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Debt Rattle September 30 2024

Sep 302024
 
 September 30, 2024  Posted by at 8:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Roofs of Paris 1886

 

• Musk Warns “If Trump Is Not Elected, This Will Be The Last Election” (ZH)
• Free Speech Makes US ‘Hard To Govern’ – John Kerry (RT)
• MTG Predicts Election Delay Or More Assassination Attempts Against Trump (JTN)
• Michigan Lawmaker Admits Dire Internal Polling For Kamala Harris (ZH)
• Trump Labels Harris ‘Mentally Impaired’ (RT)
• When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris (Carden)
• Lebowitz Calls for Biden-Harris to “Dissolve the Supreme Court” (Turley)
• Biden Broke His Word To Congress – WSJ (RT)
• Pentagon Chief ‘Blew Up’ as Israel Notified US of Strike on Nasrallah (Sp.)
• Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Arabs (Helmer)
• Famine In Europe: The Real Goal Of Anti-Russian Policies (SCF)
• Watching the China River Flow (Pepe Escobar)
• Beyond Hegemony (Jeffrey Sachs)
• Obama Was A ‘Simp’ For The Deep State – Brother (RT)
• Putin Proved Me Correct (Paul Craig Roberts)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1840125327399629120

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Football

 

 

Jimmy Dore

 

 

Lauria

 

 

Ritter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840235654908686363

 

 

Ballmer

 

 

BORDER CZAR
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840055614967345259

 

 

 

 

The numbers add up.

• Musk Warns “If Trump Is Not Elected, This Will Be The Last Election” (ZH)

Elon Musk has argued that the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States, “something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible,” will effectively establish a ‘one-party state and Democracy is over.’ Responding to a thread on X in which Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pointed out that the DOJ is suing Alabama for trying to remove noncitizens from its voting lists, and blocked the SAVE Act – Musk noted that “Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco”:

“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it! Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years. The voting margin in the swing states is often less than 20 thousand votes. That means if the “Democratic” Party succeeds, there will be no more swing states!! Moreover, the Biden/Harris administration has been flying “asylum seekers”, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.

America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over. The only “elections” will be the Democratic Party primaries. This already happened in California many years ago, following the 1986 amnesty. The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape. Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.”

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But that’s the whole idea.

• Free Speech Makes US ‘Hard To Govern’ – John Kerry (RT)

The freedom for individuals to choose their sources of information makes it difficult to reach consensus and, consequently, to govern effectively, former presidential climate envoy John Kerry stated. At a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on Green Energy last week, the former Secretary of State under President Barack Obama criticized the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and the press, among other things. Kerry pointed out that social media poses challenges for building consensus in democracies. “It’s really hard to govern today,” he remarked. “The referees we used to have to determine what is fact and what isn’t have kind of been eviscerated,” he noted, adding that individuals now decide where to get their news.

“If people go to only one source… and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to simply hammering it out of existence,” he asserted. As long as Democrats can “win ground” and “win the right to govern,” they would be “free to implement change,” the former Democratic senator stated. “I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to address the challenges we face. To me, that is part of what this race, this election, is all about,” he added.

At another WEF event earlier this year, Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker lamented the loss of corporate media’s monopoly on information. “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” she said, noting that customers now have access to a broader array of sources. Amid increasingly divisive election rhetoric, research suggests that Americans trust the media even less than they are willing to publicly admit. While 24 percent of Americans claim to trust the media to tell the truth, only 7 percent believe it privately, according to a study completed in June by the think tank Populace, in cooperation with Gradient and YouGov.

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“The momentum shift has happened and Trump is leading and his support is rapidly accelerating..”

• MTG Predicts Election Delay Or More Assassination Attempts Against Trump (JTN)

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on Saturday predicted that more assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump could occur as the election gets closer. “We have entered the most dangerous phase of the election,” Greene said on the social media platform, X. “The momentum shift has happened and Trump is leading and his support is rapidly accelerating. I’m hearing it everywhere, even where I was not before. Democrats will do anything to stop him.” She said that there have already been two assassination attempts on Trump’s life.

“They’ve already been trying to put him in prison and literally assassinate him,” Greene wrote. “What comes next? More assassination attempts? Will they delay the election? Be prepared.” Trump has had two assassination attempts on his life. One was at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the other in Florida while he was golfing. As the election gets closer, both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have been traveling around the U.S. doing rallies. (JTN)

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Money Talks, But Polls Walk

• Michigan Lawmaker Admits Dire Internal Polling For Kamala Harris (ZH)

In a Sunday bombshell, Axios reports that Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has privately warned donors that Vice President Kamala Harris is “underwater” in Michigan – a critical battleground state for Democrats – according to a video clip obtained by the outlet. Slotkin’s revelation comes at a time when the Dems are fighting tooth and nail to hold onto the Senate, and Michigan could be a deciding factor. During a virtual fundraiser last Wednesday with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Slotkin didn’t mince words. “I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she admitted, further stating that their internal polling shows Harris sinking in the Wolverine State. The news comes as a blow Democrats as they eye a tough Senate race where Slotkin herself is vying for a seat against GOP contender, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).

Michigan is a critical state for Democrats. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt, taking Michigan – or any state in the so-called “Blue Wall” that includes Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it could pave his way back to the White House. Recent polling averages from FiveThirtyEight have Harris ahead by just 2.4 points, while a New York Times/Siena College poll puts her lead at a razor-thin 1 point. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans smell blood in the water. Slotkin’s Senate race has seen millions of dollars pour in, with GOP operatives sensing a prime opportunity to flip the seat. Republican internal polling suggests the race may be neck-and-neck, despite some public polls showing Slotkin with a narrow lead.

While Slotkin’s public polling paints a more optimistic picture, with RealClearPolitics giving her a 48% to 43% edge, Republicans are raising alarms. GOP strategists believe the Michigan Senate race is tightening, especially as Slotkin’s campaign fights off the GOP war chest. With Slotkin admitting Harris is struggling in Michigan, it’s clear Democrats have a lot to worry about in 2024. The Senate map isn’t doing Democrats any favors either. While ruby-red Ohio and Montana have been getting attention, a surprise Republican win in Michigan could virtually guarantee a GOP majority come next November.

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“..Saturday, Harris vowed to step up deportations and deny asylum to migrants who cross the border outside legal entry points.”

• Trump Labels Harris ‘Mentally Impaired’ (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has labeled Vice President Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” for immigration policies that apparently allowed more than 400,000 convicted criminals to walk freely into the US. According to data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this week, 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 people with pending criminal charges entered the US illegally and are living free inside the country while awaiting court hearings or deportation proceedings. These include 62,231 convicted of assault, 56,533 with drug convictions, and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump declared that Harris should be “impeached and removed from office” for allowing this many criminals into the country.

Harris let in “some of the worst murderers you’ve ever seen,” he claimed, “and that’s not even mentioning the rapists, the gang members, the drug dealers, the child predators, and the traffickers in women.” “[President] Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country,” he said. It is unclear whether all of the criminals mentioned by ICE entered the US while Biden and Harris were in office. However, one of Biden’s first acts as president was to reinstate the Obama-era policy of ‘catch and release’, under which illegal migrants entering the US are detained, and then immediately released with orders to show up at immigration hearings years in the future. Under Trump, migrants arrested by law enforcement agents were taken straight to detention centers from 2019 onwards.

There were around 10.2 million illegal immigrants living in the US in 2020. Under Biden, who tasked Harris in 2021 with overseeing border security, at least 10.6 million more have entered the country, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures. The 425,431 convicted criminals counted by ICE are drawn from a list of over 7 million migrants who are awaiting removal proceedings but are not in custody. As such, the true number of criminal aliens living in the US could be vastly higher. Voters concerned about immigration overwhelmingly trust Trump to tackle the issue. In a bid to close this gap, Harris has distanced herself from past comments on immigration – for example, comparing ICE to the Ku Klux Klan and chanting “down with deportation” at a protest. During a visit to the US-Mexico border on Saturday, Harris vowed to step up deportations and deny asylum to migrants who cross the border outside legal entry points.

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“..columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris “strangely moving..”

• When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris (Carden)

Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials. It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.

The first was a letter signed by over 100 former Republican national security officials stating that while they, alumni of every Republican administration from Reagan to Trump, “expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues” they also “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” According to the former GOP officials, Trump’s “susceptibility to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, unusual affinity for other authoritarian leaders, contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior, and chaotic national security decision-making” render him a danger to U.S. national security interests. Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.

As a group, the signatories of the first letter are a very mixed bag. The missive does feature a few sensible, responsible pillars of the Washington establishment, including those of former defense secretary (and U.S. senator) Chuck Hagel, and former FBI and CIA director William Webster. Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris “strangely moving,” writing, “Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?”

This columnist at Al Jazeera, however, offers no stated desire for beers with the Cheneys, particularly father Dick. “What makes Cheney’s endorsement, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it, particularly galling is the way in which they gloss over these past sins in order to paint him as a guardian of American values,” charged Howard University Law school professor Ziyad Motola.

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No Supreme Court and no Constitution. Pretty soon after that, you’ll have no country.

• Lebowitz Calls for Biden-Harris to “Dissolve the Supreme Court” (Turley)

Author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz added voice to the unhinged calls on the left for trashing the Supreme Court. As I discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal (and in my book), there is a growing counter-constitutional movement in the United States led by law professors, pundits, and celebrities. Lebowitz amplified those calls in a radical demand to simply get rid of the Court. Lebowitz called for President Joe Biden to “dissolve the Supreme Court” despite the fact that it would violate the Constitution and remove one of the most critical protections against executive and legislative abuse. Lebowitz insisted that the Supreme Court is a “disgrace” because, in a reference to Donald Trump, it is “completely his.” To the wild applause of the New York audience, she added: “It’s so disgraceful, this court, that it shouldn’t even be allowed to be called the Supreme Court. It’s an insult to Motown. Basically, it’s a harem. It’s Trump’s harem.”

Her views aligned with others on the left who have attacked the Constitution, the Court, and even rights like free speech as now threats to our democracy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer previously declared in front of the Supreme Court, “I want to tell you, [Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, [Brett] Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced that she wants the impeachment of all six of the conservative justices. She was immediately joined by other Democratic members. Previously, Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she does not understand why we even have a Supreme Court. She asked “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” Other members, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called for packing the Court with additional members to immediately secure a liberal majority to rule as she desires.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., RI), has assured voters that Vice President Kamala Harris will support the packing of the Court with a liberal majority. Despite supporting censorship to combat “disinformation,” many on the left now eagerly spread disinformation about the Court and its rulings. Lebowitz repeated false claims about the Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, stating that the decision makes the president a “king” who “can do whatever you want.” In reality, the Court followed the same approach that it has taken in prior conflicts between the branches. As it has in the past, the Court adopted a three-tiered approach to presidential powers based on the source of a presidential action. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which the court ruled against President Harry Truman’s takeover of steel mills.

In his famous concurrence to Youngstown, Justice Robert Jackson broke down the balance of executive and legislative authority between three types of actions. In the first, a president acts with express or implied authority from Congress. In the second, he acts where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area). In the third, the president acts in defiance of Congress. In this decision, the court adopted a similar sliding scale. It held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial or private actions. None of this matters. Facts do not matter. Many on the left are calling for the trashing of the Constitution based on wildly inaccurate claims.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.” In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.” In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Lebowitz is also wrong about the voting record of the justices. In reality, the Court continues to rule largely by unanimous, or nearly unanimous decisions. After April, unanimity stood at 46 percent of cases. Of the 22 6-3 decisions, only half broke along ideological lines. That is the same as the 11 such cases last term. The average for unanimous decisions has been roughly 43 percent. The rate is back up to 48 percent for the last term. When you add the nearly unanimous opinions, it is the vast majority of cases. Moreover, Sotomayor agreed with Roberts in 71% of cases Kavanaugh and Barrett agreed with Sotomayor roughly 70% of the time. In critical decisions, conservative justices like Gorsuch and Barrett have joined their liberal colleagues and the Court has repeatedly voted against positions supported by Donald Trump.

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“One of the conditions stipulated was that the Biden administration articulate a strategy regarding US support for Ukraine within 45 days of the budget’s enactment, and quarterly moving forward..”

• Biden Broke His Word To Congress – WSJ (RT)

US President Joe Biden has not been honest with the American public about his administration’s plan for Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in an article on Friday. Despite Biden styling himself a supporter of Ukraine’s freedom in his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, he refuses to level with Congress and the American public about his strategy to achieve victory, the editorial stated. In April, lawmakers passed a nearly $61 billion supplemental budget for Ukraine, after months of wrangling between Democrats and Republicans. One of the conditions stipulated was that the Biden administration articulate a strategy regarding US support for Ukraine within 45 days of the budget’s enactment, and quarterly moving forward. “Biden knew this commitment was necessary to get aid through Congress, and he signed the bill,” WSJ observed.

Despite this, the strategy was submitted “months after the congressionally-mandated deadline,” the newspaper said, citing a press release from GOP lawmakers. “Also, and this is typical of the Biden stonewall: The document is entirely classified,” WSJ wrote, adding that congressmen want the strategy made available to the American public. ”Don’t count on the Administration following this order before Nov. 5, if it ever does,” the board said. “A public release might mean that Vice President Kamala Harris would have to explain her own thinking on the war before the election. As long as she doesn’t, and the Administration covers it up, Ms. Harris co-owns Mr. Biden’s record of muddled half measures.”

The Biden administration announced a further $8 billion in military aid for Kiev on Thursday, reserving the remainder of a large Congressionally-approved allocation set to expire by the end of September. This came right after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky visited the US to pitch what he termed his “victory plan” to his biggest sponsor. According to several Western media sources, Kiev’s wishes are now increasingly clashing with those of its backers in the West. Its allies have also so far denied its ever-more urgent demands to allow the use of Western-supplied arms to strike deep into Russian territory.

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“..there are many US troops stationed in the Middle East, and they had a very short time to prepare for possible hostile military response..”

• Pentagon Chief ‘Blew Up’ as Israel Notified US of Strike on Nasrallah (Sp.)

Israel gave a “few minutes notice” to the United States about its intention to strike the secretary general of Lebanese movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, enraging Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, US media reported.
Defense Secretary Austin “blew up” when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant informed him about the strikes on Nasrallah, as there are many US troops stationed in the Middle East, and they had a very short time to prepare for possible hostile military response to the assassination, the publication explained. Since last week, the Israeli Air Force has been carrying out massive strikes on Hezbollah targets in various parts of Lebanon. Several precision airstrikes were also recorded in Beirut, killing senior Hezbollah commanders, including Nasrallah.

To date, the Israeli army has reported strikes on several thousand Hezbollah targets. Observers note that Israel has not attacked Hezbollah with such intensity since the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Hezbollah has responded with rocket fire primarily at northern Israel, but the range of rocket attacks has increased significantly in recent days. The situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border has escalated since the start of Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip in October 2023. Tensions are growing amid statements by the Israeli military about preparations for a ground operation in Lebanon.

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“The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century..”

• Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Arabs (Helmer)

In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper. Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself – pay lucrative profits in fact. How profitable the bribery and killing methods of American decapitation of the secular Arab nationalists have been since 1943 is the story told in The Jackals’ Wedding. The combination of decapitation and genocide now being pursued by the Israelis lacks the usual cost-accounting restrictions. This is because the imperial ideologies have turned into God-dictated duty, Crusader zealotry revived, but this time Judaeo rather than Christian, rabbinical rather than papal. It is also because the US government is paying the bill. Faith in the transubstantiation of the Jewish state would wither away much quicker than the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem without US cash, capital, and underwriter guarantees.

That kingdom lasted 192 years; Israel is 76 years old; Zionism, 127 years. In self-defence, popular resistance and national liberation of the Arabs, religious conviction can only be as effective as there is military capacity for the fight. The will to fight without the weapons is doomed; just as the war-fighting capacities of the Arabs are doomed if they are inadequate – sabotaged and betrayed off the battlefield; out-gunned if used in combat; held back without a fight. For reminder of how long the present long war will be, let’s repeat this from the beginning last October. The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century. It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.

That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans, adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions, and homicidal mania. Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way.

He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.** American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946. The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948. It was then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion, and Israeli military operations to enforce it.

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“Thousands of Bulgarian farmers are going bankrupt, and the crisis is only expected to get worse in the near future.”

• Famine In Europe: The Real Goal Of Anti-Russian Policies (SCF)

The controversy over Ukrainian agricultural products continues. Ukrainian food products have simply invaded the European market and are driving thousands of farmers out of business. Despite the protests and political pressure, no EU decision-maker seems interested in changing this tragic scenario. However, the crisis seems to have even deeper dimensions and could be a real time bomb for the entire European society. The Bulgarian government recently asked the European Commission to pass a resolution banning the import of Ukrainian chicken eggs. According to the Bulgarian authorities, the large amount of cheap Ukrainian eggs on the European market is hurting Bulgarian producers, who rely on egg sales as a vital part of their business. Thousands of Bulgarian farmers are going bankrupt, and the crisis is only expected to get worse in the near future.

The problem is not limited to eggs or Bulgaria. Selling grain, meat, dairy products and everything that is produced in the countryside seems to be no longer an attractive business in Europe. Since 2022, protests for change have been taking place in all parts of the European continent. From Poland to France, no European farmer is happy to see his products being replaced on the market by massive quantities of cheap Ukrainian agricultural items. This is due to the irrational decision of European decision-makers to ban all import tariffs on Ukrainian food products. The measure is allegedly intended to boost the Ukrainian economy during the crisis caused by the conflict with Russia – which ironically is sponsored by the West itself. In the current European market, it is cheaper to import Ukrainian food than to resell the native products, which is obviously causing thousands of farmers to abandon their businesses.

As well known, most of Europe does not have a very strong agricultural sector, with local farmers relying on government aid to stay active in the market. Without this aid and with the invasion of Ukrainian products, it is simply no longer profitable to be part of European agribusiness, which is why thousands of people are likely to stop working in the rural areas and join the growing class of the European “precariat”. At first, some analysts may see this scenario as a mere market shift, replacing European production with Ukrainian production. However, this analysis is limited. Despite having some of the most fertile soils in the world, Ukraine is currently a target of Western financial predators, who demand the handover of arable land as a means of payment for NATO’s billion-dollar aid packages. Organizations such as Blackrock and other funds will soon own almost all that is left of Ukraine’s “black soil.”

And then Ukrainian agricultural production will depend on the willingness of the “financial sharks” to feed the Europeans. It is true that the lack of food self-sufficiency in European countries is not a new problem. Imports are already a vital mechanism for all of Western Europe. But parallel to the dependence on imports, there is also the irrational policy of sanctions and coercive measures against several emerging food-producing countries. The Russian Federation, for example, is prohibited from selling anything to Europeans, but the problem is even greater. The EU has been considering for years imposing severe sanctions on Brazil, for example, alleging “environmental irregularities”. It will get to the point where the EU’s “humanitarian and environmental” requirements will prevent Europeans from buying anything from any country.

If we ask who is interested in this whole scenario, the answer will once again seem clear. There is only one country encouraging Europe to impose more and more sanctions, buy more and more Ukrainian grain and send more and more weapons to Kiev under payment terms regulated by Blackrock. Of course, this is the same country that boycotted Russian-European energy cooperation and committed the terrorist attack on Nord Stream. And certainly this is also the only state interested in maintaining the geopolitical status quo and preventing the creation of a multipolar world, where Europeans would have freedom of alignment and could pragmatically choose their partners.

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“..like a river undisturbed while traversing a rocky wilderness, China silently flows away on its path to peaceful primacy.”

• Watching the China River Flow (Pepe Escobar)

Leading website Guancha has published the transcript of a first-class lecture at Renmin University on China-U.S. relations by Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. Jacques is one of the very few Westerner scholars with on the ground experience who actually understands the Chinese psyche and way of life in contrast to the West. A particularly intriguing section of the lecture concerns research by Danny Quah, the dean of the widely respected Lee Kuan Yew Institute in Singapore. This is the money quote: “Between 1980 and 2020, Europe’s share of global GDP fell from 26% to 15%. In other words, it fell by 11 percentage points, a very large drop. Although the decline in the United States was smaller, it fell from 21% in the 1980s to less than 16% in 2020. From another perspective, Asia and East Asia are constantly rising. The share in 1980 was 11.5%, and it has risen to 25% in 2020. Among this 25%, China has made the largest contribution, accounting for 18% of the world.”

What this graphically illustrates is the acute swing in the world’s center of economic gravity – no matter the rhetorical tsunamis emanating from the Hegemon. In 1980 the economic center was Atlanticist. Quah though believes that the economic center will reach the Sino-Indian border only by 2050. When we take China compounded with the 10 members of ASEAN, without even considering South Asia, it’s fair to argue that the economic center will already be in the East by 2030, and will be Sino-Indian before 2040. Jacques is correct that by then “the ‘Asian Age’ will replace the ‘Western Age’, and since 1750, the world has always been in the Western Age.” On a personal note, after living and working in Asia for most of the past three decades, I qualify our century as “The Eurasian Century”.

And that, in a nutshell, is the reason why the Hegemon/Atlanticist elites are in Deep Panic mode. The free lunch – of exploiting the wealth of the Global South – is coming to an end. China has already designed the masterplan of its development strategy all the way to 2035 and in many aspects all the way to 2049. The current juncture though is extremely tricky. The People’s Bank of China is taking the necessary master tweaks of the economy very seriously. Earlier this week the PBoC announced cuts to the outstanding mortgage rate and the reserve requirement ratio: that’s the amount of cash commercial banks need to hold as reserves. The PBoC also cut the benchmark policy rate and boosted capital markets. Then the Politburo, chaired by President Xi Jinping himself, intervened in full force, vowing to protect China’s private enterprises; finally stabilise the always wobbly property sector; and adopt the necessary fiscal expenditures.

That’s the domestic front. On the external front, China is on a roll. The top priority is the slowly but surely internationalization of the yuan. And that’s where the crucial role of Hong Kong comes in – as detailed in a report by Renmin University. China is already de-dollarizing at nearly breakneck speed. The U.S. dollar’s share of bilateral trade has already fallen from 80% to less than 50%. China is now trading with the world mostly in yuan – and the petroyuan is not even in full force. Since the start of the SMO by Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, the yuan is the de facto Asian reserve currency for Russia. In parallel, Beijing is accelerating currency swaps all across the spectrum and designating more clearing banks around the world.

From Beijing to Hong Kong, Chinese politico-economic elites are quite comfortable with the fact that for the first time in History, the rise of a great power is not being conditioned by imperialism, war, slavery, looting and all of the above, but under what has been codified since the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping’s late 1970s reforms as “peaceful development.” That is mirrored in several concepts such as win-win; mutual prosperity; equality; “community of shared future for mankind”; and as a master geoeconomic project, the interlocking connectivity corridors across the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While China invests in infrastructure development around the world, the Hegemon imposes sanctions, engages in bombing, supports variations of the Forever Wars, finances and weaponizes color revolutions.

Hegemon “strategy” barely qualifying as utter mediocrity ranges from the U.S. government funding a $1.6 billion campaign to smear China to Republicans divided on whether regime change in Beijing is their ultimate goal and the Democrat ambassador in Beijing convinced that Washington’s China policy is not too hawkish. Then there’s puny functionary and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell – the man who invented the “pivot to Asia” during the first Obama administration – ordering the Europeans to go hawkish on China and defining Beijing in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as “the most significant challenge in our history”. Very few IQs above room temperature across Asia pay attention to such clowns. In contrast, what is now emerging in informed discussions from South to Southeast Asia is that BRICS progress will not be steady enough if the emphasis remains on consensual decisions.

A daring proposition is emerging that Russia and China – the actual BRICS leaders – should announce at the summit in Kazan next month that they are backing a yuan/ruble/gold alliance: as in if the world needs to choose between NATOstan hegemony or a BRICS alternative, better start with sound (real) money. Beyond the feasibility of such proposal, there’s a serious critique of Utopia; the Global Majority must be pushed to face the harsh reality it faces – nuclear destruction or an imperfect evolving new order – and make a stand, fast. Meanwhile, like a river undisturbed while traversing a rocky wilderness, China silently flows away on its path to peaceful primacy.

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“The late, great evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, often described our predicament as follows: “We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies.”

“We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.”

• Beyond Hegemony (Jeffrey Sachs)

We are at a new phase of human history because of the confluence of three interrelated trends. First, and most pivotal, the Western-led world system, in which countries of the North Atlantic region dominate the world militarily, economically, and financially, has ended. Second, the global ecological crisis marked by human-induced climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, and the massive pollution of the environment, will lead to fundamental changes of the world economy and governance. Third, the rapid advance of technologies across several domains—artificial intelligence, computing, biotechnology, geoengineering—will profoundly disrupt the world economy and politics. These interconnecting developments—geopolitical, environmental, and technological—are stoking huge uncertainties, societal dislocations, political crises, and open wars.

To address these pivotal developments, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a Summit of the Future (SOTF) (September 22-23rd, 2024 at the UN headquarters in New York) to reform our international institutions so that they are fit for purpose in our fast-changing world. Since global peace depends more than ever on the efficacy of the UN and international law, the SOTF should be a watershed in global governance, even if it does no more than point the way to further negotiation and deliberation in the years immediately ahead. Our existing institutions, both national and international, are certainly not up to the task of governance in our fast-changing world. The late, great evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, often described our predicament as follows: “We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies.”

By this he meant that we face our challenges today with the basic cognitive and emotional human nature that was formed by human evolution tens of thousands of years ago, with political institutions forged centuries ago (the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787), and with the lightning speed of technological advance (think of ChatGPT as just the latest wonder). Perhaps the most basic fact of deep societal change is uncertainty, and the most basic reaction to uncertainty is fear. In fact, the technological advances—if used correctly—could solve innumerable problems in economic development, social justice (e.g., improved access to healthcare and education through digital connectivity), and environmental sustainability (e.g., a rapid transition to zero-carbon energy sources). Yet the mood today is anything but optimistic, especially in the West. Open wars rage between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, and between U.S.-backed Israel and Palestine.

The possibility of war between the United States and China is widely, openly, and even casually discussed in Washington, though such a war could mean the end of civilization itself. At the root of these conflicts is fear, built on our stone-age emotions. The biggest fear of all is that of many American and European political leaders that the West is losing its hegemony after centuries, and that somehow the loss of hegemony will have catastrophic consequences. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made this Western fear explicit in an April 2024 column for the UK’s Daily Mail, when he stated that if the West loses the war in Ukraine, “it will be the end of Western hegemony.”

Herein lies the essence of the Ukraine war, and many other global conflicts as well. The United States and its allies want to expand NATO to Ukraine. Russia has firmly said no. Both Washington and London were ready to fight a war with Russia over NATO enlargement to protect Western hegemony (specifically, the right to dictate security arrangements to Russia), while Russia was ready to fight a war in order to keep NATO away. In fact, Russia is prevailing on the battlefield over Ukraine’s army and NATO’s armaments. This is not surprising. What is perhaps surprising is how the West completely underestimated Russia’s capabilities.

In broad terms, with the changing global order, including the rise of China and the rest of East Asia, the military and technological strength of Russia, the rapid development of India, and the growing unity of Africa, the Western-dominated world has been brought to an end, not by a tumultuous collapse of the West, but by the growing economic, technological, and therefore military, power of the rest of the world. In principle, the West has no reason to fear the rise of the rest, as the United States and Europe still maintain an overwhelming deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, against any military threat from the outside. The West is bemoaning its loss of relative status—the ability to dictate to others—not any real military insecurity.

Nothing is going to restore Western hegemony in the coming years—no military victory, technological advance, or economic leverage. The rise of advanced military, technological, economic, and financial capacities to Asia and beyond, is unstoppable (and of course should not be stopped, since it signifies a world that is fairer and more prosperous than the preceding Western-dominated world). Yet, the end of Western hegemony does not mean a new Chinese, Indian, or Asian hegemony. There are simply too many power centers—the United States, the EU, China, Russia, India, the African Union, etc.—and too much capacity and diversity to enable any other hegemon to replace the Western-led world order. We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.

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“to be the president of the USA, he had to have the backing of certain people like the Clintons” and “the [George] Soros people…the ones who are really controlling everything out there.”

• Obama Was A ‘Simp’ For The Deep State – Brother (RT)

Barack Obama courted the ‘deep state’ during his rise to power, and once in office was powerless to disobey their orders, the former US president’s half-brother has told Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi. In an interview set to air on Monday, Malik Obama told Rattansi that before he entered the corridors of power, Barack Obama “was a really humble, really nice person.” However, “to be the president of the USA, he had to have the backing of certain people like the Clintons” and “the [George] Soros people…the ones who are really controlling everything out there.” Keeping their backing, along with the support of the deep state, was crucial to Barack Obama, and Malik suggested that his half-brother wouldn’t have dared oppose the 2014 coup in Ukraine or the 2011 regime-change operation against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

“He would have lost his support,” Malik said. “He would not be what he is today, because those people are the ones that propped him up and he had to play to them.” “That’s why I like President Trump,” he continued, “because he does things his own way. He reached out to North Korea and met the leader there. [Obama] could have done that for Muammar Gaddafi. I think he’s just… he’s a simp.” The term ‘deep state’ refers to the unelected and often unknown government bureaucrats who steer government policy, particularly the leaders of intelligence agencies and the military. Malik Obama has the same father as the ex-president, and visited the White House several times during his brother’s first term in office. However, he later claimed that Barack was “cold and ruthless,” and blasted him for abandoning his Kenyan family.

He has since made a series of bizarre claims about the former president, apparently announcing last year that Barack Obama is “definitely gay,” and alleging in 2017 that he was born in Kenya. Malik Obama is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, who before running for office in 2016 challenged Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate over doubts he was born in the US. Trump later abandoned the dispute and admitted that Obama was born in the US. During the full interview with Rattansi, Malik Obama discussed the current state of his relationship with his brother, and Barack’s alleged role in forcing President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign.

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” If there is peace with Russia, the military/security complex loses its enemy, which means its power and its budget. Now watch dumbshit Americans vote Democrat and bring Armageddon upon the world.”

• Putin Proved Me Correct (Paul Craig Roberts)

For years I have warned that Putin’s refusal to quickly win the conflict with Ukraine would result in increasing Western intervention until the conflict spins out of control. That has now happened. NATO’s Secretary General and the British Prime Minister have given a green light to NATO firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine. The green light is subject to Washington’s veto. Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator whose term as president has expired, was reportedly recently in Washington lobbying the Biden regime to give its approval. Be sure you understand what Zelensky is lobbying the Biden regime to do. If the Biden regime gives the go-ahead, Europe, the US, and Ukraine will be destroyed. Here is Putin’s statement. It is a back-to-the-wall statement, as I predicted it would be: “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

So, as I correctly predicted would be the case, a never-ending conflict that drew in the West to increasingly provocative participation has spun out of control. So far everything Washington said would not be done has been done. The final red line is NATO sending missiles into Russia. If this no-no also becomes a yes-yes “because Putin never responds,” war is upon us. It has played out precisely as I said. Yet, I was either ignored by “experts” who are nothing but mouthpieces for the military-security complex, or denounced by fools as “blood-thirsty.” The fact remains: one more wrong decision from the White House and we are history.

Remember, it was Trump who wanted to normalize relations with Russia. The crazed CIA director called the President of the United States a “traitor.” Trump’s own Justice (sic) Department and FBI and the American presstitute media along with Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party fabricated a Russiagate case against Trump, brought two false impeachments against him, cooked up stripper gate, documents gate, and an “insurrection.” One thousand Americans who exercised their First Amendment rights were sentenced by a totally corrupt DOJ to prison. Once Trump announced a second campaign for the presidency, the false accusations were turned into false indictments. All of this was done to prevent peace with Russia. If there is peace with Russia, the military/security complex loses its enemy, which means its power and its budget. Now watch dumbshit Americans vote Democrat and bring Armageddon upon the world.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Assange Nasrallah

 

 

Cancer

 

 

Geese
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840294827033772126

 

 

Gardiner

 

 

23

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle August 10 2024

Aug 102024
 
 August 10, 2024  Posted by at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  63 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Café, le soir, Arles 1888

 

• The American Police State Has Murdered the Constitution (Paul Craig Roberts)
• ‘Free Speech Is An Illusion In The US’ – Tara Reade (RT)
• Special Counsel Jack Smith is No Longer in a Hurry (Turley)
• Harris’s Big Gift To Trump… If He Uses It (Victor Davis Hanson)
• US Hypocrisy on Full Display In Dubious FARA Claims Against Scott Ritter (Sp.)
• Maduro Bans X (RT)
• Serbian President Says He Received Coup Warning From Russia (RT)
• Pentagon Refuses To Rule Out Strikes On Moscow (ZH)
• Kiev Regime’s Terrorism Shows Russia Must Go All The Way (SCF)
• Putin Relies on Reason which the West Has Abandoned (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Mexico Responds To Ukraine’s Request To Arrest Putin (RT)
• Australia Being Turned Into ‘51st US state’ – ex-PM Keating (RT)
• Third Year of Record Coral Increase on the Great Barrier Reef (DS)

 

 

 

 

Walz Pelosi

 

 

New president

 

 

Trump=energy
https://twitter.com/i/status/1821717762890186925

 

 

Macgregor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1821987048129229051

 

 

 

 

“I have already noticed that alternative news websites are pulling in their horns. Soon we will know nothing.”

• The American Police State Has Murdered the Constitution (Paul Craig Roberts)

An American, even a former US Marine and UN weapons inspector, who takes issue with official explanations dear to Washington’s heart, will be accused, as Scott Ritter is, of manipulating the American public “on behalf of the Russian government.” In other words free speech, especially if it is true, is now effectively criminalized despite its Constitutional protection. For many years it has been impossible for many truths to be stated in the print and TV media. The official stories of 9/11, “Covid pandemic,” “Covid vaccine,” Washington’s invasions of Afghanistan and the Middle East, immigration, Israel’s takeover of Palestine, the conflict in Ukraine and others are off limits to skepticism. The alternative Internet media is the only source of information, and now it is being closed down by police state intimidation of Tulsi Gabbard and Scott Ritter and by the destruction of the website Vdare.

The assaults on Donald Trump shows us that not even a President in office is secure from fantastic police state charges. Try to imagine what it means that a New York state judge has set a September date for sentencing the Republican nominee for President seven weeks before the election. Here is real election interference, whereas Trump is being sentenced for interfering in an election by allegedly misreporting a business expense. That such total nonsense can occur in an American court with complicity of an American jury proves that the rule of law is dead and buried in America. Now it has gone beyond the law. It is the Constitution itself that is brushed aside in Washington’s fanatical determination to protect its lies. I have already noticed that alternative news websites are pulling in their horns. Soon we will know nothing.

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“We have the illusion of free speech. We have that illusion of a right to travel. But in reality, it is only allowed if we say what the US wants people to say, otherwise you are at risk..”

• ‘Free Speech Is An Illusion In The US’ – Tara Reade (RT)

You’re only free to speak your mind in the US if you are saying what the authorities want you to say, RT contributor and former aide to Joe Biden, Tara Reade, has claimed. Reade appeared live on RT on Thursday to comment on the search carried out by federal agents and state police at the home of former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in New York state on Wednesday. She and Ritter, who is now a journalist, had both been invited to speak at the 27th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in June, but “unfortunately the federal agents took him off the plane and confiscated his passport,” Reade recalled. She said Ritter’s passport was never returned to him by the US authorities. “Usually, that indicates that someone is under investigation because they take away your passport,” she said.

The government in Washington has been “going after Scott Ritter for years” since “he spoke out against the war in Iraq and revealed that… the US government lied about the weapons of mass destruction,” the former Biden aide claimed. The persecution of the journalist and commentator – whose views on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, as well as Israel’s war in Gaza, contrast sharply with those of the White House – is “just a pattern of what you are seeing in the US, which is the surveillance state and authoritative government,” she argued. “We have the illusion of free speech. We have that illusion of a right to travel. But in reality, it is only allowed if we say what the US wants people to say, otherwise you are at risk,” Reade said. She also suggested that, since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate last month, the party is “going back to the old Russiagate hysteria.”

Ritter, who is also an RT contributor, described the search of his property as an “act of intimidation” against him. The authorities appear to be “primarily concerned” about his “relationship” with RT and the news agency Sputnik, the journalist said in a video message on Telegram on Thursday. The 61-year-old revealed that FBI agents blamed him for working “on behalf of the Russian government” to manipulate the opinions of the American public. Ritter rejected those accusations as “absurd in the extreme.” He insisted that he was “doing nothing wrong,” and was just “an American citizen, holding my government accountable and exercising the rights given to me by the Constitution.”

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“..a neck-breaking change of direction..”

• Special Counsel Jack Smith is No Longer in a Hurry (Turley)

For over a year, Special Counsel Jack Smith has made one element the overriding priority in his prosecution of former president Donald Trump: speed. Smith repeatedly moved to curtail Trump’s appellate rights and demand expedited appeals to try to secure a conviction before the election. In that effort, he found an equally motivated judge in U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who virtually turned her court into a rocket docket to try Trump. Now, in a neck-breaking change of direction, Smith is trying to slow down Chutkan who appears again ready to pull out the stops in this case. After the mandate in the case was returned to her, Judge Chutkan immediately resumed her high-speed scheduling to look at the pre-trial issues after the Court reversed her earlier rulings on the basis of presidential immunity. The past problem with a court making speed the priority is that it does not allow much time to create a record.

The remand will now require Judge Chutkan to do so on the question of what charges and evidence may be barred under the ruling in Trump v. United States. As it has in the past, the Court adopted a three-tiered approach to presidential powers based on the source of a presidential action. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which the court ruled against President Harry Truman’s takeover of steel mills. In his famous concurrence to Youngstown, Justice Robert Jackson broke down the balance of executive and legislative authority between three types of actions. In the first, a president acts with express or implied authority from Congress. In the second, he acts where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area). In the third, the president acts in defiance of Congress.

In this decision, the Court adopted a similar sliding scale. It held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial or private actions. Only hours after receiving the mandate, Judge Chutkin scheduled an Aug. 16 conference to lay out the schedule and issues going forward. The former version of Jack Smith would have been delighted. He did not even see the need for the right for an en banc appeal in previously pushing for a pre-election trial. Now, however, Smith is telling Judge Chutkin to slow down already. Smith told the court that “The Government continues to assess the new precedent set forth last month in the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States. Although those consultations are well underway, the Government has not finalized its position on the most appropriate schedule for the parties to brief issues related to the decision.”

He has asked for a three-week delay to further consider what he wants to do. It is not clear if the press and pundits will now charge Smith with “slow walking” the case. The question is whether Smith is considering a drastic move in light of the calendar and the ruling. There is, of course, always the possibility that he either throws in the towel or opts for a post-election trial. That would certainly go against the grain of Smith, who has always pushed both the law and the calendar to the breaking point. However, as some of us have been arguing for months, he may no longer view a trial as a plausible objective. There is also the possibility that Smith will do something that some of us have discussed over the last year: pare down his case. Smith has always been undone by his appetite. As shown in his 8-0 reversal in his conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, Smith has rarely shown moderation as a prosecutor.

His overloaded criminal complaints created this disaster for his team. In Florida, Smith unwisely loaded up the prosecution with controversial charges on the retention of classified material. It not only triggered difficult challenges but slowed the case to a crawl as the parties dealt with classification laws. Had he proceeded solely on obstruction charges, he might have secured his trial before the election (and before the recent ruling on immunity). Even if the reduced case was heard by the Court on immunity, an obstruction case would have been far stronger for Smith.

The same is true with the D.C. case. Smith loaded up the case to raise the January 6th speech and other issues. Most were unnecessary, but Smith used his press conference to denounce the January 6th riot. A three-week delay will give Smith ample time (in addition to the weeks following the Supreme Court decision) to deliberate. However, it will take roughly a month off the calendar for just internal debate with the election only three months away. So, even with a judge who appears chomping at the bit to resume the fast track to trial, Smith now wants more time. Even before this request, it was hard to see how a trial could be held before the election. Now it seems a virtual certainty that any trial will have to await the results of the election. As I wrote in 2023, the odds were against a federal trial before the election, which would convert the voters into the largest jury in history.

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“..was Harris terrified of leftwing threats from her base that a Shapiro pick would guarantee her 1968-like riots at her Chicago convention?”

• Harris’s Big Gift To Trump… If He Uses It (Victor Davis Hanson)

Harris’s selection of Walz at least reveals the left’s full-bore agenda, something that previously her handlers seemed at pains to hide: an overt doubling down on the Biden neo-socialist record that will require a far more vigorous stealth 90-day campaign to camouflage the hard-left record of both Harris and Walz. Minnesota under Walz became merely a smaller version of Gavin Newsom’s California – shameless woke pandering, wars against fossil fuels, fiscal nihilism, thousands fleeing the state, high crime, high taxes, poor services, sanctuary city/pro-illegal alien activism, eroding downtowns of once majestic cities, loud-in-your-face, attack-dog denials of reality, a two-tier state legal system, tolerance of BLM/Antifa/Hamas street violence, and on and on. So Walz is a force multiplier of Harris’s vulnerabilities.

His selection (was Harris terrified of leftwing threats from her base that a Shapiro pick would guarantee her 1968-like riots at her Chicago convention?) did not just reveal the now overt anti-Semitic, anti-Israel nature of the Democratic Party (Shapiro would have likely ensured Pennsylvania’s electoral votes). Her pick also reveals the confidence that the Left has in winning what will be the most flagrant, bait-and-switch 90-day campaign in presidential history. So, the real Harris-Walz campaign messaging will be: ‘In 2024 we have to lie and mislead you about who we are and what we did, so that in 2025 we can govern you in ways you will not like.’ What are the challenges for this weirdest of tickets? Harris, in Biden-fashion, cannot finish a coherent thought. So again, like Biden in 2020, she will retreat and outsource her campaign to the media, while counting on outspending Trump 3-1, and radiating feigned moderation.

She is taking heat for neither yet meeting with a real journalist nor speaking impromptu. But in her defense, to do either might at any opportune moment collapse her stealth campaign, given that to listen to her for 60 seconds off script is to prefer her to remain silent and hidden. And she has confidence in absentia that a bankrupt media will praise her nonexistent elegance, fluency, and articulateness. Walz will customarily serve as a designated hit man for Harris. But he is just as much a liability— a shoot-from-the-hip blowhard, while owning an even more embarrassing leftwing record than Harris. And he is even less discreet. This week Walz introduced himself to the nation as a VP candidate by smearing J.D. Vance with the brazen “couch” lie. And then while foolishly beaming, he doubled-down on his crude slur (“See what I did there?”).

So, he even outdid Harris who had recently called Trump a “predator”—just days before it was disclosed that her married husband earlier had once impregnated his own children’s young nanny and tutor and had never disclosed what followed from his predation. Both will either ignore or lie about their joint opposition to fracking and pipelines; their disgraceful pro-BLM/Antifa advocacy during the lethal and destructive 2020 looting and rioting; their support for open borders and illegal immigration; their woke pandering; and their generic leftwing promotion of the usual high taxes, big government, poor services, and ‘who cares if they flee my state’ arrogance.

The Harris-Walz ticket will also collapse if, horribile dictu, the prior Biden-Harris appeasement of Iran, distancing from Israel, weakening of the military, and loss of deterrence in the next 90 days leads to theater-wide wars on the Ukrainian borderlands or in the Middle East and/or to a recession due to cumulative inflation, high interest, stagnant wages and anemic citizen employment, and unsustainable national debt service.In sum, Trump is very much even in the race. He was given a rare gift by the shunning of Josh Shapiro as Harris’s running mate. That leftwing blunder could energize the Trump campaign—if again he sticks to warning the country of who these two are, what they have done, how they are hiding their real agendas, what they will do if elected, and how they differ from his own presidential record and future agenda. Nothing else matters.

And that means Trump should ignore the now inert and evaporating Biden, refrain from attacking any Republican, stop all recriminations about 2020, avoid race and DEI ambushes, and prep hard and in detail for as many debates as he can obtain. Trump should appear magnanimous and above the fray by compromising with Harris on the debates: one debate now by her rules on ABC, and one by his rules on Fox before early voting begins. Rarely have the Democrats so foolishly gone hard left. And when they did in 1972, 1980, and 1988, Republicans used to know how to use those gifts, expose them, and win landslides despite media and institutional bias. They can do it again, but only if they are as adroit, united, and disciplined as their predecessors once were.

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“..The Wednesday raid also came the same week court documents revealed Hunter Biden took in million from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu..”

• US Hypocrisy on Full Display In Dubious FARA Claims Against Scott Ritter (Sp.)

Under the orders of the US Justice Department, the home of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was raided this week under allegations of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. More than two dozen boxes were pulled from his home, including an archive that backed Ritter’s allegations that there were never any WMDs in Iraq in 2003. The US’ latest effort to target Scott Ritter have fully put on display the government’s hypocrisy as it picks and chooses when to stay its hand and when to weaponize the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) against Americans, US attorney John Jackman told Sputnik. The Wednesday raid took place at Ritter’s home in New York as investigators have sought to argue that the former weapons inspector’s journalistic work is being framed at the direction of the Russian government. However, the claims could not be further from the truth.

“FARA, kind of by its very nature, is enforced ambiguously, which leads to very unequal levels of enforcement and basically, you know, there’s potential for it to be weaponized against political speech that the United States, especially our foreign policy establishment, finds problematic,” Jackman told Radio Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday. Potential FARA offenders are flagged by the US government if they fall under certain specifications, such as an individual who is documented as having been directed at the sole discretion of a foreign principal. That said, there are exemptions that protect “bonafide” media services, which Jackman noted its exact definition is “somewhat ambiguous.” “I’m looking at the totality of those factors together and these accusations of him acting as a foreign agent and, just on its face, the claims are extremely dubious and uncredible in my view,” Jackman told hosts Jamarl Thomas and Melik Abdul.

“I think this comes down to where they can kind of find these ambiguities in foreign agent laws since it’s been enacted and then also sort of play upon some of the jingoism and fear that the government is really trying to stoke, especially toward Russia but also toward countries in the Middle East as well, which Scott Ritter has been sympathetic to.” Jackman, who also serves as the regular co-host of DD Geopolitics, contrasted the government’s accusations against Ritter to that of the relationship between the Israeli lobby in the US and Congress. “The hypocrisy is so profound,” he said. “The Israeli lobby being able to literally buy [congressional] seats, yet the United States treats all the deference that our media, that our politicians give to Israel, literally the exact propaganda lines that the Israeli government will say to justify, you know, the war and occupation going in Gaza, in the West Bank,” Jackman told Thomas.

“Yet, when it comes to talking about the interests of, you know, other countries or even the sovereign interests of the people in the United States, right, to make sure that our tax dollars are being used in an accountable way that’s going to the infrastructure of this country, rather than going to continue to fuel war and foreign aid in, you know, the tens and hundreds of billions of dollar to countries, like, Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan, for example. So, the hypocrisy to me is just very evident,” the attorney emphasized. The Wednesday raid also came the same week court documents revealed Hunter Biden took in million from Romanian businessman Gabriel Popoviciu in exchange for attempting to exert his influence on the US government during his father’s vice presidency. Additionally, former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway registered as a foreign agent who would be lobbying on behalf of pro-Ukrainian interests.

Unlike in the Biden findings, where evidence shows an agent-principal relationship had been established between the two parties, that isn’t the case for Ritter. “This is one of the meaningful differences with Scott,” Jackman said “At every turn you know Scott is, what he’s talking about when it comes to his commentary on foreign policy and the work that he’s doing, for example, to organize this anti-war rally and draw attention to the specter of nuclear war has been done under his own volition,” he noted. “Due to his own, you know, freedom of thought and freedom of speech which actually, you know, is very tough to do in this country because it cuts against a lot of financial interests that he could potentially be taking advantage of, right?” “It would be a lot easier in this country, for example, to take advantage of a Ukrainian interest who’s willing to pay you to go on the airwaves and spout Ukrainian propaganda. It would be a lot easier to get that into the mainstream than it would to, you know, take the other side of it in this country, which requires just kind of by its very nature – and you all know – a lot of independence.”

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“Maduro accused the tech mogul of “inciting hatred, fascism, civil war, death, [and] confrontation of Venezuelans..”

• Maduro Bans X (RT)

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has announced a temporary ban on X (formerly Twitter) in the country. The decision followed his war of words with the platform’s CEO, Elon Musk, who has accused Maduro of election fraud. In a televised speech on Thursday, Maduro accused the tech mogul of “inciting hatred, fascism, civil war, death, [and] confrontation of Venezuelans,” as well as violating national laws. The leader added that he has signed a resolution presented by the National Commission of Telecommunications to ban the social media platform for ten days.“Let the plans on social networks to spread violence, hatred… [in] Venezuela from abroad end,” Maduro wrote in a separate post on X. In response, Musk took to the platform to mockingly promise to “singe his [Maduro’s] mustache from space.”

The spat between the Venezuelan leader and the billionaire started in the wake of the country’s presidential election last month, in which Maduro was declared the winner. According to the country’s electoral council, Maduro won about 52% of the vote, while opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez received 43%. The opposition disputed the results, arguing that they didn’t match their own tallies, while their backers, including the US, refused to recognize Maduro’s victory. However, other countries such as China and Russia have congratulated the Venezuelan leader on his reelection. Musk has supported the criticism of Maduro, calling him a “dictator” and accusing him of “major election fraud.” “The people of Venezuela have had enough of this clown,” he added, voicing support for the opposition.

The jab drew a sharp response from the Venezuelan president, who blasted the tycoon for allegedly trying to stage a coup and challenged him to a fistfight – a suggestion Musk accepted. The temporary ban on X comes after Maduro claimed to have deleted his WhatsApp messenger from his phone, saying it was being used to threaten Venezuela and spy on its people. He also claimed that TikTok and Instagram were being used to promote “hate” and promised to regulate their use. Maduro will be serving a third consecutive six-year term, after first taking office in 2013 following the death of President Hugo Chavez. Maduro’s previous reelection, in 2018, was also rejected by the US, along with the EU and several Latin American states.

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They want the lithium.

• Serbian President Says He Received Coup Warning From Russia (RT)

Russia warned Serbia about a potential coup attempt, President Aleksandar Vucic told journalists on Friday. His statement came a day before an expected protest in the nation’s capital. According to Vucic, Serbia’s Security Intelligence Agency (BIA) is already acting on the leads provided by Moscow. “We received official information from the Russian Federation, information transmitted and brought through official channels,” the president said, adding that the authorities “are dealing with it” and there is no reason to worry. Vucic did not elaborate on where the threat could come from or who might be behind the alleged coup plot. He still maintained that those who “dream” of achieving anything in such a way should know that “they won’t.” “Serbia is moving forward and they cannot and will not stop it,” he added.

Earlier, some Serbian news media outlets reported that the Russian security services allegedly warned Vucic about massive riots that are being prepared in Serbia with an ultimate goal of overthrowing the nation’s leadership. A Serbian ‘Vecernje Novosti’ daily stated earlier on Friday that it obtained a “color revolution handbook” supposedly published for the participants of ecological protests that are expected to be held on Saturday. The content of the “handbook” describes methods reminiscent of “color revolutions” in other nations, the media outlet claimed, adding that the protests in the country are likely to be coordinated from some “centers of power” abroad but did not accuse anyone in particular. The news came as the nation braces for possible ecological protests this weekend. In July, Serbia has become an arena for a standoff between groups of eco-activists and the government over a major lithium mine project. Last month, Belgrade granted the Anglo-Australian mining major Rio Tinto a license to develop a lithium mine in the Jadar region in the western part of the country, which is poised to become the biggest one in Europe, according to Reuters.

The project did not sit well with some local farmers and villagers, who argued that the mine would severely pollute the surrounding area. The mine would “free the European Union from reliance on China” in terms of lithium at the expense of Serbians’ health, farmer Zlatko Kokanovic, one of the activists, told Reuters. The government treats the $2.4 billion Jadar lithium project as a major boost for the national economy. The mine could cover 90% of the EU’s needs for lithium, according to Reuters. The protesters demanded the government ban lithium mining in Jadar before August 10 and vowed to announce their next steps at a rally on Saturday. The news came as the nation braces for possible ecological protests this weekend. In July, Serbia has become an arena for a standoff between groups of eco-activists and the government over a major lithium mine project.

Last month, Belgrade granted the Anglo-Australian mining major Rio Tinto a license to develop a lithium mine in the Jadar region in the western part of the country, which is poised to become the biggest one in Europe, according to Reuters. The project did not sit well with some local farmers and villagers, who argued that the mine would severely pollute the surrounding area. The mine would ”free the European Union from reliance on China” in terms of lithium at the expense of Serbians’ health, farmer Zlatko Kokanovic, one of the activists, told Reuters. The government treats the $2.4 billion Jadar lithium project as a major boost for the national economy. The mine could cover 90% of the EU’s needs for lithium, according to Reuters. The protesters demanded the government ban lithium mining in Jadar before August 10 and vowed to announce their next steps at a rally on Saturday.

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“I’m not gonna draw a circular map for you here of where they can and cannot strike.”

• Pentagon Refuses To Rule Out Strikes On Moscow (ZH)

The Pentagon on Thursday was asked by a reporter during the daily briefing whether Ukraine forces’ use of American weapons in its ongoing Kursk incursion is “consistent” with US policy of what Ukraine can and cannot do with US weapons. It has become clear that Ukrainian troops are currently using American weapons to attack Russian territory, troops, civilians, and infrastructure. Spokeswoman Sabrina Singh answered without hesitation that “yes it is consistent with our policy” and explained that Washington has supported the need for “crossfire” from Ukraine back across the border onto Russian positions from which it is being attacked, even if that is on Russian territory. She framed what is happening in Russia’s Kursk oblast—an offensive which has entered day four—as ‘defensive’ in nature.

Singh still tried to point out that it remains US policy for Ukraine to avoid striking deep into Russian territory using American arms; however, when pressed about the scenario of a direct attack on Moscow, she simply said: “I’m not going to put a specific range on it” and thus refused to rule it out. But she did caveat that “we still don’t support long-range attacks into Russia.” Singh additionally explained, “I’m not gonna draw a circular map for you here of where they can and cannot strike.” The Kremlin is likely to remain unconvinced when hearing this clear escalation in rhetoric from the Pentagon where attacking the Russian capital is discussed, even if theoretically. Needless to say we have entered incredibly dangerous times in this major proxy war when the Pentagon’s daily press briefing is openly talking about strikes on Moscow.

The Ukrainian cross-border offensive, which may have involved up to 1,000 men, began early Tuesday morning and was led by fast moving armored vehicles, which were able to penetrate up to 10km into Ukraine. Moscow says that it has observed US-supplied equipment being utilized in the attack on Russian soil. A prior Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) statement said, “Video monitoring data shows that Lancet loitering munitions destroyed a US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, a Kazak armored vehicle, a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier and an infantry fighting vehicle in their firing positions.” Newsweek also confirmed based on video evidence. The MoD further said that dozens of armored vehicles breached the border and were operating inside Russia amid a major response to push out the invaders which has included airpower.

As of Friday, the fighting in Kursk is in its fourth day, which is unprecedented for a Ukrainian military incursion inside Russia. Ukraine has simultaneously stepped up its cross-border drone attacks, reportedly hitting an important military airfield in the Lepetsk region, impacting a facility where glide-bombs are stored. According to the latest: Ukrainian drones struck a key military airfield in Russia’s Lipetsk region, as Kyiv continues its largest offensive on Russian soil since the start of the war. Ukrainian forces targeted the airfield in Lipetsk — roughly 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the border with Ukraine — on Thursday night, hitting warehouses and a number of unspecified objects in the vicinity of the airport, Ukraine’s General Staff of Command said in a Google-translated Telegram post. Earlier in the week, the Ukrainian offensive led to the evacuation of thousands of people and a state of emergency being announced in Kursk.

The timing of this high-risk assault is interesting, happening at a time where Ukraine has been on a slow and steady retreat in the Donbass. Ukraine needed something ‘big’ to both distract Russia’s military command from front line operations and as a blow to Moscow’s morale. And now Kiev is pressing the Biden White House to let it use ATACMS long-range missiles to strike deeper into Russia. “This will give them the leverage they need for negotiations with Russia — this is what it’s all about,” Mikhail Podoliak, a senior advisor to President Zelensky, told The Washington Post. On Thursday, Zelensky himself had said Russia needs to “feel” the consequences of its invasion and war. “Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” he said.

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“The Western powers incubated the Nazi virus and unleashed its mutated strain in Ukraine..”

• Kiev Regime’s Terrorism Shows Russia Must Go All The Way (SCF)

Following the atrocities in Kursk and Belgorod this week, Dmitry Medvedev, a senior member of Russia’s national security council, commented on Moscow’s long-term military objectives, saying: “This is no longer an operation to regain our lands and punish Nazis… We should only stop when we consider it appropriate.” That means, presumably, going all the way to demolish NATO’s Reich regime, a regime that seized power illegally in 2014 through a CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against an elected president. Despite Western media distortions, Ukraine is merely an artificial statelet whose so-called independence in 1991 was a legacy of gerrymandering and territorial horse-trading from the Soviet times. Russia has righteous historical claims to Odessa, the city founded by Catherine the Great, Kharkov, Nikolayev, and indeed Kiev in the same way it has to Crimea, the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozyhe regions.

The congenital treachery of the Kiev regime and its imperialist patrons make them “agreement incapable”. The betrayal and deception over the Minsk Peace Accords (2015) and the trashing of post-Cold War NATO promises of non-expansion show that any treaties that might be derived are worthless. The terrorist nature of the Kiev regime and its ideological roots in collaboration with the Nazi Third Reich in exterminating Slavic people and the systematic warmongering of the U.S.-led NATO bloc from the early days of the post-1945 Cold War, all show that a modus vivendi is impossible. The idea of Russian territories living peacefully alongside a Ukrainian rump Reich is infeasible. As long as a toxic entity of Ukrainian fascism resides and is sustained by NATO patronage there will always be a national security threat to Russia. The history of defeating Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union only for that enemy to be subsequently resurrected by Western imperialism with the remnants of Ukrainian fascists demonstrates that the disease must be eradicated.

Ukraine has the misfortune of being designated as the spearhead for a U.S.-led imperialist confrontation against Russia. The terrorism that was unleashed after the 2014 coup against ethnic Russian people has only metastasized. Attacking Russian civilians in pre-war Russian territory, targeting civilians on beaches with missiles, targeting nuclear power stations, and spreading the tentacles of terrorism to African nations friendly with Russia as recent attacks in Mali have evinced – all attest to the only way to deal with the Kiev regime. It must be vanquished entirely. Its leaders are bandits with Russian blood on their hands. Russia must crush this criminal entity once and for all – and do an immense favor to the Ukrainian people by liquidating this parasitic tyranny imposed on them by Western imperial masters. Ukrainian men are hiding or fleeing en masse from the regime to escape forced conscription – and certain death on the front lines.

Ultimately, the war in Ukraine is not just against a psychopathic NATO proxy. It is against the Western system of global domination and its NATO war machine. History shows that a negotiated detente is only a stepping stone for more aggression further up the road. The Western powers incubated the Nazi virus and unleashed its mutated strain in Ukraine. Not only does the Kiev Nazi virus have to be eradicated. So too ultimately must the Western imperialist disease that is the progenitor. Russia’s territory is the site of a historic, world-changing confrontation. That confrontation goes all the way back to the heroic battles of the Donbass, Crimea and Kursk against the Wehrmacht in 1943-44 culminating in the present against NATO. After this climactic battle is finally won by Russia, there should be never any repetition. That entails a definitive defeat of the Western imperialism that earlier spawned Nazi Germany and today’s U.S.-led NATO.

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“The liberalism in which Putin believes no longer exists in the West. So why is Putin relying on it?”

• Putin Relies on Reason which the West Has Abandoned (Paul Craig Roberts)

Vladimir Putin is an old-fashioned American liberal. He believes in reason, good will, working things out, and agreements despite having zero evidence that any such reciprocating belief exists in the West. Putin’s illusions have caused him and Russia extraordinary difficulties. Russia is currently at war in Ukraine, although Putin still doesn’t seem to realize it, referring to it as a “limited military operation” despite the obvious fact that Russia is at war with NATO which includes the US. It is sad that Putin, a person with good intentions, doesn’t have his counterparts in the Western world. Now it comes to light that the British and Ukrainian governments planned to assassinate both Russia’s President Putin and Defense Minister Andrei Belousov at the Navy Day parade in St Petersburg.

In my columns I have several times mentioned that Putin and Trump are candidates for assassination. The recent attempt on Trump, which has been removed from the “news,” has now been matched by the statement of Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, on Russian national television that Belousov called US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and squashed the assassination plan, explaining, apparently, that World War III would be the result. Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry said: “There is no doubt that the assassination attempt was planned with the participation of the Anglo-Saxon masters of Kiev.” Still, Putin wants to negotiate the end of the Ukrainian conflict. How precisely do you negotiate with people who are trying to assassinate you?

Dmitry Medvedev, President of Russia during the Putin Interregnum, currently deputy chairman of the Russian National Security Council, seems to have come to a clear vision. Here are his latest words, and one wonders if Putin hears them: “From this moment, the special military operation should become openly exterritorial in nature. We can and should go further into what still exists as Ukraine. To Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev. To Kiev and further. There should be no restrictions in terms of recognized borders.” In other words, the nonsensical “limited military operation” should be over and done with. It is time to get serious. The liberalism in which Putin believes no longer exists in the West. So why is Putin relying on it? I raise these questions because it appears that the combination of Washington’s provocations and Russian restraint is leading to a terrible war that is in no one’s interest.

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“We cannot do that..”

• Mexico Responds To Ukraine’s Request To Arrest Putin (RT)

The President of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has rejected a request by Ukraine to arrest Vladimir Putin, if the Russian leader were to land in the Latin American country this fall for the inauguration of its new head of state. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin last year in connection with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Mexico is one 124 nations recognizing the jurisdiction of The Hague-based body. “We cannot do that,” Lopez Obrador replied when asked by journalists during a press conference on Thursday if the Mexican authorities are really going to detain the Russian president. “It is not up to us,” he added, as cited by Reuters.

Izvestia newspaper had reported on the previous day that Mexico had invited Putin to the inauguration this October of its new president, Claudia Sheinbaum. According to the Mexican Embassy in Moscow, the Russian leader will decide whether to attend the ceremony himself or send some other high-ranking official to represent the country. The Ukrainian embassy in Mexico reacted to the news by reminding the country’s government that Putin is wanted by the ICC and by asking it to arrest the Russian leader if he comes. “We are confident that the Mexican government would comply with the international arrest warrant by handing the aforementioned person over to the judicial body of the UN in The Hague,” Kiev’s diplomatic mission said in a statement on Wednesday. It also thanked Mexico City for inviting Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to the inauguration.

Mexico has taken a neutral stance toward the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, with Lopez Obrador a critic of US military aid to Kiev and of the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West. The outgoing president’s successor, Sheinbaum, is a close ally and is expected to continue his policies. In March 2023, the ICC formally accused Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights of “forcible transfer of the population,” referring to evacuations of minors from combat zones amid fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Moscow has dismissed the allegations as false, while also accusing the court of being politically compromised. Russia, which never ratified the 1998 Rome Statute that established the ICC, also pointed out that the UN body had no authority over it.

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“..If we did not have an aggressive ally, like the United States, aggressive to others in the region, there would be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone..”

• Australia Being Turned Into ‘51st US state’ – ex-PM Keating (RT)

The US is surrounding Australia with military bases under the AUKUS pact, which undermines the country’s sovereignty and makes it a legitimate target for China, former Prime Minister Paul Keating has said. In an interview with ABC on Thursday, Keating, who served as prime minister between 1991 and 1996, voiced strong skepticism about whether his country benefits from being a member of AUKUS – a landmark security partnership between Australia, UK, and the US, which was announced in 2021. The pact, which has been condemned by China, focuses on helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines. Keating argued that by allowing the US to “displace our military” and surround the country with bases, Canberra is essentially giving up its right to determine its foreign and defense policy. Australia will “completely lose” its strategic autonomy as a result, he claimed.

“So AUKUS is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia,” Keating said, adding that the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is “likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States”. The former prime minister added that the expanded military presence makes the country a target from China’s point of view. “We’re now defending the fact that we’re in AUKUS… If we did not have an aggressive ally, like the United States, aggressive to others in the region, there would be nobody attacking Australia. We are better left alone,” Keating said. The US, he argued, is trying to “superintend” China, with tensions between the two being fueled by a power struggle over the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing views as part of its sovereign territory. However, Keating argued that the Taiwan situation “is not a vital Australian interest” while China “has no strategic design” on Australia.

The US attitude to Taiwan is comparable to China deciding that Tasmania needed help breaking away from Australia, he said.The former prime minister’s remarks come after Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong traveled to Washington for talks about the AUKUS pact, and to discuss a new agreement on the transfer of nuclear material to Canberra as part of its push to acquire domestic-built atomic submarines from the 2030s. China has warned that the AUKUS agreement raises nuclear proliferation risks, adding that it was conceived in the “Cold War mentality which will only motivate an arms race.” Russia has also sounded the alarm about the security situation in the Asia-Pacific, insisting that it “has no place for closed military and political alliances.”

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“..evidence from many years of scientific observation suggests the corals often and quickly recover..”

• Third Year of Record Coral Increase on the Great Barrier Reef (DS)

Massive increases in coral across the Australian Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have been reported for 2023-24 making it the third record year in a row of heavy growth. Across almost all parts of the 1,500 mile long reef, from the warmer northern waters to the cooler conditions in the south, coral is now at its highest level since detailed observations began. The inconvenient news has been ignored in mainstream media which, curiously, have focused on a non-story in Nature that claimed “climate change” poses an “existential threat” to the GBR. “The science tells us that the GBR is in danger – and we should be guided by the science,” Professor Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong told Victoria Gill of BBC News. The existential threat is “now realised” reported the Guardian.

Travelling back from the reality inhabited by the Guardian, it can be reported that last year’s gains were eye-catchingly large. On the Northern GBR, hard coral cover leapt from 35.8% to 39.5%, in the central area it rose from 30.7% to 34%, while in the south it went from 34% to 39.1%. The report is the result of monitoring of hard coral cover reefs from August 2023 to June 2024 by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). The percentage of hard coral cover is a standard measurement of reef conditions used by scientists and is said to provide a simple and robust measure of reef health. Similar reports have been published by the AIMS over the last 38 years.

For the first two years of record coral growth, the narrative-driven mainstream media ignored the recovery story. But this year, the suspicious might contend, something had to be done to blunt the sensational news of the stonking rises. Help has come in the form of a paper just published in Nature which uses proxy temperature measurements and climate models to suggest temperatures around the vast reef area are the highest recorded in 400 years. This time period is the blink of an ecological eye-lid given that coral has been around for hundreds of millions of years during periods when temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide have been markedly different. Nevertheless, this is said to pose an existential threat despite it being known that sub-tropical corals thrive between 24°C-32°C, and in fact seem to grow faster in warmer waters.

Natural bleaching, when the coral expels algae and turns white, can occur with temporary local temperature changes, but evidence from many years of scientific observation suggests the corals often and quickly recover. Long term changes in water temperature – tiny compared to coral’s optimum conditions – pose no threat, but alarmists concentrate on the bleaching events to warn of possible ecological collapse. The Guardian noted a recent fifth mass bleaching in eight years across the reef, driven, it claimed, by “global heating”. So far, its readers are in the dark as to how this squares with the recent record growth. A decade of mass bleaching, relentlessly catastrophised in the interests of Net Zero by activists in the media, academia and politics, does not appear to have done much harm to the recent growth in the Northern GBR.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Babies
https://twitter.com/i/status/1821950104229556548

 

 

Brutal

 

 

Kingfu

 

 

Snow leopard

 

 

F(r)ens

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 25 2022

Nov 252022
 
 November 25, 2022  Posted by at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  126 Responses »


Salvador Dali Figure at a window 1925

 

• Media Serve the Governors, Not the Governed (Lauria)
• Musk Announces Twitter Amnesty (RT)
• Musk Says Granting ‘Amnesty’ To Suspended Twitter Accounts (AP)
• NATO Doesn’t Supersede the U.S. Constitution (McKnight)
• Electric War (Escobar)
• Belarus Paints Grim Picture For Ukraine If It Won’t Negotiate (RT)
• Pentagon Dodges Ukraine Aid Question (RT)
• French Interior Minister Labels Italy Enemy Of France After Migration Row (RMX)
• EU Fails To Agree On Gas Price Cap – Hungary (RT)
• Estonia Warns It Will Veto EU Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)
• Hungary Faces Pressure To Ratify NATO Expansion (RT)
• Oddsmakers Favor DeSantis For 2024 (JTN)
• Climate Policy Makes Europe Too Expensive for Low-Cost EV Manufacturing (CTH)
• Meta Uncovers US Military-Linked Propaganda Campaign (RT)
• You’re Going To Get Robbed (Denninger)

 

 

 

 

Gonzalo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s talk a bit about Twitter and its amnesty policy Elon Musk announced yesterday. Which is basically free speech. Which in turn is something many people feel threatened by. The Constitution itself is a threat to them.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1971:“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy..”

• Media Serve the Governors, Not the Governed (Lauria)

In his 1971 opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote: “In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.” That’s what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been doing since 2006: censuring governments with governments’ own words pried from secrecy by WikiLeaks’ sources—whistleblowers. In other words, WikiLeaks has been doing the job the U.S. constitution intended the press to do.

One can hardly imagine anyone sitting on today’s U.S. Supreme Court writing such an opinion. Even more troubling is the news media having turned its back on its mission. Today they almost always serve the governors—not the governed. The question is why. Consolidation of media ownership has increased obedience of desperate journalists; entertainment divisions have taken over news departments; and careerist reporters and editors live vicariously through the power of those they cover, rejecting the press’ unique power to hold those officials to account. It comes down ultimately to lifestyles. Men go to war to protect and further their lifestyles. The press cheers them on for residual material betterment and increase in status. Millions of lives erased for lifestyles.

It used to be accepted in television that news departments would lose money and would be supported by the entertainment division. That’s because news was considered a public service. TV newsmen — they were almost all men in those days— were former wire service and newspaper reporters. But greed has put the presenters’ personalities before public service, as entertainment masquerades as news. Newspapers have sacrificed investigative units to maximize profit. Government is the winner. The abdication of the mainstream media of their constitutional responsibility to serve the governed and not the governors has left a void filled for more than a decade by WikiLeaks.

No longer do today’s Daniel Ellsbergs need to take their chances with editors at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or with their reporters spinning the damning information they risk their freedom to get to the public — no matter how disinterested and distracted the public may be. Now the traditional media can be bypassed. WikiLeaks deals in the raw material, that governments hang themselves with. That’s why they want Assange’s head. They lust for revenge and to stop further leaks that threaten their grip on power. That the corporate media has turned on Assange and WikiLeaks reveals their service to the state and how much they prioritize their style of life — disregarding the carnage they help bring about.

Read more …

Twitter “amnesty”. RT provides a factual story…

• Musk Announces Twitter Amnesty (RT)

Twitter boss Elon Musk has vowed to extend a “general amnesty” to an unspecified number of suspended users, a week after reversing former US President Donald Trump’s lifetime ban from the platform. “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week,” Musk tweeted on Thanksgiving Day. He added “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” a Latin phrase that means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” The SpaceX and Tesla CEO launched a Twitter poll on Wednesday, asking if Twitter should “offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” Out of more than 3.1 million users who took part, 72.4% voted ‘yes’ and 27.6% voted ‘no’.

In a separate message Musk also promised to start freeing and offering up for grabs “vast numbers of handles” that had previously been “consumed” by bots and trolls. Since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion last month, Musk has faced growing criticism for laying off hundreds of employees and reversing the permanent suspensions of multiple notable accounts, including former US President Donald Trump following a similar public vote. While critics claimed that Musk’s actions fuel hate speech, harassment and misinformation, he has rejected accusations he was some kind of “right-wing bogeyman” and insisted that Twitter under his ownership has not banned any leftists, not even for “utter lies.”

It remains to be seen how many users would be eligible for amnesty. This week the platform already reinstated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose personal Twitter account had been permanently banned since early January 2022 for posting “misinformation” about the Covid-19 pandemic. Musk, however, drew the line at Alex Jones, saying he had “no mercy” for someone who used children’s deaths for clout. Musk had vowed to transform the platform and turn it into a bastion of free speech, saying it was “important to the future of civilization” to have a digital town square where a wide range of beliefs could be discussed.

Read more …

…but the MSM, in this case AP, sees enormous threats in free speech. And if free speech equals freedom, we know what they’re afraid of. It reminds me of Sartre’s “L’enfer c’est les autres”, (Hell is -the- other people). In other words, if you honor the priciple of free speech, you welcome hell into your world. That sounds like the opposite of what the founding fathers thought. Hell is other people’s freedom.

• Musk Says Granting ‘Amnesty’ To Suspended Twitter Accounts (AP)

New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” for suspended accounts, which online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation. The billionaire’s announcement came after he asked in a poll posted to his timeline to vote on reinstatements for accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” The yes vote was 72%. “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.” Musk used the same Latin phrase after posting a similar poll last last weekend before reinstating the account of former President Donald Trump, which Twitter had banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Trump has said he won’t return to Twitter but has not deleted his account. Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots. In the month since Musk took over Twitter, groups that monitor the platform for racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech say it’s been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square. That has included a surge in racist abuse of World Cup soccer players that Twitter is allegedly failing to act on. The uptick in harmful content is in large part due to the disorder following Musk’s decision to lay off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce, fire top executives, and then institute a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to quit. Also let go were an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation.

Among those resigning over a lack of faith in Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into a chaos of uncontrolled speech were Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth. Major advertisers have also abandoned the platform. On Oct. 28, the day after he took control, Musk tweeted that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter formed a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints that would consider the cases. On Tuesday, he said he was reneging on that promise because he’d agreed to at the insistence of “a large coalition of political-social activists groups” who later ”broke the deal” by urging that advertisers at least temporarily stop giving Twitter their business.

Read more …

More violations of what the founding fathers bestowed upon us. How did all these things become so normal?

• NATO Doesn’t Supersede the U.S. Constitution (McKnight)

As our government continues to bumble and stumble at full speed towards World War III, the concept of tripwires and the legal authority of Article 5 become required understanding for the vigilant citizen. Last week the American people received the then-breaking news that a missile had landed in Poland and killed two people.Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that this was a purposeful act of war by Russia, and that the West must respond with full kinetic retaliation. He was joined by his amen corner here in the United States, that group of politicians, regime journalists, and paid lobbyists who have sold out their country for the requisite thirty pieces of silver. The War Party immediately jumped into action: this was what they’ve been waiting, praying for. A catalyst to launch the missiles, and sacrifice the world.

Poland, like the United States and nearly all of Europe, is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Maybe we should wonder why countries like Poland, Estonia, and Romania are in an “Atlantic” alliance.) A provision of NATO is Article 5, which popular conception treats as a mandatory obligation to go to war when a member of the alliance is attacked. It’s a one way pass into World War III. There were just two things wrong with this narrative. First, as was revealed within forty-eight hours and confirmed by both the Polish government and Biden White House, the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian. Vladimir Putin had not attacked NATO—purposefully or accidentally. Instead, a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to intercept a Russian strike went off trajectory killed two Poles across the border.

All of a sudden “collective security” was no longer threatened, and no one on cable news was talking about how this required NATO retaliation on Kiev. (Surprised?) Secondly, even if it had been a Russian missile, and even if Vladimir Putin himself had aimed directly at that Polish farm, Article 5 obligates the United States to nothing. The NATO Treaty also has an Article 11, which specifies that the provisions of the alliance will be carried out in accordance with the domestic constitutions and processes of the respective members. That means a majority vote of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a formal declaration of war. Any member of Congress or news talking head saying Article 5 requires an immediate military response without a debate or vote is either lying or woefully uninformed.

And even if the NATO Treaty didn’t have that provision, we’d still rest our argument of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the supreme authority of our laws. We are a sovereign nation, and the American people always have a choice on whether or not to go to war. Any international piece of paper trying to say otherwise be damned. Unfortunately, the War Party doesn’t always make that choice easy. They bribe politicians with weapon contract profits, flood the corporate press with propaganda, and instruct the American people that they must either commit to endless war or lose their liberty. They manufacture themselves consent.

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“..a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII..”

• Electric War (Escobar)

Spare a thought to the Polish farmer snapping pics of a missile wreckage – later indicated to belong to a Ukrainian S-300. So a Polish farmer, his footfalls echoing in our collective memory, may have saved the world from WWIII – unleashed via a tawdry plot concocted by Anglo-American “intelligence”.Such tawdriness was compounded by a ridiculous cover-up: the Ukrainians were firing on Russian missiles from a direction that they could not possibly be coming from. That is: Poland. And then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, sentenced Russia was to blame anyway, because his Kiev vassals were shooting at Russian missiles that should not have been in the air (and they were not). Call it the Pentagon elevating bald lying into a rather shabby art.

The Anglo-American purpose of this racket was to generate a “world crisis” against Russia. It’s been exposed – this time. That does not mean the usual suspects won’t try it again. Soon. The main reason is panic. Collective West intel sees how Moscow is finally mobilizing their army – ready to hit the ground next month – while knocking out Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure as a form of Chinese torture. Those February days of sending only 100,000 troops – and having the DPR and LPR militias plus Wagner commandos and Kadyrov’s Chechens do most of the heavy lifting – are long gone. Overall, Russians and Russophones were facing hordes of Ukrainian military – perhaps as many as 1 million. The “miracle” of it all is that Russians did quite well.

Every military analyst knows the basic rule: an invasion force should number three times the defending force. The Russian Army at the start of the SMO was at a small fraction of that rule. The Russian Armed Forces arguably have a standing army of 1.3 million troops. Surely they could have spared a few tens of thousands more than the initial 100,000. But they did not. It was a political decision. But now SMO is over: this is CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) territory. A sequence of terrorist attacks – targeting the Nord Streams, the Crimea Bridge, the Black Sea Fleet – finally demonstrated the inevitability of going beyond a mere “military operation”. And that brings us to Electric War.

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“If they [Kiev] don’t want people to die, and to die in huge numbers … It’s hard, but [the conflict] must be stopped, because the complete destruction of Ukraine will follow..”

• Belarus Paints Grim Picture For Ukraine If It Won’t Negotiate (RT)

Ukraine should do its best to end the conflict with Russia, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Thursday, adding that failure to do so would bring about the total collapse of the nation. Commenting on the hostilities in the neighboring country, the Belarusian leader noted that “everything is in Ukraine’s hands now.” “If they [Kiev] don’t want people to die, and to die in huge numbers … It’s hard, but [the conflict] must be stopped, because the complete destruction of Ukraine will follow,” he said, speaking on the sidelines of the summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Armenia. Lukashenko added that it is not just “the loss of statehood” that is at stake for Ukraine, but its very existence.

He claimed that the Ukrainian people, who are bearing the brunt of the conflict, would eventually force President Vladimir Zelensky into a diplomatic engagement. “In one or two years, the people will be accusing him: ‘What did you do to start this war?’ According to Lukashenko, the situation will “press the Ukrainian leadership – if it is reasonable – into sitting at the negotiating table.” After Russia launched its military campaign against Ukraine in late February, Belarus hosted several rounds of talks between Moscow and Kiev. At the time, however, these diplomatic efforts failed to garner any results. In October, the Belarusian president claimed that while Minsk takes part in Russia’s military operation, its role is limited.

He said that his country is preventing the conflict from spreading into its territory while making sure that “nobody would shoot Russians in the back from the territory of Belarus.” In late September, he also claimed that the conflict could end “in just a few days” if Western powers were to back a peaceful settlement. This statement was to some extent echoed by Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said last week that the participation of Western nations in dialogue could be a “guiding and reinforcing element.” While Moscow has repeatedly signaled that it is open to negotiations, President Zelensky has set some conditions. They include the “restoration of [Ukraine’s] territorial integrity,” “compensation for all war damage,” and the “punishment of every war criminal.”

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“I am not going to take the question because I’m answering your question.”

• Pentagon Dodges Ukraine Aid Question (RT)

The US military has declined to give an exact breakdown for billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine requested by the White House last week, saying it would not discuss funding to replenish domestic arms stocks amid reports of growing shortages. Asked about President Joe Biden’s letter to Congress requesting an additional $37.7 billion in assistance to Kiev, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh refused to offer details. “I would not be able to tell you how much of that… is going back to replenishment,” she told reporters during a Tuesday press conference. “With every security assistance package that we announce, we assess our own readiness and capabilities and also what needs to be replenished.”

Pressed on whether she could take the question back to the Pentagon and provide an answer later, Singh doubled down, insisting: “I am not going to take the question because I’m answering your question.”“I just don’t have a number or a dollar figure for you right now on what that looks like, and I don’t think that’s something that we would broadcast from here,” she reiterated. Though the White House previously said that $21.7 billion of the requested aid would be devoted to both “equipment for Ukraine” and the “replenishment of Department of Defense stocks,” it did not specify how much would go to each. Repeated weapon shipments to Kiev have taken a toll on the domestic stockpile.

Earlier this week, the US Army’s chief of arms acquisition, Doug Bush, said the military was accelerating its process to procure weapons in order to make up for shortages, though Pentagon documents recently seen by the New York Post suggested it will take “multiple years” to resupply the Army. Even as early as March, just weeks after the conflict in Ukraine kicked off, the Defense Department was already scrambling to replenish thousands of shoulder-fired missiles supplied to Kiev. US arms transfers have only increased in the time since, with the Pentagon’s latest fact sheet reporting more than $19 billion in direct military aid approved since February, including over 46,000 anti-armor systems, nearly 200 Howitzers, 38 long-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and a litany of other heavy weapons, vehicles and ammunition.

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“She argues that France continues to act like a colonial power, which drives Africans to migrate in the first place.”

• French Interior Minister Labels Italy Enemy Of France After Migration Row (RMX)

Following growing tensions between Italy and France over the issue of boat migrants in the Mediterranean, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has resorted to extremely harsh rhetoric, referring to the Italian government as “enemies of France.” Darmanin made the comment in response to a question from a National Rally MP Mathilde Paris during a Q&A session in the French parliament, saying Italy is “attacking France.” Paris was inquiring why the majority of the migrants aboard the Ocean Viking ship, which France allowed to dock, have been released from the administrative center housing them, despite the minister’s previous assurances that “(they) will not be able to leave the administrative center.” Instead of addressing the question, Darmanin claimed she was an “ally” of the “enemies” of France.

“In fact, madam, you are not patriotic if you ally yourself with the enemies who are attacking France at the moment,” Darmanin said in response to a question by Paris. “You are siding with Madam (Giorgia) Meloni and her government who did not respect international law, instead you are attacking French policemen,” he added. The French government is being criticized for taking in the migrants, and a report shows that 26 of the 44 minors taken in have already escaped the migrant center. The language being deployed by Darmanin is sure to add further tension between the two countries, which has been growing ever since Italy rejected taking 234 migrants from the NGO ship Ocean Viking, which had mostly North Africans on board.

Italy argues that it has already accepted 90,000 migrants in 2022 alone, and even after rejecting Ocean Viking, it still allowed three NGO ships to dock and 600 migrants to disembark. Although French President Emmanuel Macron has labeled Meloni “inhumane” for not taking in the Ocean Viking migrants, at the same time, France has now said it is retaliating by not accepting 3,000 migrants from Italy it had promised to take in. Meloni has responded, pointing to France’s CFA franc program, in which France agrees to print money for 14 African countries in exchange for mint fees, which can go as high as 50 percent. She argues that France continues to act like a colonial power, which drives Africans to migrate in the first place.

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Hopeless. They all want different price caps for different reasons.

• EU Fails To Agree On Gas Price Cap – Hungary (RT)

EU nations have failed to reach an agreement on imposing a price ceiling on natural gas following a Council of Energy Ministers’ meeting, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Thursday. Ministers from the bloc will discuss the proposed measure further during an extraordinary meeting scheduled on December 13, two days before the Summit of European leaders. “Today we started negotiations on the introduction of a ceiling on gas prices. I can say that these are bad proposals, which also threaten Europe’s energy security,” Szijjarto said. “At the meeting, no decision was made that could meet the objectives of the European Commission,” the minister stated, adding that most member states, including Hungary, see such a step as a misguided intervention with work of the natural gas market.


Szijjarto stressed that Hungary, which is heavily reliant on Russian energy imports, is planning to seek exemptions from any EU price caps on oil and gas supplied under long-term contracts. The EU has proposed introducing a cap when prices on the TTF exchange, Europe’s gas benchmark, reach €275 per megawatt hour and when prices are €58 ($59.53) higher than the LNG reference price for ten consecutive trading days within the two weeks. Both conditions need to be met for the cap to be triggered.

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“It is hoped that the price limit would allow Russian production to remain at pre-sanctions levels, but reduce the country’s oil revenue.”

• Estonia Warns It Will Veto EU Price Cap On Russian Oil (RT)

A price cap on Russian oil proposed by the European Commission is too high and may be blocked by Estonia, Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Reinsalu said on Thursday, as quoted by Estonian Public Broadcasting (ERR). The proposal by Brussels to set a limit of between $65 and $70 per barrel on Russian sea-borne oil is insufficient, he stated, arguing that Moscow would make too much revenue at that price. “Estonia finds that the price horizon’s ambition is too low, considering that the EU has also failed to agree on a ninth sanctions package. The cap seems too high,” Reinsalu said at a government press conference, adding that discussions were ongoing.

Earlier, EU energy chief Kadri Simson confirmed that bloc members had failed to reach an agreement on a Russian oil price cap, but said negotiations would continue. Estonia’s warning came after EU leaders had already watered down the proposed cap by weakening some shipping provisions and delaying the implementation of the measure. Under the updated plan seen by Bloomberg, a grace period would apply to crude loaded before December 5, when oil-related sanctions come into effect, and unloaded by January 19. If approved, the measure would ban Western companies from providing insurance, brokerage or financial assistance to vessels loaded with Russian crude, unless the cargo is purchased below an agreed price.

It is hoped that the price limit would allow Russian production to remain at pre-sanctions levels, but reduce the country’s oil revenue. The proposal was reportedly rejected by Poland along with all three Baltic States, which called the cap “too generous” for Russia and pushed for the price ceiling to be imposed at $30 per barrel. Meanwhile, nations with major shipping industries like Greece and Malta insisted the cap should not be below $70. On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would embargo nations that support the proposed price limit on its oil.

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“I would like to underline that the Swedes and the Finns have not lost a single minute of membership because of Hungary,” Orban said..”

• Hungary Faces Pressure To Ratify NATO Expansion (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has promised that Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership bids will definitely be among the first items on the agenda when the country’s parliament reconvenes next year, likely around mid-February.“I would like to underline that the Swedes and the Finns have not lost a single minute of membership because of Hungary,” Orban said, as cited by Euronews, adding that the prime ministers of Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia had nudged him to move forward with the process during their meeting on Thursday.

“We have already confirmed to both Finland and Sweden that Hungary supports the membership of these two countries in NATO, and at the first session of next year, Parliament will put this on the agenda,” the Hungarian PM stated, apparently after facing pressure during a Visegrad Group meeting in Slovakia. Last month, Orban’s chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said there was a “good chance” the Hungarian parliament would vote before its autumn session ends mid-December. The parliament usually reconvenes in early February. In May, amid Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, Sweden and neighboring Finland broke with their decades-long neutrality stance and formally applied for NATO membership. While the bloc accepted the requests, the Nordic nations’ bids have to be ratified by all 30 member states, and Türkiye and Hungary’s approval is still pending.

Earlier this month, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock rebuked Budapest and Ankara for delaying the ratification process, insisting that there is a “crystal clear basis” for allowing the two Nordic nations to join the military bloc. Hungarian officials have repeatedly stated their support for NATO expansion, and the measure is expected to be easily passed once it comes to the floor. Meanwhile, Ankara is demanding that Stockholm and Helsinki do more to fight “terrorism,” particularly Kurdish groups which are outlawed in Türkiye. Negotiations on the matter are still underway.

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Pence and Buttigieg. What a waste of time.

• Oddsmakers Favor DeSantis For 2024 (JTN)

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is the odds-on favorite to win the 2024 presidential election. Betting website Covers.com currently assigns DeSantis a 30.77% chance of winning the 2024 electoral contest, with former President Donald Trump coming in second with 22.22%. President Joe Biden rounds out the top three with 20% while Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom tie for fourth with 6.67% each. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg each have a 4.35% shot at the nation’s top job. Thus far, only Trump has officially launched his 2024 campaign, though Biden is expected to eventually do so. DeSantis, meanwhile, has declined to fuel speculation about his own potential bid, instead asserting that the GOP should focus on the upcoming Georgia runoff election.

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Want to use less oil? Stop making stuff.

• Climate Policy Makes Europe Too Expensive for Low-Cost EV Manufacturing (CTH)

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. Within the BBB western group (identified on map in yellow), the logical consequences are increased living costs for those who live in the BBB zone, and increased prices for goods manufactured in the BBB zone. In the zone where traditional low-cost energy resources continue to be developed (grey on map), we would expect to see a lower cost of living and lower costs to create goods. Two divergent economic zones based on two different energy systems.

This potential outcome just seemed to track with the logical conclusion. The yellow zone also represented by the World Economic Forum, and the gray zone also represented by an expanding BRICS alliance. Against this predictable backdrop we have been watching various events unfold, some obvious and some less so. Today, we get an obvious example: NEW DELHI, Nov 24 (Reuters) – Fiat parent Stellantis (STLA.MI) has concluded it can’t currently make affordable electric vehicles (EVs) in Europe and is looking at lower-cost manufacturing in markets such as India, its chief executive told reporters. If India, with its low-cost supplier base, is able to meet the company’s quality and cost targets by the end of 2023, it could open the door to exporting EVs to other markets, said Carlos Tavares, CEO of the group whose brands also include Peugeot and Chrysler.

“So far, Europe is unable to make affordable EVs. So the big opportunity for India would be to be able to sell EV compact cars at an affordable price, protecting profitability,” Tavares told reporters at a media roundtable in India late on Wednesday. Stellantis is investing heavily in EVs and plans to produce dozens in the coming decade, but Tavares warned last month that affordable battery EVs were between five and six years away. On his first visit to India since taking over as Stellantis CEO, he said the company was still working out a plan regarding EV exports from the country and had not yet taken any decisions.”

Normally we would expect to see market forces determining the ultimate economic outcome. Historically, we would not expect government policy that puts their nation at an economic disadvantage. However, in this WEF controlled new western economic normal we see multinational corporations’ making decisions and government leaders creating policy to support the corporations. There is money to be made by corporations within the climate change agenda, and there is money to be made by producing goods with low-cost wages and cheap materials. Eventually, if you keep following this to its natural conclusion, the entire yellow zone becomes a service driven economy.

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What on earth made them go public with this?

“..the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.”

• Meta Uncovers US Military-Linked Propaganda Campaign (RT)

Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week. “Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 Pages and two groups, all for violating the policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram, as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It apparently attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia. Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by Washington Post that revealed that the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.

The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives. While the original study did not pin blame for the fake accounts on any particular actors, two officials later told the Post that US CENTCOM – the combatant command which oversees forces in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia – “is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny” for its influence operations. At the time, CENTCOM refused to comment on whether any of the suspicious accounts were created by its personnel or contractors, but one official claimed such behavior would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”

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Death, taxes and getting robbed.

• You’re Going To Get Robbed (Denninger)

Read this Twitter thread in full.: Today, we issued a final rule that allows retirement plan investors to take climate change and other environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into consideration when making investment decisions: Oh really? Did you not just see a prime example of what happens when “ESG” takes over a corporation? Why, you did. It’s called Twitter. Three quarters of the people, all hired with “ESG” in mind, were just fired by Musk who as a private owner has zero obligation to any such so-called “principle.” The various screaming parties in the ESG cult all predicted immediate doom and disaster. No such disaster has occurred; the firm’s only service it provides to the public is running just fine with one quarter of the staffing load — and thus cost — it used to have. If you think Twitter is unique in this regard you’re too stupid to have a retirement and deserve to lose every cent of whatever you claim to be “investing.”

Let’s put this in simple terms: If “ESG” is a net positive for a company then nobody has to exempt anything or make it a separate subject of consideration and in fact doing so is stupid because if it in fact makes the firm more competitive and operating at a lower cost per unit of output it wins all on its own. What the Department of Labor has said by issuing this advisory is that your “retirement plan” can now be disadvantaged to any degree whatsoever, including losing all of it, when (not if) these “ESG” initiatives cause the firms invested in to underperform or fail outright and when that occurs you can’t sue the plan provider for violating their fiduciary responsibility to you as the true owner of the asset.

In other words the Department of Labor is formally admitting that these “ESG” initiatives are not to the benefit of the firm’s operating results and thus are also not to your benefit as an investor. This fact has now become a formal admission by our Federal Government. What’s worse? This “rule” amounts to an admission of collusive price-fixing — albeit indirect — between what are supposed to be competing firms. Under 100+ year old law that is a serious criminal felony. You will get screwed out of trillions of dollars over the coming years as a result of this and you are responsible for that screwing because you have and continue to permit this sort of rank corruption to take place without demanding it stop and backing up that demand with whatever is necessary to eliminate it.

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Steve Kirsch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1595893348035751936

 

 

 

 

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Rage Against the Vaccine

Jul 242021
 
 July 24, 2021  Posted by at 4:44 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  46 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Pollard Willows and Setting Sun 1888

 

 

I have the feeling that the story about Covid and the vaccines is about to change dramatically, but that it will take some time for us to realize it, because so much on the topic is not reported. The change will have to be undeniable before it is acknowledged.

That is, we will be moving from “the vaccines will save you” to “the vaccines may kill you”. And I don’t mean through unintentional and unfortunate adverse effects, though those are bad enough, and much more common than we are “allowed” to know. I mean that the spike proteins the vaccines force your cells to make, kill more people than the virus they purportedly protect against.

Maybe I’m a bit early, not just because this would go against the overwhelming narrative grain, but also because the process itself that will lead to this, is not yet advanced enough. But perhaps that would merely mean an early warning.

I’m not a fan of what is called “the vaccines” as we presently know them. They have been too poorly researched and too poorly tested, and therefore too risky to inoculate 100s of millions of people with. Which is why they were never approved, at least that part of the process had not been politicized yet.

Well, not fully. They did get emergency authorizations, for which other substances, that could have saved countless lives, needed to be banned and ostracized. But in the end it all comes down to what the “vaccines” accomplish over the medium- to long term, and that is exactly the part that was never tested.

Have the “vaccines” saved (m)any lives to date? It’s hard to say, they were rolled out when spring came in the northern hemisphere, a time when a year before infections plummeted. That they are skyrocketing now, in the middle of summer, may thus be a very bad sign. We won’t know until summer’s over. But there are a few things we can point to.

As an aside, the Greek PM and President have both claimed that their constitution requires people to get vaccinated. Why haven’t we heard that from other countries yet? Sacrificing your Constitution on the altar of a virus is quite the step, sacrificing your children on that same altar (see in many countries) is possible worse. Issuing an emergency authorization to inoculate children, who run a much higher risk from the vaccine than from the virus, let’s just hope that’s the worst thing that we see come out of this. The kids are at risk for the rest of their lives, it doesn’t get much worse.

Talking of presidents, Joe Biden is on record telling Americans “you can’t get covid if you have a vaccine.’ (but still wear a mask, Joe?) As the infections among fully vaccinated people keep piling up. We call that a lie. Biden also said the Delta variant is both more transmissible AND more deadly. That, too, is a lie. Is it any wonder that people are vaccine hesitant when their president lies about it to them?

Let’s go to case exhibit one: India. Where officially 3% of people have been vaccinated, but the Delta variant has been conquered.

 

Data From India Continues To Blow Up The ‘Delta’ Fear Narrative

The prevailing narrative from Fauci, Walensky, and company is that Delta is more serious than anything before, and even though vaccines are even less effective against it, its spread proves the need to vaccinate even more people. Unless we do that, we must return to the very effective lockdowns and masks. In reality, India’s experience proves the opposite true; namely:

• Delta is largely an attenuated version, with a much lower fatality rate, that for most people is akin to a cold. • Masks failed to stop the spread there. • The country has come close to the herd immunity threshold with just 3% vaccinated. • Most people are now getting cold-like symptoms from Delta, but to the extent countries hit by Delta suffered some deaths and serious illness, they could have been avoided not with vaccines and masks, but with early and preventive treatment like ivermectin.

In other words, our government is learning all the wrong lessons from India, and now Israel and the U.K. Let’s unpack what we know occurred in India and now in some of the other countries experiencing a surge in cases of the Indian “Delta” variant. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recently conducted a fourth nationwide serological test and found that 67.6% of those over 6 years old in June and July had antibodies, including 85% of health care workers.

This is a sharp increase from the 24.1% level detected during the December-January study. What we can conclude definitively is that strict mask-wearing (especially among health care workers) failed to stop the spread one bit. Yet now they have achieved herd immunity and burned out the virus with just 3% vaccination (now up to 6%) with roughly one-sixth the death rate of the U.S. and the U.K. and less than one-half that of Israel.

Here are the graphs. Remember, Delta is supposed to have come from India. Perhaps that explains the spike in May, but it burned out pretty quickly. Without vaccines, or almost. What is the lesson we can draw from that? Well, certainly not that it will kill us all unless we get vaccinated.


 

 

Case exhibit number two: Israel. Lots of vaccinations, but also many infections. A 30x rise in infections over the past month while vaccinations were at full speed.

 

Israel Finds Pfizer Jab Only 39% Effective At Stopping Delta Variant

Over the past month, Israel, the world’s most heavily vaccinated country (with leading mRNA jabs, no less) has seen the number of positive COVID tests has risen by more than 30x as the number of active infections in the country has surpassed 10K. Meanwhile, the Israeli Health Ministry, which has previously estimated the true efficacy of the Pfizer jab against the delta variant at only 64% (while still more than 90% effective at preventing serious illness and death), just released new data purporting to show that while the Pfizer jab is still 88% effective at preventing serious illness, it’s only 39% effective at preventing infection with delta.

Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist who has often reported on scientific findings that don’t support the official narrative on masks and vaccines, shared the findings in a tweet, and speculated that the true efficacy in offering protection against the Delta variant might be even lower – perhaps as low as 30%.

[..] The Israeli numbers are much lower than other recent studies, including one study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that two doses offers 88% protection against the Delta variant causing symptomatic disease, while offering 94% protection against the alpha variant.

People say: of course more vaccinated people will show up infected, there are only vaccinated people left. But first, look at the right hand (blue) column for vaccine efficacy. 3-4%, that’s all. And then look at the numbers of infection of vaccinated vs unvaccinated, knowing that perhaps 65% have been fully vaccinated (and 35% not).

If new infections were divided between the two groups along the same ratio (2:1), we should see that. Instead, we see a 6:1 ratio, 1426 vs 251. 6 times more vaccinated people get infected. What do we make of that? I know what I make of it; as I said above: “the vaccines may kill you”.

But at least those fully vaccinated will get less sick, you say. Well, this Israeli source casts doubts on that ubiquitous claim:

 

Israel Reports Sharp Decline In Pfizer Coronavirus Vaccine Efficacy

Israel on Tuesday reported a sharp decline in the efficacy of Pfizer/BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine after receiving data from a recent analysis. Data from the analysis conducted by the Health Ministry suggest the efficacy of the vaccine declines over time in preventing infection and severe illness.


Health officials presented their findings during a meeting of the ministry’s Epidemic Management Team on Monday night, which showed that protection from coronavirus infections among vaccinated people decreased by 42% since the start of the inoculation drive in Israel. In addition, protection from severe illness has also recorded a sharp drop of up to 60% among those who were inoculated in the early stages of the vaccine rollout.

Alex Berenson has some numbers on the same topic:

And ask yourself: does it make sense that a vaccine is now 30% effective vs infection but still retains the same 80-90% effectiveness against severe disease? I liked this from @ScottAdamsSays: “If a vaccination doesn’t stop you from getting a disease, but it does reduce the symptoms, wouldn’t that be called a therapeutic?” Yes, but what do you call it if it doesn’t do that either? Where is the evidence, other than in big words? Remember how Remdesivir was marketed in much the same way, and billions spent on it, only to find it was an absolute bust.

But Remdesivir is not the same as the spike protein inducing vaccines. Compared to them, it’s just a small snake oil operation. The fates of entire governments and nations (constitutions even!) have been been tied to mRNA by now, so if it doesn’t perform as promised, they have nowhere else to turn. A dangerous position to be in.

Which is why, as we see the first signs of this appearing, there will be no discussion until it can no longer be plausibly denied. And that, given the grip the campaign has over media everywhere, can take a very long time. In the meantime, there will be booster shots, allegedly because of variants, but they will only make things worse. They will boost the presence of spike proteins in bodies whose natural immune systems are already overwhelmed.. by spike proteins.

I said recently that I think the reaction to the vaccines not working will be more lockdowns and masks and vaccination pressure, in order to prevent people from finding out that the vaccines don’t work. There’ll be much talk of Delta -and Gamma- spreading like crazy and leaving us no choice, but in the end that won’t make the vaccines work.

We’ve been told that they are the only hope we have, and when that hope is gone, what are they going to say? Boosters and lockdowns, that’s what. And heaps of blame on all the unvaccinated, even if they are no more contagious or threatening -or threatened- than anyone else.

We must all hope that the course of Delta where we live will be like that in India: a 90+% decrease in infections in two months. Our problem is, the vaccines may have already made that course impossible.

 

 

This graph from Iceland is a good way to close. As vaccinations rise, so do infections. “But it would have been so much worse without the vaccines”, say the experts. You can’t prove that, though, can you? Now, I can’t -yet- prove that it’s the vaccines that led to the positive tests, but we’re working on that. It just takes a bit longer if the information is banned and hidden from view and the media ia AWOL.

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 10 2021

Feb 102021
 
 February 10, 2021  Posted by at 9:59 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  41 Responses »


Claude Monet Houses of Parliament (Sun Breaking through the Fog) 1904

 

• Nation To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve (BBee)
• Mindless Lockdowns Destroy Lives — And Our Constitution (NYP)
• Doctors Link Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines to Life-Threatening Blood Disorder (CHD)
• Biden Team Fears No COVID Herd Immunity Until Thanksgiving (DB)
• Trump Hid His Calls With Putin. Now, Biden Has Access To Them. (Pol.)
• With Biden in Charge, Media Forgets Kids in Cages (MPN)
• Trump’s Maximum Pressure Campaign Lives On Under Biden’s Command (ZH)
• Trump Plans A Reemergence And Some Retribution After Impeachment (Pol.)
• Trump Reportedly Shocked, Enraged By Bruce Castor’s Performance (F.)
• Births In China Plummeted 15% In 2020 (ZH)
• Mark Cuban’s Mavericks Won’t Play National Anthem Anymore (NYP)
• Biden Continues Push For Assange’s Extradition Ahead of US Appeal Deadline (RT)

 

 

“I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others–poor young clerks who loitered in front of the windows until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner–young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seems like a good time to open with Babylon Bee.

• Nation To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve (BBee)

The nation is preparing to celebrate what is expected to become a beloved annual holiday: Two Weeks To Slow The Spread Day, to be held in March every year. “This time of year we like to come together to remember the historic day one year ago when we put on masks and locked ourselves down, trusting that the lockdown would be over in just two weeks,” said local man Paul Christof as he stared out his window longingly, his three masks securely in place. “This year, I’m going all out with a Zoom party with no more than five of my closest friends — I mean, closest, figuratively speaking, of course. We’ll be literally far apart, because I want to stay home and stay safe, and I don’t want grandma to die.”


Traditional festivities for the newly christened American holiday include remote Amazon gift exchanges, ordering DoorDash feasts for just yourself, and the customary binging of the Netflix. Historians believe the holiday will become a hit, and people will continue to wear masks and stay home throughout the year as the festive day is celebrated for hundreds of years to come.

Read more …

“The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, “is not a suicide pact.”

• Mindless Lockdowns Destroy Lives — And Our Constitution (NYP)

The US Supreme Court on Friday made clear to Team Biden and state governors that the fight against the pandemic doesn’t give them a blank check against individual liberties. In South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom, the high court struck down a California emergency regulation that prohibited all indoor religious services. Six justices held that Gov. Gavin Newsom had violated the First Amendment by subjecting religious groups to a complete ban, even while groceries, public transit and retail shops remain open. Americans accepted a broad — but temporary — lockdown of society to slow the pandemic a year ago. Yet many still live under unprecedented restrictions: business and school closures, travel bans, curfews, quarantines, limits on groups and mask mandates.

Whatever the health benefits of these diktats (and many are questionable), they have been handed down with shocking disregard for the costs: strokes uncared for, cancers left undetected, psychological anguish (especially among young adults), skyrocketing domestic abuse and harm to children from lack of in-person schooling. Unemployment from lockdowns, meanwhile, will cause 890,000 additional US deaths over the next 15 years, according to a recent study. Lockdowns also inflict great harm upon liberty. Governments overrode the rights to meet, work, speak, worship or organize. Bureaucracies decided which businesses could open and which should die.

Our legal system understandably defers to the executive branch during an emergency, when swift action can save lives. The Constitution, Justice Robert Jackson famously wrote, “is not a suicide pact.” Emergency policies may prove imperfect, but our legal and political systems accept more mistakes during emergencies or war, because the costs of inaction are far higher. Still, our system doesn’t permit permanent dictatorial powers in the face of contrary data. In California, for example, the governor can unilaterally exercise any and all authority vested in the state, such as to impose quarantines and curfews, ration goods and services and regulate or even prohibit any economic and social activity.

Read more …

mRNA and auto-immune.

• Doctors Link Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines to Life-Threatening Blood Disorder (CHD)

For the second time in under a month, The New York Times has published an article about people who developed a rare autoimmune disease after receiving COVID vaccines. Monday’s article featured two women, both of whom were described as healthy before they received the Moderna vaccine. The women, ages 72 and 48, are now being treated for immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), a condition that develops when the immune system attacks platelets (blood component essential for clotting) or the cells that create them, according to the Times. On Jan. 13, the Times reported on the death of Dr. Gregory Michael, a Florida doctor who died 15 days after getting the Pfizer vaccine. Michael, who was 56 and described as “perfectly healthy” by his wife, developed ITP three days after being vaccinated.

He died of a brain hemorrhage on Jan. 3. As The Defender reported on Jan. 13, Dr. Jerry L. Spivak, an expert on blood disorders at Johns Hopkins University, said it was a “medical certainty” the Pfizer vaccine led to Michael’s death. Spivak, who was interviewed for Monday’s article in the Times, reiterated the link between the vaccine and ITP. Another doctor, Dr. James Bussel, a hematologist and professor emeritus at Weill Cornell Medicine who has written more than 300 scientific articles on the platelet disorder, also said he thinks there is a “possible” association between the vaccines and ITP. Bussel told the Times: “I’m assuming there’s something that made the people who developed thrombocytopenia susceptible, given what a tiny percentage of recipients they are. Having it happen after a vaccine is well-known and has been seen with many other vaccines. Why it happens, we don’t know.”

Bussel and a colleague, Dr. Eun-Ju Lee, have identified 15 cases of ITP in COVID vaccine recipients by searching the government’s database — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) — or by consulting with other physicians treating patients, and have submitted an article about their findings to a medical journal, according to the Times. In a statement provided to the Times, Pfizer said it was aware of ITP cases in vaccine recipients and that the company is “collecting relevant information” to share with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine maker added, however that “at this time, we have not been able to establish a causal association with our vaccine.” Moderna also provided a statement, but didn’t address cases of ITP, only saying that it “continuously monitors the safety of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine using all sources of data” and routinely shares safety information with regulators.

Read more …

Blind.

• Biden Team Fears No COVID Herd Immunity Until Thanksgiving (DB)

Top members of President Joe Biden’s COVID response team are warning internally that the U.S. may not reach herd immunity until Thanksgiving or even the start of winter—months later than originally calculated—according to two senior administration officials. In an interview with CBS News this week, Biden hinted at some of these concerns, saying it would be “very difficult” to reach herd immunity—a population-wide resistance to the virus—“much before the end of the summer” with the current daily rate of approximately 1.3 million vaccine doses. Other top officials working on the federal government’s COVID-19 response say the are uneasy about vaccine supply long term and the impact on herd immunity, and have begun to explore ways to expand U.S. manufacturing capacity, potentially through new partnerships with outside pharmaceutical firms.


Beyond supply issues, though, top health officials say they are increasingly worried about the United Kingdom and South African COVID-19 variants, the likelihood that more variants will emerge in the coming months, and the possibility that those variants will evade the vaccines. There is some evidence to suggest that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines protect against the B117 United Kingdom variant, though a recent study shows a new mutation could make the vaccines less effective. Data gathered by the Novavax and Johnson and Johnson clinical trials in South Africa suggest their vaccines are less effective against the variant spreading rapidly in the country. And South Africa recently said it was halting the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine because evidence from clinical trials suggested the vaccine did not work well against the variant.

Tucker: Big Tech attempting to censor COVID-19 vaccine dissent

Read more …

RussiaRussia is alive and kicking.

• Trump Hid His Calls With Putin. Now, Biden Has Access To Them. (Pol.)

Few Trump-era mysteries are as intriguing as what the 45th president said to Vladimir Putin in at least a dozen rambling, off-the-cuff calls and meetings over four years. Understanding what was said between the two could help illuminate whether Trump ever revealed sensitive information or struck any deals with the Kremlin leader that could take the new administration by surprise. Now that President Joe Biden is in the White House, he can see for himself. “They don’t need our approval to see those [records],” a former Trump White House official said, referring to the new Biden national security team. “Biden owns all the call materials. There is only one president at a time.” The Biden White House did not comment on whether it had seen the content of the calls.

But so far, at least, the National Security Council has not registered any complaints with their ability to access relevant call records from the previous administration. “It is a national security priority to find out what Trump said to Putin” over his four years in office, said one former national security official who is close to the new president. “Some things, like what happened in some face-to-face meetings where no American translator or note-taker was present, may never be fully known. But I would be very surprised if the new national security team were not trying to access” the call records. Trump closely guarded his private conversations with foreign leaders while in office, going as far as to have some hidden in the NSC’s top-secret codeword system to limit staffers’ and even cabinet members’ access and prevent leaks.

Readouts of their calls would often come from the Kremlin first, or through Trump’s Twitter feed. But while the calls were not recorded, aides were typically still on the line and taking notes of what was said. The resulting loose transcripts are known as “memcons,” or memorandums of conversation. Trump went to particularly great lengths to keep his in-person conversations with the Russian leader private, from confiscating his interpreter’s notes to forgoing American translators and notetakers altogether in their meetings. That desire for secrecy has extended even past his time in office. One former Trump official argued last week that records of Trump’s conversations with Putin, which often lasted an hour or more, should not be made available to his successor. “There are certain things a president and his immediate staff should be able to hold privileged to do the work of government, without being subject to constant partisan gamesmanship,” said a second former Trump White House official.

Read more …

Just give it a new name and you’re squeaky clean.

• With Biden in Charge, Media Forgets Kids in Cages (MPN)

The Biden administration is opening a new child prison along the United States-Mexico border. The center, located in Carrizo Springs, around 100 miles southwest of San Antonio, is being specifically built for unaccompanied migrant children attempting to cross the border and will hold around 700 people when finished, although plans noted it will be expanded if the government deems it necessary. But corporate media do not see it that way. While the Trump years were filled with stories about “kids in cages” and ICE “concentration camps” along the border, they have instead almost universally referred to the new project as an “overflow facility” to help migrant children, as the following headlines demonstrate:

“Biden administration prepares to open overflow facility for migrant children,” CNN, “Biden administration to open overflow facility for 700 migrant children,” New York Post, “Biden administration to house migrant teens at overflow facility in Texas closed under Trump,” USA Today, “Biden Admin. to Open Migrant Overflow Facility amid Increase in Unaccompanied Minor Apprehensions,” Yahoo! News, “Biden administration prepares to open overflow facility for migrant children,” CBS. “Overflow facility” is a distinctly pleasantly sounding term for such an establishment, suggesting links to positively-charged services like swimming pools or libraries. The phrase is a completely new way to refer to prisons; a news search for “overflow facility” pre-January 2021 brings up only stories about COVID overflow clinics or emergency sewage treatment works.

The phrase “concentration camp” to describe the structure was completely absent. Searching for “Biden concentration camp” into news databases is more likely to generate stories about the plight of Uyghurs in Western China rather than domestic affairs. Perhaps the worst offender, however, was Fox News, whose headline informed readers: “Biden administration to open overflow shelter for migrant children in Texas” — a framing that invites the audience to see the move as a humanitarian gesture, along the lines of rape crisis shelters. None of the children who will be sent there will go of their own free will and it is doubtful whether many will appreciate the “shelter” that the U.S. government will provide them.

[..] Over much of the past three years, corporate media have been comparing the detention centers on the border to concentration camps, if not directly labeling them as such (e.g. CNN, Esquire, Washington Post). Data from Google Trends shows that phrases like “ICE concentration camp” were barely used until 2018, the term exploding into public consciousness a year later, especially after prominent Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began using it. President Biden has promised to rein in many of the worst excesses of ICE policy, yet the organization’s role in society will not fundamentally change. Indeed, during the time he was vice-president (2009-2017), President Obama deported well over 2.5 million people through immigration orders, more than any other president in American history, earning him the moniker “Deporter-in-Chief” from critics.

Read more …

Iran, Russia, China. Axis of ….

• Trump’s Maximum Pressure Campaign Lives On Under Biden’s Command (ZH)

Tehran is continuing to reinforce its positions and pursue its interests. This is prompted by the fact that US President Joe Biden’s vow to rejoin the Nuclear Deal turned out to be entirely hollow. Iran demanded that the sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration be removed, otherwise rejoining the deal meant nothing. On February 8th, Biden confirmed that sanctions on Iran wouldn’t be lifted, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying that such a “big policy change” wasn’t planned. To show some “reduction in pressure”, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was pulled out of the region, in a signal that an escalation with Iran isn’t planned. That happened as Tehran, Moscow and Beijing announced they would hold joint naval drills.


In response, US Central Command’s Gen Kenneth McKenzie said that Iran was the “Main Driver of Instability”, in his first public address since Biden became president. McKenzie repeated a usual a US accusation against Tehran, claiming that for more than forty years it “has funded and aggressively supported terrorism and terrorist organizations.” The “maximum pressure” campaign is simply “on hold”, but is not canceled. [..] US and allied interests are being pressured all around the Middle East, as the Biden administration refuses to turn its back on any of Trump’s “maximum pressure” policies. The withdrawal of the USS Nimitz CSG is a likely a welcome sign, but the sanction regime remaining, surely, spoils the party.

Read more …

Politico keeps the threat of Trump alive.

• Trump Plans A Reemergence And Some Retribution After Impeachment (Pol.)

Three weeks ago may have been the nadir of Donald Trump’s political influence. A meager crowd of supporters gathered to send him off to Florida, he’d lost access to Twitter and the Senate’s most powerful Republican, Mitch McConnell, seemed fully prepared to ghost him out of the party. Now, heading into what could have been an historic bipartisan rebuke, the former president and his team are confident both of his acquittal and that he’ll come out of the trial with his influence over the Republican party all but cemented. Not even Trump’s closest allies can believe the turn in fortunes. “He’s Teflon, right. It’s been a month since the Capitol riot and I would say, for the most part, the GOP has coalesced back behind him,” said a former Trump campaign official.

The confidence from Trump allies heading into the former president’s second impeachment trial — this time over the deadly riots by Trump supporters on Capitol Hill — may seem premature, given the lingering political and legal hurdles he still must confront. But it provides a road map of sorts for how they view his path ahead. Already, Trump aides contend, the impeachment process has proved beneficial to the ex-president — exposing disloyalty within the party’s ranks and igniting grassroots backlash against Republicans who have attempted to nudge the GOP base away from Trump. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse spent last week fending off constituent criticisms and censures from state party officials after he compared Trumpism to “a civic cancer for the nation.” And Trump’s allies believe the ex-president’s impending impeachment trial will further illuminate who the turncoats are.

“It’s going to help expose more bad apples that he can primary if any senators vote to convict,” added the former campaign official. While ensconced at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Trump has remained in touch with political allies and advisers. But he has intentionally kept a low profile, something that will likely continue this week. A former aide suggested Trump try to demonstrate his indifference to it all by spending much of impeachment playing golf, “as a way of sort of saying, ‘Who cares?’” Aides expect that to change once the trial wraps up though, with Trump gradually reemerging in public and turning his attention toward seeking revenge against Republicans who, he believes, crossed him after he left office.

Read more …

A knack for picking lawyers.

• Trump Reportedly Shocked, Enraged By Bruce Castor’s Performance (F.)

Count former President Donald Trump among the many critics of attorney Bruce Castor’s widely panned performance on the first day of his Senate impeachment trial, with Trump reportedly outraged at his lawyer’s apparent inability to form a coherent argument, according to multiple reports. During Castor’s muddled, 50-minute speech, NBC News and the New York Times quoted an anonymous Trump source who said it was a “deliberative strategy” aimed at “lowering the temperature” after the impeachment managers’ emotional argument. But Trump had been prepared for his current impeachment team to be far less persuasive than the group of high-powered lawyers who defended him during his first impeachment trial, according to ABC News.


Still, Trump was “stunned to hear some of the arguments,” particularly Castor’s praise for his adversaries, according to ABC and the Times, which reported that “some in Trump’s orbit were unsure why Castor seemed caught off guard by video clips that were expected for days.” Trump was “deeply unhappy” with Castor’s performance and was “borderline screaming over what was going on as he was talking to people about this,” CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins said. Even Trump allies who voted to affirm Castors’ argument that the trial is unconstitutional lashed out publicly at his performance. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told reporters Castor “rambled on and on,” while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said he was not “effective.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters, “I thought I knew where he was going, and I really didn’t know where he was going.”

Read more …

“The collapse of the newborn population is really here..”

• Births In China Plummeted 15% In 2020 (ZH)

Preliminary numbers assessing China’s births in 2020 released by the country’s household registration system are setting off alarm bells for Beijing, suggesting a continued severe population decline, given the new numbers for last year show a whopping 15% decline in births from the year before. “Concerns over the outlook for China’s population have grown after the number of newborns recorded in the country’s household registration system declined 15 per cent during a coronavirus-hit 2020,” South China Morning Post observes of the new numbers. “Last year, a total 10.035 million of newborns were recorded in the household registration system, known as hukou in China, down from 11.79 million in 2019, according to figures released by the Ministry of Public Security on Monday.”

While the hukou system only reveals preliminary information on total births across the population, it’s official demographic stats for COVID-impacted 2020 is expected to come out soon via China’s National Bureau of Statistics based on a once in ten year national census it recently conducted. As SCMP underscores it’s predicted that when total official stats do come out, expectations are for a further decline after previously 2019 saw “the lowest level since 1961” and down from 2018 as well. China is the world’s most populous country with the number of people commonly estimated at just over 1.4 billion. When the current working-age population hits retirement, there are fears the decline in births trend will severely impact the world’s second largest economy.

This also given the latest official figures out of the National Bureau of Statistics show that some 18% of the population is already over 60, with this ageing demographic to grow to one-third of the entire population by 2050. The SCMP report cited one prominent research economics professor to say the writing is on the wall. “The collapse of the newborn population is really here,” he warned, writing that: “Although we cannot deduce the decline in the birth population in these regions as the annual decline in the country, we consider that idea of having two children is weak and the number of women of childbearing age has decreased, so we need not anticipate further that the birth population in 2020 will drop significantly compared with 2019. The collapse of the newborn population is really here,” said James Liang, a research professor of applied economics at the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, in a blog post last week.

Read more …

And we all care?!

• Mark Cuban’s Mavericks Won’t Play National Anthem Anymore (NYP)

Haven’t heard about any national anthem protests at Mavericks games? There’s a good reason for that: Dallas isn’t and won’t be playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” anymore. Mark Cuban told The Athletic it was his decision to eliminate the tradition of playing the anthem before games. The move went by unnoticed through the first 13 combined preseason and regular-season games at American Airlines Center because the Mavericks did not publicize it, either within the organization or through an announcement to media. Monday marked the first game in which the Mavericks allowed a limited number of fans into their arena.


Cuban has been vocal about his support of those who wish to kneel during the playing of the national anthem, the practice which former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began in 2016 and which became a lightning rod for partisan political debate. The outspoken Mavericks owner told ESPN last July of the potential for his team’s players to kneel during the anthem: “If they were taking a knee, and they were being respectful, I’d be proud of them” and that he hoped he would “join them.” He later tweeted, in response to what he called “The National Anthem Police,” that if critics of the nonviolent protest of systemic racism in the United States took issue then they could “complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”

Read more …

Depraved.

• Biden Continues Push For Assange’s Extradition Ahead of US Appeal Deadline (RT)

The Joe Biden administration will continue to pursue extradition for Julian Assange, the Justice Department said, rebuffing calls from rights groups to reverse course ahead of an appeal deadline in the WikiLeaks co-founder’s case. DOJ spokesman Marc Raimondi said on Tuesday that Washington has not abandoned plans for Assange’s extradition from the UK, noting that Biden will still challenge a January ruling from a British judge barring extradition over concerns that Assange might take his own life in American custody. “We continue to seek his extradition,” Raimondi told Reuters, signaling that the new Biden administration will pick up where ex-president Donald Trump left off in seeking to charge the anti-secrecy activist for his publication of classified documents.


The statement from the DOJ comes mere days before a February 12 deadline for the US government to submit its “grounds for appeal” in Assange’s extradition case, in which American attorneys will argue against UK Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling against the move. Calls on Washington to abandon the Assange case picked up momentum in the waning days of the Trump presidency, with activists and journalists across the political spectrum demanding he pardon the WikiLeaks publisher before his term was up. While Trump ultimately refused to grant clemency, much of the same pressure has carried over to the Biden administration, illustrated most recently in a letter from some two dozen civil liberties organizations condemning the indictments against Assange as a “grave threat to press freedom.”

Read more …

 

 

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5% of humans in the blue, 5% in the red.

 

 

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Slouching Out of the Fog Toward Pennsylvania Avenue

Nov 142020
 
 November 14, 2020  Posted by at 1:33 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Pierre Dumonstier II The right hand of Artemisia Gentileschi holding a brush 1625

 

 

Two Dr. D pieces in one week. That election stuff must be inspiring! I was wondering, after seeing Sidney Powell claim she has evidence of fraudulent things happening in connection with Dominion software, which would be a weird claim if she didn’t have that evidence, that we need to wonder what the next step(s) would be.

Since 29 states use the software, should they all be recounted by hand? Or perhaps only the swing states? Or should there be a nationwide recount, or even a full (hand-counted) re-election? Here’s that video again of Powell, and then Dr. D’s thoughts on it all:

Sidney Powell: “I’m going to release the Kraken”

 

 

Dr. D: Since this was all set up on a White House supercomputer, with many possible branches on the logic tree, but still generally drifting toward some permutation of election fraud and a Legislative fix, I’m hazily seeing a further possibility materializing out there.

This is hard since you have to get wrapped around the well-defined legal Constitutional process preventing election fraud, and promoting fairness between big and small states, by having an election, set and run by sovereign states, who then affirm their process was legal and true in the State Legislatures before referring them to the Federal level via the Electoral College. So this could go strictly popular vote as it usually does, via state legislature, as has happened, or even via Congressional House of Representative at an impasse, which has also happened. Despite media sputtering, none of this is made-up, none of this is new. It is very well-written and well-defined for exactly the reasons the Framers knew well and we have seen this year. They have even just sat down in a smoky room and made it up outside of all Constitutional processes whatsoever, and as no one objected, there was nothing to prevent it. Other than the people, of course, the real masters, maintaining as they do the overwhelmingly large, real armed body.

So let’s suppose, as seems to be happening now, that there is some election fraud. And although given more than a month, as we know the clock unwinds very quickly in legal terms — like lightning. We are already halfway through. If it were only one state, like Pennsylvania, perhaps that state’s Legislature can and should vote in their own electors. And that appears to be happening as they take the first steps of an Legislative audit, going right ‘round the Governor and Courts. Leaving their legal blocks instantly disarmed.

But Michigan is calling for a Legislative audit too, and Wisconsin looks set for a recount. Georgia is already in one, and there are several others.

This is where people lament “No matter what happens, half the nation will think the election is stolen!” Civil war, all that. Which I doubt, given that for four years half the nation ALREADY thought it was stolen by by a Russian caterer with a $10,000 loan (correct me if I’m wrong) and ALREADY are in violent insurrection to burn down, murder, and expel Federal forces from Portland for 200 days, barely making a mark on the nation nor even much impression on their very-large state.

But that’s only if we WANT it to go that way – there’s no special reason we should. America is that land that “Will always do the right thing, having exhausted every alternative” as Churchill would say.

Suppose, seeing 6 states in Legislative stop of Electors, and 29 states in question due to now widely-reported flaws in the Dominion voting system, the Republicans see an easy victory EITHER by state level voting OR by Congressional election, and in a legal, required, “continent election” it is one state, one vote – perhaps 32 v 18. This question then runs to the House of Representatives, where Nancy Pelosi can even attempt to refuse to seat anyone and refuse to hold such a vote.

But what are we really after here? With the States, the House, the Constitution, the Military on one side, and a critical mass of the people duly annoyed, can they really expect to succeed here? We have a nationwide bad election, Republican Legislature and States have all the leverage, and we have no remaining time.

So what CAN happen is that Pelosi can hold a House vote. Trump can call for one. The Courts will demand one – I fail to see how any other option could exist.

OR

Trump, Pelosi, and Biden COULD, if they feel like it, hold it all off and call for a national recount, even a completely new re-election. Now that would not be “Legal” in a certain sense as the President must be un-seated in January, but in a certain sense the law is something we make up in our heads. And they have already “just done it” once previously. Perhaps the House, with a 2/3 vote would make Trump the acting President instead of President Pelosi for the interim months, perhaps until Election #2 + 30 days = March.

Everyone would have the chance to do this again without massive nationwide fraud, and the concession that reveals this and smooths over the “stolen election/civil war” would go towards a quid pro quo of not arresting everyone involved and hanging them down the long boulevard of Pennsylvania Avenue until the U.S. Military runs out of rope. Everyone sunsets and the nation moves on. …With some laws passed on election integrity. And Presidential power, one hopes.

Such are the level of crazy times we are in now. And that’s sensible, since in such crazy, extreme times, unthinkable things happen. Like wars. Or also unthinkable peaces and reconciliations. Which we must have and have had many times before.

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 13 2020

Sep 132020
 
 September 13, 2020  Posted by at 9:22 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  23 Responses »


Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Fall of Icarus 1558

 

• What’s Behind The DOJ Aggression Toward Julian Assange (CT)
• Senate Chairman Asks DOJ IG To Open Probe Into Wiped Mueller Phones (JTN)
• The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left (PCR)
• Bill Maher Mocks Dems: ‘You Guys Are Whistling Past The Graveyard’ (Fox)
• When There are No Consequences for Anything (Kunstler)
• Russia Dispatches First Batches Of COVID19 Vaccine To All 85 Regions (RT)
• Chinese Virologist Vows To Release Proof COVID19 Was Made In Wuhan Lab (JTN)
• The Coming Wave Of Defaults (Richard Vague)
• China Steel Exports Hit By 15 New Anti-Dumping Probes So Far In 2020 (SCMP)
• Greek PM Announces Huge Military Spending To Counter Turkish Aggression (K.)
• Greek Riot Police Fire Teargas At Refugees Campaigning To Leave Lesbos (G.)
• Academy Strips ‘Schindler’s List’ Of Oscar Due To Lack Of Diversity (BBee)

 

 

India will go above 100,000 new daily cases next week, one third of all global new cases. The US was never above 75,000.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Martin

 

 

Wonder why it took the right wing so long to wake up to how Julian Assange is linked to the whole machine. Did they really need Tucker Carlson for that?

This is lawyer “sundance” at the Conservative Treehouse. The article has a lot more info, not just on Assange; he’s been digging for a long time. I know, it’s right wing media. But nobody else will cover this. And we want to get Assange released.

• What’s Behind The DOJ Aggression Toward Julian Assange (CT)

On April 11th, 2019, the Julian Assange indictment was unsealed in the EDVA. From the indictment we discover it was under seal since March 6th, 2018. On Tuesday April 15th more investigative material was released. Again, note the dates: Grand Jury, *December of 2017* This means FBI investigation prior to…. The FBI investigation took place prior to December 2017, it was coordinated through the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) where Dana Boente was U.S. Attorney at the time. The grand jury indictment was sealed from March of 2018 until after Mueller completed his investigation, April 2019. Why the delay? What was the DOJ waiting for? Here’s where it gets interesting…. The FBI submission to the Grand Jury in December of 2017 was four months after congressman Dana Rohrabacher talked to Julian Assange in August of 2017: “Assange told a U.S. congressman … he can prove the leaked Democratic Party documents … did not come from Russia.” [..]


Knowing how much effort the CIA and FBI put into the Russia collusion-conspiracy narrative, it would make sense for the FBI to take keen interest after this August 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Assange; and why the FBI would quickly gather specific evidence (related to Wikileaks and Bradley Manning) for a grand jury by December 2017. Within three months of the grand jury the DOJ generated an indictment and sealed it in March 2018. The EDVA sat on the indictment while the Mueller probe was ongoing. As soon as the Mueller probe ended, on April 11th, 2019, a planned and coordinated effort between the U.K. and U.S. was executed; Julian Assange was forcibly arrested and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and the EDVA indictment was unsealed.

As a person who has researched this three year fiasco; including the ridiculously false 2016 Russian hacking/interference narrative: “17 intelligence agencies”, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) needed for Obama’s anti-Russia narrative in December ’16; and then a month later the ridiculously political Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January ’17; this timing against Assange is just too coincidental. It doesn’t take a deep researcher to see the aligned Deep State motive to control Julian Assange because the Mueller report was dependent on Russia cybercrimes, and that narrative is contingent on the Russia DNC hack story which Julian Assange disputes. This is critical. The Weissmann/Mueller report contains claims that Russia hacked the DNC servers as the central element to the Russia interference narrative in the U.S. election. This claim is directly disputed by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, as outlined during the Dana Rohrabacher interview, and by Julian Assange on-the-record statements.


The predicate for Robert Mueller’s investigation was specifically due to Russian interference in the 2016 election. The fulcrum for this Russia interference claim is the intelligence community assessment; and the only factual evidence claimed within the ICA is that Russia hacked the DNC servers; a claim only made possible by relying on forensic computer analysis from Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor. The CIA holds a massive conflict of self-interest in upholding the Russian hacking claim. The FBI holds a massive interest in maintaining that claim. All of those foreign countries whose intelligence apparatus participated with Brennan and Strzok also have a vested self-interest in maintaining that Russia hacking and interference narrative. Julian Assange is the only person with direct knowledge of how Wikileaks gained custody of the DNC emails; and Assange has claimed he has evidence it was not from a hack.

Read more …

I understand it takes 3 hours to wipe an iPhone by getting the password wrong 10 times in a row (because delays are built into the process). That’s all I personally need to know.

The term “accidental” doesn’t fit anywhere in the narrative. And destroying this sort of evidence is a criminal offence.

• Senate Chairman Asks DOJ IG To Open Probe Into Wiped Mueller Phones (JTN)

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson on Friday asked Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to open an investigation into the dozen-plus phones belonging to associates of the Robert Mueller special counsel that had been wiped of data prior to being surrendered to investigators. Government documents released this week listed multiple phones belonging to members of Mueller’s Russia collusion probe as having been cleared of all data before they were handed over to Horowitz’s office. Many of the phones, according to the documents, were purged of data after the users entered incorrect passwords too many times.


In his letter, Johnson—the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs—said the missing data “raise[s] concerns about record retention and transparency.” The senator asked Horowitz’s office to “open an investigation into this matter to determine what, why, and how information was wiped, whether any wrongdoing occurred, and who these devices belonged to.” Johnson also asked Horowitz to explain “when and how [his] office was made aware of this matter,” what steps the office took to “confirm whether information on these phones had been wiped,” whether or not the phones in question had “text message capabilities,” and if Horowtiz’s office has “the capability to retrieve the information from these phones?” The letter asks for a response “no later than September 18, 2020.”

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Paul Craig Roberts knows the machinery.

• The United States & Its Constitution Have Two Months Left (PCR)

Bob Woodward writes that Trump’s Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis, and Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, spoke together about taking “collective action” to remove President Trump from office. General Mattis said Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.” This is the same thing that the Generals and the CIA said about President John F. Kennedy. When Generals and the CIA say that a president is unfit and dangerous, they mean he is dangerous to their budget. By “unfit” they mean he is not a reliable cold warrior who will keep hyping America’s enemies so that money keeps pouring into the military/security budget. By serving defense contractors instead of their country, generals end up very wealthy.

Both Kennedy and Trump wanted to normalize relations with Russia and to bring home US troops involved in make-war operations overseas that boost the profits of defense contractors. To stop Kennedy they assassinated him. To stop Trump they concocted Russiagate, Impeachgate, and a variety of wild and unsubstantiated accusations. The presstitutes repeat the various accusations as if they are absolute proven truth. The presstitutes never investigated a single one of the false accusations. These efforts to remove Trump did not succeed. Having pulled off numerous color revolutions in which the US has overthrown foreign governments, the tactics are now being employed against Trump. The November presidential election will not be an election. It will be a color revolution.

We have reached the point in the demise of our country that a simple statement of obvious truth is not believable. As a number of carefully researched and documented books, some written by insiders, have proved conclusively, the CIA has controlled the prestige American media since 1950. The American media does not provide news. It provides the Deep State’s explanations of events. This ensures that real news does not interfere with the agenda. The German journalst, Udo Ulfkotte, wrote a book, Bought Journalism, in which he showed that the CIA also controls the European press. To be clear, there are two CIA organizations. One is an agency that monitors world events and endeavors to provide more or less accurate information to policymakers.

The other is a covert operations agency. This agency assassinates people, including an American president, and overthrows uncooperative governments. President Truman publicly stated after he was out of office that he made a serious mistake in permitting the covert operations branch of the CIA. He said that it was an unaccountable government in inself. President Eisehnower agreed and in his last address to the American people warned of the growing unaccountable power of the military/security complex. President Kennedy realized the threat and said he was going “to break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” but they killed him first.

It would be easy for the CIA to kill Trump, but the “lone assassin” has been used too many times to be believable. It is easier to overthrow Trump’s reelection with false accusations as the CIA controlls the American and European media and has many Internet sites pretending to be dissident, a claim that fools insouciant Americans. Indeed, it is the leftwing that the CIA owns. The rightwing goes along because they think it is patriotic to support the military/security complex. After the CIA overthrows Trump, they will use Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and their presstitutes to foment race war. Then the CIA will ride in on the Pale Horse, and the population will submit.

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“…5 or 6% is a lot in this country. That’s a big, big, big victory. And if he doesn’t get that…”

• Bill Maher Mocks Dems: ‘You Guys Are Whistling Past The Graveyard’ (Fox)

“Real Time” host Bill Maher wasn’t nearly as confident about a Joe Biden victory in November as his guests were on Friday night. Maher began by citing what he called “frightening” finds from electoral analyst Nate Silver, who recently determined that if Biden wins the popular vote by less than 1%, he’ll have only a “6 percent chance” of becoming president through the electoral college. Similarly, if Biden wins the popular vote by 1 or 2%, he’ll have a “22% chance” of being elected in addition to the “46% chance” with a 2 to 3% popular vote margin. “So he could win by 3 percent and he still has less than half a chance of winning the election,” Maher said. “You’ve got to get up to 5 or 6% before he has a 98% chance of winning the election. That’s a f—ed up country.”

Author Jessica Yellin, a former CNN correspondent, dismissed any reason for panic among Democrats, pointing to Biden’s “unbelievably steady” polling throughout the year, stressing that he’s been “consistently up 6 points” against President Trump, and adding that the numbers don’t indicate the “worst-case scenario” like they did in 2016. Vanity Fair contributor Peter Hamby cited Trump’s weak polling among independents and women, insisting that a “fundamental shifting” among voters “would take something overwhelmingly dramatic.” “The whole ‘What about 2016?’ thing, it’s just not 2016,” Hamby insisted. “People have had four years of Donald Trump. A verdict has more or less been rendered since he’s taken office … and Joe Biden is just not Hillary Clinton. He’s not.”

“I know,” Maher responded. “But what Nate Silver is seeing, it doesn’t matter. Because 5 or 6% is a lot in this country. That’s a big, big, big victory. And if he doesn’t get that — and races tighten at the end! You sound like the panels I used to have on right before the last election. … You guys are whistling past the graveyard.” Yellin doubled down, telling Maher she thinks it’s “very hard” to see Trump convince the rest of undecided voters to support him, pointing to polling that shows his “law and order” messaging has not improved his standing among voters. “So far. Right now,” Maher told Yellin. “You think it’s going to shift?” Yellin replied. “It could,” Maher said. “People generally don’t like violence in the streets. I mean, yes, you’re right.

When he says, ‘I’m the one who’s going to protect you,’ they’re not getting that. They’re not buying that. What they’re saying is ‘Joe Biden is a healer and we need healing right now.’ But this could change.” Maher has previously expressed doubt about Biden’s chances for a November victory. Last month, he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid he was feeling “very nervous” following the conclusion of the Republican National Convention. “I am feeling less confident about this — maybe it’s just their convention bump got to me, but I’m feeling less confident than I was a month ago,” Maher said. “I feel very nervous, the same way I did four years ago at this time.”

Read more …

The usual suspects.

• When There are No Consequences for Anything (Kunstler)

We’re informed hours ago, for instance, that the top lawyers in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel operation wiped all the records from their cell phones before the DOJ Inspector General could collect evidence of their communications from the SC team’s three-year exercise in overthrowing a president. How is that not an obstruction of justice, and who will answer for it?

That’s on top of many other bits of essential evidence in the RussiaGate coup and other perfidious acts mysteriously gone missing — Special Agent Joe Pientka’s original “302” document from the Flynn interrogation, thousands of Strzok-and-Page’s text messages, official verifications of the Steele Dossier submitted to the FISA court, communications between the FBI “small group” (Comey, McCabe, Priestap, Carlin, McCord, Baker, et al.) plus CIA Chief John Brennan and DNI James Clapper with Senators Burr and Warner on the Senate Intel Committee, communications between “whistleblower” Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman and House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff, records of CIA prop Stephan Halper’s doings with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, all communication records between State Department official Jonathan Winer and British ex-spy Christopher Steele….

And now, like a fever building to climax, comes the news right out-front that the Democratic Party intends to foment insurrection if the election goes against them. They’re supporting the coming siege of Lafayette Square set to kick off fifty days of “protest” across from the White House beginning Sept 17 as a warm-up for anarchy in the streets across the nation following the Nov 3 vote. Behind us is the summer of riots, arson, and looting, and who paid to support all that? Who paid for flying Antifa and BLM personnel from city to city, feeding and housing them, paying for their “commercial-grade” fireworks, pallets of bricks, gas masks, lasers, bullhorns, black riot outfits? Why is it hard to find out who bought the plane tickets, booked the hotels? Months have gone by since all that started. Is someone in the DOJ following the money? And following their communications (especially considering the crimes against property they’ve committed)?

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Yes, the Lancet, world no. 1 medical journal, said the vaccine is 100% effective. Questions?

• Russia Dispatches First Batches Of COVID19 Vaccine To All 85 Regions (RT)

Russia has sent out the initial batches of the world’s first registered coronavirus vaccine to all parts of its vast territory, as authorities test the delivery system of the much-needed drug. The formula is expected to be delivered on Monday, said Russia’s Health Minister Mikhail Murashko. “The first small batches have already been shipped,” Murashko said, explaining that the government is testing the supply chain to ensure a robust delivery system across the country’s 85 regions. As well as testing the efficacy and safety of the vaccine itself, the government believes it is paramount to ensure the efficient distribution to citizens, especially to those at high risk. Russia’s homegrown Covid-19 formula is currently in the third and final stage of clinical trials, in which 40,000 Muscovites will take part.


While three-quarters will receive the jab, another quarter will be given a placebo. On Wednesday, Moscow’s Deputy Mayor Anastasia Rakova announced that testing had begun, and over 35,000 residents had applied. “Clinical trials have begun in Moscow,” Murashko said, adding that the ministry had also created “the world’s first mobile application” that allows participants to “report on their condition” throughout the lengthy trial period. [..] The vaccine’s development process has been criticized by some Western countries for its supposedly unsafe rapid development and improper testing. However, earlier this month, the respected British medical journal The Lancet published the Russian Ministry of Health’s Sputnik V study, showing the vaccine to be 100% effective, producing antibodies in all 76 participants of early-stage trials.

Halloween

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We are curious.

• Chinese Virologist Vows To Provide Proof COVID19 Was Made In Wuhan Lab (JTN)

A Chinese scientist who reportedly fled her home country out of fear for her safety has said that she intends to release evidence proving that SARS-Cov-2 did not arise in nature but was actually manufactured in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Virologist Li-Meng Yan claims to have done some of the earliest work on COVID-19 when it first emerged in China last year. She has said she left China in April and that she is currently in hiding in the U.S. On the British ITV television show “Loose Women” on Friday, Yan said she intends to release evidence showing “why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the only ones who made it.”


“The genome sequence [of the virus] is like a human finger print,” she told the talk show. “And based on this you can identify these things.” Yan said at the start of the pandemic she attempted to warn her supervisors of the threat the virus posed yet she was ignored. The scientist on the show declared it “critical” for the world to understand the virus’s origins, claiming: “We can not overcome it, it will be life-threatening for everyone,” though current epidemiological data indicate that the virus likely has a survival rate above 99%.

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The wave appears slow in the distance; it won’t be as it gets nearer.

• The Coming Wave Of Defaults (Richard Vague)

With COVID-related income supplements and unemployment benefits now expired or reduced, we face a new wave of mortgage and rental delinquencies, many of which will come in the next few months. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, as of June 30, mortgage delinquency in the U.S. had reached 8.2 percent, the highest since 2011 and almost double the 4.5 percent of a year earlier. With 53 million mortgages in the U.S., that means more than 4.3 million mortgages are delinquent. Add to that the fact that, per Black Knight mortgage analytics, almost 5 million homes have been in forbearance. With that, I estimate that at least 1 million to 2 million more of these loans will fall delinquent before the end of this year.

As for renters, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that, as of July, 18 percent were delinquent in their rent payments. That compares with less than 7 percent in prior years. With more than 43 million renters, that means more than 7.4 million are behind on their rental payments. With the loss of income and unemployment support, it is reasonable to believe that number will increase by several million over the next few months. Many of the resulting evictions that normally would have occurred have been forestalled by government mandate, and a major portion of the mortgage payments and apartment rental payments that would have been late have been staved off by the lifeline of the $1,200 checks from the CARES Act and augmented unemployment benefits.

Since this assistance has now expired, a new wave of delinquency is before us, and millions more Americans could go delinquent in the months immediately ahead. When people go delinquent on their mortgage or rent because of COVID-based job loss or income reduction, their lives often become a proverbial hell. Many resort to bankruptcy as a refuge. But that is just the start of what is a chain of impairment. For renters, their landlords are then hurt because of those missed rent payments, and so they in turn go into default on the loans they took out to buy the rental property, something felt especially by the small landlords who have little clout with their lenders. Then the lenders themselves — those that made mortgage loans to households and those that made property acquisition loans to the small landlords — suffer loss.

This all comes because the individuals who make up the first link in that chain can’t pay, often just temporarily. All can be protected — at least over the near term — by continued government support such as proposed in the HEROES Act now being debated in Congress. With that, individuals would be able to pay their rent and mortgages, and thus small landlords would be able to pay their loans, and community lenders could avoid major losses.

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Overproduction. China can’t do without it.

• China Steel Exports Hit By 15 New Anti-Dumping Probes So Far In 2020 (SCMP)

China’s steel exports have been subject to 15 new anti-dumping investigations in the first nine months of the year, more than all of last year, as experts warn that the US-China trade war and the coronavirus pandemic have hastened a trend towards global protectionism. The US, Britain, Australia and Thailand are among the countries that have initiated dumping probes into Chinese products, including steel plates, grinding balls, cylinders and strands, as well as galvanised wires. Last year, China faced 13 anti-dumping investigations into its steel exports, according to the China Trade Remedies Database. Thailand went a step further in August, slapping a 35.67 per cent anti-dumping tariff on Chinese hot-dipped galvanised coils and sheets.

China, the world’s biggest steel producer, has long been accused of flooding the international market with cheap, subsidised steel, primarily due to oversupply at home. It produced 996 million tonnes of crude steel last year, more than half of the world’s combined output of 1.8 billion tonnes, according to the World Steel Association. But against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, many smaller steel producers in Asia have had enough and are doing everything possible to protect their domestic industries. Korrakod Padungjitt, a Thai steel manufacturer and secretary general of the Thailand Iron and Steel Industry Club, said his country’s latest anti-dumping tariff on Chinese steel would just be a drop in the ocean. Chinese steel started flowing into Thailand in the early 2000s and has increasingly squeezed regional manufacturers, Korrakod said.

The Chinese steel onslaught was so ferocious that in 2010, mainland producers mixed alloy in their steel products to circumvent existing tariffs, he added. The issue is now a regular feature of annual meetings between the Asean Iron and Steel Council and the China Iron and Steel Association. Thailand’s industrial sector has been hard hit by the pandemic, with both investment and consumption plummeting. In July, Thailand’s car production fell 47 per cent compared to the same time last year, which was a significant blow to the steel sector. Earlier this year, Thailand’s Department of Foreign Trade launched an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese hot-dipped galvanised coils and sheets, which are used largely in construction and manufacturing, and in August followed through with a 35.67 per cent duty.

Read more …

Money that should go to refugees and homeless. Not French arms dealers. But due to historic and geographical factors, Greeks take their army very seriously. They’re one of few countries that meet their NATO quota.

• Greek PM Announces Huge Military Spending To Counter Turkish Aggression (K.)

Greece will strengthen its armed forces by buying new weapons systems, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced Saturday. Specifically, Greece will acquire 18 Rafale fighters, a full squadron’s strength, to replacing the aging Mirage 2000 planes; 4 new frigates, while refurbishing 4 existing ones; 4 Romeo naval helicopters; antitank weapons for the Army; torpedoes for the Navy and guided missile for its Air Force. It will also add 15,000 professional soldiers to its armed forces over the next five years, Mitsotakis said. The new weapons procurement program comes amid heightened tensions with Turkey over resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Its announcement dominated the first half of Mitsotakis’ speech on the grounds of the Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF).


The trade fair itself has been canceled, due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Mitsotakis delivered the customary speech describing next year’s economic policy. The extra spending on defense did not prevent Mitsotakis from announcing a new €6.8 billion injection into the economy, in the form of payroll and other tax cuts, subsidies and payments of pension cuts restored by the courts. “A shift in priorities (toward defense spending) does not mean a change in goals,” Mitsotakis told a restricted audience of just 50, all wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. “Ankara is now adding to the provocations in the Aegean, the undermining of peace in the entire Mediterreanean,” Mitsotakis said. “It is threatening the eastern borders of Europe, and it is undermining security in a sensitive crossroads of three continents.”

Greece military boost
https://twitter.com/e_amyna/status/1304921950222004225

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Wait. 200,000 Covid-19 rapid tests(?!) Which ones are those? Are they just PCR executed fast, or actual rapid tests?

• Greek Riot Police Fire Teargas At Refugees Campaigning To Leave Lesbos (G.)

Greek riot police fired teargas at protesting refugees clamouring to leave Lesbos as the situation on the island became more explosive days after devastating fires forced thousands to flee its notorious migrant camp. Tensions mounted as asylum seekers, desperate to make their way to other parts of Europe, watched authorities, including the Greek army, rush to replace the now gutted facility of Moria with a new holding centre. “Freedom, freedom,” demonstrators chanted under the watchful eye of riot police deployed to the Aegean isle from Athens. “We don’t need new camp … we want freedom,” proclaimed some of the crude handwritten placards held aloft by protesters on Saturday.

Witnesses reported teargas being fired after younger migrants began lobbing rocks at the police units. A series of overnight blazes starting on Tuesday razed Moria, Europe’s largest refugee camp, decanting close to 13,000 men, women and children into the surrounding countryside. With the exception of 406 lone migrant children who have been flown to the Greek mainland, the former residents have been left to fend for themselves, many making makeshift shelters out of tarps and bamboo reeds along the side of a main road leading to Mytilene, the island’s port capital. Others have camped in fields, olive groves, churches and even cemeteries.

Frustration, the insistence of Greek officials that transferal is out of the question and a growing realisation that any prospect of leaving is diminishing fast have helped create an increasingly toxic atmosphere. The destruction of containers housing the asylum service in Moria has further fuelled a prevailing sense of desperation among refugees. “The thought that they may be here for even longer now, the sight of the replacement camp and being stranded without proper shelter for days has, for many, become the tipping point,” said one aid worker requesting anonymity because she was not authorised to speak. Earlier, Greece’s alternate migration minister, Giorgos Koumoutsakos, told SKAI TV Lesbos was facing a public health emergency, “a triple challenge” that also involves “public order and national security”.

On Saturday a woman and her 20-month-old baby were flown to Athens where they will be hospitalised after testing positive for the virus. They were not among the original group, most of whom were described as asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. With fears of infection rates increasing, some 200,000 Covid-19 rapid tests were flown into Lesbos on a specially chartered plane on Friday. “There are now real fears among our island’s residents of the virus spreading,” local journalist Yannis Sinanis told the Guardian. Officials were working around-the-clock to erect the new settlement, a collection of 500 tents with the capacity to accommodate six people each. Other asylum seekers are expected to be accommodated in a ferryboat and naval ships.

Read more …

“..the Academy has plans to strip the award from over 95% of the winners and give them all to Brokeback Mountain.”

• Academy Strips ‘Schindler’s List’ Of Oscar Due To Lack Of Diversity (BBee)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has stripped Schindler’s List of its Best Motion Picture award for not having enough LGBTQ+ characters, people of color, and other oppressed groups. “Schindler’s List would have been a great movie if it just had a dozen transgendered characters,” said Le’Jon de Froofroo, spokesperson for the Academy. “As it is, there are just a bunch of Jews and Germans — very privileged races.” “Also, the movie has Nazis — this is the current year, for goodness’ sake!” Steven Spielberg has been ordered by the Academy to re-release the film with an unnecessary LGBTQ+ side plot, a gay roommate for Schindler, and a song and dance number set to a Lady Gaga song over the end credits if he wishes to re-earn the Academy Award. Otherwise, it will be re-awarded to Brokeback Mountain. This is just the first Oscar winner to be stripped of its award, as the Academy has plans to strip the award from over 95% of the winners and give them all to Brokeback Mountain.

Read more …

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 5 2020

Jan 052020
 
 January 5, 2020  Posted by at 11:03 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  15 Responses »


Jack Delano Foggy night in New Bedford, Massachusetts 1941

 

• Suleimani’s Death Huge Blow To Iran’s Plans For Regional Domination (Hassan)
• Trump Could Start A War Via Twitter; The Social Network Is OK With That (Keys)
• Sanders, Warren Want No War With Iran, Biden, Buttigieg Better-Run Wars (IC)
• Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani (Murray)
• Doubling Down Into Yet Another ‘March of Folly,’ This Time on Iran (VIPS)
• To Stop Trump’s War with Iran, We Must Also Confront the Democrats (ITT)
• PBOC Says Will Keep Monetary Policy Prudent, Flexible And Appropriate (R.)
• Bernanke: Fed Has Ample Clout To Fight Downturn If Toolkit Used Properly (R.)
• How the Two-Party System Broke the Constitution (Atlantic)
• Bushfire Turns Aussie Sky Into A Re-Creation Of The Aboriginal Flag (DMA)

 

 

It’s very hard not to wonder what everyone would have been writing and talking about in these first few days of 2020 if Australia weren’t burning and the US hadn’t killed Soleimani. Because this is all people are on about. Nobody talks about impeachment, for one thing.

It’s a shame that virtually all use the two events to reaffirm their prior positions, that they see to tweak events to reinforce their prior positions. It’s nigh impossible not to read that Trump will start a grand war, or the US will. This first article by Hassan Hassan is a rare exception.

Something else that crossed my mind: Soleimani’s death has -perhaps greatly- increased the chance that US troops will have to leave Iraq. Who would want that to happen?

• Suleimani’s Death Huge Blow To Iran’s Plans For Regional Domination (Hassan)

The killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani could prove to be the most consequential US slaying of an enemy operative in recent memory. It will eclipse in its significance the killing of Osama bin Laden almost a decade ago or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October. Not because it might spark another Middle East war, as many have warned, or merely because Suleimani was irreplaceable. Rather, his killing came at a time when the project he had led – to create an Iranian hegemony in the region – is facing unprecedented challenges in Iraq and Lebanon, through cross-sectarian and grassroots protests, while in Syria the project is still in its infancy. One can add to this picture a more aggressive policy adopted by the US.

Indeed, Suleimani was killed while he was trying to deal with these very challenges. His successor is unlikely to be able to complete that mission and contain the spiral of events in countries where, only a year ago, Iran declared major victories – in Syria against the rebels, in Lebanon through a Hezbollah-friendly government and in Iraq and Syria against Isis. In the short term, doomsday scenarios seem far-fetched. Neither side is interested in an outright war, even if developments over the past few years indicate that both have been caught in an unpredictable cycle of escalation and mounting tension. Crucially, nearly all the most influential public figures in Iraq, so far the main battle-space for the two powers, have called for a restrained and clear-headed response to prevent the situation in their country from spinning out of control.

These calls reduced significantly the chances for the worst-case scenario – of Iraq’s public figures mobilising impulsively and collectively against the United States in a way that might spark attacks and retaliations. Such scenarios would have made the US presence in Iraq unsustainable, at best. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most revered cleric, condemned Washington for its “flagrant aggression” but, in the same breath, he also called for restraint. What’s more, he cited the Iran-linked attack on the US embassy in Baghdad as part of a dangerous whirlwind of events that could steer Iraq into renewed chaos.

Beyond the extreme scenarios, Iran’s options for retaliation seem limited to familiar patterns of proxy and asymmetric warfare. Even Iranian officials have suggested any response to Suleimani’s killing would have to come later; foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said that Tehran would launch “legal measures” at international level to hold the US to account. While a future response is possible, alarmism about a spiral into confrontation between Iran and the US is misplaced.

Read more …

Hmmm. Yes, Trump was the first to use Twitter, social media the way he does. because they didn’t exist the way they do. Presidents, CIS etc., would use the NYT and WaPo to start wars, sell them to voters. Does any of this mean Twitter should censure Trump? Or that not doing it makes them warmongers?

• Trump Could Start A War Via Twitter; The Social Network Is OK With That (Keys)

Lost in the back-and-forth over the legality of the assassination and whatever future consequences it may hold is that Trump may be the first president to stoke, and perhaps even declare, war through the Internet. [..] Since taking office, Trump has used Twitter to antagonize North Korea, start false rumors about Russia, intimidate witnesses, harass journalists, slander political rivals and — perhaps we should have seen it coming — threaten Iran. For its part, Twitter seems okay — maybe even pleased — that Trump has selected their platform to connect directly with the public. To date, no other social media platform has been able to boast that two sitting presidents have actively used their platform with the level of tenacity seen on Twitter.

That was likely the thought in mind when Twitter responded to criticism over its selective enforcement of its own terms of service — the kind that prohibit direct harassment against a person, incitement of violence, certain slurs and other acts of malfeasance — by saying it would give greater leniency to world leaders because what they have to tweet is important for people to read. “Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation,” a blog post published in January 2018 said. “Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society. Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate.”

Twitter goes on to argue that removing a world leader like Trump from the platform would not silence them as some would wish, but rather “hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.” “We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” Twitter said. So far, that enforcement has amounted to a blank check for Trump to say whatever he want with impunity, with the social network apparently figuring that whatever Trump has to say — on his personal account that he used for several years before he became president — has roots in political discourse. And, hey, it’s not like anyone has died from a president’s tweet before.

But the assassination of Gen. Soleimali at Trump’s direction changes everything. Nowhere has Trump’s trademark approach to public discourse — filterless, unhinged, often ignorant and without regard to consequence — played out more than on Twitter. Now, people are paying closer attention to what Trump has to say, particularly on Iran, and a lot of the focus is on what Trump will tweet next. Certainly among those waiting with baited breath are world leaders — allies who are trying hard to prepare for what’s ahead with virtually little advance notice and foes who are looking for any excuse to attack.

As the crisis between the United States and Iran over the killing of Gen. Soleimali intensifies, it’s not unreasonable to assume Trump will, at some point, tweet something that instigates an attack or declaration of war. When that happens, Americans will die. By choosing not to enforce its terms equitably across users and show privilege and favor to world leaders, Twitter — as a platform and as a company — will play a role in whatever comes next.

Read more …

Trump alos said he wants no war with Iran. Biden and Mayor Pete are twisting like pretzels, Warren has a hard time keeping up with events.

• Sanders, Warren Want No War With Iran, Biden, Buttigieg Better-Run Wars (IC)

Warren, who faced criticism from the left for initially prefacing her alarm at the threat of “another costly war” with the statement that Suleimani was “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans,” amplified Sanders’s anti-war message more clearly on Friday. “Donald Trump is dangerous and reckless,” she wrote. “He’s escalated crises and betrayed our partners. He’s undermined our diplomatic relationships for his own personal, political gain. We cannot allow him to drag us back into another war. We must speak out.”

Biden also criticized the killing of the general as needlessly provocative, but issued a statement that embraced the Trump administration’s argument that Suleimani, who orchestrated deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers during the post-war occupation of Iraq, “deserved to be brought to justice for his crimes against American troops.” The former vice president — who voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq when he was still in the Senate, and later authored a bizarre plan to partition the country along ethnic and sectarian lines — was critical mainly of what he called Trump’s failure to explain his “strategy and plan to keep safe our troops and embassy personnel” and Trump’s lack of a “long-term vision” for the U.S. military’s role in the region.

Warren, who faced criticism from the left for initially prefacing her alarm at the threat of “another costly war” with the statement that Suleimani was “a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including hundreds of Americans,” amplified Sanders’s anti-war message more clearly on Friday. “Donald Trump is dangerous and reckless,” she wrote. “He’s escalated crises and betrayed our partners. He’s undermined our diplomatic relationships for his own personal, political gain. We cannot allow him to drag us back into another war. We must speak out.”

Biden also criticized the killing of the general as needlessly provocative, but issued a statement that embraced the Trump administration’s argument that Suleimani, who orchestrated deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers during the post-war occupation of Iraq, “deserved to be brought to justice for his crimes against American troops.” The former vice president — who voted to authorize the use of military force in Iraq when he was still in the Senate, and later authored a bizarre plan to partition the country along ethnic and sectarian lines — was critical mainly of what he called Trump’s failure to explain his “strategy and plan to keep safe our troops and embassy personnel” and Trump’s lack of a “long-term vision” for the U.S. military’s role in the region.

Read more …

Propaganda is what it is.

• Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani (Murray)

In one of the series of blatant lies the USA has told to justify the assassination of Soleimani, Mike Pompeo said that Soleimani was killed because he was planning “Imminent attacks” on US citizens. It is a careful choice of word. Pompeo is specifically referring to the Bethlehem Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self Defence. Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack. That is something most people, and most international law experts and judges, would accept. Including me.

What very few people, and almost no international lawyers, accept is the key to the Bethlehem Doctrine – that here “Imminent” – the word used so carefully by Pompeo – does not need to have its normal meanings of either “soon” or “about to happen”. An attack may be deemed “imminent”, according to the Bethlehem Doctrine, even if you know no details of it or when it might occur. [..] The truth of the matter is that if you take every American killed including and since 9/11, in the resultant Middle East related wars, conflicts and terrorist acts, well over 90% of them have been killed by Sunni Muslims financed and supported out of Saudi Arabia and its gulf satellites, and less than 10% of those Americans have been killed by Shia Muslims tied to Iran.

This is a horribly inconvenient fact for US administrations which, regardless of party, are beholden to Saudi Arabia and its money. It is, the USA affirms, the Sunnis who are the allies and the Shias who are the enemy. Yet every journalist or aid worker hostage who has been horribly beheaded or otherwise executed has been murdered by a Sunni, every jihadist terrorist attack in the USA itself, including 9/11, has been exclusively Sunni, the Benghazi attack was by Sunnis, Isil are Sunni, Al Nusra are Sunni, the Taliban are Sunni and the vast majority of US troops killed in the region are killed by Sunnis.

Precisely which are these hundreds of deaths for which the Shia forces of Soleimani were responsible? Is there a list? It is of course a simple lie. Its tenuous connection with truth relates to the Pentagon’s estimate – suspiciously upped repeatedly since Iran became the designated enemy – that back during the invasion of Iraq itself, 83% of US troop deaths were at the hands of Sunni resistance and 17% of of US troop deaths were at the hands of Shia resistance, that is 603 troops. All the latter are now lain at the door of Soleimani, remarkably.

Read more …

“One short week ago, for example, Iran launched its first joint naval exercises with Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, in an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. in the region.”

• Doubling Down Into Yet Another ‘March of Folly,’ This Time on Iran (VIPS)

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) SUBJECT: Doubling Down Into Another “March of Folly”?

The drone assassination in Iraq of Iranian Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani evokes memory of the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in June 1914, which led to World War I. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quick to warn of “severe revenge.” That Iran will retaliate at a time and place of its choosing is a near certainty. And escalation into World War III is no longer just a remote possibility, particularly given the multitude of vulnerable targets offered by our large military footprint in the region and in nearby waters. What your advisers may have avoided telling you is that Iran has not been isolated. Quite the contrary. One short week ago, for example, Iran launched its first joint naval exercises with Russia and China in the Gulf of Oman, in an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. in the region.

Cui Bono? It is time to call a spade a spade. The country expecting to benefit most from hostilities between Iran and the U.S. is Israel (with Saudi Arabia in second place). As you no doubt are aware, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life. He continues to await from you the kind of gift that keeps giving. Likewise, it appears that you, your son-in-law, and other myopic pro-Israel advisers are as susceptible to the influence of Israeli prime ministers as was former President George W. Bush. Some commentators are citing your taking personal responsibility for providing Iran with a casus belli as unfathomable. Looking back just a decade or so, we see a readily distinguishable pattern.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon payed a huge role in getting George W. Bush to destroy Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Usually taciturn, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, warned in August 2002 that “U.S. action against Iraq … could turn the whole region into a cauldron.” Bush paid no heed, prompting Scowcroft to explain in Oct. 2004 to The Financial Times that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had George W. Bush “mesmerized”; that Sharon has him “wrapped around his little finger.” (Scowcroft was promptly relieved of his duties as chair of the prestigious President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.)

In Sept. 2002, well before the attack on Iraq, Philip Zelikow, who was Executive Secretary of the 9/11 Commission, stated publicly in a moment of unusual candor, “The ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The unstated threat was the threat against Israel.” Zelikow did not explain how Iraq (or Iran), with zero nuclear weapons, would not be deterred from attacking Israel, which had a couple of hundred such weapons.

Read more …

Guess who the main Democratic donors are. Except for Bernie and Warren, but she’s already in funding trouble.

• To Stop Trump’s War with Iran, We Must Also Confront the Democrats (ITT)

Since President Trump took office in 2017, the leadership of the Democratic Party has overwhelmingly supported the precursors to today’s dangerous U.S. escalation towards Iran: sanctions, proxy battles and a bloated military budget. Yet, now that we stand on the brink of a possible U.S. war of aggression, Democratic leaders are feigning concern that Trump is leading a march to war without congressional approval, and using a faulty strategy to do so. These objections, however, are grounded in process critiques, rather than moral opposition—and belie Democrats’ role in helping lay the groundwork for the growing confrontation.

The U.S. drone assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force and a ranking official of the Iranian government, takes confrontation with Iran to new heights, inching the U.S. closer to the war the Trump administration has been pushing for. While Trump deserves blame for driving this dangerous escalation, he did not do it on his own.

As recently as December 2019, the House overwhelmingly passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2020 with a vote of 377-48. Two amendments were stripped from that bill before it went to a vote: Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) amendment to block funding for a war with Iran barring congressional approval and Rep. Barbara Lee’s (D-Calif.) amendment to repeal 2001’s “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” (AUMF). That AUMF effectively allows the government to use “necessary and appropriate force” against anyone suspected of being connected to the 9/11 attacks, and has been interpreted broadly to justify U.S. aggression around the world. Officials from the Trump administration have suggested that the 2001 AUMF may give them authority to go to war with Iran.

Of the 377 Representatives who voted for the $738 billion defense bill, 188 were Democrats. Just 41 Democrats opposed the legislation. The bill cleared the Senate with a tally of 86-8, with just four Democrats voting against it. None of the Senators running for the 2020 Democratic nomination were present for the vote. Before the vote, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor to brag about the fact that “partisan demands” had effectively been removed from the bill and declared that “sanity and progress” had won out. “Reassuringly, the past few days have finally brought an end to bipartisan talks and produced a compromise NDAA,” said McConnell.

Read more …

Talk about propaganda. Hollow words.

• PBOC Says Will Keep Monetary Policy Prudent, Flexible And Appropriate (R.)

China will keep monetary policy prudent, flexible and appropriate, and continue to deepen financial reforms, the central bank said on Sunday, reiterating previous policy statements. After a work meeting chaired by People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang, the central bank also vowed to prevent any financial crisis, and said it would continue to help small companies seeking financing, according to a statement posted on PBOC’s website. It also said it will continue to let market play a decisive role in the currency exchange rate, but would keep the yuan exchange rate stable within a reasonable range. China’s economic growth cooled to a near 30-year low of 6% in the third quarter, but is expected to meet the government’s full-year 2019 target of 6%-6.5%. The PBOC on Wednesday cut the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves for the eighth time in nearly two years…

Read more …

And there’s more where that came from. The rate cuts Bernanke once labeled “uncharted territory”, he now calls “conventional”.

• Bernanke: Fed Has Ample Clout To Fight Downturn If Toolkit Used Properly (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve still has enough clout to fight a future downturn, but policymakers should state in advance the mix of policies and policy promises they plan to use to get the most bang for their buck, former Fed chief Ben Bernanke said on Saturday. In an address to the American Economics Association, Bernanke pushed back on the notion that central banks have lost influence over the economy, and laid out his thoughts about how the Fed in particular could change its monetary policy “framework” to be sure that is not the case. Citing new research of his own and others at the Fed and elsewhere, Bernanke said the bondbuying programs known as “quantitative easing” were effective in lowering long-term interest rates even after the Fed’s target policy rate had been cut to zero.


Several rounds of QE were rolled out in response to the deep 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession, and Bernanke said bondbuying should be made a permanent part of the U.S. central bank’s toolkit. Similarly, “forward guidance,” or promises about future policy, proved effective particularly as those pledges became more specific and tied to particular goals like reaching a certain level of unemployment. “Forward guidance in the next downturn will be more effective – better understood, better anticipated, and more credible – if it is part of a policy framework clearly articulated in advance,” Bernanke said. “Both QE and forward guidance should be part of the standard toolkit going forward.” “The room available for conventional rate cuts is much smaller than in the past,” Bernanke said, but “the new policy tools are effective.”

Read more …

You can talk about the Framers all you want, but the country has changed a lot since them.

• How the Two-Party System Broke the Constitution (Atlantic)

From the mid-1960s through the mid-’90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Conservative Mississippi Democrats and liberal New York Democrats might have disagreed more than they agreed in Congress, but they could still get elected on local brands. You could have once said the same thing about liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative Kansas Republicans. Depending on the issue, different coalitions were possible, which allowed for the kind of fluid bargaining the constitutional system requires.

But that was before American politics became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades, powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two parties. National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and identity. As the conflict sharpened, the parties changed what they stood for. And as the parties changed, the conflict sharpened further. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats went extinct. The four-party system collapsed into just two parties.

The Democrats, the party of diversity and cosmopolitan values, came to dominate in cities but disappeared from the exurbs. And the Republicans, the party of traditional values and white, Christian identity, fled the cities and flourished in the exurbs. Partisan social bubbles began to grow, and congressional districts became more distinctly one party or the other. As a result, primaries, not general elections, determine the victor in many districts.

Read more …

Nice find, dark humor.

• Bushfire Turns Aussie Sky Into A Re-Creation Of The Aboriginal Flag (DMA)

An amazing photo taken by a woman as fires raged nearby seemed to mimic the Aboriginal flag. South Australian woman Rose Fletcher took the photo at Victor Harbour as the sun rose on New Year’s Day when fires near her home were at their worst. ‘It was taken on New Year’s Day, just after sunrise, when the fires were arguably at their worst, and hearts were heavy and people were frightened – me included,’ Mrs Fletcher told Daily Mail Australia. ‘The rising sun was just a pale disc behind the layers of smoke over the Southern Ocean – and then, for just a few magic seconds, as it moved up through successively dense layers, it formed the Aboriginal flag.’


Towns on Australia’s east coast have been plunged into darkness in the middle of the day recently, while others have witnessed the sky turn apocolyptic red as the fire front approached. At least 24 people have died so far and dozens more are still missing so far this fire season. Authorities predict that number will rise. In addition to the death toll, more than 1,500 homes and four million hectares of land have been wiped out. More than 500 million animals are feared to have perished. Ms Fletcher said she recognised right away the power of the image and immediately went home to share it. ‘So I went home and put it up on Facebook, hoping that those moments would speak to other people as they spoke to me, and the rest is history,’ she said.

Read more …

 

 

 

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Only The Damage To America Is Real

Dec 192019
 
 December 19, 2019  Posted by at 8:15 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  8 Responses »


Saul Leiter Harlem 1960

 

Lots of news outlets labeled yesterday’s House vote to impeach President Trump “historic”. It was. But what was historic about it was not that Donald Trump became the third president to be impeached. What was historic was the way it was done. That was a first.

Because it was not the House that impeached President Donald Trump, it was the Democratic Party. Which just happened to have the majority in the House. They appear to think that this is all that’s needed, which is a big mistake and an even bigger gamble. A gamble on the value and future of the US Constitution and the entire political system.

In an exercise in sanctimonious rhetoric, Nancy Pelosi and several other Democratic House members claim they are the only ones upholding the Constitution, and they’re the only ones who know what America’s Founding Fathers had in mind while writing the Constitution, and what they wrote about impeachment. Maybe someone should point out -again- that the Constitution is a document written by slaveholders. See how that flies with their black constituency.

Then again, none of this is really much different from what their witnesses in the past weeks had to say about Trump’s phone call with Ukraine president Zelensky, the one and only issue that impeachment eventually came to rely on, after years of trying to find something “impeachable”. That is, it’s not about facts, it’s about opinion and interpretation.

Trump asked Zelensky to look into a number of issues. But never said he wanted him to do that in order to elevate his chances in an election which was at that point a year and a half away, and in which Joe Biden’s role was not then, nor is it now, anywhere near assured. While there are many lingering questions surrounding the roles of both Joe and Hunter Biden.

For most of the witnesses called by the Democrats, including 3 “legal experts”, it was for some reason clear what Trump meant even though he never said it. That is a mighty slippery slope. That all three were donors to various Democrats is just icing on the slippery cake. But what remains most important is these were opinions, and they were not based on facts.

 

And we should at least be able to agree that facts are undoubtedly what the Founders meant for impeachment to be based on. They were wary enough of the instrument to set it up the way they did, with the role of the House and the separate role of the Senate, where a 2/3 vote is required. They did not want it based on hearsay and personal bias.

What they did not foresee was what has happened now, they trusted both the system and future politicians to safeguard themselves against using impeachment as a partisan political tool. They were wrong.

Well into this year, 2019, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi still emphasized the need for impeachment proceedings to be bipartisan. In March she said: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path..”

And on June 16, a full two months after the Mueller report came out: “I don’t think there’s anything more divisive we can do than to impeach a president of the United States, and so you have to handle it with great care..”

By September 24, however, again two full months after the Trump-Zelensky call, she abandoned that principle, and it’s not fully clear why, other than “unverified claims of an anonymous whistleblower”. She insisted it was because of the Zelensky call, but we’ve all been able to read there was not enough in that call for either her change of mind or, for that matter, impeachment itself.

 

Nancy Pelosi now hints she will delay sending articles of impeachment to the Senate because she wants to make sure the process is bipartisan. But does anyone want to claim that what happened in the House was bipartisan? If so, pray tell how we can tell it was.

Adam Schiff, like Nancy, questions if there will be a fair trial in the Senate. Does he mean like the one he presided over in the House, with behind closed doors testimony, no witnesses for the other side, and a committee chairman who constantly interrupts representatives from the other side? He may well get exactly that, just from a very different angle.

Schiff and his Democrats have been after Trump since before the 2016 elections, and the number of times they have uttered terms like “overwhelming” and “uncontested evidence” are impossible to count. But the “evidence” never was uncontested. And it isn’t to this day.

Something I don’t quite understand is that everybody knows Trump knew the call was recorded, and many people were listening in on it while it took place, so the entire interpretation of contents of the call as impeachable -he didn’t say it but he meant to- must be based on the idea that Trump is incredibly dumb – or evil?! Even if he would have wanted dirt on Joe Biden because of 2020, he could have gone about it in less “evident” ways than a semi-public phone call.

 

A house divided cannot stand. Yet the Democrats use their majority in the House to de facto say they ARE the House and thereby divide it. Unfortunately for them, this House too, cannot stand divided. It will crumble.

If one values the Constitution, the House, the Senate and the Office of President of the United States, one must treat all of these with the utmost care and respect. Which means you cannot get rid of a president just because you don’t like him or her, because if you do, you open the floodgates and you might as well throw everything America’s politics is based upon, out the window.

You can’t impeach a president based on hearsay, opinions, conjecture or personal interpretations of words s/he said. But that’s all I’ve seen and read and heard.

The Democrats are confident they can come out of this in one piece, and many even think as winners. Donald Trump doesn’t feel much of a threat, and why should he, but it’s been three years of great nuisance that now culminate in Pelosi not even having the courage to go to the Senate with her cherished impeachment articles.

Meanwhile though, the divisions in America have grown so deep it feels like Moses himself created them. And that is the real damage done. You can’t attack the political system, and the presidency, with anything but solid evidence, without doing real damage. Well, it has been done.

If Trump gets re-elected, and I would wager he will be after all the circus, the Dems can only start the wheel again. If a miracle Democrat gets the nod, the Republicans will initiate the same treatment Trump has received during his entire presidency. And so on and so forth until death do us part.

 

PS I stole the title from Michael Goodwin, who used it as his closing line.

PS2 I know there are not really two political parties in the US, but the growing gaping divide between the people is very real

 

 

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Debt Rattle December 5 2019

Dec 052019
 
 December 5, 2019  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein Interior of migratory fruit worker’s tent, Yakima, Washington Jul 1936

 

• The Market Will Need The Fed Again In 2020 (Axios)
• The Repo Market Is Broken And Fed Injections Are Not A Lasting Solution (MW)
• Is Something Broken? Quants Running “Scared” As Nothing Makes Sense (ZH)
• Legal Experts Called By Democrats Say Trump’s Actions Are Impeachable (R.)
• Gaetz Grills Impeachment Witnesses Over Democratic Donations (Fox)
• Judiciary Committee Member: Unfair, Politically Biased Ordeal (USAT)
• The 10 Most Important Revelations From The Russia Probe FISA Report (Solomon)
• Illinois’ Unfunded Pension Liability Rises To $137.3 Billion (R.)
• China Set To Make History With Record Number Of Bond Defaults In 2019 (ZH)
• France Braces For Biggest Strikes Of Macron’s Presidency (G.)
• Uber Faces £1,500,000,000 Bill For Unpaid VAT (Metro)
• Julian Assange in Videoconference: The Spanish Case Takes a Turn (IPD)

 

 

The Fed will never be able to get out. That was clear the moment they stepped in.

• The Market Will Need The Fed Again In 2020 (Axios)

The No.1 risk to the stock market continuing its outperformance next year is not President Trump or consistently weak U.S. economic data or even China, senior analysts at John Hancock Investment Management say, but whether or not the Fed continues to stimulate the economy through what they call “not QE.” What it means: Fed chair Jerome Powell has insisted the central bank’s bond buying program — initiated after rates in the systemically important repo market spiked to five times their normal level in September — is not quantitative easing. But “it walks and talks” like QE, analysts say, and has injected close to $1 trillion of liquidity into the repo market and added more than $260 billion to the Fed’s balance sheet.

The intrigue: The new “not QE” program was “like a fourth rate cut this year,” John Hancock co-chief investment strategist Matthew Miskin said during a media briefing Tuesday in New York. And it has given a boost to the stock market. The big picture: “The equity market has benefited from a super aggressive Fed,” Ethan Harris, head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told Axios during a separate event Tuesday at BAML headquarters. “I mean the Fed basically anesthetized the markets to the trade war escalation this summer.”

Because the Fed was able to mask the economy’s pain from the market, a strong sell-off may be needed to motivate the Trump administration to secure what Harris calls a “skinny” trade deal with China and avert the Dec. 15 tariffs that will hit billions of dollars worth of consumer goods. The converse is also true, Miskin argued. “If things turn more sour because we’re not getting a trade deal or the tariffs go on Dec. 15, the stress underpinning … the market will re-emerge and the Fed’s definitely going to have to be there,” he told Axios.

Read more …

End the Fed.

• The Repo Market Is Broken And Fed Injections Are Not A Lasting Solution (MW)

The Federal Reserve’s ongoing efforts to shore up the short-term “repo” lending markets have begun to rattle some market experts. The New York Federal Reserve has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to keep credit flowing through short term money markets since mid-September when a shortage of liquidity caused a spike in overnight borrowing rates. But as the Fed’s interventions have entered a third month, concerns about the market’s dependence on its daily doses of liquidity have grown. “The big picture answer is that the repo market is broken,” said James Bianco, founder of Bianco Research in Chicago, in an interview with MarketWatch. “They are essentially medicating the market into submission,” he said. “But this is not a long-term solution.”

This chart shows the more than $320 billion of total repo market support from the Fed since Sept. 17, when for the central bank began pumping in daily liquidity after overnight lending rates jumped to almost 10% from nearly 2%. Initially, the central bank rolled out roughly $75 billion in daily lending facilities to arm Wall Street’s core set of primary dealers with low-cost overnight loans to keep the roughly $1 trillion daily U.S. Treasury repo market running. The facilities allow banks to snap up loans by pledging safe-haven U.S. Treasurys or agency mortgage-backed securities with the New York Fed, but crucially without the typical risk-based pricing that lenders regularly charge when funding each other.

Read more …

“..the answer is yes: the market is broken, and you can thank central banks for that.”

• Is Something Broken? Quants Running “Scared” As Nothing Makes Sense (ZH)

It was a year where the S&P put the mini bear market of December 2018 in the dust, and after a dramatic reversal which saw most central banks flip from hawkish to dovish throughout the year…

… the MSCI World index is just shy of its January 2018 highs, and the S&P has returned an impressive 24% (despite the jittery start to December), and stands at all time record highs, despite, paradoxically, a year of record equity fund outflow. On paper, this should have been a great year for investors after a dismal 2018. In reality, however, 2019 has been just as painful for not just for hedge funds, which have substantially underperformed the S&P again and in October saw a record 8 consecutive months of outflows, the most since the financial crisis…

… but especially for quants, which after a relatively solid year, suffered the September quant crash that destroyed most of their YTD gains, and have generally been unable to find their bearings in a year in which nothing seemed to work. It’s also Georg Elsaesser, a Frankfurt-based fund manager at Invesco, is trying to calm down his newbie quant clients as choppy stock moves make life difficult for anyone trading factors, which wire up all those systematic portfolios on Wall Street. “Some of them are kind of scared,” Elsaesser told Bloomberg. “They’re asking the questions: Is something going wrong? Is something broken?” Well actually, the answer is yes: the market is broken, and you can thank central banks for that.

Read more …

All three are Democrat donors who have a deep dislike of Trump. They couldn’t hide that, didn’t even try, instead went on RussiaRussia rants.

But this was supposed to be about the Constitution, not about their opinions. Turley was the only one who stuck to what was on the table.

• Legal Experts Called By Democrats Say Trump’s Actions Are Impeachable (R.)

The hearing on Wednesday was the committee’s first to examine whether Trump’s actions qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors” punishable by impeachment under the U.S. Constitution. Three law professors chosen by the Democrats made clear during the lengthy session that they believed Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses. “If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable,” said University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt. But George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who was invited by the Republicans, said he did not see clear evidence of illegal conduct. He said the inquiry was moving too quickly and lacked testimony from people with direct knowledge of the relevant events.

“One can oppose President Trump’s policies or actions but still conclude that the current legal case for impeachment is not just woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous, as the basis for the impeachment of an American president,” said Turley, who added that he did not vote for Trump. [..] Republicans focused their questions on Turley, who largely backed up their view that Democrats had not made the case for impeachment – although he did say that leveraging U.S. military aid to investigate a political opponent “if proven, can be an impeachable offense.” Democrats sought to buttress their case by focusing their questions on the other three experts – Gerhardt, Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman and Stanford University law professor Pam Karlan – who said impeachment was justified.

Karlan drew a sharp response from Republicans for a remark about how Trump did not enjoy the unlimited power of a king. “While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron,” she said. White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham on Twitter called Karlan “classless,” and first lady Melania Trump said Karlan should be “ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering” for mentioning her 13-year-old son.

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Matt Taibbi: “We laughed at this logic when George W. Bush used it to justify his Mideast wars: “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

Michael Tracey: “This woman was ostensibly called to testify about the legal and Constitutional questions around impeachment and instead ends up going on a bizarre Cold Warrior rant implying that Russia plans to invade the United States”

• Gaetz Grills Impeachment Witnesses Over Democratic Donations (Fox)

Turning to the professors, he asked UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Michael Gerhardt to confirm that he donated to President Barack Obama. “My family did, yes,” Gerhardt responded. Shifting his attention to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, Gaetz noted the educator has written several articles that portray Trump in a negative light. “Mar-a-Lago ad belongs in impeachment file,” Gaetz said, repeating the title of an April 2017 piece Feldman wrote for Bloomberg Opinion. Gaetz further pressed Feldman, asking him: “Do you believe you’re outside of the political mainstream on the question of impeachment?” Responding to Gaetz, Feldman said impeachment is warranted whenever a president abuses their power for personal gain or when they “corrupt the democratic process.”

The professor added he was an “impeachment skeptic” until the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. After the exchange, Gaetz turned to Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan and challenged her on reported four-figure donations to Clinton, Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Why so much more for Hillary than the other two?” he added, smiling. The Florida lawmaker went on to criticize Karlan for a remark she made while answering an earlier question by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. Karlan had told Jackson Lee that there is a difference between what Trump can do as president and the powers of a medieval king. “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son ‘Barron’, he can’t make him a baron.”

Gaetz fumed at the remark, saying it does not lend “credibility” to her argument. “When you invoke the president’s son’s name here, when you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump… it makes you look mean, it makes you look like you are attacking someone’s family: the minor child of the president of the United States.”

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Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., serves on the House Judiciary Committee.

• Judiciary Committee Member: Unfair, Politically Biased Ordeal (USAT)

By now we have all heard the news that President Donald Trump’s counsel will not be participating in the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing Wednesday. As a member of the committee, I believe President Trump has made the right decision. In their obsession and rush to impeach the president by the end of the year, Democrats have rigged the process from the start. I wouldn’t blame anyone, let alone the president, for being skeptical about this unfair process. Closed door secret meetings, selectively leaked details, refusing to allow Republican witnesses, and releasing the Schiff report and witness list right before the hearing all indicate an unfair, politically biased ordeal.


With little to no information provided by Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, right now it appears anything goes. The president was provided little notice and no indication of who would be the witnesses or if there would be additional hearings. This leaves more questions than answers as we head into the next phase of an already tainted process. House Democrats do not seem to grasp that they cannot legitimize such an illegitimate process halfway through. This process has been unfair for the president and the Republicans from the start, with Democrats ignoring the historical precedents outlined in the Clinton and Nixon impeachments. When it comes to Trump, Democrats have created a whole new set of rules. For them, the end justifies the means, no matter how devoid of due process and fairness those means are.

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I don’t have space for all 10, but Solomon is a must read.

• The 10 Most Important Revelations From The Russia Probe FISA Report (Solomon)

Derogatory information about informant Christopher Steele The FBI stated to the court in a footnote that it was unaware of any derogatory information about the former MI6 agent it was using as “confidential human source 1” in the Russia case. This claim could face a withering analysis in the report. Congressional sources have reported to me that during a recent unclassified meeting they were told the British government flagged concerns about Steele and his reliance on “sub-sources” of intelligence as early as 2015. Bruce Ohr testified he told FBI and DOJ officials early on that he suspected Steele’s intelligence was mostly raw and needed vetting, that Steele was working with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in some capacity and appeared desperate to defeat Trump in the 2016 election.

And documents show State Department official Kathleen Kavalec alerted the FBI eight days before the first FISA warrant was obtained that Steele may have been peddling a now-debunked rumor that Trump and Vladimir Putin were secretly communicating through a Russian bank’s computer server. Most experts I talked with say each of these revelations might constitute derogatory information that should be disclosed to the court. On a related note, Horowitz just released a separate report that concluded the FBI is doing a poor job of vetting informants like Steele, suggesting there was a culture of withholding derogatory information from informants’ reliability and credibility validation reports.

News leaks as evidence One of Horowitz’s earlier investigative reports that recommended fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for possible prosecution put an uncomfortable spotlight on the bureau’s culture of news leaks. Since then, a handful of other cases unrelated to Russia have raised additional questions about whether the FBI uses news leaks to create or cite evidence in courts. One key to watch in the Horowitz report is the analysis of whether it was appropriate for the FBI to use a Yahoo News article as validating evidence to support Steele’s dossier. We now know from testimony and court filings that Steele, his dossier and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson played a role in that Yahoo News story.

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It’s not just the Fed, but they haven’t exactly helped.

• Illinois’ Unfunded Pension Liability Rises To $137.3 Billion (R.)

Illinois’ growing unfunded pension liability, which increased by $3.8 billion to $137.3 billion at the end of fiscal 2019, underscores the need for state action to boost funding or cut costs, analysts said on Wednesday. The increase was fueled by actuarially insufficient state contributions and lower-than-expected investment returns, according to a new state legislative report. Illinois has the lowest credit ratings among U.S. states at a notch or two above the junk level due to its huge unfunded pension liability and chronic structural budget deficit.


Eric Kim, a Fitch Ratings analyst, said growth in the unfunded liability is expected to continue as long as contributions lag actuarial requirements and pension benefits are protected under the Illinois Constitution. “For us, what this all speaks to is the state addressing fundamental structural budget challenges,” he said. Earlier this year, Governor J.B. Pritzker created pension task forces, including one to explore asset sales to boost pension funding. Laurence Msall, president of Chicago-based government finance watchdog the Civic Federation, said the state has not effectively attacked core pension problems, including unsustainable costs. “At best Illinois is running in place, while trying to avoid sliding downhill,” he said.

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A normal market phenomenon?

• China Set To Make History With Record Number Of Bond Defaults In 2019 (ZH)

While China is bracing for what may be a historic D-Day event on December 9, when the “unprecedented” default of state-owned, commodity-trading conglomerate Tewoo with $38 billion in assets may take place, it has already been a banner year for Chinese bankruptcies. According to Bloomberg data, China is set to hit another dismal milestone in 2019 when a record amount of onshore bonds are set to default, confirming that something is indeed cracking in China’s financial system and “testing the government’s ability to keep financial markets stable as the economy slows and companies struggle to cope with unprecedented levels of debt.”

After a brief lull in the third quarter, a burst of at least 15 new defaults since the start of November have sent the year’s total to 120.4 billion yuan ($17.1 billion), and set to eclipse the 121.9 billion yuan annual record in 2018. The good news is that this number still represents a tiny fraction of China’s $4.4 trillion onshore corporate bond market; the bad news is that the rapidly rising number is approaching a tipping point that could unleash a default cascade, and in the process fueling concerns of potential contagion as investors struggle to gauge which companies have Beijing’s support. As Bloomberg notes, policy makers have been walking a tightrope as they try to roll back the implicit guarantees that have long distorted Chinese debt markets, without dragging down an economy already weakened by the trade war and tepid global growth.

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The French know how to strike.

• France Braces For Biggest Strikes Of Macron’s Presidency (G.)

Emmanuel Macron is braced for the biggest strikes of his presidency as French rail workers, air-traffic controllers, teachers and public sector staff take to the streets on Thursday against proposed changes to the pension system. French rail transport is expected to almost completely grind to a halt with 82% of drivers on strike and at least 90% of regional trains cancelled, amid fears that the transport disruption could continue for days. In Paris, 11 out of 16 metro lines will shut completely, with commuters scrambling to hire bikes and scooters. Many schools will close and even some police unions have even warned of “symbolic” closures of certain police stations. Shops along the route of a march in Paris have been advised to close in case of violence on the edges of the demonstration. About half of the scheduled Eurostar trains between Paris and London have been cancelled.


The standoff is a crucial test for the centrist French president, whose planned overhaul of the pensions system was a key election promise. The government argues that unifying the pensions system – and getting rid of the 42 “special” regimes for sectors ranging from rail and energy workers to lawyers and Paris Opera staff – is crucial to keep the system financially viable as the French population ages. But unions say introducing a “universal” system for all will mean millions of workers in both the public and private sectors must work beyond the legal retirement age of 62 or face a severe drop in the value of their pensions. The row cuts to the heart of Macron’s presidential project and his promise to deliver the biggest transformation of the French social model and welfare system since the postwar era.

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Does Uber have more lawyers than drivers?

• Uber Faces £1,500,000,000 Bill For Unpaid VAT (Metro)

Car-sharing giant Uber is a step closer to being liable for an estimated £1.5 billion in unpaid UK tax. Campaigners have won an important legal step that could pave the way for the taxman to come knocking on the beleaguered firm’s door. The move is on top of another legal challenge to stop Uber operating in London. Uber has long-argued that it is a platform that brings drivers and riders together, rather than a transport business. This means that it falls to individual drivers to pay VAT on any rides instead of the company itself. But as the threshold for VAT is only for individuals earning more than £85,000 a year, none of the drivers need to charge it. Campaigners from the Good Law Project calculates this has cost the public £1.5 billion in lost revenue so far.


The law team initially attempted to take Uber to court to force them to disclose their tax affairs but the case looked like being too expensive. Instead, they challenged HM Revenues and Customs and demanded the taxman assess Uber for VAT liabilities. HMRC objected, saying its dealings with Uber were commercially sensitive and it should not have to disclose whether or not it is investigating. Today the Court of Appeal rejected HMRC’s arguments and Mrs Justice Lieven said HMRC now had to disclose whether or not they had made an assessment over Uber’s payment of VAT. The case for the Good Law Project is being led by anti-Brexit campaigner Jolyon Maugham QC who said: ‘The more time passes without an assessment being raised the more VAT is lost – forever.’

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Again, Assange -with his aides- is the only person who has abided by the law. All other parties involved have not. That should have a huge bearing on the case.

• Julian Assange in Videoconference: The Spanish Case Takes a Turn (IPD)

The UK Central Authority has had a change of heart. On December 20, Assange is set to be transferred from his current maximum-security abode, Belmarsh, to Westminster Magistrates Court to answer questions that will be posed by De la Mata. To date, the evidence on Morales and the conduct of his organisation is bulking and burgeoning. It is said that the company refurbished the security equipment of the London Ecuadorean embassy in 2017, during which Morales installed surveillance cameras equipped with microphone facilities. While Ecuadorean embassy officials sought to reassure Assange that no recordings of his private conversations with journalists or legal officials were taking place, the opposite proved true.

An unconvinced Assange sought to counter such measures with his own methods. He spoke to guests in the women’s bathroom. He deployed a “squelch box” designed to emit sounds of disruption. These were treated as the measures of a crank rather than those of justifiable concern. The stance taken by Ecuador has not shifted, despite claims by Morales that any recordings of Assange were done at the behest of the Ecuadorean secret service. Instead, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno has used the unconvincing argument that Assange, not Ecuador, posed the espionage threat. “It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadorean embassy in London to interfere in the processes of other states.” The embassy, he argued, had been converted into a makeshift “centre for spying.”

German broadcasters NDR and WDR have also viewed documents discussing a boastful Morales keen to praise his employees for playing “in the first league…We are now working for the dark side.” The dark side, it transpires, were those “American friends,” members of the “US Secret Service” that Morales was more than happy to feed samples to. NDR has added its name to those filing charges against UC Global for allegations that its own journalists were spied upon in visiting the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The allegations have the potential to furnish a case Assange’s lawyers are hoping to make: that attaining a fair trial in the United States should he be extradited to face 18 charges mostly relating to espionage would be nigh impossible. The link between UC Global, the US intelligence services, and the breach of attorney-client privilege, is the sort of heady mix bound to sabotage any quaint notions of due process. The publisher is well and truly damned.

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Simon Kuestenmacher: Map shows that #lightning follows shipping lanes: As it turns out particles in ship exhaust increase the likelihood and intensity of thunderstorms. Really cool fact that I had never considered! Source: https://buff.ly/2B0tcOV

 

 

 

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