight-news organization to an anti-Trump operation. CNN bent over backwards to knock down what former President Trump and members of his administration said lending credibility to the lab-leak theory, as the White House was deemed a nemesis by the network. On March 28, 2020, CNN’s Oliver Darcy published a story headlined, “Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family,” that offered advice about dealing with pesky loved ones who didn’t believe in mainstream COVID-19 narratives at the time.

“While the coronavirus pandemic has isolated family and friends inside their homes, it has in many cases increased online or over-the-phone communication with loved ones,” Darcy wrote. “But, in some cases, relatives and friends share poor information – whether it is bad science related to how to prevent the virus, debunked rumors about cities being put on lockdown, or conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. While any strain of misinformation is not ideal, misinformation related to a public health crisis has an especially dangerous element to it,” Darcy continued before declaring that “bad information during a public health emergency poses a risk to those who fall victim to it.” Darcy’s admonition came as CNN was one of many mainstream outlets to declare the lab-leak notion utterly preposterous.

Read more …

Scott Atlas was an early Fauci/Birx victim.

• America’ COVID Response Was Based on Lies (Scott Atlas)

Almost all of America’s leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures—even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as “learned” or “new evidence.” Little acknowledgement of error is to be found. We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.

The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns’ critics, alongside absurd denials of officials’ own incessant demands for them. In the Trump administration, Dr. Deborah Birx was formally in charge of the medical side of the White House’s coronavirus task force during the pandemic’s first year. In that capacity, she authored all written federal policy recommendations to governors and states and personally advised each state’s public health officials during official visits, often with Vice President Mike Pence, who oversaw the entire task force. Upon the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci became chief medical advisor and ran the Biden pandemic response.

We must acknowledge the abject failure of the Birx-Fauci policies. They were enacted, but they failed to stop the dying, failed to stop the infection from spreading, and inflicted massive damage and destruction particularly on lower-income families and on America’s children. More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. Even after draconian measures, including school closures, stoppage of non-COVID medical care, business shutdowns, personal restrictions, and then the continuation of many restrictions and mandates in the presence of a vaccine, there was an undeniable failure—over two presidential administrations—to stop cases from rapidly escalating.Numerous experts—including John Ioannidis, David Katz, and myself—called for targeted protection, a safer alternative to widespread lockdowns, in national media beginning in March of 2020. That proposal was rejected. History’s biggest public health policy failure came at the hands of those who recommended the lockdowns and those who implemented them, not those who advised otherwise.

[..] None of us are so naïve as to expect a direct apology from critics at my employer, Stanford University, or in government, academic public health, and the media. But to ensure that this never happens again, government leaders, power-driven officials, and influential academics and advisors often harboring conflicts of interest must be held accountable. Personally, I remain highly skeptical that any government investigation or commission can avoid politicization. Regardless of their intention, all such government-run inquiries will at least be perceived as politically motivated and their conclusions will be rejected outright by many. Those investigations must proceed, though, if only to seek the truth, to teach our children that truth matters, and to remember G.K. Chesterton’s critical lesson that “Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”

Moderna software

Read more …

By Marianna Spring – BBC “Disinformation and social media correspondent”.

Saw part of the doc, fell asleep. Disinformation for these people is anything they don’t agree with. They drag out a rape victim and blame her misery on Elon Musk.

• Twitter Insiders: We Can’t Protect Users From Trolling Under Musk (BBC)

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk. Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk’s leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles. Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times. I’ve spoken to dozens, with several going on the record for the first time.

The former head of content design says everyone on her team – which created safety measures such as nudge buttons – has been sacked. She later resigned. Internal research by Twitter suggests those safety measures reduced trolling by 60%. An engineer working for Twitter told me “nobody’s taking care” of this type of work now, likening the platform to a building that seems fine from the outside, but inside is “on fire”. Twitter has not replied to the BBC’s request for comment. My investigation also reveals:

• Concerns that child sexual exploitation is on the rise on Twitter and not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement
• Targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations – once removed daily from Twitter – are going “undetected”, according to a recent employee.
• Exclusive data showing how misogynistic online hate targeting me is on the rise since the takeover, and that there has been a 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
• Rape survivors have been targeted by accounts that have become more active since the takeover, with indications they’ve been reinstated or newly created.

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“My gawd, it’s going to be a long haul, but have a little faith — remember what that is? (It’s the conviction that all of us together stand in some meaningful relation to existence.)”

• Allegorical Intermezzo (Kunstler)

The credibility of finance was thrown overboard a long time ago. Capital was sloshing around in the bilges as the ship heaved and pitched in the angry waters, and it had to go somewhere. The next turn will be when you go looking for where it went and you discover to your nauseated chagrin that the capital is just… gone! Through some legerdemain of physics, it disappeared… turned into a kind of anti-matter… fell through a black hole (possibly ripped by that iceberg), or up the smokestacks, like it was never there at all. When that happens, our collective attention finally gets galvanized as by no shock before. When capital is truly gone, transmogrified into a whole lot of nothing, the time for standing by making faces and whining is over.

By the way, this is the way the world ends for the vacuum known as “Joe Biden” and the Party of Chaos he is propped up to represent. Chaos, we will be astounded to learn, is not your friend, is not the solution to anything, least of all a polity that is floundering in lifeboats over cold, dark, deep water a thousand leagues from dry land. What’s more, there are no ships coming to the rescue. Guess why they put oars in the boats. Get set to pull, me hardies! Yes, we’re at sea now, without a compass. Yet the stars sparkle dazzlingly above, and some aboard can actually read what they say and what they point to. If safety and sanity will not find us, maybe we can pull together toward wherever they wait.

My gawd, it’s going to be a long haul, but have a little faith — remember what that is? (It’s the conviction that all of us together stand in some meaningful relation to existence.) Even if you’re too mentally drained to believe it, act as if it is so. Or, in post-modern parlance, fake it till you make it. Didn’t think it would come to this when you signed on to the voyage? I guess so. You were comfortably ensconced one winter night in the mini-McMansion, on the overstuffed sofa, entertained by some Netflix inanity, scarfing down the microwaved cheeze morsels… when the wife said, “Hey, let’s book a cruise!” Seemed like a good idea at the time, which is what everything in the annals of history is and was. And now, look at where you are!

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‘Easier’ to inform public when there were fewer communication channels..’

• FDA Pledges to ‘Save Lives’ by Policing Online Content (CHD)

Since U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf began his second tenure as the agency’s head in February 2022, he has made combating “misinformation” one of his top priorities, arguing it is “a leading cause of preventable death in America now” — though “this cannot be proved,” he said. In an interview [last] Tuesday with The Associated Press (AP), Califf, who also headed the FDA between 2016 and 2017, reiterated his pledge to “save lives” by policing online content. One year into his second tenure as FDA commissioner — and despite waning public trust in the FDA — Califf has launched several FDA initiatives aimed “‘helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medical products and foods to maintain and improve their health’ in the face of a tsunami of confusing and misleading information.”

In his AP interview, Califf said increasing “distortions and half-truths” about vaccines and other medical treatments are “a leading cause of death in America.” “Almost no one should be dying of COVID in the U.S. today,” he said, adding that people who deny themselves the vaccines “are dying because they’re misinformed.” Combating “misinformation” is one of Califf’s priorities, along with “restructuring the agency’s food safety program and more aggressively deploying FDA scientists to explain vaccine decisions in the media.” When he took the helm last year, Califf called for the FDA to be more proactive in “countering misinformation.” Upon being sworn in last year, he said: “These kinds of distortions and half-truths that find their way into the public domain do enormous harm, both by leading people to behavior that is detrimental to their health and by causing them to eschew interventions that would improve their health. “A purely reactive mode is not appropriate, particularly in this new era of social media.”

Califf said, at the time, that he expected to take about a year to develop a strategy to combat medical “misinformation,” in a process that would involve public meetings. Six months into his term, on Aug. 5, 2022, Califf tweeted: “The distortions and half-truths of misinformation and disinformation pose enormous dangers to the effectiveness of science and to public health itself, through the negative impact it has on individual behavior. “That’s why I’ve made combating misinformation one of my priorities. Providing factual info is the key to helping people make the best informed decisions about their health.” According to Pharma Intelligence, Califf’s interest in targeting so-called “misinformation,” particularly on social media platforms, stems from his previous job at Verily, a life sciences company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.

Califf has frequently panned the proliferation of communication channels and platforms for this alleged rise in “misinformation.” Speaking at the TCT 2022 (Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics) conference, Califf said the FDA in the past would make decisions and then employ a system it had in place to directly communicate those decisions to hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, insurers and others. Now, FDA announcements are often met with “faux outrage and lies,” according to Califf, making it difficult for the “average patient to separate the truth from the lies.”

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“..if hydrogen is available in gaseous form in the ground, the economics suddenly work.” So, the energy problem is solved. Move on, folks, now we can restart economic growth. ”

• Those Pesky Savanna Monkeys and Their Dreams of Gold Hydrogen (Ugo Bardi)

By now, you probably heard the story of “Natural Hydrogen,” (or “Gold Hydrogen”), the new source of clean energy that should come for free to us, outgassed from the depths of Earth. In 2020, the idea had been reviewed by Zgonnnik (see also an earlier paper), but the concept is becoming popular after it was described in a lengthy article on “Science” of Feb 17, 2022, and then taken up in an enthusiastic article in the NY times on Feb 27, where Peter Coy defines natural hydrogen as a “Gold Mine of Clean Energy Hiding Under our Feet.” Citing from the “Times” article, “….from an economic point of view, it doesn’t make any sense” to use electricity to produce hydrogen, transport the gas and then extract the energy through combustion or a fuel cell. But if hydrogen is available in gaseous form in the ground, the economics suddenly work.” So, the energy problem is solved. Move on, folks, now we can restart economic growth.

What’s wrong with this idea? Nothing. And everything. There is nothing wrong with finding hydrogen seeping out from the ground. Earth is a huge ball of rock, and it may well be that, somewhere, it contains free hydrogen, maybe even large amounts in comparison with human needs. Unfortunately, everything is wrong with the idea of exploiting that hydrogen as an economic resource. Here, we always stumble on the same problem: most people don’t understand the difference between amount, and concentration. A resource is not a resource if it is not concentrated enough. Actually, it has to be concentrated a lot if extracting it has to make sense in economic terms. Think of the two resources that made our modern world: oil and gas. By a miracle of geology, you can find them concentrated and nearly pure in the structures we call “wells.” Drill a hole into one of these wells, and often oil will flow out by itself in huge gushes.

Sometimes you have to pump it out, but it still remains a miracle that you can have so much of it, and so concentrated. That’s how we could create an entire civilization based on it. It is not always so easy: concentrated mineral resources are very rare in Earth’s crust. The problem is best explained by the example of gold. There are large amounts of it dissolved in seawater: tens of millions of tons. It is a lot of gold, but that’s because there is a lot of seawater. If you look at the concentration, we are talking of something around 0.005 parts per billion (ppb) or, if you prefer, a few parts per trillion. That’s way too low to make extraction feasible, as it was discovered by the German chemist Fritz Haber in the 1920s when he tried to extract gold from the sea to replenish the coffers of the German state, depleted by the Great War. Actually, he had been experimenting with the idea even before the war, but he failed anyway; it was simply impossible. If it is not concentrated enough, it is not a resource.

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Tucker’s off to a promising start.

• Jan. 6 Footage Shows Capitol Cops Escorting QAnon Shaman To Senate Floor (NYP)

Newly revealed surveillance footage from Jan. 6, 2021, shows two Capitol police officers escorting Jacob Chansley, the be-horned so-called “QAnon Shaman” who has come to symbolize the riot, through the halls of the Capitol and to the very door of the US Senate. The footage aired on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Monday night shows the officers closely following Chansley as he wanders the corridors of the Capitol, bare-chested and wearing face paint and a luxuriant fur hat with Viking horns.“Virtually every moment of his time inside the Capitol was caught on tape,” says Carlson, who was granted exclusive access by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from that day inside and around the Capitol, which has never been seen before by the public. “The tapes show the Capitol police never stopped Jacob Chansley. They helped him. They acted as his tour guides.”

Sicknick
https://twitter.com/i/status/1632918878576689152

At one point, the officers are seen walking Chansley past seven other police officers milling around outside the Senate chamber, who barely give him a second look.Then they escort him to various entrances of the chamber which appear to be locked. Eventually they help him open a door, and he enters the chamber. Chansley, a 33-year-old naval veteran from Arizona, has been jailed for almost four years for “obstructing an official proceeding.” In a jailhouse interview played by Carlson he says: “The one very serious regret that I have [is] believing that when we were waved in by police officers that it was acceptable.” In a statement the Capitol police suggest that one of the officers with Chansley was trying to “de-escalate” the situation because he was outnumbered.


But that does not explain why Chansley, who was unarmed, was able to walk past seven more officers without being apprehended. “Not one of them even tried to slow him down,” says Carlson. He “understood that the Capitol police were his allies. . . . If he was in the act of committing such a grave crime, why didn’t the officers standing right next to him place him under arrest?” And yet in the narrative formed that day by the Democrats and much of the media, “Jacob Chansley became the face of January 6, a dangerous conspiracy theorist dressed in an outlandish costume who led the violent insurrection to overthrow America’s democracy,” says Carlson. McCarthy has been criticized for releasing the footage to Carlson who plans to air five stories based on the footage over two nights which he says “demolishes” the Democratic narrative of January 6.

Tucker video

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Rick and Jerry

 

 

 

 

Comorbidities – Foul Play With Death Certificates:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1632551125214699525

 

 

 

 

Thai elephant

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle November 6 2022

Nov 062022
 
 November 6, 2022  Posted by at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  64 Responses »


Ivan Shishkin The wilds 1881

 

• Berlin – Moscow – Beijing (Escobar)
• The End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End (Batiushka)
• Global Bankers ‘Very Pro-China’ – UBS (RT)
• Russia Seeks Sanctions Waiver To Facilitate Grain Exports (RT)
• The Oil Nationalization Two-Step (Luongo)
• Media Identifies Major Beneficiary Of Ukraine Crisis (RT)
• US Wants Official Of Ukrainian Descent To Run NATO (RT)
• Over 50 Countries Vote Against Anti-Nazism UN Measure (RT)
• The Great Unwind II (Alasdair Macleod)
• Lockdown Lefties Struggle In Governor’s Races, Reopen Righties Win (JTN)
• If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement (Fed.)
• Biden’s Midterms Message Includes False And Misleading Claims (CNN)
• NY Times Report That Biden Exaggerates His Economic Wins Stuns Twitter (Fox)
• Biden Unleashes Tirade Over Musk Restoring Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)
• The Twitter Massacre (MoA)
• Understanding the Reveal Stage of the Pandemic Play – Are We Winning? (LDS)

 

 

 

 

The Oil Price Cap Idiocy

 

 

 

 

Tucker Pelosi

 

 

Until proven otherwise

 

 

 

 

Pepe sees some optimism. It goes through China.

“..the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger..”

• Berlin – Moscow – Beijing (Escobar)

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China. According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger. This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams. Cue to the now notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Little Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley). According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.” Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.” Moscow knows very well what the imperial aim is when it comes to the EU reduced to the role of totally dominated – and deindustrialized – vassal, exercising zero sovereignty.

The back channels after all are not lying in tatters on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Additionally, China has not provided any hint that its massive trade with Germany and the EU is about to vanish. Scholz himself, one day before his caravan hit Beijing, stressed to Chinese media that Germany has no intention of decoupling from China, and there’s nothing to justify “the calls by some to isolate China.” In parallel, Xi Jinping and the new Politburo are very much aware of the Kremlin position, reiterated again and again: we always remain open for negotiations, as long as Washington finally decides to talk about the end of unlimited NATO expansion drenched in Russophobia. So to negotiate means the Empire signing on the dotted line of the document it has received from Moscow on December 1st, 2021, focused on “indivisibility of security”. Otherwise there’s nothing to negotiate.

Read more …

5 May 2024.

• The End of the Beginning and the Beginning of the End (Batiushka)

Many ask how much longer will the US war against Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine last? Some say only another two or three months, others much longer, even five years and more. For my own reasons I say another eighteen months, until 5 May 2024. Whatever you think, it all depends on how much the American neocon/neoliberal elite via their NATO allies, especially the UK, the Zelensky sect and their hired killers (so-called mercenaries – for few Kiev nationalists are now left to fight) want to escalate their war. And they do, which is why it did not all end last March when it could have ended. In other words, how much does the American elite want their subject-peoples, in Northern America, Western Europe and the Ukraine, to suffer?


It appears that the US elite wants them to suffer until they are all dead. But that will not happen, for the worm will turn, long, long before that. Indeed, in today’s energy and water-restricted Ukraine, some worms are already turning. And even some cold and hungry people in Western Europe and Northern America are turning too. What the elite wants, and what the people, especially in the Ukraine, will put up with, are two different things. It could all be ended tomorrow, if the elite wanted. Much more likely, this is going to take quite some time, for the war is not between the Ukraine and Russia, but between the USA and Russia. The Ukraine is merely the battlefield. No, I repeat, wait patiently until May 2024.

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“Don’t bet against China and Hong Kong..”

• Global Bankers ‘Very Pro-China’ – UBS (RT)

International investment bankers are bullish about the Chinese economy despite worrying reports by the Western media, the chairman of UBS Bank, Colm Kelleher, said on Wednesday. Kelleher was speaking at the Global Financial Leaders Investment Summit in Hong Kong, which brought together more than 200 bankers and investors from 20 countries, after more than two and a half years of Covid restrictions there. Hong Kong is now reportedly seeking to boost its status as an international financial hub. “We’re not reading the American press, we actually buy the [China] story,” he said, as quoted by the Financial Times. “But it is a bit of waiting for zero-Covid to open up in China to see what will happen.

According to the FT, Kelleher’s reference to the media was “an apparent joke and a nod” to earlier remarks made by Fang Xinghai, the vice chair of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. Fang, along with other Chinese officials, used pre-recorded video interviews to reassure international investors of the country’s economic strength. He told attendees: “I would advise international investors to find out what’s really going on in China and what’s the real intention of our government by themselves. Don’t read too much of the international media.” Fang’s comments, which came after a record sell-off of Chinese equities last week in the wake of President Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power, prompted laughs and applause from the audience. “Don’t bet against China and Hong Kong,” he added.

Last week, the Chinese stock market had its worst day since the 2008 global financial crisis, with the yuan hitting a new 14-year low against the US dollar, as Xi secured his third term and undertook a major leadership reshuffle. The sharp selloff was triggered by concerns that a number of senior officials who have backed market reforms and opening up the economy were missing from the new top team. This sparked investor concerns about the future direction of the country and its relations with the US.

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The west doesn’t care about feeding the poor.

• Russia Seeks Sanctions Waiver To Facilitate Grain Exports (RT)

Russia has asked the EU and other Western nations to lift sanctions on state lender Rosselkhozbank, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing sources. According to the news agency, such a move would allow the bank to restore relations with its correspondent banks abroad and process payments for Russian grain and fertilizer exports. Prior to the introduction of anti-Russia sanctions, such payments were serviced by international banks and subsidiaries of Russian banks in Switzerland, the report says. According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Rosselkhozbank is currently “servicing the lion’s share” of Russia’s fertilizer and food related transactions. The report did not mention whether Russia has received a response to its appeal. According to Reuters, the request was made during talks on the fate of the Ukrainian grain deal, which expires later this month.


As part of the agreement, reached in July, Western countries were supposed to ease restrictions on Russian agricultural exports. While the sanctions do not directly target these exports, certain curbs on payment processing, shipping and insurance have created obstacles for Russian exporters. Washington has taken steps to convince businesses that there are no sanctions on Russian food exports, a senior State Department official told the news outlet. The department reportedly sent out letters of reassurance to companies seeking proof that their deals with Russia would not violate restrictive measures. Nevertheless, Moscow has repeatedly said that sanctions make agricultural exports next to impossible and has demanded their cancellation. Rosselkhozbank fell under Western sanctions along with Russia’s other largest banks earlier this year, and its assets and correspondent accounts in US dollars and euros were frozen.

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Narrative.

• The Oil Nationalization Two-Step (Luongo)

[..] say your goal is to legitimize the state takeover, or advance another step forward the state takeover, of an industry. Let’s use oil and gas for today’s lesson. The first thing you do is manufacture a crisis that will disrupt the supply of the product you want to takeover. In this case, it started with COVID-19, which disrupted far more than just the energy sector. More than 2 million barrels per day of refining capacity was lost world wide thanks to COVID-19. Given the current hostility to new refineres (more on this later), those barrels are not coming back. Don’t forget, that for a “Straussian Two-Step” this big you will have to brainwash and/or gaslight two entire generations into hating themselves for being rich, wasteful, spoiled, alive or worse, just plain white.

So, they are already primed to hate all the things at play here — capitalism, Big Oil, Banks, Old White Guys (rich or poor) — and enrage your useful idiots by pushing their already tenuous hold on reality to the literal breaking point. “I can’t even….” isn’t the most common phrase uttered on Tik-Tok for nothing. That’s the Thesis part. So, when the crisis hits thanks to natural gas disruption you forbid buying of from a particular country… — Hello, Vlad? We’re in a helluva pickle, would you mind invading Ukraine…? Nyet…? Well, we’ll see about that…. — MISSING PAGES FROM THE RETURN OF DR. STRANGELOVE WORKING SCRIPT. … you demonize not only Vlad but the industry itself for price gouging and preying on the widdle guy during a war. There’s a word for this… chutzpah.

Predictably, you then allow your fake political opponents … [enter Cocaine Mitch from Stage Right] … to produce the opposite argument. In this case, the counter is obviously we need free markets to produce oil and gas. The refiners are just responding to the market. That fake opposition, of course, also blames Vlad for this crisis to ensure the market’s champion looks not only patriotic but also suitably bought and paid for by Big Oil, Old White Guys, etc.

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“..EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started..”

• Media Identifies Major Beneficiary Of Ukraine Crisis (RT)

Yahoo News has identified a major beneficiary of the Russia-Ukraine slugfest: the US military industrial complex, which is reaping a windfall even as the bloody conflict causes economic havoc, energy shortages and a looming food crisis around the world. As the media outlet reported on Saturday, EU nations have committed to about $230 billion in new weapons purchases since the Russian military offensive against Kiev started in February. US defense contractors are poised to land the lion’s share of those orders, given their dominance as suppliers to European militaries, Yahoo added. Many European nations turn to US arms makers for more than half of all their weapons purchases. Yahoo cited data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) to show examples of US dominance in European arsenals.

For instance, US-made arms accounted for 95% of the weapons purchases by the Netherlands from 2017 to 2021. The ratios were 83% US weaponry for Norway, 77% for the UK, and 72% for Italy. European weapons imports jumped 19% during the five-year period as then-President Donald Trump prodded his NATO allies to meet their obligations for defense spending. The Ukraine crisis is set to create an even bigger windfall, as President Joe Biden leads an international campaign to flood Ukraine with weapons and the conflict triggers accelerated steps by European nations to bolster their own defenses. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defense spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Center for European Reform, told Yahoo. The crisis in Eastern Europe dispelled the notion that war on the continent is no longer possible, he added.

“They’re waking up to the fact that not only is it very possible, but it is happening, and it’s happening not that many miles away from them.” Since Biden took office in January 2021, European countries entered at least the initial stage of negotiations for $33 billion in arms purchases, including $21 billion since February, Yahoo said, citing figures from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. US defense contractors will also benefit from Washington’s massive military aid to Kiev, as the Pentagon races to replenish stocks of artillery pieces, rocket launchers and other weapons. Biden has set aside more than $65 billion in military and economic aid for Ukraine since the conflict began. Russia has warned that the influx of Western weapons will prolong the crisis while making the US and other NATO members de facto participants.

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This comes far too close to putting Bandera in charge.

• US Wants Official Of Ukrainian Descent To Run NATO (RT)

The “prime candidate” favored by Washington to replace outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is Chrystia Freeland, currently Canada’s Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, the New York Times reportedon Friday. The bloc reportedly aims to install a woman at its helm for the first time, with other likely contenders being Estonian premier Kaja Kallas, Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova and Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, former president of Croatia, who was also Zagreb’s ambassador to Washington. The “strong contenders”list provided by the NYT corresponds with earlier media reports this year. The selection of a new NATO Secretary General, however, is still months away and “the names that surface first” may not survive the bargaining among the bloc’s members, unnamed NATO officials told the NYT.

Incumbent head of the bloc Stoltenberg was set to leave his post on September 30, but his term was prolonged to late 2023 amid the conflict in Ukraine. The NATO boss might ultimately end up having his tenure extended for another year, one of the officials reportedly suggested. Still, Freeland is believed to be the “prime candidate” for the post of NATO chief, favored by the US itself. “Where any of the candidates come down on support for Ukraine in the war against Russia will be a critical factor,” the paper writes. Freeland, whose mother was Ukrainian, is known to have a strong pro-Ukrainian stance. She is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, described by the NYT as a “grateful immigrant to Canada” who was during World War Two a “younger man involved with a Ukrainian nationalist movement that saw the Nazis as useful foils to counter the Soviets.”

The paper didn’t mention, however, that Chomiak was a prominent Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and the editor-in-chief of a Ukrainian-language propaganda daily Krakivs’ki Visti. The outlet, published between 1940 and 1945, was funded directly by Nazi Germany and described by Canadian historian – and Chomiak’s son-in-law – John-Paul Himka as a “vehemently anti-Semitic”publication. Freeland has been extremely ambiguous on her ancestry, not only refusing to condemn her maternal grandparents but somewhat endorsing them instead. In 2015 she wrote an essay called “My Ukraine,” stating that her Nazi collaborator grandparents “saw themselves as political exiles with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine.” “That dream persisted into the next generation, and in some cases the generation after that,” Freeland wrote in the essay.

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Pretzel: You can’t condemn nazism without also condemning Russia, which fights nazism.

• Over 50 Countries Vote Against Anti-Nazism UN Measure (RT)

A UN resolution opposing the celebration of Nazism and related ideologies has met with significant resistance from the US and other western democracies, with 52 countries voting against it on Friday. The draft resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,” introduced by Russia’s representative to the UN, was adopted with 105 votes in support. In addition to the 52 votes against it, 15 countries abstained from choosing sides.

The resolution expresses profound concern about glorifying Nazism, neo-Nazism and former Waffen SS members, condemning the construction of monuments and the holding of public ceremonies honoring the Third Reich. Introducing the resolution, the Russian delegate referenced an increase in xenophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, among other forms of discrimination, as necessitating it. The US and several of its allies attempted to explain their vote against the measure by claiming Russia was exploiting Nazi atrocities to justify its military operation in Ukraine, insisting that to join them in condemning the lionization of Nazis would be letting them get away with weaponizing the Holocaust to serve their nefarious ends.

The UK accused Moscow of “furthering lies and distorting history,” even while acknowledging it was using “legitimate human rights concerns raised by neo-Nazism mobilization” to justify its activities in Ukraine. The US went further, arguing that Russia’s “pretextual use of fighting neo-Nazism undermines genuine attempts to combat neo-Nazism.” And Ukraine claimed Moscow’s anti-Nazism message had “nothing in common with the genuine fight against Nazism and neo-Nazism,” which Kiev stressed it condemned in all forms. Australia, Japan, Liberia and North Macedonia proposed an amendment to clarify that while they were very much anti-Nazi, they were also profoundly anti-Russian.

Their addition “notes with alarm that the Russian Federation has sought to justify its territorial aggression against Ukraine on the purported basis of eliminating neo-Nazism,” reminding everyone that the “pretextual use of neo-Nazism to justify territorial aggression seriously undermines genuine attempts to combat neo-Nazism.” Russia opposed the amendment, accusing the writers of “trying to drive a wedge between states” by dropping it on the committee at the last minute. It was adopted with 63 votes approving, 23 against, and 65 abstaining. Moscow introduced a similar resolution last year, before the military operation in Ukraine had begun but after the US-backed coup had installed a government that allowed neo-Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion and lionized Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Poles and Jews during World War II. The 2021 resolution was opposed by just two states: the US and Ukraine.

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Banks have been encouraged to increase risk and leverage. Now that bites.

• The Great Unwind II (Alasdair Macleod)

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the CEO of a commercial bank involved in lending to businesses and with profit centres acting in a range of financial activities. As CEO, you are answerable to the board of directors for the bank’s performance, and ultimately the bank’s shareholders for maintaining and advancing the value of their shares. Furthermore, let us set this imaginary exercise in the present. These are the issues that should keep you awake at night: In common with your competitors, the ratio of your balance sheet assets to total equity is almost the highest in the history of the bank, in many cases for other banks over twenty times leaveraged. Official inflation, measured by the CPI is about ten per cent, and producer prices are rising somewhat faster.

Your central bank expects a return to the 2% target in two- or three-years’ time. But your contacts at the central bank have privately admitted to you that they cannot imagine the circumstances where this would be true without a deep recession. Bond yields are rising, and losses are beginning to impact on the bank’s investments. The bank has relatively little direct exposure to corporate bonds and equities, but they are commonly held as collateral against customer loans. How are higher interest rates impacting the quality of the bank’s loan book? The bank supported its business customers through the covid pandemic, which increased the indebtedness of them all. This exposes the bank to excessive default risk if rates rise further.

The mortgage loan book has been a profitable business for decades. But the bank is beginning to see a material rise in delinquencies. If loan guarantees are not forthcoming from government agencies, the bank may have to shut this activity down. What impact will higher interest rates have on the bank’s derivative exposure? What are the counterparty risks in derivative chains? Derivatives that involve inadequately capitalised counterparties should perhaps be sold on, or where the bank has the option to do so, closed down. The underlying problem is that the conditions that led to the bank becoming increasingly involved in diversified activities, such as investment banking, trading, and investment management have now changed.

Since financial deregulation in the 1980s, the bank has expanded into these profitable areas. The whole industry moved from dealing in credit into generating fee income. The growth in fee income can be directly related to the long-term trend of falling interest rates, which apart from interruptions such as the dot-com excesses and the Lehman crisis, stimulated growth in corporate finance, underwriting, investment management, and trading in financial securities. The expansion of these activities in turn led to a massive expansion of derivative markets, with new instruments being devised, such as credit default and interest rate swaps.

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“Don’t mess w people’s kids. It lands differently — and they will hold a grudge.”

• Lockdown Lefties Struggle In Governor’s Races, Reopen Righties Win (JTN)

Some of the Democratic governors most associated with harsh and prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns are facing stiff electoral headwinds in the midterms, while Republicans who endured national scorn by quickly reopening their states are cruising toward reelection. Republicans were already in an advantageous position with voters on crime and the economy, particularly inflation, the top two issues in polling this fall. Education issues, which propelled Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) to victory a year ago, are a leading concern in some races. And while elections tend to focus more on the future than the past, the starkly contrasting performances of lockdown lefties and reopen righties suggests that a reckoning on pandemic policies may be a stealth issue in major governor’s races.


The repercussions of lockdown policies are also felt indirectly in the top issues for voters, from supply-chain problems and inflation driven by COVID relief spending to plummeting test scores and parental outrage over school curricula resulting from remote learning. “Red wave is coming Tuesday,” freespoken sports show host Colin Cowherd tweeted Thursday. “Don’t mess w people’s kids. It lands differently — and they will hold a grudge.” “I lean mostly left, but data clearly proved kids 18 and under were safe,” and yet many were kept out of school, resulting in plunging test scores, rising suicides and “[c]haos for parents,” he continued. “A price will be paid and hopefully a lesson learned.” “Her Excellency the Queen of Michigan,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), “made it illegal … to visit friends, sell paint, mow grass, and golf” while flouting her own unilateral orders, The Spectator wrote in a recent list of “Eight Democrats we all hope lose this November.”

Maher

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No chance it will go smooth.

• If Republicans Win On Tuesday, Thank The Election Integrity Movement (Fed.)

If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting. The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record. The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted. The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax, which falsely claimed Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. Sometimes Democrats’ 2020 changes were instituted legally. Frequently, though, they were effected by other means, such as getting a friendly state or local official to change the rules unilaterally.

The 2020 election plan, some of which was admitted to in a flattering Time magazine story, sought to flood the zone with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots, historically understood to be riper for fraud and other election irregularities than supervised, in-person voting. The plan also involved the private takeover of government election offices to run Democrat-focused get-out-the-vote operations. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, financed the project, doling out $419 million to two left-wing groups that focused grants and assistance to government offices in the Democrat areas of swing states.

This radical change — “practically a revolution in how people vote,” as Time put it — included the widespread practice of placing ballot drop boxes predominantly in Democrat areas of the country, mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballots or applications for mail-in ballots, using well-funded teams of ballot harvesters both inside and outside of government, lowering and changing the standards for mail-in ballot acceptance, and fixing or “curing” ballots that were improperly filled out. Corporate media and other Democrats claimed the election was the best-run in history. In reality, it was a mess. Big Tech and the media ran coordinated disinformation campaigns to benefit Democrats by suppressing news that hurt the party. Big Tech also deplatformed effective conservative voices and media outlets, suppressed fundraising emails from Republicans, and elevated certain information to help Democrats.

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Biden loses both CNN and NYT mere days before the midterms.

• Biden’s Midterms Message Includes False And Misleading Claims (CNN)

Social Security, part 1 Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser in Pennsylvania last week: “On our watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are going to get the biggest increase in their Social Security checks they’ve gotten.” He has also touted the 2023 increase in Social Security payments at other recent events. But Biden’s boasts leave out such critical context that they are highly misleading. He hasn’t explained that the increase in Social Security payments for 2023, 8.7%, is unusually big simply because the inflation rate has been unusually big. A law passed in the 1970s says that Social Security payments must be increased by the same percentage that a certain measure of inflation has increased. It’s called a cost-of-living adjustment.

Social Security, part 2 Biden said at a Democratic rally in Florida on Tuesday: “And on my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.” The claim that the 2023 increase to Social Security payments is the first in 10 years is false. In reality, there has been a cost-of-living increase every year from 2017 onward. There was also an increase every year from 2012 through 2015 before the payment level was kept flat in 2016 because of a lack of inflation. The context around this Biden remark in Florida suggests he might have botched his repeat campaign line about Social Security payments increasing at the same time as Medicare premiums are declining. Regardless of his intentions, though, he was wrong.

A new corporate tax Biden repeatedly suggested in speeches in October and early November that a new law he signed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act, will stop the practice of successful corporations paying no federal corporate income tax. Biden made the claim explicitly in a tweet last week: “Let me give you the facts. In 2020, 55 corporations made $40 billion. And they paid zero in federal taxes. My Inflation Reduction Act puts an end to this.” But “puts an end to this” is an exaggeration. The Inflation Reduction Act will reduce the number of companies on the list of non-payers, but the law will not eliminate the list entirely. That’s because the law’s new 15% alternative corporate minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income.

The debt and the deficit Biden said at the Tuesday rally in Florida: “Look, you know, you can hear it from Republicans, ‘My God, that big-spending Democrat Biden. Man, he’s taken us in debt.’ Well, guess what? I reduced the federal deficit this year by $1 trillion $400 billion. One trillion 400 billion dollars. The most in all American history. No one has ever reduced the debt that much. We cut the federal debt in half.” Biden offered a similar narrative at a Thursday rally in New Mexico, this time saying, “We cut the federal debt in half. A fact.” There are two significant problems here. First: Biden conflated the debt and the deficit, which are two different things. It’s not true that Biden has “cut the federal debt in half”; the federal debt (total borrowing plus interest owed) has continued to rise under Biden, exceeding $31 trillion for the first time this October. Rather, it’s the federal deficit – the annual difference between spending and revenue – that was cut in half between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022. Second, it’s highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for even the reduction in the deficit. Biden doesn’t mention that the primary reason the deficit plummeted in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 was that it had skyrocketed to a record high in 2020 because of emergency pandemic relief spending. It then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned.

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“..don’t blame this poor old man it’s not his fault.”

• NY Times Report That Biden Exaggerates His Economic Wins Stuns Twitter (Fox)

Critics of President Biden got a surprise on Friday, as the New York Times published a report grilling the 46th president for making exaggerations about his successes on the economy. Times reporters Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley published a piece on Friday titled, “As Elections Approach, Biden Spins His Economic Record,” which claimed that the president’s boasts about his economic achievements were not true. The report began by summing up the White House economic spin, “As President Biden and his administration have told it in recent months, America has the fastest-growing economy in the world, his student debt forgiveness program passed Congress by a vote or two, and Social Security benefits became more generous thanks to his leadership.” The piece declared, “None of that was accurate.”

The report also claimed, “The president, who has long been seen as embellishing the truth, has recently overstated his influence on the economy, or omitted key facts.” It then mentioned an erroneous claim recently made by the White House on Social Security. Quoting Biden and then correcting him, the Times said, “’On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,’ he declared. The problem: That increase was the result of an automatic cost-of-living increase prompted by the most rapid inflation in 40 years.” The piece added, “Mr. Biden had not done anything to make retirees’ checks bigger — it was just a byproduct of the soaring inflation that the president has vowed to combat.”

The official White House Twitter account made that same claim about Social Security this week, receiving a swift, community-based fact check from Twitter. The White House then took the tweet down. Further skewering Biden, the Times stated, “It is common for presidents to spin economic numbers to improve their pitch to voters,” yet “the president’s cheerleading has increasingly grown to include exaggerations or misstatements about the economy and his policy record.” The piece did insist that Biden’s “economic exaggerations generally pale in comparison to the tales spun by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump,” though the very fact that a major liberal media outlet would go after Biden on falsehoods, turned heads on social media.

Conservative journalist Michael Caputo encouraged the paper to go further: “Go ahead say it, NYTimes, do it. You can say it: Biden is a liar.” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., tweeted, “I’m suspicious of NYT’s motivation for printing the truth about Biden. It’s out of character for them. Perhaps blaming him and his gaffs for the midterm results is the beginning of the left’s effort to replace him with a different nominee in 2024.” [..] National Review’s Jeff Blehar commented, “don’t blame this poor old man it’s not his fault.”

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One week after Musk took over, and 4 days before the midterms, Biden accused Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world”. I don’t recall Biden having said this before, but he must have, right?! Because content moderation hasn’t changed at all yet, as per Musk. Oh, and 60 orgs call on advertizers to withdraw their money. But what exactly made Twitter toxic? Just that Musk mentioned free speech?

There is no way this is not coordinated.

• Biden Unleashes Tirade Over Musk Restoring Free Speech on Twitter (Turley)

Elon Musk has not actually changed the “content moderation” policies at Twitter yet, but President Joe Biden went on a virtual rave on Friday over the prospect of free speech breaking out on a single social media site. As a type of censor-in-chief, Biden has led calls for censorship on social media, which have been largely heeded by companies like Facebook and Twitter. Now Biden is accusing Twitter of “spewing lies all across the world” by seeking to reduce one of the largest censorship systems in history. The President lamented that the influence of the media will be “de minimus.” He is a bit late on that front. President Biden has previously accused social media companies of “killing people” by refusing to impose robust censorship over a wide range of subjects.

Many of those banned or censored were doctors with opposing views on the data and the science related to the pandemic. Some of those doctors were the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more focused Covid response that targeted the most vulnerable population rather than widespread lockdowns and mandates. Many are now questioning the efficacy and cost of the massive lockdown as well as the real value of masks or the rejection of natural immunities as an alternative to vaccination. Yet, these experts and others were attacked for such views just a year ago. Some found themselves censored on social media for challenging claims of Dr. Fauci and others. The Great Barrington Declaration was not the only viewpoint deemed dangerous.

Those who alleged that the virus may have begun in a lab in China were widely denounced and the views barred from being uttered on social media platforms. It was later learned that a number of leading experts raised this theory with Fauci and others early in the pandemic. We are now seeing increasing evidence of back channels used by government and political figures to maintain a censorship system by surrogate in the social media companies and foreign allies. The President, however, was in full censor-in-chief mode this week, referring to censors as “editors.” He denounced Musk who “goes out and buys an outfit that spews lies all across the world.” He then claimed “There are no editors anymore. There are no editors anymore.” The President added “the ability of newspapers to have much impact is de minimis.”

That last statement seemed to lament the loss of a close and active ally for the Democrats. Neutrality is anathema if you have largely been able to control political and social exchanges on social media. What the President said next. however, was particularly telling and chilling: “How do people know the truth? What do they — how do they make — make a distinction between fact and fiction? There’s so much — so much going on. And we’re in the middle of this.” Indeed, perish the thought that citizens might be left to pursue the truth on their own without the government or surrogates in the media framing it for them. How could we possibly “know the truth” without our social media overlords?

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“If one trains the system with badly categorized data it will be badly categorize data. It does not need an extra team to learn that.”

• The Twitter Massacre (MoA)

I am amusing myself with watching the panic some people express over Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter. Yesterday 3,700 of its 7,500 workers were fired. That is not good, but the company was losing money and making money is at the core of the capitalist game. Of interest is what functions were eliminated. The Guardian provides this list: From news reports and terminated employees’ announcements, here’s what we know so far about the teams that have been hit by the layoffs of thousands of Twitter employees: • The human rights team has been laid off, according to a now former employee, Shannon Raj Singh, who said the team worked to protect those at risk in global conflicts, including in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia. • The ML (machine learning) Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team is gone, according to a tweet of a laid-off manager. • The “internet technology team”, which helps keep the site running, has been cut to “a skeleton crew”, two sources told the Times. • An accessibly experience engineering team has been cut, according to a laid-off engineering manager. • The curation team, responsible for the Moments feature on Twitter, has also been cut, former employees reported.

Twitter’s communications department is almost entirely gone, according to the Verge. Other areas that have been heavily impacted, the Verge reported, include product trust and safety, policy, research and social good. What were these teams actually doing? The human rights team leader gave some hints: Shannon Raj Singh @ShannonRSingh – 17:58 UTC · Nov 4, 2022. “Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. sI am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.”

The human rights team was the ‘regime change’ force on Twitter. It intervened in conflicts where the U.S. preferred a certain side. Shannon Raj Singh had previously meddled in Afghan and other countries’ cultures: “Shannon Raj Singh is a Legal Counsel for SAHR, advising a Kabul-based team on sexual violence litigation in Afghanistan, which aims to end the invasive and discriminatory practice of female virginity testing. She is an international criminal law attorney focused on victim-centered responses to mass atrocities. Currently based in The Hague, she has experience working with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a number of human rights NGOs in sub-Saharan Africa. She has also practiced as a litigator in the United States, appearing in both state and federal courts and assisting with overseas corruption investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team was also fired. Machine learning, also glorified as ‘artificial intelligence’, is essentially an (often lousy) pattern recognition system. It can be trained with categorized data and, after that, can categorized other data it gets presented. All one needs to know about its ethics, transparency and accountability is the old IT wisdom ‘garbage in garbage out’. If one trains the system with badly categorized data it will be badly categorize data. It does not need an extra team to learn that. I do not know what the ‘Internet technology team’ was doing but the function obviously still exists. It was merely downsized.

NBC Twitter

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“The SPARS PANDEMIC 2025-2028, published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in October 2017..”

“You are the long-term data. You may die in the process but that’s science in the 21st century!”

• Understanding the Reveal Stage of the Pandemic Play – Are We Winning? (LDS)

The SPARS PANDEMIC 2025-2028, published by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security in October 2017, is another of those amazingly prescient, yet “entirely fictional” scenario plans that ended up looking like the blueprint for the actual covid pseudo pandemici. It is in fact the prequel to that other freakishly coincidental pandemic wargame, Event 201, hosted in October 2019 (a few weeks before SARS-COV-2 hit the headlines) by the same institution along with the CIA and the World Economic Forum (WEF). What business does the CIA and its brainchild, the WEF, have going anywhere near public health strategy planning? Absolutely none, unless of course public health strategy is to be used as a nefarious special purpose vehicle for intelligence services and the global corporate oligarchy.

[..] It is a masterclass in absurdity which has its roots in the inherent contradiction in drafting a plan that purports to deal with the inevitable fallout of a manufactured crisis while pretending that the crisis is not manufactured. Its aim is to present failure scenarios to public health spin doctors, referred to as “public health risk communicators”, and invite them to “mentally rehearse responses” to these failures. But, in providing pitiful explanations for all the failure scenarios, it effectively exposes the Medical Counter Measures (MCMs) of a corrupt pseudo pandemic for the sham that they are. Instead of mitigating the consequences of a real pandemic, the MCMs are the very things that perversely create the necessity for narrative spin and psyops.

[..] It is undoubtedly sinister because of its prediction of all the ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’ that were made in the manufactured covid ‘pandemic’. In the latter sections of the document – the Reveal stage – the planners anticipate fallout from being unable to keep a lid on vaccine injury. Nevertheless, a somewhat happy ending for the pandemic planners is fashioned in their Pandemic Play. So, will they succeed in constructing the reality they desire? In the 2017 playbook, as “claims of adverse side effects beg[i]n to emerge”, the pandemic planners coyly suggest that the demands for the “removal of the liability shield protecting the pharmaceutical companies” will be deflected by the “emergency appropriation of [taxpayer] funds”. Because God forbid that Big Pharma, having siphoned off billions from the taxpayers’ purse for efficiently distributing poison, might then be subjected to the humiliation of footing the bill for the injuries caused by it.

The pandemic planners were also prepared for the ethical quandary of hastily mass injecting an experimental preparation with no long-term safety data. The ‘rare’ side effect rebuttal is alluded to by reference to “relatively few reports of neurological symptoms” while the problem is framed as an overblown social media response. Ultimately the blame is placed squarely at the feet of an ignorant public – those “demand[ing] proof that the vaccines [do] not cause long-term effects” are “displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific research”! You just don’t get it, so let me spell it out to you on behalf of the pandemic planners. You, the entire public, the 5.3 billion people injected so far – you are the subjects of the experiment, and the experiment isn’t over until the CDC, FDA, MHRA et al say it is. You are the long-term data. You may die in the process but that’s science in the 21st century!

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Turkey map 2050

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 5 2022

Nov 052022
 
 November 5, 2022  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Ivan Shishkin Midday. Near Moscow 1869

 

• Love Letter to Ireland and to ALL the Debt-Enslaved Nations of the World (Chu)
• The One Chart That Explains Everything (Mike Whitney)
• UK Was ‘Hours’ Away From Potential Total Meltdown – Bank Of England (RT)
• Wells Fargo Braces For More Layoffs As Loan Volumes Collapse 90% YOY (ZH)
• Michael Hudson on The Destiny of Civilization (Platypus)
• How Bright Are EUropeans ? (Vilches)
• Key Takes From Vladimir Putin’s Latest Speech (RT)
• British Spies Constructing Secret Terror Army In Ukraine (GZ)
• EU Exploring Ways To Use Frozen Russian Assets (RT)
• Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain (Kunstler)
• What Employment? (Denninger)
• FBI Is ‘Rotted At Its Core,’ Republican Lawmakers Say (RT)
• Can Licht Make the Cuts? (Byers)
• Florida Bans Puberty Blockers, Transgender Surgery For Minors (SAC)
• Vaccine-Doubting Doctor Ordered To Pay $1m In Legal Costs (NP)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re deeper in debt than ever. And planning to spend trillions on net zero. It doesn’t add up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Ireland’s external debt is 609% more than her GDP..”

• Love Letter to Ireland and to ALL the Debt-Enslaved Nations of the World (Chu)

Sometime in October, 2022, the national debt of the United States will blow through $31 Trillion. That’s a lot of zeros! To give some context on how exponential is this growing number: It took the USA 205 years to surpass $1 Trillion in total national debt on October 22, 1981; but it will only take 41 years to exponentially add another 30 Trillion! Note to all the anal-retentive persons out there: Nothing survives exponential growth. Nothing. All 7 of the G7 nations (USA, Japan, Italy, France, Germany, UK, and Canada) are in the top 10 list of most indebted nations, as far total national debts are concerned. Three of the BRICS nations (China, India and Brazil) are in this top 10 list.

Table 3 shows the “national debt to GDP” ratios for the top 10 nations, in descending scale. One of the ways to understand what this “national debt to GDP” ratio means in layman terms is to use the “credit card to income” analogy. Let’s say that we have a credit card limit of $100,000 USD and our annual income is $50,000 USD. Because of hard times and all, we have maxed out our credit card and we owe $100,000 USD. Well, in our case then, the “credit card debt to income” ratio is 200%. Question: How long can we maintain our lifestyle if our “credit card debt to income” ratio is 200%? Answer: Not very long. All ten nations listed in Table 3 are spending more than they produce in terms of GDP each year.


Six of the G7 nations (Japan, Italy, France, USA, Canada, and UK) are spending more than they produce each year for quite a few years now. None of the BRICS nations are in the top ten of this list. Question: How long can nations like Japan, Greece, Italy, Portugal, etc. continue to incur national debts way beyond their annual national income? Answer: Not very long. All these 10 nations with a “national debt to GDP” ratio over 100% are spending money beyond their means. Japan and Greece are spending money way beyond their means.

Table 4 is a list of the “external debt to GDP” ratios for the top 10 nations, in descending scale. At the #1 spot, Ireland’s external debt is 609% more than her GDP. There is something that we should note about Ireland’s GDP. Apple, maker of the iPhones and all things that begin with an “i”, launders its European sales through its Irish headquarters. Why? To avoid paying taxes as Ireland has one of the most preferential business tax polices in the world. However, Apple’s “contribution” to Ireland’s GDP, which has been as high as 25%, generates ZERO income for the Irish nation. How’s that for a GDP accounting trick? Therefore, this ridiculous 609% is even a lot higher! Now, imagine if our credit card debt is more than 609% of our annual income! What happens when the credit card company demands that we pay off our credit card debt? That’s about to happen to Ireland, Netherlands, UK, etc.

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“This is why we are experiencing the redivision of the world into warring blocs. This is why we are seeing the roll back of 30 years of Globalization and massive suppyline disruption.”

• The One Chart That Explains Everything (Mike Whitney)

It explains why Washington is so worried about China’s explosive growth. It explains why the US continues to hector China on the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea. It explains why Washington sends congressional delegations to Taiwan in defiance of Beijing’s explicit requests. It explains why the Pentagon continues to send US warships through the Taiwan Strait and ship massive amounts of lethal weaponry to Taipei. It explains why Washington is creating anti-China coalitions in Asia that are aimed at encircling and provoking Beijing.

It explains why the Biden administration is stepping up its trade war on China, imposing onerous economic sanctions on its businesses, and banning critical high-tech semi-conductors that are “are essential not just… for virtually every aspect of modern society, from electronic products and transport to the design and production of all manner of goods.” It explains why China has been singled-out in the US National Security Strategy (NSS) as “the only competitor with both the intent and, increasingly, the capability to reshape the international order.” It explains why Washington now regards China as its biggest and most formidable strategic adversary that must be isolated, demonized and defeated.

The chart above explains everything, not just the hostile diplomatic jabs that are designed to discredit and humiliate China, but also the openly belligerent policies that are aimed at Russia as well. People need to understand this. They need to see what is really going on so they can put events in their proper geopolitical context. And what “context” is that? The context of a Third World War; a war that was thoroughly-planned, instigated and (now) prosecuted by Washington and Washington’s proxies. That’s what’s really going on. The increasingly violent conflagrations we see cropping-up in Ukraine and Asia are not the result of “Russian aggression” or “evil Putin”. No. They are the actualization of a sinister geopolitical strategy to quash China’s meteoric rise and preserve America’s dominant role in the world order. Can there be any doubt about that?

No. None. This is why we are experiencing the redivision of the world into warring blocs. This is why we are seeing the roll back of 30 years of Globalization and massive suppyline disruption. And this is why Europe has been thrust headlong into frigid darkness and forced deindustrialisation. All of these suicidal policies were concocted for one purpose and one purpose alone, to maintain America’s exalted spot in the global system. That is why all of humanity is presently embroiled in a Third World War; a war that is designed to prevent China from becoming the world’s biggest economy; a war that is designed to preserve US global primacy.

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Sort of a shame that MissTrust couldn’t finish her ‘mission’.

• UK Was ‘Hours’ Away From Potential Total Meltdown – Bank Of England (RT)

U Britain narrowly avoided a financial crisis in September that could have seen some pension funds totally collapse, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, told Channel 4 on Thursday. Asked how close the UK came to a potential total economic meltdown after Liz Truss’ mini-budget was announced, Bailey said: “I think at the point when we intervened, I can tell you that the messages we were getting from the markets were that it was hours.” Truss’s so-called “mini-budget” included the biggest tax cuts since 1972, funded by a huge increase in borrowing, without an explanation as to how the government would pay it back. The measures caused the pound to hit an all-time low against the dollar and the price of UK government bonds – known as gilts – to collapse.


The Bank of England intervened by announcing an expansion of its emergency bond-buying to “restore orderly market conditions.” “It was becoming unstable and it was affecting pension funds, for instance, and how they were operating. So, we had to step in quickly and we had to step in quite decisively. This felt, and was, a very real threat to financial stability,” Bailey said. His interview came just hours after the regulator hiked the interest rate from 2.25% to 3% to try and curb soaring inflation. Bailey also warned that Britain was facing its longest recession since records began and warned of a “tough road ahead” for the UK and its households.

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Let the bailouts begin…

• Wells Fargo Braces For More Layoffs As Loan Volumes Collapse 90% YOY (ZH)

Among the growing list of many companies bracing for layoffs is now Wells Fargo, who has seen their U.S. loan volumes “collapse”. The fall off in loan volume has left some workers “idle”, according to a new CNBC report. This, in turn, has them worried about further job cuts. In the early weeks of Q4, the bank had about 18,000 loans in its pipeline, the report says. This is down an astonishing 90% from a year earlier when the pandemic housing boom was in full swing. The dropoff in loan volume is at least partly attributable to a slowing housing market as rates have risen. With the Fed raising rates again this week, it doesn’t look like the spigot on loans is going to be re-opening anytime soon.


Other housing loan companies, like Rocket Mortgage, are also expected to be downsizing as a result of the slowing activity in housing. Wells Fargo “has historically been the most reliant on mortgages” out of all major U.S. banks, CNBC notes. CFO Mike Santomassimo had already warned about the slowdown in mid-October, stating: “We expect it to remain challenging in the near term. It’s possible that we have a further decline in mortgage banking revenue in the Q4 when originations are seasonally slower.” The bank said this week: “The changes we’ve recently made are the result of the broader rate environment and consistent with the response of other lenders in the industry. We regularly review and adjust staffing levels to align with market conditions and the needs of our businesses.”

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“..no country should be obliged to lower its living standards, bankrupt itself, and privatize its public domain in order to pay foreign debts. If a country can’t pay its debt, it’s a bad loan..”

• Michael Hudson on The Destiny of Civilization (Platypus)

They’re different kinds of debts, and canceling them requires different kinds of institutions. E.g., what’s most in the news these days is student loan debt and that it could be canceled by just an act of President Biden, which he won’t do, because he’s the person that sponsored the bankruptcy law. That law made it impossible to cancel student debts by bankruptcy laws. It could be done by a congressional law. The government has all sorts of regulatory agencies to handle corporate debt write-downs. Corporate write-downs in bankruptcy proceedings are a normal course, taking place almost continually, and we’re going to see that again. There are real estate debts. When the junk mortgage frauds peaked in 2008, President Obama ran by promising to write-down the junk mortgage debts to the actual market value of the homes bought by the victims of bank fraud and to bring the mortgage payments in line with the current rent.

As soon as he was elected, Obama invited the bankers to the White House and said, “don’t worry. I’m the only guy standing between you and the pitchforks. That was just to get elected. I’m on your side.” He proceeded to evict seven or eight million American families. Not only did Obama not write-down the debts, but he started quantitative easing that has given nine trillion dollars to support the real estate market, the stock market, and the bond market, so that the banks and the wealthy rentier 10% of the American economy would not lose any money. The result was that American home ownership rates have fallen from 69% and plunged into the 50s. America is being turned from a middle-class home ownership economy into a landlord economy.

We’re regressing back towards the 19th century, including its legacy of feudalism. That’s what we’re moving toward, as official government policy. We still have a strong government, but the role of the government is now to enforce the debts, not to write them down, and the most serious debts in the news are actually international debts. And of course, international debts cannot be settled by one nation. What is the vehicle to cancel the debts of global South countries like Argentina, that is now in yet another crisis with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Argentinian crisis, Sri Lanka — all this will characterize the Global South by this fall as a result of rising energy prices for oil and gas, rising food prices, and capital flight to the U.S. as it raises its interest rate.

If countries have to pay more for food and energy, how can they afford to pay their foreign debts? It’s necessary to have a new international organization to sponsor this. That’s what both President Putin and President Xi have said: we’re going to create a BRICS bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF and this will have to accompany a new world court. We are going to provide a different philosophy of operations for this bank: the principle is that no country should be obliged to lower its living standards, bankrupt itself, and privatize its public domain in order to pay foreign debts. If a country can’t pay its debt, it’s a bad loan, and just as individuals and corporations are allowed to declare bankruptcy, countries should be able to declare bankruptcy.

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“..EUropeans would just appear to be aggressive, manipulative, and conceited… and not superior to anyone else..”

• How Bright Are EUropeans ? (Vilches)

Dr. Josep Borrell is the EU´s topmost senior diplomat as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Recently joined by another un-elected official namely the EU Commission President Ursula von den Leyen both now roughly insist that EUrope´s problems stem from its addictiveness to excellent and cheap Russian energy and resources, to China´s humongous export markets and high productivity dependency, and to the military ´security´ that the US today supposedly renders to them. So, accordingly their solution for EUrope would be to (a) get itself up in arms yet again and (b) to double-down on the ‘battle of narratives´ which should be interpreted to be just some more effective EU propaganda. So from this perspective rather than being bright EUropeans would just appear to be aggressive, manipulative, and conceited… and not superior to anyone else. So why be so proud about it all ?.


Objectively searching into the EUropean political soul it´s easy to find EUrope´s self-EUthanization vis-á-vis its sheer lack of any ´affectio societatis´. This makes EUrope an un-viable business associate to and for anyone, even amongst themselves in view of the current widespread infighting. But JB´s ´brightness´ does not stop there, now proclaiming that “the world needs Europe” and that EUrope is a “garden” and the rest a mere ”jungle” ready to encroach upon it… So at this rate it would be wise to copernically acknowledge that EUrope is not any “global super-power” and that God Almighty has not appointed the un-elected European Commission as the rule-maker for the rest of the world to follow. Furthermore, the “international community”(sic) is not headquartered at Davos or Brussels and 85% of planet Earth does not even wake up in the West every morning. Making that clear would focus EU politics better than complaining about “too many abstentions” in the UN votes regarding this conflict which EU officials fail to understand and accept.

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“Ukraine, Batman and complex identities”…

• Key Takes From Vladimir Putin’s Latest Speech (RT)

Russian President Vladimir Putin honored National Unity Day by meeting with historians and dignitaries – including leaders of religious communities – and discussing the role of history in protecting national sovereignty, identity, and culture. Here are some key points from his speech and the subsequent discussion. “Russia’s clash with the neo-Nazi regime that arose in Ukraine was inevitable, and had our country not undertaken the actions it did in February, nothing would have changed, only our position would have been far worse,” Putin said. “Our so-called friends brought the situation in Ukraine to the stage where it was a mortal threat to Russia.” Putin compared the situation with what happened in 1941, when the USSR had ample warning about the upcoming Nazi invasion but did not take steps to defend itself, suggesting that this was one of the reasons millions of Soviet citizens died before victory over Nazism was achieved.

Western countries meddled in Ukraine’s internal affairs after the fall of the Soviet Union and “managed to instill such pseudo-values into the minds of millions of people, which led to the fact that anti-Russia was created on this territory, sowing hatred, violating the minds of people, depriving them of true history,” Putin said. Ukraine has been turned into a grave danger for Russia, but also something suicidal for the Ukrainians themselves, he explained. “It is Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, that is the first and main victim of the deliberate sublimation of hatred towards the Russians and Russia. In Russia, everything is exactly the opposite – you know this very well: we have always treated the Ukrainian people with respect and warmth. It remains so, despite today’s tragic confrontation.”

Speaking further about the current conflict in Ukraine, Putin drew parallels with the Russian Revolution over a hundred years ago. “In fact, the confrontation is going on within one people – just like it was after the upheavals of 1917.” Back then, “foreign powers warmed their hands on the tragedy of our people. They did not care about either the Whites or the Reds, they pursued their own interests, weakened and tore historical Russia to pieces.” The West is doing the same in Ukraine today, Putin said, sacrificing the Ukrainian people to achieve their geopolitical goals, which he described as “weakening, disintegrating and destroying Russia.” Russians need to know the full past of their country, the president argued, without repeating the “mistakes of the Soviet period,” where academia worked to fit ideological patterns.

“Something similar is happening now in some countries in the West, where much is determined by the current radical-liberal establishment. To please it, key historical events are presented in a completely distorted, inverted form, and the truth is canceled,” Putin said. “When someone wishes to deprive the state of sovereignty and turn its citizens into vassals, they begin by twisting the country’s history, in order to deprive people of their roots, doom them to unconsciousness,” the Russian president explained, condemning this as a “deliberately perverted attitude to history.” Pointing to Ukraine as an example of this, Putin said that “there have been similar attempts against Russia, and they do not stop, but we firmly and in time put up a solid barrier against them. “

While Russia is absolutely a part of European civilization, there is no denying that many major colonial empires in the West are now “medium-sized or small countries,” Putin said, comparing the population of Portugal with its former colony Brazil, the UK with India, and how China’s Guangdong province alone has 1.5 times the population of Germany. “European capitals were [once] the center of the universe – but this is already in the past,” the Russian president said. Putin also opted to broach a slightly less political issue. During the question-and-answer session, he noted that academic work won’t be enough without teaming up with popular culture and merchandising. Russian children “know of Batman but not of our own heroes,” Putin said, noting that historical education starts from an early age. “There should be cartoons, films, children’s literature… All of these things are needed. That’s why we’re here today, to nudge this process forward.”

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Thorough.

• British Spies Constructing Secret Terror Army In Ukraine (GZ)

Documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal plans by a cell of British military-intelligence figures to organize and train a covert Ukrainian “partisan” army with explicit instructions to attack Russian targets in Crimea. On October 28th, a Ukrainian drone attack damaged the Russian Black Sea fleet’s flagship vessel in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Moscow immediately blamed Britain for assisting and orchestrating the strike, as well as blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines – the worst acts of industrial sabotage in recent memory. The British Ministry of Defense issued a blustery denial in response, branding the accusations “false claims of an epic scale.” Whoever was behind those specific attacks, suspicions of a British hidden hand in the destruction are not unfounded.

The Grayzone has obtained leaked documents detailing British military-intelligence operatives inking an agreement with the Security Service of Ukraine’s Odessa branch, to create and train a secret Ukrainian partisan terror army. Their plans called for the secret army to conduct sabotage and reconnaissance operations targeting Crimea on behalf of the Ukrainian Security Service (SSU) – precisely the kind of attacks witnessed in past weeks. As The Grazyone previously reported, the same coterie of military-intelligence operatives was responsible for drawing up plans to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge. That goal was fulfilled on October 8th in the form of a suicide truck bomb attack, temporarily disabling the sole connecting point between mainland Russia and Crimea, and triggering a major escalation in Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

These blueprints were produced by a military veteran named Hugh Ward, at the request of Chris Donnelly, a British military-intelligence operative best known for hatching the covert, Foreign Office-funded Integrity Initiative information warfare program. The plans were circulated throughout Donnelly’s private transnational network of military officials, lawmakers and intelligence officials. Such high-level connections underline that he is far from a passive observer in this conflict. He has used his position and contacts to secure the resources necessary to train up the secret saboteur battalion in order to attack Russian targets in Crimea. This wrecking strategy is certain to escalate the war, and undercut any momentum toward negotiation.

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“US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May that seizing the assets was “not something legally permissible in the United States.”

• EU Exploring Ways To Use Frozen Russian Assets (RT)

The European Union is trying to determine whether it’s feasible to use the assets of the Russian Central Bank that have been frozen by member states to finance Ukraine, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The discussions are at an early stage and legal experts have been asked to look into possible options, the outlet wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. Some $300 billion belonging to the Russian Central Bank were frozen by the EU, the US, and their allies as part of anti-Russia sanctions. Any EU action would deal with assets held in Europe, Bloomberg says, adding that the issue has also been raised with the US.


Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU wanted to confiscate Russian assets in order to use them for the reconstruction of Ukraine but admitted that establishing a legal base for such a move was tricky. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in May that seizing the assets was “not something legally permissible in the United States.” Russia strongly criticized the freezing of the funds, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accusing the West of essentially committing theft.

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“The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything..”

• Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain (Kunstler)

By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.” Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries.

These dissenters turned out to be “right for the wrong reasons,” she declared, the main reason being that they were not aligned in good-think with the Woke-Jacobinism of her fellow “progressives” at Brown U, and academics all across the land, who were righteously busy destroying the intellectual life of the nation, making it impossible for the thinking class to think. Let’s face it: every society actually needs a thinking class, a cohort able to frame important issues-of-the-moment that require argument in the public arena to align our collective thoughts and deeds with reality. America used to have a pretty good thinking class, with a pretty good free press and many other platforms for opinion — all animated by respect for the first amendment to the Constitution.


The thinking class destroyed that by vigorously promoting a new censorship regime in every American institution, shutting down free speech and, more crucially, the necessary debate for aligning our politics with reality. Hence, America’s thinking class became the torchbearers of unreality, in step with the Party of Chaos which held the levers of power. This included the powers of life and death in the matter of Covid-19. These were the people who militated against effective early treatment protocols (to cynically preserve the drug companies’ emergency use authorization (EUA) and thus their liability shields); the people who enforced the deadly remdesivir-and-ventilator combo in hospital treatment; the people who rolled out the harmful and ineffective “vaccines”; who fired and vilified doctors who disagreed with all that; and who engineered a long list of abusive policies that destroyed businesses, livelihoods, households, reputations, and futures.

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Normally October numbers rise for Christmas…

• What Employment? (Denninger)

Vomited up the Bureau of Lies and Scams did…. “Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 261,000 in October, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in health care, professional and technical services, and manufacturing.” Yeah-yeah. I pay near-zero attention to the headline, ever, and this was no exception to my rule in that regard. The market did the hanky-panky on the release but as I write this is up strongly, close to +50 handles on the Spoos. Why? Someone bothered to actually read the internals? I’m impressed, because the internals of the household survey, unadjusted, said +141k and out of that 111 of it came out of the “not in labor force” figures, so in fact its really about +30 net-net on the population itself.


In other words statistically zero. October is usually a very decent hiring month as, which we all know, there’s this thing called “Christmas” coming and the start of the hiring for it is usually reflected here. Prior to the pandemic in 2019 October was +589k on the same unadjusted household number, and 425k of that came from bench-sitters, so economic reasons were enough to get close to half a million off their butts. This time it was only good for 100k and the total impulse was basically all of that. Thus the market reaction: Pavlov’s Dog took this as “The Fed will slow down or reverse course.” Which, incidentally, means they probably won’t because, as I’ve pointed out, that Pavlovian response is exactly what The Fed needs to break before it can take its foot off the rate-increase gas and not only did the market exhibit the exact opposite when the announcement came out it confirmed it this morning.

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“The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

• FBI Is ‘Rotted At Its Core,’ Republican Lawmakers Say (RT)

America is no longer a country where citizens are afforded equal justice under the law, as guaranteed by their Constitution, because the nation’s top law enforcement agency has been corrupted by politicized leadership and a “woke, leftist agenda” being imposed from the top, Republican lawmakers have claimed. The allegations were contained in a 1,050-page report released on Friday by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. The report, which was based on information gathered from 14 FBI whistleblowers who came forward to expose a pattern of misconduct, argued that the agency was “rotted at its core.” “Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report said. “The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”

The report detailed such abuses as a secret partnership in which the FBI receives private information on conservative users from Facebook, without seeking their consent or going though the legal processes that would normally be required to tap such data. Whistleblowers also alleged that the FBI “looked the other way” on dozens of attacks against anti-abortion groups, even as the agency sent heavily armed teams of officers to arrest pro-life activists at their homes for alleged violations of selectively enforced crimes. Parents who spoke out at school board meetings over controversial policies were targeted by investigators as alleged terrorists.

At the same time, former FBI official Timothy Thibault “shut down” a probe into the overseas business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and attempted to keep the case from being reopened, the report said. Thibault openly displayed his political bias in social media posts that included his official title. “America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Friday. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening, and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”

The report also accused the FBI of inflating statistics on domestic extremism to help fuel a narrative promoted by President Joe Biden’s administration. FBI employees who have conservative views are being purged from the agency, it claims. Republicans argued that the FBI was plagued by a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” as well as “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.” The agency’s shift toward “political meddling” has allegedly pulled resources away from legitimate law enforcement duties. For instance, one whistleblower claimed that he was told after the January 2021 US Capitol riot that child sex-abuse cases were “no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”

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CNN has more employees than viewers.

• Can Licht Make the Cuts? (Byers)

When Chris Licht became chairman and chief executive of CNN, back in May, his boss David Zaslav asked him to conduct a six-month review of the 4,500-person global news business. During the early months of that review, Licht would repeatedly tell members of his staff that the broad cost-cutting effort that was taking place across Warner Bros. Discovery would not result in layoffs at CNN. The parent company had more than $50 billion in debt, of course, and Zaz had promised to identify at least $3 billion in cost-cutting synergies across his new media empire, but Licht repeatedly assured staff that CNN would be spared: “As it relates to CNN, there are no layoffs per se,” Licht said at one staff-wide event in June. “A lay off is a downsizing, where you are given a target, and that is not happening at CNN.”


During the course of the review, however, Zaslav and his C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfelds asked Licht to engage in a hypothetical financial engineering exercise, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told me. If he were to cut costs at the company, how would he manage to achieve savings? Over time, the target number that Zaz and Gunnar were asking for became larger, and the exercise became less hypothetical. Then, last month, staring down the barrel of a recession and another disappointing earnings report, Zaz and Gunnar gave Licht a direct order: he needed to cut $100 million from CNN’s budget. Zaz’s team might argue that such an edict is financially responsible amid the current economic environment, but it is nevertheless significant. The figure, which CNN representatives declined to comment on, likely translates to almost 10 percent of CNN’s overall budget, sources familiar with the financials told me.

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I guess I simply don’t understand where this satanic cult came from. It seems to have appeared from nowhere.

• Florida Bans Puberty Blockers, Transgender Surgery For Minors (SAC)

Breaking Friday, Florida’s Board of Medicine and state Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted to ban puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery for minors in the state. “The chief point of agreement among all of the experts — and I must emphasize this — is that there is a pressing need for additional, high-quality clinical research,” said the board of medicine’s chair, Dr. David A. Diamond, a radiation oncologist. More than 70 percent of children with gender dysphoria “typically outgrow” it, City Journal reported earlier this year.


National Review reports: “The board of medicine voted 6-3, with five others not present, on Friday to forbid doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and hormones or performing surgeries until a patient is 18. Exceptions will be made for children who are already receiving the treatment. The Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine also voted to ban the use of puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery in new patients who are minors but allowed an exception for children enrolled in clinical studies. Florida is also one of at least nine states that prohibits Medicaid coverage of gender-transition services.”

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Canada is lost.

• Vaccine-Doubting Doctor Ordered To Pay $1m In Legal Costs (NP)

When a host of doctors, academics and journalists criticized her COVID vaccine-doubting, anti-lockdown views, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill struck back, filing a $12-million libel suit against them. A judge this week ordered the pediatrician in Brampton, west of Toronto, to pay the defendants as much as $1.1 million in legal costs after her lawsuit was struck down earlier this year as a potential curb on important public debate. Part of the costs were assigned to a fellow plaintiff, Dr. Ashvinder Kaur Lambda, who sued only two of the 23 defendants, but Gill is on the hook for the bulk of the hefty award.


Justice Elizabeth Stewart said the cost sum was appropriate, noting that the damages sought by the two physicians in their suit was “a considerable sum by any calculation and of understandably great concern” to the people they sued. “Although the individual … plaintiffs are not substantial corporations or institutions, they are educated persons who were represented by counsel throughout,” she added. Meanwhile, the doctor faces more legal trouble at Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. After cautioning Gill last year over some of her COVID statements, the regulator ordered her earlier this month to appear on similar charges before a discipline tribunal, a sort of trial where a guilty verdict could lead to revocation of her licence.

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Asian leopard cat. Its markings look like a python.

 

 

 

 

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