CNN Archives - The Automatic Earth

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.

This was the best answer on the war in Ukraine. Home run pic.twitter.com/vJnE8xpiOz

— MAGS (@TAftermath2020) May 11, 2023

Nancy Mace

"This could be the most corrupt scheme in American politics." pic.twitter.com/fj5FNmRAWz

— MAGA War Room (@MAGAIncWarRoom) May 10, 2023

Ed Dowd

300,000 Excess Deaths from the Jab 'And We Think We're Low' – Ed Dowd

"I would love to see excess mortality start to trend back towards normal. Unfortunately, it's not," lamented Blackrock portfolio manager @DowdEdward.

"In the group that I follow – which is undeniable – Group… pic.twitter.com/JZJhPuKJ3D

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) May 10, 2023

German farmers

Webb

Some of Wall Street’s most powerful bankers, the two founders of Google,Amazon, JP Morgan and Facebook,they all were helping to enable Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking crimes.

Why is the mainstream media so silent about this?
🤔 pic.twitter.com/r46L8w1vID

— Richard (@ricwe123) May 11, 2023

Overpopulation

In May 2009, a small group of billionaires gathered in secret to discuss how their enormous collective wealth could be used to solve the problem of "overpopulation".

Present at this highly secretive meeting were, among others: David Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and… pic.twitter.com/K9WNwSCcyC

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) May 10, 2023

McLuhan

In 1977, media prophet Marshall McLuhan discussed CIA and FBI surveillance, and then spun it into one of the most mind-bending comments on identity in the digital age I've ever heard. pic.twitter.com/gDWVJa4Anh

— Benjamin Carlson (@bfcarlson) May 10, 2023

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

Watters

We’ve now entered impeachment territory. This is the biggest political bribery scandal in American history and it has national security consequences. The Biden family’s been untouchable because they are the system. The FBI and the CIA are in on it- this is how the system works.… pic.twitter.com/vddPR2vCli

— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) May 11, 2023

• 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.

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.”

“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

“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

Powerful moment:

CNN: "Do you want Ukraine to win this war?"

Trump: "I don’t think about it in terms of winning and losing, I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people."

*Massive audience applause*

The people want peace.pic.twitter.com/Y62bhwPhX7

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) May 11, 2023

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.”

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

Russia MFA Spokeswoman Zakharova: "President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen is a representative of European revanchists and seeks simply to take revenge on our country for her Nazi ancestors and the crushing defeat that they suffered 78 years ago." pic.twitter.com/lfoGsl2hP3

— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) May 10, 2023

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.

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

The True Cost of Electric Cars Batteries
Source: California Insiderhttps://t.co/58nByDjFlU pic.twitter.com/smTiiB3AJb

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) May 10, 2023

“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.

Cold Outside

Comedy can be a powerful remedy for the cultural insantity pic.twitter.com/frUVrLXB1D

— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) May 10, 2023

Vet

Spaß beim Tierarzt ist auch eher selten 😂😂😻😺😽 pic.twitter.com/lG3zEBm6hx

— Monika Bassani 4X💉 🪣 📯 (@Pisepampell) May 10, 2023

Pigeon loop

pic.twitter.com/4foCT3OvjO

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) May 9, 2023

Mola mola

The Mola mola, also known as the ocean sunfish, is the heaviest known bony fish in the world. The largest recorded specimen measured 3.3 m (10 ft 10 in) in length and weighed 2,300 kg (5,100 lb).pic.twitter.com/BUYehfOuN4

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) May 10, 2023

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Debt Rattle March 7 2023

Mar 072023

March 7, 2023 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: Bakhmut, BBC, CNN, Jan 6, neocolonialism, profiteering, Tucker Carlson, Twitter, Zelensky 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

#BREAKING @RepThomasMassie Calls For All Of The January 6th Tapes To Be Released And For A Complete Catalogue Of All The Feds Present That Day

"There is some really strange behavior on those videos of people behind the police lines in plain clothes like touching them on the… pic.twitter.com/iXqbELYKyv

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) March 7, 2023

RFKjr

.@RobertKennedyJr: The Pentagon and the National Security Agency Ran the Entire Pandemic Response

"Pfizer and Moderna don't really own those vaccines. They slap their labels on them, but it was a Pentagon project." pic.twitter.com/Mu2X9juMeB

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 6, 2023

Crosstalk Pepe

Jaishankar

Jaishankar eloquently pointing out that Europe was in fact paying lip service to Russian sanctions. pic.twitter.com/8ZLX6BZ54A

— The Sirius Report (@thesiriusreport) March 6, 2023

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.

“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.

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.

Zelensky has decided to send more unwilling conscripts to meet Wagner. Why do you think that is? pic.twitter.com/SyyBhxW789

— Donbass Devushka (@PeImeniPusha) March 6, 2023

“..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.

“..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

The roads out of Artyomovsk. APU took about two weeks too long to start this retreat. pic.twitter.com/AKFsZeuZYD

— Donbass Devushka (@PeImeniPusha) March 6, 2023

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.

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.

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.

~~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.

“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.

“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.

“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?

“The West deceived Russia.”

Oleksiy Arestovych, former adviser to Zelensky, explains how Russia was manipulated by the West. pic.twitter.com/rnLiYS2IaI

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) March 6, 2023

“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.

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

Illumina CEO Explains How Pfizer & Moderna Created Their COVID Vaccines Without The Live Virus

“What’s interesting is Moderna has never had the live virus in their site. It was all a software problem.” pic.twitter.com/kzNI81sPzA

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) March 6, 2023

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.

“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!

‘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.”

“..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.

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

BREAKING: Tucker Carlson has obtained footage of Brian Sicknick walking around the Capitol healthy after the media claimed he had been killed by Trump supporters pic.twitter.com/Vd5sEu6oqS

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 7, 2023

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

Virtually no one in Washington, Republican or Democrat, wanted to see this tape released tonight. pic.twitter.com/YfpvaIZTbn

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 7, 2023

Rick and Jerry

RICKY and JERRY walk, talk & joke about the Holocaust.

If you find this offensive, don’t see what they’re doing, don’t get what they’re saying – fine – but you’re missing out, missing out on profound and utterly human levels.

COMEDIANS IN CARS GETTING COFFEE (2019)… https://t.co/sUo90gSBfN pic.twitter.com/7QXsC7ZcwB

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) March 6, 2023

Comorbidities – Foul Play With Death Certificates:

Foul Play With Death Certificates: Hospitals Made Record Profits@DrHenryEaly: "In Santa Clara County, California, and in Alameda County, California, they did a partial audit, and it lowered their [COVID] death certificates by 22% and 25%. Why? Because hospitals were counting… pic.twitter.com/SULaoEtJh8

— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 6, 2023

Thai elephant

Animals: This elephant in Thailand learned that the passing trucks carry his favorite snack.

Different countries, different problems. pic.twitter.com/d5oZT5LFUg

— Ben Proj (@ben_proj) March 6, 2023

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Debt Rattle November 6 2022

Nov 062022

November 6, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:35 am Finance Tagged with: Beijing, Biden, CNN, Johns Hopkins, midterms, NATO, Nazism, NYT, Scholz, Twitter 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

Tucker just ended NBC after they got CAUGHT scrubbing the Today Show's Paul Pelosi report raising questions about the attack:

"NBC News has Jeffrey Epstein'ed the entire thing." pic.twitter.com/MohFv4mQ1E

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 5, 2022

Until proven otherwise

"Until Proven Otherwise." – @DrAseemMalhotra pic.twitter.com/Bipui1xoxn

— Texas Kate (@Texas_Kate) November 3, 2022

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“..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.

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.

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.

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.

“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

Bill Maher: "Woke culture… that's one reason why the Republicans are going to do so well in this election." pic.twitter.com/sQASkgpYQp

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 4, 2022

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.

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.

“..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.”

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?

“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

Pipeline layoffs: no prob. Twitter layoffs: consternation. pic.twitter.com/sJWds8yjUQ

— James Hirsen (@thejimjams) November 4, 2022

“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!

Turkey map 2050

You know Turkish elections are around the corner when maps like this show up on tv.
They claim that by 2050 the whole region and beyond will be under Turkish control.
The best part of all this delirium is that a large number of Turks actually believe it, @RTErdogan relies on this pic.twitter.com/musnhCN1jj

— Harry Theocharous (@TheocharousH) November 5, 2022

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Debt Rattle November 5 2022

Nov 052022

November 5, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: China, CNN, debt, FBI, Florida, Putin, secret terror army, Total Meltdown, Wells Fargo 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)

Memorial on Old Arbat Street, Moscow, to children killed in Donetsk by US-backed Ukrainian forces BEFORE the Russian special operation began in February. pic.twitter.com/o4pczQ4YKl

— Dan Kovalik (@danielmkovalik) November 4, 2022

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.

“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.

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.

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.”

“..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.

“..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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

Asian leopard cat. Its markings look like a python.

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Debt Rattle July 3 2022

Jul 032022

July 3, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:21 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Biden, BRICS, Clarence Thomas, CNN, disintegration, EPA, food crisis, liberal world order, nuke war 52 Responses »

Pablo Picasso The muse 1935

• This 4th of July: Requiem for Freedoms Long Gone? (Brig Gen (ret) Blaine Holt)

• The Disintegration Of Western Society – Visible To The Naked Eye (Wilbert)

• “High Gas Prices Necessary For ‘Future Of The Liberal World Order'” (JTN)

• Saudi Arabia in Discussion to Join BRICS Coalition (CTH)

• A World Food Crisis Is Coming, And US Allows CCP To Buy American Farmland (CNBC)

• Nuke War Coming, Mysterious Deaths Don’t Stop, Dems Can’t Win – PCR (USAW)

• Kissinger’s Gas Crisis -And Pipeline- (George Webb)

• Wall Street Advocates Begin Admitting Demand Side Economy is in Free Fall (CTH)

• 700 Million Worldwide Will Die from CV19 Vax by 2028 – Dr. David Martin (USAW)

• Washington State Governor Makes Covid Vaccines A Permanent Requirement (JTN)

• We’ll Investigate Bidens’ Shady Business Dealings (NYP)

• On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals and Racial Politics (Musa al-Gharbi)

• The EPA’s Loss Is A Win For Democracy (Darwall)

• CNN Suffers Biggest Ratings Dip In 7 Years: Viewers Plummet 13% In June (DM)

Happy 51st birthday Julian

Putin on Edward Snowden

Putin on Edward Snowden; takes a dig on America

Surely Julian #Assange made a wrong choice seeking protection in Ecuadorian Embassy. pic.twitter.com/Ba1UN7Hwxs

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) May 3, 2022

We’re almost there!

Kash Patel Transition Nov 2020

BREAKING: Kash Patel reveals EVIDENCE proving that Donald Trump was not planning an insurrection because he ordered the transition of power in November 2020 through the Government Service Agency. pic.twitter.com/McIKuJ3VX7

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 2, 2022

Bandera
https://twitter.com/i/status/1543221160187502596

FUN FACT: Over $8.5 trillion has been wiped out of the US stock market this year.

“Established old money elites and entrenched academics have long denigrated the power and influence that came from innovation and hard work.”

• This 4th of July: Requiem for Freedoms Long Gone? (Brig Gen (ret) Blaine Holt)

Marinate those ribs, ice the beer, and get the fireworks ready so we can revel in the red, white, and blue. Let’s raise our collective glasses today to the bold few who spoke on our behalf more than 200 years ago. Thomas Jefferson’s inspired words live on: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Can you imagine how electric the atmosphere must have been on that steamy summer day when the Founders, having agreed to the brave separation from the British Crown on July 4, 1776 – committed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other as 51 of the 56 signers executed the Declaration of Independence.

The American Constitution is the longest standing governing document in the history of the world. We owe the Founders not just gratitude, but a civic commitment backed by our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to protect and preserve liberty. Free people in hot pursuit of their happiness are quite an excitable and often unruly lot. Established old money elites and entrenched academics have long denigrated the power and influence that came from innovation and hard work. From Woodrow Wilson to Henry Kissinger to the Davos elites, the usurpation of liberty through the attacks on individual freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are being fired upon citizens at a rapid pace. The nefarious plot to slowly eat away at liberty has been working for more than 70 years.

Global elitist, Henry Kissinger had the playbook when he said; “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.” Since Wilson’s day the elites have worked overtime imagining ways to bridle, We the People. Rather than the ho-hum predictable “good ‘ole boys (and girls) clubs,” or access to capital and opportunity based on your last name, they have leveraged eager and willing accomplices in government bureaucracy to establish what we all know as “the system.” Professional politicians beholden to big money rarely fear the people or the ballot box. Voila! — Your 40-year, double-digit term senators and representatives are born.

“The most practical example of this is recent with the Nordics joining NATO without any referendum or popular poll within the countries’ society.”

• The Disintegration Of Western Society – Visible To The Naked Eye (Wilbert)

While we notice the closest integration among emerging countries, we notice a certain disparity among the richest, first-world countries, because they may not seem like it, but they also have internal problems that cannot always be fought. And the most recent of these is inflation, with an unprecedented rise in prices. The middle class, the main target of the Great Reset enthusiasts, is beginning to feel prices rising more and more, even though they don’t fully agree with the war at the moment, which is impressive if you consider that public opinion is of little concern to the leaders who are driving the economic-military and diplomatic disaster in Europe. The most practical example of this is recent with the Nordics joining NATO without any referendum or popular poll within the countries’ society.

And the argument to be used I can already imagine: “But democracy is representative, William! If the people vote for politician x, it’s because they agree with his platform.” Yes. But that is half right. Not entirely. Democracy, especially representative democracy, has a serious flaw, precisely in terms of representation. Politicians who are not faithfully committed to the objectives of the nation, of the homeland, but, unfortunately, are rather vain, cause a distortion in the etymological sense of the term “representative democracy”, because who would it represent? Not the people! And one of the causes of the wrong votes that the people usually give (considering totally clean elections) is due to the fact that it is not invested in the political conscience of these societies, usually due to a lack of interest from part of society, but also due to the lack of incentives from the State in this matter.

But this is a very complex subject that I can deal with in another article. To try to continue the reasoning of the Western disintegration and distortion of the democratic sense, I can give a practical example of Brazil, because it is closer to home. The juristocracy ended up taking over the country after Operation Lava Jato, which was nothing more than an American collusion with the Brazilian opposition to depose the Dilma Rousseff government (which does not cancel out Dilma’s mistakes, who was a terrible supposed economist and basically destroyed the country, becoming easy prey as she fell into popular disgrace). But what is this juristocracy? Simply the country’s Supreme Court overruling any take on government that the Federal Executive Branch has. And that’s just about anyone anyway.

He actually said it.

• “High Gas Prices Necessary For ‘Future Of The Liberal World Order'” (JTN)

White House economic adviser Brian Deese on Thursday told CNN that high gas prices were a necessary inconvenience to preserve the “future of the liberal world order,” amid the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The average price of gas exceeded $5 per gallon for the first time in U.S. history in early June. CNN’s Victor Blackwell asked Deese to speak to comments President Joe Biden made earlier in the day suggesting Americans would pay high prices for “as long as it takes” for the war in Ukraine to end. Blackwell noted that experts have predicted the war’s end is unlikely to come in the near future before asking Deese “what do you say to those families that say ‘listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable’?”

“What you heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes,” Deese answered. “This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.” The Biden administration has drawn considerable criticism for its handling of the economy, especially on inflation and energy policy. Amid rising energy costs and opposition demands for increased domestic production, the government on Friday announced it had yet to decide on a plan to deny or approve, in part or in full, the expansion of oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Rutte WEF

Back in 2021, Netherlands pm Rutte indicated that the farmers had to leave here in order to roll out the WEF food hubs.
Source: https://t.co/m7P5009X8G pic.twitter.com/mHPjoE25CR

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) July 2, 2022

Biden’s there next week?!

• Saudi Arabia in Discussion to Join BRICS Coalition (CTH)

It is very curious timing in this article from Newsweek, containing massive geopolitical implications, using identified Saudi Arabia sources, would come in advance of Joe Biden’s visit to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Is this strategic geopolitical pressure from Saudi leader Mohamed Bin Salman (MbS) ahead of the meeting with Biden; or is this a genuine possibility that looms as likely? If the former, then Joe Biden is being geopolitically slow roasted by Saudi Arabia for his previous disparagements and ideological hypocrisy in his visit. If it is the latter, well, then the tectonic plates of international trade, banking and economics are about to shift directly under our American feet.

We have been closely monitoring the signs of a global cleaving around the energy sector taking place. Essentially, western governments’ following the “Build Back Better” climate change agenda which stops using coal, oil and gas to power their economic engine, while the rest of the growing economic world continues using the more efficient and traditional forms of energy to power their economies. This article from Newsweek is exactly about this dynamic with Saudi Arabia now potentially joining the BRICS team. [..] Here is the money quote:

[…] “China’s invitation to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the ‘BRICS’ confirms that the Kingdom has a major role in building the new world and became an important and essential player in global trade and economics,” Mohammed al-Hamed, president of the Saudi Elite group in Riyadh, told Newsweek. “Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is moving forward at a confident and global pace in all fields and sectors.”[…] “This accession, if Saudi joins it, will balance the world economic system, especially since the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil in the world, and it’s in the G20,” Hamed said. “If it happens, this will support any economic movement and development in the world trade and economy, and record remarkable progress in social and economic aspects as Saudi Arabia should have partnerships with every country in the world.”

That would essentially be the end of the petrodollar, and -in even more consequential terms- the end of the United States ability to use the weight of the international trade currency to manipulate foreign government. The global economic system would have an alternative. The fracturing of the world, created as an outcome of energy development, would be guaranteed.

Chinese Purchase Of North Dakota Farmland Raises National Security Concerns

• A World Food Crisis Is Coming, And US Allows CCP To Buy American Farmland (CNBC)

At first glance, the largely barren, wind-swept tract of land just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, seems to be an unlikely location for international espionage. There’s not much on the more than 300-acre patch of prime Dakota farmland right now other than dirt and tall grasses, bordered by highways and light industrial facilities on the outskirts of the city. The nearest neighbors include a crop production company, a truck and trailer service outfit, and Patio World, which sells landscaping supplies for suburban backyards.But when the three North Dakotans who owned the parcels of land here sold them for millions of dollars this spring, the transaction raised alarm bells as far away as Washington, D.C.

That’s because the buyer of the land was a Chinese company, the Fufeng Group, based in Shandong, China, and the property is just about 20 minutes down the road from Grand Forks Air Force Base — home to some of the nation’s most sensitive military drone technology.The base is also the home of a new space networking center, which a North Dakota senator said handles “the backbone of all U.S. military communications across the globe.”Now some security experts warn the Chinese corn milling plant should be stopped, because it could offer Chinese intelligence unprecedented access to the facility. It’s an only-in-America kind of fight — pitting the property and economic rights of a community against national security warnings from high-ranking officials in the nation’s capital.

Debate over the project has roiled the small community, with emotional city council hearings, local politicians at odds with one another, and neighborhood groups gearing up to block the project. Craig Spicer, whose trucking company borders the Chinese-held land, said he’s suspicious of the new company’s intent. “It makes me feel nervous for my grandkids,” he said. “It makes me feel nervous for my kids.” Gary Bridgeford, who sold his parcel of the farmland to the Chinese company for around $2.6 million this year, said his neighbors have vented their anger at him and planted signs opposing the project in his front yard. “I’ve been threatened,” he said. “I’ve been called every name in the book for selling property.”

Bridgeford said he believes the national security concerns are overblown. “How would they gain any knowledge of the base?” he asked. “It’s about 12 miles away. It isn’t like its next door.” “People hear the China stuff and there’s concern,” Bridgeford said. “But everyone has a phone in their pocket that was probably made in China. Where do you draw the line?”

Paul Craig Roberts.

• Nuke War Coming, Mysterious Deaths Don’t Stop, Dems Can’t Win – PCR (USAW)

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says American leaders want war with Russia. Russia is trying to avoid war, but the provocations from the U.S. and NATO keep coming. At some point, Dr. Roberts says Russia will be backed into a corner, and it won’t take long for the battle to go nuclear. This is a special interview inside the Weekly News Wrap-Up that explains how we got here and where we are going in terms of war with Russia. Dr. Roberts says it’s no longer a question of if, but when, it all hits the fan.

You cannot hide the unexplained deaths and emergency sickness. It is now happening every week. 32-year-old SNL comedian Nick Nemeroff died in his sleep this week, but before he did, he was on video complaining about being deathly sick after the two CV19 shots he already got. He pledged that he would not get the booster, and he never did–because he died a few days later. Meanwhile, Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker was rushed to the hospital with some strange emergency, and the drummer for Five Seconds of Summer passed out on stage for no apparent reason. Once again, the question is, “Were they vaxed?” This trend is going to continue for some time to come no matter if you are famous or not.

A new poll for the Democrats is coming in awful. An AP poll reveals 8 out of 10 Democrats say the country is “headed in the wrong direction.” That’s 8 out of 10 DEMOCRATS. Let that sink in. Couple that with another story from the AP that reports new data showing 1 million Democrats have left the party to register with the GOP. It looks like the Democrats cannot win without massive cheating or a war that shuts down the election process this fall. It’s going to be a rough ride. Buckle up.

George Webb races through Europe. He’s confusing at times.

• Kissinger’s Gas Crisis -And Pipeline- (George Webb)

Five years ago, I speculated about seven laptops in the Senate Sergeant of Arms office – six laptops running covert actions in Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, and Yemen and a seventh laptop used for the Iran Nuclear Deal. I believe the “Iran Nuclear Deal” laptop is still in use today. I based this speculation on a Senate Sergeant of Arms Blackberry I was left by a long-time Biden advisor who said the encrypted Blackberrys were given to the US Senate by the US State Department to negotiate secret energy deals like the Iran Nuclear Deal. Each country’s “deal” had separate participants, so I speculated there would be a separate laptop for each country’s covert action participants. Very similar to the Iran Nuclear Deal was the East Med Pipeline deal involving the US, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, which I called the “Southern Route” in 2017.

The “Southern Route” was being negotiated by Eric Braveman, his “husband”, Neil Brown, Avi Braverman of Israel, and one Ukrainian Billionaire named Igor Kolomoisky with lots of Cyrus bank accounts. So with all these US Senate Sergeant of Arms laptops running these top-secret negotiations, imagine my surprise when at least six of these laptops were stolen from the US Senate Sergeant of Arms office on January 6th, 2021. The “angry mob” took selfies in the US Senate Rotunda but still found time to break into the US Senate Sergeant of Arms office and steal six critical laptops. I had followed the story of the seven laptops for the seven Top Secret plans slipping through the fingers of CIA chief David Petraeus to his girlfriend, Paula Broadwell.

Petraeus somehow left seven folders with Top Secret information for overthrow operations in African and the Middle East on his desk – “Zero Footprint” for Libya and “Timber Sycamore” for Syria, for instance. I had been looking for the Blackberrys servers on Capitol Hill since I began my video series in 2016. because I knew Hillary Clinton and CIA Director David Petraeus communicated with encrypted Blackberry devices. Imagine my surprise again a few days ago when I found that Michael Stenger, the Senate Sergeant of Arms during January 6th, 2021 Capitol break-in, was suddenly dead, just before a special hearing was called on the House inquiry into the January 6th events. The timing of this death seem to correspond to getting funding at the G7 meeting of the top seven nations of the world to underwrite the East Med pipeline.

The plan appears to be 1) Have Kolomoisky provoke Russia with a series of Azov Battalian raids in the Donbas, 2) Have Russia occupy the Donbas in response, 3) Get emergency funding from the G7 to build the East Med Pipeline on behalf of the Genie Energy oil and gas energy consortium that I had been reporting on since 2016. Since some of Kolomoisky’s henchman were seen on Capitol Hill on January 6th, I supposed early on during my broadcasts of January 6th that the Ukrainians were at least going for their own “overthrow server” and for the East Med Pipeline laptop.

” Infuriating does not adequately describe my sentiments toward these intentional liars.”

• Wall Street Advocates Begin Admitting Demand Side Economy is in Free Fall (CTH)

At the exact moment that U.S. inflation began spiking in housing, energy, fuel and food, consumer demand for non-essential purchases, durable goods, started dropping. This is a natural outcome that mirrors your own experience in checkbook economics. When food, fuel and energy cost you more, you stop buying stuff and start prioritizing. Following the path of the “build back better” agenda, the U.S. version called “Green New Deal,” meant the Biden administration had to continue denying that any demand side contraction was taking place. However, it is clear from the indexes under the control of purchasing managers that orders for factory goods have been dropping.

The same is true on the services side of the PMI. Demand for services are being prioritized, and demand for non-essential services are dropping. The U.S. economy is contracting. Denial abounds. Infuriating does not adequately describe my sentiments toward these intentional liars. We are in an abusive relationship with all levels of government and their media spokespeople. Independent and honest journalism, the sharing of information that can empower people to intercede events with political liars, is quite literally the only thing that might save us from the catastrophic consequences of all this pretending. Knowledge is power, and we need to build our arsenal with an urgency unlike any before in our lifetime.

“This is old school racketeering, and it is no different than the mob in the 1920’s. This is old school racketeering for personal gain and profit at the expense of human lives.”

• 700 Million Worldwide Will Die from CV19 Vax by 2028 – Dr. David Martin (USAW)

Dr. David Martin has a deep medical science and investment resume. Dr Martin also runs a company (M·CAM International) that finances cutting edge innovation worldwide. He is also one of the key people seeking justice in lawsuits suing medical companies and the federal government involved in delivering the so-called vaccines for CV19. In simple terms, according to Dr. Martin, the CV19 vaccines are “bioweapons.” Big Pharma and the government knew it and also knew it would cause massive deaths and permanent injuries. Dr. Martin says, “It’s going to get much worse. . . . It is not a Corona virus vaccine. It is a spike protein instruction to make the human body produce a toxin. . . . The fact of the matter is the injections are an act of bioweapons and bioterrorism. They are not a public health measure. The facts are very simple. This was premeditated. . . . This was a campaign of domestic terror to get the public to accept the universal vaccine platform using a known biological weapon. That is their own words and not my interpretation.”

How many will die from the CV19 bioweapons? Dr. Martin says, “By their own estimate, they are looking for 700 million people globally, and that would put the U.S. participation in that of the injected population as 75 million to 100 million people. . . . There are a lot of reasons why they hope it will be between now and 2028 because there is this tiny little glitch of the illiquidity of the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs. So, the fewer recipients of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the better. Not surprisingly, the recommendation was people over the age of 65 were the first ones to get injected.”

Dr. Martin thinks the catastrophic effects of the CV19 injections will hit the medical industry soon. Dr. Martin explains, “The dirty secret is . . . there are a lot of pilots having micro vascular and clotting problems, and that keeps them out of the cockpit, which is a good place to not have them if they are going to throw a clot for a stroke or a heart attack. The problem is we are going to see that exact same phenomenon in the healthcare industry and at a much larger scale. So, we now have, along with the actual problem . . . of people getting sick and people dying, we actually have that targeting the healthcare industry writ large. Which means we are going to have nurses and doctors who are going to be among the sick and dead. That also means the sick and the dying are also not going to get care.”

Dr. Martin and his group are suing everybody from President Biden along with the FDA, CDC, Pfizer, Moderna and many others over the deaths and injuries from the CV19 bioweapons fraudulently passed off as “vaccines.” The next big court case is July 6, 2022, in federal court in Utah. Dr. Martin contends “this is far worse” than the Nuremberg trials of Nazis after WWII and adds, “This is organized crime. . . . They have hidden behind the immunity shield that absolves them of product liability by naming the delivery of a bioweapon–a vaccination program. . . . This is actually a criminal act. This is an act of domestic terror, and it is an anti-trust violation. This is racketeering. This is old school racketeering, and it is no different than the mob in the 1920’s. This is old school racketeering for personal gain and profit at the expense of human lives. You need to call it what it is, and it’s organized crime. I would say the Nazis were better than the people who are doing this. . . . The real question is why did American citizens develop a weapon to kill Americans and get paid to do it? That is a morally outrageous question, and, unfortunately, almost no one is asking it.”

…. for many state employees

• Washington State Governor Makes Covid Vaccines A Permanent Requirement (JTN)

Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has issued a directive making COVID-19 vaccines a permanent condition of employment for state workers in executive and small cabinet agencies, including boosters. The new vaccination standards for state employees are, according to the directive, meant to head off any possibility of going back to more severe actions implemented during the height of the pandemic, including stay-at-home orders and the closure of schools and businesses. “Widespread vaccination is also the primary means we have as a state to protect our health care system and to avoid the return of stringent public health measures,” the directive states.

All new state employees are required to be vaccinated with the most up-to-date vaccines, including any additional doses or boosters as recommended by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Current exempt state employees – executive or professional workers paid a salary rather than by the hour – are required to be fully vaccinated as of July 1, 2023. The directive calls for the State Human Resources Division of the Office of Financial Management to take steps necessary to continue the requirement that state employees not represented by a union be fully vaccinated, including that they have the most up-to-date vaccinations by July 1, 2023.

[..] Elizabeth Hovde, director of the Center for Health Care and Center for Worker Rights at the free market Washington Policy Center, indicated she didn’t understand where Inslee is coming from with this new directive. “COVID-19 is serious, but it is no longer a public-health crisis,” she told The Center Square in an email. “It has become like other viruses that we have to deal with in a reasonable and voluntary way. This is not reasonable or appropriate. And it doesn’t serve the public or the state workforce.” According to the state Department of Health’s COVID-19 Data Dashboard, there are 228 COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people, and 10% of hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients.

“People of working ages – and they are who this would apply to – have never been the ones dying from COVID-19 in a way that depletes hospital resources or state workforces,” Hovde continued. “Staffing shortages in the public sector and among health care workers are exacerbated by the governor’s vaccine mandate, on the other hand. “From ferries and highway workers to hospitals and first responders, Inslee’s vaccine mandate has ruined careers and family finances, and it has decreased expected service levels, for no demonstrable health benefit.

By Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan and James Comer. Kevin McCarthy is House Republican leader, Jim Jordan is House Judiciary ranking member, and James Comer is House Oversight ranking member.

• We’ll Investigate Bidens’ Shady Business Dealings (NYP)

We’ve pursued these threads despite Democrats’ refusal to cooperate. We’ve made almost 100 requests for information relating to Biden family schemes. Many, including every request made to the Biden administration, have been ignored. But with the help of witnesses who have documentation of their dealings with the Biden family, some answers are becoming clear. First, Joe Biden’s family members profited in foreign regions where he had influence as vice president. Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian company in an industry in which he had no experience. His only qualification was that his father ran point on US Ukraine policy. Second, Bidens have used their connections with Joe to promise access to the highest levels of government.

While Joe was vice president, Hunter promised Mexican business partners access to his father, and Joe Biden obliged by hosting them at the vice-presidential residence and the White House. Third, these practices continued during Joe Biden’s four-year government hiatus. In 2018, in the 2020 campaign’s run-up, Hunter Biden boasted privately, “If I say it’s important to me, then he [Joe] will work a way in which to make it a part of his platform.” Biden family members increasingly targeted foreign ventures, including multiple deals with the Chinese Communist Party. Fourth, Bidens were paid hundreds of thousands — if not millions — despite performing no discernible work.

Joe’s brother James boasted to foreign and domestic business partners that Joe would become president and they would reap the rewards in profits and US government endorsements. American banks flagged questionable transactions involving James and Hunter Biden and filed more than 150 Suspicious Activity Reports with the Treasury Department. Finally, contrary to Joe Biden’s statement that he never spoke to Hunter about his foreign business dealings, associates state that he was fully aware of his family’s business dealings and influence peddling. There is evidence of a direct sum of money set aside for “the Big Guy” — who witnesses have identified as Joe Biden — from foreign nationals. This raises significant questions about our national security and the role foreign nationals were allowed to play when he was vice president.

We have uncovered some answers, but many questions remain. In November, the American people will decide whether they accept being told what information they are allowed to know by a colluding media, including who is making policy decisions for this country and for whose interests. A Republican majority will be committed to uncovering the facts the Democrats, Big Tech and the legacy media have suppressed.

“Thomas first encountered the work of Malcolm X while pursuing his undergraduate degree. He had a poster of the man in his dorm room.”

• On Clarence Thomas, White Liberals and Racial Politics (Musa al-Gharbi)

Many assume that Thomas’ rulings flow out of a commitment to conservative orthodoxy, fervent Christianity, or partisan politics. The truth is much more interesting than that, albeit perhaps more unsettling. Thomas’ alignment with the Republican Party seems to be driven first and foremost by a deep mistrust of white liberals, the institutions they control, and the policies they try to advance in the name of ‘social justice.’ This mistrust was widely shared among black activists of his generation. Malcolm X, for instance, famously declared:

“In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negros (i.e. the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power… the white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or a tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between white liberals and white conservatives. Politically the American Negro is nothing but a football.”

Thomas first encountered the work of Malcolm X while pursuing his undergraduate degree. He had a poster of the man in his dorm room. He memorized many of Malcom’s speeches by heart and continues to evoke him frequently to this day. But it wasn’t just Malcolm who was skeptical of white liberals. Not by a longshot. In 1966, for instance, the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a position paper arguing: “More and more we see black people in this country being used as a tool of the white liberal establishment. Liberal whites have not begun to address themselves to the real problem of black people in this country… previous solutions to black problems in this country have been made in the interests of those whites dealing with these problems and not in the best interests of black people in the country. Whites can only subvert our true search and struggles for self-determination, self-identification, and liberation in this country.”

Now take on the CDC and FDA.

• The EPA’s Loss Is A Win For Democracy (Darwall)

Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act does not give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) authority to proceed with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is much more significant than the narrow grounds on which it was decided. The Clean Power Plan was already dead. It had been repealed and replaced by the Trump administration, decisions that were later struck down by a court of appeals. Moreover, there is history between the EPA and the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court ruled against the EPA’s rewriting of the Clean Air Act to facilitate its use as a tool of climate policy, which was already seen as “poor and probably unworkable” by officials in the Obama administration.

“We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance,’” Justice Antonin Scalia famously wrote. The Court also ruled that the agency had acted unreasonably with its mercury emissions rules, though the EPA boasted that despite this decision, investments meant that most power plants were already well on the way to compliance. Perhaps that attitude was a factor in the Supreme Court’s shock decision in February 2016 to stay the Clean Power Plan to prevent a repeat of the EPA’s workaround. As Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court’s liberal minority, put it, “This Court has obstructed EPA’s effort from the beginning.” Formally, the Court’s decision revolves around rival interpretations of Section 111 (d) of the Clean Air Act and what Congress meant by “best system of emission reduction.”

Around 20 pages of Chief Justice John Roberts’s 31-page opinion for the court is taken up analyzing what he calls this “previously little-used backwater.” By “system,” did Congress mean a system modifying an existing plant’s emission performance? Or can “system” refer to the whole electrical grid or even a cap-and-trade scheme, as Kagan contends? Kagan’s brisk arguments demonstrate how a differently composed Court would have decided the matter. Important as these rival arguments might be, they function as kabuki theater for the underlying disagreement between the justices on the role and legitimacy of the administrative state. Although Roberts refers only once to the administrative state, it is never far from the surface. But the battle lines are made explicit in Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence and in the Kagan dissent.

They hope Trump will win.

• CNN Suffers Biggest Ratings Dip In 7 Years: Viewers Plummet 13% In June (DM)

CNN’s ratings continue to slip in primetime to their lowest numbers in seven years, despite a public about face on sensationalism and opinion shows under new boss Chris Licht. The network, promised by Licht to ‘go a different way’ during a time ‘where extremes are dominating cable news’, appear to still be in the tank even during a month that saw the blockbuster January 6 hearings. Despite the hearings, which drew tens of millions of viewers across multiple networks, CNN had fewer viewers in June than it did in May, which continued a months-long downward slope for the network since the invasion of Ukraine lifted them in March. While the three major cable news outlets – CNN, Fox News and MSNBC – have all seem some declines since former President Trump left office, the numbers for CNN continue to disintegrate at an alarming rate.

CNN, which moved under Warner Discovery leadership in April, drew an average of just 654,000 viewers in primetime in June and 487,000 for one entire newsday, down one and three percent respectively. During the committee hearings week of June 13-19, the network averaged just 480,000 viewers, the network’s worst ratings week since November 2015 and down 13 percent from those May averages. Overall, June 2022 was the lowest-rated month for 24-hour viewership on CNN since July 2015, according to The Daily Beast. By contrast, MSNBC – which had the highest ratings for the hearings on cable – averaged 1.28 million viewers in primetime, up 26 percent from May. Fox News also had a better second quarter than they did in 2021.

DeSantis mRNA

pic.twitter.com/hldlTuTYoJ

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) July 2, 2022

Canada Day
https://twitter.com/i/status/1543429525861711874

https://twitter.com/i/status/1543170144595283968

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Debt Rattle June 17 2022

Jun 172022

June 17, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:05 am Finance Tagged with: boosters, CNN, Elon Musk, Fauci, Gazprom, Jan 6, Lavrov, pumping turbines, refiners, Simone Gold, Trump 65 Responses »

Albrecht Dürer Praying hands 1508

• Lavrov to Boris Johnson: Just Try to Bring Russia to Its Knees (Celente)

• Fauci Admits ‘Not Enough Data’ On Boosters For 5-Year-olds (Fox)

• Gazprom Defends Gas Cuts As Prices In Europe Soar (AFP)

• German Official Warns Of Gas Shortages, Bankruptcies, Massive Price Hikes (RMX) s

• Tesco Sales Fall Amid ‘Unprecedented Increases In Cost Of Living’ (G.)

• US Energy Chief To Discuss Record Pump Prices With Refiners Next Week (R.)

• MBS and Putin: Why Talk to One and Not the Other? (Warner)

• Elon Musk To Make Twitter Inclusive, User-Friendly & Profitable (TMS)

• New CNN Boss: Stop Calling Trump’s Election Fraud Claims ‘The Big Lie’ (DM)

• Trump Demands Equal Time On TV Networks To Counter Jan. 6 Hearings (JTN)

• COVID Dr. Simone Gold Sentenced To Prison For Jan. 6 Riot (JTN)

“When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle, and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken — it may be fair words shall prevail.”
– Rudyard Kipling, “The Jungle Book”

Lavrov did a BBC interview yesterday.

• Lavrov to Boris Johnson: Just Try to Bring Russia to Its Knees (Celente)

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, said in an interview Thursday that the Kremlin was forced to carry out a “special military operation” in Ukraine because there was “no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into NATO was a criminal act.” Lavrov spoke with the BBC about the fallout from the war, and how Russia has been largely ostracized from the West. He pointed the the UK in particular. “I don’t think there’s even room for manoeuvre any more,” Lavrov said. He said both Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss have both said openly that “we should defeat Russia, we should force Russia to its knees.” “Go on, then, do it!” Lavrov said.

Truss and Johnson have been two of the most outspoken critics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lavrov may have been referencing Truss’ comment in February when she said she wanted to “degrade” the Russian economy. “We’ve now imposed the most severe sanctions that Russia has ever seen, stopping access to vast swathes of the Russian economy, and stopping them build up their armed forces, cutting the Russian economy off at the knees,” she said. Johnson in May called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “crocodile” chewing on Ukraine’s leg. “How can you deal with a crocodile when it’s in the middle of eating your left leg?,” Johnson said. “The guy’s completely not to be trusted.”

BAM!! Lavrov not taking any shit!! pic.twitter.com/uUeJZG9Hjc

— Pete Liquid (@PeteLiquid) June 16, 2022

“That’s not science. That’s conjecture. And we should not be making public policy on it..”

• Fauci Admits ‘Not Enough Data’ On Boosters For 5-Year-olds (Fox)

Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted Thursday that even though the Biden administration recommends that everyone over the age of 5 gets a booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, there is currently insufficient evidence to prove that the boosters actually lower rates of hospitalization or death in children. During a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., asked Fauci if he was aware of any studies that showed a reduction in deaths or hospitalizations for children who had received boosters. “Right now, there’s not enough data that has been accumulated, Senator Paul, to indicate that that’s the case,” Fauci stated.

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases began to explain that he thinks the basis for the recommendation had to do with looking at morbidity and mortality of children in different age groups, when the senator cut him off. “So there are no studies. And Americans should all know this. There are no studies on children showing a reduction in hospitalization or death with taking a booster,” Paul said. Paul, who is also a doctor, noted that the only studies that had been done were antibody studies, which he argued were not enough to prove a vaccine’s efficacy. He claimed that just because a vaccine produces antibodies, that does not mean it is necessary. To illustrate his point, he argued that a person could get 10 boosters and get antibodies from all of them, but that does not mean a person needs to get 10 booster shots.

Fauci, who testified virtually because he currently has COVID-19, called Paul’s hypothetical “somewhat of an absurd exaggeration,” but Paul claimed that this is basically what the government is doing. “That’s not science. That’s conjecture. And we should not be making public policy on it,” he said.

Rand Paul Fauci

I asked, "Can you tell me if anyone on the vaccine approval committees ever received money from the people who make vaccines?"

Fauci : "People who receive royalties are not required to divulge them." pic.twitter.com/a0YIm2jfvZ

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 16, 2022

The “pumping turbines” in Nordstream I need repair. German company Siemens sent them all the way to Montreal to be fixed. Because of Canada and German sanctions, they cannot be brought back to the pipeline. Unless both countries circumvent their own sanctions. They will.

• Gazprom Defends Gas Cuts As Prices In Europe Soar (AFP)

Russian energy giant Gazprom on Thursday defended gas cuts to Europe as prices soared and tensions raged between Russia and the West over Ukraine. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said that Moscow will play by its own rules after cutting daily gas supplies to Germany and Italy. “Our product, our rules. We don’t play by rules we didn’t create,” Miller said during a panel discussion at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia’s second city. Earlier this week, Gazprom slashed its natural gas deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline, after saying Germany’s Siemens had delayed the repair work of compressor units at the Portovaya compression station. “For now, there is no way to solve the problem that arose with the compressor station,” Miller said.

“Siemens is still silent, trying to find a solution.” Italian energy giant Eni also reported problems, saying it will receive only 65 percent of the gas requested Thursday from Gazprom. Gazprom has said exports to countries that did not belong to the former Soviet Union were down 28.9 percent between January 1 and June 15 compared to the same period last year. “Of course, Gazprom is reducing the volume of gas supplies to Europe,” Miller said, pointing out that the prices have increased several-fold. [..] Moscow has lost several European gas clients after it demanded that all “unfriendly” countries pay for Russian natural gas in rubles in response to a barrage of Western sanctions over Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine.

Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and the Netherlands have had their natural gas deliveries suspended over refusing to pay in rubles. The Nord Stream pipeline was commissioned in 2012 and delivers gas from northwestern Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. The launch of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was set to double Russian gas deliveries to Germany was halted in response to Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine. “Nord Stream 2 is under pressure and gas could be supplied to Germany even today via it. But it has not been put in operation because it is not certified,” Miller said.

Your governments volunteer to do this to you.

• German Official Warns Of Gas Shortages, Bankruptcies, Massive Price Hikes (RMX)

A gas shortage and high prices will send “shockwaves through the country,” leading to landlords cutting the heat for tenants and widespread company bankruptcies, warned Klaus Müller, the head of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, which is the regulatory office for electricity, gas, telecommunications, postal services, and railway markets. Müller paints a bleak picture about the crisis in an interview with German newspaper Rheinische Post, saying it will “send shockwaves throughout the country. Banks will ramp up their business with installment loans, and ailing companies will fall into insolvency.”

Müller’s office, which is a federal agency within the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, has a bird’s eye view of the economic situation in Germany and also special insight into how economic conditions will develop into the future. Müller says he expects gas prices to continue to climb, resulting in increased inflation that goes far beyond energy. He also warns that there will be a dramatic lack of gas in the winter, which could lead to landlords turning down the heat to save on energy. In turn, Germans may have to grapple with colder apartments. [..] The government has already pushed businesses and citizens to reduce their energy consumption, but that pressure may come in the form of new laws and regulations in the future, with Müller calling for more pressure to be applied to save gas.

Although Germany has pushed for a general ban on Russian oil imports, the country is highly reliant on natural gas from Russia. If Russia were to cut gas in the critical winter months or even restrict supplies, it could lead to critical damage to the German economy, a scenario energy experts have already warned about. Germans will not only be colder in their apartments, but companies will also face mass bankruptcies, said Müller. However, he said government policies could help mitigate financial losses and preserve critical gas supplies. He said he wants to encourage companies to save gas with a bonus scheme.

Bigger market share, less income.

• Tesco Sales Fall Amid ‘Unprecedented Increases In Cost Of Living’ (G.)

Tesco said sales have fallen at its UK stores in recent weeks as its customers face “unprecedented increases in the cost of living”. The UK’s largest supermarket said it had gained market share but sales in the three months to 28 May fell 1.5% on the same period last year when the UK was in lockdown. Ken Murphy, the chief executive of Tesco, said: “The market environment remains incredibly challenging.” He said it was difficult to separate the significant impact of last year’s coronavirus lockdowns from other influences on shoppers but said Tesco was seeing “some early indications of changing customer behaviour as a result of the inflationary environment”.

He said: “Customers are facing unprecedented increases in the cost of living and it is therefore even more important that we work with our supplier partners to mitigate as much inflation as possible.” Tesco said sales of clothing and general merchandise, such as homewares and toys, were most affected, while online sales were also affected as shoppers returned to supermarkets. It said the decline in the volume of goods sold was partly offset by inflation. Sales in the Republic of Ireland were down 2.4% but were up 2% overall because of strong growth in central Europe and at its Booker wholesale chain. The retailer’s comments come after more than one in five (22%) of those who took part in a recent survey said they skipped a meal or reduced the size of meals because they could not afford to buy food.

Looking for a scapegoat.

• US Energy Chief To Discuss Record Pump Prices With Refiners Next Week (R.)

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to meet with refining executives on June 23 as tensions between the White House and the oil industry mount over soaring gasoline prices, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The planned talks come as President Joe Biden, under pressure over high gasoline prices, has demanded that oil refining companies explain why they are not putting more fuel on the market as they reap windfall profits. read more The Energy Department had no comment, but referred to a letter Biden sent on Wednesday to executives from companies, including Marathon Petroleum , Valero Energy and Exxon Mobil, that said he had directed Granholm to hold an emergency meeting and engage the National Petroleum Council in coming days.

The NPC is a privately-funded panel that makes recommendations to the energy secretary and executive branch. The U.S. oil industry’s main trade groups pushed back on the Biden administration on Wednesday in a letter to Biden, pointing out that the nation’s oil refineries are already running at close to full capacity. “Any suggestion that U.S. refiners are not doing our part to bring stability to the market is false,” said Chet Thompson, the head of the American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers. Energy companies are enjoying bumper profits since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as punitive U.S. sanctions against Moscow add to a global supply squeeze driving crude prices above $100 a barrel and U.S. gasoline prices to records over $5 a gallon. U.S. refiners, meanwhile, are running at near-peak levels to process fuel – currently at 94% of capacity, according to government data.

OPEC+ has brought Putin and MBS closer than you may think.

• MBS and Putin: Why Talk to One and Not the Other? (Warner)

The administration’s argument for a Biden-MBS meeting is that it is in the greatest interest for Middle East peace and peace “around the world” that the two should talk. Overall peace as well as increased oil production override the horrendous human rights record of the Saudi leader, according to the Biden team. If “pariah” was the term Biden used to describe MBS during his campaign and then changed his mind, what about the president’s views on Vladimir Putin? If the Biden team sees meeting MBS face-to-face as a positive step to increase oil production and reduce tensions in the Middle East, surely there is a more pressing need to have another Biden-Putin summit to stop the carnage in Ukraine and increase grain delivery.

But the last and only summit between the two, in Geneva on June 16, 2022, led to no concrete results. On the contrary; eight months later Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Putin was obviously not impressed enough with Biden to alter his plans for attacking Ukraine. For the moment, no mention is being made of a follow-up meeting. If Biden can’t talk to Putin, who can? The most promising candidate is French President Emmanuel Macron. According to reports, Macron has had a hundred hours of telephone conversations with the Russian president since December. To what avail? While the conversations may have solidified Macron’s self-image as a big league international leader, the war continues to rage in Ukraine. So President Biden is planning to meet MBS in the interest of Middle East peace and peace “around the world,” but no mention is being made of a follow-up to the Geneva summit in the interest of peace in Ukraine.

Biden is also to meet MBS for increased oil supplies but he is not willing to meet Putin for increased grain. The problems of peace and oil override (I avoid the use of trump even with a small t) human rights violations while a direct discussion with Putin for peace and grain has no possibility. The fundamental question is the value of talking. Any proposal to have Biden meet again with Putin brings back memories of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain 1938 talks with Hitler. The appeasement agreed upon in Munich had no positive effect in stopping World War II. Macron is being criticized along these lines. Biden would certainly be rebuked for even proposing a second summit.

“it’s essential to have free speech and for people to be able to communicate freely.”

• Elon Musk To Make Twitter Inclusive, User-Friendly & Profitable (TMS)

Elon Musk is aiming to significantly transform Twitter, according to him during a meeting with the platform’s employees on Thursday. He plans to purge it of bot/fake accounts, increase the number of real users, and allow free speech to flourish while boosting profitability. Employees who do their job responsibly will not be fired. Elon Musk met with Twitter employees on Thursday to answer their questions, clarifying the future of the platform that will become his if the purchase will be completed. He spoke about some plans, and also explained his views on remote work and layoffs, which employees are afraid of.

Musk Veritas

BREAKING: Project Veritas LEAKS #TwitterAllHands with @ElonMusk

"It’s essential to have free speech."

"It’s important to represent multiple opinions & not driving a narrative."

“In order for people to have trust in @Twitter there needs to be transparency." pic.twitter.com/7rNphPg2zH

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 16, 2022

During the meeting, Musk made it clear that freedom of speech is a priority for him. Speaking about his stance on content moderation, he said, “We should allow people to say what they want.” Musk emphasized that “it’s essential to have free speech and for people to be able to communicate freely.” To be very clear, he said that Twitter should work to prevent the spread of potentially harmful or offensive content in order for users to feel comfortable using the platform. “There’s freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” Musk said. He explained that anyone can go to Times Square and say whatever they want, but this does not mean that it needs to be advertised to millions of people.

Therefore, Musk believes that people should be allowed to say whatever they want that is within the law, but they should not be amplified and widely spread. “Anyone could just go into the middle of Times Square right now and say anything they want. They can just walk into the middle of Times Square and deny the Holocaust … but that doesn’t mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people. So I think people should be allowed to say pretty outrageous things that are in the bounds of the law but that don’t get amplified and don’t get a ton of reach.” In addition, Musk said that he has a plan to attract hundreds of thousands of new users to the platform, bringing their total to a billion or more. To date, the platform has just over 200 million accounts, although it is difficult to say for sure how many of them are bots/fake.

Employees

BREAKING: Leaked Internal Slack Messages Show Twitter Employees Reaction to @ElonMusk's #TwitterAllHands Call pic.twitter.com/VMZ1Uoxu4E

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 16, 2022

CNN is losing too much money.

• New CNN Boss: Stop Calling Trump’s Election Fraud Claims ‘The Big Lie’ (DM)

CNN’s new boss Chris Licht has ordered staff to stop using the phrase ‘the big lie’ to describe Donald Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, as it’s a Democrat slogan. The wording is a popular one for the network. According to Mediaite, the phrase has been said 168 times in the first half of June alone. Hosts like Reliable Sources’ Brian Stelter are often fond of the phrase to the point where they use it prominently in graphic packages and chyrons. But Licht has ordered Stelter and other journalists to stop, and has suggested ‘Trump’s election lie’ or ‘election lie’ as possible replacements. He issued the edict days after warning staff over their incessant use of ‘BREAKING NEWS’ graphics on stories, which he said was melodramatic, and ultimately diluted the power of big stories when they did break.

Licht was asked to opine on the term during a conference call Tuesday with the network’s management and the producers of various shows. He allegedly said that he preferred staff avoid it, though was clear in saying that this was not mandatory. A source said that Licht believes the specific phrasing of ‘the big lie’ – a reference to Hitler’s Nazi propaganda efforts during the Third Reich – is a Democratic Party talking point. CNN has come under fire for moving away from its well-respected news coverage towards dreary opinion programming, where hosts on seven and eight-figure salaries parrot woke talking points. Licht is also said to be keen to move the well-resourced network back towards neutral news coverage, with CNN hailed over its coverage of the Ukraine war and other big international news stories.

[..] Licht, as part of his efforts to revamp the outlet, has been evaluating news personalities and programs that became polarizing during Donald Trump’s presidency. Those who fail to get on board with the network’s new priority to become ‘less partisan’ could be terminated, CNN insiders told Axios. Licht isn’t reportedly looking to get rid of primetime personality programming, but he does want CNN’s news staff to present information in a way that upholds the network’s apparent values of unbiased reporting. Analysts allege this could prove problematic for network correspondents Jim Acosta and Brian Stelter, among others, who have ‘become the face of the network’s liberal shift.’

“Trump’s statement appeared to appeal to the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time provision that mandates that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates..”

• Trump Demands Equal Time On TV Networks To Counter Jan. 6 Hearings (JTN)

Kept by congressional Democrats from putting on a defense, former President Donald Trump demanded Thursday that television networks airing the Jan. committee hearings provide him equal time to provide his side of the case. “I DEMAND EQUAL TIME!!!” Trump said in a midday statement posted on his Truth Social media site just hours before the Democrat-led panel began a new hearing on the Capitol riots. “The Fake News Networks are perpetuating lies, falsehoods, and Russia, Russia, Russia-type disinformation (same sick people, here we go again!) by allowing the low rated but nevertheless one sided and slanderous Unselect Committee hearings to go endlessly and aimlessly on (and on and on!),” the 45th president added.

Democrats holding the Jan. 6 hearings have refused to let House Republicans to put their own members on the committee and have openly talked about the hearings being a vehicle to keep Trump from running again. “The point is that the constitutional purpose is clear, to keep people exactly like Donald Trump and other traitors to the union from holding public office,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told ABC News earlier this year. Trump’s statement appeared to appeal to the Federal Communications Commission’s equal time provision that mandates that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political candidates who request it if their opponents has gotten it. Trump called the Jan. 6 hearings “a one-sided, highly partisan Witch Hunt, the likes of which has never been seen in Congress before and that he deserved time on national TV to present his side of the case, including election irregularities and Democrat failures to secure Capitol.

Simone Gold was at the Capitol not to riot, but to talk about and protest the vaccine rollout. And she did.

• COVID Dr. Simone Gold Sentenced To Prison For Jan. 6 Riot (JTN)

Founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Simone Gold, was sentenced to 60 days in prison for her role in the Jan. 6 riot. Gold, who rose to fame during the COVID pandemic for pointing out the vaccine’s unknown factors, will have one year of supervised release following the prison sentence, Department of Justice records show. She must also pay $500 in restitution and the maximum fine of $9,500. Gold pleaded guilty in December to entering and remaining in the Capitol building. On the afternoon of Jan. 6, Gold spoke in Statuary Hall about her opposition to vaccine mandates and government lockdowns, the DOJ’s Statement of Offense claims. She was arrested by FBI agents 12 days later. She made headlines in 2021 for telling the “Mad Truth with Dr. Gina” podcast that it is illegal “to mandate an experimental medication or treatment for anything” and advocating for those who are less vulnerable to abstain from vaccination.

Gonzalo Lira: “Oh boy. So one of the Americans captured in Ukraine, Robert Drueke, is not a trained combat soldier—he’s a chemical weapons specialist.”

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Debt Rattle February 28 2022

Feb 282022

February 28, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:50 am Finance Tagged with: Ardern, balance sheets, CNN, DeSantis, DNA, Lukashenko, mRNA, Putin, WHO 48 Responses »

Leonardo da Vinci The madonna of the carnation 1478-80

• Worst Fears Realized: Pfizer mRNA Transcribes into DNA (Chudov)

• DNA Transcribed from mRNA Vaccine Contains MUTANT gp130 Tumor Gene (Chudov)

• Col Douglas Macgregor: Slightly Different Take on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (CTH)

• Day 4- SITREP (Clint Ehrlich)

• Putin’s Nuclear Threat (Scott Ritter)

• CNN Scours Social Media for Ukraine Content to Broadcast (CTH)

• Belarus Preparing To Deploy Troops To Ukraine In Support Of Russia (JTN)

• DeSantis Bill Shields Healthcare Providers From Liability (JTN)

• WHO Making Moves On International Vaccine ‘Passport’ (Pol.)

• New Zealand High Court ENDS Jacinda Ardern’s Vaccine Mandate (NP)

• The Dirty Work Of Going Through Old Positions On Bank Balance Sheets (BTR)

Zelensky story

pic.twitter.com/hTyiGMXkGX

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2022) February 27, 2022

Kash Patel

Kash Patel: “John Durham is working on the largest criminal conspiracy in US history. It makes Watergate look like a parking citation.” pic.twitter.com/u5WfJjdaCj

— Luke Goldberg (@LukeGoldberg4) February 27, 2022

“Your organism acts in accordance with your DNA program, and now, well, the program has been hacked and modified by Pfizer.”

• Worst Fears Realized: Pfizer mRNA Transcribes into DNA (Chudov)

What the article shows is that in vitro, using a human liver cell line, Pfizer mRNA vaccine uses a natural reverse transcriptase enzyme called LINE-1, and the genetic code of the vaccine is reverse transcribed into the DNA. It also explains that vaccine mRNA actually does travel to the liver as one of the preferred sites (the other sites, as we heard, are ovaries and more). What does it mean? Normally, our cells do the opposite: the cell nucleus, where the DNA is, expresses certain DNA code based on conditions of the cell, and produces natural, human messenger RNA. That messenger RNA travels out of the nucleus, where it is expressed into proteins needed for cell building. This is how growing organisms express different genetic programs to grow muscle cells or brain cells, etc.

This process is called “transcription”. For many years, Central Dogma of Molecular Biology stated that the “reverse transcription” — moving genetic code from RNA back into the sacred cellular nucleus and recoding the DNA — was impossible. Eventually, scientists realized that it is possible under various conditions. For example, the HIV RNA virus is able to do so and it reprograms our DNA to produce copies of it. HIV is the virus that causes AIDS. To effect reverse transcription, enzymes called “reverse transcriptases” are needed. One of them is called LINE-1. Apparently, per study, the Pfizer mRNA vaccine causes cells to produce that LINE-1 enzyme.

Simplified: As I explained in response to a questioner: “Pfizer mRNA vaccine changes our genetic code that determines how our organisms operate, that you inherited from your mom and dad. Now your DNA was changed from what your mom and dad gave you, by adding a little mysterious “edit” from Pfizer. Your organism acts in accordance with your DNA program, and now, well, the program has been hacked and modified by Pfizer.”

Cancer Code: Considering that Sars-Cov-2 “spike protein” has cancer code from Moderna 2017’ patent 9,587,003, it is imperative to find out the implications of this reverse transcription, and whether the vaccinated now have any undesirable genetic code embedded into their DNA. Of particular interest is whether this mRNA-induced reverse transcription affects the “germ line”, such as eggs and sperm cells, and whether it also affects the fetus of pregnant mothers.

Our astute commenter pointed out an anonymous 4chan post from Dec 2020, long before any of this became known. The date makes us all ask, did this person know too much?

People must simply not understand the grave danger. Vaccinations continue.

• DNA Transcribed from mRNA Vaccine Contains MUTANT gp130 Tumor Gene (Chudov)

Please note that a question arises: gp130 mutations can cause liver tumor, and the entire experiment was performed on a line of immortal liver cancer cells. Could it be that the original article picked up mutated gp130 from the Huh7 liver cancer cells? If that is the case, if the DNA sequence is inherent to Huh7 line itself, it could invalidate a lot of conclusions that the original science article, as well as my own articles, were making. However, the authors were diligent with controls and did NOT see the questioned DNA sequence that I am looking at, in the control cells that did NOT receive the Pfizer vaccine. In addition, the published DNA sequence contained Sars-Cov-2 genes (see BLAST results), so it does come from the effect of the vaccine, not the Huh7 culture cells.

I did perform some cursory checks, to the best of my ability, and the Huh7 line contains p53 mutations, but it does not seem like it contains gp130 mutations. So, keeping my fingers crossed, the mutated gp130 gene that I found, is a genuine finding of lab research, comes from the mRNA vaccine, and not a coincidental pickup from the Huh7 cells. I am guessing that the authors were looking at liver cells specifically, because they knew where to look (that the mRNA delivery system delivers the lipid nanoparticles to the liver). Why did the authors pick liver cells? Maybe because they heard of this 4chan post from 2020, when NOTHING yet was known about the strange mRNA vaccines.

We were Told it will Never Happen

Clarifications: The sequence of mutated gp130 genes, found in the DNA reverse transcribed from Pfizer Covid vaccine,
• Does not mean that it will NECESSARILY cause cancer
• The four “red dot” mutations listed, may be harmless
• Does not mean that it was added to Pfizer vaccine intentionally to cause harm
• Does not mean that it is even expressed as a gp130 protein, as expression of genes depends on cellular context
• What it DOES mean is that we need to look at this closely.

“Macgregor is saying that Russia does not want to engage a civilian population and is making every effort to avoid civilian conflict..”

• Col Douglas Macgregor: Slightly Different Take on Russia-Ukraine Conflict (CTH)

My spidey senses tell me that Col Douglas Macgregor will not be welcomed back on Fox News after he gave a rather different take on what is happening amid the Russia-Ukraine conflict that does not toe the common media line. Jennifer Griffin was furious. The first presentation was during a segment with Fox Host Dan Bongino. The second presentation of essentially the same analysis was with Trey Gowdy. In both discussions Macgregor’s perspective reconciles the disparity between what the U.S. government, State Dept, and corporate media are saying -vs- what is visible. Essentially, Macgregor is saying that Russia does not want to engage a civilian population and is making every effort to avoid civilian conflict in those population centers.

In part this is because Putin knows the Western approach is a propaganda war that would be fueled by what it would look like if population carnage took place. However, if Ukraine President Zelenskyy does not acquiesce to terms, Putin could easily crush those centers with artillery and rockets. What Macgregor outlines would explain why these skirmishes always seem ‘off in the distance’. The western government and media perspective is to make it seem like Volodymyr Zelenski and the rebellious civilian misfits are beating the Russian army because that frames a better story. However, what Macgregor outlines is Putin not wanting to fuel the United Nations, NATO and State Dept narrative engineering, thus the absence of visible fighting.

Twitter thread.

• Day 4- SITREP (Clint Ehrlich)

The gulf between popular perception and strategic reality continues to grow in Ukraine. If you only read Western media, you would think the Russian military was on the verge of defeat. In reality, they have a clear path to victory. Satellite imagery indicates that a massive Russian armored column, with +800 vehicles, is approaching Kiev from the north. At the same time, Russian forces in the East are working to link up and encircle a large fraction of the Ukrainian military. What we’re witnessing is a funhouse mirror version of the Gulf War. During that conflict, images of smart bombing broadcast into American homes highlighted U.S. dominance. Today, Twitter images of Ukrainian tactical success are creating a false narrative of Russian defeat.

The single least appreciated fact about the current conflict is that Russia has only committed 1/2 to 2/3 of the forces it built up around Ukraine’s borders. It also has the ability to draw Belarus into the war, whose armored divisions would represent a potent “fourth wave.” What Russia *has* suffered is a massive defeat in information warfare. The narrative of Ukrainian success is having real consequences in terms of the willingness of foreign powers to toughen sanctions and provide military aid. We have already seen the Ruble fall to its lowest exchange rate in history (100:1) vs. the Dollar. This is not quite enough to destabilize the Russian economy – in the sense of causing internal political chaos – but it’s enough that ordinary Russians are scared.

Before the war, Western polling showed that Russians favored military intervention in Ukraine to prevent NATO membership by a 2:1 margin. But it’s clear that they did not appreciate that Russia would become a global pariah state. I don’t believe the war enjoys that support now. Today, I’m worried that Western nations may overplay their hand in trying to remove Putin. They have drawn blood in their attempts to harm Russia’s economy, and they will seek to go further in driving the Russian people to rise up and demand an end to the war.

Infrastructure intact
https://twitter.com/i/status/1497578697381007361

Excellent background.

• Putin’s Nuclear Threat (Scott Ritter)

Vladimir Putin is a madman. He’s lost it. At least that is what the leaders of the West would like you to believe. According to their narrative, Putin — isolated, alone, confused, and angry at the unfolding military disaster Russia was undergoing in Ukraine — lashed out, ostensibly threatening the entire world with nuclear annihilation. In a meeting with his top generals on Sunday, the beleaguered Russian president announced, “I order the defense minister and the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces to put the deterrence forces of the Russian army into a special mode of combat service.” The reason for this action, Putin noted, centered on the fact that, “Western countries aren’t only taking unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere, but top officials from leading NATO members made aggressive statements regarding our country” in relation to the ongoing situation in Ukraine.

The “deterrence forces” Putin spoke of refers to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. What made the Russian president’s words resonate even more was that last Thursday, when announcing the commencement of Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine, Putin declared that “no one should have any doubts that a direct attack on our country will lead to the destruction and horrible consequences for any potential aggressor.” He emphasized that Russia is “one of the most potent nuclear powers and also has a certain edge in a range of state-of-the-art weapons.” When Putin issued that threat, The Washington Post described it as “empty, a mere baring of fangs.” The Pentagon, involved as it was in its own review of U.S. nuclear posture designed to address threats such as this, seemed non-plussed, with an anonymous official noting that U.S. policy makers “don’t see an increased threat in that regard.”

[..] by invoking Article IV, NATO was positioning itself for potential offensive military action; its previous military interventions against Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2004, and Libya in 2011, were all done under Article IV of the NATO Charter. Seen in this light, the premise that NATO is an exclusively defensive organization, committed to the promise of collective self-defense, is baseless. Second, while Article V (collective defense) protections only extend to actual NATO members, which Ukraine is not, Article IV allows the umbrella of NATO protection to be extended to those non-NATO members whom the alliance views as an ally, a category Stoltenberg clearly placed Ukraine in.

Finally, Stoltenberg’s anointing of Ukraine as a NATO ally came at the same time he announced the activation and deployment of NATO’s 40,000-strong Response Force, some of which would be deployed to NATO’s eastern flank, abutting Ukraine. The activation of the Response Force is unprecedented in the history of NATO, a fact that underscores the seriousness to which a nation like Russia might attach to the action. When seen in this light, Putin’s comments last Thursday were measured, sane, and responsible. Since the Article IV consultations began, NATO members have begun to supply Ukraine with lethal military aid, with the promise of more in the days and weeks to come.

These shipments can only gain access to Ukraine through a ground route that requires transshipment through NATO members, including Romania and Poland. It goes without saying that any vehicle carrying lethal military equipment into a war zone is a legitimate target under international law; this would apply in full to any NATO-affiliated shipment or delivery done by a NATO member on their own volition. What happens when Russia begins to attack NATO/EU/US/Allied arms deliveries as they arrive on Ukrainian soil? Will NATO, acting under Article IV, create a buffer zone in Ukraine, using the never-before-mobilized Response Force? One naturally follows the other…

Scott Ritter

“Bitten off more than they can chew.” – @realscottritter explains how the US and NATO’s post-Cold War restructuring left them unable to match a highly capable Russian military.

With @DanCohen3000

Full Interview: https://t.co/Ws8Ki9T6ST #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/Ri6RruUoo6

— MintPress News (@MintPressNews) February 28, 2022

Reporting from mom’s basement.

• CNN Scours Social Media for Ukraine Content to Broadcast (CTH)

CNN ‘War Correspondent’ Clarissa Ward accidentally explained why the public is confused about what the corporate media are saying about the Ukraine war with Russia, compared to what is actually visible about the Ukraine war with Russia. During a segment with Brian Stelter, Ms Ward explained how CNN war corresponding in Ukraine consists of talking about material provided to her by CNN production crews who sit and scour through YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and social media posts to find the input material for their stories. Clarissa Ward didn’t mean to expose how the propaganda of modern warfare is created, but she did. Ward was thanking the people in the background of CNN who search social media for their Ukraine content; however, in talking about what they do, she affirmed what we already knew was taking place.

People wondering why there is no visible ‘fight’ in this war, now find the baseline which Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh was talking about last week. The State Department, intelligence community and political participants in the U.S. government are constructing the “war” against Vladimir Putin through the prism of social likeability as a cultural weapon. When the goal is to produce content that tells the “better story,” social media becomes the battlefield. War corresponding is reduced to using the corporate media platform to enhance the social media battlefield. Essentially you might call this “World War Reddit.”

The CNN war correspondent doesn’t even need to be in Ukraine, except for the fact they need some form of geographical context to create the credibility. The actual content of Ukraine material for the broadcast can just as easily be assembled in New York, California or mom’s basement in Illinois. The social media content extracted by CNN workers, stationed anywhere, is then transmitted to the network producers who assemble the material, and a “war correspondent’ puts on a helmet and appears live on camera in Ukraine to discuss it. This is modern journalism, aka propaganda creation, aka narrative engineering, and why there’s a lack of actual evidence for anything being attributed to the narrative surrounding the war between Ukraine and Russia.

>> @ClarissaWard describes how CNN staffers have been "combing exhaustively through all of the social media footage" from Ukraine and Russia, working to geolocate it and "place it in its appropriate context…" pic.twitter.com/IMv4DIGs6t

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) February 27, 2022

We know too little about Lukashenko. So little, our media can make him a cartoon character.

• Belarus Preparing To Deploy Troops To Ukraine In Support Of Russia (JTN)

Belarus is making preparations to deploy troops into Ukraine in support of Russian forces as soon as Monday, a Biden administration official told The Washington Post on Sunday evening. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week, with some of his troops coming into Ukraine through Belarus. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been a close ally of Putin. He criticized Western sanctions on Russia and said it would push the Kremlin towards a Third World War, according to Russian state media. “It’s very clear Minsk is now an extension of the Kremlin,” the U.S. official told The Washington Post.

Two military transport planes took off from an airfield in western Belarus on Sunday, according to eyewitness accounts on a Telegarm channel analyzed by The Kyiv Independent. Previously, Belarus was only allowing Russian forces to use its territory and providing medical care and intelligence. The most recent reports would bring Belarus directly into the war.

Have your cake and eat it too? Two steps up and one step back?

• DeSantis Bill Shields Healthcare Providers From Liability (JTN)

Defying a coalition of 35 organizations calling for a veto, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this week shielding health-care providers from being sued by patients and family members over COVID-19-related injuries, deaths and refusal to try available treatment. The new law provides liability protection to health-care providers that follow “government-issued health standards” that “include the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines, which many say aren’t working,” the groups wrote in a letter to DeSantis. “Some medical professionals have stated that these CDC protocols have led to unnecessary medicines, ventilation and deaths.” Shawn McBride, director of The American Freedom Information Institute, Inc., who led the 35 groups opposing the bill, said that while DeSantis “signed a bill that may allow CDC protocols to continue in some hospitals, we’ve laid the foundation to help more folks get to medical freedom.”

On the same day DeSantis signed the bill, the Florida Department of Health issued new guidelines allowing for more treatments to be made available. DeSantis and State Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced the new guidance without mentioning the bill he signed into law. The guidelines, DeSantis claims, push back on “unscientific corporate masking, reducing isolation for all Floridians including those in schools and daycares, and recommending that physicians should exercise their individual clinical judgement and expertise based on their patients’ needs and preferences.” They also “are empowering health care practitioners to follow science, not Fauci’s status quo,” he added.

The guidelines address corporate mask policies, advise healthcare practitioners and facilities to reevaluate status quo protocols “in favor of scientifically based treatment options to benefit patients,” update school and daycare guidance to limit the student and child isolation timeframe, and reduce the overall isolation period for Floridians who test positive for COVID-19. “The state of Florida has widespread natural and vaccine-induced immunity,” Dr. Ladapo said. “Evidence suggests that most secondary transmission occurs early on. Our state will continue to make decisions for Floridians rooted in sound science, not fear, whether they are working or in school.”

One world government.

• WHO Making Moves On International Vaccine ‘Passport’ (Pol.)

The World Health Organization will convene member states and leaders of Covid-19 immunization credential technology groups to recognize different vaccine certificates across nations and regions, a top Vaccination Credential Initiative official told POLITICO’s Ben Leonard. The WHO is bringing together the groups to develop a “trust framework” that would allow countries to verify whether vaccine credentials are legitimate, said Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at MITRE and a co-founder of the VCI. Why it matters: The effort would aid international travel by allowing proof of vaccination to be more easily shared and verified, Anderson said.

Many countries and regions have different standards for proof of inoculation, creating confusion for travelers and officials. “It’s piecemeal, not coordinated and done nation to nation,” Anderson said. “It can be a real challenge.” The WHO would say only that news on the topic should be coming “soon.” The VCI is behind SMART Health Cards, which have become the de facto standard for digital vaccine credentials in the U.S., with dozens of states developing or adopting the technology. The group will participate in the initiative. It’s unclear whether the U.S. would participate.

The move would be the most significant coordinated international push to enable interoperable credentials among nations and regions. Existing standards include a digital Covid certificate for European Union member nations. The U.S. has no official standard despite SMART Health Cards’ dominance. Advocates have touted the vaccine credentials, commonly known as passports, as a way to facilitate travel and reopening efforts. Many red-leaning states have opposed the technology, but that hesitancy appears to be softening as several of those states have adopted the technology.

Richard Werner

Richard Werner, D.Phil. (Oxon) discusses the political agenda behind COVID

Richard notes that recent financial sanctions against peaceful protesters in Canada presage things to come if digital IDs & CBDCs are in place

WATCH: https://t.co/ZcuaZSz2Q3 pic.twitter.com/BmZJb3MTHA

— Taylor Hudak (@_taylorhudak) February 27, 2022

“..a High Court ruled that her vaccine mandate represented a “gross violation of human rights”

• New Zealand High Court ENDS Jacinda Ardern’s Vaccine Mandate (NP)

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was left reeling on Friday after a High Court ruled that her vaccine mandate represented a “gross violation of human rights” for New Zealanders. The landmark case means that the police and NZDF cannot be fired for refusing to take the experimental vaccine. This case will be used to overthrow all of Ardern’s illegal mandates in New Zealand. Justice Francis Cooke ruled that ordering frontline police officers and Defence staff to be vaccinated or face losing their job was not a “reasonably justified” breach of the Bill of Rights. Nzherald.co.nz reports: The lawyer for the police and Defence staff at the centre of the claim is now calling for the suspended workers to return to their jobs immediately, saying many have given decades of service to their community and are still committed to their jobs.

The challenge, put forward by a group of Defence force and police employees, questioned the legality of making an order under the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act to require vaccination for frontline employees. The challenge was supported by a group of 37 employees affected by the mandate, who submitted written affidavits to the court. Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety Michael Wood, Deputy Police Commissioner Tania Kura and NZDF Chief People Officer Brigadier Matthew Weston filed affidavits defending the mandate. As it stands, 164 of the overall police workforce of nearly 15,700 were affected by the mandate after choosing not to be vaccinated. For NZDF, the mandate affected 115 of its 15,500 staff. The group relied on two aspects of the Bill of Rights – the right to decline a medical procedure and the right to religious freedom.

SNL
https://twitter.com/i/status/1498016470344683524

Where’s the risk located?

• The Dirty Work Of Going Through Old Positions On Bank Balance Sheets (BTR)

A bear has arrived for lunch and unfortunately, he’s staying for dinner. We have been up all night working the phones. It has been a Lehman weekend – as in a 24-hour scramble to find and calculate the risk – NOT the size of the risk. The dirty work of going through old positions on bank balance sheets is being done around the clock as we speak. We do know the cost of default protection on French banks has diverged from UK-Asia-centric HSBC meaningfully. After working at Soc Gen for three years we can tell you, the books on most EU banks are a cobweb of darkness. In 2016, when Glencore was going down, every week we found more and more risk tied to Glencore assets. The truth bled out very slowly.

Italian banks have been very close with Russia as well. The point is, it’s very tough for politicians to “target” SWIFT sanctions into this darkness, very tough. In a loud voice the client said – Larry – details matter BIGLY we need to urgently to know exactly what is sanctioned here. They – Olaf – Macron – Biden – will try and dance around risk with a targeted SWIFT but they re probably not qualified to do so. They are messing with the plumbing of the global financial system. If they shoot from the hip, there could be large consequences. Politicians are reaching in the dark to find risk. If they sanctioned the CBR (central bank of Russia) and the transfer agents for Eurobonds, then Russia will default on all foreign debt immediately. And if Russia tries to find a back door through China – will the USA fine or sanction Chinese banks?

Over the weekend another client said “Germany can play SWIFT tough guy all they want – but Macron has to protect the vulnerable Soc Gen and Draghi is probably trying to ring-fence exposed, Moscow cozy Italian banks like Intesa and UniCredit. Lost in the Ukraine tragedy -the Fed’s favorite inflation measure- core PCE has moved from 3.7% in September to 5.2% in January, and the war-torn invasion only pours lighter fluid on this fire. *SCHOLZ: GERMANY TO SPEND MORE THAN 2% OF GDP YEARLY ON DEFENSE + massive social costs across the EU to off set energy prices as well. So long to the planet’s global negative yield anchor. We are heading back to a 1967-1979 regime. Overweight hard assets, take down financial assets and buckle up.

Anonymous Ukraine

Agenda 21
https://twitter.com/i/status/1497812728232222721

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Debt Rattle February 3 2022

Feb 032022

February 3, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, CNN, deliberate infections, Facebook, imminent, ivermectin, Joe Rogan, New Zealand, NHS, pivot, psychosis, Putin, truckers 65 Responses »

James McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple 1883-4

• Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

• Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

• Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

• New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

• US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

• Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

• Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

• Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

• America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

• Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

• Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

• World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

• MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

PCR “We have built this crisis with this new definition of “cases”.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1488981740303572993

The 10 billion, 90%-efficacy vaccine shots have caused the noticeable trend break downwards.

Bunch of idiots

Kilmeade: We were lead by a bunch of idiots pic.twitter.com/fuIsO2nICy

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2019) February 2, 2022

ADP predicts huge job losses. Watch tomorrow.

Dave Collum: ”The job market is not tight, it’s broken.”

1/ The fact that Imperial College did such a study tells you they KNEW no-one was going to die. You can’t take that risk, even if they volunteer. 2/ It was an early version of the virus, which a/ no longer exists, and b/ was 10-100x more lethal than Omicron. And they still already knew there would be no deaths.

• Deliberate Infections Give Unique Covid Insight (BBC)

The world’s first Covid “challenge trial” – which deliberately infected people – gives a unique view on the early stages of the disease. The virus was given to 36 young, healthy and unvaccinated volunteers, at the Royal Free hospital, in London. The results show where and when the virus takes hold in the body – and that some resist the infection. Future challenge trials could help find the next generation of Covid vaccines and drugs. They allow scientists to study the earliest stages of an infection, even before symptoms develop. Each of the volunteers, aged 18-30, had an identical dose of Covid – equivalent to the amount in a single droplet propelled out of somebody’s nose during the peak of their Covid infection – squirted up their nose. But only half of them became infected.

And understanding how the others – unvaccinated and without immunity from previous infections – resisted the virus will be the focus of future research. In those that did develop an infection, the virus took off rapidly, the first symptoms and positive test results appearing within just 42 hours. The previous consensus had been it took five days from exposure to the virus to first symptoms. And while the virus takes a foothold in the throat, the greatest amount was found when it moved up to the nose, leading the researchers to stress the importance of facemasks covering both. “It’s a really unique study,” Prof Christopher Chiu, from the Institute of Infection, at Imperial College London, said.

The amount of virus peaked about five days after the infection and remained detectable up to 12 days later. Symptoms were mild but some volunteers had a prolonged loss of their sense of smell. Prof Chiu said: “Lateral flow tests correlate very well with the presence of infectious virus. “Even though in the first day or two they may be less sensitive, if you use them correctly and repeatedly, and act on them if they read positive, this will have a major impact on interrupting viral spread.” The virus used was an early variant taken from a patient at the start of the pandemic. Further studies will explore more recent versions.

The damage to healthcare will last for a long time.

“.. I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.”

• Letter From NHS Clinical Scientist Who is Quitting Over the Covid Vaccines (DS)

“[..] a letter from an NHS Clinical Scientist of some 25 years – currently employed at an NHS University Hospital Trust but who has just resigned – to Health Secretary Sajid Javid to tell him why she is quitting over the complicity of the health service in the national scandal that is the Covid vaccine rollout.”

A core principle in healthcare is to ensure that patients are given free access to all information, to enable them to make a proper and informed choice about any treatment. As a scientist, I have been and still am gravely concerned about the Government and NHS misrepresentation of these vaccines as ‘safe and effective’ – a mantra still promoted by our Government and media, despite the overwhelming evidence demonstrating otherwise of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and worldwide databases for reporting adverse effects. Worryingly, the great majority of GPs have not being raising awareness of this scheme, leading to significant under-reporting and, consequently, under-estimation of the actual situation.

I personally have spoken to people who, after experiencing bad reactions to the first dose, have been encouraged by doctors to continue regardless and take the second, with serious consequences for their health. They had never heard of the MHRA Yellow Card scheme and wouldn’t know how to make a report. Misinformation starts from the seniors: I have been told (in writing) by Human Resources senior staff at my hospital that that vaccines have been “licensed”, genuinely oblivious to the fact that MHRA has granted only emergency approval. I have been appalled by the NHS willingness to trample over the concept of personalised medicine in the promotion of products still in phase three trials. There has been no stratified analysis of the balance of risks and benefits.

No scientific reference to real data from the pandemic statistics nor to those of the adverse effects – deaths and life-limiting injuries – reported globally. No mention of the unavailability of medium and long term safety data, which may not be relevant for the elderly but it certainly is for the young. No information about alternative treatments. This is not the NHS I joined and embraced. Primum non nocere: first, do no harm. Equally important is the right to bodily autonomy, including the right to refuse any treatment or medication. Enshrined in law for the protection of all human beings, this core principle extends to everybody, patients and healthcare staff alike. The Government mandate, offering NHS workers the alternative between taking an experimental product against their best judgement or lose their livelihood, can hardly be portrayed as ‘free choice’.

I hope it is clear that the motivation of NHS staff across all professions in resisting this coercion is founded on ethical grounds. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, clinical scientists – we all feel that our integrity would be compromised, that the fundamental principle of trust, at the core of our unique relationship with the patients we serve, would be irreparably transgressed; and that this erosion of professional ethics would carry the inherent danger of establishing coercion as an acceptable practice in future, with NHS staff imposing procedures on patients against their will – the victim becoming the perpetrator. From a patient prospective, I know which doctors I will trust when all this is over.

“Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]”

• Has The Red Carpet Been Rolled Out For A Mainstream Pivot On Ivermectin? (QTR)

I couldn’t help but think when this Japanese study popped up yesterday that the timing sure would be convenient now for the mainstream media to start a pivot on ivermectin. Now that Moderna has received official FDA approval for its vaccine and Pfizer is happily seeking Emergency Use Authorization to jab kids as young as 6 months – and now that major drug manufacturers have had their antiviral Covid pills approved – maybe it can finally be time to pump the brakes on the ivermectin hysteria and allow the truth and reason to nudge their way in. In other words, the fat pigs are finally finished stuffing their gluttonous faces at the trough of the FDA, stocked with newly-printed U.S. dollars.

Unable to physically consume anymore, and noticing that all but a few molecules of feed are even left, they can now reluctantly relinquish their positions at the front of the line and waddle away, leaving the rest of the animals a chance to squabble over the remains. All of the major pharmaceutical companies (and their lobbyists) finally getting the approvals that they want for all of their Covid drugs may roll out the red carpet for us to finally embrace reality and the truth, which I believe is that ivermectin has efficacy. What we’re seeing now in the media is a massive pivot regarding Covid. With the emergence of omicron and many geographic locations around the world lifting their Covid restrictions – and most notably politicians understanding they can’t win an election by locking us in our home [..] the media pivot on Covid has been pronounced since 2022 began.

And not unlike the pivot we’ve already seen on the lab leak and whether or not vaccines would end the virus, I’m expecting we see a similar pivot on ivermectin. Of course, I could be wrong. I don’t mind being wrong. I exist on the fringe, as my readers know. In the words of Peter Venkman: “If I’m wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail – peacefully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it!” But if I’m not…and the narrative on ivermectin does in fact change to wind up as “Duh, of course ivermectin works and we’ve known it all along, it just doesn’t work as well as [insert big pharma drug here]” everybody responsible for suppressing over the last 2 years needs to be held accountable for what, in my opinion, may wind up amounting to crimes against humanity.

Pointless and endless.

• New Zealand To End Quarantine Stays And Reopen Its Borders (Fox)

New Zealand’s government on Thursday said it will end its quarantine requirements for incoming travelers and reopen its borders, a change welcomed by thousands of citizens abroad who have endured long waits to return home. Since the start of the pandemic, New Zealand has enacted some of the world’s strictest border controls. Most incoming travelers need to spend 10 days in a quarantine hotel room run by the military, a requirement that has created a bottleneck at the border. The measures were initially credited with saving thousands of lives and allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several outbreaks of the coronavirus.

But, increasingly, the border controls have been viewed as out-of-step in a world where the virus is becoming endemic, and in a country where the omicron variant is already spreading. The bottleneck forced many New Zealanders abroad to enter a lottery-style system to try and secure a spot in quarantine and passage home. The shortcomings of the system were highlighted over the past week by pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who was stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand officials initially rejected her application to return home to give birth. After international publicity, officials backed down and offered her a spot in quarantine, which she has accepted.

The border changes mean that vaccinated New Zealanders returning from Australia will no longer need to go into quarantine from the end of this month, and vaccinated New Zealanders returning from the rest of the world can skip quarantine by mid-March. They will still be required to isolate at home. However, most tourists will need to wait until October before they can enter the country without a quarantine stay. And anybody who isn’t vaccinated will still be required to go through quarantine.

Why does Facebook need to get into this?

• US Truckers Got Booted Off Of Facebook (Kirsch)

I just got off the phone with Brian Brase who is organizing the US truckers. He’ll be on the VSRF call tomorrow (register at vacsafety.org). They got kicked off of Facebook because Facebook said they violated their QAnon policy. I suggested Substack and Brian said, “What’s that?” So I suggested I might be able to help them find a group of people who could run the IT for them to provide the truckers and their supporters a way to communicate. If you have both the time and expertise to do this, please volunteer using this form and we’ll get these guys re-platformed ASAP.

They lost $200 billion in market cap overnight.

• Facebook Stock In Free-fall (RT)

Shares of Facebook’s parent company Meta went into a nosedive after the markets closed on Wednesday, following an underwhelming quarterly report, the first since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the name change. The stock stood strong at $323 a share when the markets closed at 4 pm EST, but collapsed to $249 just half an hour later, for a loss of almost 23%. In just the first eleven minutes of after-hours trading, $16 billion in Meta’s market cap had been wiped out. What triggered the sell-off was Meta’s quarterly report showing lower revenue, earnings per share, and the numbers of daily and monthly active users than expected by investors.

Whereas the investors expected around $30.15 billion, Facebook’s figures showed $27-$29 billion, CNBC reported, citing a Refinitiv survey of market analysts. According to the same source, earnings per share came in at $3.67, short of the expected $3.84. The number of daily active users (DAU) stood at 1.93 billion, less than the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users (MAU) also undershot the 2.95 expectation, ending up at 2.91 billion, according to Street Account. This is the first quarterly report since Zuckerberg announced his social media behemoth would be changing its name to Meta, to better represent its focus on the upcoming “metaverse” and encompass the existing Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp brands.

Awkward walk back.

• Ukraine Invasion No Longer ‘Imminent’ – White House (RT)

The US government is no longer using the word ‘imminent’ in its narrative around the alleged Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters, on Wednesday, explaining that it was sending an unintended message. “I used it once. I think others have used that once, and we stopped using it because I think it sent a message that we weren’t intending to send, which was that we knew that President Putin had made a decision,” Psaki said at a press briefing. “I would say the vast majority of times I’ve talked about it, I’ve said he could invade ‘at any time,’” she added. Psaki’s remarks come after the US envoy to the UN backtracked from the use of ‘imminent’ in an interview with NPR aired on Tuesday.

“No, I would not say that we are arguing that it’s imminent,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the broadcaster. The official transcript of Psaki’s January 25 briefing says otherwise, however. Asked whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine – which the US media and intelligence agencies have claimed since late October would happen any day now – was still “imminent,” here’s what Psaki had to say. “When we said it was imminent, it remains imminent,” she told one reporter. “Well, ‘imminent’ has a pretty intense meaning. Doesn’t it?” she said in answer to the very next question. “And it’s still the belief that it’s imminent?” was the followup, to which Psaki replied, “Correct.”

3,000 troops vs 130,000 Russia?!

• Russia Condemns Destructive US Troops Boost In Europe (BBC)

Russia has condemned a US decision to send extra troops to Europe to support its Nato allies amid continuing fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow said it was a “destructive” step which heightened tension and reduced the scope for a political solution. The Pentagon said 2,000 US troops would be sent from North Carolina to Poland and Germany, and a further 1,000 already in Germany would go to Romania. Russia has some 100,000 troops near Ukraine. It denies planning to invade. The tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimea peninsula and backed a bloody rebellion in the eastern Donbas region.

Moscow accuses the Ukrainian government of failing to implement the Minsk agreement – an international deal to restore peace to the east, where Russian-backed rebels control swathes of territory and at least 14,000 people have been killed since 2014. Responding to US President Joe Biden’s decision to deploy extra troops to Europe this week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said it was a “destructive” and an “unjustified” step. Speaking on Wednesday, Mr Grushko added that it would “delight” the Ukrainian authorities, who would continue sabotaging the Minsk agreement “with impunity”. The Pentagon earlier said the American troops being deployed would not fight in Ukraine – but would ensure the defence of Washington’s allies. Their deployment is in addition to the 8,500 troops the Pentagon put on alert last month to be ready to deploy to Europe if needed.

“They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

• America’s Putin Psychosis (Ritter)

The war of words between Russia and the United States over Ukraine escalated further on Tuesday as Russian President Vladimir Putin responded for the first time to the U.S. written reply to Russia’s demands for security guarantees that were expressed in the form of a pair of draft treaties submitted by Moscow to the U.S. and NATO in December. “It is already clear…that the fundamental Russian concerns were ignored. We did not see an adequate consideration of our three key requirements,” Putin said at a press conference that followed his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Moscow.

Putin said the U.S. had failed to give “adequate consideration of our three key demands regarding NATO expansion, the renunciation of the deployment of strike weapons systems near Russian borders, and the return of the [NATO] bloc’s military infrastructure in Europe to the state of 1997, when the Russia-NATO founding act was signed.” He detailed what he alleged was NATO’s long history of deception, re-emphasizing the 1990 verbal commitment by former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker that NATO would not expand “an inch” eastward. “They said one thing, they did another,” Putin said. “As people say, they screwed us over, well they simply deceived us.”

With some 130,000 Russian troops deployed in the western and southern military districts bordering Ukraine, and another 30,000 assembling in neighboring Belarus, U.S. policy makers are scrambling to figure out what Russia’s next move might be, a choice most U.S. policy makers believe boils down to diplomacy or war. Rather than examine the situation from the perspective of Russian national security interests, however, these officials have placed the fate of European peace and security in the hands of a single individual: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

“European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel.”

• Don’t Blame Putin for Europe’s Energy Crisis (FP)

Europe typically depends on Russia for more than one-third of its natural gas use. Although Russia has been sending less to Europe this winter, it is fulfilling its long-term contractual commitments. The difference now is that it has all but cut off the additional supplies it usually sells on the spot market. If Russia were to cut or reduce contracted deliveries to Europe as well—which half a century of energy relations suggests is unlikely—it would be exceedingly difficult and expensive for Europe to replace lost Russian gas flows. Spot prices, already skyrocketing to unprecedented levels, would go even higher as European buyers tried to pull in LNG supplies otherwise headed for Asia, energy-intensive industries would shut down, and even household heating and electricity use would likely need to be rationed to prevent power outages.

But even if Russian gas flows continue uninterrupted, Europe still faces an energy crisis this year and, more importantly, in the years to come. By late summer of 2021, it was already evident that Europe was facing a looming energy crisis with gas storage levels unusually low. As winter set in, prices predictably soared to record levels, reaching such heights late last year that many industrial firms shut down production. In Britain, nearly 30 power utilities went bankrupt. European natural gas topped $60 per million Btu, equivalent to an oil price of an astonishing $350 per barrel. (Brent crude sells for around $90 a barrel, and the comparable U.S. gas price is around $4.) European household energy bills will rise another 50 percent this year, according to Bank of America.

Faced with public backlash and worries about the impact on the macroeconomy, governments with few other options to keep prices in check have resorted to subsidizing energy costs for people feeling the pinch. Denmark has announced it plans to send checks to households using natural gas for heating to offset the rise in prices. Norway, France, and several other European countries have done the same. Energy prices have eased in recent weeks, but only because Europe has been lucky with the weather. Winter temperatures have not been as cold as feared. The same has been true of Asia, allowing Europe to draw some cargoes of LNG that otherwise would have been needed there.

Is this the end? The MSM start eating each other, like here the Guardian devouring CNN, in the same way that CNN’s Cuomo and Zucker go after each other. Because: they have no viewers left.

CNN calls itself “the iconic network”, Brian Stelter goes after Rogan saying he’s not credible because he doesn’t have a large media corporation like CNN behind him. He does have 25x more viewers though.

NOTE: wonder if the Guardian knows it’s part of “Media” too, and losing trust.

• Why Is Trust In Media Plummeting? Just Look At What’s Happening At CNN (G.)

Media outlets are supposed to report the news not become it. On Wednesday CNN found itself coming afoul of that rule when Jeff Zucker abruptly resigned from his position as network president amid lurid circumstances. In a memo sent to colleagues, Zucker explained he was stepping down after failing to disclose a “consensual relationship” with a close colleague. While Zucker didn’t name the colleague directly, Allison Gollust, CNN’s executive vice-president and chief marketing officer, has confirmed her involvement in a memo to employees. Hang on a minute. Is a powerful man really resigning from a big job because he had a consensual relationship with a colleague? That’s not the usual way of things; many men have been accused of far worse transgressions and still managed to cling to power.

Well here’s some context: Gollust happens to be the former communications director for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. And Zucker’s relationship with Gollust came up during an internal investigation into former anchor Chris Cuomo, who was fired from CNN in December after using his job to help his brother, Andrew, combat sexual harassment allegations (leading some commentators to dub CNN the “Cuomo Nepotism Network”.) Zucker stood by Chris Cuomo for months when his conflict-of-interest scandal first hit but eventually fired him a few days after the anchor was accused of sexual misconduct by a junior colleague at another network. Like his brother, it seems Chris holds a grudge. Two sources told Politico that it was Cuomo’s legal team, which is still negotiating his exit from the network, who flagged the relationship between Zucker and Gollust.

A reporter from media startup Puck News has also claimed that CNN received a letter from Cuomo’s lawyers asking for all communications between Zucker, Gollust and Cuomo to be preserved. While Zucker may not be having a very good week, Donald Trump (whose views on CNN are common knowledge) is having a ball. “Jeff Zucker, a world-class sleazebag who has headed ratings and real-news-challenged CNN for far too long, has been terminated for numerous reasons, but predominantly because CNN has lost its way with viewers,” Trump wrote in a statement. I hate to say it, but Trump has a point. You don’t have to be a cynic to reckon that CNN’s dismal ratings may factor into Zucker’s sudden departure: CNN had record ratings during the Trump years but has seen viewership plummet recently.

The Cuomo scandal certainly hasn’t helped the network’s credibility: during the early days of the pandemic Chris Cuomo repeatedly interviewed his brother on air and it was largely treated like hilarious banter instead of a clear conflict of interest. And that’s hardly been the only embarrassment the network has suffered: last year Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst exposed himself on a Zoom call with colleagues. While the New Yorker fired Toobin from his staff writer position, CNN gave him a little tap on the wrist and put him back on the air.

Optimistic headline.

• World Leaders Support Joe Rogan (RT)

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele both came out in defense of American podcast host Joe Rogan this week after critics, including the White House, encouraged Spotify to censor his show. The campaign – which has attempted to get Rogan’s Spotify show censored after he expressed skepticism over Covid-19 vaccines for young people and hosted several vaccine-skeptic doctors – was bolstered on Tuesday after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said there was “more that can be done” by Spotify to crack down on speech which goes against the national Covid-19 line. Psaki’s comments were condemned by free speech activists in the US, who claimed they were unconstitutional and amounted to the state pressuring a private company to censor dissidents.

The two world leaders also came out in defense of Rogan’s right to free speech. In a statement, Bolsonaro said, “I’m not sure what [Rogan] thinks about me or about my government, but it doesn’t matter.” “If freedom of speech means anything, it means that people should be free to say what they think, no matter if they agree or disagree with us. Stand your ground! Hugs from Brazil.” Bukele – who has been accused of threatening freedom of the press in his county by criticizing ‘fake news’ journalists – used Psaki’s comments to mock critics who claim free speech “is under attack in El Salvador,” and appeared to argue that the White House’s interference in the Rogan matter amounted to a more egregious attack on free speech than anything his administration is accused of doing. Following calls for Rogan to be censored, Spotify announced it would start adding a ‘content advisory’ to shows that discuss the Covid-19 pandemic. The advisories will direct listeners to allegedly ‘trusted sources’ on the coronavirus, including scientists and academics.

“WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.”

• MPs Push For Julian Assange To Be Granted Political Asylum In France (EN)

Four French MPs are pushing for Julian Assange to be offered asylum in France amid the WikiLeaks founder’s ongoing fight against extradition from the UK to the US. Jennifer De Temmerman, Jean Lassalle, Cedric Villani and Francois Ruffin are due to speak at a press conference in Paris on 1 February where they will explain why Assange — currently in prison in the UK — should be given sanctuary in France. Assange’s defence team announced in February 2020 that it would be seeking asylum for him in France, ahead of the hearing in the UK on whether the 50-year-old should be extradited to the US for trial.

Two years on, Assange continues to fight extradition to the US, where would face trial over the release of a trove of classified military documents more than a decade ago. In December 2021, Britain’s High Court overturned a ruling by a lower court that Assange could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. In January, Assange won the right to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court, further delaying his possible extradition. WikiLeaks was formerly based in France and Assange’s children live in the country, but his lawyers admitted in 2020 that the fact that he is not on French soil would complicate the process.

Cement use. 3 years vs 100 years.

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Debt Rattle January 28 2022

Jan 282022

January 28, 2022 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:12 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Clinton, CNN, Musk, natural immunity, truckers, Trudeau, Ukraine, vaccine failure, Zelensky 78 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Bust of woman with arms raised 1922

• White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)

• The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)

• The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)

• 4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)

• Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)

• Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)

• Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)

• Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)

• Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)

• The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)

• Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)

• Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)

• Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)

• China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)

• Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)

• What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

US military: average per year 1.7 million reports of all diseases combined. First 10 months 2021: 22 million.

1/5 Sécurité des vaccins: un scandale se profilerait-il au Département de la Défense (USA) ?
"J'ai la confiance de personnes très haut placées au DoD, des médecins."
"Vous avez en moyenne 1,7 mio de déclarations de maladies par an."
"2021: en 10 mois , l'année du vaccin, 22 mio!" pic.twitter.com/DQuqE34boh

— Collectif Sauver la Science (@GabinJean3) January 27, 2022

Scary indeed.

Ryan Cole

Dr. Ryan Cole – shocking if true… pic.twitter.com/UwWr0H57Kl

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2019) January 28, 2022

Natasha Bertrand posted a story about a Biden-Zelensky call that didn’t go well, but deleted it soon afterward. Still, people from the White House, Ukraine and CNN itself reacted to it. Was it all for clickbait?

• White House Calls CNN Report On Russian Invasion ‘Completely False’ (RT)

The White House has pushed back on a CNN report about Thursday’s phone call between US President Joe Biden and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it “completely false.” “President Biden said that there is a distinct possibility that the Russians could invade Ukraine in February. He has previously said this publicly and we have been warning about this for months. Reports of anything more or different than that are completely false,” Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, tweeted on Thursday evening. She was responding to a tweet by CNN’s senior national security correspondent Alexander Marquardt, who was quoting his colleague in Kiev, Matthew Chance.

“A Russian invasion is now virtually certain once the ground freezes, Biden said to Zelensky, a senior Ukrainian official told [Chance]. Kyiv could be ‘sacked,’ Russian forces may attempt to occupy it, ‘prepare for impact’, Biden said, according to this official,” Marquardt tweeted. CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper had Chance cite “the Ukrainian official” live on air. “The capital, Kiev, this city here, could be “sacked.” That’s the word he [Biden] apparently used, according to this Ukrainian official. [It could be] sacked by Russian forces,” Chance told Tapper. Chance went on to quote what he called a “quite impactful line” from the Biden-Zelensky call as narrated to him by the anonymous Ukrainian official. “President Biden [was] telling his Ukrainian counterpart that Ukraine should prepare for impact. Quite a stark warning there from the US leader.”

The quote was quickly picked up by other outlets, such as the Independent, the Express and the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto quoted Horne as saying that “anonymous sources are ‘leaking’ falsehoods” about the call. Zelensky’s spokesman Sergii Nykyforov likewise dismissed reports citing the alleged “senior Ukranian official” as “completely false.” “Correct information can only be found in official releases from the Ukrainian and American sides,” he stated.

Phone call

Ukrainian official describes Biden-Zelensky phone call to @mchancecnn NOTE: Since this report, WH & Zelensky spokesman have disputed official’s claims (see thread) pic.twitter.com/B2WV4ACL28

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) January 28, 2022

The UK Yellow Card system fails as badly as VAERS. And that is not a coincidence. It takes 40 minutes to fill out a form.

• The Covid Evidence Dismissed By The BBC As ‘Conspiracy-laden’ (Beck)

Ms Bayliss has been gathering witness statements from those who allege they are vaccine-injured, and from potential expert witnesses in the US and the UK. She said: ‘We have subsequently uploaded 103 statements regarding vaccine associated deaths and injury, and 13 from identifiable whistleblowers, medical experts and scientists.’ To build his case, Mr Hyland investigated our medicines regulatory authority, specifically the alleged negligence of June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA. He said: ‘The charge against the MHRA is that they negligently conducted themselves and have caused British citizens real harm and suffering. ‘They have failed to act on any of the Yellow Card reports they have received. There are currently 2,000 deaths reported and 500,000 adverse events. They should have stopped the programme before the deaths reached 100 and launched a thorough investigation.’

The Yellow Card data show that 1 in 120 people have reported an event they considered serious enough to spend 40 minutes filling out a Yellow Card form. ‘This may be just the tip of the iceberg,’ said Ms Bayliss, ‘as the MHRA admit they receive information from around 10 per cent of those damaged.’ The figure is low because some doctors find they cannot access the Yellow Card scheme from their hospital computers, while others do not know about it. Members of the public are generally not informed about Yellow Card and most who complain to their GP that they think they have suffered a serious adverse event are told that the vaccine is an unlikely cause and their symptoms are put down to ‘coincidence’, as the Royal College of General Practitioners has not issued them with any advice.

If the coincidence theory held water, you would expect an even spread of reports across the three vaccinations used in Britain. We have Pfizer-BioNTech’s experimental mRNA jab introduced in December 2020, and Oxford/AstraZeneca’s more traditional one which has been available since January 2021. Plus the new kid on the block, Moderna’s mRNA jab introduced in April 2021. Although we began using it four months after Pfizer and three months after AstraZeneca, Moderna is clocking up 50 per cent more Yellow Cards than AZ, who have 60 per cent more reported injuries than Pfizer. Oxford/AstraZeneca has been received by 24.9million people and the Yellow Card scheme shows that 1 in 103 have been impacted, while Pfizer-BioNTech’s has been received by 25.3million people and Yellow Card shows that 1 in 162 people have been impacted.

Moderna has been given to 1.6million people and its Yellow Card reporting rate shows that 1 in 50 people have been impacted. On average, 1 in 120 people have suffered an adverse reaction. ‘In our view, we have enough evidence to show gross negligence,’ said Mr Hyland. ‘It is clear that the MHRA have failed to follow up concerns about vaccine injury and they failed to withdraw harmful batches when they knew about the issues. ‘They also exaggerated the risk of Covid by failing to distinguish the difference between dying with Covid, which is when someone has other illnesses, or of Covid, which is when the patient has no other illnesses.’ Covid-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has a low fatality rate: less than one per cent of those who contract it. The Office of National Statistics has revealed under a Freedom of Information request that only 13,597 deaths in England and Wales out of 140,000 attributed to Covid were caused by Covid alone. The bulk of deaths were of people with comorbidities.

The immune system works.

• The High Cost of Disparaging Natural Immunity to Covid (Makary)

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination. Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

The CDC study and ours confirm what more than 100 other studies on natural immunity have found: The immune system works. The largest of these studies, from Israel, found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic illness. None of this should surprise us. For years, studies have shown that infection with the other coronaviruses that cause severe illness, SARS and MERS, confers lasting immunity. In a study published in May 2020, Covid-recovered monkeys that were rechallenged with the virus didn’t get sick. Public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do. They used the wrong starting hypothesis, ignored contrary preliminary data, and dug in as more evidence emerged that called their position into question.

Many, including Rochelle Walensky, now the CDC’s director, signed the John Snow memorandum in October 2020, which declared that “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.” Many clinicians who talk to other physicians nationwide had have long observed that we don’t see reinfected patients end up on a ventilator or die from Covid, with rare exceptions who almost always have immune disorders. Meanwhile, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of everyday Americans, rallying to fire pilots, truck drivers and others in the supply-chain workforce who didn’t get vaccinated. And in the early months of the vaccine rollout, when supplies were limited, we could have saved many more lives by giving priority to those who didn’t have recorded natural immunity.

The Great Barrington guys also come from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. And look what Collins and Fauci did to them.

• 4 Out of 5 Americans Have Covid ‘Natural Immunity’ (KB)

In the United States, the media barely mention Covid prior infections or the existence of natural immunity. But a CDC-sponsored database in partnership with Yale, Harvard, and Stanford universities shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans have natural immunity from prior infections, Wildfire can exclusively report. The CDC released a study last week called “COVID-19 Cases and Hospitalizations by COVID-19 Vaccination Status and Previous COVID-19 Diagnosis — California and New York, May–November 2021.” The findings were reported by Agence France-Presse. “During America’s last surge of the coronavirus driven by the Delta variant, people who were unvaccinated but survived Covid were better protected than those who were vaccinated and not previously infected,” AFP noted about the new study.

“The finding is the latest to weigh in on a debate on the relative strengths of natural versus vaccine-acquired immunity against SARS-CoV-2, but comes this time with the imprimatur of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” AFP added. The U.K.’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA), issued a report that echoes much of the CDC’s findings on natural immunity. It showed that those with prior infections to Covid were much less likely to test positive for Covid infections than those in the vaccinated groups. Those with prior infections even in the pre-Alpha period were tested to have natural immunity roughly equivalent to those with vaccinated immunity acquired from three shots. The UKHSA report also showed that nearly the entire population of Great Britain has some form of antibodies to Covid-19.

Poof!

• Denmark Declares Covid-19 No Longer ‘Socially Critical Disease’ (TH)

As some countries double down on punishing the unvaccinated and continue with draconian Covid-19 restrictions, Denmark has taken the opposite approach, announcing Wednesday that all safety measures will be lifted next week. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the Nordic country is reclassifying Covid-19; it will no longer be considered a “socially critical disease.” “Tonight we can shrug our shoulders and find the smile again. We have incredibly good news, we can now remove the last coronavirus restrictions in Denmark,” Frederiksen said at a press conference. Frederiksen acknowledged that the decision may seem unusual as Omicron infections are spiking in the country, with 46,000 new Covid cases reported on Wednesday.

“Recent weeks have seen very high infection rates, in fact the highest in the entire pandemic,” she noted. “Therefore, it may seem strange and paradoxical that we are now ready to let go of the restrictions.” Health Minister Magnus Heunicke pointed to high rates of vaccination and fewer hospitalizations as the reasons officials have taken this approach. “The situation in Denmark is that we have this decoupling between infections and intensive care patients, and it is mainly due to the large attachment among Danes to revaccination. That is the reason why it is safe and the right thing to do now,” Heunicke said. The UK, Ireland and the Netherlands have all taken a similar approach.

For children 5-11 years old. Fauci wants 3 jabs each for every kid over 6 months.

• Sweden Opts Against Covid Jabs For Children (RT)

The Sweden Public Health Agency on Thursday announced that it had opted against following some western countries in endorsing vaccination against Covid-19 for children 5-11 years old. Administering shots in that age group wouldn’t have a major effect on the spread of Covid-19 and would offer little medical benefit to the individual children receiving them, the agency said in its guidance for the upcoming spring term. “With the knowledge we have today, with a low risk for serious disease for kids, we don’t see any clear benefit with vaccinating them,” agency official Britta Bjorkholm told reporters. The decision may be revisited if new information becomes available or a new variant of the virus changes the risk-reward analysis for vaccinating children.

Sweden’s decision is contrary to a trend toward countries approving vaccination of younger and younger children, especially with Covid-19’s Omicron variant spreading rapidly. Such counties as Germany, France, Italy and Spain have approved jabs for children as young as 5. In the US, chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters on Wednesday that he expects three-dose regimens to eventually be approved for children as young as 6 months old. Proponents of vaccinating children have argued that even though risks of serious illness or death from Covid-19 are relatively low in young people, they can spread the virus to more vulnerable segments of the population. Swedish health officials, however, argue that vaccinating small kids would entails no great benefit – either to them or to the people around them. “A general vaccination from the age of 5 is also not expected to have any major effect on the spread of infection at present, neither in the group of children aged 5–11 nor among other groups in the population,” the Public Health Agency said.

Here’s two of them. It’s repeated everywhere. The vaccinated are dying.

• Vaccine Failure In Two Charts And Two Graphs From Four Countries (Berenson)

I could make the long case about original antigenic sin, falling antibodies, the issues around cellular immunity, myocarditis, and all the rest. But I’m just going to offer these four images because they speak more clearly than anything I could say. Scotland, Britain, Israel, and Denmark are four of the world’s most highly vaccinated countries. They all have 90 percent adult Covid vaccination rates and 60 percent adult boosters. Yet the vast majority of deaths are occurring in vaccinated people; serious cases are soaring; and infections are almost literally off the charts. This is Covid vaccine failure at the most profound and basic level.

SCOTLAND: Covid death rates (RATES, not raw numbers) by vaccination status for the last four weeks. Death rates in vaccinated but unboosted people have been higher than rates in the unvaccinated each week. Also, 87 percent of total deaths occurred in vaccinated people in the most recent week:

BRITAIN: (the data in the British chart below is United Kingdom-wide and thus includes Scotland – some British readers asked me to make that clear.) Covid deaths by vaccination status in the most recent four weeks (2,845 out of the 3,860 people for whom vaccine status could be determined were vaccinated – 74 percent):

But you still label them Covid patients?

• Most Covid Patients In Wales In Hospital For Other Conditions (BBC)

Well over half of patients with confirmed cases of Covid in hospital in Wales are being treated for other conditions, official figures show for the first time. A total of 42.2% of confirmed Covid patients were being “actively” treated for it on Tuesday. This means nearly six out of 10 are “incidental” Covid patients being treated for other conditions. Meanwhile, Covid hospital figures continue to fall. The number of patients being treated primarily for Covid is far higher for those in critical care – nearly 90%, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The average for the last week for Covid patients is just over 40% being treated primarily for the virus.

Even though patients might “incidentally” have Covid, it does not mean that it cannot add complications to their health or treatment, and it still presents challenges for patient management for hospitals. Meanwhile, there were another 220 patients who “probably” or “definitely” caught Covid while in hospital, according to Public Health Wales figures for the last week. The daily average number of Covid patients in hospital beds dropped for the 12th day in a row to 560 on Wednesday, according to Digital Health and Care Wales. The daily average for those patients in critical care or on invasive ventilation with Covid has also fallen to 22 – the lowest figure since 11 August. Daily Covid admissions are also still falling, down to 27 a day.

The big hospitals are fine. The smaller ones, not so much.

• Biden Admin Used Billions In Hospital Covid-19 Funds To Pay Drugmakers (STAT)

The Biden administration quietly took nearly $7 billion from a fund meant to help hospitals and clinics affected by the pandemic and used it to buy Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics, according to a document obtained by STAT. The move is similar to the Trump administration’s decision to divert $10 billion from the same fund to Operation Warp Speed, which STAT reported exclusively in March. Now, the hospital money, known as the Provider Relief Fund, has run dry, and has no new money left to allocate, according to the agency that administers it. Providers have only been able to submit requests for expenses incurred through March 2021 — before both the Delta and Omicron surges battered the health care system.

With the new $7 billion shift, which has not been previously reported, the diversion to drugmakers totals nearly $17 billion, or roughly 10% of the overall money Congress allotted for the fund for hospitals and physician practices. Congress set aside that money to help health care providers pay for pandemic-related expenses including staffing, personal protective equipment, care for uninsured patients, and vaccine distribution. The new details about the Biden administration’s spending decision come as hospitals across the country are struggling with a crushing surge of Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths due to the Omicron variant. And their representatives in Washington are furious.

[..] A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said using the money to pay drugmakers for contracts was a reasonable use of the hospital and clinic funds because the vaccines and therapeutics purchased were given to providers at no cost. “All Provider Relief Fund dollars have been used for Provider Relief Fund purposes,” the spokesperson said. However, there is no transparency into which contracts the money was used for, and where those products were distributed. Government watchdog reports offer clues to the timeline of the spending. As of March 1, 2021, $10 billion had been used to pay drugmakers. By Aug. 31, that number jumped to $14.8 billion. And per the document obtained by STAT, the total is $16.7 billion through Dec. 23.

“People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down, the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. ”

• The Folly of Pandemic Censorship (Taibbi)

NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.” Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,” casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, “I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.”

We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to wonder if any official statements can be trusted.

To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing “Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21 of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition of Covid misinformation: It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.” “It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19, but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as backup.

“The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of 101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,” but “cases are rare.” Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president, the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain voices.

Big campaign to vilify the truckers. Trudeau, had Covid and is well jabbed, happens to get infected and goes in hiding for 5 days, to avoid the PR mess.

• Joe Rogan, Elon Musk React To Canadian Trucker Convoy (RT)

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan have spoken about the Canadian truckers driving across the country to protest the government’s Covid-19 mandates, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced them as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” “Canadian truckers rule,” Musk tweeted on Thursday afternoon. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ that set out from British Columbia and is expected to reach the Canadian capital of Ottawa sometime this weekend was ignored by the major media outlets at first. As it approached Ontario, however, the convoy became a political football. Trudeau denounced the truckers and said they “do not represent the views of Canadians” in a televised speech on Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, he announced he had been “exposed” to Covid-19 and would quarantine for five days – thereby missing the convoy’s arrival in Ottawa – even though he has already had the virus and been vaccinated and boosted. Jagmeet Singh, whose New Democrats are propping up Trudeau’s minority government, also condemned the truckers and accused them of spreading “false information” via “inflammatory, divisive and hateful comments.” He also criticized his brother-in-law for donating to the protest. Canadian media reported that Jodhveer Singh Dhaliwal had asked for his donation back after being told of “the true nature” of the convoy.

[..] Benjamin Dichter, one of the organizers of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and the group’s official spokesman, said they are peaceful and law-abiding. He told the Toronto Sun that the convoy is a protest over Trudeau’s government forcing drivers to wear masks even when alone inside their trucks, a vaccine mandate, and a requirement to get the jab before crossing the US-Canada border. Dichter also denied reports that GoFundMe has frozen some Can$5 million in donations for the convoy, calling them “fake news.” Joe Rogan, who hosts the immensely popular podcast on Spotify, also shone a spotlight on the convoy during his show on Wednesday. Speaking to a guest from Montreal, he showed footage of the truckers and described it as Canada being “in revolt” over the government’s mandates. “It’s a giant convoy of trucks,” Rogan said. “That’s apparently some insane amount of people. Fifty thousand trucks are headed to Ottawa to protest the vaccine mandates by Trudeau.”

Canada: We’re Not Gonna Take it!

Canada: We're Not Gonna Take it!

(crank it up!)

#TruckersConvoy2022 pic.twitter.com/Dg2i0YHgDe

— G■■■en A■vi■e (@RichardStiller4) January 27, 2022

My guess would be Canada won’t be repeated. The truckers also want to block US-Canada border crossings.

• Truckers Inspired By Canada Begin ‘Freedom’ Convoys Around The World (JTN)

Truckers around the world are creating their own convoys to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates after being inspired by the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which reportedly has thousands of trucks. Freedom Convoy 2022, the group that organized the Canadian trucker protest, reported initially having 1,600 trucks. The convoy, which now has nearly 50,000 trucks, will be in Ottowa by Saturday with the goal of getting “the government of Canada to repeal its cross border Covid tracking passport / phone app and ALL Covid-19 vaccine mandates,” according to a press release. The Canadian convoy has reportedly been joined by some American truckers and in Ontario, farmers came in tractors to show support. Both the United States and Canada mandate cross-border truckers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Americans are invited to also protest the mandate this Saturday at three border locations: Houlton, Maine; Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; and Sweet Grass, Montana. In Australia, the “2022 Official Convoy to Canberra” has more than 44,000 members on Facebook and more than 10,000 followers on Telegram as of Thursday. The group is planning to meet in the capital by Jan. 31 to protest vaccine mandates. European truckers are organizing to protest vaccine mandates as well. The European Convoy Telegram channel has more than 7,300 members. Truckers are organizing across Europe, including the Netherlands, France, Hungary and more, to converge on Brussels by Feb. 7. The truckers have received an outpouring of support from celebrities as well.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world tweeted his support for the convoy. “Canadian truckers rule,” he said, later adding: “If you scare people enough, they will demand removal of freedom. This is the path to tyranny.”

Trudeau hiding
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486870820177649666

“Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs”..”

• Musk Unloads On ‘Puppet’ Biden In Twitter Rant (RT)

Tesla tycoon Elon Musk referred to Joe Biden as a “damp sock puppet in human form” on Thursday, in response to the US president’s photo-op with General Motors chair Mary Barra. In the video, which was posted on Biden’s official Twitter account on Wednesday evening, the president praised GM’s investment in electric vehicle manufacturing as a blow to climate change. Responding to the message, Musk argued that electric vehicle manufacturing in the US “Starts with a T / Ends with an A / ESL in the middle.” He then took a dig at the president, completing his tweet with a “sock” emoji.

Musk also claimed that Biden was “treating the American public like fools” while responding to another Twitter user, who argued that Biden was “trying to cancel a great American company and rewrite EV history” by endorsing GM and Ford. Amateur fact-checkers pounced on the thread to back up Musk, posting data that shows Tesla’s Model Y and Model 3 were by far the top-selling electric vehicles in the US – and both made domestically. GM’s Bolt came in at a distant fourth place in 2021, with Ford’s Mustang Mach-E beating it out for third place, according to Car & Driver. In a video with Barra, Biden wrote that “companies like GM and Ford are building more electric vehicles here at home than ever before,” while Barra announced a $7 billion investment in Michigan along with a battery cell plant to be opened in the US.

At least some of Ford’s electric vehicles are manufactured in Mexico, not the US. Last year, the United Auto Workers union said Ford “put corporate greed and more potential profits over American jobs” with a plan to build a new electric model in Mexico, rather than in Ohio.

1 week till Olympics. Xi is nervous.

• China Warns US Over Ukraine & Blasts “Interference” In Beijing Olympics (ZH)

China on Thursday blasted the US for continuing to interfere in its affairs, further saying nothing has fundamentally changed, but instead charging there’s been “new shocks” since the Biden-Xi virtual summit of two months ago. The scathing rebuke came on Thursday as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with his counterpart Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Importantly, Wang took the opportunity to for the first time side with Russia in the direct communication with the US top diplomat, saying Moscow has “reasonable security concerns” over Ukraine that must be “taken seriously”. Chinese state media and Beijing-linked pundits have also become increasingly vocal on the issue, charging NATO with overstepping…

He urged calm on the part of all sides but specifically called on the West to “abandon its Cold War mentality”. It’s been no secret that Washington sanctions and punitive actions against officials in both countries have served to make Russia and China unlikely allies against a common enemy. “All parties should completely abandon the Cold War mentality and form a balanced, effective and sustainable European security mechanism through negotiation,” Wang spelled out in the call with Blinken, according to AFP. The tough rhetoric echoed the words of Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian during a Wednesday press briefing. In response to US claims that Russia is likely to invade Ukraine during the Beijing Winter Olympics, Zhao said,

“As the world’s largest military alliance, NATO should abandon the outdated Cold War mentality and ideological bias, and do things that are conducive to upholding peace and stability.” He suggested that NATO is outdated and contributes to instability: “China firmly opposes all kinds of small cliques,” he added, and urged “fully consider each other’s legitimate security concerns, avoid antagonism and confrontation, and properly address differences and disputes through equal consultation on the basis of mutual respect.”

Wang focused much of his Thursday call with Blinken on the “urgent priority” that the “US should stop interfering in the Beijing Winter Olympics.” The swipe appeared not just aimed at Washington’s continued emphasis on China’s human rights abuses, including allegations of detention centers and “genocide” targeting Uighur Muslims, but in response to the words the day prior from Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Sherman had unexpectedly linked the Ukraine crisis with the Olympic games hosted by China: “We all are aware that the Beijing Olympics begin on Feb. 4, the opening ceremony, and President Putin expects to be there. I think that, probably, [Chinese] President Xi Jinping would not be ecstatic if Putin chose that moment to invade Ukraine, so that may affect his timing and his thinking,” Sherman said in a virtual conference.

“Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer.”

• Why Do American Elites Want War in Ukraine? (Kassam)

George Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) contains the following description of the English elite: “One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed…. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.”

America’s own ruling class has more than its share of the unteachable types, as well as the cynical scoundrelism of Orwell’s description of the U.S. ruling elite as “mere bandits…consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.” And when it’s not bombs at home, it’s bombs away. Or perhaps in Joe Biden’s case, both. The current president is perhaps the leading exemplar of American banditry, coupling treachery with an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. His own former boss, President Barack Obama, is said to have remarked upon his Vice President’s “ability to f*** things up.” And that ability has not diminished with time.

So, of course, to war. Whether in lock-step or goose-step, the rest of the ruling class amplifies Biden’s thirst for something, anything that provides respite from domestic catastrophe. We are just days away from front-page headlines dubbing the tent cities across America “Bidenvilles.” Something must be done. And that thing, to paraphrase Vice President Kamala Harris, is the thing they have been doing, every day: point at Russia. “Putin is the devil and Russia subverted American democracy” has become a moralistic mantra for every Biden booster and Foggy Bottom staffer. But flaccid, obfuscatory jaw-jawing over the moral turpitude of Russia’s dealings with Ukraine has also whet the appetites of the long-benched war lobby. That lobby wants its turn back at the helm. Sanctions ain’t good enough, cry its advocates on Capitol Hill and in the media. Stiffen the sinews. Summon up someone else’s blood. Cry Ukraine for democracy, Joey and Uncle Sam! No one’s buying it.

I get the feeling that if Durham doesn’t do it, someone else will. And what did Obama know?

• What Did Clinton Know and When Did She Know It? (Sperry)

As indictments and new court filings indicate that Special Counsel John Durham is investigating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for feeding false reports to the FBI to incriminate Donald Trump and his advisers as Kremlin agents, Clinton’s role in the burgeoning scandal remains elusive. What did she know and when did she know it? Top officials involved in her campaign have repeatedly claimed, some under oath, that they and the candidate were unaware of the foundation of their disinformation campaign: the 35-page collection of now debunked claims of Trump/Russia collusion known as the Steele dossier. Even though her campaign helped pay for the dossier, they claim she only read it after BuzzFeed News published it in 2017.

But court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on. [..] Dossier author Christopher Steele himself has suggested Clinton was briefed on his reports. On July 5, 2016 — the same day the FBI publicly exonerated Clinton in her email scandal — Steele handed off the first installments of the dossier to an FBI agent overseas who had handled him previously as an informant. In their London meeting, Steele noted that Clinton was aware of his reporting, according to contemporaneous notes Steele took of their conversation.

“The notes reflect that Steele told [his FBI handler Michael Gaeta] that Steele was aware that ‘Democratic Party associates’ were paying for [his] research; the ‘ultimate client’ was the leadership of the Clinton presidential campaign; and ‘the candidate’ was aware of Steele’s reporting,” Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz wrote in his 2019 report examining the FBI’s use of the dossier to justify spying on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Later that same month, during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the CIA picked up Russian chatter about a Clinton foreign policy adviser who was trying to develop allegations to “vilify” Trump. The intercepts said Clinton herself had approved a “plan” to “stir up a scandal” against Trump by tying him to Putin. According to handwritten notes, then-CIA chief John Brennan warned President Obama that Moscow had intercepted information about the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump.”

Kolakusic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1486641636784357381

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Debt Rattle Christmas Eve 2021

Dec 242021

December 24, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, boosters, CNN, confused, Crimea, Fauci, fluvoxamine, ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, Newsweek, Omicron 46 Responses »

Claude Monet Camille Sitting on the Beach at Trouville 1870-71

• Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection With Omicron Or Delta (medRxiv)

• UK Reveals How Long Boosters Protect From Omicron (RT)

• Efficacy And Safety Of Two Neutralising Monoclonal Antibody Therapies (Lancet)

• The Mask and the Face (Farrow)

• Patriotic Duty My Eye (David Stockman)

• If You’ve Had COVID You’re Likely Protected for Life (Mercola)

• Ontario List Fluvoxamine As A Covid-19 Treatment To Consider (CTV)

• A Myth is Born: How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies (Resc.)

• ‘Biden Seems Confused’: CNN Question President’s Cognitive Health (DM)

• Fauci et al Withheld Information on China’s Coronavirus Experiments (NW)

• US Airlines Cancel Hundreds Of Flights Scheduled For Friday (DM)

• Putin Reveals Thinking Behind 2014 Moves In Crimea (RT)

Brian Tyson: 70% of deaths could have been saved with early treatment. I have not lost a single patient (of over 6,000).
https://twitter.com/i/status/1473365779634655234

When a T cell is exposed to a foreign pathogen, it extends a signaling device or ‘antenna’ known as a vitamin D receptor. It then searches for vitamin D. If there is an inadequate vitamin D level, they won’t begin to mobilize.

“..but deaths continue to climb”. That’s what the FT gets from this series of graphs. Good grief.

“This study shows that after three months the vaccine effectiveness of Pfizer & Moderna against Omicron is actually negative. Pfizer customers are 76.5% more likely and Moderna customers are 39.3% more likely to be infected than unvaxxed people. “

“Observational study from Denmark indicates that the mRNA vaccines protect for a few weeks only but then SIGNIFICANTLY AUGMENT Omicron infectivity. Is the immune system actually harmed, creating shot repetition dependency (with unknown long-term safety)?”

• Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection With Omicron Or Delta (medRxiv)

In this brief communication we are showing original research results with early estimates from Danish nationwide databases of vaccine effectiveness (VE) against the novel SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) up to five months after a primary vaccination series with the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines. Our study provides evidence of protection against infection with the Omicron variant after completion of a primary vaccination series with the BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccines; in particular, we found a VE against the Omicron variant of 55.2% (95% confidence interval (CI): 23.5 to 73.7%) and 36.7% (95% CI: -69.9 to 76.4%) for the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines, respectively, in the first month after primary vaccination. However, the VE is significantly lower than that against Delta infection and declines rapidly over just a few months. The VE is re-established upon revaccination with the BNT162b2 vaccine (54.6%, 95% CI: 30.4 to 70.4%).

Note the number of cases in this stat:

10 weeks. That’s it. Leave the needle in.

Or: realize that Omicron is a very mild version of a disease that 99.97% of people already survived, and keep the needle out forever.

Because after 12 weeks (3 months), see above, “Pfizer customers are 76.5% more likely and Moderna customers are 39.3% more likely to be infected than unvaxxed people. ”

• UK Reveals How Long Boosters Protect From Omicron (RT)

While Covid-19 booster shots provide more protection against severe disease from the new Omicron variant, even this starts to wane after 10 weeks, the UK Health Security Agency has announced amid talk of post-Christmas lockdowns. The agency’s data on Omicron in comparison to the previously dominant Delta variant of the virus shows that people infected by the new strain may be up to 70% less likely to end up in a hospital, UKHSA Chief Executive Jenny Harries said on Thursday. She called it an “encouraging early signal” but noted that “this is early data and more research is required to confirm these findings.” Health Secretary Sajid Javid welcomed the findings, but pointed out that “cases of the variant continue to rise at an extraordinary rate – already surpassing the record daily number in the pandemic.”

“Hospital admissions are increasing, and we cannot risk the NHS [National Health Service] being overwhelmed,” Javid said. Protecting the NHS was the rationale for the original 2020 lockdown, based on the early doomsday models from Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College in London. Addressing widespread speculation about new restrictions coming after the holidays, Javid said it was “still too early” to tell and that the government was continuing to “monitor the data hour by hour.” He urged Britons to “please stay cautious this Christmas and get your booster as soon as possible to protect yourself and your loved ones.” “While two doses of the vaccine aren’t enough, we know boosters offer significant protection against the variant and early evidence suggests this strain may be less severe than Delta,” the minister said. However, UKHSA data noted that the booster efficacy begins to wane more quickly against Omicron, and is already 15-25% lower after just 10 weeks.

Hmm. Panacea?

• Efficacy And Safety Of Two Neutralising Monoclonal Antibody Therapies (Lancet)

Findings Between Dec 16, 2020, and March 1, 2021, 546 patients were enrolled and randomly assigned to sotrovimab (n=184), BRII-196 plus BRII-198 (n=183), or placebo (n=179), of whom 536 received part or all of their assigned study drug (sotrovimab n=182, BRII-196 plus BRII-198 n=176, or placebo n=178; median age of 60 years [IQR 50–72], 228 [43%] patients were female and 308 [57%] were male). At this point, enrolment was halted on the basis of the interim futility analysis. At day 5, neither the sotrovimab group nor the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group had significantly higher odds of more favourable outcomes than the placebo group on either the pulmonary scale (adjusted odds ratio sotrovimab 1·07 [95% CI 0·74–1·56]; BRII-196 plus BRII-198 0·98 [95% CI 0·67–1·43]) or the pulmonary-plus complications scale (sotrovimab 1·08 [0·74–1·58]; BRII-196 plus BRII-198 1·00 [0·68–1·46]).

By day 90, sustained clinical recovery was seen in 151 (85%) patients in the placebo group compared with 160 (88%) in the sotrovimab group (adjusted rate ratio 1·12 [95% CI 0·91–1·37]) and 155 (88%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group (1·08 [0·88–1·32]). The composite safety outcome up to day 90 was met by 48 (27%) patients in the placebo group, 42 (23%) in the sotrovimab group, and 45 (26%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group. 13 (7%) patients in the placebo group, 14 (8%) in the sotrovimab group, and 15 (9%) in the BRII-196 plus BRII-198 group died up to day 90.

Interpretation Neither sotrovimab nor BRII-196 plus BRII-198 showed efficacy for improving clinical outcomes among adults hospitalised with COVID-19.

Douglas Bryce Farrow, Professor of Theology and Ethics, McGill, Montréal.

“Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be.”

• The Mask and the Face (Farrow)

Dear […] Thank you for responding on behalf of the provost, and for passing on the congratulatory letter to our students from the city’s director of Public Health. As you know, in any McGill communication I receive, I don’t read past the point where it begins offering me unsolicited medical advice, which is beyond the university’s competence and which I have made clear I regard as a form of harassment. But this letter, being from an external bureaucrat, I read through with some interest. I was struck by this line: “La vaccination demeure le geste civique le plus efficace pour préserver nos acquis de cet automne.” “Vaccination remains the most effective civic gesture to preserve our achievements this autumn.” What remarkable transparency and simplicity!

Vaccination—or, more accurately, an experimental injection with lipid nanoparticles of uncertain and possibly toxic effect on bodily tissues, used as a delivery system for genetic instructions designed to reprogram certain cells so as to cause them to produce an unknown quantity of a spike-protein pathogen with equally uncertain, but certainly dangerous, effects on the immune system and on other crucial systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, etc.—has, mirabile dictu, become le geste civique. Then again, what else could it become? For plainly it has not become a means of prevention of the spread of a coronavirus, even allowing (as I do not) that preventing spread is a rational and achievable goal. The latest iteration of the virus appears, if anything, to prefer the vaccinated.

Isn’t that convenient? Omicron is highly transmissible but not very severe, so according to the new definition of a “pandemic,” onwards and upwards with pandemic measures! Perhaps the achievement of which Dre. Drouin speaks, then, is merely that of putting the first two needles in every arm, as a prelude to the many more that are to come? With your help, she’s certainly done well with that. Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be. The Great Reset—sorry, the dangerous pandemic—rolls on, with no end in sight. One of your administrative colleagues at a nearby university told some of her professorial charges, who had expressed concern about the psychological and pedagogical well-being of their students, to expect three or four more years of this. I hope there will be some annual variation in the congratulatory note, particularly as the needle count rises and morale drops still more precipitously.

COVID vaccination was always primarily a civic gesture, of course, for it was never medically justified or justifiable for the majority of people, especially young people like our students. That this gesture has been elicited from the latter by manipulation, censorship, bullying and in some sectors coercion, not only of adults but now even of young children, requires one to ask what sort of gesture it really is and what kind of civic life it points toward. So does the fact that, together with associated policies such as lockdowns and denials of early treatment, it has plainly done far more harm than good. You do know, I trust, that in far too many cases the harm was permanent or fatal. That (as FOIA requests have confirmed) is something that was known to Pfizer from early days, and to the regulatory agencies by, at the latest, three months into the rollout.

The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91%

• Patriotic Duty My Eye (David Stockman)

Rough Rider Teddy must be rolling in his grave as he looks down upon these poseurs gathered in the Roosevelt room. For crying out loud, every one of them is double vaxxed and totally boosted. And they have issued orders to force the same upon more than 130 million of their countrymen—allegedly to prevent the latter from becoming walking vectors of disease and killers of their neighbors. Yet if the Vaxx is actually a spread stopper, why do they sit there in their masks? What’s the need to protect Biden from Fauci when the sainted doctor is armed to the teeth with vaxxed-in antibodies? And why is Biden festooned with the medical equivalent of Depends when he’s already got the accident-prevention protection of the Vaxx?

Or does he? That is to say, if it doesn’t work to stop the spread, the benefit is only private and not public and hence there is no earthly reason for mandating it against the will of millions of citizens who fear that the risks outweigh the benefits. And if it does stop the spread—despite the manifest evidence to the contrary—-why all the face mask virtue signalling on live TV? In short, this “photo op” is worth a thousand words. It’s a live action illustration of what’s been wrong since the beginning in March 2020. Namely, the predicate that one-size-fits all social control mechanisms—lockdowns, closures, distancing, masking, vaxxing—must be preemptively and harshly employed by arms of the state in order to stop the spread of an aerosolized airborne virus which cannot be seen and cannot be stopped.

Indeed, the latest argument for mandatory vaxxing—-that it prevents not transmission and infection but just a serious course of the disease—makes the picture patently absurd. What are these cats afraid of then? The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism. That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.

Take the pathetic case of the United Kingdom. It is governed by a Conservative Party that’s traitorous to the cause of liberty and led by an unkempt Donald Trump wanna be who has assaulted the essence of liberal democracy to such a sweeping extent that his most authoritarian predecessors (i.e. Winston Churchill, among others) scarcely dreamed of it and the Donald himself couldn’t hold a candle to it. BoJo, in fact, is right now hauling out all the tools of public health authoritarianism in response to what amounts to a run-of-the-mill winter flu among the British population. And that latter proposition is not debatable. Not when you compare the peak January data, when virtually no one was vaccinated compared to 80% of adult Brits today, with the 7-day rolling averages through last week. Thus,

• The case rate last week was 1,138 per million or 30% higher than the 875 per million recorded at the January 2021 peaks, but–
• The death rate last week of 1.64 per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91% compared to the 18.21 rate at the January 2021 peak.

“..immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime.”

• If You’ve Had COVID You’re Likely Protected for Life (Mercola)

If you’ve had COVID-19, even a mild case, major congratulations to you as you’ve more than likely got long-term immunity, according to a team of researchers from Washington University School of Medicine. In fact, you’re likely to be immune for life, as is the case with recovery from many infectious agents — once you’ve had the disease and recovered, you’re immune, most likely for life. The evidence is strong and promising, and should be welcome and comforting news to a public that has spent the last year, 2020, in a panic over SARS-CoV-2. Increasingly evidence is showing that long-lasting immunity exists. Seasonal coronaviruses, some of which cause common colds, yield only short-lived protective immunity, with reinfections occurring six to 12 months after the previous infection.

Early data on SARS-CoV-2 also found that antibody titers declined rapidly in the first months after recovery from COVID-19, leading some to speculate that protective immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may also be short-lived. Senior author of the study, Ali Ellebedy, Ph.D., an associate professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, pointed out that this assumption is flawed, stating in a news release: “Last fall, there were reports that antibodies waned quickly after infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, and mainstream media interpreted that to mean that immunity was not long-lived. But that’s a misinterpretation of the data. It’s normal for antibody levels to go down after acute infection, but they don’t go down to zero; they plateau.”

The researchers found a biphasic pattern of antibody concentrations against SARS-CoV-2, in which high antibody concentrations were found in the acute immune response that occurred at the time of initial infection. The antibodies declined in the first months after infection, as should be expected, then leveled off to about 10% to 20% of the maximum concentration detected. In a commentary on the study, Andreas Radbruch and Hyun-Dong Chang of the German Rheumatism Research Centre Berlin explained: “This is consistent with the expectation that 10–20% of the plasma cells in an acute immune reaction become memory plasma cells, and is a clear indication of a shift from antibody production by short-lived plasma cells to antibody production by memory plasma cells. This is not unexpected, given that immune memory to many viruses and vaccines is stable over decades, if not for a lifetime.”

Add to the list.

• Ontario List Fluvoxamine As A Covid-19 Treatment To Consider (CTV)

Ontario has become the first province to list an inexpensive and well-known antidepressant as a treatment doctors can “consider” for patients with a mild COVID-19 infection in a bid to keep them out of hospital. In the science table listing on Wednesday, a panel indicated that the drug fluvoxamine can be considered and prescribed to patients with a mild case who are at risk of having more severe symptoms. Fluvoxamine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant that is typically used to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorders. “Right now, we’re in a really unprecedented wave of Omicron and we have just a staggering number of patients getting infected,” Dr. Menaka Pai, associate professor of medicine at McMaster University and co-chair of the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, told CTV News.

“Our goal is to keep them safe, to keep them out of hospital and also to preserve our scarcest resource, which I would say is our hospital beds.” The drug costs a little more than a dollar a day and would be taken for 15 days, starting with a small dose. In comparison, the antivirals medicines from Pfizer and Merck cost nearly $1,000 dollars per patient. Studies have shown that the drug can cut hospital admissions due to COVID-19 by up to 30 per cent. “When you look at all that data together, it is very likely that fluvoxamine prevents hospitalization in patients with mild COVID-19,” Pai said. “So patients who are not yet on oxygen, and if our goal in this wave of the pandemic is to stop patients with COVID from ending up in those scarce hospital beds, then that I think is a very important finding, indeed.”

“A fixture on the WHO’s list of 100 essential medicines all hospital systems are recommended to carry..”

• A Myth is Born: How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies (Resc.)

When a Texas cattleman, seventy-nine, died last September in New Mexico after contracting covid, his family never anticipated the worldwide headlines that would ensue. In a ballyhooed press conference, New Mexico Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase, the state’s top health chief, announced New Mexico’s first ivermectin “overdose,” soon adding a second fatality allegedly from “ivermectin toxicity.” Now, Scrase has acknowledged that his repeated, what he called “offhand,” assertions were groundless. Two deaths were not caused by ivermectin, a long-used generic drug that was emerging as a covid treatment. Instead, he said that the pair died because they “actually just delayed their care with covid.” That is a big difference.

Scrase backpedaled on December 1 in a little-noticed online press briefing and only after we pressed his agency to provide evidence for its claims of so-called “ivermectin deaths.” Officials had repeatedly said they were awaiting a toxicology report on the cattleman’s death. Yet we learned that the report was never even ordered or done, and, moreover, the man’s death was ruled by the state’s coroner as being from “natural” causes. Not a single media outlet reported Scrase’s admission, even as dozens, including the The Hill and The New York Times, had eagerly covered his original assertions about ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. “I don’t want more people to die,” read one early headline, quoting Scrase. “It’s the wrong medicine for something really serious,” Scrase said in the Times article.

Doctors, scientists, and toxicologists worldwide were puzzled by the assertions, because ivermectin is an extraordinarily safe, FDA-approved drug. A fixture on the WHO’s list of 100 essential medicines all hospital systems are recommended to carry, nearly four billion doses have been given in four decades. New Mexico became a key player in a broad pattern of governmental deception late last summer to portray ivermectin as dangerous, in tandem with three related developments. Research strongly supported the drug’s efficacy against covid; prescriptions were soaring; and public health officials were single-mindedly focused not on treatment but on vaccination.

We previously reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s tweeted warning last August against using ivermectin meant for livestock was prompted by incorrect—and unverified—information from Mississippi. Health officials there had posted an alert suggesting the state’s poison control center was deluged with hundreds of calls over ingestion of livestock ivermectin; in reality, we found, four reports were received. But, fueled by bits of contorted evidence like this, the anti-ivermectin train was unstoppable. We have now learned that, in the rush to bury a drug described as “astonishingly safe” and long used globally to quell animal and human parasites, FDA was not alone.

CNN turns on Biden?!

• ‘Biden Seems Confused’: CNN Question President’s Cognitive Health (DM)

A CNN correspondent said Wednesday that Joe Biden ‘seemed confused’ in his ABC News interview earlier this week, when the president appeared to mix up COVID-19 at-home tests and antiviral pills. Biden, 79, spoke to ABC’s David Muir for 20 minutes in an interview that aired on Wednesday and defended his administration against criticism of its handling of the pandemic and readiness for the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, but also admitting that there were certain mistakes made. When asked about complaints that the lines to get tested for COVID-19 were excessive, with waits of over five hours in New York City as one example, Biden said that 500 million at-home tests had been ordered.

But several times he referred to the tests as ‘pills’ – potentially thinking of the Pfizer antiviral pills, which were federally approved on the same day. ‘Repeatedly throughout this interview – President Biden seems confused and was confusing the half a billion tests that they’ve ordered with a half a billion pills,’ said Jeff Zeleny, CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent. ‘Of course, pills were in the news today with the Pfizer approval of the anti-viral, so he corrected himself, but that was one thing that stuck out to me.’ Zeleny, appearing on Wolf Blitzer’s show on Wednesday afternoon, accused Biden of ‘really not accepting any responsibility’ for the lack of testing. Biden, asked whether the administration should not have seen Omicron coming and prepared accordingly, said ‘nobody saw it coming’.

Defiant, the president said they were doing the best they could. Zeleny said it was not enough. ‘Simply, this administration, and the president leading the charge here, really not accepting any responsibility at all for this lack of testing,’ Zeleny said. ‘We’ve seen these images across the country, long lines, just the inability to get tests. ‘And yes, Omicron came on very quickly here, but it has been almost a month since Thanksgiving where they knew this was coming. ‘So he said he wishes he could have acted faster, and then explains why he didn’t.’

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny says Joe Biden is “not accepting any responsibility for this lack of testing.”

“There is no sense from this administration [tests] will be sent out early in January as the president suggested." pic.twitter.com/S9C0MpfjqN

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 23, 2021

And Newsweek turns too…

• Fauci et al Withheld Information on China’s Coronavirus Experiments (NW)

The NIH fought for more than a year to keep details about the EcoHealth grant under wraps. The 528 pages of proposals, conditions, emails, and progress reports revealed that EcoHealth had funded experiments at the WIV that were considerably riskier than the ones previously disclosed. The trouble began in May 2016, when EcoHealth informed the NIH that it wanted to conduct a series of new experiments during the third year of its five-year grant. One proposed producing “chimeras” made from one SARS-like virus and the spike proteins (which the virus uses to infiltrate animal cells) of others, and testing them in “humanized” mice, which had been genetically engineered to have human-like receptors in their lungs, making them better stand-ins for people. When such novel viruses are created, there is always a risk they will turn out to be dangerous pathogens in their own right.

Another risky experiment involved the MERS virus. Although MERS is lethal—it kills 35 percent of those who catch it—it’s not highly transmissible, which is partly why it has claimed fewer than 900 lives so far. EcoHealth wanted to graft the spikes of other related coronaviruses onto MERS to see how that changed its abilities. Both experiments seemed to cross the gain-of-function line. NIH program officers said as much, sending Daszak a letter asking him to explain why he thought they didn’t. In his reply, Daszak argued that because the new spikes being added to the chimeras were more distantly related to SARS and MERS than their original spikes, he didn’t anticipate any enhanced pathogenicity or infectiousness. That was a key distinction that arguably made them exempt from the NIH’s prohibition on gain-of-function experiments.

But, of course, one never knows; as a precaution, he offered that if any of the chimeric viruses began to grow 10 times better than the natural viruses, which would suggest enhanced fitness, EcoHealth would immediately stop all experiments, inform the NIH program officers, and together they’d figure out what to do next. The NIH accepted Daszak’s terms, inserting his suggestions into the grant conditions. Scientists at WIV conducted the experiments in 2018. To their surprise, the SARS-like chimeras quickly grew 10,000 times better than the natural virus, flourishing in the lab’s humanized mice and making them sicker than the original. They had the hallmarks of very dangerous pathogens.

WIV and EcoHealth did not stop the experiment as required. Nor did they let the NIH know what was going on. The results were buried in figure 35 of EcoHealth’s year-four progress report, delivered in April 2018. Did the NIH call Peter Daszak in to explain himself? It did not. There are no signs in the released documents that the NIH even noticed the alarming results. In fact, NIH signaled its enthusiasm for the project by granting EcoHealth a $7.5 million, five-year renewal in 2019. (The Trump administration suspended the grant in 2020, when EcoHealth’s relationship with the WIV came under scrutiny.)

Because airports over the holidays were not chaotic enough yet..

• US Airlines Cancel Hundreds Of Flights Scheduled For Friday (DM)

Hundreds of Christmas Eve flights have been canceled as the fast-spreading Omicron variant takes a toll on flight crews and other workers. Chicago-based United Airlines has canceled at least 120 flights for Friday, while Atlanta-based Delta said it has canceled about 90 and Alaska Airlines said it had canceled 17. United and Delta said they were working to contact passengers so they would not be stranded at airports. ‘The nationwide spike in Omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation. As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to cancel some flights and are notifying impacted customers in advance of them coming to the airport,’ United said.

At least one of the airlines is making it clear that COVID is responsible for the cancellations. When accessing a cancelled flight on United’s website, the following message pops up: ‘Your flight is canceled due to an increase in Covid cases limiting crew availability. We’re sorry for disrupting your holiday plans and for the inconvenience.’ Delta said it has ‘exhausted all options and resources — including rerouting and substitutions of aircraft and crews to cover scheduled flying — before canceling around 90 flights for Friday.’ Delta cited potential inclement weather and the impact of the Omicron variant for the cancellations. Notably, American and Alaska had said they would comply with President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for government contractors, while Delta’s CEO had promised to fight the rule.

“..We were put in a situation where we could not do otherwise..”

• Putin Reveals Thinking Behind 2014 Moves In Crimea (RT)

Before the Maidan in 2014, Moscow was happy to work closely with all Ukrainian governments and had no plan to take any action in Crimea. However, this changed when a democratically elected leader was overthrown, the Russian president said on Thursday. Speaking to journalists at his annual end-of-year press conference at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow, Putin said he would have continued working closely with Ukrainian partners if there hadn’t been a “bloody coup d’etat,” in which people were “killed and burned.” The current tension between Russia and Ukraine began following the events of the 2014 Maidan, when violent street protests toppled a democratically elected government. Shortly after the uprising in Kiev, Crimea was reabsorbed into Russia following a referendum. The vast majority of the world considers the vote illegitimate and views the peninsula as illegally occupied by Moscow.

Before the Maidan, reabsorbing Crimea was not even on the cards, the Russian president said. “How could we say no to Sevastopol and Crimea, to the people who live there? How could we not take them under our protection, under our wing? Impossible. We were put in a situation where we could not do otherwise,” Putin said. The president also referred to a decision by the Soviet Union to create the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which saw new borders created inside what was formerly the Russian Empire. According to Putin, those living in Crimea, as well as in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine, were not given a choice of which country they belonged to, and many of those locals wished to be Russian. “They created a country which never existed before,” he claimed, suggesting that today’s crises are ripple effects from that decision.

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