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Debt Rattle March 4 2026

Mar 042026
 
 March 4, 2026  Posted by at 9:42 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  76 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Landscape Under a Stormy Sky 1889


• The War’s Going Pretty Well, Ackshully (Stephen Green)
• President Trump, Rubio Warn Iran ‘Hardest Hits Are Yet To Come’ (JTN)
• Trump Makes It Painful to Be a Liberal, Blue-Haired Gorgon (Kevin Downey Jr.)
• ‘ Their Whole Currency Is Lying’ (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Are White Nations Too Far Gone To Recover? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Iran: The Last Stand against Baal (Alexander Dugin)
• Persian Gulf Goes Dark For Container Shipping; No Detour Left (FreightWaves)
• Spain and UK Response to Iran Conflict Shows NATO Weakness and Duplicity (CTH)
• Briitish Muslims and UK Reaction to US Strikes Against Iran (CTH)
• Zelensky Warns Iran War Could Starve Ukraine Of Critical US Arms (ZH)
• European Commission Wants Your Free Speech. X Is In the Way (Adina Portaru)
• OpenAI Rewrites ‘Sloppy’ Pentagon AI Deal After Backlash Over Surveillance (ZH)
• Video Released of Clintons’ Deposition Over Epstein (Lucas)
• Rep. Ted Lieu Spreads Bizarre Conspiracy Theory in Congress Hearing (Turley)
• Supreme Court Delivers Key Victory for Parental Rights in California (Turley)

 


 

Stephen Green: “Carlson on Monday repeated propaganda claims that Qatar and Saudi Arabia caught Mossad agents planting bombs to massacre Arab civilians — something that literally never happened.”

https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/2028617747534430335?s=20

 


 

 


 


“Iran is losing this war, badly,” [..] “Because if they weren’t, the Gulf states part of the map below would be absolutely awash in red icons.”

• The War’s Going Pretty Well, Ackshully (Stephen Green)

“The dog did nothing in the night-time,” a confused Inspector Gregory said to Sherlock Holmes, who replied, “That was the curious incident.” Without glossing over the losses suffered by American, Israeli, or coalition forces — not to mention the civilians targeted by Iran’s terrorist regime — in the first few days of Operation Epic Fury, Iran is so far the dog that didn’t bark. Or, more accurately, tries to bark but not much comes out.Or at least that’s my impression after seeing a nifty map of all of Iran’s attacks, courtesy of a generally reliable X user calling himself Plane Fag. Sorry, I don’t name X users. “I popped over to GeoConfirmed’s website… and it verified the impression I’d got from my OSINT feed: Iran is losing this war, badly,” PF posted early Monday. “Because if they weren’t, the Gulf states part of the map below would be absolutely awash in red icons.” Here’s PF’s map:



The data is roughly 30 hours old now, but the current map — which you can see for yourself at this link — doesn’t look all that much worse. “It’s normal to go after an enemy’s C3 (command, control, communications) to disrupt their ability to pass on orders and co-ordinate attacks, but by erasing almost all of Iran’s most senior military and political leadership in one stroke, there wasn’t even anyone to give those orders even if C3 had been intact,” PF added. “Operating on their own initiative and/or pre-planned strikes, they’re just not massing enough fires to achieve salvo weights that can effectively saturate defenses.”Translated into civilian speak: You’ve got to fire a lot of missiles or drones all at once at a single target to overwhelm defenses, and Iran either lacks the physical ability or the command cohesion to do so.

Roughly half of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers are believed to be destroyed, and that’s a number that can only go up. I’d also add that Tehran announced that it had closed the Straits of Hormuz, but the spice oil still flows. So, yes, the war’s going pretty well. There are at least three caveats, though.The longer the bombings continue, the greater the likelihood of being “one mechanical failure or magical BB away from having an American held prisoner or worse,” as CDR Salamander put it in that column I linked to yesterday. Along a similar line, Iran’s terror attacks (via missile, drone, or direct) are meant to create cracks in the coalition (even such as it is), and Tehran might have some success there.

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin got on the phone Monday with Emirati and Qatari leaders, and according to the Kremlin, both agreed that both men “emphasized the need for an immediate ceasefire and a return to the political and diplomatic process.” (But a caveat within the caveat: That’s to be expected of both Qatar and the UAE. Keep an eye on Riyadh, though. If it starts to waver, then SecState Marco Rubio will be knee-deep in shuttle diplomacy before breakfast.) Finally, there’s the missile/interceptor logic. Does the coalition run out of ballistic missile and drone defenses before Iran’s offensive capabilities are smothered or the regime collapses/cries uncle? All while the clock ticks on the coalition and that “magical BB” gets a lucky hit on an F-35.

Read more …

“The State Department has urged Americans currently in the Middle East to leave their respective countries in light of the escalating conflict.”

• President Trump, Rubio Warn Iran ‘Hardest Hits Are Yet To Come’ (JTN)

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued stark warnings to Iran Monday that the “hardest hits” in its new conflict in the region is still to come if it does not agree to end its nuclear program. The United States and Israel launched missiles at Iran over the weekend, which resulted in the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Iran has since retaliated by targeting Israel and U.S. bases in several Middle Eastern countries.Trump told CNN that he thinks the U.S. side of the conflict is “going very well,” and warned Iran that bigger hits could still be coming.


“We’re knocking the crap out of them,” Trump said. “We’ve got the greatest military in the world and we’re using it … We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.” The president also commented that the U.S. was ahead of schedule in the amount of damage it has caused Iran, but that he anticipates the attacks will last approximately one month. Rubio echoed the president’s comment, stating that the next phase of U.S. attacks on Iran will be “more punishing” than the ones they have dealt it so far.

“The hardest hits are yet to come from the U.S. military. The next phase will be even more punishing on Iran than it is right now,” Rubio told reporters. “The objectives of this operation are to destroy their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can’t rebuild it, and make sure that they can’t hide behind that to have a nuclear program.” The State Department has urged Americans currently in the Middle East to leave their respective countries in light of the escalating conflict.

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“Even back in the early 2000s, I knew better. Thus, my days as a Big Apple Bolshie ended. On September 11, 2001, I became a Republican.”

• Trump Makes It Painful to Be a Liberal, Blue-Haired Gorgon (Kevin Downey Jr.)

As some of you know, I was a big ole New York City liberal for many years. I was really bad at it, and I got increasingly worse. Back in 2003, a white lib friend with a bachelor’s from Brown and a need to downplay zher privilege once “bravely” decried “systemic racism,” while chugging a $10 IPA and occasionally checking its $700 phone (big money in 2003). As zhe spoke, I silently recalled my first racially motivated ass-kicking. I was six or seven years old, growing up in Detroit. They were older, bigger, and there were more of them. Two held my arms while one or two beat the potato salad out of me. Another bigger kid bopped my five-year-old sibling. My helplessness to save him still infuriates me.


I had never even been in a fight. In all seriousness, I thought we had been thumped by members of the Jackson Five. Humiliatingly, one of them was Janet. FACT-O-RAMA! To be a devout libstain in New York City, one must have a tenuous-at-best grasp on reality. A lack of verisimilitude isn’t shameful; it’s a necessity. Logic is a roadblock that your bald, vegan batwanger-in-law can capriole over with a tumulus of Care Bear virtue, though phantom as it may be. Is it just me, or does that last FACT-O-RAMA! try too hard? Let’s continue…Anyhoo, to the well-to-do apparatchik, black folks in the U.S. are constant victims of white racism, and illegal immigrants don’t rape and kill. Yet somehow, I am responsible for all of the terror they totally “don’t” commit.

Even back in the early 2000s, I knew better. Thus, my days as a Big Apple Bolshie ended. On September 11, 2001, I became a Republican. Days later, as I lay in my room, smelling the bodies of my fellow New Yorkers burning in the heap that used to be the World Trade Center, I watched George W. Bush assure We the People that Islam was “the religion of peace.” That’s when I left the Republican Party and became a nuisance of the New World Order. Today, I not only do not possess the delirium to be a leftist, but I am also sickened by those who do.As a comedian, I can read a room like nobody’s business. My weakness is that I assume everyone sees what I see, and that’s not the case.

I assumed everyone saw what I saw, including that:

• states, even red ones, were kidnapping kids if their religious parents refused to fillet their child’s genitalia if the kid so deemed

• people were fired if they didn’t use the selected “pronouns” of the mentally ill incel in the next cubicle

• communism is everywhere

But, man oh man, the prerequisites necessary to be a Democrat today require a level of denial not seen since your friend’s creepy Uncle Gerhard told you the Holocaust never happened. If you want to wave the chimerical flag of liberal virtue today, you have to pretend:

• Hamas isn’t a bunch of evil rapists; they are “victims”
• the mullahs of Iran aren’t genocidal animals who behead women who think for themselves and toss gay men off of buildings; they are “austere religious scholars”
• men in makeup aren’t responsible for more mass shootings than their population would suggest; you are just a “transphobic” conservative who doesn’t understand “bigotry”

• You were told to be “inclusive” to groups of radical miscreants seeking to treat your kids’ genitals like Waffle House hash browns, and render them diced, shredded, and scattered, and it’s groovy to take those kids from your home if you refuse to play along.
• We were informed that trans decepticons were being “genocided” despite the reality that trans people are slaughtering WAY more people than their populations would represent, usually kids.
• And lefty stool samples are defending the trans animals gunning down innocent children

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“I think their strategy, to tell you, was kind of a Muhammad Ali “Rope-a-Dope” where they were going to ride it out.”

• ‘ Their Whole Currency Is Lying’ (Victor Davis Hanson)

Jack Fowler: Victor, your thoughts if we don’t take action because Iran is, despite what happened a few months ago, the bombing of the enrichment and the nuclear facilities, they are constructing new facilities even deeper in some other mountain. But is there any doubt in your mind that if Iran goes unchecked for the next months or years, that there will not be a catastrophe from them having nuclear capability?


Victor Davis Hanson: No, you can’t negotiate with them because their whole currency is lying, and they’re fanatic ideologues. And they have a supernatural view of what’s going to happen, and they’re on the right side of Cosmic Divinity and all of these ideas. I think [former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani in a disputed statement, but I think it was accurate, said that Israel was a one bomb state, and that was the advantage that you got half the Jews in the world in one place, where all you needed was one bomb. So you can’t negotiate.

I think their strategy, to tell you, was kind of a Muhammad Ali “Rope-a-Dope” where they were going to ride it out. And then [President Donald] Trump would be gone in three years, and people would be angry, and you’d get a Joe Biden, or better yet a type of puppet of the Left. But better yet, you would get an [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] or a “squad” member, or a [Gavin] Newsom or [Kamala] Harris, and then you’re home free to get the bomb.] Because they would not do anything. That was the strategy. I think it would’ve worked actually if Trump had let him off the hook. So now the question is the domestic support. When the statue [of Saddam Hussein] fell in April of 2003, I think most polls showed that George Bush had a popularity rating of between 80% and 90%.

There was a controversy over the carrier flag “Mission Accomplished” because there was a little bit of terrorist activity. I was in Washington at the Naval Academy, and I remember distinctly that Chris Matthews, I was watching CNN, who ended up despising Bush, was a big critic. He said, “We’re all neocons now,” on the air. And then I remember Andrew Sullivan, who was sort of a chameleon in his political views, but mostly started out as, I guess, a British conservative, but ended up very left-wing. He was all for it. There was a guy who did little green footballs. Remember that little podcast? I knew the guy. He was a nice guy.

I rode a bike with him once and he was all in, and then all of a sudden the insurgency came. And the American casualties started and everybody adopted. And then there was a Vanity Fair on the neocons that they felt had been the architects, Richard Perle, David Frum, Bill Crystal, and all of them, had adopted, I guess you would call it my beautiful war and your lousy occupation. And the scapegoat they focused on was [former Secretary of Defense] Don Rumsfeld. If you just get rid of Dom Rumsfeld, everything will be okay. What I’m saying is that domestic support will depend on how many American casualties, how quick is it over, and how effective are the results.

If it is over within three weeks, and there’s a revolution and they have some type of transitional government, unlike Iraq, then everybody’s going to say, I was for it all along. Even the ones that were against it. If, on the other hand, they start shooting down planes or they hit an American base or they take out a frigate or something, they get a lucky shot on a carrier, and we don’t get a change and we stop, then everybody said I was never for it.

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” Is a country with a population this uninvolved, this completely stupid, really a superpower?”

• Are White Nations Too Far Gone To Recover? (Paul Craig Roberts)

For decades, Americans have been brainwashed about the virtues of being a Tower of Babel. The liberal-left calls it “multiculturalism” and sings its praises. I have in front of me evidence of the extent to which our ethnic American nation has disappeared. It exists in the form of a notice from a Medicare supplement provider, that is, an insurance company that for a premium will ensure a person against the medical expenses that Medicare will not pay. In other words, Medicare only provides partial protection. To be insured, you have to pay for a private insurance policy.


The notice from the supplement provider lists the languages in which customer representatives can supply assistance. English, of course, and Spanish, America’s second language. Arabic, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, German, Gujarati, Vietnamese, Hindu, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, and Urdu. These are languages in which just one Medicare supplement company can provide assistance. The list for Medicare itself, which I once saw, list 50 or more languages in which it provides assistance.

For a Medicare supplement company to provide assistance in 20 languages for Medicare covered persons is expensive to the company and implies that there are many people in America who speak these languages, but not English. Think about this for a moment. How many countries have a world population in place of an ethnic population that is the basis of the countries name? Does Israel have a world population? Does Japan? Does China, Indonesia?

What multiculturalism does is to destroy nations. Multiculturalism replaces nations with Towers of Babel. This process has gone the furtherest in the white ethnic countries. For example, the red state of Texas faces a vote whether to permit Sharia law in Texas and whether to permit Israeli indoctrination as a mandatory requirement in Texas education. Insouciant white Americans have sat on their butts while the liberal-left stole their country from them and turned it over to immigrant-invaders. Is a country with a population this uninvolved, this completely stupid, really a superpower? Or is it instead a nation that has defeated itself by its own insouciance?

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Dugin aka Putin’s philosopher. “Now the cult of Baal reigns supreme, the cult of the golden calf, the cult of global power, the cult of the United States and Israel. This is a civilization of violence, Satanism, cannibalism, perversion, and pedophilia.”

• Iran: The Last Stand against Baal (Alexander Dugin)

What happened on the first day of the US and Israel’s war against Iran fundamentally changes the balance of power in the world and the rules of international politics. Trump has already said that international law does not exist: ‘What is moral is what I consider to be moral.’ In principle, in the wake of the abduction of Maduro and the establishment of direct external control over Venezuela, and now after the strikes on Iran, with the targeted destruction of the military-political and religious leadership of the country — a sovereign power that was willingly in negotiations with the United States — it is no longer possible to talk about rules, laws, or any norms of international relations in the world.


Indeed, now only the right of the strong, the right of the quick, applies. Whoever strikes faster or acts faster is right. Everything else becomes merely supplemental justification. That is, it is now important to strike a decisive blow against the enemy, break his resistance, destroy his leadership, and strike at his main military and energy facilities. After that, you can frame it however you want, justify it however you want, and spend a long time sorting it out.

I think that now almost everything depends on how long and how decisively Iran can resist. If it continues to wage war even after the destruction of its political leadership, if it does not surrender, does not raise the white flag, and does not capitulate, then this could end badly for the West itself. After all, then everyone else will start acting in exactly the same way, paying no attention to anything and overestimating their own potential regardless of their legal status. This will give free rein to many regional powers, which will do whatever they want. This could very quickly lead to the use of nuclear weapons — perhaps in the Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict, perhaps in others. There are definitely no rules anymore.

In short, if Iran continues its resistance under new leadership, this could have very serious consequences for the West itself, affecting Trump, the US, and NATO countries. But if the situation with Venezuela repeats itself – either the new leadership declares surrender, or the military is simply unable to continue fighting – then the war will be short. If this proves to be the case, then we should expect a similar scenario. There is no doubt that Trump and the West, seeing that this scheme works, will simply turn to eliminate Russia’s main political and military-political leadership as their next move.

Today, it is already clear that we are acting indecisively. Following the same model, we could be struck right in the middle of the next negotiations with Kushner and Witkoff. Perhaps even with a nuclear weapon. Therefore, I believe that the situation is critical for us. We did not stand up for Venezuela or Iran, and China is also remaining neutral. But in such a case, China will be next after us. And then the “kingdom of Epstein” will reign over the whole space of mankind.

I would like to emphasize that today we can already say that we are not just dealing with the liberal West. Liberalism has quickly faded away and disappeared from the agenda. No one talks about liberal values or democracy anymore — all that is in the past. Now the cult of Baal reigns supreme, the cult of the golden calf, the cult of global power, the cult of the United States and Israel. This is a civilization of violence, Satanism, cannibalism, perversion, and pedophilia. And this “pedophilic civilization of Baal” is dropping its masks before our very eyes and going on the attack in earnest.

From all points of view, what is happening now is very reminiscent of the End Times. If we do not find the strength within ourselves to comprehend the situation, we will find ourselves in a catastrophic position. Many insist that “this is no time to panic,” but sometimes it is better to take what is happening seriously than to assume that we will get through it unscathed. Now it is clear that we will not get through it unscathed: Iran is the last thing standing in the way of a direct war between the civilization of Baal and Russia.

If we had enough will and determination (although I have serious doubts about this), we would have to start acting according to the same rules that everyone else besides us is already acting on. That is, we could eliminate the military and political leadership of Ukraine and, without paying attention to any costs, we could solve the tasks of the Special Military Operation. By the way, against the backdrop of names world powers are using, like “Shield of Judah,” “Operation Epic Fury,” and “Seal of the Flood,” I would rename our modest Special Military Operation “Sword of Katechon.” And that would immediately change a lot.

But I’m afraid we won’t dare to do that and will continue with the same old song. And then, I repeat, missiles will fly into Moscow right in the middle of negotiations with Kushner and Witkoff, literally following the Iranian scenario. The civilization of Baal is simple: it repeats the same scenarios over and over again, and they work every time, because everyone thinks that this only applies to Gaddafi, Hussein, Milosevic, Mubarak, Nasrallah, Assad, or Khamenei, but not to themselves. Thus, step by step, the civilization of Baal achieves its goals.

Therefore, either we mobilize urgently, or the situation will become extremely difficult. And if we still harbor any illusions, then there is some kind of profound falsehood at large within our own camp. This is especially noticeable against the backdrop of what has happened in Iran, which is a catastrophe of global proportions. Wonderful people, remarkable spiritual leaders, have been killed. For comparison, it would be like the Patriarch of Moscow, the President, the Chief of the General Staff, and all the key ministers were killed at the same time, along with more than a hundred schoolgirls, innocent souls, killed by missiles. After such an event, is it possible to remain indifferent and pretend that it does not particularly concern us, that it is not our business?

Therefore, if we endure all this and remain silent, then next time they will do the same to us. That is why I am absolutely certain that in the current situation, we should immediately declare a state of emergency, at least at the highest level of government. After all, the situation is becoming simply critical for us.

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“There is no viable alternative to getting containers in or out of ports such as Jebel Ali by ocean if the Persian Gulf is off limits..”

• Persian Gulf Goes Dark For Container Shipping; No Detour Left (FreightWaves)

Ocean lines flee Strait of Hormuz as Iran targets Persian Gulf ports While tanker vessels came under fire in the Strait of Hormuz, container lines were suspending operations to Persian Gulf ports following the joint Israel-U.S. attack on Iran. Media reports said ports in the United Arab Emirates and Dubai’s port of Jebel Ali were hit by Iranian missiles, and that Tehran had attacked at least three tankers in the strait. A fire began at Jebel Ali after an incoming drone was intercepted. While the strait has not been officially closed, several liner operators suspended operations to the Persian Gulf, and ordered their vessels to seek shelter.


Hormuz is the gateway for Persian Gulf energy transport, with about 20% of the world’s crude oil supply passing through its waters. While futures prices ticked up late Sunday, analysts note that 80% of Iran’s oil is sold to China, so it’s unclear what the extended effect could be on global markets.The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre, which monitors maritime security in the Middle East and Indian Ocean region, reported a number of attacks against vessels on Sunday. Shipping was caught in the crossfire after Tehran responded following Saturday’s Epic Fury attack that killed Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other high-ranking government and military officials.

US Central Command on Sunday denied Iranian claims that it hit the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln with a ballistic missile.Maersk, CMA CGM and Mediterranean Shipping Co. suspended or shifted vessel services to the region. CMA CGM also announced an Emergency Conflict Surcharge of $2,000 for 20-foot, $3,000 per 40-foot and $4,000 per refrigerated container. The surcharge covers all Red Sea ports in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Djibouti, Sudan and Eritrea, as well as Persian Gulf destinations. Maersk prior to the outbreak of hostilities said the deteriorating security situation led it to divert the MECL service to the United States and ME11 to North Europe away from the Suez Canal route and around Africa. The carrier had only recently restarted regular rotations through the Red Sea.

Iran-sponsored Houthi rebels in Yemen warned they would resume attacks that all but shut down Suez transits for the largest container carriers since late 2023.“There is no viable alternative to getting containers in or out of ports such as Jebel Ali by ocean if the Persian Gulf is off limits,” said Xeneta analyst Peter Sand, in an email to FreightWaves. “Carriers will instead omit these calls on east-west services and drop boxes at a least-worst alternative port for onward transportation by road. This will cause severe disruption and port congestion at a regional level, but will not have a major impact on a global scale when compared to the seismic influence of conflict in the Red Sea.”Sand noted ex-Asia container rates had ticked up since Feb. 15 as the US massed forces near the Gulf.

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“Once, again President Trump’s lack of trust in NATO proved correct.”

• Spain and UK Response to Iran Conflict Shows NATO Weakness and Duplicity (CTH)

When addressing Greenland’s strategic value within U.S. Arctic defense efforts, President Trump argued that although the European Union and NATO insisted there was no need for American control —promising instead to marshal their combined military strength to defend the territory— he remained skeptical of their assurances. Trump’s remarks were met with swift shock and visible dismay. Pearls were clutched and jaws stood agape.However, it only took a few weeks for a moment of clarity to surface following the Israeli/U.S. decision to strike Iran and eliminate the long-standing nuclear threat. Suddenly Great Britain and Spain tell the U.S. they will not allow American military use of their joint airbases. Once, again President Trump’s lack of trust in NATO proved correct.


This visible example of unidirectional self-interest is happening at the same time European and British leadership are requesting demanding the United States provide the security guarantees for their Ukraine ambitions. The contrast is stark. Concerns about Islamist extremism within the U.K. appear to influence the thinking of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. With a significant number of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries now living in Great Britain, some argue that actions perceived as antagonizing more radical elements abroad could have domestic repercussions within the U.K. That said, the contrast in support is so stark that opposition leadership inside the U.K. are now confronting the British Prime Minister.

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Britain is no longer a Christian nation. Do you see how serious that is? Your world is gone. You will never get it back.

• Briitish Muslims and UK Reaction to US Strikes Against Iran (CTH)

Susan Kokinda and the Lyndon LaRouche network give their perspective on the British reaction to the U.S. strikes against Iran. The analysis has value from a review of the historic relationship of the British imperialist policy toward matters of foreign entanglement and the control mechanisms that have historically flowed from the U.K As a consequence of British government policy much of the Kokinda analysis accurately touches on the root cause of U.K response. However, the emphasis on the modern UK government as the lead of a global network is not always as severe or πcomplicated as the Lyndon LaRouche network would espouse. WATCH:



Great Britain has imported a large percentage of extreme Islamists. As Iran is confronted, and as Israel is viewed as a significant beneficiary to that confrontation, the leftist British government -represented by majority base supporting Prime Minister Keir Starmer- is politically trying to retain stability. Starmer does not want to upset the Muslim population within the U.K. That is a significant political facet undiscussed in the Kokinda review of British response. Additionally, the Trump Doctrine in confronting totalitarian dictators, or oppressive government systems, has always been to support the rise of the authentic nationalist voice of the nation in question.

President Trump has no personal or policy motive to drive the outcome when the authentic rise of the voice happens. Instead, he seeks to remove the anti-American sentiment carried by the former -hopefully replaced- regime. In all of President Trump s prior foreign policy examples we see he focuses on creating opportunity for liberty and freedom, but he does not seek to determine how that liberty and freedom are ultimately expressed so long as there is no negative outcome to American interests. President Trump positions the United States to remain the biggest, most powerful and influential nation in the world.

To the extent that Chinese tentacles need to be severed, Trump policy delivers. (North Korea, Panama Canal, Canada, Venezuela, Iran) To the extent that malicious actors in the world need to be removed, his policy delivers. (Venezuela, Iran) To the extent that American economic interests are represented in all of the outcomes, he forces reciprocity. (Canada, EU, NATO, ASEAN, trade tariffs) America-First. Let each nation compete on equal footing; but let there be no doubt America has the biggest footprint.

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“At a moment the depth of American arms supplies and ammo stockpiles are in question given the rate of expenditure in the new Iran war ..”

• Zelensky Warns Iran War Could Starve Ukraine Of Critical US Arms (ZH)

This isn’t the first time the world’s attention has shifted away from the Ukraine war, but it certainly marks the biggest other conflict to erupt throughout the four-year long war in Eastern Europe. Every time there is a ‘distraction’ – President Zelensky takes pains to try and refocus attention on Kiev’s plight, quite naturally. At a moment the depth of American arms supplies and ammo stockpiles are in question given the rate of expenditure in the new Iran war, the Ukrainians are rather nervous to say the least. Zelensky has freshly warned that deeper US involvement in the conflict with Iran could disrupt the steady flow of American weapons that Ukraine depends on in its war against Russia.


Of course, Ukraine was issuing desperate pleas for more arms and ammo even long before Trump’s Operation Epic Fury kicked off. On slowed arms flows, he said as quoted in WSJ: “We understand that a long war–if it is long–and the intensity of the military actions will affect the amount of air defense we receive,” Zelensky told reporters on Monday, according to audio of his remarks published by Ukrainian media.m Zelensky said he spoke to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz about the issue of weapons supplies to Ukraine, and was in contact with other allies. So far, he added, there are no signs of any delays.

“Everyone understands that, for us, this is a matter of life,” Zelensky said of the arms Ukraine receives through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, a program European allies use to purchase weapons from the U.S. for Ukraine. But then again America’s Gulf allies, who are also desperate for anti-air replenishment, consider this moment a matter of life and death too.WSJ notes further, “Ukraine has said it desperately needs PAC-3 interceptor missiles for the Patriot systems supplied by the U.S.” Further, “The U.S. has been using its own Patriot systems to protect U.S. military bases and the airspace of allied countries in the Middle East from Iranian retaliatory strikes.”

So it seems like Zelensky’s arms wish list will be further delayed – not for lack of money, but simply based on rate of slow replenishment, but mostly Washington’s new conflict theatre priority: Iran and the Gulf. What’s worse is that the war is already threatening expansion across the whole Mideast region, as the conflict spreads to Lebanon. Still, Ukraine has come out in favor of Trump’s strike on Iran, given especially that Russia uses Iranian suicide drones in the Ukraine conflict, and has from nearly the start.

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We need Trump to stop this. He will, because the Digital Services Act will bother Americans too. But what a mess.

• European Commission Wants Your Free Speech. X Is In the Way (Adina Portaru)

Last week, Elon Musk’s X launched a landmark legal challenge against a $140 million fine issued by the European Commission last December under the Digital Services Act, an EU censorship law. The case was filed at the General Court of the EU, which hears high-stakes challenges to EU regulatory and enforcement actions.The commission claims the fine, the first to be issued under the DSA, was for alleged transparency and procedural breaches, all of which X denies. But the real reason the company was targeted is clear: X is a free speech platform, and Elon Musk refuses to implement online censorship in the EU and around the world.


This case, which ADF International is proud to support, concretizes the severe threat to free speech posed by the DSA. The EU law, which came into force in 2024, requires “very large online platforms,” like X, Meta, and Google (platforms with more than 45 million users per month), which operate or are accessible in the EU, to remove so-called “illegal content.” “Illegal content” is defined in line with a plethora of anti-free speech legislation across EU countries, such as in Germany, where it is illegal to insult a politician (Section 188 German Criminal Code). The legislation additionally requires platforms to “mitigate” so-called “systemic risks,” such as “negative effects” on “civic discourse,” “electoral processes,” and “gender-based violence.”

Codes of conduct have also been added to the legislation regarding “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and guidelines on electoral processes and the protection of minors, resulting in 153 pages of additional regulations that were never voted on. Platforms face massive fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover for non-compliance with the DSA and can even be suspended in the EU. The vague terms used in the legislation and codes of conduct are extremely broad and lack precise legal definitions, meaning they are ideal tools for the commission to censor disfavored views. And the commission’s reach extends far beyond Europe through the DSA.

A recent report from the House Judiciary Committee showed big tech platforms face immense pressure from the commission to set their global content moderation rules to censorial DSA standards. This means the EU law is censoring speech not just in Europe, but also in the United States and around the whole world. The case of Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen demonstrates what DSA censorship will look like in practice. After six years of criminal prosecution, Päivi is awaiting a verdict from the Supreme Court of Finland for tweeting a Bible verse. She was prosecuted under the “War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity” section of Finland’s criminal code. Under the DSA, censorial laws like this will become the global baseline.

Since Elon Musk bought X and turned it into a free speech platform, Brussels has been clear about its hostility toward the platform. Former European Commissioner Thierry Breton issued a stark warning in 2023 stating: “You can run but you can’t hide … fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA. … Our teams will be ready for enforcement.” Former commission Vice President for Values and Transparency Vera Jourova added: “Twitter has attracted a lot of attention, and its actions and compliance with EU law will be scrutinized vigorously and urgently.” In this context, it’s clear why the commission gave X the first-ever DSA fine last December. They were sending a message to all big tech platforms about what will happen to platforms that refuse to accept censorship. That is what makes X’s legal challenge so important – they are fighting for the right of citizens around the world to freely express their views online. In this case, X is challenging the centralized powers given to the commission by the DSA, which it argues violate its right to due process and are contrary to the rule of law. The commission is able to set the rules for content moderation, set up the infrastructure, launch investigations, and issue penalties under the DSA, all with no meaningful oversight. If this is allowed to stand, the EU will have the unchallenged ability to police the global public square, with dire consequences for online free speech.

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Question: Did OpenAI -the system-really write it, or was it their owners/lawyers? Ifthelatter, what does that say about the quality of the system?

Here’s what to do: Let OpenAI write two scripts: one in favor of OpenAI, one in favor of the Pentagon.

Let Grok, Anthropic et al do the same.

• OpenAI Rewrites ‘Sloppy’ Pentagon AI Deal After Backlash Over Surveillance (ZH)

OpenAI – which millions of users trust with everything from legal documents to tax returns – is revising its newly signed contract with the US Department of War, just days after it was announced that they would replace Anthropic for use in government systems because the rushed rollout “looked opportunistic and sloppy.” Hours after negotiations collapsed between the Pentagon and rival startup Anthropic on Friday, the San Francisco-based company agreed to supply its AI models for use in classified military operations. The breakdown followed talks with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over how the government could deploy advanced AI tools.


OpenAI initially described its agreement as containing “more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s.” But on Monday, CEO Sam Altman said the company was working with the department to add explicit contractual language barring the intentional use of its systems for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons or nationals. “The AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of US persons and nationals,” Altman said the revised terms would state, adding that intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency would be excluded from the deal for now. So – while OpenAI has likely bought some legal cover with these changes, there’s always the possibility of unintentional use. From a Monday update to OpenAI’s statement on the deal:

“Throughout our discussions, the Department made clear it shares our commitment to ensuring our tools will not be used for domestic surveillance. To make our principles as clear as possible, we worked together to add additional language to our agreement. This language makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information. The Department also affirmed that our services will not be used by Department of War intelligence agencies like the NSA. Any services to those agencies would require a new agreement.

The new language reads: “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information. The Department of War plans to convene a working group made up of leaders from the frontier AI labs, cloud providers, and the Department’s policy and operational communities.

OpenAI will participate and expect this will be an important forum for ongoing dialogue on emerging AI capabilities, privacy, and national security challenges going forward. These updates build on the framework we announced last week and we hope will help create a pathway for other labs to work with the Department going forward.

* * *
OpenAI says it can uphold its own red lines through a mix of contractual provisions and technical controls. The company says it will deploy models via cloud access rather than installing them directly onto military hardware and will keep its personnel involved in the loop. It has reiterated that its technology cannot be used to direct autonomous weapons systems. Altman suggested the company was comfortable relying in part on existing law. “Anthropic seemed more focused on specific prohibitions in the contract, rather than citing applicable laws, which we felt comfortable with,” he said Saturday.

But by Monday, he acknowledged concerns about how AI systems could enable large-scale data gathering.“We shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday. The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication,” Altman wrote in a message to employees reposted on X. “We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.”The updated language would “prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance or monitoring of US persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information,” according to the company.

The Pentagon’s pivot to OpenAI came after Anthropic’s negotiations unraveled over two core red lines articulated by its CEO, Dario Amodei: no domestic mass surveillance and no use of AI in lethal autonomous weapons systems – and would require the Pentagon to seek approval to use it in the heat of battle.. According to the Financial Times, Hegseth sought language permitting the models for “all lawful use.” Anthropic executives argued existing U.S. law could allow mass AI-enabled data collection and pressed for tighter contractual safeguards until new legislation was enacted. Discussions reportedly stalled over terms governing the mass collection of publicly available data.

The Pentagon had signaled openness to revising phrasing that Anthropic viewed as overly broad, and senior figures at the company believed a deal was close. But negotiations ultimately fell apart.Since then, the Trump administration has moved aggressively against Anthropic. President Donald Trump has directed agencies to phase out the company’s tools. The Treasury Department, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all announced they would end Anthropic contracts – with full dis-integration to occur within six months. The Pentagon also designated the company a supply chain risk.

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All 4,5 hrs at the link.

• Video Released of Clintons’ Deposition Over Epstein (Lucas)

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released full video of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimonies about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The depositions for each before the bipartisan panel lasted 4.5 hours. Hillary Clinton was deposed last Thursday. Bill Clinton was deposed on Friday, the first time a former president has been compelled to testify before Congress. Clinton said he first flew on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and took trips to Asia, Africa, and Europe. Clinton said his former treasury secretary, Larry Summers introduced him to Epstein. He said that Epstein was interested in funding brain research and other humanitarian work.


“He knew I was planning to set up a global network to provide lots of AIDS medicine to as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” Clinton said of Epstein. Clinton said his relationship with Epstein ended when the humanitarian team expanded. “A lot of other people who might do better, and who really cared about the work, came forward,” Clinton said. The former president said Epstein “never asked me anything untoward.” He later added, “There was nothing that I saw when I was around him. It made me realize he was trafficking women.”

During the Democrats’ questioning, Clinton was asked if he was aware of President Donald Trump’s interaction with Epstein. “I don’t want to leave the impression, since there was no follow up question, he never, the president never, this was 20-something years ago, never said anything to me to think he was involved in anything improper with regard to Epstein, he just didn’t,” Clinton said. Hillary Clinton was asked how she felt about photos of her husband in the pool at the home of Epstein, which were published in batches of the Epstein files released by the Justice Department. The former secretary of state replied she was not there to provide opinions.

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“Lieu’s rave about the alleged murder of a child made the National Inquirer look like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.”

• Rep. Ted Lieu Spreads Bizarre Conspiracy Theory in Congress Hearing (Turley)

Years ago, Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Cal.) demanded that “Facebook should do more internally to regulate fake news and point out fake news.” This week, he finally made his case for such private censorship. Lieu went full conspiracy theorist during a congressional hearing this week, leaving many gobsmacked. Lieu’s rave about the alleged murder of a child made the National Inquirer look like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In an age of rage, Lieu knows that you must go louder and bigger to be heard above the mob. Facts are now passé and Lieu is known for sensational claims like claiming that “Trump is broke.”


At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Epstein files, Lieu won the race to the bottom with his colleagues in making outrageous, unsupported claims. It was a moment reminiscent of the recent face-planting by Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Cal.) in disclosing the names of powerful men shielded by the Administration in the scandal. (Four had no connection to Epstein). He suggested that Trump not only abused a minor, but that she was later bumped off to keep her from speaking. What Lieu does not inform the public is that his blockbuster disclosure was based on the unverified account of an anonymous man, who worked as a limo driver in 1995. The bizarre account claimed the driver picked up Trump and overheard him on the phone with someone called “Jeffrey” and made references to “abusing some girl.” The driver said that he wanted to pull over and “hurt[] him”.

Driver Dan Ferree has self-identified as the source referenced by Lieu. Ferree reportedly has posted hundreds of politically anti-Trump and extreme memes to his Facebook account, including a recent image of Trump in what appears to be a casket. He has also reportedly claimed that he was stalked by Trump associates. In a defamation case, Ferree would be difficult to pass off as a credible source for a publication. The use of such sources is a familiar tactic in Washington. During the Chandra Levy scandal, politicians and pundits piled on Rep. Gary Condit (D., Cal.) as the presumptive murderer of the congressional intern. The source cited by Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne turned out to be a “horse whisperer” in Dubai who said that he had heard Condit arranged for her murder. (Condit was later cleared in the case).

Ferree is only marginally better than a horse whisperer as a source of Lieu. Ferree told the FBI that he met a young girl who told him she had been raped by Trump and Epstein at a “fancy hotel.” He claimed that the young girl was later found with her head “blown off.” He said that, while the officers at the scene thought it was murder, the coroner later ruled it a suicide. There was no proof of such a case. It appears that Lieu knew or suspected that the source of the allegation was unhinged or unreliable because he later re-posted only two of the three pages of the statement to the FBI. The third page included other bizarre claims about the Oklahoma City Bombing and a drunk Hillary Clinton.

Lieu decided it was best to withhold the third page and the details of a raving, drunken Hillary Clinton and an effort to frame an innocent man for the Oklahoma bombing. It seems that he was not aggrieved that the FBI did not investigate that part of Ferree’s allegations.Nevertheless, at an earlier event, Lieu declared: “Why are Republicans so interested in Bill and Hillary Clinton? It’s because they’re trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children.”

What is striking is how so many politicians supporting the crackdown on disinformation on the right are purveyors of such disinformation. From the Russian conspiracy hoax to the flogging of migrants by Border agents, members and the media have regularly spread false accounts with impunity. It is not considered disinformation if it appears on BlueSky or MS NOW. The intentional omission of the third page of the allegation puts this disinformation effort in a particularly menacing light. This was not some hair-triggered posting that failed to research the underlying story. This was a knowing effort to later re-post the sensational allegation while removing a third of the document that undermined the credibility of the source.

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“What Plaintiffs seek is to force the State to respect their enduring federal constitutional rights as citizens of the United States.”

• Supreme Court Delivers Key Victory for Parental Rights in California (Turley)

The Supreme Court on Monday issued an important order on its shadow docket in Mirabelli v. Bonta. The court granted an emergency appeal filed on behalf of Catholic parents by the Thomas More Society, blocking a state law that barred parental notification that their children had changed their gender identity. I previously wrote about the case after heralding the decision of District Court Judge Roger Benitez, who wrote a powerful opinion in support of the rights of all parents. He wrote: “The Attorney General on behalf of the State of California says Plaintiffs’ lawsuit is “properly understood as seeking a federal constitutional exemption from the California constitutional right to privacy, as applied to gender identity in the school context.” State Defs’ Oppo to Plaintiffs’ MSJ, Dkt 256, at 9. But the Attorney General gets it upside down. Plaintiffs do not ask the State to magnanimously permit a sort of federal constitutional exemption. What Plaintiffs seek is to force the State to respect their enduring federal constitutional rights as citizens of the United States.”


The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed his injunction. For years, some of us have been raising the attacks on parental rights. That is why this order is so notable. I recently wrote about this fight in Michigan, where parents secured the right to sue to defend their rights against the Rockford Public School District. The District refused to inform them of gender identity changes in their children. While it only restores the injunction during the pendency of the litigation below, it reflects a clear notion of the likelihood to prevail on the merits. There remains ambiguity on where individual justices fall on the issues. The parents raised both free exercise and substantive due process challenges. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wanted to go further in ruling on the merits in favor of the parents.

In her opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett rules for the parents, not the teachers, in the case. In her concurrence with the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh, she focuses most on explaining why a view in favor of substantive due process is consistent with the decision in Dobbs. The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented. Justice Kagan decried the rejection of California’s priorities and objected to “throwing over its policies in a slapdash way.” Justice Sotomayor was the only member of the Court who opposed all of the parents’ and teachers’ claims. Without writing a dissenting opinion, she would have denied their application in its entirety.

The decision puts even greater focus on another case. Last year, I wrote about a startling decision in Foote v. Feliciano in which the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled against parents in a similar challenge. Massachusetts parents Marissa Silvestri and Stephen Foote demanded notice of any gender identity change of their child after learning that the 11-year-old child had self-declared as “genderqueer.” The First Circuit dismissed the challenge, holding “as per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children.”

The petition for review to the Supreme Court is now pending. Foote could allow the Court to reaffirm the fundamental rights of parents and, most importantly, clearly establish the standard for review in future cases. The previously stated in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.” It is time for the Court to back up that constitutional right with clear and robust protections.

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https://twitter.com/Lissa4Maga/status/2028645571804729596?s=20 Thiel Bloom Cancer https://twitter.com/ShiningScience/status/2028759204232941763?s=20 https://twitter.com/NextScience/status/2028517198122348771?s=20

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle September 1 2023

Sep 012023
 
 September 1, 2023  Posted by at 8:41 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  35 Responses »


Laurits Andersen Ring At Breakfast 1898

 

• US Getting ‘Money’s Worth’ In Ukraine – Sen. Blumenthal (RT)
• US Congress To Consider Pro- and Anti-Nazi Amendments (RT)
• Heritage Suggested We Form A Ukraine Strategy. Neocons Lost Their Minds (Fed.)
• Living on a War Planet (Bromwich)
• Hungary Blocks EU Military Aid To Ukraine – Borrell (RT)
• Biden Will Use Covid To Rig Election – Trump (RT)
• Trump Reportedly Rambled Non-Stop During NY Deposition (Manley)
• ‘Obama’s Man In Africa’ Under House Arrest As Popular Coup Rocks Gabon (GZ)
• The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are (Lawrence)
• Does BRICS Need Its Own Currency? (Pepe Escobar)
• From One Unapologetic Media Hoax to the Next (VDH)
• New Meanings of ‘Deep State’ and ‘Working Class’ (Matt Taibbi)
• Glyphosate Exposure Linked to Severe Depression and Cognitive Decline (SP)

 

 

 

 

Watters Biden book

 

 

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697198312259006945

 

 

Tulsi
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697174012462514602

 

 

Macgregor

 

 

Hotel Ukraine

 

 

Tucker Portnoy

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military..”

Have we completely lost oversight of how obscene this is?

• US Getting ‘Money’s Worth’ In Ukraine – Sen. Blumenthal (RT)

The US is using Ukraine as the “tip of the spear” against Russia, getting a major return on its “investment” in Kiev without any American lives lost, according to Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. “Even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide, should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment,”Blumenthal argued in an op-ed, published earlier this week by the Connecticut Post. “For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half. We’ve united NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan.

“We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid,” he claimed. The senator’s unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims were made after he visited Kiev with fellow Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican. Blumenthal was impressed by Zelensky’s “magnetic energy” and “resolve and resilience,” and taken by his admission that “Ukraine could not have survived without America and our allies.” “Ukraine is at the tip of the spear, fighting our fight for independence and freedom,” the senator claimed.

Zelensky doesn’t want or need US troops, but “he deeply and desperately needs the tools to win,” Blumenthal added, providing a wish list of more tanks, planes, guns, ammunition and everything else. The US has so far committed over $130 billion in funding to Ukraine, covering everything from HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems, M777 towed artillery, M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Javelin and Stinger missiles, Patriot air defense batteries, ammunition, equipment, and even salaries for Ukrainian soldiers and government officials.

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Obscene 2. Funding Azov.

• US Congress To Consider Pro- and Anti-Nazi Amendments (RT)

Congresswoman Victoria Spartz, an Indiana Republican, has proposed an amendment to the 2024 Pentagon funding bill that would remove the 2018 prohibition on funding ‘Azov’ due to the Ukrainian unit’s neo-Nazi character. Fellow Republican Andy Ogles of Tennessee, on the contrary, wants to explicitly ban the Pentagon from providing intelligence to Azov. The Spartz amendment would “Strike section 8105 of the bill which prohibits funds to the ‘Azov Battalion’,” according to documents posted on the website of the House Rules Committee. It would amend HR 4365, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for the next fiscal year, which begins in October. Journalist Aida Chavez noticed the amendment on Thursday, along with several other proposals by Republican lawmakers, who have a slim majority in the House.

Ogles, on the other hand, wants to expand Section 8105 to ban the US from providing intelligence to Azov, and also ban any aid to the ‘Russian Volunteer Corps’ (RVC). He had previously tried to ban any “funding, equipment, training, fuel, or other support” to “the Russian Volunteer Corps, the Azov Battalion, or any other neo-Nazi militia” in Ukraine in an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). ‘Azov Battalion’ was originally a militia set up by the notorious neo-Nazi Andrey Biletsky after the 2014 US-backed coup in Kiev, that took part in Ukraine’s crackdown on dissidents in Kharkov and Donetsk. Biletsky admitted to several Western outlets that he handpicked their symbols – the ‘Wolfsangel’ rune used by the German 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ in WWII, and the ‘Black Sun’ logo beloved by SS leader Heinrich Himmler.

Spartz was elected in 2020 and represents Indiana’s 5th congressional district. She was born in Chernigov, in present-day Ukraine, and immigrated to the US in 2000. Her amendment is the first time any US lawmaker has attempted to repeal Section 8105 since it was passed in 2018. In late 2019, a group of 40 House Democrats wrote to the State Department describing Azov as a “violent white supremacist” group “that openly welcomes neo-Nazis into its ranks.” The unit responded by accusing them of hostility to Ukraine. Azov has since been fully integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces. The ‘Azov Tactical Group’ is currently operating as part of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, recently visited by President Vladimir Zelensky on the Donbass front.

Several other House Republicans have proposed more Ukraine-related amendments to the Pentagon funding bill. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia want to block any funds from being used for Ukraine. Greene also wants to ban “the conduct of ground operations in Ukraine by the US Armed Forces or intelligence officials of the US.” Paul Gosar of Arizona has proposed redirecting all $300 million from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (Section 8104) to the pay of enlisted service members, while his colleague Andy Biggs wants to delete the entire section outright. Montana’s Matt Rosendale would block all spending on Ukraine “until a border wall system along the US-Mexico border is completed and operational control of such border is achieved.”

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“..even if one accepts that we should be supporting Ukraine to the hilt, it’s fair to ask what the plan is to end the war — and no, “until Russia is totally defeated” is not a serious response, much less a strategy.”

• Heritage Suggested We Form A Ukraine Strategy. Neocons Lost Their Minds (Fed.)

The Heritage Foundation came under fire [last] week from a bunch of politically toxic neocons for suggesting we should prioritize helping Americans suffering from natural disasters like the Maui wildfires over funding a grinding war of attrition between Ukraine and Russia. A radical suggestion, I know. The background here is that under the leadership of President Kevin Roberts, Heritage has been saved from irrelevance by focusing less on what establishment neocon Beltway elites think is important and more on what ordinary Americans actually want. And one of the things they want is for Congress to stop pouring taxpayer dollars into Ukraine. In an op-ed last week, Roberts noted this as part of a pointed criticism of an underhanded White House plan to force another round of aid to Ukraine into a supplemental funding bill that would add money to FEMA’s depleted Disaster Relief Fund (DRF).

Roberts rightly says this is a dirty trick designed to pressure Republicans to support more aid to Ukraine by tying it to aid for hurricane and wildfire victims. Then this week, Heritage posted a couple of ads making the entirely fair point that every American has now sent more money to Ukraine than to the victims of the Maui fires. One of those ads argued that until the Biden administration comes up with a plan to end the war, Congress shouldn’t approve another cent of aid. Reasonable people can disagree about how much support Americans owe the Ukrainians in their struggle against Russia. But even if one accepts that we should be supporting Ukraine to the hilt, it’s fair to ask what the plan is to end the war — and no, “until Russia is totally defeated” is not a serious response, much less a strategy.

This war, like nearly all wars, will end with a negotiated political settlement. Since American taxpayers are funding the war, they deserve to know if our leaders have a plan to end it that doesn’t amount to World War III. As the war drags on, it seems increasingly obvious they do not have such a plan. Their only policy seems to be to keep funneling money into Ukraine with little to no oversight and no strategy to forge a durable peace settlement. But for Heritage to articulate all of this was too much for the neocons. As with one voice, they denounced Heritage and invoked Ronald Reagan, declaring that Reagan is surely “rolling over in his grave,” as both Marc Thiessen and Avik Roy put it. National Review’s Jay Nordlinger went a step further, pronouncing that the Heritage Foundation has become a “moral obscenity.”

Elsewhere at NR — which unlike Heritage has not managed to escape irrelevance — there was an unintentionally hilarious post from Dominic Pino critiquing Heritage’s position on U.S. aid to Ukraine. Pino managed to sum up the neocon worldview in a single line, noting that “not all the money goes to Ukrainians. Much of it goes to U.S. defense contractors, which employ Americans and contribute to U.S. economic output.” Ah yes, there’s nothing like bankrolling foreign wars with no end-game strategy to get the American economy going. Defense contractors are Americans too! Think about it, the Ukraine war is a U.S. jobs program!

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Q: If, as the author here, you realize the Russia SMO was provoked, at what point does the reaction to the provocation become “illegal and immoral”?

The provocation was not just a virtual further eastward extension of NATO, but Ukraine had gathered a huge military force (200-300K) looking ready to invade the Donbass. After killing some 14,000 there over 8 years.

• Living on a War Planet (Bromwich)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an illegal and immoral act, but the adjective that usually follows illegal and immoral is “unprovoked.” In truth, this war was provoked. A contributing cause, impossible to ignore, was the eastward extension of NATO, always moving closer to the western borders of Russia, in the years from 1991 to 2022. That expansion was gradual but relentless. Consider the look of such a policy to the country –- no longer Communist and barely a great power — which, in 2013, American leaders again began to describe as an adversary. With the end of the Cold War in 1991 (the very global conflict that gave NATO its reason for being), the eastward projection of the alliance accelerated dramatically.

Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Soviet bloc, were brought into NATO in 1999; and 2004 witnessed an even richer harvest of former satellites of the USSR: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all either near to or bordering on Russia. Then came the Bucharest Summit Declaration of April 2008: Georgia and Ukraine, the NATO heads of state announced, would be given the opportunity to apply for membership at some future date. If you want to know why Putin and his advisers might have considered this a security concern for Russia, look at a map. The United States has supported Ukraine with copious donations of weapons, troop-trainers, and logistical and technical advisers left to work the interoperable targeting equipment we “share” with that country. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO drilled at least 10,000 Ukrainian troops per year in advanced methods of warfare.

In the war itself, weapons supplies have climbed steadily from Stinger and Javelin missiles to Abrams tanks (whose greenhouse-gas environmental footprint is 0.6 miles per gallon of gas, or 300 gallons every eight hours of use), to cluster bombs, and most recently the promise of F-16s. All this has put fresh wind in the sails of the weapons manufacturers of the American military-industrial-congressional complex. In May 2022, the CEO of Lockheed Martin thanked President Biden personally for his kindness. F-16s, after all, are big money-makers. As for the additional fuel that ordinary Ukrainians require, it is now being sequestered underground by Ukrainian commodities traders at enormous environmental risk.Wars and their escalation — the mass destruction of human life that is almost invariably accompanied by destruction of the natural world — happen because preparations for war bring leaders ever closer to the brink. So close, in fact, that it feels natural to go on.

That was certainly the case with Russia, Ukraine, and NATO, and the escalation that followed. Examples of such escalation are indeed the rule, not the exception in time of war.Think of the invention, testing, and strategic planning that led to the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. In Jon Else’s extraordinary documentary The Day After Trinity, the physicist Freeman Dyson offered a sober analysis of the momentum driving the decision to use the bomb: “Why did the bomb get dropped on people at Hiroshima? I would say: it’s almost inevitable that it would have happened — simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed by that time to do it. The air force was ready and waiting. There had been prepared big airfields in the island of Tinian in the Pacific from which you could operate. The whole machinery was ready.”

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“..Hungarian FM Peter Szijjarto described the EU as being in a “very bad shape” due to the Ukraine conflict, “worse than at any time in the past, in terms of security, economy and energy supply.”

• Hungary Blocks EU Military Aid To Ukraine – Borrell (RT)

The EU has been unable to release €500 million in ‘European Peace Facility’ funding for Ukraine, due to opposition from one of the members, the bloc’s foreign policy commissioner Josep Borrell told reporters on Thursday. The country was later identified as Hungary. “I have to regret that the 8th tranche of the European Peace Facility (EPF) is still blocked,” Borrell said after an EU ministerial meeting in Toledo, Spain. “I hope we will be able to unblock [it] in the next [few] weeks. But this is a problem that is still pending to be solved.” Budapest has been blocking the EPF funds for months, objecting that Kiev has designated a major Hungarian bank as a ‘war sponsor’. The bloc has used the EPF, established in March 2021, as a way to fund weapons and ammunition deliveries to Ukraine outside of normal budgetary procedures.

Following the meeting of EU defense ministers on Wednesday, Borrell spoke of the need to train more Ukrainian troops faster, noting that almost 40,000 conscripts will have undergone training at various EU sites this year, including at the Spanish military academy in Toledo itself. Thursday’s meeting involved foreign ministers, and included a briefing by Ukrainian FM Dmitry Kuleba. At the press conference, Borrell spoke of the need for the EU to support Ukraine “today, tomorrow and always” in a manner that is “predictable and sustainable,” but mainly financial. The Spanish politician again mentioned that he had proposed to the European Commission to create a new Ukraine Assistance Fund, spanning the period from 2024 to 2027, and expressed hope the body would “reach an agreement by the end of the year.”

Borrell envisioned the fund to amount to about €5 billion annually, for a total commitment of €20 billion over the next four years. While Borrell spoke as if Brussels could afford to leverage its entire economic, political, and military might in the service of Ukraine, Hungary has been skeptical of the bloc’s policies. Speaking at a forum in Slovenia earlier this week, Hungarian FM Peter Szijjarto described the EU as being in a “very bad shape” due to the Ukraine conflict, “worse than at any time in the past, in terms of security, economy and energy supply.” The bloc’s commitment to arming Ukraine has made it unable to broker a peace, while the EU’s energy, security, and economic prosperity have been dealt serious blows by the embargo against Russia, according to Szijjarto.

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“..it was Trump himself who continuously renewed the state of emergency declaration used to justify the changes.

He also imposed a nationwide lockdown in March and April 2020, issued national guidelines recommending the closing of schools, and appointed the pro-mandate Dr. Anthony Fauci..”

• Biden Will Use Covid To Rig Election – Trump (RT)

Former US president Donald Trump has claimed that President Joe Biden’s administration will take advantage of the reemergence of Covid-19 to rewrite election rules in order to prevent him from winning the upcoming election. “The left-wing lunatics are trying very hard to bring back covid lockdowns and mandates with all of their sudden fear mongering about the new variants that are coming,” Trump said in a video message released on Thursday. “Gee whiz, you know what else is coming? An election.” “They want to restart the covid hysteria so they can justify more lockdowns, more censorship, more illegal drop boxes, more mail-in ballots and trillions of dollars in payoffs to their political allies heading into the 2024 election,” he continued, adding “does that sound familiar?”

The threat of Covid-19 was invoked by both Democrat and Republican governors to change election laws in 2020. Mail-in ballots were issued to more voters and accepted beyond the usual election-day deadline, party activists were permitted to harvest ballots from drop-boxes, and absentee ballots were accepted without witness signatures. The implementation of these laws varied from state to state, with Democrat-run states typically waiving the most rules. While these changes resulted in an election that defied almost every traditional indicator to end in Trump’s loss, it was Trump himself who continuously renewed the state of emergency declaration used to justify the changes.

He also imposed a nationwide lockdown in March and April 2020, issued national guidelines recommending the closing of schools, and appointed the pro-mandate Dr. Anthony Fauci to lead his coronavirus task force. “To every Covid tyrant who wants to take away our freedom, hear these words: we will not comply, so don’t even think about it. We will not shut down our schools; we will not accept your lockdowns; we will not abide by your mask mandates; and we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates,” Trump continued in Thursday’s video. “They rigged the 2020 election and now they’re trying to do the same thing all over again by rigging the most important election in the history of our country.”

Public health officials are currently tracking the spread of two new coronavirus variants: EG.5, or Eris, and BA.2.86. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer tracks new cases of the virus, its most recent figures show a 19% increase in hospitalizations and a 17% increase in deaths between the second and third week in August. However, only a quarter as many people were hospitalized this month as during the same month last year, and most of those receiving treatment are over the age of 65, CDC Director Mandy Cohen said on Tuesday. Nevertheless, universities in Georgia and Louisiana have already reimposed mask mandates, as have some healthcare providers and other businesses.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1697083418947801265

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Quite funny.

• Trump Reportedly Rambled Non-Stop During NY Deposition (Manley)

Last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James claimed the Trump Organization illegally increased their profits by hundreds of millions of dollars by exaggerating the value of their properties. A transcript of a deposition recently revealed that former US President Donald Trump rambled so frequently throughout a formal interview that a lawyer with the Office of the New York Attorney General griped: “We’re going to be here until midnight.” The deposition was made public ahead of Trump’s September 22 hearing over a state lawsuit that accuses the former commander-in-chief of engaging in business fraud practices that saw his net worth skyrocket by some $2 billion.
The attorney general’s case against Trump indicates the former president, as well as his two eldest sons, and two of his former top executives repeatedly inflated his net worth in financial filings made on behalf of the Trump Organization.

Prosecutors argue that by doing so, it helped Trump deceive banks into extending lower-cost loans that saved him hundreds of millions of dollars in interest. During the seven-hour deposition, Trump rambled about various topics including his “beautiful” marble bathrooms, a reference to the historical figure George Washington, and boasted that he could have done more sales than “ever” during his presidency. When asked how his children’s roles in the Trump Organization changed after he was elected to the US presidency, Trump strayed from the answer and began to talk about North Korea. “I was interested in solving the problem with North Korea, which was ready to blow up, and solving the problems we had with China, who was just ripping us off left and right, and making sure that Russia never went into Ukraine, which they didn’t, under our auspices and, you know, a lot of other things,” Trump said as part of his lengthy response.

When the former president was asked to clarify his answer, he continued to pile details onto his response. “I think you would have a nuclear holocaust, if I didn’t deal with North Korea. I think you would have a nuclear war, if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. The attorney general’s lawyer, Kevin Wallace, then responded: “I’m not going to use my seven hours on nuclear war.” When asked how involved he was in his family’s business dealings during his presidency, Trump launched into another lengthy answer in which he boasted about the properties that the Trump Organization owns. “We have properties that make money, but you can sell for many, many times because of the quality of the property like a Turnberry in Scotland,” said Trump, who complained several times that the lawsuit was “unfair.”

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“Irresponsible and unpredictable governance has led to a steady deterioration in social cohesion, threatening to drive the country into chaos..”

• ‘Obama’s Man In Africa’ Under House Arrest As Popular Coup Rocks Gabon (GZ)

When a military junta arrested President Ali Bongo Ondimba on August 30, Gabon became the ninth African nation to depose its government through a military coup. As citizens of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali did before them, crowds of Gabonese poured into the streets to celebrate the removal of a Western-backed leader whose family flaunted its lavish lifestyle while more than a third of the country’s population languished in destitution. “Irresponsible and unpredictable governance has led to a steady deterioration in social cohesion, threatening to drive the country into chaos,” a leader of Gabon’s junta, Col. Ulrich Manfoumbi, declared upon seizing power. President Bongo’s arrest was met with indignant condemnations from Washington and Paris, which had propped him up as he pillaged his country’s vast oil wealth.

His ouster represented a particularly sharp rebuke of former President Barack Obama, who groomed the Gabonese autocrat as one of his closest allies on the continent, and leaned on him for diplomatic support as he waged a war on Libya that unleashed terror and instability across the region. So close was the bond between Obama and Bongo that Foreign Policy branded the Gabonese leader, “Obama’s Man in Africa.” With Obama’s help, Bongo attempted to fashion himself as a reformist modernizer. He traveled repeatedly to Davos, Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum, where was appointed an “Agenda Contributor.” There, he pledged to accelerate the Fouth Industrial Revolution in Africa by implementing lucrative digital identification and payment systems among his country’s heavily impoverished population.

Bongo’s bio on the WEF website lists him as a “spokesperson for Africa on biodiversity” and “composer of musical pieces” whose interests include “history, football, classical music, jazz and bossa nova.” The self-styled renaissance man managed to hit it off with Obama, kibitz with Klaus Schwab, and press the flesh with Bill Gates. But at home, he found few friends among the struggling Gabonese masses. Ali Bongo rose to power as the son of the late Gabonese autocrat Omar Bongo Odinmba, who ruled the country from 1967 to his death. In 2004, a year after discussing a $9 million image-washing deal with disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Bongo secured a meeting with President George W. Bush. When he died five years later, he left behind a $500 million presidential palace, over a dozen luxurious homes from Paris to Beverly Hills, and a country overrun with inequality.

[..] nothing on the Bongo family’s lengthy and well-documented record of corruption seemed to bother President Barack Obama when he embarked on a regime change operation in Libya ironically justified as an exercise in “democracy promotion.” With Washington’s help, Gabon was rotated into the UN Security Council, where it functioned as a rubber stamp for US resolutions demanding sanctions and a No Fly Zone on Libya in February 2011. Bongo’s cooperative spirit earned him a visit with Obama in Washington four months later. There, while staying at the president’s personal residence, he became the first African leader to call for Qaddafi to give up power. “They could call any African leader with private cell numbers,” then US Ambassador to Gabon Eric Benjaminson remarked to Foreign Policy, referring to Bongo’s staff. “They knew Qaddafi and they knew his chief of staff very well, and we were trying to work through the Gabonese to get Qaddafi to step down without military action.” Benjaminson added, “Obama sort of liked him.”

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“This administration simply has no idea what a sound China policy would look like.”

• The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are (Lawrence)

The Biden regime’s robotic procession to Beijing proceeds apace. Following Antony Blinken’s fruitless visit in mid–June, we have paid Janet Yellen’s airfare for another fruitless visit, and following Yellen it was the same for John Kerry. This week it is Gina Raimondo’s turn. The secretary of state, the Treasury secretary, the chief climate envoy, and the commerce secretary: What is the point of this parade? I cannot but wonder whether these officials are dispatched across the Pacific in descending order of competence. Raimondo, who previously flopped as governor of Rhode Island—except for her plan to cut civil service pensions, an unfortunate success—is mediocrity made flesh. The Chinese must be wondering, with chagrin or amusement or both, who the Biden regime will next send their way.

The assignment in all these cases is the same: It comes down to “two seemingly contradictory responsibilities,” as The New York Times’s Ana Swanson put it in a curtain-raiser last week. She described “a mandate to strengthen U.S. business relations with Beijing while also imposing some of the toughest Chinese trade restrictions in years.” This is succinct, although we can live without the “seemingly.” Proposing to conduct routine business while sabotaging China’s competitive position in advanced technologies is prima facie a ridiculous idea. But The Times must have its “seemingly,” because it is imperative we pretend the Biden regime thinks sensibly and means well in its relations with the People’s Republic.

Blinken got nothing done, Yellen got nothing done, Kerry got nothing done, and in Raimondo’s case it is hopeless. The final item on her itinerary is a visit to Disneyland in Shanghai, and you have to credit the secretary’s scheduler for the parting reference to dreams and fantasy. An English friend observes that we Americans are doing a lot of blinkin’ and yellin’ across the Pacific these days. Fair enough, but I think it is more of the former than the latter for the time being. This administration simply has no idea what a sound China policy would look like.

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It’s not so easy. But the euro proves this is not true: “A currency has to be issued by a sovereign government.”

• Does BRICS Need Its Own Currency? (Pepe Escobar)

Right at the heart of fervent discussions are the merits of designing a new BRICS currency. Brazilian economist Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., a former IMF director who was deeply involved with BRICS from 2007 to 2015, has noted how a reserve currency discussion among the original five members was already too difficult. With 11, even more so. A currency has to be issued by a sovereign government. The indispensable Michael Hudson has cut to the chase to focus on what President Putin stressed in the summit in Johannesburg: what is needed is a means of settlement among Central Banks to keep in check the imbalances of trade and investment in their balance of payments. That implies no BRICS supra-national gold backed currency.

Prof. Hudson has observed that, “nobody uses gold as a currency. You don’t go to the grocery store or you don’t buy stocks and bonds or even houses with gold. You’re not going to be able to do it with anything like a BRICS currency within the future.” So the possible “BRICS currency” on a – distant? – future will be “only a narrow currency that only governments can spend for each other, and it’s created on a computer. It’s not anything that you can hold in your pocket to spend.” Michael Kumhof, a senior advisor for the Bank of England, adds a few more elements: “A currency does not need to be issued by a single state, instead its issuance can be delegated by a group of states to a common institution, see the ECB [European Central Bank]. And while that currency would be unlikely to be used by people to buy a coffee (although who knows, given enough time), it could be used by corporations for invoicing in cross-border trade.”

Kumhof projects a different future: “Imagine if 50-100 countries joined BRICS, some of them with pretty small, marginal currencies. They might appreciate being able to invoice and settle in a strong common currency rather than only having a choice between USD and, say, RMB. Not to mention the fact that if the Chinese want to keep some of their capital controls (good idea for now, I think), the RMB could not really fully replace the USD in such transactions. A BRICS currency would not be subject to such restrictions. This BRICS bank would buy up bonds of member countries according to some quota, and then issue a common currency against it, with all its gains and losses shared by member governments.

That could create an arbitrarily large amount of liquidity (and firepower for BRICS) without requiring any debt to do so, in fact massively reducing debt while doing so. And of course I agree that this would need to be supplemented by a bancor-type arrangement to clear cross-country imbalances.” What’s certain for now is that at the heart of what’s coming next will be an enhanced role for the New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS bank, headquartered in Shanghai and now presided by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

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“Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.”

• From One Unapologetic Media Hoax to the Next (VDH)

From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.” When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth? Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time? Not at all. Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.” The country then wasted another year.

The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Donald Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens—given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent—to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid. On that accusation Trump was impeached. Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it. Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling. And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and Rep. Adam Schiff. The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Joe Biden, who had actually committed them.

Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop. The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop. Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens. The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Donald Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign. No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump. For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.

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“..the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.”

• New Meanings of ‘Deep State’ and ‘Working Class’ (Matt Taibbi)

DEEP STATE: In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage: During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.

This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast’s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state.” Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories…”

The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement. Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy. How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then.

Drake answered he was reading “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry” by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies,” inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications. On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years.

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Still in use. Insane.

• Glyphosate Exposure Linked to Severe Depression and Cognitive Decline (SP)

A new peer-reviewed study released by a group of scientists in Taiwan has revealed an astonishingly strong link between severe depression, cognitive decline and exposure to the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate. The study was fully published last Tuesday in the highly respected Elsevier Journal, Environmental Research, and was met with silence by the manufacturers of glyphosate-based herbicides such as Bayer/Monsanto, who produce the infamous weedkiller Roundup. The study authors stated that they: “conducted analyses on existing data collected from 1532 adults of the 2013–2014 U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to explore the possible relationship between glyphosate exposure and cognitive function, depressive symptoms, disability, and neurological medical conditions.”

“Our study used a cohort representative of the U.S. adult general population and found a significant negative correlation between urinary glyphosate levels and cognitive function test scores. Additionally, our findings suggest that the odds of having severe depressive symptoms were significantly higher than having no symptoms in individuals with higher glyphosate levels, as measured by the PHQ-9,” the scientists continued. The NHANES is a biennial nationwide survey that recruits a representative sample of the population. The study population had a mean age (SD) of 48.15 (18.32) years and a mean BMI (SD) of 29.15 (7.25) kg/m2. The majority of participants were women (51.5%), while the most common ethnicity was non-Hispanic white (47.1%). Regarding socioeconomic status, 53.7% of participants reported a household income of ≥ $4500 per year. Additionally, 37.2% of participants had a body mass index of ≥30 kg/m2. The proportion of individuals with detectable levels of glyphosate was 80.4%.

“Because many of the key neurological system questionnaires used to assess neurological function in NHANES are only available to adults, we restricted our study population to those 18 years of age or older,” the scientists added. “In conclusion, our study provides important evidence of an association between urinary glyphosate levels and adverse neurological outcomes in a representative cohort of U.S. adult population. Specifically, we observed lower cognitive function scores, greater odds of severe depressive symptoms, and increased risk of serious hearing difficulty in individuals with higher glyphosate exposure,” the scientists concluded.

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Moore

 

 

 

 

Red crab
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697266961934414091

 

 

Shrimp
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697299523020705853

 

 

Dogs play
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697288483096678738

 

 

Italian music
https://twitter.com/i/status/1697312042942697983

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 30 2022

Nov 302022
 
 November 30, 2022  Posted by at 9:20 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  35 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Coffee maker 1943

 

• Twitter Stops Enforcing COVID-19 Misinformation Policy (ZH)
• ‘Negative Efficacy’ Should Have Stopped COVID Vaccine Recommendations (ET)
• 12 Ways To Hold Big Pharma Accountable For Covid Evils (Fed.)
• A Look from Inside – The Fauci Deposition
• Elon Musk’s Twitter Is A Monster Of The Left’s Own Making (QTR)
• Musk Says Exposé of Twitter’s ‘Free Speech Suppression’ Coming ‘Soon’ (ET)
• Kremlin Outlines Conditions For Ukraine Talks (RT)
• NATO Says ‘Door is Open’ for Ukraine Membership….But (Celente)
• EU Fails To Agree On Russian Oil Price Cap As Full Ban Looms (ZH)
• Rand Paul Calls Out Complete Lack Of Oversight On Ukraine Aid (SN)
• The Four Fuckeries (Jim Kunstler)
• Will The US Try To Pull Off A “Grenada” In Serbia? (Saker)
• US Paralyzed By Islamic Republic Of Iran’s Strategic Swing (Escobar)
• Apple Turns Off China Protest Communication Tool (SN)
• SBF Doesn’t Know What Happened To His Twitter Stake (Axios)

 

 

 

 

Actual scientists are speaking out. Watch. “Most of them fall asleep crying.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597663704044408832

 

 

 

 

Finland PM Marin Sanna visits New Zealand.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1597825029324296192

 

 

 

 

A good step, but only step no. 1. You will have to address the lives lost due to censorship of for instance doctors, on top of the whole Pfizer/Fauci/White House/EU terror. Twitter is complicit in this.

• Twitter Stops Enforcing COVID-19 Misinformation Policy (ZH)

Twitter will no longer enforce its Covid-19 misinformation policy, under which users who deviated from prevailing establishment narratives frequently had their accounts locked or suspended. The longstanding policy did not apply to misinformation from government officials, who regularly lied about things such as transmission, masks, vaccine efficacy, side effects, or any of the other ‘science’ which turned out to be patently false. Twitter did not officially announce the change, rather, the company added a note to a page on its website outlining its Covid-19 policy. “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” reads the note, which follows a line that still reads: “As the global community faces the COVID-19 pandemic together, Twitter is helping people find reliable information, connect with others, and follow what’s happening in real time.”

What’s more, Sky News reports that the company’s Covid-19 ‘misleading information’ policy was nuked, which showed that the company operated on a strike system in which those who had a label added to their tweets were given one strike, while those with deleted tweets were given two strikes. Users with two to three strikes would have a 12-hour lockout, while those with four strikes were permanently suspended. “The platform suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed nearly 98,000 pieces of content for violating its COVID misinformation policy between January 2022 and September 2022, according to information published by Twitter. The site also reduced the visibility of tweets or accounts believed to be in violation of the policy by stopping tweets or retweets from those accounts appearing in certain parts of Twitter, displaying their replies in lower positions in conversations and excluding their tweets or account from recommendations on the site.” -Sky News

Of note, half of Twitter’s content moderation, human rights and communications teams were laid off when new owner Elon Musk took over. Hundreds more left after Musk issued an ultimatum to staff requiring them to sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave.


Twitter reports that since January of 2020, 11.72M accounts were “challenged,” 11,230 accounts were suspended, and 97,674 pieces of content were “removed.”

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Talk about sliding scales. Not even when we knew the mRNA was endangering and killing people, did we stop.

• ‘Negative Efficacy’ Should Have Stopped COVID Vaccine Recommendations (ET)

It is a well known fact that COVID vaccine effectiveness wanes quickly as time goes on; this is confirmed by countless studies. Although the official narrative for COVID-19 vaccines nowadays only emphasizes its efficacy on protection against ICU admission and death rates, it actually implies the indisputable fact that vaccines don’t protect, contrary to their design, against infection or even symptomatic infection, especially after the emergence of various Omicron variants. Even the protection two shots offers against hospitalization drops to about 40 percent after less than a year. It’s actually looking worse for protection against severe symptoms, as efficacy rates seem to drop into the negatives about five months into full vaccination.


When a vaccine’s efficacy drops into the negatives, it means that vaccination actually elevates the risks of hospitalization and severe diseases rather than reducing the risks. In simple terms, it does more harm than good when the efficacy is negative. During the time prior to the pandemic, any vaccine with an efficacy less than 50 percent would be regarded as a poor product. When a product shows negative efficacy, it should be banned. It seems that the pandemic isn’t only bad for our health, but also is tugging at our common sense.

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No room for all twelve here.

• 12 Ways To Hold Big Pharma Accountable For Covid Evils (Fed.)

What is the common denominator between the pharmaceutical companies, the public health bureaucracy, medical associations, the corporate media, and Big Tech companies when it comes to censorship and medical misinformation? Money, of course. According to Statista, the pharmaceutical and medical industry spent $5.6 billion on U.S. television advertising in 2021, second only behind the life and entertainment industry at $10.1 billion. For reference, total U.S. TV ad spending is expected to exceed $68 billion in 2022. According to eMarketer, pharmaceutical and health care companies combined spent an estimated $9.5 billion on digital media in 2020, with 56 percent going toward search advertising, dominated by Google and Facebook, which have aggressively censored medical information that deviated from the official public health narrative.

This accounted for about 7.1 percent of all U.S. digital ad spending. The pharma industry pays, in the form of user fees, for 75 percent of the FDA’s drug review budget, according to Forbes, and 45 percent of its overall budget. One investigation showed that 40 of 107 physician advisers on the FDA committees examined “received more than $10,000 in post hoc earnings or research support from the makers of drugs that the panels voted to approve, or from competing firms.” According to an analysis by the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has numerous conflicts of interest, including openly accepting private gifts through the CDC Foundation, accepting supposedly “prohibited” donations, and “automatic” conflict of interest waivers for advisory committee members.

In 2010, the CDC inspector general noted a “systemic lack of oversight” of its ethics program. The CDC uses taxpayer money to develop patents and then receives money from pharma companies in the form of licenses and royalties. The NIAID, headed by Fauci, also accepts donations, such as a $100 million pledge by Bill Gates for work on gene therapies. Individual public health officials and scientists, including Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, receive royalties on patents used by the industry, teaching hospitals accept industry donations, and doctors accept “consulting fees,” and other travel and meals payments from pharma companies when they promote their products.

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Strange story: a 7-hour Fauci deposition, and absolute crickets from the media.

Jim Hoft and attorney John Burns were present at the deposition. Excellent read.

• A Look from Inside – The Fauci Deposition

Here are some observations and highlights from the Fauci deposition: ** Fauci is a skillful liar. As we have seen now for months in his public comments, he lies when he feels he can get away with it or when he feels there will be no meaningful consequences. ** Fauci frequently lied unless and until he was confronted with alternate facts. For example, he claimed he really wasn’t familiar with Ralph Baric (creator of the COVID virus) or Peter Daszak (who brokered Fauci’s NIAID grant money to the Chinese biolab in Wuhan), until he was confronted with evidence that his own chief of staff emailed him describing Daszak and Baric as being part of Fauci’s team! ** Fauci claimed that he had no knowledge that his communications team did not coordinate with social media companies to stop “misinformation and disinformation” until he was forced to admit that he actually did know of certain instances of coordination.

** Fauci continued to push the now-debunked assertion that COVID-19 was a naturally occurring virus. ** Fauci said disinformation and misinformation (information he disagrees with) puts lives at risk. ** Fauci refused to define “gain of function” research saying it was too broad of a term to define. ** FUN FACT: until VERY recently, Fauci’s daughter worked for Twitter. ** FUN FACT: Fauci is a hypochondriac. In a bizarre and stunning segment during the deposition, Fauci blew off some of his frustration on the poor court reporter. The court reporter transcribing the deposition sneezed, and Fauci stopped the deposition and scolded the court reporter: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU??? Do you have some sort of respiratory illness, because in the era of COVID, I’m concerned about being near you.” Court Reporter: “I’m not sick, I just have allergies. I can wear a mask though.” Fauci: “Ok. Thank you, because the last thing I want is to get COVID. [notably, (1) Fauci himself did not wear a mask at any point during the deposition, and (2) he appeared to be several feet away from the court reporter].

** FUN FACT: in another Fauci hypochondria spasm, Fauci conspicuously mean-mugged Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry after Landry sneezed into his suit coat jacket. ** Gamesmanship. Whenever introduced to a difficult topic, he dishonestly refused to define key terms so he could avoid being pinned down and held accountable. For example, when discussing the topic of “gain of function” research, he refused to acknowledge what the term meant, objecting that it was a term so broad it could not be defined. ** Fauci repeatedly claimed that he “couldn’t recall” or “couldn’t remember,” and attempted to bolster these incredible statements by appealing to the volume of emails he would receive or issues or studies that would come across his desk. This is simply not credible for nearly all of such statements, because the incidents in question were either recent or within the past three years, and they were all highly politically charged.

[..] ** Other Fauci deceit tactics: throwing subordinates under the bus. Fauci is a famous survivor among bureaucrats. One way he has survived this long is by only taking credit for wins and pawning off losses on hapless subordinates. This trend continued in his deposition, in which he brazenly argued that, while he is the head of the NIAID and its $6 billion dollar budget, he repeatedly didn’t have any knowledge about what his immediate direct reports were doing right under his nose. Fauci supports accountability, so long as he has a subordinate to sacrifice.

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“The social media platform had been the topic of political discussions about censorship, but no one had really done anything about it.”

• Elon Musk’s Twitter Is A Monster Of The Left’s Own Making (QTR)

I don’t believe Musk about everything, as my long-time followers know, but I do believe him when he says the platform has become more popular since he took it over. Not only is it more entertaining than its ever been, it’s simply a nice feeling not to have to run my Tweets over in my head before publishing them, thinking: “What would some hyper left-wing hipster in a beret in an office in San Francisco working a 4 hour work week as a content moderator think of what I’m about to post?” But this article isn’t just for those who are enjoying Twitter’s re-birth. More importantly, it’s for those who are having emotional meltdowns over it. What these users, former users, advertisers and general fragile individuals need to understand is that Elon Musk buying Twitter never even happens without an environment that creates the impetus for it to take place.

Putting Musk’s actual motives aside (I have often wondered if he actually wanted to buy Twitter when it came down to brass tacks), he projected publicly that his interest in taking a stake in the company was because they were actively suppressing free speech. Soon, a public discussion about Twitter’s censorship – which had kicked off years prior when Tim Pool publicly skewered head Twitter censor Vijaya Gadde on Joe Rogan’s podcast – was on the table. The social media platform had been the topic of political discussions about censorship, but no one had really done anything about it. Nobody made drastic moves to affect change. And love him or hate him, that’s exactly what Elon Musk did. The impetus for Musk to throw his hat in the ring on the discussion wasn’t just run-of-the-mill moderation issues, either. It was, instead, an incessant and burning need to eliminate content that Twitter didn’t view as favorable to its political leanings.

No matter what side of the aisle you’re on politically, it’s tough to push back against the idea that conservatives were targeted for suspension disproportionately on the platform. Furthermore, legitimate news stories that otherwise would have been worthy of Pulitzer Prizes – like the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story – were actively blackballed from the platform and users who discussed them risked being suspended or banned. These are nearly the very same actions that Beijing takes on Chinese social media when a story or narrative gets out that isn’t stamped with the government’s approval. Now, it looks as though we’re going to find out exactly what was going on behind the scenes at Twitter when the decision to actively censor a major story that could have had an impact on the 2020 election was made. And I don’t care who is running the platform, that type of transparency is sorely needed.

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This goes back to the lives lost to mRNA. Let’s see you do it.

• Musk Says Exposé of Twitter’s ‘Free Speech Suppression’ Coming ‘Soon’ (ET)

Elon Musk said Monday that Twitter’s internal files on the company’s “free speech suppression” will be revealed “soon,” raising expectations that light will be shed on the circumstances around Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post’s explosive story that exposed information on a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” Musk said in a post late Monday. Critics have long held that Twitter has used vague standards to censor or suspend accounts and that the ones targeted are predominantly those expressing conservative views. Twitter has denied any bias in its actions, repeatedly insisting it is simply following its content moderation policies.

Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post published an article that allegedly detailed meetings President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had with a Ukrainian energy firm before then-Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainian government officials to fire a prosecutor probing the company. The story was seen by Biden’s political opponents as evidence of corruption and the news quickly spread across Twitter, prompting the social media firm to start removing links to the article and, for a period of time, suspending the New York Post’s Twitter account. Conservatives saw Twitter’s actions in this regard as evidence of the company’s pro-Biden, anti-Trump bias. Twitter said at the time that it was simply enforcing its rules on hacked materials, which prohibit distribution of information that is obtained through hacking.

Musk in April spoke out in opposition to Twitter’s decision to temporarily suspend New York Post’s Twitter account. “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” Musk said in April, responding to a post about the Hunter Biden laptop story. Musk, who took over Twitter in late October, has vowed to make the platform into a politically unbiased bastion of free speech. He said in an open letter following his acquisition of Twitter that he bought it because “it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.” “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society,” Musk added.

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“Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky emphasized that “there will be no Minsk-3 [agreement], which Russia would violate right after sealing it.”

Of course Zelensky knows full well Russia didn’t violate Minsk 1 and 2. Ukraine did. And US.

• Kremlin Outlines Conditions For Ukraine Talks (RT)

Peace negotiations could start between Russia and Ukraine if Moscow sees genuine “political will” on the part of Kiev to engage in dialogue, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has said. Earlier this month, he noted that the Ukrainian leadership seemed reluctant to sit down for talks at present. When asked by Russian journalists on Tuesday whether there are any preconditions for any potential dialogue to begin between Moscow and Kiev, Peskov said: “It has to be political will, readiness to discuss those Russian demands which have been known for long.” Speaking via video-link during the G20 summit in Indonesia’s Bali in mid-November, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky emphasized that “there will be no Minsk-3 [agreement], which Russia would violate right after sealing it.”

The Ukrainian head of state was referring to the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements brokered by Germany and France back in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The accords, among other things, envisaged special status for Donetsk and Lugansk regions within the Ukrainian state. Russian President Vladimir Putin cited Kiev’s failure to implement the agreements as one of the reasons for the start of Moscow’s military campaign against its neighbor in late February 2022. Commenting on Zelensky’s remarks at the G20 summit, Peskov argued at the time that they “absolutely confirm” Kiev’s unwillingness to engage in talks. Addressing leaders in Bali, the Ukrainian head of state proposed ten steps that, in his view, would lead to peace. Among the key points of his plan is the complete withdrawal of Russian forces from all Ukrainian territories and respect for the country’s borders drawn up in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Moscow claims some of those regions, most notably Crimea, as its own, following referendums it had held there. It came shortly after The Washington Post reported in early November that the Biden administration had privately asked Zelensky to signal willingness to hold talks with Russia, if only just for show. Washington was reportedly concerned that Kiev’s irreconcilable position could see support from some of its Western allies dwindle amid what anonymous White House officials described as a growing “Ukraine fatigue.” The article claimed that Washington was not serious about getting Kiev to negotiate, and only sought to ensure that weapons and other aid kept flowing from as many nations as possible.

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Escalation tactics. Anytime it’s clear Russia is winning, they bring in heavier weaponry. Forcing Russia to follow suit. Same with dangling NATO membership in front of Zelensky. The war must go on.

• NATO Says ‘Door is Open’ for Ukraine Membership….But (Celente)

Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, dangled the possibility that Ukraine may someday, in the future, join the Alliance and benefit from the protection of Article 5 that, when distilled, says: an attack on one, is an attack on all. He made the comment during a two-day summit in Bucharest where Ukraine’s electric grid and Russia’s relentless air campaign took center stage. The Russian strikes have left millions in the dark as temperatures hit 19 degrees in Kyiv. “NATO’s door is open,” he said, according to The New York Times. But he noted that the calvary is not coming during this conflict. “NATO will continue to stand for Ukraine as long as it takes. We will not back down.” In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, announced that Kyiv filed a new, expedited application to join NATO in light of Russian President Vladimir Putin annexing four occupied regions in the country.

Zelensky, correctly said in a statement that Finland and Sweden benefited from an accelerated accession into the Alliance. (But neither of those countries are members.) “De facto, we have already proven interoperability with the Alliance’s standards, they are real for Ukraine — real on the battlefield and in all aspects of our interaction,” Zelensky said. “Today, Ukraine is applying to make it de jure. Under a procedure consistent with our significance for the protection of our entire community. Under an accelerated procedure,” the statement continued. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, killed the idea and said, the issue should be taken up “at a different time.”

NATO’s refusal to accept Ukraine into the fold is understandable because it would assure the beginning of WWIII. But it has still been a sensitive subject in Kyiv. Last summer, Ihor Zhovkva, the deputy chief of staff for Zelensky, said in an interview that Kyiv was told by NATO that it is “not a member because we do not want you.” “NATO is telling us we are not giving you anything,” he said in an interview with a local news outlet in Kyiv, according to Bloomberg. Some could argue that Ukraine was the victim misleading public statements from the U.S. and NATO prior to the invasion. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Stoltenberg said Moscow would be met with a“forceful” response if there was an invasion. Blinken went further and said the U.S. has a “sacred obligation” to defend its allies.

Under Article 10 of the 1949 Washington Treaty, NATO has the right to invite any willing European country into the fold. But Stoltenberg made it clear, before the invasion, that there is a distinction between a NATO partner and ally. Kyiv is a partner. NATO is compelled to only defend allies. NATO countries never embraced Ukraine as an ally because it meant certain war with Russia.

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“(see, it was all theater, everything – from day one – and politicians knew it as soon as they did the math)”

• EU Fails To Agree On Russian Oil Price Cap As Full Ban Looms (ZH)

In its relentless pursuit of virtue-signaling hills that it is willing to die on within minutes, several months ago the EU had a brilliant idea: let’s implement a toothless oil price cap on Russian oil exports, one which actually has zero impact on deeply discounted Russian oil and thus doesn’t lead to any more European energy shocks, but because of the optics and the much “lower” permitted transaction price, it will make for great headlines and show the world just how powerful the EU is. Well, the plan almost worked… until Poland and the Baltics forgot to read the fine print, thought that Europe actually does mean business, and blew up the deal. Recall on Friday, negotiations on the Russian oil price cap were suspended – despite a willingness by most European nations to just cross the checkmark and move on – as Poland and the Baltic states objected to a proposed ceiling of $65.

There was some hope that this opposition was just for show, and that come Monday the Poles would relent after some “closed door” negotiations, Europe would slap a $65 price cap, Russia would continue to sell its oil to China and India, and – quietly – to Europe, and gradually renormalize a fractured oil market where India and China pay a 25% discount for oil while the rest of the world has to pay a premium as an offset. However, it was not meant to be, and on Monday European Union governments again failed to agree on a price cap on Russian seaborne crude oil, as Poland again insisted that the cap had to be set lower than proposed by the G7 to cut Moscow’s ability to finance its invasion of Ukraine, diplomats told Reuters. “There is no deal. The legal texts have now been agreed, but Poland still can’t agree to the price,” one diplomat said.

No new date for talks has been set yet, diplomats said, even though a far worse outcome may await Europe in just one week: as a reminder, the price cap mechanism is to enter into force on Dec. 5. And if there is no agreement on the G7 price cap idea by next Monday, the EU would implement harsher measures agreed at the end of May – a ban on all Russian crude oil imports from Dec. 5 and on petroleum products from Feb. 5, Polish diplomats said. That would be a truly catastrophic scenario, and one which could promptly send the price of oil into the stratosphere as JPMorgan explained not too long ago. To be sure, it’s not too late for Poland to fall in line: Hungary and two other landlocked central European states secured exemptions from that ban for the pipeline imports they rely on.

Meanwhile, even the G-7 group of nations has proposed a softer version of the EU ban to keep oil supply to the global economy steady, because Russia supplies 10% of the world’s oil (see, it was all theater, everything – from day one – and politicians knew it as soon as they did the math). It proposed that the EU and other global customers keep buying Russian crude, but only if its price is at or below a G7 agreed level. That would cut the Kremlin’s revenues. The G7 has proposed a cap of $65-70 per barrel, but Poland and some others argue this will not hurt Moscow because Russian crude is already trading below that range at $63.50, and after today’s oil price rollercoaster, the “Russian” price briefly dipped below $60. With Russian production costs estimated at around $20, Moscow has a very large profit from its oil exports. Poland, Lithuania and Estonia have been pushing for a price cap of $30 per barrel.

And yet, despite consensus that Polish opposition would be overturned, the country’s resolve has only hardened: “The Poles are completely uncompromising on the price, without suggesting an acceptable alternative,” the EU diplomat said. “Clearly there is growing annoyance with the Polish position.” Which is hilarious because only Poland is adhering to the principle of what the price cap was supposed to achieve – namely choke off Russian oil profits; and yet for all the pompous rhetoric by G-7 nations, everyone is happy to keep the spectacle going knowing full well that this is just one giant virtue-signaling scheme. Everyone, except Poland that is… and as a result the “annoyance” is not with Putin but with the “Polish position” which is keeping fat European technocrats away from their well-deserved 3-star meals for a fake job well done.

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“..the Biden administration inspected only 10% of 22,000 weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine..”

• Rand Paul Calls Out Complete Lack Of Oversight On Ukraine Aid (SN)

Senator Rand Paul reacted Monday to news that the Biden administration is struggling to account for some $20 billion in aid that was sent to Ukraine, noting that both political parties ignored his call for an inspector general to overlook it. A report from Fox News, linked in a tweet by Paul, notes that according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration inspected only 10% of 22,000 weapons the U.S. has provided to Ukraine between February and November. It also outlines how Republicans could push for audits to determine where all the military aid is going and how much of it is ending up in the wrong hand.


“Didn’t someone try to legislatively mandate a special inspector general to scrutinize Ukrainian spending?” Paul urged, adding “Oh, that’s right, it was my amendment and most Democrats AND Republicans opposed any semblance of oversight.” Just a fortnight ago, following the throughly debunked “Russian missile attack” on a Polish border town, which turned out to be a Ukrainian missile that had stayed off course, Biden asked Congress to provide another $37.7 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine. The United States has already pledged more than 52 billion euros in military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since the war began in February 2022 and October 3, way more than any other nation or nations combined.

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“..and also stranded the media in an endless loop of ass-covering they are still locked into..”

• The Four Fuckeries (Jim Kunstler)

“We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meijer.” I doubt there is another era in the history of Western Civ when the forces in-motion acting on society were so mystifying to those acted upon. And isn’t it especially galling that this is so in an age after rational scientific practice had decoded so many of nature’s secrets? Did that project somehow fail in the end? Has the Enlightenment been defeated? How have we become trapped like frogs being boiled haplessly in our own pond-water? I have reduced these forces to four obvious streams of the sheerest seemingly evil fuckery, which is to say nefariously managed events meant to harm us. They are surely all related in some way. Let’s try to de-mystify them to understand what we’re up against.

First: Covid-19. How is it that we don’t know for sure how this organism came into the world, or understand what ensued after it did? Answer: the people who caused it to happen in the Wuhan lab have been busy covering their asses for three years, and successfully so. Yet we know exactly what Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric and others did. The paper trail in correspondence and patents alone is clear. We just can’t seem to do anything about it. We don’t know why they did it yet, too, but there are plausible guesses. Maybe Dr. Fauci wanted to cap his long, checkered career with a final heroic triumph: the introduction of world-saving mRNA vaccines — incidentally, a great financial boon to himself and the pharma industry he secretly served. Like everything else Fauci worked on for forty years, this experiment ended in disaster: a Frankenstein disease that persists in the population and vaccines that maim and kill people. How did Fauci and company get away with it? Here’s how:

Two: Government’s war on its own citizens. I’d date this for the sake of simplicity to the DOJ’s and FBI’s campaign to defenestrate Donald Trump starting in 2016 for the crime of winning an election. What began as the Russia collusion prank morphed into RussiaGate, another ass-covering extravaganza in which public officialdom gave itself blanket permission to lie about everything it was doing. The likes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe and Barack Obama’s girl squad in the White House — to name just a few of many participants — also managed to hook in the mainstream news media under the supposition that they were the good guys fighting a disgusting, pussy-grabbing supervillain, which disposed the news media to go along with all the FBI and DOJ lies, and also stranded the media in an endless loop of ass-covering they are still locked into.

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“..it was simply impossible to fail no matter how inept and incompetent the entire invasion was..”

• Will The US Try To Pull Off A “Grenada” In Serbia? (Saker)

Remember the 1983 US invasion of Grenada aka “Operation Urgent Fury”? It all began on October 23, 1983 when two truck bombs blew up the buildings housing the US and French “Multinational Force in Lebanon”. This attack resulted in 307 people killed including 241 U.S. and 58 French military personnel. Following the bombings, US diplomats engaged in their usual frantic flag-waving and promises to never ever give in to terrorism. The biggest problem for the US was that it had no way to retaliate in a way which would satisfy the flag-waver’s desire for blood. Just blowing up random buildings in Lebanon made very little impact, as for the promises to stay for as long as needed, it was obvious PR – it was clear to everybody that the time to pack and leave had come.

Of course, this was very humiliating for the wannabe “indispensable nation” cum “city upon a Hill”,,, So Reagan, with his undeniable genius for PR and optics, ordered the invasion of Grenada just two days after the bombings in Beirut. Why Grenada? Well, for one thing it was barely defended (mostly by Cuban engineers and locals with small arms) and truly tiny (so tiny, in fact, that the overwhelming majority of US Americans had no idea where it was or why there was suddenly an urgent need to invade. Second, it was very close to the USA, so everybody could get a slice of the cake, including the 1st and 2nd battalions of the US Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82nd Airborne and the Army’s rapid deployment force, U.S. Marines, Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces totaling 7,600 troops.

In terms of hardware, the US brought in 7,300 troops, 4 tanks, 1 LHA (USS Saipan LHA-2), 1 aircraft carrier, 3 destroyers, 2 frigates, 1 ammunition ship and even 27 F-14A Tomcats. All that against a few hundred construction workers armed only with small arms! I won’t go into all the details here, but let’s just say that this invasion was one of the worst and most poorly executed operation in the history of warfare: a truly HUGE US force was brought in to strike at a basically defenseless tiny island nation with the sole purpose of changing the optics of the disaster in Lebanon.

But, no to worry, the Pentagon handed our more medals than the number of participants, while some US special forces who wanted to press charges against helicopter pilots for cowardice (who abandoned the SOF on a runway because of small arms fire) were “counseled” against the idea. Bottom line is this: after the epic disaster in Beirut, the US wanted a quick and easy war to restore the “prestige” of the US armed forces, only to end up with yet another epic disaster, but at least in the case of Grenada, it was simply impossible to fail no matter how inept and incompetent the entire invasion was.

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Iran=BRI, SCO, INSTC, BRICS+.

• US Paralyzed By Islamic Republic Of Iran’s Strategic Swing (Escobar)

Iran’s parliament has just approved the accession of the Islamic Republic to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), previously enshrined at the Samarkand summit last September, marking the culmination of a process that lasted no less than 15 years. Iran has already applied to become a member of the expanding BRICS+, which before 2025 will be inevitably configured as the alternative Global South G20 that really matters. Iran is already part of the Quad that really matters – alongside BRICS members Russia, China and India. Iran is deepening its strategic partnership with both China and Russia and increasing bilateral cooperation with India.

Iran is a key Chinese partner in the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is set to clinch a free trade agreement with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and is a key node of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), alongside Russia and India. All of the above configures the lightning-fast emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a West Asia and Eurasia big power, with vast reach across the Global South. That has left the whole set of imperial “policies” towards Tehran lying in the dust. So it’s no wonder that previously accumulated strands of Iranophobia – fed by the Empire over four decades — have recently metastasized into yet another color revolution offensive, fully supported and disseminated by Anglo-American media.

The playbook is always the same. Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei actually came up with a concise definition. The problem is not bands of oblivious rioters and/or mercenaries: “the main confrontation”, he said, is with “global hegemony.” Ayatollah Khamenei was somewhat echoed by American intellectual and author Noam Chomsky, who has remarked how an array of US sanctions over four decades have severely harmed the Iranian economy and “caused enormous suffering.”

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Apple is not looking good lately.

• Apple Turns Off China Protest Communication Tool (SN)

As it mulls kicking Elon Musk’s Twitter off the app store, it has now been revealed that Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, a move that harmed the organizational efforts of demonstrators protesting against the CCP’s lockdowns. Over the past week, multiple major cities across China have seen massive protests against lockdowns, with the normally compliant Chinese exploding into rage in response to their government’s ‘zero COVID’ policy. Much of the unrest blew up in response to an incident in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi, where at least 10 people, some say up to 40, were killed during an apartment fire because lockdown rules stopped residents from fleeing the burning building.

Most of the city’s residents have been prevented from leaving their homes for over 100 days as a result of the draconian rules, which are still in place nearly three years after the pandemic began. With Beijing now trying to contain what some are calling the most serious mass uprising since Tiananmen Square, Apple is apparently helping them to crush dissent. Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China, which protesters had been using to evade censorship. AirDrop allows local connections between devices, meaning it cannot be monitored or censored by local authorities. However, Apple launched an update to the app in China that restricted usage to just 10 minutes, making it harder for protesters to communicate with other activists, as well as send messages nearby bystanders and tourists.

AirDrop was also being used by protesters in Hong Kong, who were brutally suppressed by the CCP during months of unrest in 2019. The smartphone company chose to roll out the new “feature” in China only right as the country experienced its biggest demonstrations in decades, which some would suggest is more than just a coincidence. “Apple has helped Beijing to suppress public dissent multiple times, mostly by complying with its requests to remove apps used by protestors for information and communication,” reports Reclaim the Net. “Apple also helps the Chinese Communist Party prevent users from remaining private by banning VPNs in the region.”

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“..Bankman-Fried, as of Nov. 10, either believed that Alameda owned a stake in Musk’s Twitter, or that he was uncertain, and therefore misleading potential investors.”

• SBF Doesn’t Know What Happened To His Twitter Stake (Axios)

Sam Bankman-Fried tells Axios that he always intended to roll over at least a portion of his former firm’s $100 million Twitter stake into the new, privately held entity led by Elon Musk. But the former FTX CEO said in an interview on Monday night that he’s not sure that ever happened with the Alameda Research controlled stake. It’s the first time Bankman-Fried has addressed the question around his Twitter stake since Musk said last week that neither SBF nor FTX ever held a position in the privatized Twitter, a statement that contradicted a Semafor news report. Alameda Research, the entity that Bankman-Fried said owned the Twitter stake, is the trading firm that he controlled and is the entity at the center of FTX’s implosion.

A text message seen by Axios that Bankman-Fried sent to Musk said the Twitter stake Alameda owned was worth around $100 million. “I believe that that it was intended for Alameda to rollover at least $20 million or more,” Bankman-Fried told Axios. “I don’t know for sure whether that ultimately happened.” Bankman-Fried noted that at least some of the Twitter stake may have been sold prior to Twitter going private, but he could not confirm. Bankman-Fried, through his advisers, had offered to help Musk buy out Twitter in the spring with potentially billions of dollars. But he later backed out of his offer after the two spoke by phone, Axios previously reported.

Bankman-Fried said at the time that he was interested in rolling the stake into the privatized company, with Musk acknowledging that Bankman-Fried was “welcome to roll.” The Twitter stake was listed on a Nov. 10 balance sheet shown to prospective FTX investors before the company went bankrupt, according to the Financial Times. The balance sheet, upon which Semafor also relied for its reporting, listed $43.3 million of Twitter stock as an illiquid deliverable — or sellable — asset. That suggests that Bankman-Fried, as of Nov. 10, either believed that Alameda owned a stake in Musk’s Twitter, or that he was uncertain, and therefore misleading potential investors.

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Big house cats. Sound on.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597818714631852033

 

 

Backwards dog

 

 

Blob top jellyfish
https://twitter.com/i/status/1597658696481312768

 

 

 

 

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