May 192023
 


John Falter The Windy City 1946

 

The US Should Be a Force for Peace in the World (EMN)
Ukraine Has ‘Five Months Left’ To Impress US – FT (RT)
US Wants To ‘Freeze’ Ukraine Conflict – Politico (RT)
Kiev Pilots Not Allowed To Train On EU F-16s Amid US Skepticism – NYT (TASS)
Putin Warned Patriot Air Defences Wouldn’t Survive Long in Ukraine (MWM)
Zelensky Asks G7 For Peace Summit Without Russia – FT (RT)
US Not Ready For Practical Steps On Peace Settlement In Ukraine – Lavrov (TASS)
Chinese Special Envoy Meets With Zelensky (RT)
Kissinger Changes His Mind On Ukraine Joining NATO (RT)
Ensuring Regional Security Not Feasible Via NATO Expansion – China (TASS)
Congress Could Have the Final Say on the Russian Collusion Scandal
It’s Over Folks (Denninger)
FBI Concerned Jan. 6 Footage Would Expose Undercover Agents, Informants (ET)
Justice Neil Gorsuch Speaks Out Against Lockdowns and Mandates (BI)
Rand Paul: Elon Musk Will Go Down As A Historic Champion For Free Speech (SM)

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Macgregor Trump jr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1659105972923637761

 

 

Contact us
https://twitter.com/i/status/1659094491477823488

 

 

Lest We Forget: Obama and Biden sat in that August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let’s let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump.

 

 

 

 

The following is the text of a full-page ad by the Eisenhower Media Network in the New York Times on May 16, 2023.

The US Should Be a Force for Peace in the World (EMN)

sThe Russia-Ukraine War has been an unmitigated disaster. Hundreds of thousands have been killed or wounded. Millions have been displaced. Environmental and economic destruction have been incalculable. Future devastation could be exponentially greater as nuclear powers creep ever closer toward open war. We deplore the violence, war crimes, indiscriminate missile strikes, terrorism, and other atrocities that are part of this war. The solution to this shocking violence is not more weapons or more war, with their guarantee of further death and destruction. As Americans and national security experts, we urge President Biden and Congress to use their full power to end the Russia-Ukraine War speedily through diplomacy, especially given the grave dangers of military escalation that could spiral out of control.

Sixty years ago, President John F. Kennedy made an observation that is crucial for our survival today. “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.” The immediate cause of this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears. And Russian leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy led to war. Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the Russia-Ukraine War before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.

Russia’s current geopolitical anxiety is informed by memories of invasion from Charles XII, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. U.S. troops were among an Allied invasion force that intervened unsuccessfully against the winning side in Russia’s post-World War I civil war. Russia sees NATO enlargement and presence on its borders as a direct threat; the U.S. and NATO see only prudent preparedness. In diplomacy, one must attempt to see with strategic empathy, seeking to understand one’s adversaries. This is not weakness: it is wisdom. We reject the idea that diplomats, seeking peace, must choose sides, in this case either Russia or Ukraine. In favoring diplomacy we choose the side of sanity. Of humanity. Of peace.

We consider President Biden’s promise to back Ukraine “as long as it takes” to be a license to pursue ill-defined and ultimately unachievable goals. It could prove as catastrophic as President Putin’s decision last year to launch his criminal invasion and occupation. We cannot and will not endorse the strategy of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. We advocate for a meaningful and genuine commitment to diplomacy, specifically an immediate ceasefire and negotiations without any disqualifying or prohibitive preconditions. Deliberate provocations delivered the Russia-Ukraine War. In the same manner, deliberate diplomacy can end it.

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“If we get to September and Ukraine has not made significant gains, then the international pressure on [the West] to bring them to negotiations will be enormous..”

The US will blame Zelensky for the failure, and wash its own hands.

Ukraine Has ‘Five Months Left’ To Impress US – FT (RT)

Ukraine needs to demonstrate some “advances” over the next five months as the US would consider these crucial to the future of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing several European and American officials. Washington has to show that the massive military support the US and its allies have been providing to Ukraine has not been in vain, the paper also said. “It is important for America to sell this war as a successful one, as well as for domestic purposes to prove that all of those aid packages have been successful in terms of Ukrainian advances,” a European official told the FT.

The polls show that public support for Ukraine is waning in the US, and President Biden’s administration has to show that the tens of billions of dollars it spent on assistance for Kiev made a major difference on the frontlines, the media outlet said. According to FT sources, Washington believes the next five months are critical to the outcome of the conflict. “If we get to September and Ukraine has not made significant gains, then the international pressure on [the West] to bring them to negotiations will be enormous,” another source told the FT, on condition of anonymity. September will see the UN General Assembly and G20 leaders’ summit take place one after another. Both events could be used to make the warring parties sit down at a negotiating table, FT said.

The Western military support for Kiev is also about to reach its limits, the sources warned. “The message [to Kiev] is basically that this is the best you’re going to get,” a European official told the paper. “There’s no more flexibility in the US budget to keep writing checks, and European arms factories are running at full capacity.” The US continues to be Ukraine’s biggest backer when it comes to arms supplies. Washington’s allies are concerned about its capacity to keep up the same level of support and expect it to go down in 2024 and a US presidential election. “We can’t keep the same level of assistance forever,” a European official said, adding that the current level of support might be sustained for a year or two but no longer.

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It takes two -or more- sides to freeze a conflict.

US Wants To ‘Freeze’ Ukraine Conflict – Politico (RT)

The administration of US President Joe Biden is reportedly considering ‘freezing’ the conflict in Ukraine for the foreseeable future instead of pushing for the country’s victory, according to sources cited by Politico on Thursday. Three serving and one former US official told the outlet that a long-term low-intensity stand-off was currently being discussed in the White House. The former official compared the possible scenario to how the Korean War of the early 1950s ended in an armistice. There was no formal peace agreement, and both Pyongyang and Seoul claim sovereignty over the entire Korean Peninsula, with a demilitarized zone separating the two parts. “A Korea-style stoppage is certainly something that’s been discussed by experts and analysts in and out of government,” the source said.

“It’s plausible, because neither side would need to recognize any new borders and the only thing that would have to be agreed is to stop shooting along a set line.” The benefits for the US would be that a frozen conflict would be less costly for Western nations and draw less public attention, and consequently less pressure to assist Kiev, the outlet explained. Ukraine would still be allied with Washington and continue switching its military to NATO standards, as it seeks to join the bloc someday. The ‘Korean scenario’ for Ukraine drew media attention in January, after Aleksey Danilov, the secretary of the country’s national security council, claimed in an interview that Moscow had sent a top official to European capitals to promote it.

The Kremlin denied that and claimed Danilov may have mistaken a Ukrainian politician surnamed Kazak for his namesake in the Russian government, whom he identified as the messenger. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, argued that Danilov’s words were meant for “domestic consumption,” so that the Ukrainian government could measure the public reaction to it. The Russian official mused that “being split is the best-case scenario,” for Kiev, under the circumstances. Moscow called NATO’s expansion in Europe and its creeping takeover of Ukraine without its formal accession as one of the key reasons for sending troops against its neighbor. The conflict, Russia has maintained, is part of a US proxy war against it, in which Ukrainians serve as cannon fodder.

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“..Kiev will need approvals from the United States where the fighters were made..”

Kiev Pilots Not Allowed To Train On EU F-16s Amid US Skepticism – NYT (TASS)

Ukrainian pilots are not allowed to train on F-16 fighter jets owned by European countries, as Washington remains unconvinced that Kiev needs the expensive aircraft, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing a senior Ukrainian official. Despite the fact that some European countries have signaled that they are ready to send F-16s to Ukraine, authorities in Kiev will need approvals from the United States where the fighters were made. Without American consent, the training is likely to be limited to technical lessons and technical language only, the newspaper said. The Biden administration is unconvinced that Ukraine needs the expensive jets. Besides, the United States does not want its highly restricted systems to be duplicated or fall into enemy hands.


US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Wednesday that he had no update on F-16s. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said on May 9 that his country is discussing the possibility of sending F-16 fighters to Ukraine with Great Britain, Denmark and “some other countries in Europe” and the United States. “An intensive dialogue” is underway, Rutte said. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba earlier said that some European allies had started work on the issue of sending US F-16 fighters to Kiev. However, there has been scarce comment on the plan in the West, while Ukraine itself admits that the process may not start any time soon. Meanwhile, the office of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak earlier announced a new military support program to train Ukrainian pilots on Western warplanes.

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“..We will crack the Patriot [like a nut] too, and something will need to be installed in its place, new systems need to be developed – this is a complex and lengthy process..”

Putin Warned Patriot Air Defences Wouldn’t Survive Long in Ukraine (MWM)

On May 16 as part of a complex series of strikes on the Ukrainian capital Kiev the Russian Air Force employed the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missile to neutralise a unit from an American Patriot air defence system, destroying its a radar and a control centre and reportedly at least one of its launchers. According to Russian sources, the Ukrainian crew operating the Patriot were aware a strike was incoming, but had only a limited warning time due to the Kinzhal missile’s very high speed – limiting opportunities for the missile system to change position or reload. The Patriot system targeted was one of two delivered, with Germany and the United States having each supplied a single unit.

The unit reportedly fired 32 surface to air missiles at the Kinzhal on approach, which at approximately $3 million each amounted to a $96 million barrage to attempt to destroy a missile with an estimated cost of under $2 million. The very high cost and limited number of the Patriot’s interceptors was a key argument for not sending the systems to Ukraine, with their effectiveness also having been brought to question not only due to the system’s highly troubled combat record, but also to the advanced capabilities of new Russian missiles such as the Kinzhal, Iskander and Zicron. These are considered nearly impossible to intercept particularly in their terminal stages. The delivery of Patriots was nevertheless seen as necessary due to the near collapse of Ukrainian air defences, as warnings have been given with growing frequency by both Western and Ukrainian sources that the arsenal of S-300 and BuK missile systems protecting the country has become critically depleted.

Destruction of the Patriot systems comes less than a month after the first systems were delivered in April, and follows a warning in December from Russian President Vladimir Putin that the destruction of the systems was an absolute certainty should they be deployed in Ukraine. He assured that with Washington “now saying that they can put a Patriot [in Ukraine]. Okay, let them do it. We will crack the Patriot [like a nut] too, and something will need to be installed in its place, new systems need to be developed – this is a complex and lengthy process” – indicating that NATO had no newer generations of long range air defence systems available to replace the Patriot once its vulnerability was demonstrated.

Macgregor

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“..this proposal calls for Russia to withdraw its forces from all territories within Ukraine’s 1991 borders, to pay reparations, and to submit to war-crime tribunals.”

Zelensky Asks G7 For Peace Summit Without Russia – FT (RT)

President Vladimir Zelensky has asked the G7 to consider holding a summit on the peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine without the participation of Russia, an EU official has told the Financial Times. The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US and the EU will discuss the possibility of staging such an event this summer during a three-day Group of Seven meeting, which kicks off in Hiroshima on Friday, the outlet reported on Thursday. According to the official, the discussions at the high-profile meeting in Japan will focus on the ten-point peace plan that Zelensky has been promoting in recent months. Among other things, this proposal calls for Russia to withdraw its forces from all territories within Ukraine’s 1991 borders, to pay reparations, and to submit to war-crime tribunals.

Moscow has rejected the plan as “unacceptable,” pointing out that it ignores the reality on the ground and is actually a sign of Kiev’s unwillingness to resolve the crisis through talks. Zelensky’s spokesperson has confirmed to the FT that Kiev asked the G7 to consider the ten-point plan as Kiev is trying to get as many nations as possible to support the proposal. The Ukrainian leader himself is expected to address the summit in Hiroshima via video link. Ukraine is also interested in “China being involved in the implementation of the Ukrainian peace formula,” said Andrey Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, as quoted by the paper. On Thursday, Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, including Yermak, held a meeting in Kiev with China’s newly appointed special envoy for Eurasian affairs, Li Hui. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Li told the Ukrainians that Beijing is eager to serve as a peace broker to help reach a political resolution between Kiev and Moscow, based on the principles outlined in a 12-point roadmap published by China in late February.

Beijing’s plan, which calls for early talks between Russia and Ukraine without preconditions, got a positive reception in Moscow, which said it’s ready to discuss it further. However, the West reacted negatively, with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claiming that Beijing lacked “credibility” as a mediator, having refused to condemn Moscow’s military operation. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell described the Chinese roadmap as merely “a set of wishful considerations.” On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow remains prepared to listen to peace proposals “based on a genuine wish to contribute to the stabilization of the world order,” including those recently made by Brazil and the African nations.

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“..the US was ready to support any initiative for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine once it was first supported by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky..”

US Not Ready For Practical Steps On Peace Settlement In Ukraine – Lavrov (TASS)

The US is not ready either at this stage or in the foreseeable future for any kind of constructive action with regard to the settlement in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on Thursday following talks with Ugandan counterpart Jeje Odongo. “The United States is not ready either at this stage or, in my opinion, in the foreseeable future, for any constructive action regarding the settlement of the situation in Ukraine, which they themselves created the conditions for over many years,” he said. According to Lavrov, the United States created the situation in Ukraine “by way of its strategic course to oppose the objective formation of a multipolar world, to maintain its hegemony, and subjugate anyone and everyone to its will.”


“Ukraine is used as an obedient instrument within the framework of this course,” the foreign minister stressed. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on May 16 that Russian and Ukrainian authorities had agreed to receive an African delegation to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Ramaphosa spoke on behalf of six African nations: Egypt, Zambia, the Republic of Congo, Senegal, Uganda and South Africa. When asked to comment on the South African initiative, White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said that the US was ready to support any initiative for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine once it was first supported by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

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China imposes itself step by step. Next step: Xi sends his special envoy. While “NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that China lacked “credibility”..” That won’t fly anymore.

Chinese Special Envoy Meets With Zelensky (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has met with China’s newly appointed special envoy for Eurasian affairs, Li Hui, who traveled to Kiev to convey Beijing’s views on a diplomatic resolution to Ukraine’s conflict with Russia. According to a statement published on Thursday by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Li held talks with Zelensky as well as the head of the Ukrainian President’s Office, Andrey Yermak, Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, and representatives from several other ministries. Beijing said both sides had agreed that the recent phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Zelensky had outlined the direction for future relations between their two nations, which it stated should be built on mutual respect and sincerity.

During his trip, Li reiterated that Beijing is willing to serve as a peace broker to help reach a political resolution to the conflict with Russia, based on the principles outlined in a 12-point roadmap published by China in late February. “There is no panacea in resolving the crisis. All parties need to start from themselves, accumulate mutual trust, and create conditions for ending the war and engaging in peace talks,” Li said, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s statement. The special envoy’s two-day trip to Ukraine is the first leg of a wider European tour, during which he is expected to visit Poland, France, Germany, and Russia. Beijing has explained that the trip aims to promote communication toward “a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis.”

China’s peace efforts have been welcomed by Russia as well as some European nations such as Hungary, and have been praised for acknowledging the national interests of both parties. The roadmap, however, has been criticized by some in the West. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that China lacked “credibility” as it has refused to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell insisted that “the only thing that can be called a peace plan is Zelensky’s proposal.” The Ukrainian president has demanded that Russia must withdraw from territories that Kiev claims as its own, as well as pay war reparations and face an international tribunal. The Kremlin has dismissed the initiative, claiming it does not take into consideration “the realities on the ground,” including the new status of four former Ukrainian regions as part of Russia.

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Medvedev: “Henry Kissinger called for Ukraine to join NATO.

True, he will celebrate his 100th birthday in 10 days, and he also met with Brezhnev. However, he is completely wrong here. He called the conflict between the United States and China the main threat to humanity. I have always believed that it is important to consider direct and obvious threats, not hypothetical ones, to correctly assess the situation. Imagine that Ukraine is admitted to the North Atlantic Alliance by the current dull-witted leaders:
1) NATO is already waging a hybrid war against Russia;
2) the Ukrainian nationalist regime will not stop trying to regain the lost territories;
3) we will have to respond harshly to this with all possible means, and…
4) here is Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
Subtle arguments about preventing existential threats do not work during bloody conflicts. This should be clear even to those who are approaching their centenary. Best wishes on the upcoming centenary! Keep the clarity of mind that Sleepy Joe has lost.”

Kissinger Changes His Mind On Ukraine Joining NATO (RT)

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has signalled a U-turn in his views on Ukraine’s prospective NATO membership. The veteran politician told The Economist that he now believes peace in Europe cannot be achieved without Ukraine joining the US-led military bloc. Last fall, Kissinger insisted that “it was not a wise American policy to attempt to include Ukraine into NATO.” He said the bloc’s eastward expansion since the fall of Soviet Union in 1991 had essentially removed Russia’s historic “safety belt,” but insisted that was no justification for Russia’s “surprise attack” on Ukraine. However, in his interview on Wednesday with the British outlet, the politician, who turns 100 on May 27, suggested that “for the safety of Europe, it is better to have Ukraine in NATO.”

He acknowledged that he currently finds himself “in the weird position that people say, ‘Look at him, he’s changed his mind. Now he’s for membership of Ukraine in NATO.’” The reason for such shift is “twofold,” Kissinger said. “One, Russia is no longer the conventional threat it used to be. And, secondly, we have now armed Ukraine to a point where it will be the best-armed, most modern country and with the least experienced leadership in Europe,” he explained. According to the former US Secretary of State, the position taken by European countries towards Kiev’s membership is “madly dangerous.” “The Europeans are saying we don’t want them in NATO because they’re too risky and therefore we’ll arm the hell out of them and give them the most advanced weapons. How can that possibly work?” he asked.

Back in 2008, NATO declared that Kiev would join the bloc, but did not specify a date for that to happen. “The decision to leave open the membership of Ukraine in NATO was very wrong, and unwise,” Kissinger said. The possibility of Ukraine, which the Russians consider “the little brother closest to them organically, or historically,” being accepted into the US-led alliance became “a final turning point” for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin when he decided to send troops to the neighboring country in February 2022, he explained.

Last month, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius suggested that “this is not the time to decide” about Ukraine’s place in NATO. He was backed by Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda, who said it “would be too difficult” to make Kiev a member of the bloc while the conflict with Moscow continues. Russia, which sees NATO’s eastward expansion as a major security threat, had singled out Kiev’s push to join the bloc as among the main reasons for launching its military operation in Ukraine more than a year ago.

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“..he would prefer to avoid a situation wherein Ukraine became a non-aligned neutral state.”

Ensuring Regional Security Not Feasible Via NATO Expansion – China (TASS)

It is impossible to ensure European security by expanding military blocs, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a briefing on Thursday. “It is impossible to ensure regional security by means of strengthening and expanding military blocs. One country’s security should not be ensured at the expense of the security of others,”he said in response to a TASS request to comment on published remarks by Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State (1973-1977) and National Security Advisor to two presidents (1969-1975), about Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO. China expects all parties to the conflict to adhere to a common, comprehensive and sustainable security concept, Wang added. According to the senior diplomat, this could be achieved through dialogue and consultations based on respect for the legitimate security interests of all parties.

On May 17, The Economist magazine published an interview with Kissinger, who will turn 100 years old on May 27. In the interview, the doyen of US diplomacy and veteran practitioner of geopolitics said that Ukraine should become a member state of NATO. According to him, Ukraine’s accession to the North Atlantic Alliance would be in the interests of both Kiev and Moscow, and would serve as a guarantee against any future attempts by the Ukrainian leadership to resolve territorial disputes by military means. Kissinger acknowledged that he had changed his point of view about Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO, saying he would prefer to avoid a situation wherein Ukraine became a non-aligned neutral state.

On May 15, the Washington Post reported, quoting sources, that the NATO countries had decided not to send Ukraine an invitation to become a member of the alliance at its upcoming summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, but are discussing the possibility of stepping up cooperation with Kiev and potentially establishing a timeframe for its entry into the military bloc. According to the authoritative US publication, a consensus exists among the alliance’s members that, in spite of Kiev’s fervent pleas, NATO will not be extending an official invitation to Ukraine to join the bloc during the Vilnius summit on July 11-12.

NATO adopted a political declaration at the Bucharest summit in April 2008 that Ukraine would eventually become a NATO member, but declined to provide a Membership Action Plan (MAP), the first step in a prospective member country’s legal procedure for joining the organization. In February 2019, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) approved amendments to Ukraine’s constitution enshrining its NATO aspirations into law. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Kiev was seeking to obtain an understanding of a specific date by which Ukraine could expect to join the alliance.

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“..If history is any measure, nothing concentrates the mind as much as a subpoena and immunity grant..”

Congress Could Have the Final Say on the Russian Collusion Scandal

[..] figures from Steele to Comey could be compelled to give full accounts in light of this Report. Congress has an interest in hearing from these witnesses as it explores how to make real reforms at the Justice Department and the FBI. The need for congressional action was made clear by the FBI itself in its immediate response to the Report. It insisted that it has reformed itself after what it described as “missteps identified in the report.” There are many ways to describe an investigation into false allegations raised by an opposing political party to derail a presidency. Calling that a “misstep” is like calling the explosion of the Hindenburg a “mislanding.” The FBI has now gone through regular cycles of scandals followed by assurances of self-reform.


Even if one is willing to suspend disbelief over the latest “trust us were the government” press release, it ignores that fact that the FBI was accused again in 2020 of playing a role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. If Congress wants to reform this system, Durham has given it a blueprint for how to do it. After the Report, there is now an undeniable right of Congress to seek this testimony as part of its legislative and oversight functions under Article I. While figures like Elias may “decline to be voluntarily interviewed,” this does not have to be voluntary exercise. In speaking with many witnesses, Durham was dealing with some potential crimes with expired statutes of limitation. If witnesses lie to Congress, they could also face charges under a new statute of limitations. If history is any measure, nothing concentrates the mind as much as a subpoena and immunity grant . . . and it may be time to concentrate some minds in Washington.

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“..No republic can continue to exist when it becomes trivially easy for one political faction or another to deliberately weaponize law enforcement..”

It’s Over Folks (Denninger)

America, that is. There is one last chance to save it: The FBI and DOJ must be disbanded, everyone working for it fired with no pensions, no benefits, no nothing, and if we need the functions of either agency and/or DHS they must be reconstituted with hard criminal penalties for anything that even smells like this in the future. If not, well, we’re done. We’re done because it is now seven years after this injustice occurred, it was not minor, it was not due to “oversight” or “accident” and by the most-charitable read the reason it happened is political bias through the entire organization from the top down leaving nobody to challenge it. Further, knowing this the Democrat party political campaign of the time (Hillary’s) deliberately suborned the acts of the FBI and instead of being told to shove it and being publicly outed for their attempt they got what they wanted including the personal and financial destruction of several people. A huge number of members of Congress then went on to use their speech and debate clause to slander people left, right and center all based on these lies.

Current law and the Constitution provide us no means of punishment of said members of Congress due to that speech and debate clause but no such protection exists for the principals nor the FBI personnel involved. Let me just cite this: “Given the foregoing, and viewing the facts in a light most favorable to the Crossfire Hurricane investigators, it seems highly likely that, at a minimum, confirmation bias played a significant role in the FBI’s acceptance of extraordinarily serious allegations derived from uncorroborated information that had not been subjected to the typical exacting analysis employed by the FBI and other members of the Intelligence Community. In short, it is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia. Similarly, the FBI Inspection Division Report says that the investigators “repeatedly ignore[d] or explain[ed] away evidence contrary to the theory the Trump campaign … had conspired with Russia …. It appeared that … there was a pattern of assuming nefarious intent.” 1749 An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”

That’s the most-charitable read. I decline to provide that given the repeated and amplified abuse out of the Democrat Party, including from Hillary, Schiff and others particularly considering that exactly zero of said persons have apologized or in any other way backed off from their knowing lies. Folks the capacity to do this on a forward basis must be destroyed. This is not optional. No republic can continue to exist when it becomes trivially easy for one political faction or another to deliberately weaponize law enforcement to go after disfavored individuals based on their political affiliation, inventing not just domestic events but claimed collusion with foreign powers that never occurred.

Indeed it is arguable that these very same people were in fact doing what they accused Trump of, but with Ukraine and China instead of Russia — and there is now developing hard evidence of the money flows involved in same. The extent to which they reached into policy during the Obama years and to which it influenced or even controlled the policies of the administration during the pandemic, an outbreak that we have every reason to believe sourced from that very same China, is not yet known. There are over 1 million dead Americans over the last three years as a direct and indirect consequence and sixty million, roughly, children who got screwed in whole or part out of their education during those three years. Never mind all the other people who got screwed and all of the inflation which we have and will continue to suffer under.

Greenwald

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Gaetz

You can tell the level of undue pressure from the number of whistleblowers…

FBI Concerned Jan. 6 Footage Would Expose Undercover Agents, Informants (ET)

FBI officials were concerned that footage from inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would show undercover agents and confidential informants, a whistleblower said in testimony revealed on May 18. George Hill, a retired supervisory intelligence analyst who worked out of the FBI’s Boston field office, recounted that the bureau’s Washington field office (WFO) pressured officials in Boston to open investigations on 138 people who attended a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, even though there were no indications the people violated the law. Boston officials pushed back, saying they would need evidence, such as footage of individuals inside the Capitol, to open investigations of the individuals. “Happy to do it. Show us where they were inside the Capitol, and we’ll look into it,” one official was quoted as saying.

Jim Jordan

“We can’t show you those videos unless you can tell us the exact time and place those individuals were inside the Capitol,” WFO officials responded, according to Hill. Hill said Boston officials questioned why they couldn’t get access to the tranche of some 11,000 hours of footage from inside the Capitol. “Because there may be—may be—UCs, undercover officers, or … confidential human sources, on those videos whose identity we need to protect,” Washington-based officials responded. Hill recounted the discussions during testimony to the U.S. House’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The clip from the testimony was played during a hearing on May 18 and detailed in a report the panel released based on whistleblower disclosures.


Marcus Allen, another FBI employee who has also become a whistleblower, has alleged that he was retaliated against because he shared an email with other FBI workers that questioned whether FBI Director Christopher Wray was truthful while testifying to Congress. “You believe that Christopher Wray indicated that there were no confidential informants, no FBI assets that were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 that were part of the violent riot, isn’t that right?” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a member of the subcommittee, asked Allen. “Yes, sir,” Allen said. They appeared to be referring to testimony given behind closed doors. After playing the clip of Hill’s comments, Gaetz said, “You got retaliated against for the very thing, for saying the very thing that the Washington field office was telling Boston.”

FBI

Wray told one congressional panel in a public hearing in late 2022 that he wouldn’t say whether the bureau had confidential sources embedded among the Jan. 6 protesters. “As I’m sure you can appreciate, I have to be very careful about what I can say, about when we do and do not, and where we have and have not used confidential human sources,” Wray said. “But to the extent there’s a suggestion, for example, that the FBI’s confidential human sources or FBI employees in someway instigated or orchestrated Jan 6th, that’s categorically false.” [..] Garret O’Boyle, another FBI special agent who is now a whistleblower, told the House panel that he was pressured by at least one agent based in Washington to violate FBI policy and also the law by serving grand jury subpoenas against a person who was the subject of an anonymous tip. “They tried to get me to serve a federal grand jury subpoena when there was no proper predicate to do so,” O’Boyle said on May 18.

O’Boyle

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Gorsuch’s full text at the URL. This is the background.

Justice Neil Gorsuch Speaks Out Against Lockdowns and Mandates (BI)

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Arizona v. Mayorkas marks the culmination of his three-year effort to oppose the Covid regime’s eradication of civil liberties, unequal application of law, and political favoritism. From the outset, Gorsuch remained vigilant as public officials used the pretext of Covid to augment their power and strip the citizenry of its rights in defiance of long standing constitutional principles. While other justices (even some purported constitutionalists) absconded their responsibility to uphold the Bill of Rights, Gorsuch diligently defended the Constitution. This became most apparent in the Supreme Court’s cases involving religious liberty in the Covid era.

Beginning in May 2020, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging Covid restrictions on religious attendance across the country. The Court was divided along familiar political lines: the liberal bloc of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to uphold deprivations of liberty as a valid exercise of states’ police power; Justice Gorsuch led conservatives Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in challenging the irrationality of the edicts; Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, justifying his decision by deferring to public health experts. “Unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people,” Roberts wrote in South Bay v. Newsom, the first Covid case to reach the Court.

And so the Court repeatedly upheld executive orders attacking religious liberty. In South Bay, the Court denied a California church’s request to block state restrictions on church attendance in a five to four decision. Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, urging deference to the public health apparatus as constitutional freedoms disappeared from American life. In July 2020, the Court again split 5-4 and denied a church’s emergency motion for injunctive relief against Nevada’s Covid restrictions. Governor Steve Sisolak capped religious gatherings at 50 people, regardless of the precautions taken or the size of the establishment. The same order allowed for other groups, including casinos, to hold up to 500 people. The Court, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the liberal justices again, denied the motion in an unsigned motion without explanation.

Justice Gorsuch issued a one paragraph dissent that exposed the hypocrisy and irrationality of the Covid regime. “Under the Governor’s edict, a 10-screen ‘multiplex’ may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there,” he wrote. But the Governor’s lockdown order imposed a 50-worshiper limit for religious gatherings, no matter the buildings’ capacities. “The First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion,” Gorsuch wrote. “But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”

Gorsuch understood the threat to Americans’ liberties, but he was powerless with Chief Justice Roberts cowing to the interests of the public health bureaucracy. That changed when Justice Ginsburg died in September 2020. The following month, Justice Barrett joined the Court and reversed the Court’s 5-4 split on religious freedom in the Covid era. The following month, the Court granted an emergency injunction to block Governor Cuomo’s executive order that limited attendance at religious services to 10 to 25 people. Gorsuch was now in the majority, protecting Americans from the tyranny of unconstitutional edicts. In a concurring opinion in the New York case, he again compared restrictions on secular activities and religious gatherings; “according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians… Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”

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“Thank God for someone who can still speak their mind and won’t take some guff off a journalist who tells him he can’t speak his mind.”

Rand Paul: Elon Musk Will Go Down As A Historic Champion For Free Speech (SM)

Senator Rand Paul praised Elon Musk Wednesday for standing up for free speech, predicting that the Twitter owner will be recorded as a key figure in history in the fight against censorship. Referring to Musk’s compelling take down of a CNBC hack earlier this week, Paul noted “Thank God for someone who can still speak their mind and won’t take some guff off a journalist who tells him he can’t speak his mind.”
“Somewhere along the way something happened and people began to think that only certain forms of speech were acceptable,” The Senator urged.


“Then along came Elon Musk,” Paul continued, adding “The country, the Bill of Rights frankly, all of us, are going to be very thankful that a guy with a lot of money bought a social media entity and allowed us to see the government colluding to limit speech.” “People need to get this right. Private companies can decide what they want to air, newspapers can, television shows can. But what we cannot allow to happen is the government to collude with private business and use them basically as their extension and their arm of censor,” Paul emphasised. He added that “Elon Musk exposed this only because he had 44 billion dollars to buy a company and expose their inner workings off collusion with government.”

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The celestial entrance known as ‘Heaven’s Gate’ located within the breathtaking Tianmen Mountain in China. Situated approximately 5,000 feet above sea level, Tianmen Cave in China stands as the world’s highest naturally formed arch. Accessing this remarkable landmark involves ascending 999 steps referred to as the “stairway to heaven,” where the number nine holds significant meaning in Chinese numerology, symbolizing good fortune and eternity.

 

 

Most people refuse to even think about pedophilia. But that creates the space for it to exist.

 

 

Whale trap

 

 

There’s a dog school in Canada so they don’t stay home alone. This is a picture taken on the way to school.

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

May 182023
 
 May 18, 2023  Posted by at 8:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  34 Responses »


Giorgio de Chirico The Archaeologists 1927

 

Durham Found Zero Merit to Trump Russia Claims (CTH)
Durham Report Condemns FBI’s Russia Probe (Turley)
Oversight Panel Has Subpoenaed Joe Biden Phone Records (BB)
The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Scully)
Neighbor Countries Ready To Pay Zelensky To Stop Conflict – Seymour Hersh (RT)
Ukrainian Spymaster Wants 100-km Demilitarized Zone With Russia (TASS)
Sowing Seeds of Plunder: A Lose-Lose Situation in Ukraine (OffG)
Russia Confirms Grain Deal Extension By Two Months – Zakharova (TASS)
NATO’s ‘Reckless’ Expansion To Undermine Security Dialogue – Lavrov (TASS)
China Notifies Embassies In Beijing Not To Display Ukraine Propaganda (TASS)
Hungary Urges EU To Redirect Ukraine Aide (RT)
The Working-Class Revolt Against Net Zero (Spiked)
Dutch Farmer ‘Families Are Crying At The Kitchen Table Every Day’ (RMX)
The Harm Caused by Masks (Anderson)
Global Impact Of The First Year Of Covid-19 Vaccination (Lancet)
Dollar Dominance ‘Coming To An End’ – Jim Rogers (RT)
FBI Adds Itself To FBI Watch List (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Fitton

 

 

 

 

Gaetz

 

 

 

 

Patriots
https://twitter.com/i/status/1658919182661042176

 

 

 

 

American lieutenant colonel broke Zelensky’s dream: Forget about returning the territories, you are incapable. Ukrainian forces are unable to dislodge Russian troops from their positions, despite the bold statements of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, US Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis said.

Answering the question of whether it is possible to realize Zelensky’s dream of returning to Kyiv the territories liberated by Russia, Davis replied that there is not even a theoretical possibility for that. “Simply, there is no fundamental basis to create such a large combat power and to dislodge an enemy as entrenched and equipped as Russia is now. It is a completely unrealistic combat goal,” Davis said in an interview with the YouTube channel “Judging Freedom”.

 

 

 

 

“Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump. Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it.”

Durham Found Zero Merit to Trump Russia Claims (CTH)

People ask why I find it difficult to write about the Durham report empirically confirming everything we previously outlined in the past five years. Here’s my answer. Eventually, after the shock & awe of the Durham confirmations wear off, I am hopeful that people will stand back and realize the bigger question that covers all of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy nonsense. This was a United States government operation to conduct full-throated surveillance on a U.S. presidential candidate, and then remove that candidate from the office of the presidency after his victory in the 2016 election. With John Durham outlining in granular details how the FBI, DOJ and larger intelligence apparatus acted politically to weaponize government on behalf of an allied presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton, a bigger question remains.

There never was any merit to the Trump-Russia nonsense, so what exactly were Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann doing for two years? Using the silo defense as a method of obfuscation, John Durham noted in his report [page #2] as below, never delved into that obvious question. Durham specifically, and with great intent, says he did not look at what Mueller and Weissmann were doing; even though, Durham destroyed any predication that might have given merit to the intention of their special counsel existence. Durham writes a 316-page report, meticulously detailing the false construct of the Trump-Russia narrative. Yet for some reason, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation, an entire special counsel investigation that was predicated and justified by that false Trump-Russia narrative, never found the same evidence?

Durham never looked at it. Why? Because he knew Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann were installed to cover up the original fabrications by the CIA, FBI, DOJ and U.S. intelligence apparatus. Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump. Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it. Stop pretending. Once you stop pretending, you realize just how rotten this system is. John Durham intentionally and with specific foresight, did not want to reveal the criminal conduct of the Mueller/Weissmann special counsel. He knew exactly what they were doing; his investigation paralleled what their investigation would have done if Mueller was not established to hide the originating schemes.

Everything Durham found, Mueller could have easily found, and stated, and ended the nonsense. This reality, and Durham’s intentional decision to avoid confronting the Mueller fraud, is why no one should defend any part of what John Durham was doing, nor the report he delivers in conclusion. Durham is just as dirty as Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann. If he wasn’t, he would have outlined the purpose of Mueller and left them naked to the consequences. But that’s not what a good little silo maintainer does. Instead, John Durham simply acts as if Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann didn’t exist to try and destroy President Trump. Durham ignores the cleanup operation entirely.

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“In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report.”

Durham Report Condemns FBI’s Russia Probe (Turley)

According to Durham, Comey — who later wrote and sold a book on “ethical leadership” — led the FBI to use “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence” to effectively tie up a duly elected president for three years. Durham reports that FBI personnel admitted they disregarded standards for surveillance despite “acknowledging — both then and in hindsight — that they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly [working for a foreign power].” In the end, it is not a crime to be unethical or incompetent, so no charges will be filed as a result of the report. Durham clearly hopes that the belated transparency provided by his report will produce greater future accountability. That may be the only naive aspect of his findings.

Of course, the FBI promptly issued a statement that it has — once more — reformed itself in light of its failures. But who really believes this is unlikely to occur again? Indeed, the same pattern and figures reemerged in 2020, when another false narrative was created to dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Some of the officials involved in the false Russia collusion conspiracy were signatories on the letter by 51 former intelligence officials claiming that the laptop story was likely “Russian disinformation.” And the media again pushed that version before the 2020 election — only to admit, two years later, that the laptop was authentic all along. Conspicuously missing in the aftermath of Durham’s report is the one thing that would establish a clear commitment to reform: an apology. Clinton, Comey, members of Congress and others could apologize to the American people — and, yes, even to Trump.

That, of course, will never happen. Attorney General Merrick Garland, in releasing a report that concluded this investigation never should have occurred, made no statement whatsoever. Thus, Durham was left throwing haymakers in an empty political boxing ring — and those who perpetrated this scandal on the nation are left to carry on making money on books, speeches, TV commentary and lectures about political or electoral ethics. The media, meanwhile, is offering little more than a shoulder-shrug and more spin. So, in the relative silence of media coverage following the report’s release, Durham can contemplate an ultimate Zen-like question: If a 305-page report proves a concerted political hoax but no one is there to read it, does it make a difference?

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“Over an 11-year period, Hunter’s firm paid over $25k for Joe’s second iPhone (1-302-377-xxxx), which circumvented White House security protocols, along with ‘most lines’ on a ‘Wells Fargo credit line’ that Joe utilized. These phone, banking, and other financial records must be subpoenaed.”

Oversight Panel Has Subpoenaed Joe Biden Phone Records (BB)

The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed phone records of a phone belonging to President Joe Biden that Hunter Biden’s business paid for, according to Peter Schweizer, Government Accountability Institute president in an interview on Tuesday. Schweizer said in an interview with 77 WABC’s Cats & Cosby that it was discovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop that he was paying a phone bill for his father from 2009 to 2017, which encompassed the time Biden was vice president. “We obtained that phone number and we’ve shared it with individuals and the Oversight Committee in Congress is going to subpoena those phone records. And what’s important here is that’s not a government phone, this is not Joe Biden’s private phone that he’s paying for himself. It’s actually [Hunter] Biden’s business that paid for it,” Schweizer said.


“I think it’s going to yield a lot of interesting information as to who Joe Biden was talking to on this phone that was being paid for by his son,” said Schweizer, who is a senior contributor to Breitbart News and best-selling author of multiple books on corruption by political elites. Schweizer called the reported removal of the investigative team at the IRS looking into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax evasion “very troubling.” The removal came in alleged retaliation to a whistleblower who had contacted Congress about a possible cover-up going on at the IRS on the case. “It’s very troubling — the pattern that we’re seeing here,” Schweizer said, adding:

“You have these whistleblower complaints filed by people in the IRS that were looking at Hunter Biden’s failure to pay taxes. They issued whistleblower complaint to Congress — the report is that those individuals had been removed from the case, which is contrary to the Whistleblower Law — you’re not allowed to remove somebody from their position just because they filed a whistleblower complaint.” Schweizer said the removal of the investigative team is potentially illegal. He explained: “What happened in 2018 was the IRS looked into the fact that Hunter Biden had taken in all this foreign income, we exposed it in Secret Empires in 2018. That sort of launched the grand jury and you had this IRS investigation. And they basically concluded that Hunter Biden had taken in millions of dollars from foreign sources, had not paid taxes on it.


You have this friend, this lawyer in Los Angeles that paid two million to the IRS to pay some of the back taxes, but the IRS was looking into charges of tax evasion. They went to congressional committees and complained that they believe there had been political interference from DOJ. I haven’t seen the details, but this was the claim. And now lo and behold, the IRS says we’re going to remove the team from investigating Hunter Biden, who had been on it now for what, five years, and we’re going to start apparently gonna have to start the whole thing over, so what does that mean to the investigation? What does that mean? I think it’s massive, but first of all…I think it’s illegal by the whistleblower statute. You cannot remove somebody from their position, simply because they made a whistleblower complaint.”

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“Having thus alerted readers that the new candidate with the familiar name is basically a head case, the Post and Times can now put that name back on the blacklist..”

The Real Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Scully)

While Republican affairs can certainly get rough and unseemly at times, it’s usually the Democratic Party we can turn to for lessons in cold, unsentimental power politics. Consider, for instance, the reception accorded by the party establishment and like-minded reporters to an unexpected entrant into the 2024 presidential race, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who rates, one might have supposed, the respect due a worthy contender and honest dissenter. After declaring his candidacy last month, RFK Jr. immediately showed at 14 percent in polls. Mild alarm followed, among supporters of President Biden, when two weeks later the next round of polling gave Kennedy an average of 20 percent. You could tell this was a bit of a shock because, almost instantly, the Washington Post dismissed it as nothing, in a hurried item headlined “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Threat to Biden Is Inflated. Here’s Why.”

As surely as any Kennedy could once expect to be fawned over by Post reporters, this Kennedy — especially if he starts drawing crowds and votes — is never to be spared condescension and rebuke. The “why,” in case you haven’t heard, is that RFK Jr. has in recent years been airing “controversial,” “dangerous” views, and this makes him, says the Post, a “fringe figure” you needn’t take seriously. Among his many provocations: Kennedy claims that pandemic lockdowns were calamitous for working people and for children; that citizens should choose for themselves whether to receive vaccines; that corporate influences on government are pervasive and corrupting; and that censorship contrived by the state is intolerable. Worse even than these outrages, during the pandemic this man called into question the conduct and veracity of Anthony Fauci. And this offense — challenging Doctor Fauci! — is still regarded as the most shameful assault on science since the persecution of Galileo.

It doesn’t matter that, point for point, RFK Jr. makes a strong case and most everyone knows it. His problem is, the prohibition on saying such things has not been lifted. A well-established, scientifically tested, and empirically proven phenomenon known as liberal groupthink has set in, preempting even the most obvious conclusions. So, even if Kennedy’s presidential bid is off to an impressive start, in the Post’s analysis he is still relegated to the same category as “fringe figure Lyndon LaRouche,” who — trivia time for Post readers — “in 1996 managed to pull double digits in some primary states.”

The New York Times, in its version of the LaRouche treatment, likewise left the impression of a candidate’s announcement speech strangely and single-mindedly focused on “shaking Americans’ faith in science,” no matter that the candidate himself had said nothing at all along those lines, and no matter that in all of his scientific arguments he cites scientific methods and scientific evidence. Here again the day’s news was predetermined: casting the accomplished son and namesake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy as just another sorry entry in “a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.” Having thus alerted readers that the new candidate with the familiar name is basically a head case, the Post and Times can now put that name back on the blacklist, denying Kennedy coverage unless he troubles them further by rising in polls or by making crazy demands for primary debates.

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“Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around..”

Neighbor Countries Ready To Pay Zelensky To Stop Conflict – Seymour Hersh (RT)

Poland is leading a group of European nations that are secretly urging Vladimir Zelensky to find a way to settle the conflict with Russia, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh has reported, citing a “knowledgeable” American official. According to US intelligence, other EU countries that want to see an end to the fighting include Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Hersh wrote in an article published on his Substack page on Wednesday. “Hungary is a big player in this and so are Poland and Germany, and they are working to get Zelensky to come around,” the unnamed official claimed. Those countries have made it clear that “Zelensky can keep what he’s got if he works up a peace deal even if he’s got to be paid off, if it’s the only way to get a deal.” By “keep what he’s got,” the source was referring to the Ukrainian president’s villa in Italy and interests in an offshore bank, Hersh clarified.

However, Zelensky has so far rejected the proposal, while other major European players – France and the UK – “are too beholden” to the Biden administration, which is continuing to back the Ukrainian leader, the official said. One of the main reasons why Poland and the others want the conflict to end is because the burden of accommodating Ukrainian refugees has become too much for them, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist wrote. The problem for those countries “is how to get the US to stop supporting Zelensky,” Hersh’s source suggested. He claimed that US intelligence is well aware that “Ukraine is running out of money and… that the next four or months are critical. And Eastern Europeans are talking about a deal.” However, he added that “it’s not clear to the intelligence community what the president and his foreign policy aides in the White House know of the reality.”

The US is “still training Ukrainians how to fly our F-16s that will be shot down by Russia as soon as they get into the war zone. The mainstream press is dedicated to Biden and the war, and Biden is still talking about the Great Satan in Moscow while the Russian economy is doing great,” the official explained. Russia has repeatedly stated that it’s ready to resolve the conflict at the negotiating table. However, it did not receive any proposals from Ukraine and its Western backers that it could consider reasonable. Zelensky has been promoting his ten-point peace plan, which calls for Russian forces to withdraw to borders claimed by Ukraine, to pay reparations, and to submit to war-crime tribunals. Moscow has rejected the plan as “unacceptable,” saying it ignores the reality on the ground and is actually a sign of Kiev’s unwillingness to solve the crisis through diplomatic means.

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Problem is, they want the DMZ and still become a NATO member. Russia will not let that happen.

Ukrainian Spymaster Wants 100-km Demilitarized Zone With Russia (TASS)

Top Ukrainian intelligence official Kirill Budanov has proposed creating a 100-km-long demilitarized zone between Ukraine and Russia. “The question of ending the war [involves] the creation of a demilitarized zone; this is our goal,” the head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate told the Ukrainian Islandia (Iceland) TV channel. When further elaborating on the practical aspects of creating such a zone, Budanov said that, “this would be a zone that could not be attacked by the usual means.” “In my view, this would absolutely be the right distance,” the top intelligence official pointed out. The Russian government had earlier repeatedly voiced its readiness to negotiate with Ukraine to reach a settlement of the conflict.


At the same time, however, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that the main obstacle standing in the way of such talks was the prohibition on conducting negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was legally enshrined by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s decree of September 30, 2022, “as well as the initiatives of the Ukrainian head of state, which indicate official Kiev’s complete detachment from modern realities,” including the demand to withdraw Russian troops from the new regions of the country. On February 9, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow did not see any desire on the part of the Ukrainian side to start a serious conversation on a peaceful settlement.

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“Today, thousands of rural boys and girls, farmers, are fighting and dying in the war. They have lost everything. The processes of free land sale and purchase are increasingly liberalised and advertised. This really threatens the rights of Ukrainians to their land, for which they give their lives.”

Sowing Seeds of Plunder: A Lose-Lose Situation in Ukraine (OffG)

It’s a lose-lose situation for Ukrainians. While they are dying, financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests. So says Frédéric Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, an independent think tank. Depending on which sources to believe, between 100,000 and 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers (possibly more) have died during the conflict with Russia. That figure, of course, does not include civilian casualties. But it is not the purpose of this article to explore these issues. Much has already been written on this elsewhere. But billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the NATO countries and hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have died. They died in the belief that they were protecting their nation – their land. A land that is among the most fertile in the world.

Professor Olena Borodina of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine says: “Today, thousands of rural boys and girls, farmers, are fighting and dying in the war. They have lost everything. The processes of free land sale and purchase are increasingly liberalised and advertised. This really threatens the rights of Ukrainians to their land, for which they give their lives.” Borodina is quoted in the February 2023 report by the Oakland Institute War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, which reveals how oligarchs and financial interests are expanding control over Ukraine’s agricultural land with help and financing from Western financial institutions. Aid provided to Ukraine in recent years has been tied to a drastic structural adjustment programme requiring the creation of a land market through a law that leads to greater concentration of land in the hands of powerful interests.

The programme also includes austerity measures, cuts in social safety nets and the privatisation of key sectors of the economy. Frédéric Mousseau, co-author of the report, says: “Despite being at the centre of news cycle and international policy, little attention has gone to the core of the conflict — who controls the agricultural land in the country known as the breadbasket of Europe. [The] Answer to this question is paramount to understanding the major stakes in the war.” The report shows the total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals and large agribusinesses is over nine million hectares — exceeding 28% of Ukraine’s arable land (the rest is used by over eight million Ukrainian farmers).

The largest landholders are a mix of Ukrainian oligarchs and foreign interests — mostly European and North American as well as the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. A number of large US pension funds, foundations and university endowments are also invested in Ukrainian land through NCH Capital – a US-based private equity fund, which is the fifth largest landholder in the country. President Zelenskyy put the land reform into law in 2020 against the will of the vast majority of the population who feared it would exacerbate corruption and reinforce control by powerful interests in the agricultural sector.

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Last time?!

Russia Confirms Grain Deal Extension By Two Months – Zakharova (TASS)

Moscow confirms that the grain deal has been extended for two more months, providing an opportunity to help ensure global food security, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said earlier that the grain deal had been extended for another 60 days. “We confirm the Turkish president’s announcement of a two-month extension of the Black Sea initiative, which is an opportunity to help ensure global food security not in words but in deeds, to help first and foremost the countries that need it most,” she said, adding that “imbalances” in the grain deal’s execution should be “corrected as soon as possible.” Zakharova went on to say that Moscow’s primary views of the deal have not changed.

Agreements on the export of food and fertilizers from Ukraine to the international market were concluded on July 22, 2022, for 120 days and extended in November for the same period. One of the agreements regulates the order of grain supplies from the Kiev-controlled ports of Odessa, Chernomorsk and Yuzhny. Moreover, a memorandum was inked by Russia and the UN on lifting export restrictions for Russian agricultural products and fertilizers to global markets. Moscow notes that the second part of the agreement is not being implemented. On March 18, 2023, Russia announced that the deal was extended for 60 days, warning that this would be enough time to assess the efficacy of the memorandum signed with the UN.

The Russian side has repeatedly stressed that the future decision on extension of the deal depends on implementation of the Russian part of the agreement, adding that the lack of progress on that issue threatens the future of the initiative. Representatives of Russia, Turkey, Ukraine and the UN discussed the issues of extension of the grain deal and the implementation of the Russian part of the agreement on supplies of grain and fertilizers on May 10-11 in Istanbul. The agenda also contained the issues of secure functioning of the grain corridor. Russia was represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin. No particular decisions on extension of the deal or consideration of Moscow’s requirements were announced following the negotiations.

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Lavrov: The Minsk agreements were the last attempt at diplomacy

• We will no longer rely on the West as a partner that has at least some capacity for an agreement, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with “Tsargrad” television, saying that Moscow will instead turn its attention to the rest of the world that wants to continue cooperation with her.

• According to his words, “there is no real diplomacy anymore” in the West. As he pointed out, it was last “seen” in 2014 and 2015, when the Minsk agreements were signed, but even then it was not real diplomacy, but, as he assessed, “diplomacy of lies”.

• The diplomacy of Western colleagues is reflected in bribing, threatening and forcing other countries to follow their policies, but all this indicates that the West is actually “not sure of the correctness” of its agenda, because if they are right, why should they threaten and use with harsh tactics, concluded Lavrov.

NATO’s ‘Reckless’ Expansion To Undermine Security Dialogue – Lavrov (TASS)

Reckless NATO expansion and the bloc’s absorption of neutral countries will undermine any prospect for dialogue on European security, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a news conference following Moscow talks with his Belarusian counterpart Sergey Aleinik on Wednesday. “NATO’s reckless expansion eastwards, northwards or to other geographical areas undermines the very prospects to continue normal communication on European security,” Lavrov said, adding that “unfortunately, we are witnessing this process amid NATO’s absorption of almost all neutral nations.” “That’s sad,” he added. According to Russia’s top diplomat, the number of countries in Europe who advocate military or political neutrality is getting thinner, now that Finland has joined the alliance.


Sweden “seems to be on course to become a NATO member, too, while Switzerland rejected its neutral status by its actions,” he said. “That [neutrality] was enshrined in the constitutions of respective countries, and they created a space for finding a balance of interests and compromise between European NATO members and, say, the Union State and the Collective Security Treaty Organization,” he lamented.= “When and if the West comes to its senses and realizes that it will not be able to reverse the historically unbiased process of a multipolar world order evolving, that will, of course, require a conversation that will not be limited to Europe only,” Lavrov maintained as he insisted that global security should be “honest and equal.”.

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“..specifically raising the Ukrainian flag or displaying posters in support of Kiev..”

China Notifies Embassies In Beijing Not To Display Ukraine Propaganda (TASS)

China reminds foreign missions and offices of international organizations based in the country of the need to comply with international diplomatic treaties, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Wednesday. Commenting on billboards in support of Ukraine exhibited outside some foreign embassies in Beijing, the Chinese diplomat said, “China is calling on all embassies and representative offices of all international organizations to comply with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and carry out activities in line with international agreements.”


Wang’s comment came in response to a question from a reporter who asked whether the Chinese authorities had earlier advised foreign embassies against using the exterior walls of their buildings to display politicized propaganda, specifically raising the Ukrainian flag or displaying posters in support of Kiev. Wang urged all foreign diplomatic missions and organizations in China to respect Chinese laws. Kyodo reported on Tuesday, citing multiple sources, that Chinese officials have requested foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations in Being not to use the outer walls of their buildings for displaying political propaganda. Some embassies have put up signboards in support of Ukraine, the Japanese news agency said.

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“..the funds should be redirected to other regions, namely to the Balkans or North Africa…”

Hungary Urges EU To Redirect Ukraine Aide (RT)

Budapest has blocked a new €500 million ($544 million) package of EU financial assistance to Kiev, urging Brussels to redirect its support elsewhere. The eighth tranche from the so-called European Peace Facility (EPF) – a €5.6 billion ($6.08 billion) off-budget fund used to finance and supply foreign militaries – was vetoed by Hungary on Monday. Budapest told Reuters that it wanted the EPF to keep its original global scope, instead of being used exclusively to finance Kiev amid its ongoing conflict with Moscow. “Hungary does not agree with the fact that the European Union, along with other existing tools, uses the EPF solely with regard to Ukraine, as this does not allow sufficient funds to be channeled to promote the EU’s interests in other areas,” a government spokesperson wrote in an email to the outlet, adding that the funds should be redirected to other regions, namely to the Balkans or North Africa.

“For the Hungarian government, it is crucial that these issues should be clarified, and that’s why it did not approve the disbursement of the next tranche from the EPF,” the spokesperson concluded. The EPF was originally established in 2021, with a proclaimed goal of boosting the EU’s ability to maintain peace and strengthen regional and international security. The fund is used to reimburse the bloc’s own members, who send arms and equipment overseas, as well as to directly finance foreign militaries.

However, prior to the beginning of the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, the fund was rarely used. A total of less than $125 million was allocated to supply non-lethal military equipment to several nations, including Ukraine. After the hostilities began, however, the EU funneled some €3.6 billion ($3.9 billion) under the EPF scheme to Ukraine in military support. Budapest has found itself at odds with Brussels over the conflict, taking a neutral stance and refusing to supply Kiev with weaponry. Hungary has also prohibited weaponry shipments heading to Ukraine from going through its territory, as well as opposed the bloc’s anti-Russian sanctions.

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“This is a clash between the luxury doom-mongering of an upper-middle class more concerned with its own self-importance than with the self-sufficiency of society..”

The Working-Class Revolt Against Net Zero (Spiked)

Two kinds of road-blocking are taking place in Europe right now. In the first, the sons and daughters of privilege, people with names like Edred and Tilly, are holding up traffic to put pressure on governments to speed up Net Zero. If we don’t cut carbon emissions drastically, they say in their cut-glass tones, our poor planet will be consumed in a heat death of rotten mankind’s own making. In the second, working people – farmers, truckers, cab drivers – are clogging the streets to put pressure on governments to slow down Net Zero. Or better still, scrap it altogether. If we don’t cut out the Net Zero nonsense, say these people who make and deliver things for the Edreds and Tillys of the world, farms will close, jobs will be lost and economic precarity will intensify.

Whose side should you take? It’s a no-brainer. This is a clash between the luxury doom-mongering of an upper-middle class more concerned with its own self-importance than with the self-sufficiency of society, and the common sense of working people who understand that farming, food production, energy creation and transportation are essential to the survival of our species. Between an elite driven mad by visions of a climate-change apocalypse and ordinary people who still inhabit the reality-based world. Between Net Zero fanatics who want to wind back modernity and Net Zero sceptics who think modernity works pretty well, thank you. It’s the latter road-blockers – the people using their HGVs, tractors and taxis to send a stern message to our eco-elites – that we should be cheering. Their revolt against Net Zero represents a daring populist strike against the delusions and complacency of the 21st-century establishment.

Danish truckers are the latest workers to join the rebellion against green authoritarianism. Yesterday, they caused ‘road havoc’ in Denmark. They parked their huge hauliers side by side on key roads. Sections of the border with Germany were affected, as were the M11 and M16 around Copenhagen. Roads towards the ferry docks at Helsingor – ‘one of the most important ports in Denmark’ – were also briefly clogged by angry truckers. Their beef? The government’s plan to introduce a ‘truck tax’ in 2025. As part of its devotion to the cult of Net Zero, the Danish ruling class wants to slash carbon emissions by 70 per cent before 2030. And one way it intends to do that is by imposing a punitive mileage-based eco-tax on the drivers of diesel trucks, in the hope that the financial pressure will become so unbearable that they’ll switch to electric trucks instead.

The ingratitude is staggering. Truckers are the lifeblood of a modern society. They transport the fuel, food and other goods that are essential to everyday life. They drive alone, for hours, in all weathers, to keep society well stocked. And how do the elites in Copenhagen repay these people who, without fuss or fanfare, bring them everything they need? By slapping them with a new kind of sin tax – the sin in this case being to drive a vehicle that the eco-minded consider to be ‘dirty’ and ‘polluting’.

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“..they created huge farms because that was the policy promoted by the government and also by the banks. They wanted the farms to scale up their businesses. And now, suddenly the policy is to make smaller farms. This is also the EU policy. ”

Dutch Farmer ‘Families Are Crying At The Kitchen Table Every Day’ (RMX)

Currently, the Dutch government is looking to offer buyouts for 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, and if they do not accept, their land will be confiscated The government is offering them 120 percent of the value of their land. A) Do you think that’s a fair offer, and B) Do you think they’re going to fight it?

It’s not fair at all because they have smashed these farmers for years now, and the people are so desperate that many families are crying at the kitchen table every day, and even a couple of farmers committed suicide already. Really, it’s that bad. Our government and also the banks supported a plan to create bigger farms, so the farmers bought the land of their neighbors, and they created huge farms because that was the policy promoted by the government and also by the banks. They wanted the farms to scale up their businesses. And now, suddenly the policy is to make smaller farms. This is also the EU policy. Then, you add nitrogen regulations. These farmers now have these huge farms, which means big debts, huge debts, because they had to invest. And now, the government comes up with the idea that they have this nitrogen problem, and farms need to close or be reduced in size.

The banks turn around and say, then your business — because a farm is really a business — is only worth 50 percent compared to yesterday. So these people have huge debts. They are captured in a system that they never asked for. They followed the rules, and now they are pushed in a direction that is really desperate for them. They don’t know what to do. It’s so difficult. These farms have been running from generation to generation. So, there is a lot of history tied up in these farms, and if you are desperate and don’t know what to do anymore, and you’re facing uncertainty year after year, then the government turns around and says, “OK, we have a way out for you, we have money to give you.” I think a lot of farms will do that, which is a disaster because they are the second-largest producer of food in the world after the United States. The Netherlands is just a tiny country, but we are producing so much food for the rest of the world. That’s a problem because we now have 8 billion people.

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“..while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels..”

The Harm Caused by Masks (Anderson)

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.” In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels. The German study, a scoping review of existing research, aimed “to investigate the toxicological effects of face masks in terms of CO2 rebreathing on developing life, specifically for pregnant women, children, and adolescents.”

The latter two groups, of course, have been among those most frequently subjected to mask mandates in schools, despite Covid’s low levels of risk for them and the evidence that masks don’t work. What can breathing too much carbon dioxide do to you? The authors write that “at levels between 0.05% and 0.5% CO2,” one might experience an “increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and overall increased circulation with the symptoms of headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, dizziness, rhinitis, and dry cough.” Rates above 0.5 percent can lead to “reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision-making and reduced speed of cognitive solutions.” Beyond 1 percent, “the harmful effects include respiratory acidosis, metabolic stress, increased blood flow and decreased exercise tolerance.” Again, mask-wearers are likely breathing in CO2 levels between 1.4 percent and 3.2 percent—well above any of these thresholds. What’s more, “Testes metabolism and cell respiration have been shown to be inhibited increasingly by rising levels of CO2.”

So, high blood pressure, reduced thinking ability, respiratory problems, and reproductive concerns are among the many possible results of effectively poisoning oneself by breathing in too much carbon dioxide. The authors write that “it is clear that carbon dioxide rebreathing, especially when using N95 masks, is above the 0.8% CO2 limit set by the US Navy to reduce the risk of stillbirths and birth defects on submarines with female personnel who may be pregnant.” In other words, mandates have forced pregnant women to wear masks resulting in levels of CO2 inhalation that would be prohibited if they were serving on a Navy submarine.

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The original Lancet article is from Sep. 2022. I don’t usually include “old” things; this is a news aggregator. But the “new” comment on the article warrants interest.

@A1an_M: “I thought of another, simpler way of demonstrating that this Lancet paper claiming the vaccines saved 19.8 million lives is complete and utter bollards, using empirical data. OurWorldInData helpfully tells us how many people had actually been vaccinated at the end of December 2021: 4.55 billion As per my earlier tweet, we know that at worst in early 2020, pre vaccines, the Infection Fatality Rate of SARS-COV-2 averaged 0.25% across the world (Ioannidis). https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v3 (By December 2021 it was less than half of that but we’ll let that slide for now) So assuming the vaccinated population was typical of the population as a whole, we can say that only 0.25% of those 4.55 billion vaccinated people were at risk of death from COVID. 0.25% of 4.55 billion is 11.4 million people.

So it is impossible for the vaccines to have saved 19.8 million lives. Fallen at the very first hurdle, the Lancet paper has. How embarrassing. I could go on and talk about how, out of those 11.4 million vaccinated people who were at risk of death, based on the mortality seen in England and Wales in 2020, more than 60% were over 80 and more than 90% had more than one other comorbidity making the chances of the majority of them surviving for a year even in the absence of a vaccine rather slim… or that the vaccines don’t prevent infection, transmission, hospitalisation or death from COVID and therefore it’s quite possible they didn’t save a single life, never mind 11.4 million .. but at this stage the Lancet model is flat on the floor begging for mercy so I will stop here.”

Global Impact Of The First Year Of Covid-19 Vaccination (Lancet)

The first COVID-19 vaccine outside a clinical trial setting was administered on Dec 8, 2020. To ensure global vaccine equity, vaccine targets were set by the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility and WHO. However, due to vaccine shortfalls, these targets were not achieved by the end of 2021. We aimed to quantify the global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination programmes. A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission and vaccination was separately fit to reported COVID-19 mortality and all-cause excess mortality in 185 countries and territories. The impact of COVID-19 vaccination programmes was determined by estimating the additional lives lost if no vaccines had been distributed. We also estimated the additional deaths that would have been averted had the vaccination coverage targets of 20% set by COVAX and 40% set by WHO been achieved by the end of 2021.


Based on official reported COVID-19 deaths, we estimated that vaccinations prevented 14·4 million (95% credible interval [Crl] 13·7–15·9) deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020, and Dec 8, 2021. This estimate rose to 19·8 million (95% Crl 19·1–20·4) deaths from COVID-19 averted when we used excess deaths as an estimate of the true extent of the pandemic, representing a global reduction of 63% in total deaths (19·8 million of 31·4 million) during the first year of COVID-19 vaccination. In COVAX Advance Market Commitment countries, we estimated that 41% of excess mortality (7·4 million [95% Crl 6·8–7·7] of 17·9 million deaths) was averted. In low-income countries, we estimated that an additional 45% (95% CrI 42–49) of deaths could have been averted had the 20% vaccination coverage target set by COVAX been met by each country, and that an additional 111% (105–118) of deaths could have been averted had the 40% target set by WHO been met by each country by the end of 2021.

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“No currency has been on top more than 150 years. Nobody has always been on top, so it’s always happened.”

Dollar Dominance ‘Coming To An End’ – Jim Rogers (RT)

The US dollar is starting to lose its leading position across the globe, as Washington has become the world’s largest debtor, famed investor Jim Rogers told Sputnik news agency on Wednesday. The co-founder of the Quantum Fund noted that more and more countries are growing hesitant about the greenback, as deep reliance on its use can lead to various problems. “Many friends of America are moving, trying to find something to compete with and ultimately replace the US dollar,” Rogers said in an interview with the Russian outlet. According to the investor, an international currency should have an absolutely neutral status, and the lack of neutrality demonstrated by the White House, along with growing concerns over US creditworthiness, have deprived the greenback of that quality.

“Many people are starting to say: wait a minute, I don’t know if we want to use that money, because it will have a problem someday,” he said. “But also, the world’s international currency is supposed to be completely neutral. Anybody can use it for anything you want. But now Washington is changing the rules. And if they get angry at you, they cut you off.” Rogers explained that a growing number of countries are now seeking an alternative to the greenback, adding that the Chinese yuan could replace the US currency as the most common means for conducting international settlements.

Russia has been boosting economic ties with China over the past few years, adopting the yuan in international trade. In early April, the Chinese currency replaced the dollar as the most-traded foreign currency in Russia. Moreover, the yuan continues to penetrate a number of other markets around the world. “It will happen. It has always happened. And America’s time is coming to an end. The American dollar this time is coming to an end,” Rogers concluded. “No currency has been on top more than 150 years. Nobody has always been on top, so it’s always happened.”

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“Without the FBI at our disposal, we may have to turn to traditional partners such as the mafia to fight our political enemies..”

FBI Adds Itself To FBI Watch List (BBee)

In an unprecedented move to protect the safety and security of millions of Americans, the FBI has added itself to the FBI watchlist. “When we reflected on the vast number of pedophiles, insurrectionists, frauds, and killers in our organization, we thought: ‘Holy cow! Someone needs to keep an eye on these weirdos!'” said FBI Director Christopher Wray to reporters. “That’s why today we have decided to place the FBI on the FBI watchlist so the FBI can keep a close eye on the FBI before the FBI does something terrible.” Congress is demanding oversight of the FBI’s monitoring of the FBI, as the FBI has been known in the past to let the FBI get away with horrific crimes.


The FBI in turn is monitoring the Congressional oversight committee in charge of overseeing the FBI’s oversight of the FBI. “Americans shouldn’t worry, we have this all under control,” said Wray. Critics of the move expressed concern this may hamper the FBI’s ability to organize governor kidnapping schemes, insurrections, and mass shootings. “Without the FBI at our disposal, we may have to turn to traditional partners such as the mafia to fight our political enemies,” said one anonymous Washington bureaucrat. “What’s the world coming to?” At publishing time, the FBI announced they now have the FBI in custody. Unfortunately, they released the FBI from custody a few minutes later.

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Soros


Just in from NOAA: April 2023 cooler in the US than April 1895, despite a 1000% increase in industrial era atmospheric CO2.

 

 


Just in from NOAA: No warming in the US since January 2005, despite 44% more atmospheric CO2.

 

 

Oyster swims

 

 

Jellyfish

 

 

NASA

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

May 162023
 
 May 16, 2023  Posted by at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Alessandro Allori Self portrait c1555

 

John Durham: FBI Had No Verified Intel When It Opened Probe On Trump (JTN)
IRS Abruptly Removes Investigative Team From Hunter Biden Probe (Straub)
3 FBI Whistleblowers To Testify On ‘Abuses Of Power’ (DM)
Dirty Secrets (Jim Kunstler)
Ukraine Is Not A Symbol of Freedom & Liberal Democracy (Muir)
Prigozhin Denies Talking To Kiev About Selling Out Russian Troops (RT)
Cries and Whispers Along the Russian Watchtowers (Pepe Escobar)
West Acknowledges Direct Involvement In Conflict In Ukraine – UN Envoy (TASS)
Hungary Blocks €500 Million Payment To Ukraine (RT)
Musk Responds To Epstein Subpoena (ZH)
US Empire of Debt Headed for Collapse (Pepe Escobar)
A Disorderly Reset With Gold Revalued By Multiples (Egon von Greyerz)
Nonprofit Hospitals Made Huge Profits During Pandemic (ET)
Climate Sceptics Target Scientists For Vicious Abuse On Musk’s Twitter (G.)
Biden Finally Draws Larger Crowd Than Trump (BBee)

 

 

 

 

Watters


https://twitter.com/i/status/1658283426028605442

 

 

 

 

Zel speech

 

 

 

 

CNN

 

 

Gaetz

 

 

Trump

 

 

 

 

Oz social credit
https://twitter.com/i/status/1657785330936733698

 

 

Macron portrait

 

 

Tom Renz
https://twitter.com/i/status/1658306655090532353

 

 

 

 

There are voices that say Durham intends to go after the FBI next, but I doubt it. He has taken so long with his report that all the usual suspects have had the time to erase -the worst of- their tracks.

The FBI is a cesspit, but fear not: Wray has already made the changes needed. As you were. The smell is hard to bear.

There will be no new charges or arrests. Can you believe it? This has been a coup. There was never any proof for Crossfire Hurricane, but America’s rightfully elected president is gone anyway. And it’s him who’s under investigation, not the people who framed him.

John Durham: FBI Had No Verified Intel When It Opened Probe On Trump (JTN)

Special Counsel John Durham released a damning final report Monday after more than three years investigating the Russia collusion probe, declaring the FBI had no verified intelligence or evidence when it opened the Crossfire Hurricane probe of President Donald Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016. The prosecutor, however, recommended no new criminal charges. “Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Durham wrote in a 300-plus page report sent to Congress and others and obtained by Just the News. DOJ was slated to make the report public later Monday.

The prosecutor faulted the department and the FBI for failing to follow their own standards and allowing a probe to persist, including the surveillance of an American citizen, without basis under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we concluded the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote. “The FBI personnel also repeatedly disregarded important requirements when they continued to seek renewals of that FISA surveillance while acknowledging – then and in hindsight – that they did not genuinely believe there was probably cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power.”

The report’s release touched off instant outrage and impact on Capitol Hill, where House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan tweeted he planned to summon Durham for testimony next week. The FBI immediately reacted, saying Durham’s findings justified the changes that current Director Christopher Wray made after taking over from fired Director James Comey. “The conduct in 2016 and 2017 that Special Counsel Durham examined was the reason that current FBI leadership already implemented dozens of corrective actions, which have now been in place for some time. Had those reforms been in place in 2016, the missteps identified in the report could have been prevented,” the FBI said. “This report reinforces the importance of ensuring the FBI continues to do its work with the rigor, objectivity, and professionalism the American people deserve and rightly expect.”

Durham specifically faulted the FBI for relying on evidence from the campaign of 2016 Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, including the now-discredited Steele dossier, saying leadership lacked the necessary distrust of politically motivated allegations. “Our investigation also revealed that senior FBI personnel displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor towards the information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated persons and entities,” he wrote. “This information in part triggered and sustained Crossfire Hurricane and contributed to the subsequent need for Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation.”

“In particular, there was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents. The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence.” The special prosecutor pointedly highlighted what he portrayed as a dual system of justice, noting the FBI never opened a counterintelligence probe of Clinton’s campaign, despite receiving intelligence she had authorized a dirty trick to paint Trump as a stooge for Russian President Vladimir Putin to impact the outcome of the election.

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“..This drastic action allegedly came on the orders of the Justice Department..”

IRS Abruptly Removes Investigative Team From Hunter Biden Probe (Straub)

In an alarming move that has raised eyebrows and suspicions about the integrity of federal agencies, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) abruptly removed the entire team working on the high-profile tax fraud investigation of Hunter Biden, first son of President Joe Biden. This drastic action allegedly came on the orders of the Justice Department, adding to the widespread concern among conservatives about potential corruption and the abuse of power within the federal government. The abrupt reassignment of the investigative team has been perceived by many as retaliation against the supervisory special agent whistleblower, who alleged a coverup of the controversial probe. The agent, who has been overseeing the investigation since early 2020, was informed of this sudden personnel change, according to a letter from his attorneys, Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt, to Congress.

In the letter, Lytle and Leavitt suggested that the removal of the investigators not only constituted retaliation but could also be construed as an obstruction of a congressional inquiry. The attorneys pointed out that their client had a legal right to make disclosures to Congress under 5 U.S.C. § 2302 and that any attempt to prevent a federal employee from furnishing information to Congress is a direct violation of long-standing appropriations restrictions. They further emphasized that the removal of the experienced investigative team was the very issue the whistleblower initially sought to expose. Hunter Biden [..] is the alleged subject of the coverup claims. Communications retrieved from his abandoned laptop revealed that he had paid up to “half” of his income to his father, President Joe Biden.

This controversy arose simultaneously with the release of the long-awaited report by special counsel John Durham detailing bias in the FBI’s investigation of former President Donald Trump’s alleged links to Russia. The timing of these events has further incensed conservatives, fueling claims of a biased news cycle. The IRS whistleblower first surfaced last month when Lytle informed congressional leaders that his client wished to expose the “preferential treatment” in the Hunter Biden case and the alleged false testimony to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland had repeatedly reassured lawmakers that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss could unilaterally make charging decisions in the investigation. This information comes amid reports of “growing frustration” within the FBI over Weiss’s failure to bring charges against Hunter Biden, despite the bureau concluding most of its work last year.

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“..they were instructed to pursue Jan. 6 investigations over child sex crime cases, because they were ‘no longer a priority.'”

3 FBI Whistleblowers To Testify On ‘Abuses Of Power’ (DM)

Three FBI officials will testify on alleged ‘abuses of power’ by FBI leadership – ranging from discrimination against conservatives to inflation of domestic terrorism statistics – during a public whistleblower hearing by the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Thursday, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively. Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and head of the select committee, has secured the in-person testimony of suspended FBI special agents Garret O’Boyle and Steve Friend, as well as former FBI State Operations Specialist Marcus Allen. President of Empower Oversight Tristan Leavitt will also be testifying. The hearing is set to be held at 9 a.m. ET Thursday and will focus on the ‘abuses of power’ the former officials witnessed.

They will be given the opportunity to detail how they have been ‘retaliated’ against by the FBI, according to a source familiar. O’Boyle and Friend participated in a closed door transcribed interview in February conducted by the select committee. According to notes from the interview, the former agents specifically expressed concerns with instructions from FBI leadership that they focus on pursuing ‘domestic violent extremism’ probes and disregard standard investigative procedures in January 6 cases. In addition, the former officials told the committee that they were instructed to pursue Jan. 6 investigations over child sex crime cases, because they were ‘no longer a priority.’ Specifically, the former agents accuse the FBI of inflating statistics on ‘domestic violent extremism’ to fit the Biden administration’s political narrative that extremism is on the rise nationwide.

‘The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics, constituting false official federal statements,’ Friend wrote in an affidavit. ‘Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from an isolated incident at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.’ Friend had his security clearance revoked last September after he vocalized concerns to his superiors, which he described in an affidavit as being a clear retaliatory move by the agency against him. O’Boyle’s clearance has also been stripped. Allen, who has not yet sat before the select committee, is expected to present new evidence to the lawmakers Thursday.

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“Trump versus RFK, Jr. would bring the people of this country together and refocus the nation’s attention on things that matter. It would also be the Baby Boomer’s last stand.”

Dirty Secrets (Jim Kunstler)

Like myriad institutions in recent decades, the Democratic Party had come to be dominated by women. Women, being hard-wired for safety-seeking, were easily manipulated by the security state into an hysteria fixated on Donald Trump, who was made to represent everything that seemed unsafe. They gave the game away on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day with their women’s march that featured thousands wearing the emblematic “pussy hats.” Message: don’t think you can have your wicked way with this! The hysteria hasn’t let up since then, and now that Mr. Trump is resurging from a thousand attempts to kill him off like some implacable axe-murderer in a horror movie, the corps of useful idiots is showing signs of nervous exhaustion.

The Democratic Party’s front-man, “Joe Biden” (or the claque behind him backstage), has screwed the pooch on just about every matter of vital public interest at home and abroad, and now this president stands revealed as the head of a racketeering operation that specialized in bribery. Yet, oddly, it is Mr. Trump who has been fed into the cogs of the judiciary on an unending set of Mickey Mouse charges. There’s a pretty fair possibility that none of that will work. The Democrats must suspect this, and their nemesis has declared his intentions for a return to power pretty clearly: fire all the seditionists in the security state, pardon all the people on the Right who were unjustly prosecuted, and commence some righteous prosecutions against people who actually deserve it.

Thus, the Left plunges ever-deeper into mental illness — celebrating it at every opportunity and even shoving it America’s face, Joker-style, in defiance: Here, have another drag queen…. A big part of the Left’s mental illness is the inability to even notice their own self-destructive trajectory. There’s a way out for them but it’s pretty drastic. That would be turning to RFK, Jr. for leadership. Trouble is, Mr. Kennedy intends to go after the Democrats’ patron, the security state itself, which he’s publicly blamed for the deaths of his father and uncle. Bobby Kennedy also happens to be an enemy of the US public health agencies and especially a critic of the Covid-19 vaccines that the Left has hung its identity on. They still can’t admit that getting vaxxed and boosted was a tragic mistake.

But an election contest between RFK, Jr. and Donald Trump would be a most salutary exercise for our country. Both of them want to dismantle the overgrown surveillance apparatus and severely reform the agencies under the executive branch. That is, they are both intent on disarming the security state and the Censorship Industrial Complex it spawned. They are both against the stupid Neo-con wars. Trump versus RFK, Jr. would bring the people of this country together and refocus the nation’s attention on things that matter. It would also be the Baby Boomer’s last stand.

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“Ukraine is not a symbol of Freedom & Liberal Democracy. It is a corrupt warmongering Proxy of the US and the Western Globalist Elites”

Ukraine Is Not A Symbol of Freedom & Liberal Democracy (Muir)

Statements from the U.S. and other Western officials, as well as pervasive accounts in the news media, have created a stunningly misleading image of Ukraine. There has been a concerted effort to portray the country not only as a victim of brutal Russian aggression but as a plucky and noble bulwark of freedom and democracy. The conventional narrative would have us believe that Ukraine is an Eastern European version of Denmark. The promoters of that narrative contend that the ongoing war is not just a quarrel between Russia and Ukraine over Kiev’s ambitions to join NATO and Moscow’s territorial claims in Crimea and the Donbas. No, they insist—the war is part of a global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a leader worthy of nothing less than Winston Churchill’s legacy.

President Biden, in his March 26 remarks on the war, said the conflict was “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” CNN’s John Blake literally compared Ukraine’s cause to America’s in its Revolutionary War. He claimed Ukrainians “are building their own monuments to democracy, with their blood.” The world, he said, “has been transfixed by their battle to repel the mighty Russian army and preserve the birth of democracy in their homeland.” He added that “the war in Ukraine isn’t just a geopolitical struggle—it’s a call to remember. The courage of the Ukrainian people is a reminder of what the U.S. used to be—a ‘beacon of liberty,’ where virtually every schoolchild memorised the ‘Concord Hymn’ poem inscribed at the base of the Minute Man statue.”

In a March 26 USA Today op-ed, John M. Bridgeland, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President George W. Bush, similarly expressed fawning admiration for Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s alleged commitment to democracy. “The world is seeing the bravery of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people, who are willing to die to defend their democracy and freedom,” he wrote. Indeed, Bridgeland said, “No cost is too high [for Ukrainians] to defend their democracy and beloved Ukraine.”

[..] The notion that Ukraine was such an appealing democratic model in Eastern Europe that the country’s mere existence terrified Putin may be a comforting myth to U.S. politicians and pundits, but it is a myth. Ukraine is far from being a democratic-capitalist model and an irresistible magnet for Russia’s groaning masses. The reality is murkier and troubling: Ukraine has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the international system. In its annual report published in January 2022, Transparency International ranked Ukraine 123rd of the 180 countries it examined, with a score of 32 on a one to 100-point scale.

Ukraine’s track record of protecting democracy and civil liberties is not much better than its performance on corruption. In Freedom House’s 2022 report, Ukraine is listed in the “partly free” category, with a score of 61 out of a possible 100. Other countries in that category include such bastions of liberal democracy as Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines (55), Serbia (62), Hungary (59), and Singapore (47). Interestingly, Hungary—which has been a target of vitriolic criticism among progressives in the West because of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s conservative social policy—ranks eight points higher than Ukraine, which is the recipient of uncritical praise from the same Western ideological factions.

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This was always a non-story. Makes no sense at all. Next!

Prigozhin Denies Talking To Kiev About Selling Out Russian Troops (RT)

Evgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company, claims it would have been “physically impossible” for him to meet with Ukrainian military intelligence agents in Africa to make a treasonous proposal to them. The alleged contacts were described by the Washington Post based on purported leaks from the Pentagon. The outlet claimed on Sunday that classified US documents, which made their way to the public through a Discord server, claim there had been communication between Prigozhin and Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR).

The Wagner head allegedly sought to have Ukrainian troops withdraw from the area around the bitterly contested city of Artyomovsk (known in Ukraine as Bakhmut) in order to ease the pressure on his own troops for a while, in exchange for information on Russian troop positions elsewhere. The alleged contacts were said to take place by phone and an in-person meeting in Africa, where the Wagner Group is also active. Prigozhin dismissed the report as “speculation dumped by the Washington Post” and insisted he had not been to Africa since months before the hostilities in Ukraine broke out in February 2022. He suggested that the newspaper was overstating the supposed intel or had fallen victim to planted disinformation.

The Post said two Ukrainian officials confirmed the contacts between Prigozhin and the GUR, but when the newspaper asked Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky about them, he appeared to be angered and demanded to know who the sources in his government were. “Who is talking about the activities of our intelligence? Because this is the most severe felony in our country,” he said, before accusing the newspaper of trying to help Russia. The Post later redacted this portion of the interview on its website. In a statement, Prigozhin alluded to the apparent act of self-censorship, calling into question the Post’s reliability.

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“..the ground will start to be laid for US/NATO to eventually turn rump Ukraine, the Baltic lap dogs, rabid Poland and a few other extras into a sort of Fortress Eastern Europe engaged in a war of attrition against Russia with the potential to last decades. That may be the ultimate argument for Russia to finally go for the jugular, as soon as possible.”

Cries and Whispers Along the Russian Watchtowers (Pepe Escobar)

Trademark American arrogance/ignorance does not erase the fact there seems to be a serious power struggle among the siloviki. Yevgeny Prigozhin, a siloviki, in fact denounced Shoigu and Gerasimov as incompetent, implying they only keep their posts out of loyalty to President Putin. This is as serious as it gets. Because it’s linked to a key question posed across several educated silos in Moscow: if Russia is widely known to be the strongest military power in the world with the most advanced defensive and offensive missiles, how come they have not wrapped up the whole deal in the Ukrainian battlefield? A plausible answer is that only 200,000 members of the Russian army are currently fighting, and about 400,000 to 600,000 are waiting in reserve for the Ukraine attack. While they wait they are in constant training; so waiting works to Russia’s advantage.

Once the famous “counter-offensive” peters out, Ukraine will be hit with massive force. There will be no negotiated settlement. Only unconditional surrender. What goin’ on right now – the Prigozhin drama – is subordinated to this logic, running in parallel to a quite sophisticated media operation. Yes, the Ministry of Defense (MoD) made several serious mistakes, as well as other Russian institutions, since the start of the SMO. To criticize them in public, constructively, is a salutary exercise. Prighozin’s tactics are a gem; he manipulates a degree of public outrage/indignation to put pressure on the MoD bureaucracy by essentially telling the truth. He could even go as far as naming names: officers who are abandoning different sectors of the frontlines. In contrast, his Wagner “musicians” are pictured as true heroes. Whether Prigozhin’s sound and fury will be enough to fine tune the MoD’s entrenched bureaucracy is an open question.

Still, media coverage of the whole drama is essential; now that these problems are in the public domain, people will expect the MoD to act. And by the way, this is the essential fact: Prighozin has been allowed (italics mine) to go as far as he wants by the Higher Power (the St. Petersburg connection). Otherwise he would be in a revamped-gulag by now. So the next few weeks are absolutely crucial. Putin and the Security Council certainly know what everyone else doesn’t – including Prighozin. The key take away is that the ground will start to be laid for US/NATO to eventually turn rump Ukraine, the Baltic lap dogs, rabid Poland and a few other extras into a sort of Fortress Eastern Europe engaged in a war of attrition against Russia with the potential to last decades. That may be the ultimate argument for Russia to finally go for the jugular, as soon as possible. Otherwise the future will be bleak. Well, not so bleak. Remember Putin: “We haven’t even started anything yet.”

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“..Baerbock said that possible arms supplies by third countries to Russia were unacceptable because they could be equated to participation in the conflict..”

West Acknowledges Direct Involvement In Conflict In Ukraine – UN Envoy

The West has outright acknowledged its direct involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya told a meeting of the UN Security Council on Monday. “Recently [German Foreign Minister] Annalena Baerbock said that possible arms supplies by third countries to Russia were unacceptable because they could be equated to participation in the conflict,” the permanent representative pointed out. “And what about the fact that now the entire military machine of the West is working to keep the war going?” Nebenzya asked. “This is yet another open admission of direct Western involvement in the conflict,” Nebenzya said.

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Hungary seems to always cave in the end.

Hungary Blocks €500 Million Payment To Ukraine (RT)

Hungary has blocked the transfer of €500 million ($544 million) worth of arms and military equipment from the EU to Ukraine, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported on Monday. With Kiev scrambling for Western arms to bolster its long-promised counteroffensive against Russian forces, the package was supposed to be sent next week. The package was supposed to be the eighth drawdown for Ukraine from the European Peace Facility (EPF), a €5.6 billion ($6.08 billion) fund that the bloc uses to finance foreign militaries and reimburse its own members who send arms to foreign conflicts. Prior to last February, the ‘Peace Facility’ had only been used to supply non-lethal equipment to Georgia, Mali, Moldova, Mozambique, and Ukraine, for a total of less than $125 million.

Budapest refused to authorize the latest transfer unless it received “guarantees” that the EPF would remain “global” in its scope, and not be used solely to arm Ukraine, ANSA reported, citing “an informed source.” That Hungary would block the supply of arms to Kiev is not surprising. While Hungary is a member of NATO, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has refused to allow the US-led bloc to send weapons to Ukraine via Hungarian territory. Orban has accused the US and his fellow NATO allies of stoking the conflict “at the expense of European interests,” while his government supports a Chinese plan aimed at resolving the conflict diplomatically. Late last year, Hungary held up an €18 billion ($19.5 billion) tranche of economic aid for Ukraine, which the bloc would have borrowed on global markets. Orban argued that by doing so, the EU would have become “indebted” over Ukraine. He eventually relented when the bloc lifted a freeze it had placed on grant money for Hungary.

In January, Hungary also blocked the release of the seventh tranche of EPF arms for Ukraine, although the package was approved several weeks later. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly called on the West to supply him with heavier weapons and more ammunition ahead of a much-vaunted counteroffensive against Russian forces. Zelensky toured Italy, Germany, the UK, and France in recent days and secured further promises of aid from all four, but he still insists he needs fighter jets and longer-range missiles to make good on his promise to retake the Russian territories of Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, and Crimea. American military officials have publicly expressed doubt that the Ukrainian military can achieve these goals, and leaked Pentagon documents suggest that Washington is bracing for the failure of Kiev’s offensive.

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This stinks.

Musk Responds To Epstein Subpoena (ZH)

Update: Musk has replied news that he’s been subpoenaed in the US Virgin Islands lawsuit against JPMorgan over their relationship with Epstein. “This is idiotic on so many levels,” said Musk, adding “That cretin never advised me on anything whatsoever.” “The notion that I would need or listen to financial advice from a dumb crook is absurd.” Lastly, Musk claims that JPMorgan “let Tesla down ten years ago, despite having Tesla’s global commercial banking business, which I then withdrew. I have never forgiven them.”
* * *
Elon Musk was issued a subpoena by the US Virgin Islands as part of its lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s alleged facilitation of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, a court filing revealed Monday. According to the filing, the Virgin Islands has attempted to serve Musk since late April, because Epstein “may have referred or attempted to refer” Musk as a client to JPMorgan. “The USVI hired an investigative firm to try to locate an address from Musk, and also contacted one of the CEO’s lawyers, who in the past has waived the requirement of him being personally served with legal documents in past federal cases, according to the filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.” -CNBC.


“The Government contacted Mr. Musk’s counsel via email to ask if he would be authorized to accept service on Mr. Musk’s behalf in this matter but did not receive a response confirming or denying his authority,” reads the filing. JPMorgan is accused of servicing approximately 55 Epstein accounts between 1998 and 2013, years after his 2006 arrest for soliciting minors in Florida. Meanwhile, the US Virgin Islands has also been unable to subpoena Google co-founder Larry Page in connection with its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, according to federal court filings.

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“what’s happening in the banking crisis today is that debts grow faster than the economy can pay..”

US Empire of Debt Headed for Collapse (Pepe Escobar)

Prof. Michael Hudson’s new book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point” is a seminal event in this Year of Living Dangerously when, to paraphrase Gramsci, the old geopolitical and geoeconomic order is dying and the new one is being born at breakneck speed. Prof. Hudson’s main thesis is absolutely devastating: he sets out to prove that economic/financial practices in Ancient Greece and Rome – the pillars of Western Civilization – set the stage for what is happening today right in front of our eyes: an empire reduced to a rentier economy, collapsing from within. And that brings us to the common denominator in every single Western financial system: it’s all about debt, inevitably growing by compound interest.

Ay, there’s the rub: before Greece and Rome, we had nearly 3,000 years of civilizations across West Asia doing exactly the opposite. These kingdoms all knew about the importance of canceling debts. Otherwise their subjects would fall into bondage; lose their land to a bunch of foreclosing creditors; and these would usually try to overthrow the ruling power. Aristotle succinctly framed it: “Under democracy, creditors begin to make loans and the debtors can’t pay and the creditors get more and more money, and they end up turning a democracy into an oligarchy, and then the oligarchy makes itself hereditary, and you have an aristocracy.” Prof. Hudson sharply explains what happens when creditors take over and “reduce all the rest of the economy to bondage”: it’s what’s called today “austerity” or “debt deflation”.

So “what’s happening in the banking crisis today is that debts grow faster than the economy can pay. And so when the interest rates finally began to be raised by the Federal Reserve, this caused a crisis for the banks.” Prof. Hudson also proposes an expanded formulation: “The emergence of financial and landholding oligarchies made debt peonage and bondage permanent, supported by a pro-creditor legal and social philosophy that distinguishes Western civilization from what went before. Today it would be called neoliberalism.”

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Egon talks his book.

A Disorderly Reset With Gold Revalued By Multiples (Egon von Greyerz)

Tectonic shifts lie ahead. These will involve a US and European debt crisis ending in a debt collapse, a precipitous fall of the dollar and the Euro with Gold emerging as a reserve asset but at multiples of the current price. The next phase of the fall of the West is here and will soon accelerate. It has been both precipitated and aggravated by the absurd sanctions of Russia. These sanctions are hurting Europe badly and affecting the US in a way that they didn’t expect, but was obvious to some of us. The Romans understood that free trade was essential between all the countries that they conquered. But the US administration blocks have both the money and the ability to trade of the countries they don’t like.

But shooting yourself in the foot really hurts and the consequences are in front of our eyes. No foreign country will want to hold US debt or dollars. That is a catastrophic problem for the US as their deficits will grow exponentially in coming years. So a debt collapse is not just a looming disaster but a bomb hurling towards the US economy at supersonic speed. With the imminent death of the petrodollar and explosion of US debt, there is only one solution for the funding requirements of the US Government – the FED which will stand as the sole buyer of US Treasuries.

So the DEBT spiral of higher debt, higher deficits, more Treasuries, higher rates and falling bond prices will soon turn into a DEATH spiral with a collapsing dollar, high inflation and most probably hyperinflation. Sounds like default to me but that word will probably never be used officially. It is hard to admit defeat even when it stares you in the face! Yes, the US will probably obfuscate the situation with CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) but since that is just another form of Fiat money, it will at best buy a little time but the end result will be the same.

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“American life expectancy during this period sharply declined by a staggering 2.5 years from 2019 through 2022..”

Nonprofit Hospitals Made Huge Profits During Pandemic (ET)

Federal officials gave more than $23 billion in COVID-19 aid to the nation’s top 20 nonprofit hospitals, even as a 62 percent increase in their collective net assets led to parallel surges in the institutions’ total profits and revenues during 2018–2021, according to a new report. Only two of the 20 institutions have repaid the government for the COVID-19 aid they received. “The 20 largest nonprofit hospitals in the country continued making massive profits while their cumulative net assets soared to $324.3 billion in 2021, up from $200.6 billion in 2018. “Those hospital systems received congressional COVID bailouts of $23 billion and only two providers partially paid their COVID bailout back,” according to the report compiled by Open The Books, an Illinois-based research nonprofit that compiles and posts spending by all levels of government in the United States.

The two institutions that have partially repaid the government weren’t identified. The biggest jump among the top 20 was 92 percent by the Mayo Clinic, based in Rochester, Minnesota, whose assets surged to $17.7 billion in 2021 from $9.2 billion in 2018. The Mayo Clinic received $350,000 in federal COVID-19 aid, the lowest amount received among the top 20 institutions. The Cleveland Clinic Health System, based in Independence, Ohio, saw its assets rise 60 percent, to $15.7 billion from $9.8 billion, while receiving $118 million in federal COVID-19 aid. Intermountain Healthcare, based in Salt Lake City, the 12th-largest of the top 20, enjoyed a 63 percent growth in net assets to $11.6 billion from $7.1 billion; Intermountain received $518 million in aid.

[..] As the revenue poured in for the 20 hospitals, compensation for their top executives soared, often beyond $10 million annually, according to the report. For example, the CEO of Ascension Healthcare, which is based in St. Louis and is the nation’s second-largest such system, received $13 million in 2021 and more than $22 million over the period covered by the study. [..] The recipient among the top 20 of the most COVID-19 aid was San Francisco-based CommonSpirit Health with $3.6 billion, followed by Providence St. Joseph Center with $3 billion, Ascension Healthcare with $2.7 billion, Livonia, Michigan-based Livonia Health with $2.3 billion and Sutter Health, based in Sacramento, California, with $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, the overall health of Americans got worse between 2018 and 2021. “American life expectancy during this period sharply declined by a staggering 2.5 years from 2019 through 2022. While ‘comparable country averages’ rebounded from a COVID-related drop in 2021, the United States continued declining in life expectancy,” the report found.

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Yeah, “The Science” doesn’t do it anymore. You’ll have to work again.

Climate Sceptics Target Scientists For Vicious Abuse On Musk’s Twitter (G.)

Some of the UK’s top scientists are struggling to deal with what they describe as a huge rise in abuse from climate crisis deniers on Twitter since the social media platform was taken over by Elon Musk last year. Since then, key figures who ensured “trusted” content was prioritised have been sacked, according to one scientist, and Twitter’s sustainability arm has vanished. At the same time several users with millions of followers who propagate false statements about the climate emergency, including Donald Trump and rightwing culture warrior Jordan Peterson, have had their accounts reinstated. Climate scientists say the change has been stark, and they are fighting to make themselves heard over a “barrage” of often hostile comments.

“There’s been a massive change,” said Mark Maslin, professor of earth system science at University College London and the author of popular books including How to Save Our Planet. “I get so much abuse and rude comments now. It’s happening to all of us, but I challenge the climate deniers so I’ve been really targeted.” Maslin says he used to have regular meetings with Sean Boyle, Twitter’s former head of sustainability, who was laid off in Musk’s mass cull of staff shortly after he took over in Aprll 2022. Maslin said Boyle discussed the platform’s work to develop ways of ensuring that trusted information was pushed to the top. “They were using climate change as a good test bed, because it was fairly clear who the good and bad actors were,” Maslin said. “But he was sacked and Twitter became the wild west.”

Maslin said he will stay on the platform and push back against conspiracy theories with scientific evidence. “I want people to understand there are solutions. There is a real need for us to be on social media defending the truth, however nasty the responses get.” But not all scientists have found standing up to regular hostility an easy feat. Doug McNeall, a statistician working on climate change at the Met Office Hadley Centre at Exeter University, said he had blocked or muted many accounts on Twitter even before Musk’s arrival. “I got to the point where it was definitely affecting my mental health,” he said. “I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”

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El Paso.

Biden Finally Draws Larger Crowd Than Trump (BBee)

The mainstream media has been heaping praise on President Biden for finally drawing a larger crowd than former President Trump. According to reports, hundreds of thousands are gathering in El Paso and it’s all because of President Biden. “These are truly historic numbers we are seeing! Trump could never get this many people even at his biggest rallies,” gushed CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. “This is an incredible moment for President Biden. He’s clearly resonating with the American people — well, the people, anyway — and it’s clear that his policies are making a real difference.”


Upon seeing the massive crowds, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow added, “This just goes to show that people are hungry for real leadership and real strength. President Biden is clearly delivering on that front.” Many news sites praised the crowd for its youthfulness and diversity. “Just look at how young of a crowd Biden pulls!” exclaimed Anderson Cooper. “All those unaccompanied minors — I mean democrat voters and it’s all thanks to Biden.” When asked for comment, even Trump had to admit that it was a “tremendous and unbelievably large crowd of people that — to be quite frank with you — I could never draw, believe me!”

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Smile

 

 

Flower matis

 

 

 

 

Moose
https://twitter.com/i/status/1658079007307444227

 

 

Puma
https://twitter.com/i/status/1657802557731766274

 

 


Blue footed

 

 

Lynx

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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


Henri Matisse Flowers 1907

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

Nancy Mace

 

 

 

 

Ed Dowd

 

 

German farmers

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Overpopulation

 

 

McLuhan

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

Watters

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

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

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

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

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More power than Congress?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Trump

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

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

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

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


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

Trump CNN

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Plenty offers. But they need to include China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bold Gambits On The West Asian Chessboard (Pepe Escobar)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Well-known recipe

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

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


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

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Because 450,000 Americans died vs 28 million Russians.

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

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

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

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

Zakharova

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Start small.

Liechtenstein To Accept Bitcoin For Payments To State (RT)

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


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

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Are we to believe they do not know this?

Net Zero Grid Batteries Alone Would Bankrupt America (Rucker)

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

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

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

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

True cost

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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Cold Outside

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

Pigeon loop

 

 

Mola mola

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

May 052023
 


Mark Chagall Peace window, UN 1967

 

Beijing Ready To Settle Ukrainian Crisis Jointly With Russia – FM (TASS)
Pepe Escobar: US Outmatched by Russia, China (Sputnik)
The Worst Kind Of Peace Is Better Than Any War – Exiled Ukraine Dissident (RT)
Washington Responsible For Attack On Kremlin – Moscow (RT)
US Has Nothing To Do With Attack On Kremlin – White House (TASS)
West Has Fueled ‘Sense Of Impunity’ In Kiev – Zakharova (RT)
Ukraine Helpless Against Russian Smart Bombs – Official (RT)
Zelensky Calls For Creation Of International Tribunal Against Russia (TASS)
West’s Attempts To Revive Neo-nazi Ideology Lead To Global Catastrophe (TASS)
Putin Compares Russian And Western Debt (RT)
Oh Countrywide, Is That Your Ghost? (Denninger)
FBI File Ties Biden To ‘Criminal Scheme’ To Trade Money For Policy (WT)
The Polish ‘Zeitenwende’ Connection (Jorge Vilches)
Nord Stream Sabotage ‘Secret Teams’ Revealed (Ponton)
State Department Slams Assange On World Press Freedom Day (Gosztola)

 

 

 

 

Drew
https://twitter.com/i/status/1654300820114948099

 

 

 

100% of all regional banks in the United States had their stocks in the red May 4, for the first time ever. This comes a day after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the US banking system was stronger than ever.

 

 

Orban

 

 

 

 

Yeadon

 

 

 

 

China inserts itself step by step..

“We are ready to make a practical contribution into the political resolution of the Ukrainian crisis through contacts and coordination with Russia..”

Beijing Ready To Settle Ukrainian Crisis Jointly With Russia – FM (TASS)

During Thursday’s talks with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in India, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said the Chinese side was ready to make a practical contribution into the Ukrainian crisis settlement in cooperation with Russia, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Friday.”China will persistently assist and promote peace talks. We are ready to make a practical contribution into the political resolution of the Ukrainian crisis through contacts and coordination with Russia,” the ministry’s website quoted Qin Gang as saying. During the meeting, the top Chinese diplomat said ties between Beijing and Moscow had intensified after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Russia.


“China and Russia have been maintaining active contacts at all levels, promoting cooperation in all directions,” Qin Gang said. “China is ready <…> to intensify strategic contacts with Russia, to strengthen and deepen cooperation in all areas,” the diplomat added. Both sides have reaffirmed their intention to improve coordination within the framework of important international organizations and formats, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the Group of Twenty (G20) and the United Nations. Beijing and Moscow will jointly “resist all manifestations of hegemony, defend common interests of countries with emerging markets and developing nations, defend equality and justice in the world,” the minister said.

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“The Biden administration’s policy of simultaneously confronting both Russia and China is doomed to fail, Pepe Escobar, geopolitical analyst and veteran journalist, told Radio Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.”

Pepe Escobar: US Outmatched by Russia, China (Sputnik)

Under the Biden administration Washington’s relations with Moscow and Beijing hit a new low. Having snubbed Russia’s security draft proposals concerning NATO enlargement and Ukraine’s neutrality, the US ramped up military aid to the Kiev regime after the beginning of Moscow’s special military operation (SMO) to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine. The Biden administration not only slapped Russia with sanctions and derailed the March 2022 Istanbul preliminary peace accords between Moscow and Kiev but openly called for bleeding Russia white and imposing strategic defeat on the nation. Simultaneously, Washington resorted to a series of provocations against China over Taiwan, the island located at the junction of the East and South China Seas, which Beijing regards as an inalienable part of the People’s Republic.

House Speakers Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen in what was seen by Beijing as a clear defiance of One China principle, while President Joe Biden issued repeated “gaffes” that the US is ready to “protect” the island militarily from the People’s Republic. Recently, the Pentagon has speeded up the provision of weapons to Taipei as the latter is bracing for the January 2024 presidential elections. Despite these provocative moves, the US military is not ready for a full-fledged confrontation with China, according to Escobar. “They won’t fight real wars,” the veteran journalist said. “And now they are even more freaked out because they know, for instance, if they try something in the South China Sea, the Chinese have the famous carrier killers all over the coast. So, if you have three or four American complexes navigate over there, they can be sunk in 30 minutes. And the Pentagon knows that, they gamed it.”

Likewise, Washington has failed to defeat Moscow either militarily or economically despite a set of unprecedented measures taken by the US, its NATO allies and partners against Russia. “Russia survived everything that the West threw against it after the start of the special military operation, especially the economic war, the financial war,” Escobar said. “And Russia survived and resisted. And now it’s even growing again with the 3% inflation, where we have nations in Europe with 10-20-30% inflation and floundering.” What’s more, the Biden administration’s provocations and bellicose rhetoric against Russia and China has served to push the two great powers closer together. In March, Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a three-day visit to Moscow at the invitation of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Observers have drawn attention to the fact that Russia became the first foreign state visited by Xi after his historic reelection on March 10.

Commenting on the development, Chinese observers told Sputnik that Russia and China “have entered a new stage of comprehensive cooperation and strategic partnership.” That is how Team Biden has turned Brzezinski’s nightmare scenario of a “grand coalition” between Moscow and Beijing into reality. According to Escobar, Moscow has spent much of the past decade preparing for the West’s hybrid and financial war. Russian policy makers began game planning for a potential showdown shortly after a US-backed coup in Kiev usurped power in Ukraine. “If the SMO had been launched in 2014, Russia would not have been ready economically, financially and even militarily for it. Now they are. I’m sure that Elvira Nabiullina, at the Russian central bank, knew exactly what she did. This probably had been discussed for at least two years at the highest level at the Security Council level,” he said.

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“As a result of this tragedy, Ukraine has lost the attributes needed for statehood..”

The Worst Kind Of Peace Is Better Than Any War – Exiled Ukraine Dissident (RT)

In Kolomyia, a small town in Ukraine’s Western Ivano-Frankovsk Region, a court is hearing the case against Ruslan Kotsaba, who is accused of treason and crimes against the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, the defendant is not present, having fled to the US in August 2022. The details of the charges brought against the journalist are still unknown. An advisor to the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Markiyan Lubkivsky, has stated that documents which “may indicate” treason and espionage were seized during his arrest. However, they have not been made public. Meanwhile, Kotsaba insists he’s being persecuted for his pacifist views. Since 2014, he has been a war correspondent working on both sides of the front in Donbass. During Pyotr Poroshenko’s presidency, the authorities persecuted him for issuing calls to boycott conscription.

Meanwhile, Kotsaba was also often attacked by nationalists. Under Vladimir Zelensky, the crackdown has continued, and Amnesty International has recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. In a conversation with RT, Kotsaba discussed the internal conflicts tearing Ukrainian society apart, the possibilities for pacifism in the country, and its post-war future. RT: This year will mark the ten-year anniversary of the start of the Euromaidan [a series of violent Western-backed protests which overthrew the elected government]. You took an active part in those events as a journalist. How do you feel about them now? Ruslan Kotsaba: The Ukrainian language has two different words for positive and negative kinds of anniversaries. We call the anniversary of a positive event “rychnitsa,” and the anniversary of a bad one “rokovina.” The Euromaidan anniversary is doubtlessly a “rokovina.”

As a result of this tragedy, Ukraine has lost the attributes needed for statehood. The so-called “Revolution of Dignity” was just a political strategy. Millionaires wanted to become billionaires, and the rest of the people were just used as extras. In regard to the Maidan, we need to clearly separate the people on the stage from the people in front of the stage. The actors on the stage used political methods to spark mass hysteria. The crowd merely jumped up and down under the xenophobic slogans. The media empires of the oligarchs all worked to take down President Viktor Yanukovich. At the time, people believed that they could elect someone who would make things better. But in Ukraine, the power vertical has progressively deteriorated – every new politician is worse than his predecessor.

This whole political strategy was based on the belief that new people would come and things would improve. But as we can see now, it’s only getting worse. The strategy has exhausted itself. I hope we were its last guinea pigs. At first, the Maidan looked like a festival, but it all ended with mass killings. To this day, no one knows who is responsible for the deaths, why no one has been punished, and why the authorities ordered to cut down the trees that proved that the shots were fired from the building where the deputies of the [Ukrainian far-right] ‘Svoboda’ party were positioned.

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“.. it is important that the US “clearly understands” that Russia is aware of its involvement in Ukraine and “how dangerous such direct involvement is.”

Washington Responsible For Attack On Kremlin – Moscow (RT)

All of Kiev’s decisions are ultimately dictated by Washington, including which targets to hit and by what means, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed on Thursday. His comments came after two Ukrainian drones unsuccessfully attempted to strike the Kremlin in the early hours of Wednesday morning. “Such decisions – the definition of goals, the definition of means, and so on – all this is dictated to Kiev from Washington, and we are well aware of this,” Peskov told reporters. The spokesman for President Vladimir Putin dismissed attempts by US and Ukrainian officials to “disown” Wednesday’s attack as “laughable,” insisting that “we know full well that decisions to carry out such terrorist actions are made not in Kiev, but in Washington.”

Peskov asserted that it is important that the US “clearly understands” that Russia is aware of its involvement in Ukraine and “how dangerous such direct involvement is.” The spokesman said that Kiev’s attempted drone strike on the Kremlin is being thoroughly investigated, but did not provide estimates on when any conclusions would be officially announced. Peskov reiterated that Moscow reserves the right to respond to the attack with “a variety of steps.” Although declining to specify what those measures might be, the Kremlin official insisted they would be carefully considered and “in line with Russia’s interests.” Putin’s office reported on Wednesday that two Ukrainian UAVs had been disabled by air defenses while trying to strike the president’s Kremlin residence in Moscow in the early hours of the morning. Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time of the incident and no one was hurt, the statement added.

Russia described the failed drone strike as “a pre-planned terrorist act” and an attempt on Putin’s life perpetrated by Kiev. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has denied his country’s involvement in the attack, while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that Washington could not “in any way validate” Russia’s claims. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has also stated that the US is unable to confirm the “authenticity” of the incident. The Kremlin has vowed that Moscow will retaliate to the raid “anywhere and anytime it deems necessary,” while senior Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin has called for the use of “weapons capable of stopping and destroying the Kiev terrorist regime.”

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You paid for it, provided the intelligence, but you have nothing to do with it?

“Moscow knows that Kiev chooses the means and targets for its strikes exactly as it’s told by Washington..”

US Has Nothing To Do With Attack On Kremlin – White House (TASS)

The US has nothing to do with the recent drone attack on the Kremlin, US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby said on MSNBC television on Thursday. “We still don’t really know what happened,” he said, adding that Washington is still assessing the situation. Kirby said he had seen comments by Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Thursday, which stated Washington was involved in the incident. “I can assure you that there was no involvement by the United States in this. Whatever it was did not involve us,” he said. “We had nothing to do with this.” In a separate interview with CNN, Kirby was asked if the US regarded Putin as a legitimate military target. “We don’t endorse, we do not encourage, we do not support attacks on individual leaders,” he replied.


The Russian presidential press service said earlier that Ukraine sent two drones overnight into Wednesday to attempt a strike on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence in the Kremlin. Russian military and security personnel promptly disabled them. Putin was unharmed and is carrying on with his work as usual. The Kremlin regards the incident as a premeditated terrorist attack and an assassination attempt on the head of state. Russia reserves the right to retaliate when and how it sees fit. Peskov said statements by Ukrainian and US officials that they weren’t involved in the drone attack on the Kremlin were laughable. Moscow knows that Kiev chooses the means and targets for its strikes exactly as it’s told by Washington, he said.

Kremlin roof

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“They destroyed the lawful government in Ukraine [in 2014], put crooks and bandits in charge, provided them with money and weapons, imbued them with a sense of absolute impunity and provided political cover and military support..”

West Has Fueled ‘Sense Of Impunity’ In Kiev – Zakharova (RT)

The US and its allies are ultimately responsible for the actions of the “Kiev regime,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has claimed. “They destroyed the lawful government in Ukraine [in 2014], put crooks and bandits in charge, provided them with money and weapons, imbued them with a sense of absolute impunity and provided political cover and military support,” Zakharova said on Thursday. The official stressed that Russia holds “Washington, London, and NATO in general” accountable for all of the Ukrainian government’s actions. On Wednesday, the office of President Vladimir Putin accused Kiev of launching two drones at the Kremlin in an attempt to assassinate the Russian leader.


Ukrainian officials have rejected the allegation, claiming that their country does not attack targets in Russia. Moscow has warned that it reserves the right to retaliate in a way it deems appropriate and at a time and place of its choosing. Ukrainian troops are expected to launch a long-touted counteroffensive against Russian forces within the coming weeks. Foreign allies have pledged to support Kiev for as long as it takes to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. Leading Western media outlets have suggested that the operation could be a decisive moment for the conflict, and that Ukraine may find it difficult to secure future aid, should it fail to make significant gains on the ground.

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Send F-16s!

Ukraine Helpless Against Russian Smart Bombs – Official (RT)

Kiev has no way to counter Russian high-precision guide bombs, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Colonel Yury Ignat admitted on Tuesday, reiterating longstanding requests for modern American jets. Speaking at a press briefing, Ignat claimed that Russia launches up to 20 guided bombs on the frontline every day. The official pointed out that those munitions can travel some 70km and hit critical infrastructure facilities and other targets. “We cannot counter this kind of ammunition… and air defense is ineffective,” the spokesman noted, adding that to prevent such strikes, Ukraine has to directly take on the planes that deliver the bombs, usually the Su-34, Su-35, and other tactical aviation aircraft. To do this, Ignat said that Ukraine needs “a long hand to reach the enemy at a distance further than we can do it now.”

He pointed out that one of the longest-range air defense weapons Kiev has is the Soviet-era S-300 missile system, which can reach targets at a distance of up to 100km. He added that Ukraine’s air defense capability had been further reinforced by Western-made weapons with a range of 150km, but that these are in short supply. In light of this, he reiterated that the problem could be solved if the West were to provide Ukraine with modern jets. “F-16s can effectively counter Russian aviation all along the forward edge of the battle area,” the spokesman said, adding that such jets could discourage Moscow’s aircraft from approaching the Ukrainian border. “It’s not necessary to down the enemy aircraft, but we just have to have a strong counter argument,” he added.

In February, US President Joe Biden said that Ukraine “does not need F-16s now,” adding that Washington was concentrating on sending to Kiev “what our seasoned military thinks [it] needs,” including tanks and artillery. Moscow ramped up its strikes against Ukrainian energy and military infrastructure last October after Kiev carried out several acts of sabotage on Russian soil, most notably the deadly bombing of the strategic Crimean Bridge. Russia has repeatedly warned the West against supplying Ukraine with weapons, arguing that this will only prolong the hostilities while making it a direct participant in the conflict.

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“..Western countries themselves created this regime, and now they support those who commit extremist and terrorist acts.”

Zelensky Calls For Creation Of International Tribunal Against Russia (TASS)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has urged to create an international tribunal against Russia. “The aggressor must feel the full power of justice. This is our historical responsibility. <…> Only one institution is capable of responding to the original crime, the crime of aggression: a tribunal,” Zelensky told the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Thursday during his visit to The Hague. The Russian side has previously repeatedly pointed out that the the Kiev regime would soon face a tribunal and its methods would be recognized in the future as extremist and terrorist. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the West would not be able to wash itself of what has become part of its activities. According to her, Western countries themselves created this regime, and now they support those who commit extremist and terrorist acts.

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Patrushev.

West’s Attempts To Revive Neo-nazi Ideology Lead To Global Catastrophe (TASS)

West’s experiments to revive the neo-Nazi ideology must be curtailed, because they lead to a global catastrophe, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview to the Izvestia newspaper, published on Wednesday. “The Anglo-Saxons have been actively reviving the neo-Nazi ideology in order to fulfill their modern geopolitical tasks. Such experiments to not lead to dominance, they lead to a global catastrophe and must therefore be curtailed in a tough and uncompromising manner,” Patrushev said. In his words, numerous facts prove that many members of Western political elites shared the Nazi ideology and provided financial and organizational support to Adolf Hitler. “Today, they need to keep their ‘democratic’ face,” he said. “Nazi ideology remains an absolute evil, no matter how you disguise it.”

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“It’s 121.7% [of GDP] in the US, the eurozone 90.9%, Germany’s and France’s total 66.5% and 111.1% respectively, Russia 14.9%..”

Putin Compares Russian And Western Debt (RT)

Russia is in better economic shape than many large Western nations in terms of inflation and the level of sovereign debt, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. During a working meeting with Economy Minister Maksim Reshetnikov, Putin noted that Russia’s state debt is only a fraction of its GDP. “It’s 121.7% [of GDP] in the US, the eurozone’s debt amounts to 90.9%, Germany’s and France’s total 66.5% and 111.1% respectively, Russia’s 14.9% is a well-performing indicator,” the leader stated. Putin also drew attention to the rate of inflation in Russia, noting it is among the lowest compared to numerous other countries – including in the West. “As of March, [inflation] is 3.5% in Russia, 7.4% in Germany, the euro area as a whole recorded 6.9%, while inflation in France and the US amounted to 5.7% and 5% respectively,” Putin pointed out. Central bank data cited by Russian media in March showed that the country’s foreign debt has dropped to its lowest level since 2007. It reportedly decreased by 21.1% last year to $380.5 billion, representing a fall of $101.8 billion.

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“..trying to force the rest of it on the public will cause enough of them to starve that a revolt is quite likely..”

Oh Countrywide, Is That Your Ghost? (Denninger)

Bear Stearns is not the banking system — it is contained. Subprime is contained. “We’re gonna OWN subprime lending — Mozilo” Uh huh. Who remembers me over on the Countrywide Yahoo finance forums back in 2007 before it all blew — when I was shorting into price ramps on that stock because from where I sat they were a zero. They were a zero. It was a nice trade. Who remembers me calling out WaMu in early 2007 when they were paying dividends with money they didn’t have, and regulators did nothing? That article is still here, if you look for it. They were also a zero. But First Republic is isolated, just like SVB. Uh huh. Sure it is. How’s PacWest doing? Oh, not so good. Let’s see…oh, looks sort of like an impending zero. But wait — First Republic was it, right? Sure it was.

There’s no real problem here, right? The TNX was down a full percent yesterday because….. the Fed will save it all, right? No they won’t. Not because they don’t want to. They can’t this time. Oh, you think not eh? How’s your homeowner’s insurance premium? Your car insurance? Your food bill? You know, all that stuff you have to buy? Yeah, you’re reading this and you’re probably middle class or better. You’re doing mostly ok. You’re on the right side of the bell curve, right? Half the people are on the left, and they’re not ok. For them that 20% increase means they are taking payday loans to buy food, effectively and sometimes literally. That ends the game folks. If The Fed tries it we get government and social collapse. The ramp in asset prices can’t just stop: It has to come back out. All of it. And yes, that will mean lots of firms — and people — blow up.

This is not fixable with any sort of deposit guarantee. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the banks loaned out a lot of money at 2% and thus can’t pay 4% or so or they will go broke. But other, equally safe or more-so investments do pay that 4-5%; for example, a government money-market fund that has daily liquidity equal to that of a bank and only holds US Treasuries. Having made those loans at uneconomic rates in the first place there isn’t anything they can do about it now. As was the case in 2006-2007 and which I pointed out in Leverage losses are made when bad loans are originated; they are often not recognized at that time but the loss has been incurred. What’s left to argue over is who is going to eat it, and unlike the 2008 blow-up trying to force the general public to eat it will not work because they are already under the inflationary pressure from the BS run during the pandemic that led to the problem and trying to force the rest of it on the public will cause enough of them to starve that a revolt is quite likely.

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“The FBI has been sitting on the report … for several years..”

FBI File Ties Biden To ‘Criminal Scheme’ To Trade Money For Policy (WT)

The FBI has been sitting on a report detailing a scheme involving then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden to accept money in exchange for policy decisions on behalf of a “foreign national,” two senior Republicans said Wednesday. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, and Rep. James Comer, Kentucky Republican, said their information was “highly credible” and came from whistleblowers who pointed to a confidential human source report that the FBI has had for several years. They did not say when the alleged dealing occurred nor what country was involved. They did say the information that the FBI obtained was detailed enough to have been verified. “Based on those disclosures, it has come to our attention that the DOJ and the FBI possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. It has been alleged that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose,” the lawmakers wrote.

“However, it remains unclear what steps, if any, were taken to investigate the matter,” the lawmakers said. The FBI uses form 1023 to collect information from a human source. Mr. Comer, acting as chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, issued a subpoena ordering FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to turn over the form by May 10. The FBI said it received the letter and subpoena but declined to comment beyond that. It is a rough period for the FBI, which feverishly pursued Donald Trump as a candidate and as president. That included lying to a court to obtain a surveillance warrant on a Trump campaign figure and pursuing the now-discredited Steele dossier, a Democratic opposition research document that fabricated lurid stories about Mr. Trump and dealings with Russia.

Mr. Grassley, in particular, has been critical of the FBI’s decisions. He and Mr. Comer said they are now investigating the FBI’s handling of the report on Mr. Biden. “The DOJ and the FBI appear to have valuable, verifiable information that you have failed to disclose to the American people. Therefore, Congress will proceed to conduct an independent and objective review of this matter, free from those agencies’ influence,” they said. Mr. Comer’s subpoena covers “all FD-1023 forms, including within any open, closed or restricted access case files, created or modified in June 2020, containing the term ‘Biden,’ including all accompanying attachments and documents to those FD-1023 forms.”

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“Today the son of Zbigniew Brzezinski [..] is the current US Ambassador to Poland.”

“The idea is to establish Poland as the military & political leader of a brand new yet again US-managed Europe which would leave ´doubtfull´ Germans aside.”

The Polish ‘Zeitenwende’ Connection (Jorge Vilches)

The idea is to establish Poland as the military & political leader of a brand new yet again US-managed Europe which would leave ´doubtfull´ Germans aside. Actually, both the US and Poland have lately actively required Germany – now desperate for energy and commodities — to get out of their way and to just obediently contribute to the new ´European´ project with Poland as steering wheel and the US in the driver´s seat. So Germans just stay put and abstain. And there were no effective means to ever achieve the above other than by cutting Germany off very cheap, high-quality and reliable supplies from a truly resourceful and energy-rich Russia. Now, after hundreds of pummeling sanctions and the NS1 & NS2 gaspipes non-sanctum sabotage, this has finally been achieved yet definitely against European and German best interests. So clear enough this time around no soup and no dice either for Germany.


But still, geopolitically and trade-wise the US so far has developed an attractive (and manageable) scenario. And this may also clearly explain the role planned out for a willing Poland – which Germans and the world at large have not yet quite understood – as part of the US strategy for the provoked Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. Because NATO losing an important chunk of Ukraine was always in the military cards. But Poland would still always end up conveniently next to the Russian border as an effective European gate-keeper and a highly destructive NATO Offense Team in every sense of the term. Today the son of Zbigniew Brzezinski -former U.S. National Security Adviser and author ofThe Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives- is the current US Ambassador to Poland.

Both Mark Brzezinski and his father Zbigniew have always ardently maintained that no Eurasian challenger in any way should ever be allowed to emerge and eventually dominate Eurasia and thus challenge U.S. global pre-eminence. Clear enough? Through unilateral and blatantly wrong decisions imposed by US vested interests, the current Green leadership of the German traffic-light ruling coalition has self-inflicted a needless energy crisis which will prove to be disastrous both for Germany and Europe… although to the great (supposed) “benefit” of Poland as briefly explained above. And at the same time it has allowed to miss the enormous opportunity for Germany to become a 21st. century world-leading nation as the outstanding bond between Europe and Eurasia… instead of turning into an obsolete vassal state at the mercy of colonial-minded, basement-crazy,´ exorbitantly privileged´ neo-con Atlanticists eternally dollar-indebted with impunity, unipolar and exceptionalistic with “(their) rules-based world” and 750 US military bases in 80 countries plus.


Even worse, chances are that Germany may turn itself into a poorly-developed, over-populated and highly polluted society with no gravity upon the rest of the world. In such case Germans at large should know and fully accept that their Greens did not do this all by themselves but rather with a very broadly-based German political base. So yet once more Germans should only blame themselves for their astonishing defeat. No, Germany´s current messy mess is not about Russia or Russians and it is not about Ukraine or Ukranians. Actually, it is about German politics and its “360 degree” fecal-grade leadership which comfy Germans agree to be governed by as if nothing had ever been concluded despite their historical experience in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Poland enjoys the scene and prepares for its US-dictated role as leader of the “new” Europe as if this were the “Zeitenwende” sea-change Germany was to expect after the now infamous speech delivered to the Bundestag by Chancellor Olaf Scholz on 27 February 2022.

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A pretty incredible in-depth investigation.

Nord Stream Sabotage ‘Secret Teams’ Revealed (Ponton)

Initially, our investigation’s aim was to put a face on some of the key story points made by renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in his Nord Stream incident report published on 8 February 2022. In Part 1 of our investigation, we presented data and evidence which validated the main elements of Hersh’s story, including the CIA-led Navy diving team out of Panama City in Florida, and also that the explosives were planted on the Nord Stream pipelines at a depth of 260 feet just a few miles off the coast of Denmark’s Bornholm Island – under the cover of the annual NATO BALTOPS-22 drill in the Baltic Sea held in June 2022. We also confirmed the validity of Hersh’s accusation that NATO ally Norway was in fact intimately involved in this covert military operation.

There were parts of Hersh’s story which we did not go into detail in Part 1 of our investigation, but which we have been able to do here. This includes substantiating Hersh’s claim that the C4 explosives attached to the pipelines during the BALTOPS exercise in June would be triggered in late September by a sonar buoy dropped by a Boeing Poseidon P8 aircraft. We will also demonstrate how specialists from the deep sea oil and gas industry were also consulted and would have, at least, participated in the planning of this operation. In addition to this, we will also show how NATO member Denmark was also involved in the operation as well, as well as the cover-up alongside its close Nordic neighbour Sweden. Throughout this investigation, our strategy was never to crunch large amounts of flight data, or military and commercial ship logistical data, as there are many capable researchers who specialise in these areas, and we will be highlighting their work accordingly.


Rather, our strategy here is to review as much available and pertinent evidence we could gather, which has turned out to be substantial, while sticking to a plausible and common sense-based analysis, and see where this approach would eventually take us. In this article we will show how a CIA-led operation with highly trained divers and the latest Dry Combat Submersible (DCS) technology, was able, with the help of NATO allies, to operate under the cover of a major NATO Naval exercise BALTOPS-22, to take out the Nord Stream pipelines. In order to further validate Hersh’s story, we must first prove that NATO possessed all of the equipment and teams necessary, that these were all mission capable, and that they were positioned at the crime scene during BALTOPS-22.


S361 Manned Dry Combat Submersible (DCS1) from Msubs.

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“The State Department basically dusted off a few talking points from 2010, when WikiLeaks first published U.S. State Embassy cables..”

“A 2011 review by the Associated Press of sources, which the State Department claimed were most at risk from the publication of cables, found no evidence that any person was harmed. The potential for harm was “strictly theoretical.”

State Department Slams Assange On World Press Freedom Day (Gosztola)

On World Press Freedom Day, the United States State Department abandoned its policy of not commenting on the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and essentially backed the prosecution against him. Matthew Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel “whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day.” “I’m not asking for the [U.S. Justice Department point of view. I’m asking for what the State Department thinks,” Lee said. It was not the first time Lee had posed this question. In 2021, on World Press Freedom Day, Lee asked if President Joe Biden’s administration was looking into the Assange case, “his detention, his extradition, the request for extradition here, the charges against him?”

“I realize you can’t speak for DOJ, but from the State Department’s perspective, is the current position still – does that still hold? Do you believe that Mr. Assange is a journalist?” Lee added. “And given the importance you place on accurate and factual information being disseminated, do you believe that the information that was published based on the U.S. government documents that he obtained and put out was either unfactual or inaccurate?” Jalina Porter, who was a spokesperson for the State Department, avoided the question. “So to your specific on Julian Assange, we’ll have to get back to you on that.” But now, with Biden going around repeatedly declaring that “journalism is not a crime,” Patel read a prepared response. “The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history,” Patel declared. “His actions risked serious harm to U.S. national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”

Patel continued, “It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention. So it does not matter how we categorize any person, but we view this as something, he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct.” The response was lousy and stale. The State Department basically dusted off a few talking points from 2010, when WikiLeaks first published U.S. State Embassy cables that exposed the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy. To be clear, Assange’s “role” was that of a publisher who received documents from U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. A 2011 review by the Associated Press of sources, which the State Department claimed were most at risk from the publication of cables, found no evidence that any person was harmed. The potential for harm was “strictly theoretical.”

Lee appropriately pushed back on the idea that being charged with “serious criminal conduct” made Assange a person unworthy of support on World Press Freedom Day. “Yeah, but anyone can be charged with anything. Evan Gershkovich has been charged with a serious criminal offense in Russia, and you say that he is a journalist, and he is obviously,” Lee replied. “And I just want to know whether or not you, the State Department – regardless of any charges that he faces – believe that he is a journalist, or he is something else.” Patel contended the two cases are “completely different.” He said, “The United States doesn’t go around arbitrarily detaining people, and the judicial oversight and checks and balances that we have in our system versus the Russian system are a little bit different.”

The U.S. government subjected nearly 800 people to rendition, indefinite detention, and torture and brought them to Guantanamo Bay military prison, which was established a legal blackhole for alleged terrorism suspects. It’s still open, continues to hold detainees not charged with any crimes, and in fact, the United Nations recently condemned the US for keeping Abu Zubaydah in arbitrary detention, which “may constitute crimes against humanity.” Yes—the U.S. does arbitrarily detain people. Just not people the U.S. thinks should be free from arbitrary detention.

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Corinth Canal, Greece

 

 

Owl

 

 


Butterflies will sometimes land on a Caiman and drink its salty, crocodile tears to in order to survive. This helps the Caiman to feel both less sad and more fabulous.

 

 

Squid

 

 


In 2015, photographer Atif Saeed captured this intense photograph of a male lion moments before it launched an attack on him. He narrowly escaped with this incredible shot of a face-to-face with a lion about to kill.

 

 

Lion whisperer

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Apr 282023
 
 April 28, 2023  Posted by at 8:47 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  54 Responses »


Edgar Degas Danseuse au Tutu Vert 1887

 

Ukraine Peace Talks – A Grown Up Is Taking Charge (MoA)
Complicated Ukraine Crisis Must End By Negotiations – China (TASS)
Kremlin Explains Which Contact With Kiev Is ‘Welcome’ (RT)
China Shifting Away From Dollar In Cross-Border Transactions (RT)
FBI Claims China Has 50x More Hackers (RT)
De-Dollarization Kicks Into High Gear (Pepe Escobar)
Mr. Lavrov’s New York Shuffle (Pepe Escobar)
West No Longer Hides Planning Of Kiev’s Counteroffensive – Zakharova (TASS)
NATO Gives 1,550 Armored Vehicles, 230 Tanks To Ukraine – Stoltenberg (TASS)
Ukrainian Air Defense ‘Depleting’ – Minister (RT)
The EU Has Spilled Ukrainian Grain Meant For Africa All Over Itself (Marsden)
Zakharova: Why US and EU Fear Russian Media (RT)
In The Seeds War Who Is Burying Whom? (Helmer)
Pfizer & FDA Knew About Safety Concerns For Pregnant And Nursing Women (CR)
Biden Energy Secretary Wants All US Military Vehicles To Be Electric By 2030

 

 

 

 

RFK vaccines

 

 

 

 

Tucker ESG

 

 

Zelensky sells Ukraine

 

 

 

 

China sends their top diplomat. Everyone better take him seriously. Nothing else will be accepted.

Ukraine Peace Talks – A Grown Up Is Taking Charge (MoA)

The U.S. is unwilling to yet give up in its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Russia can not stop the war without securing its legitimate interest to keep NATO and/or the U.S. out of its neighbor state. A loss of the war would create an existential danger for Russia. With the two major powers engaged in a war a third party is needed to solve the conflict. In the spring of last year Turkey and Israel successfully helped to find a peace agreement. A good solution was found and Russia as well as Ukraine agreed to it. But the U.S. needed the war to continue. It sent the British prime minister Boris Johnson to Kiev to sabotage the deal. The Ukrainian president was told that the country would lose all ‘western’ support should it sign an agreement with Russia. As the somewhat neutral middle powers were unable to push any agreement through it became obvious that a third party with more heft was needed to seal a deal.

The time of moving towards a deal also needed to be right. On February 24, exactly a year after the war had started, China announced its Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis. This was not a peace plan but a lay out of things that will need to be understood and done to come to a sustainable solution of the crisis. A months later China took the next step that will be needed in the process. It introduced a high ranking diplomat who will hold the preliminary talks in Ukraine and Russia to find the potential ways to proceed. The announcement was made after a phone call between the presidents Xi and Zelensky:

“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he held a “long and meaningful call” with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, a long-anticipated first contact between the leaders since Russia’s invasion 14 months ago. Xi appealed for negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to begin, according to a Chinese government readout of the call, which Beijing said Zelenskyy requested. Xi pledged to send a “special representative” to Ukraine for talks about a “political settlement” — warning that “there is no winner in a nuclear war.” China hopes to become a neutral peace broker in the conflict, although the U.S. and others have questioned its impartiality given a “no limits” partnership in which it has lent Moscow rhetorical and financial support.”

[..] The Chinese special representative for Eurasian affairs is Lu Hui, a very senior diplomat. He has held several positions in China’s embassies in Moscow and Astana as well as within China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs: In 2008-2009 Mr. Liu Hui served as a deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. From August 2009 to August 2019 he served as an Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s readout of the call does not mention the envoy. The U.S. response to the announcement of an envoy was designed to put China’s efforts into doubt: “John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said the U.S. welcomed the call as a “good thing.”

“We’ve been saying for quite some time that we believe it’s important for President Xi and PRC officials to avail themselves of the Ukrainian perspective on this illegal and unprovoked invasion by Russia,” Kirby told reporters, referring to China by the initials for its formal name, the People’s Republic of China. Earlier, Kirby, told NBC News, “We will let these two leaders speak to the details of their conversation.” A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was “way too soon after just getting word of this conversation to speculate about” whether the call should foster optimism about China’s peace plan. “Thus far, China has not shown itself to be unbiased when it comes to supporting Russia,” the official said.

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China starts to impose itself step by step.

Complicated Ukraine Crisis Must End By Negotiations – China (TASS)

No matter how complicated the conflict in Ukraine may be, it must be resolved at a negotiation table, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said during the meeting with foreign ministers of Central Asian countries in Xi An in northwestern China. “No matter how complicated the crisis may be, it must be resolved by negotiations; no matter how complicated a conflict may be, it must be resolved only by politics,” Qin Gang said, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry website. He added that “the significant historic background and complex real reasons have caused the Ukrainian crisis to develop to the current stage.”


“China and Central Asian countries have similar views and positions on the Ukrainian crisis,” Qin Gang noted. He added that Beijing is ready to work with the international community, including Central Asian states, in order to reach a “common denominator” for resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. On April 26-27, Qin Gang took part in the 4th meeting of foreign ministers of China and five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the top diplomats exchanged opinions on pressing international and regional issues.

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“We are ready to welcome anything that can bring the conflict in Ukraine closer to an end and, naturally, the accomplishment of all Russia’s goals..”

Kremlin Explains Which Contact With Kiev Is ‘Welcome’ (RT)

Moscow backs any foreign contact with Kiev that seeks a political settlement to the Ukraine conflict and as long as Russia’s interests are respected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday. His comments came a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart, Vladimir Zelensky, for the first time since Moscow launched its military operation in the neighboring state more than a year ago. “We are ready to welcome anything that can bring the conflict in Ukraine closer to an end and, naturally, the accomplishment of all Russia’s goals,” Peskov told journalists. The spokesman added that conversations between leaders are the “sovereign [right]” of each country.

Russian President Vladimir Putin cited the need to protect the people of Donbass and Kiev’s failure to implement the 2014-2015 Minsk peace accords as reasons for Russia’s attack on Ukrainian forces in February 2022. He also said Russia was seeking the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine. Peskov pointed out that the Kremlin is aware of the 12-point roadmap for peace publicly unveiled by China in February. According to the proposal, the conflict must be resolved through negotiations and in accordance with international law, while the “independence and territorial integrity of all countries must be effectively upheld.” Moscow, however, has accused Ukraine of effectively rendering potential negotiations useless by demanding that Russia surrender newly acquired territories.

In 2014, Crimea voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia in the wake of the coup in Kiev that year. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, did the same after holding referendums in September. Kiev considers these territories to be illegally occupied by Russia. Unlike many Western countries, China has refused to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Xi praised strategic partnership with Russia during a trip to Moscow last month. During his call with Zelensky, the Chinese leader reiterated that dialogue was “the only viable way forward.”

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First gradually, then all at once.

China Shifting Away From Dollar In Cross-Border Transactions (RT)

The yuan surpassed the US dollar to become the most-used currency in China’s cross-border transactions last month, Reuters reported on Wednesday citing official data. Cross-border payments and receipts in yuan surged from $434.5 billion in February to a record $549.9 billion in March, according to calculations by the outlet, based on data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. The Chinese currency was used in 48.4% of all cross-border transactions, reflecting a trend of shifting away from the dollar, as well as Beijing’s efforts to promote the use of the yuan. The share of the greenback in China’s international settlements dropped from 48.6% in February to 46.7% last month. The volume of cross-border transactions covers both current and capital accounts, the outlet said.


Although the share of the yuan in global settlements is still relatively low, it has been steadily on the rise over the past several years. China’s attempts to move away from the dollar in international trade have sped up against the backdrop of sweeping sanctions imposed by Western nations against Russia, a major global energy producer and exporter. Indian policymakers have also taken steps towards shifting away from the greenback to rubles and rupees in mutual trade with Moscow. Russia has been boosting its use of alternative currencies in transactions since last year. President Vladimir Putin has suggested that the Chinese yuan should be used more widely, not only in trade with China, but also in Russia’s transactions with countries in Africa and Latin America. The latest data from the Bank of Russia shows that the yuan has become a major player in Russia’s foreign trade.

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“..Chinese hackers outnumber US cybersecurity agents by at least “50 to 1..”

FBI Claims China Has 50x More Hackers (RT)

FBI Director Christopher Wray has claimed that Chinese hackers outnumber US cybersecurity agents by at least “50 to 1,” saying the People’s Republic operates a larger cyber program than all other world powers combined. Addressing lawmakers during a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, Wray outlined the bureau’s recent cybersecurity efforts and its funding needs, stating the hackers are capable of inflicting “greater damage than ever before” while placing special emphasis on the “China threat.” “The scale of the Chinese cyber threat is unparalleled. They’ve got a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined, and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations, big or small, combined,” he said, adding that Washington is struggling to keep up with Beijing in the cyber realm.

“To give you a sense of what we’re up against, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, on nothing but China, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1.” The bureau head went on to warn of cyber attacks conducted by other foreign states, including Russia, Iran and North Korea, but said China posed the greatest danger to US privacy and security, pointing to its alleged “multi-pronged strategy” to surpass the United States as “the global superpower.” In addition to “nation-state actors,” Wray also noted the FBI’s concerns about private cyber criminals, saying the agency is now investigating “over 100 different ransomware variants,” referring to a common form of malware which seeks to hold user data hostage in exchange for payment.

The FBI has requested funding to create around 200 additional cyber positions at the bureau to address the purported threat from China, seeking just over $63 million, in addition to the $10.8 billion budget already proposed for the 2023 fiscal year. “There’s no country that presents a more significant threat to our innovation, our ideas, our economic security, our national security than the Chinese government,” Wray continued. “And that’s why we’ve grown the number of investigations into threats from China about 1,300%.” Chinese officials have denied US allegations of hacking and data theft, and instead leveled similar charges at Washington. Earlier this month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry claimed the United States is now the “biggest threat to global cybersecurity” which seeks to “maintain its hegemony in cyberspace,” urging the US to cease its “global hacking operations.”

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“Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves..”

De-Dollarization Kicks Into High Gear (Pepe Escobar)

The collective west is reaching Desperation Row – now timed with the astonishing announcement of a Biden-Harris US presidential ticket running again in 2024. This means that the US administration’s neo-con handlers will double down on their plan to unleash an industrial war against both Russia and China by 2025. And that brings us back to de-dollarization and what will replace the hegemonic reserve currency of the world. Today, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) represents more than 25 percent of global oil exports (Saudi Arabia stands at 17 percent). More than 25 percent of China’s oil imports come from Riyadh. And China, predictably, is the GCC’s top trading partner. The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange went into business in March 2018.

Any oil producer, from anywhere, can sell in Shanghai in yuan today. This means that the balance of power in the oil markets is already shifting from the US dollar to the yuan. The catch is that most oil producers prefer not to keep large stashes of yuan; after all, everyone is still used to the petrodollar. Cue to Beijing linking crude futures in Shanghai to converting yuan into gold. And all that without touching China’s massive gold reserves. This simple process happens via gold exchanges set up in Shanghai and Hong Kong. And not by accident, it lies at the heart of a new currency to bypass the dollar being discussed by the EAEU. Dumping the dollar already has a mechanism: making full use of the Shanghai Energy Exchange’s future oil contracts in yuan.

That’s the preferred path for the end of the petrodollar. US global power projection is fundamentally based on controlling the global currency. Economic control underlies the Pentagon’s ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ doctrine. Yet now, even military projection is in shambles, with Russia maintaining an unreachable advance on hypersonic missiles and Russia-China-Iran able to deploy an array of carrier-killers. The Hegemon – clinging to a toxic cocktail of neoliberalism, sanction dementia, and widespread threats – is bleeding from within. De-dollarization is an inevitable response to system collapse. In a Sun Tzu 2.0 environment, it is no wonder the Russia-China strategic partnership exhibits no intention of interrupting the enemy when he is so busy defeating himself

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“Let’s take a walk with him across the current wasteland. Mr. Lavrov, you’re the star of the show.”

Mr. Lavrov’s New York Shuffle (Pepe Escobar)

Now picture a true gentleman, the foremost diplomat of these troubled times, in total command of the facts and endowed with a delightful sense of humor, taking a perilous walk on the wild side, to quote iconic Lou Reed, and emerging unscathed. In fact, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s New York moment – as in his two interventions before the UN Security Council on April 24 and 25 – performed the diplomatic equivalent of bringing the house down. At least the sections of the house inhabited by the Global South – or Global Majority. April 24, during the 9308th meeting of the UNSC under the agenda “Maintenance of international peace and security, effective multilateralism through the protection of the principles of the UN Charter”, was particularly relevant. Lavrov stressed the symbolism of the meeting happening on the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace, deemed quite significant by a 2018 UN General Assembly resolution.


In his preamble, Lavrov noted how “in two weeks, we will celebrate the 78th anniversary of Victory in World War II. The defeat of Nazi Germany, to which my country made a decisive contribution with the support of the Allies, laid the foundation for the post-war international order. The UN Charter has become its legal basis, and our organization itself, embodying true multilateralism, has acquired a central, coordinating role in world politics.” Well, not really. And that brings us to Lavrov’s true walk on the wild side, pinpointing how multilateralism has been trampled. Way beyond torrents of denigration by the usual suspects, and their attempt to submit him to an ice cold shower in New York, or even confine him to the – geopolitical – freezer, he prevailed. Let’s take a walk with him across the current wasteland. Mr. Lavrov, you’re the star of the show.

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“..once again are loudly confirming their direct involvement in the conflict.”

West No Longer Hides Planning Of Kiev’s Counteroffensive – Zakharova (TASS)

The West is no longer hiding that it is really behind the planning for Ukraine’s much-vaunted counteroffensive, and will pull out all the stops to ensure its success, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing on Thursday. “The West openly states that it will do everything possible to make the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian armed forces, which is planned for the near future, a success. That is to say, as you can imagine, they do not even hide that they are behind all this military planning, not only tactical guidance, which we have repeatedly talked about, but also the ongoing disposition [of forces] according to their strategic plan,” she said.


Zakharova also stressed that representatives of Western countries, by openly demanding that the Russian side suffer the maximum possible losses, “once again are loudly confirming their direct involvement in the conflict.” On Tuesday, the New York Times, citing classified Pentagon and US intelligence documents that surfaced on the Internet, reported that the Ukrainian armed forces planned to launch a counteroffensive in the south next month. According to the newspaper, by the end of April, Ukraine is expected to have prepared 12 combat brigades with a complement of 4,000 servicemen each.

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“..providing as many weapons as possible to Kiev is the best way to facilitate peace in Ukraine..”

NATO Gives 1,550 Armored Vehicles, 230 Tanks To Ukraine – Stoltenberg (TASS)

More than 98% of the combat vehicles that NATO promised to Ukraine have already been delivered, the bloc’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday. “Overall, through the Contact Group led by the United States, NATO Allies and partners have provided unprecedented support to Ukraine. More than 98% of the combat vehicles promised to Ukraine have already been delivered. That means over 1,550 armored vehicles, 230 tanks and other equipment, including vast amounts of ammunition. In total we have trained and equipped more than nine new Ukrainian armored brigades,” he pointed out at a meeting with Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel in Brussels.


According to Stoltenberg, NATO believes that providing as many weapons as possible to Kiev is the best way to facilitate peace in Ukraine because it will allow President Vladimir Zelensky’s regime to be in a strong negotiating position. However, the NATO chief warned against underestimating the Russian army, and claimed that Russia was sending thousands of troops to attack the city of Artyomovsk (called Bakhmut in Ukraine). Bettel, in turn, noted that Luxembourg did not have weapons to send to Ukraine, which was why it was making a financial contribution, paying for what Kiev was asking for.

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“..the importance of showcasing foreign weapons on the battlefield..”

Ukrainian Air Defense ‘Depleting’ – Minister (RT)

Kiev is running out of Soviet-made anti-aircraft missiles and needs the US and its allies to provide more weapons, including fighter jets, to close the gap with Russia, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov has said. “We have a Soviet [air defense] system, and its missile reserves are depleting. If we don’t produce them and only nations, from which we can’t get them, have more, we need to replenish them with something else,” Reznikov stated in an interview with national media on Thursday. The minister said Western-made anti-aircraft systems and an increasing number of missiles compatible with them are Kiev’s goals, as was acquiring fighter jets from NATO. “A modern generation 4++ plane is a fully-fledged part of air defense. Once we have them, they will close the gaps left by our soviet systems,” Reznikov said, expressing certainty that his nation will be able to work through Western resistance.

The US and its allies have been reluctant to send these types of weapons to Ukraine. Kiev needs sponsors to pledge to provide not only the fighter jets, but also all the munitions and maintenance services they require, the minister explained. “Some nations signed off on tanks, and what we see is them giving four or six, not 200 or 300.” Kiev’s problems with air defense were exposed by purported classified Pentagon assessments leaked online. A late February estimate predicted that most types of Soviet missiles would be gone by May, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. The US military proposed covering the shortfall with supplies of German Iris-T and American NASAMS and Patriot systems, according to the leak.

In the interview, Reznikov stressed the importance of showcasing foreign weapons on the battlefield for Kiev’s effort to maintain the flow of arms into the country. He recalled how he used a photo of an Australian-provided Bushmaster armored vehicle for that purpose. “I said: ‘I urgently need a video with a thank you to the Australian people.’ The guys recorded a message of gratitude in English, and I sent [it] through our ambassador to Australia,” he stated. “We said we needed more Bushmasters.” Kiev has long promised to use Western arms and training to launch a major counteroffensive against Russia sometime this spring and reclaim territory, but so far it has failed to materialize. Reznikov said the expectations for the operation have been overblown. Several Western media outlets have also warned that Kiev’s military achievements during the future push against Russia may prove to be lackluster and undermine requests for more military assistance.

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“Apparently Brussels has an endless supply of taxpayer cash to toss at the problems that it creates for itself..”

The EU Has Spilled Ukrainian Grain Meant For Africa All Over Itself (Marsden)

Leave it to the EU to manage parlaying food hogging into a disaster. Well, for everyone except perhaps Spain, the recipient of 16% of all grain shipments under the deal, which is reportedly using it to increase its production and export of pork by feeding the food destined for humans to Spanish pigs. Other EU farmers now need bailouts. “This is support for the farmers affected by the increase of imports from Ukraine, not for the consequences of the war,” said EU Agriculture Commissioner Janus Wojciechowski. “We have a ‘reserve’ for the crisis and we used only €56 million for the specific situation.” What a bargain! Only a few tens of billions of euros to fix an entirely self-made problem. Yet another resounding demonstration of competence by the big-brained Brussels bureaucrats.

There have been blatant indications for months that the plan was veering towards disaster. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan pointed out in January that 44% of Ukrainian grain was ending up in the EU. And with their own grains devalued as a result of their flooded markets, European farmers don’t seem happy about being made unwitting martyrs for Ukraine. They have been pushed out of their own markets in order to keep cash from grain sales flowing to Kiev. “In effect, prices in local/regional markets have dropped causing a significant impact on farmers’ income. The Commission is not reacting swiftly enough. Our members had already flagged the concerns about market disruptions last year,” said Paulo Gouveia, chief policy advisor for the European farmers cooperative, Copa-Cogeca. Apparently, the farmers just don’t have much of an appreciation for the amount of time it took for Brussels to amass the massive pile of cash required to cushion its policy disaster as it circled back and crash-landed on the EU’s own citizens and economy.

Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia have all sounded the alarm over the impact of the grain glut. “We have proven through statistical data and figures that Hungarian farmers are indeed incurring huge losses because of the grain going through the solidarity lane staying in Hungary instead of reaching its intended destination,” said Hungarian Agriculture Minister Istvan Nagy. Nagy says that Hungarian farmers have lost up to 37% of their income over the Ukrainian grain, driving down the price of local supply. But the EU initially denied Hungary’s and Slovakia’s requests for assistance and has only more recently considered another round of compensation that includes them. Nagy described the initial choice to exclude them as political, even though Slovakia has since evoked health concerns related to findings of unauthorized pesticides on Ukrainian wheat. And now Brussels is paying lip service to their concerns with another €100 million, which is couch cushion cash for the EU compared to the billions it regularly tosses around.

All this flooding of the EU with Ukrainian grain could have been avoided if it had simply ensured that the grain was used for its stated purpose. Russian President Vlaidmir Putin has been warning all along that the food was being misdirected. “From August 1, 2022, to March 20, 2023, 827 ships left Ukraine, of which only 3 million tonnes of grain were sent to Africa and 1.3 million to the poorest countries in Africa. As I said, almost 45% went to well-fed European countries, despite the fact that this whole deal was presented under the pretext of ensuring the interests of African countries,” Putin underscored at the Russia-Africa Parliamentary Conference in Moscow earlier this year.

[..] Apparently Brussels has an endless supply of taxpayer cash to toss at the problems that it creates for itself, bailing out everyone from farmers to businesses over its own backfiring efforts to stick it to Russia amid the crisis in Ukraine. It’s becoming increasingly clear that what the EU desperately needs is some adult supervision, but the available candidates seem few and far between.

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“Those who like these rules of the game have the right to play by them. We don’t. This is what we rebelled against.”

Zakharova: Why US and EU Fear Russian Media (RT)

The European Parliament’s insistence that Serbia censor RT Balkans and Sputnik in order to “harmonize” with the EU is absurd, evil, and a manifestation of imperialism and colonialism, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said. On Wednesday, the parliament’s foreign affairs committee adopted the report by Slovakian MEP Vladimir Bilcik, criticizing Serbia for not joining the EU sanctions against Russia and demanding Belgrade shut down Russian “disinformation” outlets just as the bloc has done. The US State Department has also called for a ban on RT Balkans. “It’s an absurd situation,” Zakharova told reporters at the daily briefing in Moscow on Thursday. “These statements speak for themselves. The West isn’t even hiding, but saying the quiet part out loud.”

The US and the EU are now openly saying that Russia, Russian culture and language, or Russian media and journalists, simply shouldn’t exist, Zakharova noted. She compared the European Parliament’s demands to calls by Ukrainian officials to “exterminate” the Russian population in Crimea and Donbass, saying they can only be described as “evil.” “The only possible thing to say is that this is an imperialist point of view, a manifestation of neo-colonialism. Some countries, without any moral grounds, illegally arrogate to themselves the right to model the world and its development at their own discretion: who can live, speak, trade, produce, have children, and who cannot,” Zakharova told reporters. “This is a modern version of slavery, in which the colonial powers claim the right to be considered masters, and others – their slaves.”

“Those who like these rules of the game have the right to play by them. We don’t. This is what we rebelled against.” The US and its allies, Zakharova argued, want Russia to have no opportunity to speak, because the very existence of Russian media threatens the Western plans for narrative manipulation. “Our media, journalists and outlets report from the epicenters of world events, based on facts, encourage people to critically evaluate reality (as they should),” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. “Apparently, this goes against the plans that the American rulers have to ‘zombify’ their own population.”

American television, Zakharova noted, presents a “a one-sided, practically sterilized, filtered and adjusted picture of the world,” having reached an “ideological dead end.” Any airing of alternative viewpoints threatens to expose this media ecosystem as biased and contradictory. RT Balkans began operations in November 2022. The EU reportedly plans to blacklist the outlet as part of its 11th package of sanctions against Russia. The bloc had banned all broadcasting activities by RT and Sputnik in March 2022, calling them “Russian propaganda” that endangered Ukraine. Major social media platforms have blocked RT accounts in the bloc, while YouTube extended the ban globally.

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“Today we are buying seeds abroad, because during Yeltsin’s time all the seed banks were destroyed, and the seed breeding stations were closed..”

In The Seeds War Who Is Burying Whom? (Helmer)

This week Russian grain and berry producers went public with a warning that new regulations proposed by the federal Ministry of Agriculture to implement new legislation on seed production, due to come into effect in September, will lessen competition in the domestic market, raise seed and farm product prices, reduce crop yields, and lower production volumes. “The draft regulation, On the approval of the rules for the localization of the production of seeds of agricultural plants on the territory of the Russian Federation — allows foreign companies to do business on the territory of our country only if they work jointly with Russia’s scientific institutes. The share of the latter in joint ventures must be at least 51%, otherwise the foreign seed producers will not be able to work on the Russian market and supply products.”


This statement was authored by the Russian Grain Union and the Berry Union, and leaked to Vedomosti, a Moscow business newspaper. With imported seeds accounting for 97% of commercial beet plantings, 72% for sunflowers, 69% for potatoes, 56% for corn, and between 75% and 100% for berries, forcing the exit of foreign companies from the Russian market will cause scarcity, price inflation, and consumer protest.

[..] “The fact is that our seed production in Russia was destroyed back in the 90s,” tomato breeder Tatiana Tereshkova told an industry publication a year ago. “Once we had specialized farms with special equipment and people. But since they completely switched to import, the farms were overturned, and the specialists went to other areas. Now all this needs to be revived from scratch. If the state considers that this is really necessary, then everything can be resuscitated. There are the people; there is also the will. The main thing is that there should be no indulgence towards foreign manufacturers. It seems to me that in two to three years we will cope if necessary.”

After President Yeltsin and his US proxies, acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar and Kremlin chief of staff Anatoly Chubais had destroyed the Soviet seed research and development centres, Russian agriculture lagged far behind other countries. The commercial incentives were also transformed in favour of imports of foreign seeds, plant stock, and insecticides and herbicides. According to Vitaly Barakhtenko, founder of the Museum of Seeds and Plant Protection Products in St. Petersburg, “across the world seeds are usually harvested from the equatorial zone, because there are the most favourable conditions on the planet: constant sun, stable temperature. Imagine, in winter and summer about 28 degrees! Under these conditions, the seeds develop much better. Plus, you can grow three to four crops. No greenhouse in Russia will give such a result. But you can approach it.”

“Today we are buying seeds abroad, because during Yeltsin’s time all the seed banks were destroyed, and the seed breeding stations were closed,” Arkady Dudov, a Leningrad region farmer told an agro-industry website. “It takes decades to revive all this. Here in Leningrad we kept the seed bank for the country safely underground . Above, during the Great Patriotic War, the city population under the blockade were dying of hunger, but they did not eat the seeds. And then Yeltsin blew it all. As a result, all the seeds we have now are Dutch and American. They sell us the hybrids that we grow. But we cannot immediately cultivate a clean line from these fruits, it takes five years to do this. I took care of this problem for myself seven years ago, got the first seeds, the first results. But at the local level, this is not supported in any way; on the contrary, they are strangling the farmers by all sorts of checks.”

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Pure horror.

Pfizer & FDA Knew About Safety Concerns For Pregnant And Nursing Women (CR)

No wonder Pfizer and the FDA sought to hide these documents from the public for 75 years. To this day, the medical field is pressuring pregnant women to get these terrible shots, but now we know that Pfizer was tracking safety concerns for these women from day one. As we observe plummeting birth rates and skyrocketing fetal losses throughout the world, it is now clear that Pfizer and the FDA were aware that the vaccine could spread through the placenta and breast milk, as later studies seemed to confirm. Where is the action from Congress? This affects all of humanity, including a generation yet to be born. The eight-page confidential document was dated April 20, 2021, but tracked 458 pregnant women and 215 lactating women from the time the shots were released until February 28, 2021. That was the same date that Pfizer already recorded over 1,200 deaths and over 1,000 categories of serious adverse events. Here are the gory details, courtesy of Trial Site’s Sonia Elijah.


Pregnancy
• 54% of the 458 pregnant women reported adverse events. These included symptoms in line with AEs experienced by others who took the shots.
• 53 of the women (11.6%) experienced miscarriages, which is definitely on the high end of what we should expect.
• Most notably, six of the babies experienced serious AEs that Pfizer admitted were caused by the vaccine transferring “transplacentally.” This likely caused them to be born prematurely. So Pfizer knew from day one not only that the shots do not remain in the shoulder muscle and do indeed spread throughout the body, but that the spike protein could spread to the placenta.

• Two of the babies died after suffering from known respiratory ailments associated with the spike protein (severe respiratory distress and pneumothorax) after their mothers received the vaccine during the second semester.
• One of the infants was born at 24 weeks, which is extremely precarious, yet Pfizer never followed up on the outcome, even though the company seemed to think the baby was exposed “via transplacental route.”
• Another premature baby developed fetal tachycardia (rapid heart rate) just one week after the mother received her second dose. The baby was hospitalized, but the company never followed up on the outcome. Surveys have shown 8%-13% of people suffered rapid heartbeat after getting the shots.

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Are these people for real?

Biden Energy Secretary Wants All US Military Vehicles To Be Electric By 2030

As if the US military was not already crippled by woke activism at the highest levels of the Department of Defense, the latest news suggests that the nation’s military vehicle fleet will be hobbled as well. Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, a Canadian born lawyer with no military background, testified Wednesday to the Senate Armed Services Committee that she supported requiring the United States military to move to an all-electric vehicle fleet by 2030. That’s less than seven years. She added: “And I do think that reducing our reliance on the volatility of globally-traded fossil fuels where we know that global events, such as the war in Ukraine, can jack up prices for people back home – it does not contribute to energy security.” “I think energy security is achieved when we have homegrown, clean energy that is abundant, like you see in Iowa. We think we can be a leader globally in how we have become energy-independent…”

Her assertions rest on a number of fallacies. First, Granholm does not address where the energy would come from to power the lithium based batteries that an EV fleet would rely on. Generally, green energy options are highly inefficient and carbon based fuels are the primary source of electricity for much of the nation. They seem to think electricity is magic, but every time a climate activist charges up their EV they are most likely using “fossil fuels” to do it. Iowa is held up as a golden idol among climate activists for its large windmill farms that produce up to 40% of the state’s power, but such systems tend to fail under harsh conditions and are in no way portable, which makes one wonder why Granholm cited Iowa as a reference for justifying military EVs? The advantage of gas based vehicles over EVs is obvious – There is no long wait time for recharging, refueling is instant and access to a large energy producing source is not required.

In a war zone, there are few places to plug in your Tesla Humvee. Shifting to EVs would essentially bottleneck operations, making vehicles less independent with less range and easier to disrupt. Second, as a side note, gas prices were rising well before the war in Ukraine due to inflation caused by government mismanagement and central bank fiat money creation. Let’s stop trying to perpetuate the lie that Russia is somehow responsible for our economic troubles. Third, a few years ago the US was a net exporter of crude oil, and after Biden’s entry into the White House this advantage suddenly disappeared. This increased production along with the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline would have ensured US energy security for many years to come. That was until the government interfered with oil output and Biden blocked Keystone. He then began selling off US strategic oil reserves in order to artificially manipulate market prices down while depleting military resources.

It’s also important to realize that the lithium needed to create the batteries for EVs is primarily mined overseas in countries like China (often with child slave labor). How does switching to EVs reliant on lithium make US energy secure, let alone the military more capable? Fourth, there is no evidence of a “climate crisis.” It doesn’t exist. So why are we talking about this at all? There is no telling how much damage the climate agenda will ultimately do to US defensive capabilities, but the overall trend in energy is more and more centralization. Centralization, as opposed to redundancy, leads to weakness. The reduction of US carbon based energy and the over-reliance on a green electrical grid is expected to trigger skyrocketing consumer prices over the next several years. Transfer this dynamic of high cost and logistical uncertainty over to the military and you have a recipe for disaster.

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Giraffe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1651518468955467780

 

 

Parrot pump

 

 

Sea butterfly
https://twitter.com/i/status/1651570161965514752

 

 

DogCat
https://twitter.com/i/status/1651676706862690330

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 222023
 
 January 22, 2023  Posted by at 10:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  58 Responses »


Joseph Mallord William Turner The Fifth Plague of Egypt 1800

 

Six More Classified Documents Discovered At Biden House (ZH)
DOJ Seizes More Classified Docs From Biden’s Wilmington Home (Fox)
Joe Biden Took Classified Documents Home When He Was a Senator (CTH)
World Moving Closer To ‘Irreversible’ Disaster – Chomsky (RT)
Ukraine – Russian Army Activates Southern Front (MoA)
Fighting Russia ‘Very, Very Difficult’ For Ukraine – Gen. Milley (RT)
Russian Casualties In Ukraine Have Hit 188,000 – US Intel (Az.)
US Attempts To Seek Latin America’s Russian Arms Supplies To Kiev (TASS)
Duma Speaker Warns Of Powerful Retaliation For Weapons Supplies To Kiev (TASS)
Russians’ Level Of Trust In Putin Exceeds 78% (TASS)
Twitter Lost 80% Of Its Workforce Under Elon Musk (Az.)
Twitter Files Prove America Headed for ‘Totalitarian State Territory’ (ET)
EU Car Sales Collapse – Industry Body (RT)
GMC Blinks First: Regulator Declines to Investigate Dr Aseem Malhotra (DS)
Japan Declares It Will Handle COVID-19 Like a Seasonal Flu (GP)

 

 

 

 

The Year of the Tiger has given way to the Year of the Rabbit.

 

 

German MP

 

 

Dowd

 

 

 

 

Scott Adams
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616949618725781506

 

 

 

 

Well, more docs. And more obfuscation. Whereas Trump’s home was raided, Biden is said to have ”offered access to his home” (after more than 2 months. Lots of write-ups, here are two. I went to the CNN homepage, crickets.

BTW, it’s not “Six More Classified Documents”, but “six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials”. Yes, that could mean 1000 documents.

Six More Classified Documents Discovered At Biden House (ZH)

The Department of Justice found “six items consisting of documents with classification markings” during a Friday search of President Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, according to a Saturday statement by the president’s personal lawyers. Also found were notes from Biden’s time as a Senator, as well as his tenure as Vice President, according to a statement from Biden attorney Bob Bauer, which strategically leads with ‘we’ve fully cooperated!’ The search lasted from 9:45 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. Friday, during which members of Biden’s personal legal tam were present along with members from the Office of the White House counsel, according to the statement. The DOJ also took materials “for further review.” The new documents mark the latest development in the scandal involving classified documents found at non-authorized locations used by Biden. The first batch of papers was discovered in early November, the day before midterm elections, at the Penn Biden Center. More documents marked classified were found at his Wilmington, Delaware home in December – and then earlier this month, an additional batch of papers was found at the home. “

The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Department officials earlier considered having FBI agents monitor a search by Mr. Biden’s lawyers for classified documents at his homes but decided against it, both to avoid complicating later stages of the investigation and because Mr. Biden’s attorneys had quickly turned over a first batch and were cooperating, the Journal reported this week. Some law enforcement officials had discussed the possibility of asking Mr. Biden’s team for consent to have the FBI search the property themselves. Officials didn’t immediately take that step in part to preserve their freedom to take a tougher line later, including by executing a search warrant, the Journal reported. Instead, the two sides agreed that Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys would inspect the homes, notify the Justice Department as soon as they identified any other potentially classified records, and arrange for law-enforcement authorities to take them. -Wall Street Journal”

So, Biden’s personal attorneys searched the house themselves, said they turned everything over to the DOJ, and yet more were found? When Trump’s lawyers did that he was raided by the FBI.

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13 hour search covered “all working, living and storage spaces in the home.” What are the odds more will be “discovered” next week?

DOJ Seizes More Classified Docs From Biden’s Wilmington Home (Fox)

The Justice Department seized additional classified records from President Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home after an FBI search on Friday, Fox News has learned. “On Jan. 20, 2023, the FBI executed a planned, consensual search of the President’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware,” Joseph D. Fitzpatrick, an assistant U.S. attorney to U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois John Lausch, told Fox News Saturday. Lausch was the DOJ official running the investigation into Biden’s improper retention of classified records ahead of the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Hur. Fox News has learned Lausch is still playing an integral role in the probe as Hur gets up to speed. The FBI search began Friday morning at 9:45 a.m. and concluded Friday night around 10:30 p.m.


Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer said Saturday evening the search covered “all working, living and storage spaces in the home.” “At the outset of this matter, the President directed his personal attorneys to fully cooperate with the Department of Justice,” Bauer said. “Accordingly, having previously identified and reported to DOJ a small number of documents with classification markings at the President’s Wilmington home, and in the interest of moving the process forward as expeditiously as possible, we offered to provide prompt access to his home to allow DOJ to conduct a search of the entire premises for potential vice-presidential records and potential classified material.” Bauer said that by agreement with the Justice Department, representatives of both Biden’s personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were present for the search. Neither the president nor the first lady were present during the search.

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Don’t be fooled by comparisons between Trump and Biden classified docs. Trump was president when he took them home, and the criminal probe will address the legality of that. Biden took them as Senator and VP. 100% illegal.

Ted Cruz: on Twitter “This says some of the docs are from his Senate service. Serious Q: how on earth did he do that? I’ve served in the Senate for 10 years. EVERY single classified doc I’ve read—100%—have been in a secure SCIF in the basement of the Capitol. What the hell??”

Note: chief of staff Ron Klain is leaving, and more Obama insiders are lined up for the job.

Joe Biden Took Classified Documents Home When He Was a Senator (CTH)

According to multiple media report [See Here and See Here] Joe Biden’s attorneys coordinated a friendly FBI search their client’s Delaware residence. Lawyers for Biden were present and overseeing the FBI review of the home, when additional classified documents were discovered. Interestingly, the Biden lawyers seemingly admit their client had been taking classified documents home for quite some time. According to their statement: “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”

That statement was written by Joe Biden’s personal attorney, Bob Bauer. That’s interesting on many levels, including the fact that Bob Bauer is married to Anita Dunn. Mrs. Anita Dunn is one of the original people who helped put Barack Obama in the White House; and Dunn worked with President Obama throughout his terms. Additionally, Anita Dunn is on the short list to replace Biden’s outgoing Chief of Staff, Ron Klain. Many people have wondered if Joe Biden was being set up for failure over this classified document scandal. In my opinion, the entire operation is being managed – but not to remove Biden, simply to control him and ensure he doesn’t run again.

When it comes to the insurance of their ideological long-term goals, democrats play cutthroat politics much better than most imagine. Ask Bernie Sanders what it’s like to be viewed as an impediment to the ideological quest, and what lengths his party will take to cut you down. Now overlay Joe Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer. Think about who exactly it was discovering these documents and why. If Obama is the silent partner in the background of the Biden administration, then Dunn is the operational manager. If Dunn is the operational manager, then her husband is very useful as the principle’s attorney. From the big picture, it sure looks like Bauer is playing the role of Brutus.

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“the deterioration of an arena of rational serious debate and deliberation”

World Moving Closer To ‘Irreversible’ Disaster – Chomsky (RT)

The world is teetering on the brink of the abyss due to an increased risk of nuclear war, failure to address environmental challenges, and diminished ability to tackle problems rationally, world-renowned philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky told RT on Saturday. During the interview, Chomsky, who is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, was asked to expand on his remark that humanity could be pathologically dedicated to self-destruction. The philosopher recalled that in recent years the Doomsday Clock, which reflects how close humanity is to Armageddon, has moved closer to midnight, which symbolizes the extinction of humanity. He suggested that in several days it could be set even closer to this mark.

According to the philosopher, humanity’s main concerns are “an increasing threat of nuclear war” and “a very severe and growing threat of destruction of climate.” The latter problem persists because “states are not doing what they know they must do to solve this crisis,” he said. The third issue, Chomsky continued, is “the deterioration of an arena of rational serious debate and deliberation” combined with “the collapse of democratic forces” around the world. The professor admitted that while it might seem that this point has nothing to do with the threat of nuclear war and climate change, rational debate is “the only hope for dealing with the first two.”

“All three have gotten considerably worse during the past year, and unless there’s a sharp reversal, we’ll simply be heading for a precipice, falling over, irreversible, and not in the long distant future,” he warned. His comments come after earlier this week, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said that those who want to see Moscow defeated in Ukraine, ignore the fact that “a loss by a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger the start of a nuclear war.” Moscow believes the Ukraine conflict to be a proxy war waged against it by the US and its allies. However, Russia has repeatedly said that a nuclear war should never be fought, with its military doctrine allowing the use of atomic weapons only if the very existence of the state is threatened.

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“Russia’s Wagner forces have surrounded Bakhmut, lynchpin of ‘Zelensky Line’ [Ukr deployments in Donbass.] US media has begun backtracking on Bakhmut’s importance, anticipating its imminent fall into Russian hands & preparing opinion. A crushing defeat for US-UK axis in Ukraine.”

“The forces which are currently getting mauled in the Bakhmut area constitute 50% of Ukraine’s battle ready forces..”

Ukraine – Russian Army Activates Southern Front (MoA)

The long expected Russian offensive in Ukraine has begun. The Ukrainian army, egged on by its U.S. controllers, had put most of its resource into the static defense of the Bakhmut (Artyomovsk) – Soledar sector of the eastern front. An insane number of Ukrainian brigades, though many partially depleted, were concentrated on that 50 kilometer long front. This left other sectors nearly empty of Ukrainian troops. I count the equivalent of some 27 brigade size formations in that area. The usual size of a brigade is some 3,000 to 4,000 men with hundreds of all kinds of vehicles. If all brigades had their full strength that force would count as 97,500 men. In a recent interview the Ukrainian military commander Zaluzhny said that his army has 200,000 men trained to fight with 500,000 more having other functions or currently being trained.

The forces which are currently getting mauled in the Bakhmut area constitute 50% of Ukraine’s battle ready forces. On the southern and northern sectors of the battle-line the Ukrainian forces have been thinned out and are only able to defend against minor forces. The Ukrainian forces in the north and south are in the same position Russian troops had been in when the Ukrainian army last year launched a blitz attack in the Kharkiv region. The Russian screening force of some 2,000 boarder guards and federal police retreated and used its artillery to destroy the oncoming Ukrainian forces. The attack ran out of power and came to a halt after progressing some 70 kilometers on a rather large front. But Ukraine no longer has, unlike the Russians at that time, the artillery that is need to stop a larger thrust.


The big Ukrainian concentration in Bakhmut is now in an operational encirclement. The Russian forces have progressed north and south of the city and their artillery can easily control the western exit roads of Bakhmut. This a Verdun like situation. Russian artillery is by far numerical superior and can slaughter the Ukrainian troops at will. Even the U.S. military is now suggesting that Ukraine should give up on that city. Should the government in Kiev agree to that it will be a retreat under fire with likely high casualties. Not retreating though will make things even worse.

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A good cop, bad cop routine.

“Asked in November whether Ukraine stood a chance of retaking its pre-February territory, he said that the probability of this outcome “is not high, militarily.”

Fighting Russia ‘Very, Very Difficult’ For Ukraine – Gen. Milley (RT)

Ukraine will struggle to make good on its promise to drive Russian forces out of its former territory, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley stated on Friday. While civilian officials in Washington insist that Kiev must keep fighting, Milley has repeatedly questioned the chances of success. “President Biden, President Zelensky, and most of the leaders of Europe have said this war is likely to end in a negotiation,” Milley said during a meeting of the US-led Defense Contact Group at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday. “From a military standpoint, this is a very, very difficult fight,” he added. The US alone has allocated more than $110 billion in military and economic aid to Kiev since last February – supplying Ukraine with progressively heavier armaments, including infantry fighting vehicles, anti-air systems, and more than a million artillery shells.

Although Ukraine’s NATO-trained troops appear on the cusp of receiving Western-designed main battle tanks, Russian forces have inflicted a series of crushing defeats on Kiev’s military in recent weeks. The strategically important Donbass settlements of Soledar and Klescheevka have both fallen to Moscow’s troops, and the key city of Artyomovsk is now facing Russian encirclement. “I still maintain that for this year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine,” Milley said on Friday, referring to the four former regions of Ukraine that voted to join Russia in September, and Crimea, an historic Russian territory that voted to rejoin the Russian Federation in 2014.

“That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. But it’d be very, very difficult.” Retaking all of this land – including Crimea – is a stated objective of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. To that end, Zelensky has the support of the US, with President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowing to bankroll his military for “as long as it takes,” and Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring in December that “fundamentally, Ukrainians are making the decisions” about whether they want to attempt to capture Crimea or not. However, Milley’s public statements have been more tempered than those of Biden and his cabinet. Asked in November whether Ukraine stood a chance of retaking its pre-February territory, he said that the probability of this outcome “is not high, militarily.”

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These are obviously nonsense numbers.

Gonzalo Lira: “Actual Russian casualties? No one knows for sure. But credible estimates put them at no more than 20,000 KIA, 60,000 WIA.”

Macgregor in the video: 157,000 Ukraine deaths. And we know there are 5-10 times more Ukraine victims than Russian.

Russian Casualties In Ukraine Have Hit 188,000 – US Intel (Az.)

Russian casualties in Ukraine have hit an eye-watering 188,000 according to United States intelligence, Report informs via The Sun. Report informs via The Sun that the massive new figure of those killed or injured in battle was shared with allies at yesterday’s Western summit to drum up support for Ukraine held at Ramstein Air Base in Southern Germany. It is a significant increase on the publicly estimated 100,000 Russian soldiers killed, wounded, or deserted since last February’s invasion that the UK’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace outlined at the end of last year. Top US General Mark Milley said Russia has suffered a “tremendous amount of casualties” – but stopped short of revealing the exact figure publicly. He said: “They have really suffered a lot.. I would say significantly well over 100,000.” Yesterday ministers and military chiefs from around 50 nations took part in the talks convened by US defence secretary Lloyd Austin at Ramstein – the main US airbase in Europe.

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Old, rusty, in need of repair, but at least Ukrainians know how to use them.

US Attempts To Seek Latin America’s Russian Arms Supplies To Kiev (TASS)

Russia will keep a close eye on the US attempts to urge Latin American countries to hand over weapons to Ukraine, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday. The Russian presidential spokesman thus commented on a statement by a Pentagon representative that Washington was working with nine Latin American countries to urge them to hand over available Russian weapons to Ukraine in exchange for the delivery of US equipment. Responding to a question about whether this news came as a surprise for Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman said: “In general, it is hard today to imagine anything that can be a surprise.”


“Here it is very important [to bear in mind] the legal restrictions of any deliveries to third countries. This is because any deliveries are, of course, conditioned by certain commitments of those countries that receive military equipment,” Peskov pointed out. “Of course, we will keep a close eye on this situation,” the Kremlin press secretary said. Commander of the US Southern Command General Laura Richardson announced on Thursday that Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and six other Latin American countries had Russian military equipment and Washington was working “to replace that with US equipment if those countries want to donate it to Ukraine.”

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“Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons, Western politicians who have been making such decisions should realize that this may lead to a global disaster that would wipe out their countries..”

Duma Speaker Warns Of Powerful Retaliation For Weapons Supplies To Kiev (TASS)

Weapons supplies to Ukraine by the United States and NATO for attacks on Russia would lead to retaliatory use of more powerful armaments, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin warned on Sunday. “Supplies of offensive weapons to the Kiev regime would lead to a global disaster. If Washington and NATO countries send arms that will be used for attacks on peaceful cities or attempts at occupying our lands, a threat they have been making, this would provoke retaliatory measures with the use of more powerful weapons,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel. The senior Russian lawmaker slammed as untenable other countries’ arguments that “nuclear powers never used weapons of mass destruction in local conflicts.” “Those powers never faced a situation where the security of their citizens or their territorial integrity was at stake,” he argued.


The State Duma speaker called on members of the US Congress, Germany’s Bundestag, France’s National Assembly and other European parliamentarians to realize their responsibility for humankind. “By their decisions, Washington and Brussels are pushing the world to a disastrous war – to military operations that will be quite different from what they have seen so far, when only military and critical infrastructure being used by the Kiev regime has been attacked. Given the technological superiority of Russian weapons, Western politicians who have been making such decisions should realize that this may lead to a global disaster that would wipe out their countries,” Volodin concluded.

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Try that with your leaders wherever you live.

Russians’ Level Of Trust In Putin Exceeds 78% (TASS)

The Russian public’s level of confidence in President Vladimir Putin fell by 0.3 percentage points to 78.1% on January 9-15, according to a poll released by the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center on Friday. “When asked if they trusted Putin, 78.1% of the poll’s participants said ‘yes’ (a 0.3 percentage point drop from a rating referring to December 26-30, 2022). The share of people who approve of the way the president is handling his job rose by 0.3 percentage points to 75.2%,” the pollster said. A total of 50.5% of those polled said they approved of the Russian government’s work (a 0.6 percentage point increase) and 53.2% approved of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin’s work (a 0.4 percentage point rise). As many as 62.6% of respondents said they trusted Mishustin (a 0.8 percentage point increase).


As for the leaders of the parliamentary parties, 32.5% of those surveyed trust leader of the Russian Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov (a 0.9 percentage point rise), 28.9% trust leader of the A Just Russia – For Truth party Sergey Mironov (a 3.5 percentage point drop), 8.2% said they trusted Chairman of the New People party Alexey Nechayev (1.7 percentage point fall) and 17.2% of the poll’s participants trust leader of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) Leonid Slutsky (a 2.4 percentage point rise). The level of popular support for the United Russia party stood at 38.8% (a 0.4 percentage point rise). The level increased by 0.2 percentage points to 10.6% for the Russian Communist Party and fell by 0.2 percentage points to 3.9% for the New People party.

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“..the trust and safety team includes fewer than 20 full-time employees..”

Twitter Lost 80% Of Its Workforce Under Elon Musk (Az.)

The number of employees at Twitter has decreased by about 80% since US entrepreneur Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar acquisition. Report informs via foreign media that before Musk finalized the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late October, 2022, the San Francisco-based company had about 7,500 employees, but that number has gone down to approximately 1,300 active employees, CNBC said on Friday. Twitter now has fewer than 550 full-time engineers and the trust and safety team includes fewer than 20 full-time employees.

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Yep.

Twitter Files Prove America Headed for ‘Totalitarian State Territory’ (ET)

Thanks to the revelations in the Twitter Files, there’s evidence that the FBI and other agencies worked to suppress “lawful speech,” and if this type of action is allowed to continue, the United States is headed for “totalitarian state territory,” Matthew Peterson, the cofounder of New Founding, said in an interview with Epoch Times–NTD collaborative program “Newsmakers.” New Founding helps people and organizations position themselves to avoid threats from Big Tech and “woke capital,” and Peterson has two decades of experience in digital media and political consulting. When asked what will happen if the country’s current trajectory continues for three to five years, Peterson said, “We’ll be in totalitarian state territory, there’s no question about it.”


“I mean, remember, this went so far as the government saying, ‘You need to find evidence that there are Russians influencing the election on Twitter.’ And Twitter saying, ‘No, that’s not happening.’ “And then [Twitter had] to be quiet about it and not even defend themselves when they knew that there wasn’t Russian interference that they could find,” he added. Peterson further explained that the U.S. government drove a narrative that it knew wasn’t true and was the “antithesis” of America’s founding principles. “[The government’s actions are] the antithesis of America. The American founding is basically contradicted by what’s happening here, over and over again. And if we don’t do something about that, we will not have free speech in this country,” Peterson warned.

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Mostly EU cars.

EU Car Sales Collapse – Industry Body (RT)

The European Union passenger car market contracted by 4.6% last year to just 9.3 million units, which is the region’s lowest level since 1993, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) reported this week. According to the report, the slump was mainly due to the impact of component shortages in the first half of the year. The market, however, improved from August to December, with new car registrations expanding by 12.8% in the last month of the year. Overall, in 2022 only Germany managed to post growth (+1.1%) among the EU’s four largest markets. It was helped by the strong result in December, the ACEA said. The other three markets all performed worse than in 2021, with Italy posting the steepest decline (-9.7%), followed by France (-7.8%) and Spain (-5.4%).


Data showed that the number of vehicles registered in EU countries (excluding Malta, for which statistics are not available) rose to more than 896,000 units last month from over 795,000 a year earlier. Car sales by the Volkswagen Group (including Skoda, Audi, Seat, Porsche, and others) in the European Union decreased by 5.2% last year, the ACEA said. Automaker Stellantis saw its sales nosedive by 14.1%, while Renault Group sales fell by 4.3%, and BMW sales by 5.1%. Mercedes-Benz sales stood practically at the same level as in 2021, at 549,023 units. Meanwhile, South Korean Hyundai (including Kia) increased its vehicle sales in the EU by 2.6%, Japanese Toyota and Honda sales grew by 7.7% and 4.4%, respectively. Sales by American carmaker Ford decreased by 2.3%.


Most popular cars Europe vs US

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More than blinking.

GMC Blinks First: Regulator Declines to Investigate Dr Aseem Malhotra (DS)

To paraphrase the Sound of Music song, “How do we solve a problem like Malhotra?” After receiving several complaints, the General Medical Council has decided not to investigate cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who has become a thorn in the side of the medical profession. Professional regulators have been at the forefront of pandemic discipline, contributing to a culture of fear among practitioners. Severe action has been taken against registrants who criticise or do not comply with the official narrative. I know this from my experience as an officer of the Workers of England Union, representing members brought before the Nursing and Midwifery Council on charges of bringing the profession into disrepute. Apparently the public must be protected against nurses who don’t believe that masks stop airborne respiratory viruses, or who believe in informed consent for novel mRNA vaccines.

A significant strike against this censorial tyranny was by general practitioner Sam White last year. Dr. White was ordered, as a condition of maintaining his clinical licence, to delete his social media posts about COVID-19 and to refrain from making similar comments. Dr. White took the GMC to the High Court and won. The condition was overturned as a breach of his rights to freedom of expression under the Human Rights Act 1998. Whereas White was an early critic of COVID-19 policy, Malhotra is a relatively recent convert. Initially he promoted the vaccine, but when his fit and healthy father died shortly after receiving the injections, Malhotra changed his mind and began speaking out against the mass vaccination programme.

His personal loss came alongside his observation in clinical practice of a marked increase in myocarditis cases (as well as blood clots and other cardiac complications). Malhotra had a review paper published on this phenomenon, and his findings of iatrogenic harm are corroborated by other medical scientists. sMalhotra has repeatedly urged suspension of the vaccination programme until the risks are better understood. He became a darling of vaccine sceptics, with his charismatic and compassionate voice doing the rounds of alt media channels and independent-minded broadcasters working for more mainstream channels (such as Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, and Neil Oliver on GB News). However, he was ignored by the legacy media, and it was not until two weeks ago, when he took the opportunity of a BBC interview on statins, that his call was more widely heard.

Malhotra

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Lots of doctors speaking out in Japan.

Japan Declares It Will Handle COVID-19 Like a Seasonal Flu (GP)

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan announced on Friday that he had instructed his cabinet to reclassify COVID-19, placing it in the same category as seasonal flu, rubella, and chickenpox in spring. “Today, we held a press conference on the discussion on revising the new coronavirus infectious disease into category 5,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Friday. “In order to further advance the efforts of ‘living with Corona’ and restore Japan to a state of normalcy, we will transition the various policies and measures to date in phases,” Kishida said. In Japan, Covid-19 is currently listed as “Category 2: Very Dangerous” together with tuberculosis, avian flu, and diphtheria.


“COVID-19 is currently classified as “equivalent to category 2,” requiring that hospitals and clinics report the names of infected patients and the details of their diagnosis before making recommendations regarding hospitalization. The soaring numbers of people infected in Japan’s seventh coronavirus wave have increased the administrative burden on the medical front line, leading to regional medical associations and the National Governors’ Association to repeatedly call for a review of the system,” Nippon.com reported. The outlet added that experts have proposed that COVID-19 be reclassified as a “Category 5: Diseases for which outbreaks and spread should be prevented,” similar to seasonal flu, which would restrict reporting to only those at high risk of developing severe symptoms or restrict data collection to only patients diagnosed at designated medical facilities.

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Martha Stewart
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616606806574235650

 

 

Kory treatment
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616978685969547266

 

 

 

 

WTF

 

 

Great hornbill
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616774751128625153

 

 

Flycatcher

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 202023
 


Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of his father 1628-29

 

Russian Orthodox Church Issues Apocalyptic Warning (RT)
Going, Going, Gone: Fiddling While the West Burns (Batiushka)
World Economic Forum Wants You to Trust Them (ET)
‘Russiagate’ Is Dead, But Social Media Control Is Here To Stay (Livshitz)
Global South: Gold-Backed Currencies To Replace The US Dollar (Escobar)
Economist: Turkey Could Be On ‘Brink Of Dictatorship’ (K.)
Over 1 Million Workers Hit French Streets Against Macron’s Pension Reform (ZH)
How A Corrupt FBI Could Save Joe Biden In Classified-Docs Scandal (Bovard)
CDC Knowingly Left Serious Adverse Events Off Post-Vaccination Surveys (ET)
How the CDC Became the Speech Police (Soave)
Safety Signals for Heart, Blood, Reproduction in Yellow Card Vaccine Data (DS)
Fauci Lied; 120,000 US Children Died (Exp.)
Twitter Files Show Authoritarian “Cult Of Identity” Controls The Media (Gurri)

 

 

 

 

Tucker Nixon (Must see)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616322813794680832

 

 

 

 

Our Birthright

 

 

Mike Rowe We’re at war with the things we need

 

 

MSM Pfizer
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616157050912014337

 

 

Watters

 

 

 

 

“We pray to the Lord so that he enlightens those madmen and helps them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world..”

Russian Orthodox Church Issues Apocalyptic Warning (RT)

Any attempts to destroy Russia could spell disaster for the entire world, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, warned on Thursday. Speaking after a religious service marking the Orthodox Christian holiday of Epiphany, the primate claimed that both the international community and Russia are facing “very huge threats.” According to Patriarch Kirill, the root of the problem is that some “madmen” believe that Russia, which “has powerful weapons and is populated by extremely strong people… who had never given in to an enemy and had always emerged victorious, could be defeated under the current circumstances.” Neither would it be possible to “impose on them certain values that cannot even be called values, so that they would be like everyone else and obey those who have the power to control most of the world,” he noted.


“We pray to the Lord so that he enlightens those madmen and helps them understand that any desire to destroy Russia will mean the end of the world,” he added. The Patriarch’s remarks echo a statement by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday, who warned the countries that want to see Moscow defeated in Ukraine that nuclear powers such as Russia had “never lost a major conflict on which their fate depended.” Should such a nation lose a conventional war, such an outcome could trigger a nuclear conflict, he added. Earlier this month, the head of the Russian Church appealed to both Moscow and Kiev’s forces to establish a truce in the run-up to and during Orthodox Christmas on January 7 to give the faithful a chance to attend religious services. Hours later, the proposal was supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered Moscow’s troops to stand down for 36 hours. The ceasefire, however, was rejected by Kiev, with Ukrainian officials dismissing the offer as “hypocrisy” and a military ruse.

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“Europeans hate their elites. The spoilt elites may tell their peoples: ‘Let them eat cake’. But they have forgotten that what the people want is bread.”

Going, Going, Gone: Fiddling While the West Burns (Batiushka)

Let us not forget that the conflict in the Ukraine is about the struggle of the United States to maintain its dinosaur’s status as the world’s last superpower. More exactly, it is about America’s attempt to destroy China as a rival. For since China, allied with Russia, is unbeatable, China has to be attacked through Eurasian Russia. In this crazed neocon video-game fantasy, the USA has overlooked Western Europe. In one sense that is understandable, since its leaders are just a pack of mindless Pavlovian dogs, intent on copying their master in Washington – and a pile of dollars greatly helps their salivating capacity for imitation. However, the US mistake is as usual to look only at its puppets. This was the same mistake as in Baghdad and Kabul, or for that matter in Tehran and Saigon, not to mention in Manila and a host of capitals in Latin America. Appoint an English-speaking yes-man, give him a Swiss bank account full of dollars and a US passport, ensure he has control over the capital and its TV and radio station and then you will control the whole country. Only Hamid Karzai didn’t and you won’t either.

Western Europe, the EU and the UK, with a few other bits and pieces, is also inhabited by 500 million people (the other 50 odd million belong to the elite). Some, especially from the elites, live in the capitals. The vast majority do not live there and generally despise those who do live in the capitals. Ask a Frenchman what he thinks of ‘les sales parisiens’ (filthy Parisians), ask a Romanian what he thinks of the elite in Bucharest, a Pole what he thinks of those in Warsaw or an Englishman what he thinks of Londoners. If you don’t believe me, ask Macron in France. Alternatively, ask any Frenchman what he thinks of France’s real rulers – the grossly overpaid super-elite in Brussels. The English hated them so much, they had Brexit. A lot of Germans, who by a huge majority never wanted to give up the Deutschmark, got quite jealous of that, even though the incompetent and perfidious British elite totally mishandled the Brexit negotiation process.

If in Western Europe, the vast majority don’t like their leaders, they will eventually – even the passive British – get rid of them and they will appoint leaders whom Washington does not like, Le Pen, Farage etc. Remember Orban? He is already in power, as is Erdogan (though he is in Turkey). The Ukrainian conflict is already reshaping Europe’s totally outdated (1945) security architecture and forcing a reconfiguration. The realignment will not be in Washington’s favour. Demonstrations against NATO are already starting in various European countries. But what is more likely to topple the US puppet elite is strikes and protests. Europeans hate their elites. The spoilt elites may tell their peoples: ‘Let them eat cake’. But they have forgotten that what the people want is bread.

Once Western Europe, including even the UK, has gone, the end of the short unipolar era will be here. The domino effect, from Kiev to Dublin, is surely only a matter of time. Remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989? Within twenty-five months the whole of the Soviet Eastern European Empire fell, one country after another, until in December 1991, the Soviet Union itself fell. Berlin to Vladivostok. Well, the time is now up for the American Empire in its turn. It will also fall, and for the same reasons. The SU (Soviet Union) went. So will its reverse, the US (United States). Red stars, white stars, they have both had their time. Keep your eyes on Western Europe.

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Could have fooled me….

World Economic Forum Wants You to Trust Them (ET)

One of the central themes of the World Economic Forum summit this week is “restoring trust”; this initiative comes at a moment when progressive corporate organizations such as the WEF are being scrutinized for violating U.S. antitrust laws. A WEF panel discussion called “Disrupting Distrust” featured speakers from Mastercard, the United Way, and Consumers International, as well as communications consultant Richard Edelman. It proceeded under the slogan: “Trust is at the heart of meaningful multi-stakeholder cooperation … Yet levels of distrust are higher than ever.” The panel was hosted by Kathleen Kingsbury, an opinion editor at The New York Times.

The discussion opened with a report from Edelman’s Annual Edelman Trust Barometer, which found that trust in government had declined substantially, leaving corporations as the most trusted institutions in society. Edelman also warned of a “growing mass class divide” in public opinion. The divergence of public opinion started in 2013 in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, he said, and it has now “metastasized” to three-quarters of the countries in the world. Helena Leurent, director of Consumers International, said “economic pain” is the top issue causing mistrust. “The consumer is embattled,” she said, citing dramatic increases in food and fuel prices over the past two years. “The cost of living is the body blow.” “I find a lot of irony in this,” Joel Griffith, research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Epoch Times.

“The energy crisis that we’re facing now across the world is a problem that by and large has been caused by the 50-plus world leaders that are gathered there, because almost in lockstep these world leaders, from [President Joe] Biden, to the European Union leaders, to our counterpart in Canada, have declared a long-term war on fossil fuels,” Griffith said. “They’ve created this energy crisis, they’ve created the inflation crisis, created the rising price trajectory, and they are not acknowledging responsibility.” Another topic on the trust agenda was what Edelman called the “battle for truth.” Rather than what had previously been the “Moses model,” in which truth is handed down from higher institutions to the masses, Edelman said, “now trust is local, in my employer and in my company and my CEO.” Speaking for The New York Times, Kingsbury said that “in journalism, we struggle with an issue of a lack of trust … particularly in our expertise.”

Tucker WEF
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615896188573700096

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“the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero..”

‘Russiagate’ Is Dead, But Social Media Control Is Here To Stay (Livshitz)

Donald Trump’s time as president was dominated by years of mainstream news headlines declaring that his unexpected victory was attributable to Saint Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency (aka ‘The Russian IRA’). The company reportedly corralled online networks of bots and trolls that perpetuated pro-Trump propaganda in a bid to get the outsider elected at the Kremlin’s request. This narrative quickly became widely accepted among US liberals, and remains entrenched today – but a new study decisively shows it to be false. The paper, published in the respected academic journal Nature, investigates the exposure of Twitter users to alleged activity on the social media platform by the IRA during the 2016 US election, “and its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior.”

The study’s findings speak for themselves. For example, 70% of purported IRA-connected posts during that campaign were seen by just 1% of the network’s users, “who strongly identified as Republicans.” Coverage of these posts was moreover “eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.” The academics also found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship” between exposure to these tweets, and “changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” Alleged IRA posts seen on Twitter by users were “overshadowed – by an order of magnitude – by posts from national news media and politicians.” For every four IRA tweets published in the last month of the 2016 election campaign, 106 per day from national news media and 35 per day from US politicians were seen on average. In other words, 25 times and nine times more posts respectively.

The academics also probed whether there was any connection between exposure to alleged IRA posts and “changes in respondents’ positions on salient election issues” and political polarization, surveying them on “eight major policy issues salient during the election, and respondents’ self-reported political ideology.” They bluntly concluded that there were not “statistically significant relationships between exposure on any of the issue-based and polarization outcomes.”
Extensive data-based analyses were also conducted to “examine the relationship between exposure to Russian foreign influence accounts and vote choice.” Again, the conclusion couldn’t be more damning – “the relationship between the number of posts from Russian foreign influence accounts that users are exposed to and voting for Donald Trump is near zero (and not statistically significant).”

RFKjr
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615834413149065218

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“..India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33..”

Global South: Gold-Backed Currencies To Replace The US Dollar (Escobar)

First: One of the key take aways from the World Economic Forum annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland is when Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan, on a panel on “Saudi Arabia’s Transformation,” made it clear that Riyadh “will consider trading in currencies other than the US dollar.”So is the petroyuan finally at hand? Possibly, but Al-Jadaan wisely opted for careful hedging: “We enjoy a very strategic relationship with China and we enjoy that same strategic relationship with other nations including the US and we want to develop that with Europe and other countries.”

Second: The Central Banks of Iran and Russia are studying the adoption of a “stable coin” for foreign trade settlements, replacing the US dollar, the ruble and the rial. The crypto crowd is already up in arms, mulling the pros and cons of a gold-backed central bank digital currency (CBDC) for trade that will be in fact impervious to the weaponized US dollar. The really attractive issue here is that this gold-backed digital currency would be particularly effective in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Astrakhan, in the Caspian Sea. Astrakhan is the key Russian port participating in the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), with Russia processing cargo travelling across Iran in merchant ships all the way to West Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean and South Asia.

The success of the INSTC – progressively tied to a gold-backed CBDC – will largely hinge on whether scores of Asian, West Asian and African nations refuse to apply US-dictated sanctions on both Russia and Iran. As it stands, exports are mostly energy and agricultural products; Iranian companies are the third largest importer of Russian grain. Next will be turbines, polymers, medical equipment, and car parts. Only the Russia-Iran section of the INSTC represents a $25 billion business. And then there’s the crucial energy angle of INSTC – whose main players are the Russia-Iran-India triad. India’s purchases of Russian crude have increased year-by-year by a whopping factor of 33. India is the world’s third largest importer of oil; in December, it received 1.2 million barrels from Russia, which for several months now is positioned ahead of Iraq and Saudi Arabia as Delhi’s top supplier.

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He’s been in charge for 20 years already.

Economist: Turkey Could Be On ‘Brink Of Dictatorship’ (K.)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or rather his shadow, has made the cover of this week’s issue of the Economist in a decidedly unflattering way, as a leader that has taken his country “to the brink of disaster.” As the introduction to the financial paper’s report on the state of the country ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections states, “Mr Erdogan’s behavior as the election approaches could push what is today a deeply flawed democracy over the edge into a full-blown dictatorship.” The Economist says Erdogan’s now 20-year-old reign was initially beneficial to Turkey: he mended the economy, neutralized the country’s meddling generals and secured, in 2005, the formal opening of accession talks to the EU, while putting his islamist agenda, which had alarmed the long-dominant secularist heirs to Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish Republic’s founder, mostly to the side.

But, as the paper points out, “the longer Mr Erdogan has been in power, the more autocratic he has grown.” Moving on from Prime Minister to President, he turned that mostly ceremonial post into a really powerful one in the service of an autocracy. “Approaching his third decade in power, he sits in a vast palace snapping orders at courtiers too frightened to tell him when he is wrong. His increasingly eccentric beliefs swiftly become public policy,” the article says. Erdogan once likened democracy to a tram journey: when you reach your destination, you get off. His treatment of mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, whom the Economist calls the “most plausible rival” for the presidency is indicative. A 2-year prison term and a ban from politics for calling election officials who had annulled his first election “idiots” have taken Imamoglu out of the presidential race if the conviction is not annulled or overturned and have cast doubt that the election will be fair or free, the Economist says.


Internationally, Erdogan could cause trouble for Greece and Cyprus by “foment[ing] fiercer territorial quarrels; he could “create further confusion and strife in Syria”; he could “allow the 5m migrants and refugees in Turkey to set sail for southern Europe.” And he could continue to block the accession of Finaland and Sweden into NATO. Yet, the Economist contends, Erdogan cannot afford to make a total break with the West, because he needs investments and he needs armaments. But, the article argues, it is time for a firmer stance by western powers, beginning with the US. “Mr Erdogan is a bully who sees timidity as a reason to press his advantage and toughness as an incentive to mend fences,” the Economist says.

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“On Thursday the walls of the Élysée palace must tremble..”

Over 1 Million Workers Hit French Streets Against Macron’s Pension Reform (ZH)

President Macron’s retirement and pension reform program has unleashed the expected mass demonstrations, strikes, and likely soon to be riots on the streets of France. The much anticipated reform bill headed through parliament will see the official retirement age rise by two years, from the age of 62 to 64. And just like that, it’s popping off… as French authorities brace for more chaos in the coming weeks. Previously, the unions promised the “mother of all battles”. As a result, public transport has seen significant disruptions in service, while many schools are already closed, amid some 200+ well-attended protests all across France on Thursday. Various forms of public transport were brought to a standstill in Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, Nantes and Nice, due to the strikes, and the Eiffel Tower was closed to visitors as well as the protests spread.

Eight major unions had designated Thursday the “first day of strikes and protests” – with promises of many more to come. France’s education ministry said that over 40% of primary school teachers, as well as one-third of high school teachers are participating in the strikes, forcing many to close their doors for the day, and possibly weeks ahead. French rail authority SNCF reported a “severe disruption” across the country, with metro lines in the capital having to implement partial closures. “On some rail lines, as few as one in 10 services were operating, while the Paris metro was running a skeleton service,” BBC reported. A reported over one million people total are believed to have participated in Thursday’s protests and strikes, according to the unions, which plan to keep up the intense pressure until Macron’s bill is defeated.

Likely the demonstrations will get more and more radical and violent, as French protests tend to go… All the country’s unions – including so-called “reformist” unions that the government had hoped to win to its side – have condemned the measure, as have the left-wing and far-right oppositions in the National Assembly. “On Thursday the walls of the Élysée palace must tremble,” Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel said on Tuesday.In many places, crowds clashed with police, who deployed riot control measures including tear gas and batons, as they struggled to clear streets against vastly superior numbers.

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“It looks bad — but the FBI got Hillary out of a worse legal tar pit.”

How A Corrupt FBI Could Save Joe Biden In Classified-Docs Scandal (Bovard)

The White House is being whipsawed by the discovery of secret documents from President Joe Biden’s vice presidency recklessly stored around his garage, his Delaware house and his rented Washington office. The appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden’s classified-document violations could imperil the president’s survival. But Biden may be saved by the charades the FBI concocted to rescue Hillary Clinton. But breaking news Tuesday night revealed the investigation may already be turning into a farce. Amazingly, the Justice Department is permitting Biden’s personal lawyers to control the evidence — without the FBI. Federal law penalizes the removal or mishandling of classified documents via “gross negligence” by up to 10 years in prison.

The number of clearly marked confidential documents discovered on Biden’s turfs is up to 20 — all of which were supposedly “inadvertently misplaced” (for at least six years), per White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. It looks bad — but the FBI got Hillary out of a worse legal tar pit. Clinton’s presidential campaign was roiled by the disclosure she’d used an insecure private email server to handle top-secret documents while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. In 2015, the FBI Counterintelligence Division opened a criminal investigation of the “potential unauthorized storage of classified information on an unauthorized system.” The FBI treated Clinton and her coterie like royalty worthy of endless deference, according to a 2018 report by the Justice Department inspector general.

The FBI agreed to destroy the laptops of top Clinton aides after a limited examination of their contents (including a promise not to examine any post-Jan. 31, 2015, emails or content). When BleachBit software and hammers were used to destroy email evidence under congressional subpoena, the FBI treated it as a harmless error. The IG criticized federal investigators for relying on “rapport building” with Team Hillary instead of using subpoenas to compel the discovery of key evidence. The IG recommended possible disciplinary penalties for five FBI employees who sent blatant anti-Trump texts (some of those agents later staffed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump). FBI investigators shrugged off every brazen deceit they encountered.

The IG report quoted an unnamed FBI agent responding to a fellow agent’s question on how an interview went with a witness who worked with the Clintons at their Chappaqua residence: “Awesome. Lied his ass off. Went from never inside the scif [sensitive compartmented information facility for classified documents] at res [residence], to looked in when it was being constructed, to removed the trash twice, to troubleshot the secure fax with HRC a couple times, to everytime there was a secure fax i did it with HRC. Ridic.” The agency waited until the end of the investigation in July 2016 to question Clinton and refused to videotape that crucial interview. Bizarrely, the FBI planned to absolve her “absent a confession” by Clinton during the interview, the IG report noted.

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“Updated versions of the protocol list the same 15 adverse events. None of the conditions were included in the actual surveys.”

CDC Knowingly Left Serious Adverse Events Off Post-Vaccination Surveys (ET)

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) didn’t include serious adverse events like heart inflammation on post-vaccination surveys even though the agency knew the issues could be linked to COVID-19 vaccines, documents show. Even before the surveys were rolled out in December 2020 after the first vaccines were authorized, the CDC knew that myocarditis—a form of heart inflammation since confirmed as being caused by the Pfizer and Moderna shots—and other serious adverse events were of “special interest” when it came to the vaccines, according to a newly disclosed version of the protocol for the survey system. The Nov. 19, 2020, protocol for V-safe, the survey system, lists myocarditis, stroke, death, and a dozen “prespecified medical conditions.”

The protocol was obtained by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), a nonprofit that seeks transparency around health information. All of the conditions can cause severe symptoms. V-safe is a system of surveys that was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor vaccine safety. It was developed and is managed by the CDC. Updated versions of the protocol list the same 15 adverse events. None of the conditions were included in the actual surveys. Respondents could check boxes if they experienced certain symptoms, but only 10 lower-level problems such as fever and nausea were listed as options.

“It’s deeply troubling that the CDC would construct V-safe in a manner that does not permit it to be able to easily assess the rate of harm from adverse events the CDC had already identified as potentially being caused by these products,” Aaron Siri, a lawyer representing ICAN, told The Epoch Times. “This calls into question what the CDC was really trying to accomplish with V-safe. Was it trying to assess the actual safety of these products? Or was it trying to design a system that would be more likely to affirm its previous public pronouncements regarding the safety of these products?”

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“We’ve never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding in terms of censoring people.”

How the CDC Became the Speech Police (Soave)

Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the longserving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after nearly four decades on the job.Ashish Jha, the Biden administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, hailed Fauci as “the most important, consequential public servant in the United States in the last half century.” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described him as a near-constant “source of information and facts” for all Americans throughout the pandemic.

Indeed, the U.S. public’s understanding of COVID-19—its virality, how to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from—was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like him, to a greater degree than most people realize. The federal government shaped the rules of online discussion in unprecedented and unnerving ways. This has become much more obvious over the past few months, following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Musk granted several independent journalists access to internal messages between the government and the platform’s moderators, which demonstrate concerted efforts by various federal agencies—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even the White House—to convince Twitter to restrict speech. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, are eye-opening.

But Twitter was hardly the only object of federal pressure. According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. “Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all,” reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: “BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo.”

[..] Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, professors of medicine at Stanford University and Harvard University, respectively, have claimed that social media platforms repeatedly muzzled their opposition to lockdowns, mask requirements, and vaccine mandates. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a public interest law firm that has joined the lawsuit, thinks the federal government’s campaign to squelch contrarian coronavirus content was so vast as to effectively violate the First Amendment. “What’s at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age,” says Jenin Younes, the group’s litigation counsel. “We’ve never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding in terms of censoring people.”

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“..many adverse events will go unrecorded, and this becomes more likely the longer the delay between treatment and the associated adverse reaction.”

Safety Signals for Heart, Blood, Reproduction in Yellow Card Vaccine Data (DS)

The strength of the C-19VYC reporting scheme is that it is capable of generating an enormous amount of valuable information about adverse reactions to the experimental COVID-19 vaccines. Reports of suspected adverse reactions can be submitted not only by physicians but also by the recipients of the vaccines themselves, providing valuable feedback to the MHRA based on first-hand experience. This inclusive aspect of the C-19VYC reporting scheme has proved very successful, with nearly half a million adverse event reports submitted, roughly one for every hundred recipients of the COVID-19 vaccines in the U.K. Despite this strength in terms of quantity of data, the C-19VYC reporting scheme has a number of serious weaknesses related to the nature of the data collected.

These weaknesses place limits on the scheme’s ability both to detect and to measure safety signals. The first problem is that the scheme does not identify or include a control group of individuals, who have not taken the vaccine, against which to compare those who have. Other major weaknesses are that reporting is passive rather than planned and takes place at a single point in time. Thus, reporting relies on the sufferer of the adverse reactions or his or her physician making the connection between the vaccine treatment and the adverse reaction. As a consequence, many adverse events will go unrecorded, and this becomes more likely the longer the delay between treatment and the associated adverse reaction. Reporting rates of adverse reactions are also likely to represent only a fraction of actual cases because physicians or recipients may have too little time to fill out the onerous paperwork, may not have knowledge of the Yellow Card scheme, or may be unwilling to countenance the idea of harms resulting from a medication in which they have placed trust.

As well as being low, reporting rates are expected to vary substantially between different sectors of the population. Experience shows that females post roughly three times more adverse event reports than males, and the reporting rate for adverse reactions varies with age, dropping off in the elderly population where adverse reactions may be obscured by multiple forms of pre-existing chronic illnesses. In addition, reporting rates are likely to vary with the severity of the adverse reaction. Individuals are far more likely to have the motivation and tenacity to file a report if their adverse reaction is severe than if it is mild. On the other hand, if the adverse event results in death, grieving friends or relatives may be too preoccupied to file a C-19VYC report.

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“..nearly half a million children and young adults died within a year of his fateful announcement with over 118,000 of those deaths suspected to be due to the Covid-19 vaccine..”

Fauci Lied; 120,000 US Children Died (Exp.)

Time and time again throughout 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci, stood at the podium, the bright lights of the cameras blinding him as he faced the nation. With a steady hand, he held up a vial of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, promising it would be the key to protecting America and its children from the “deadly” Covid-19 disease supposedly ravaging the country. But little did the public know, the truth about the Covid vaccine’s safety had been buried deep within Fauci’s own lies and deceit and confidential U.S. Government and Pfizer documents. Fauci used propaganda, lies and manipulation to coerce parents into getting their children vaccinated.

But the weight of the lives lost has quickly come crashing down on him and the nation, as a secret Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report has revealed that nearly half a million children and young adults died within a year of his fateful announcement with over 118,000 of those deaths suspected to be due to the Covid-19 vaccine’s dangerous side effects. The CDC report should spark widespread outrage and be on the front page of every single major newspaper. But instead, it has been and will continue to be met with a deafening silence. Despite the staggering death toll the report will be buried and swept under the carpet.

The mainstream media, consumed with working overtime to distract the public with propaganda on the war in Ukraine, alleged climate change and the cost of living crisis, has paid and will pay no attention to the devastating consequences of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s deception. The public wil continue to be kept in the dark, and the U.S. Government will move quickly to cover up its own involvement in the tragedy. With Dr Fauci quietly announcing his “retirement” in August 2022. It’s all business as usual and simply just another day at the office. But it is also a shocking failure of transparency and accountability, and the people of the United States should be forever haunted by the lives lost due to the Covid-19 vaccine scandal.

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“If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet..”

Twitter Files Show Authoritarian “Cult Of Identity” Controls The Media (Gurri)

Only yesterday, Elon Musk was a hero to progressives. He had made the electric car sexy and organized a migration to Mars to save humanity from the coming ecological apocalypse. Musk voted for Barack Obama twice and for Biden once. When he offered to purchase Twitter on April 14 of last year, he clearly believed he was reconnecting progressivism to its liberal roots. “For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” he said. Famously, Musk characterized himself as “a free speech absolutist.” But elites took that for a declaration of war and changed their tightly synchronized minds about the man. Twitter in the hands of Musk was “dangerous to our democracy,” said Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren.

“If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet,” wrote David Leavitt. The White House expressed newfound concern about “the power of large social media platforms … over our everyday lives … tech platforms must be held accountable for the harm they cause.” Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter management had gone on record stating, “We do not shadow ban [i.e., secretly block users]. And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” Thanks to Twitter’s internal emails and messages released by Musk, we now know both claims were false. “Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users,” wrote journalist Bari Weiss. The targets were offenders against elite orthodoxy—a conservative activist, a right-wing talk show host, and a Covid-dissenting doctor, among others.

In December, Musk invited Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Shellenberger to examine the company’s internal Slack messages and emails. Taibbi and Weiss are fierce critics of establishment media; Shellenberger is a strong anti-establishment voice on energy and homeless policy. All are, in Weiss’ phrase, “politically homeless,” neither right nor left, but tend to write about aspects of the struggle between the elites and the public. Taibbi, Weiss, and Shellenberger are clear thinkers and good writers but two traits, in my opinion, separate them from the pack: independence and integrity. Musk could have bought himself a passel of hired hacks who would have churned out whatever spin he wished. With these three authors, he gave up control over the Twitter Files output in exchange for their ironclad credibility.

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Lavrov
https://twitter.com/i/status/1616066295719677954

 

 

 

 

GoreWEF
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615808847544999941

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1616132119549329408

 

 

Fetch
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615833809077010432

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1613580927946592258

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 172023
 


Hasui Kawase Mimhae Pavilion, Kyongju, Korea 1940

 

How The Davos Elite Took Back Control (Fazi)
Global Political Elite Skipping Davos (RT)
All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front (Escobar)
Kiev Coaching EU On Path To Ruin – Exiled Ukrainian Politician (RT)
West Sees Ukraine As Spoils Of Cold War – Medvedchuk (RT)
Croatian President Weighs In On ‘Proxy War’ Against Russia (RT)
Biden Uses His Lawyers To Shield His Classified Docs From The FBI (Turley)
More Documents Marked As Classified Found At Biden’s Home – White House (CBS)
Adam Schiff Admits Biden May Have Endangered National Security (CB)
Did The Deep State Turn on Biden? (Roach)
Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election (Jacobin)
‘Twitter Files’ Expose Big Pharma Bullying (ZH)
China Records First Population Decline In 60 Years (RT)
The Black Album (Trish Wood)
There Is Nothing Green About Green Energy (Pettimore)
The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People (Ugo Bardi)

 

 

 

 

The Woke Mind Virus
https://twitter.com/i/status/1613830456243273730

 

 

Dowd sudden death epidemic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615116979030966278

 

 

Forget about the housing market. It’s done.

 

 

BBC stickers

 

 

Pregnant women are not getting vaxxed.

 

 

Carpe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615019200921182217

 

 

 

 

 

 

The business elite.

How The Davos Elite Took Back Control (Fazi)

Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.

While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.

Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). The composition of the WEF’s board is also very revealing, including Laurence D. Fink, CEO of Blackrock, David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé. There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.

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CEOs take over.

Global Political Elite Skipping Davos (RT)

The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland has kicked off on Monday with a number of top-tier leaders absent. US President Joe Biden is skipping this year’s gathering, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, and new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also passing on the event, along with the entire Russian business elite, which has been forced off the guest list by Ukraine-related sanctions. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Chinese businessmen will also miss the forum following the aftershocks of a recent spike in Covid-19 cases and troubles on the domestic stock market, which saw some $224 billion erased last year from the fortunes of China’s wealthiest people.


Of the Group of Seven (G7) leaders, only German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to attend Davos this year, along with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Despite the shrinking number of political leaders, this year’s attendance list is rich in top managers. Among 2,700 participants in the official WEF sessions, “we’re likely to surpass the old record from 2020 with 600 global CEOs – including 1,500 C-suite level overall,” according to WEF head of digital and marketing, George Schmitt. According to Bloomberg, a total of 116 billionaires are attending the WEF this year, a 40% rise from ten years ago. Representatives from the US will form the largest group with 33 delegates. Some 18 more billionaires are coming from Europe, and 13 from India, including industrialist Gautam Adani, the world’s fourth-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

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“Analyst Peter Koenig has developed a convincing thesis that the WEF, the WHO and NATO may be running some sort of sophisticated death cult.”

All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front (Escobar)

Cynics of all persuasions may be excused for lamenting Mr. Zircon – currently on oceanic patrol encompassing the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and of course “Mare Nostrum” Mediterranean – won’t be presenting his business card at Davos. Analyst Peter Koenig has developed a convincing thesis that the WEF, the WHO and NATO may be running some sort of sophisticated death cult. The Great Reset does mingle merrily with NATO’s agenda as agent provocateur, financer and weaponizer of the proxy Empire vs. Russia war in black hole Ukraine. NAKO – an acronym for North Atlantic Killing Organization – would be more appropriate in this case. As Koenig summarizes it, “NATO enters any territory where the ‘conventional’ media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.”

In parallel, very few people are aware that on June 13, 2019 in New York, a secret deal was clinched between the UN, the WEF, an array of oligarch-weaponized NGOs – with the WHO in the front line – and last but not least, the world’s top corporations, which are all owned by an interlinked maze with Vanguard and BlackRock at the center. The practical result of the deal is the UN Agenda 2030. Virtually every government in the NATOstan area and the “Western Hemisphere” (US establishment definition) has been hijacked by Agenda 2030 – which translates, essentially, as hoarding, privatizing and financializing all the earth’s assets, under the pretext of “protecting” them. Translation: the marketization and monetization of the entire natural world.

Davos superstar shills such as insufferable bore Niall Ferguson are just well rewarded vassals: western intellectuals of the Harvard, Yale and Princeton mould that would never dare bite the hand that feeds them. Ferguson just wrote a column on Bloomberg titled “All is Not Quiet on the Eastern Front” – basically to peddle the risk of WWIII, on behalf of his masters, blaming of course “China as the arsenal of autocracy”. Among serial high-handed inanities, this one stands out. Ferguson writes, “There are two obvious problems with US strategy (…) The first is that if algorithmic weapons systems are the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin may eventually be driven to using the latter, as he clearly lacks the former.” Cluelessness here is a euphemism. Ferguson clearly has no idea “algorithmic weapons” mean; if he’s referring to electronic warfare, the US may have been able to maintain superiority for a while in Ukraine, but that’s over.

[..] Nobody with an IQ over room temperature will expect Davos next week to discuss any aspect of the NATO vs. Eurasia existential war seriously – not to mention propose diplomacy. So I’ll leave you with yet another typical tawdry story about how the Empire – who rules over Davos – deals in practice with its vassals. While in Sicily earlier this year I learned that an ultra high-value Pentagon asset had landed in Rome, in haste, as part of an unscheduled visit. A few days later the reason for the visit was printed in La Repubblica, one of the papers of the toxic Agnelli clan. That was a Mafia scam: a face-to-face “suggestion” for the Meloni government to imperatively provide Kiev, as soon as possible, with the costly anti-Samp-T missile system, developed by an European consortium, Eurosam, uniting MBDA Italy, MBDA France and Thales.

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Medvedchuk is the voice of reason in Ukraine politics. So of course he’s in exile.

Kiev Coaching EU On Path To Ruin – Exiled Ukrainian Politician (RT)

Kiev’s adopted policy of hatred and intransigence towards Russia is inevitably driving it into poverty, a former Ukrainian opposition-party leader, who was forced from his home nation, has concluded. Now Kiev is teaching Europe the same approach, leading to the same outcome and to possible nuclear war, he added. Viktor Medvedchuk’s political party had the biggest opposition faction in the current Ukrainian parliament. The government of President Vladimir Zelensky launched a crackdown on the group and on its leader personally. A proponent of reconciliation with Russia, he has written a keynote article published on Monday in Russian newspaper Izvestia, explaining the roots of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Both Zelensky and his predecessor Pyotr Poroshenko had been elected after the 2014 coup in Kiev on a platform of peace, and each made a U-turn after getting into office, Medvedchuk pointed out.

He argued that this shows a pattern of betrayal of the Ukrainian people by its leadership and by what he termed a “party of war.” Being enemies with Russia is against Ukraine’s economic interest, Medvedchuk asserted. Not only is Russia a major market and source of raw materials from which Ukraine can benefit, the country’s industrial sector was mostly in the east and people there, who for historic reasons have emotional ties to Russia, were antagonized by Kiev. Economic ruination is an inevitable consequence of the conflict, the politician wrote. “It is no longer Europe that teaches Ukraine politics, but Ukraine that teaches Europe how to achieve economic decline and poverty with the help of a policy of hatred and intransigence. And if Europe continues to support this policy, it will be dragged into a war, possibly a nuclear one,” he warned.

He accused Western nations of giving the incumbent Ukrainian government “triumph after triumph, while no military breakthrough is observed,” referring to the parades that generals in Ancient Rome were given after major victories. Meanwhile, the “party of peace” gets no voice either at home or in Western nations, Medvedchuk lamented. “Those who stood for peace were slandered, intimidated and repressed on incitement from the West. The Ukrainian party of peace simply did not fit into Western democracy.” “This eloquently suggests that most US and European politicians do not want any peace for Ukraine. But this does not mean at all that Ukrainians do not want peace, and Zelensky’s military triumph is more important to them than their lives and destroyed homes.” he reasoned. Only when pro-peace politicians are allowed to make their case freely can there be hope to resolve the situation, Medvedchuk believes.

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“Western nations must recognize that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. Otherwise, it will “grow further, spilling over to Europe and other countries..”

West Sees Ukraine As Spoils Of Cold War – Medvedchuk (RT)

The West’s insistence that it won the Cold War and was entitled to the spoils at the expense of Russian interests is at the root of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the country’s exiled opposition leader has said. Viktor Medvedchuk was forced to leave his home nation under the threat of prosecution for alleged treason. His Opposition Bloc – For Life party had the biggest faction in the Ukrainian parliament and advocated reconciliation with Russia. However, the government of President Vladimir Zelensky cracked down on it and ultimately forced many of its members into exile or silence. In an article published by Russian newspaper Izvestia on Monday, Medvedchuk analyzed the causes of the current crisis, arguing that the origin of the conflict lies in the way that the end of the Cold War is perceived by Washington and Moscow.

“The West definitely considers itself as a winner and Russia as a defeated party,” he said. Consequently, it considers ex-Soviet territories as “legitimate prey for the US and NATO” under the “woe to the conquered” principle. From Moscow’s standpoint, it simply relinquished confrontation when it decided against pursuing communism. Since the 1990s, it had sought friendly relations with Western nations, as well as economic and political integration into the EU, Medvedchuk wrote. The US plan, as evidenced by the expansion of NATO in Europe despite the objections of Moscow, was at odds with opening the door to its Cold War opponent. Ultimately, it derailed EU-Russian engagement, he argued. Conflicts like the Balkan wars are further evidence that the West had moved to gobble up the former Eastern Bloc, he continued, since they helped to “make it easier for the winner to take it over.”

The West targeted Ukraine for absorption and saw the country as part of its rightful prize, but a lot of resistance had to be overcome in order to split it from Russia, considering Kiev’s historical ties with Moscow, and the economic interest in maintaining good relations, Medvedchuk explained. Kiev antagonized the eastern part of the country, which was both economically stronger and more pro-Russian than the nationalist lands in the east, he suggested. And even then, both Zelensky and his predecessor, Pyotr Poroshenko, had been elected on a peace platform only to become “war party” politicians after taking office. The current conflict can be resolved only if pro-peace politicians are allowed to make their case, and Western nations must recognize that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. Otherwise, it will “grow further, spilling over to Europe and other countries,” and has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war, he warned.

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“They go from war to war. And what should I be? An American slave?”

The president and PM have very different views.

Croatian President Weighs In On ‘Proxy War’ Against Russia (RT)

Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has claimed NATO, a military bloc of which Zagreb is a member, is waging a “proxy war” against Moscow in Ukraine. He also dismissed sanctions against Moscow as “nonsense,” adding that he does not want to be an “American slave.” Speaking to Croatian reporters in the city of Vukovar on Sunday, Milanovic said, among other things: “Washington and NATO are waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine,” as quoted by media outlet Istra24. He went on to argue that “The plan cannot be to remove Putin. The plan cannot be sanctions,” adding that such punitive measures are “nonsense and we will not achieve anything with them.” “They go from war to war. And what should I be? An American slave?” Croatia’s president asked rhetorically.

Milanovic voiced his frustration with the US-led military bloc’s policies in the same interview in which he tore into Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic, over his latest Ukraine-related remark. Speaking to news channel France 24 on Saturday, Plenkovic said the Balkan nation’s lawmakers, who in mid-December didn’t support the EU’s program to train Ukrainian military personnel in member states, have “failed to be on the right side of history.” Commenting on the remark, Milanovic, in turn, slammed the premier for bringing “disgrace” to his country “and to its democratic representatives in front of others.” The Croatian president argued that this kind of behavior reaches a low that is “the bottom of the bottom.”

As for the EU’s mission, the Croatian president warned that it effectively means that “for the first time in its history, the EU is participating in a war.” This, according to Milanovic, is “against the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.” In December 2022, Milanovic argued that having Ukrainian service members train on Croatian soil would “bring war” to the Balkan nation. He also insisted at the time that “Ukraine is not an ally,” criticizing Brussels’ decision last June to grant Kiev candidate status as “cynical.”

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“Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. [..] While that attorney-client privilege can be overcome under a “crime/fraud exception,” it adds a level of initial protection.”

Biden Uses His Lawyers To Shield His Classified Docs From The FBI (Turley)

The discovery of a fourth set of classified documents, at the Biden residence in Delaware, has further undermined the White House’s virtual mantra that the president “takes classified documents very seriously.” Putting aside the repeated movement of highly classified documents over six years, one curious element has emerged in this scandal: the use of private counsel. Not only did President Joe Biden enlist lawyers to clear out his private Washington office; he then used them — rather than security officers or the FBI — to search for additional classified documents. The initial use of lawyers is notable. While it seems a fairly pricey moving crew, Biden could argue a trove of documents might require a judgment on where they should be sent and whether they belong to Biden, the Penn Biden Center or the government.

But why was a legal team sent in six years after Biden took the documents on leaving as vice president? Were the lawyers specifically selected because they had clearances, an acknowledgment there might be classified material unlawfully housed in the office? After the fourth batch of documents was discovered this week (the third found in Delaware), Richard Sauber, referred to as the “special counsel to the president,” stressed that he has a clearance. Sauber admits the lawyers who found the first batch at the residence didn’t have clearances but says he found the later documents. It remains unclear which lawyers were involved in which discoveries, whether they had clearances and (if so) at what level. In fact, it seems to suggest Biden continued to use uncleared lawyers after his team found highly classified documents Nov. 2 in the Penn Biden office closet in Washington. That itself could be viewed as gross mishandling of classified information.

It’s strange Biden did not use security officers or the FBI to conduct further searches. The president has a host of people who regularly handle classified material. So why use the lawyers? The answer appears the same as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails: control. Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. Trump also used counsel, but eventually the FBI raided his home to search and remove not just classified material but documents found in boxes with that material. While that attorney-client privilege can be overcome under a “crime/fraud exception,” it adds a level of initial protection. It also allowed Biden to control the discovery and initial record of the discovery of classified information. The key to any investigation will be the chain of custody extending back to the documents’ removal in 2017 when Biden left office.

How these documents appeared in their discovered locations is known only to his lawyers. It’s a link in the chain of custody that Biden effectively controls. With Mar-a-Lago, the FBI was criticized for staging documents to be shown in the storage room. The photos were then leaked to an eager media. There will be no staged photos of documents alongside Time magazine covers for Biden. Nor were documents he housed with classified documents removed. Indeed, it’s not clear if the FBI will know what documents were stored in the same boxes. What was potentially lost is significant. Classified documents are generally supposed to be in folders with a thick, colored border and large printed classification warnings. Were some of those folders observable before they were moved? If so, anyone could tell a pile contained classified material, including the president and passersby.

Likewise, the initial discovery could show the context of surrounding material. The FBI at Mar-a-Lago carefully photographed that context and its search. Here, we’re relying on counsel to have kept such a record when most lawyers would be reluctant to do so given the risk to their client. The key is that unlike FBI agents, these lawyers are not acting on behalf of the public interest but for the president’s personal interests. If there are criminal charges, the key witnesses will be lawyers representing the president as an individual. They are more likely to minimize incriminating or embarrassing elements.

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Turley’s comment on this: “Biden counsel continues to make statements seemingly against their client’s interests. Sauber said that the lawyers who discovered the documents on Wednesday night did not have clearances…”

More Documents Marked As Classified Found At Biden’s Home – White House (CBS)

Lawyers for President Biden found more documents marked as classified at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged in a statement Saturday. White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of documents marked as classified were found during a search of Mr. Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there. The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Mr. Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration are under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice. “While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.” The Justice Department declined to comment to CBS News on the newly discovered documents. Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of records with classified markings. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office. On Thursday, asked whether Mr. Biden could guarantee that additional classified documents would not turn up in a further search, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “You should assume that it’s been completed, yes.” Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation. Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”

Marco Polo

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Shifty turns.

Adam Schiff Admits Biden May Have Endangered National Security (CB)

In what is a stunning admission, California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff has admitted that President Joe Biden may have endangered national security by mishandling classified documents. He spoke to ABC “This Week” host Jonathan Karl on Sunday when the topic of the classified document scandal and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel was talked about. “Congressman Schiff, you were on this show just after Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel in the case of the Trump documents. You said it was the right move. Do you feel the same way about this special counsel?” the host said. “I do think it’s the right move. The attorney general has to make sure that not only is justice evenly applied, but the appearances of justice are also satisfactory to the public.

And here, I don’t think he had any choice but to appoint a special counsel. And I think that special counsel will do the proper assessment,” the Congressman said. “I still would like to see Congress do its own assessment of — and receive an assessment from the intelligence community of whether there was an exposure to others of these documents, whether there was harm to national security, on the case of either set of documents with either president. But, yes, I think the special counsel was appropriately appointed,” he said. “Jonathan, if I could also, though, because my state is still trying to dig out from these terrible storms, I want to thank the president for making an emergency declaration and let Californians know that in the three most affected counties they can now apply for help in terms of rebuilding their homes and their businesses and that other counties need to report their damage as soon as possible so they can qualify for relief as well,” he said as the host brought the conversation back to the documents.

“You raise the possibility of those national security assessment. Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as – as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” the host said. “I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts. We have asked for an assessment in the intelligence community of the Mar-a-Lago documents. I think we ought to get that same assessment of the documents found in the – in the think tank, as well as the home of President Biden. I’d like to know what these documents were. I’d like to know what the IC’s assessment is, whether there was any risk of exposure and what the harm would be and whether any mitigation needs to be done. I think that would be appropriate and consistent with what we requested in the case of Mar-a-Lago,” the Congressman said.

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Well, someone did.

Did The Deep State Turn on Biden? (Roach)

In spite of his manifest unpopularity and refusal even to campaign, Biden was installed as president in 2020. Having rarely met an actual Biden supporter, Trump voters were skeptical and angry. The extended recounts, unceremonious dismissal of legal challenges, and videos of disappearing ballots, along with strident denunciations of “election deniers,” did not reassure anyone. Later revelations showed the coordinated way government officials, the media, NGOs, billionaires, and others conspired to “fortify” the 2020 election. Biden governed as he ran: mostly hidden from the public, beholden to donors and party elders, doing as little as possible. This seemed acceptable for a while, since it allowed the various constituent parts of the government to do what they wanted with little interference.

Everyone knows Biden’s never been that sharp and seems more decrepit than ever, that his vice president is even dumber than he is, and that he’s not really running anything. But this is all a feature, not a bug, for the cabal that brought him to office. For them, the more independence they have from oversight, the better. Lately, it seems there’s a disturbance in force. Biden and his allies have continued their vendetta against Trump, exposing his tax returns and raiding his home for possessing documents he supposedly owed the National Archives. This did not go over as well as Attorney General (and all-around hack) Merrick Garland anticipated, and it seems Garland and the January 6 Committee have each decided to scale back their demands. This is why the recent exposure of top secret documents in Biden’s old office, his garage, and a mysterious third location suggests something is afoot.

We went from a Monday disclosure to a special counsel being appointed on Thursday. Nothing like this happens this quickly unless it is by design. There are, of course, ways to deal with this situation that do not involve public exposure. Couldn’t Biden or his staff order some FBI agents or White House people to pick them up and take them to wherever they’re supposed to be stored? It’s in the news because somehow his lawyers found the documents and reported them before the story could go through White House channels. And, lawyers being lawyers, they followed the street-lawyer rule that if someone has to go to jail, make sure it’s your client and not you. Concerned about individual culpability for obstruction or mishandling documents, they made this hot potato someone else’s problem as fast as possible.

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The Jacobin is one of the Dems’ staunchest supporters. Until now.

Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election (Jacobin)

Amid the generalized media crack-up that surrounded the 2016 presidential election, the bogeyman of “Russian bots” quickly became a load-bearing concept. A Russia-based social media campaign, or so it was said, had saturated sites like Twitter with fake accounts and, in doing so, helped to swing the election for Donald Trump. Becoming axiomatic in liberal circles, this story soon took on a life of its own. It’s since played a prominent role in mainstream media narratives of the 2016 election, been the subject of highly publicized congressional hearings, and also loomed large in the wider global discourse about “fake news.” That the Russian government preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton and that Russia-connected actors engaged in digital skulduggery related to the election are not really in dispute.

Much of the mainstream discussion around Russian bots, however, has been premised on unexamined assumptions about the scale and effectiveness of these efforts. Powerful states including the United States, after all, regularly engage in the likes of online propaganda and sock-puppeting campaigns. Whether they have a more than negligible impact on real world events, electoral and otherwise, is another question. It’s notable, then, that a new analysis published by the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University finds no evidence whatsoever that Russia-based Twitter disinformation had any meaningful impact on voter behavior in 2016. In place of the terrifying bot army menace that’s periodically been invoked, the researchers instead detail an enterprise with minimal reach or influence, and one overwhelmingly concentrated among partisan Republicans already inclined to vote for Trump.

They estimate that as many as thirty-two million US Twitter users may have been “exposed” to tweets from Russia-aligned accounts over the eight-month period preceding the 2016 election.” In numerical terms that may sound like a lot, but it actually isn’t when you factor in the sheer volume of posts and information encountered by social media users on a daily basis. As the report puts it: While, on average, respondents were exposed to roughly 4 posts from Russian foreign influence accounts per day in the last month of the election campaign, they were exposed to an average of 106 posts on average per day from national news media and 35 posts per day from US politicians. In other words, respondents were exposed to 25 times more posts from national news media and 9 times as many posts from politicians than those from Russian foreign influence accounts.

Sheer exposure, of course, doesn’t even necessarily amount to influence. Like advertising, politically motivated content can functionally be background noise if it fails to reach particular audiences or in turn doesn’t have an impact on those that it does. In both respects, the study is quite unequivocal: not only were Russian Twitter efforts dwarfed by posts from media and politicians, but actual exposure to them was highly concentrated within a subset of partisan conservatives: Results . . . show that the amount of exposure depends substantially on users’ self-identified partisanship: those who identify as “Strong Republicans” were exposed to roughly nine times as many posts from Russian foreign influence accounts than were those who identify as Democrats or Independents.

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Musk Says ZeroHedge Did “Nothing Warranting Suspension”

‘Twitter Files’ Expose Big Pharma Bullying (ZH)

Today’s Twitter Files drop contains several notable pieces of evidence. First, that lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry launched a ‘massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine,” according to The Intercept’s Lee Fang. As part of this effort, lobbying group BIO “wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.” Of note, Pfizer and BioNTech raked in $37 billion in revenue in 2021 alone from the COVID-19 vaccine, while Moderna made $17.7 billion the same year (and has recently announced a plan to hike the price of the Covid-19 vaccine by approximately 400%). BioNTech, which developed the Pfizer vaccine, “reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.”

According to Fang, “Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request,” while “A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine.” Meanwhile, the “fake accounts” flagged by the pharmaceutical companies for action were real people – one of whom Fang spoke with on the phone. “For more than two years, a global movement has been speaking out against pharmaceutical greed and demanding that everyone, everywhere has the tools to combat pandemics,” said Maaza Seyoum, a campaigner for the People’s Vaccine Alliance. “Whatever nasty tricks companies and governments pull,” she continued, “we cannot and will not be silenced.” Second, ‘Pfizer & Moderna’s lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects (PGP), which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid “misinformation.”‘ according to Fang.

BIO funded the PGP campaign, “Stronger,” to the tune of $1.275 million. Its focus? Helping Twitter ‘create content moderation bots,’ selecting which public health accounts would be verified, and helping to crowdsource content takedowns. Of note, the Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included regular emails to Twitter officals with takedown and verification requests. “Here’s an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter’s lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.” Fang includes a screencap of an email with two excel spreadsheets containing said requests.

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One child policy fallout. Like trying to turn an oil tanker around. Population to almost halve by 2100.

China Records First Population Decline In 60 Years (RT)

The population declined in 2022 to 1.411 billion, down some 850,000 people from the previous year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced during a Tuesday briefing on annual data. Analysts said the decline was the first since 1961 during the great famine triggered by former leader Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. “The population will likely trend down from here in coming years. This is very important, with implications for potential growth and domestic demand,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. The birth rate also fell to a record low of 6.77 births per 1,000, down from 7.52 a year earlier and the lowest level since the founding of Communist China in 1949. Some 9.56 million babies were born, compared with 10.62 million in 2021 – despite a push from the government to encourage more married couples to have children.


The new data came alongside the announcement of one of China’s worst annual economic performances in nearly half a century, with the economy expanding by just 3% for the year, far below the government’s target, underscoring the steep economic challenges the country faces as its labor force shrinks and its retired demographic grows. The demographic crisis, which is expected to have an increasing impact on Chinese growth in the years to come, has been a key concern for policymakers. Beijing scrapped its decades-long and highly controversial “one child” policy in 2015, after realizing the restrictive policy had contributed to a rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce that could severely distress the country’s economic and social stability. To arrest the falling birth rate, the Chinese government announced in 2015 that it would allow married couples to have two children. But after a brief uptick in 2016, the national birth rate has continued to fall.

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“At least the Manson Murders were covered by corporate media. We all shared a similar experience.”

The Black Album (Trish Wood)

Later I bought the book, Helter Skelter, written by the man who prosecuted Charlie. But as an adult and a true crime reporter it was a story I steered clear of, never once accepting a production role in any of the many retellings. Like Didion, I remained skittish about it. I couldn’t make sense of Sharon Tate’s astonishing beauty being annihilated and the peace and love ethos of rich Hollywood hippies reduced to feral human remains – for nothing. The True Detective-type photos from Cielo Drive are images that still haunt. So, why am I so gripped by the revelations that Big Tech, legacy media and for sure the government actually silenced the voices of experts honestly trying to stop the unfolding disaster of lockdowns? Why does this feel like a moment as significant as those era-ending murders in the pretty house on a quiet SoCal Drive?

A team of independent journos is uncovering irrefutable proof that our well being was not paramount in the minds of those who peddled a fake consensus to invoke lockdowns — in my view — the most ruinous public health mistake in modern history. Government, its public health officials, legacy media, and even the medical journals were more into narrative stitching than truth and actually saving lives. The stories of governmental and scientific fraud and perfidy are all over Substack and Twitter and Elon is being hailed as a hero — as he should be, despite what my friend CJ Hopkins said on the podcast last week. But corporate media are running their usual smear-games — abdicating their responsibility to their audience — in order to hide their own complicity in a policy scandal that dwarfs all others.

In the meantime, we are on our own, facing an ugly truth about the people who govern us and the agencies they exploit to stay in power. Everything we thought was true about this power dynamic is a lie. At least the Manson Murders were covered by corporate media. We all shared a similar experience.

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Trojan Horse.

Twitter thread.

There Is Nothing Green About Green Energy (Pettimore)

As a miner for 40 years I have worked in various mines around the world. Gold, platinum, copper, coal, lead, zinc, oil and salt. I’m going to tell you something, and here it is. We will destroy the earth in the name of “Green Energy” Follow along and I will explain. MiningWatch Canada is estimating that “[Three] billion tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition” – a “massive” increase especially for six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals Over the next 30 years 7.5 billion of us, we will consume more minerals than the last 70,000 years or the past 500 generations, which is more than all of the 108 billion humans who have ever walked the Earth.

Mining requires the extraction of solid ores, often after removing vast amounts of overlying rock. Then the ore must be processed, creating an enormous quantity of waste – about 100 billion tonnes a year, more than any other human-made waste stream. Purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic meters of water, which then becomes polluted with acids and heavy metals. On top of that, imagine the destruction and energy required to obtain these essential metals:
18,740 pounds of purified rock to produce 2.2 pounds of vanadium
35,275 pounds of ore for 2.2 pounds of cerium
110,230 pounds of rock for 2.2 pounds of gallium
2,645,550 pounds of ore to get 2.2 pounds of lutecium

Also staggering amounts of ore are needed for other metals. By 2035, demand is expected to double for germanium; quadruple for tantalum; and quintuple for palladium. The scandium market could increase nine-fold, and the cobalt market by a factor of 24. (Marscheider-Wiedemann 2016 ‘raw materials for emerging technologies’. The potential demand for rare metals is exponential. We are already consuming over two billion tonnes of metals every year — the equivalent of more than 500 Eiffel Towers a day. There is nothing refined about mining. It involves crushing rock, and then using a concoction of chemical reagents such as sulphuric and nitric acid, a long and highly repetitive process using many different procedures to obtain a rare-earth concentrate close to 100% purity.

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“The problem is that we don’t have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes.”

The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People (Ugo Bardi)

With 8 billion people alive on Earth, it may be reasonable to believe that the planet is becoming a little crowded. Nevertheless, we should not neglect the opposite opinion: that we have resources and technologies sufficient to keep 8 billion people alive and reasonably happy, and perhaps even more. Neither position can be proven, nor disproven. The future will tell us who was right but, in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to propose that population growth should be slowed down by birth planning. The problem is that we don’t have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes. The position that sees overpopulation as a problem has been thoroughly demonized over the past decades and, still today, you cannot even mention the subject without being immediately branded as a would-be exterminator.

It happened to Bill Gates, to the Club of Rome, and to many others who dared suggest that the world would be a better place if the human population were to stabilize at levels lower than the present one. The demonization trend is, of course, a knee-jerk reaction: the people who propose population planning would be simply horrified at being accused of supporting mass exterminations. But note also that demonization starts from a real problem. Exterminations DID happen in the recent past, and they were carried out largely on the basis of a wrong evaluation of the overpopulation problem. During the Nazi era in Germany, the idea that Europe was overpopulated was common and it was widely believed that the “Lebensraum, “living space” available was insufficient for the German people. The result was a series of exterminations correctly considered the most heinous crimes in human history.

How was that possible? The Germans of that time were the grandfathers of the Germans of today, who are horrified at thinking of what their grandparents did or at least did not oppose. But, for the Germans of those times, killing the Untermenschen, the inferior races, seemed to be the right thing to do, given the vision of the world that was proposed to them and that they had accepted. The Germans fell into a trap called “utilitarianism.” It is one of those principles that are so embedded in our way of thinking that we don’t even realize that it exists. But it does, and it causes enormous damage. In principle, utilitarianism wouldn’t seem to be such a bad idea. It is a rational calculation of the consequences of taking or not taking a certain action based on the principle of generating the maximum good for the maximum number of people. So defined, it looks both sensible and harmless. But that’s the theory. What we have is a good illustration of the age-old principle that “in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they are not.”

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Relativity
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614947859245240325

 

 

Huxley

 

 

This should make a few doctors think.

 

 

Hairdresser
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614661494947340289

 

 

 

 

Cleaner shrimps

 

 

Blue whale
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615041486331969584

 

 


A hummingbird lays back and “relaxes” after drinking flower nectar. Source: Rahul Singh

 

 

Skippy

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 272022
 


L.S. Lowry The mill, Pendlebury 1943

 

The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate (Zweig)
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate (ZH)
You Need to Start Paying Attention to the ‘Twitter Files’ (PJM)
It’s Time to Reform the Bureau (Turley)
What Will the FBI *Not* Do? (Hanson)
Pandemic Response Gets A Permanent New Home At The White House (STAT)
Ukraine Calls For UN-Brokered ‘Peace Summit’ In February (RT)
Report: The CIA Is Directing Sabotage Attacks Inside Russia (Antiwar)
Medvedev Gives Timeline For Reconciliation With The West (RT)
What Can Happen In 2023 (Dmitry Medvedev)
ECB Governing Council Says Growth Of Key Rate In 2023 Possible (Az.)
Russia Ready To Resume Gas Supplies To EU – Official (RT)
Germany Becoming ‘Dysfunctional’ State – MP (RT)
Return Europe To A Union Of Homelands (RMX)
Republican Senators Turn On Leader Mitch McConnell Over $1.7t Omnibus (DM)
What It’s Really About (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

Blood-brain barrier

 

 

 

 

Tom Renz
https://twitter.com/i/status/1607224317099798530

 

 

 

 

Mozart

 

 

 

 

More Twitter files, this time on Covid response.

Elon Musk @elonmusk: “Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread. Follow-up piece to come next week, featuring leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions. (Many of whom were, of course, actively suppressed on Twitter).”

Author David Zweig also has a longer article here . I’ll start off with his Twitter thread.

The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate (Zweig)

– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.
3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press, @thefp, is one piece of that important story.
4. The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.
5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
6. At the onset of the pandemic, according to meeting notes, the Trump admin was especially concerned about panic buying. They came looking for “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation” about “runs on grocery stores.” But . . . there were runs on grocery stores.
7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.
8. When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on “anti-vaxxer accounts.” Especially Alex Berenson.
9. In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.
10. Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.

Read more …

“We are asking them to step up,” Murthy said. “We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action.”

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate (ZH)

Today’s edition, dropped by journalist David Zweig, focuses on ‘how Twitter rigged the Covid debate’ by taking direction from both the Trump and Biden administrations (while at the same time trying to censor the former president). What’s somewhat notable is how aggressive government (and ex-government) officials were in trying to stifle free speech, while Twitter’s non-government-linked employees would often push back (and then totally fold) – a theme we’ve observed in previous drops. In one such instance, former head of Twitter’s Trust & Safety team Yoel Roth tells former FBI lawyer and then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker to calm his tits over a Trump tweet. Of course, in the end the government typically got its way, as you will read below.

Zweig, who was granted access to internal files while on assignment for The Free Press, notes that “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.” What’s more, the censorship effort extended to Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. In July 2021, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a 22-page advisory concerning what the World Health Organization referred to as an “infodemic,” and called on social media platforms to do more to shut down “misformation.” “We are asking them to step up,” Murthy said. “We can’t wait longer for them to take aggressive action.”

That’s the message the White House had already taken directly to Twitter executives in private channels. One of the Biden administration’s first meeting requests was about Covid, with a focus on “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to a meeting summary by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy. They were especially concerned about Alex Berenson, a journalist skeptical of lockdowns and mRNA vaccines, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform: By the summer of 2021, the day after Murthy’s memo, Biden announced publicly that social media companies were “killing people” by allowing misinformation about vaccines. Just hours later, Twitter locked Berenson out of his account, and then permanently suspended him the next month.

Berenson sued Twitter. He ultimately settled with the company, and is now back on the platform. As part of the lawsuit, Twitter was compelled to provide certain internal communications. They revealed that the White House had directly met with Twitter employees and pressured them to take action on Berenson. The summary of meetings by Culbertson, emailed to colleagues in December 2022, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and illustrates how it tried to directly influence what content was allowed on Twitter. Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.

Read more …

Yeah, we could use some summaries. Authors so far: Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, David Zweig, Leighton Woodhouse, Abigail Shrier. And perhaps others?! I hadn’t even noticed the last two.

You Need to Start Paying Attention to the ‘Twitter Files’ (PJM)

The “Twitter Files” have now officially had more sequels than Planet of the Apes and can be difficult to absorb. Thus, I don’t think they’re getting the attention they deserve. For those of you not following the “Twitter Files” drops, let me catch you up on what I believe are some of the most important parts:
• The FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million to censor conservatives.
• The FBI pressured Twitter to give them information that would legally require warrants, though they did not have warrants.
• Leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI would eventually hold weekly meetings with Twitter and tell them whose tweets to squelch and which accounts they wanted to be suspended. Almost all were those of conservatives.
• The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, they knew it was coming out — weeks before the 2020 election — and they told Big Tech to expect a “Russian disinformation” drop and squelch the story. That means the FBI corrupted the election to help Joe “totally showered with his daughter, Ashley” Biden.
• There are so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they have their own Slack channel.


In response to the “Twitter Files” detailing how the FBI-Twitter circle jerk was real, the bureau called the allegations “conspiracy theories” but never actually denied its relationship with Twitter. Elon Musk provided the world with an early Christmas present on Saturday with Twitter Files Pt. IX. I’ll sum it up so you can avoid the Twitter mess and get to the relevant facts:
• The FBI was a portal, specifically the San Francisco office, for other government agencies to get to Twitter to surveil and censor Americans.
• Hiding under the title of Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), actors from local police departments to the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA were watching and censoring Americans — not foreigners.
• Twitter wasn’t the only Big Tech firm hip-deep in spooks. The feds had their fingers in Verizon, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, and, for some reason, Pinterest.
• As the 2020 election neared, the FBI-FITF assailed Twitter with hundreds of requests to censor Twitter accounts and tweets. There were so many requests that Twitter execs had to come up with a system to prioritize them.
• FBI employees were tasked with doing word searches on Twitter, looking for violations of Twitter policies — instead of chasing actual criminals.
• The FBI had roughly 80 agents working with Big Tech companies. It is unclear how many members of the DOD, CIA, etc. were involved

Read more …

“Criticizing the FBI is now ‘disinformation’”

It’s Time to Reform the Bureau (Turley)

The “Twitter Files” released by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, show as many as 80 agents targeting social-media posters for censorship on the site. This included alleged briefings that Twitter officials said was the reason they spiked the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. The FBI sent 150 messages on back channels to just one Twitter official to flag accounts. One Twitter executive expressed unease over the FBI’s pressure, declaring: “They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).” We also have learned that Twitter hired a number of retired FBI agents, including former FBI general counsel James Baker, who was a critical and controversial figure in past bureau scandals over political bias.

It is not clear what is more chilling — the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program, or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. The FBI has issued a series of “nothing-to-see-here” statements regarding the Twitter Files. In its latest statement, the FBI insists it did not command Twitter to take any specific action when flagging accounts to be censored. Of course, it didn’t have to threaten the company — because we now have an effective state media by consent rather than coercion. Moreover, an FBI warning tends to concentrate the minds of most people without the need for a specific threat. Finally, the files show that the FBI paid Twitter millions as part of this censorship system — a windfall favorably reported to Baker before he was fired from Twitter by Musk.

Criticizing the FBI is now ‘disinformation’. Responding to the disclosures and criticism, an FBI spokesperson declared: “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” Arguably, “working every day to protect the American public” need not include censoring the public to protect it from errant or misleading ideas. However, it is the attack on its critics that is most striking. While the FBI denounced critics of an earlier era as communists and “fellow travelers,” it now uses the same attack narrative to label its critics as “conspiracy theorists.”

After Watergate, there was bipartisan support for reforming the FBI and intelligence agencies. Today, that cacophony of voices has been replaced by crickets, as much of the media imposes another effective blackout on coverage of the Twitter Files. This media silence suggests that the FBI found the “sweet spot” on censorship, supporting the views of the political and media establishment. As for the rest of us, the FBI now declares us to be part of a disinformation danger which it is committed to stamping out — “conspiracy theorists” misleading the public simply by criticizing the bureau. Clearly, this is the time for a new Church Committee — and time to reform the FBI.

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“Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years.”

What Will the FBI *Not* Do? (Hanson)

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency. Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was. Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax. Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was. Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified. While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it: “As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”

McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant. Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists. Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”

Read more …

What could go wrong?

Pandemic Response Gets A Permanent New Home At The White House (STAT)

The era of the rotating cast of public health czars at the White House may finally be over. Presidents for decades have brought fresh faces to the White House to coordinate federal responses to threats such as Covid-19, mpox, Ebola, AIDS, and the bird flu. Now, Congress aims to give pandemic response a permanent home at the White House.Next year’s government funding package includes a brand-new White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy that would have a director appointed by the president and up to 25 staff members. “They’re not simply going to retire the role that [White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha] plays when the emergency declaration ends,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the director of its Global Health Policy Center.


“You can’t just keep piling on coordinators, disease by disease.” The new director’s main responsibilities would be to advise the president on preparing for pandemics and other biological threats, to coordinate response activities across the federal government — including research into new countermeasures and distribution of medical supplies — and to evaluate the government’s readiness. The director would also be a member of the Domestic Policy Council and the National Security Council. “The functions outlined are exactly what is needed at the White House, and what I’ve been calling for for years, to avoid having any single agency take the lead on something that overlaps most departments in the U.S. government,” said Ken Bernard, who worked in biodefense policy in both the Clinton and George W. Bush White Houses.

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Start off with impossible conditions. And then say: hey, we tried!

Ukraine Calls For UN-Brokered ‘Peace Summit’ In February (RT)

Kiev has proposed holding a so-called “peace summit” by the end of February to mark the one-year anniversary since Russia launched its military operation against Ukraine. The initiative was announced by that country’s Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, who also set out conditions for inviting Moscow to the event. In an interview with AP published on Monday, Kuleba stated that Ukraine will do whatever it can to win its ongoing military conflict with Russia in 2023, but admitted that diplomacy always plays an important role. “Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” Kuleba said, adding that “every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”

The minister noted that the UN was “the best venue for holding this summit, because it is not about making a favor to a certain country” and suggested that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres could act as mediator for the event. “He has proven himself to be an efficient mediator and an efficient negotiator, and most importantly, as a man of principle and integrity. So we would welcome his active participation,” Kuleba said about Guterres. Asked about the matter of inviting Russia to this “peace summit,” Kuleba insisted Moscow must first face an “international court” and be prosecuted for supposed war crimes. He also dismissed Putin’s recent calls for negotiations, stating that everything Russia does on the battlefield “proves” that Moscow does not want to talk.

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s addressed G20 leaders in Indonesia and laid out a ten-point “peace formula,” which includes the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the withdrawal of Russian troops, an “all for all” prisoner swap, and a tribunal for those Kiev accuses of aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has insisted that Kiev must “recognize the reality on the ground” as a prerequisite for any peace negotiations, including the new status of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye as parts of Russia.

Read more …

Sleeper cells.

Report: The CIA Is Directing Sabotage Attacks Inside Russia (Antiwar)

The CIA has been using a European NATO country’s intelligence services to conduct sabotage attacks inside Russia since the February invasion of Ukraine, investigative journalist Jack Murphy reported on Saturday, citing unnamed former US intelligence and military officials. The report said that no US personnel are on the ground in Russia but that the operations are being directed by the CIA. The US is using an ally’s intelligence services to add an extra layer of plausible deniability, and a former US special operations official told Murphy that layer was a major factor in President Biden signing off on the attacks. Murphy said he didn’t name the NATO country whose intelligence services were being used in the report because “doing so might endanger the operational security of cells that are still operational inside of Russia.”

The report appeared on Murphy’s personal website, and in a note at the end of the piece, he explained why it wasn’t published by a media outlet. “While working with editors at mainstream publications I was asked to do things that were illegal and unethical in one instance, and in another instance I felt that a senior CIA official was able to edit my article by making off the record statements, before he leaked a story to The New York Times to undermine this piece,” he wrote. According to the report, the covert campaign inside Russia has been years in the making. Two former military officials said that the NATO country’s spy services had hidden a cache of explosives and equipment in Russia more than a decade ago, and some of the gear has been used recently.

A former US special operations official and US person briefed on the campaign said that the CIA didn’t get involved with the NATO country’s operations inside Russia until 2014. The first time sleeper cells entered Russia that were directed by both the CIA and the NATO ally’s spy service was in 2016, and more entered the country in the following years. The NATO ally provided the undercover operatives with stories to explain their presence in Russia and documents to back them up. The report said that around the time Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the NATO ally’s spy service activated its sleeper cells inside Russia using covert communication, and they were ready for orders on what targets to strike.

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Medvedev becomes more visible. He’s still close to Putin, or so it seems. If anything happens to Putin, he appears to be the go-to guy.

Medvedev Gives Timeline For Reconciliation With The West (RT)

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has accused Western powers of lying, causing a rift that will remain for decades to come, and convincing Moscow that there is no sense in trying to reach an agreement with them. Medevedev, who serves as deputy chair of the national Security Council, wrote in a keynote article on Sunday that the year 2022 has shattered illusions about the West, proving that its promises and principles cannot taken at face value. “Alas, there is nobody in the West we could deal with about anything for any reason,” he wrote. Medvedev went on to say that nations that claim global leadership deceived Russia when they claimed NATO expansion in Europe posed no threat to it.

They again lied when they backed a peace roadmap for Ukraine, which in reality was meant to give Kiev time to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with Russia, he added. The conflict in Ukraine is a war against Russia by a proxy, which was long in the making, Medvedev claimed. The behavior of Washington and others this year “is the last warning to all nations: there can be no business with the Anglo-Saxon world [because] it is a thief, a swindler, a card-sharp that could do anything.” For Russia, there will be no restoration of normal relations with the West for years or even decades to come, Medvedev predicted. “From now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power there. We will be careful and alert. We will develop relations with the rest of the world,” he wrote.

However, Medvedev argued that the loss of Western leadership could be a net positive, considering what he called the moral bankruptcy of the US-led neo-colonial order. Elites that caused the financial meltdown of 2008 and the ongoing global crisis are unable to claim global leadership, he wrote. “The West is incapable of offering to the world any new ideas, which would take humanity forward, solve global problems, or provide collective security,” the former president insisted. Medvedev expects that several regional blocs will emerge in the near future, each with its own values and rules, and that Russia will have its place in the new order.

Read more …

A very strange Twitter thread from Medvedev. Elon Musk reacted: “Those are definitely the most absurd predictions I’ve ever heard, while also showing astonishing lack of awareness of the progress of artificial intelligence and sustainable energy..”

What Can Happen In 2023 (Dmitry Medvedev)

On the New Year’s Eve, everybody’s into making predictions Many come up with futuristic hypotheses, as if competing to single out the wildest, and even the most absurd ones. Here’s our humble contribution.


1. Oil price will rise to $150 a barrel, and gas price will top $5.000 per 1.000 cubic meters
2. The UK will rejoin the EU
3. The EU will collapse after the UK’s return; Euro will drop out of use as the former EU currency
4. Poland and Hungary will occupy western regions of the formerly existing Ukraine
5. The Fourth Reich will be created, encompassing the territory of Germany and its satellites, i.e., Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, Slovakia, the Kiev Republic, and other outcasts
6. War will break out between France and the Fourth Reich. Europe will be divided, Poland repartitioned in the process
7. Northern Ireland will separate from the UK and join the Republic of Ireland
8. Civil war will break out in the US, California. and Texas becoming independent states as a result. Texas and Mexico will form an allied state. Elon Musk’ll win the presidential election in a number of states which, after the new Civil War’s end, will have been given to the GOP
9. All the largest stock markets and financial activity will leave the US and Europe and move to Asia
10. The Bretton Woods system of monetary management will collapse, leading to the IMF and World Bank crash. Euro and Dollar will stop circulating as the global reserve currencies. Digital fiat currencies will be actively used instead
Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets!

Read more …

“..a delicate balancing act between fighting inflation and exacerbating the slowdown..”

ECB Governing Council Says Growth Of Key Rate In 2023 Possible (Az.)

A veteran member of the European Central Bank’s rate-setting council believes it has only just passed the halfway point of its tightening cycle and needs to be “in there for the long game” to tame high inflation, Report informs referring to Financial Times. After more than a decade of aggressive easing, 2022 was the year when many leading central banks began to raise rates in response to soaring prices. The ECB increased borrowing costs by 2.5 percentage points, capping the year with its fourth rise in a row to leave its benchmark deposit rate at 2 percent.


Klaas Knot, head of the Dutch central bank and one of the governing council’s more hawkish rate-setters, told the Financial Times that, with five policy meetings between now and July 2023, the ECB would achieve “quite a decent pace of tightening” through half percentage point rises in the months ahead before borrowing costs eventually peaked by the summer. In the eurozone, consumer price inflation hit a record high of 10.6 percent in the year to October – more than five times the ECB’s 2 percent target. In the Netherlands, inflation has been higher still, peaking at 17.1 percent in September. However, growth in the bloc is grinding to a halt, leaving central bankers facing a delicate balancing act between fighting inflation and exacerbating the slowdown.

Read more …

“The Polish leg of the route is currently being used to pump stored gas from Germany.”

Russia Ready To Resume Gas Supplies To EU – Official (RT)

Moscow is ready to restart supplies of natural gas to the EU via the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Monday. He noted that shipments through the route were halted for political reasons. According to the official, the EU remains a relevant market for Russia, which is able to resume supplies to a region suffering from a gas shortage. “For example, the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, which was shut down for political reasons, remains unused,” Novak said. Gas supplies via the pipeline, which usually flow westward, have been mostly reversed since Poland terminated a supply contract with Russia ahead of its end-2022 expiry date, after rejecting Moscow’s demand for ruble payments. The Polish leg of the route is currently being used to pump stored gas from Germany.


In response to Warsaw’s move, Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom cut off supplies, saying it could no longer send gas via Poland, while Moscow imposed sanctions against the firm that owns the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline. Although Russian gas deliveries to the EU via the Nord Stream and Yamal-Europe pipelines have been halted, Russian gas is still being supplied to certain European buyers via a transit line through Ukraine and the TurkStream pipeline through Türkiye. Despite the persisting problems, Novak says he still sees the EU as a viable market for Russia. “Today we can confidently say that there is a stable demand for our gas. Therefore, we continue to consider Europe as a potential market for our products. It is clear that a large-scale campaign was launched against us, which ended with acts of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipelines,” he said. The market for LNG also remains open, according to Novak, who noted that Russian LNG supplies to the EU are expected to grow to 21 billion cubic meters by the end of the year.

Read more …

“We don’t want gas and oil supplies from Russia any more, at the same time our ‘green’ friends are restarting coal-fired power plants..”

Germany Becoming ‘Dysfunctional’ State – MP (RT)

Germany faces a serious risk of going bankrupt due to the government’s inability to find a viable solution to the current energy crisis, the Vice President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Kubicki, said in an interview published in the national Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag. According to the official, Germans now have the impression that their country is on the way to becoming a “dysfunctional state.” “Infrastructure, energy prices and the inability of the Bundeswehr [the country’s armed forces] to protect us are challenges that require immediate action from the German authorities, otherwise things will go wrong,” he said.

Kubicki blasted Economy Minister Robert Habeck over purchases of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the US for “a lot of money” while at the same time refusing to mine cheaper shale gas in Germany “for purely ideological reasons.” He added that the German authorities should revise their approach to nuclear power plants, which should continue operating while the country is facing an energy crisis. “We don’t want gas and oil supplies from Russia any more, at the same time our ‘green’ friends are restarting coal-fired power plants, while preventing a reasonable extension of the life of nuclear power plants,” Kubicki said, commenting on Habeck’s latest decisions.

The MP called for a change in the government’s strategy and the rejection of excessive financial assistance in the face of the energy crisis. “If we continue to pursue the policies of paying out money for years as part of the fight against the energy crisis, then we are at risk of national bankruptcy if not state socialism,” Kubicki warned. According to the Vice Speaker, the funds that Berlin is planning to spend on additional purchases of energy resources amid the crunch were originally destined for investments in other areas. “This money cannot be printed or covered by taxpayers. We cannot exist in a state of financial crisis for a long time due to the risk of shortage of funds to support other areas,” he said.

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Poland seeks more power.

Return Europe To A Union Of Homelands (RMX)

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that “he and Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will change Europe.” In an interview for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, Morawiecki explained that Europe and power should return to stronger nation states. “We do not believe in a superstate of 27 EU member states. We want a return of a union of homelands,” underlined the Polish prime minister. Morawiecki pointed out that Europe has to choose between an authentic solidarity of equal states, or a model of a single superstate in which “decisions will be made in a couple of the largest capitals, disregarding other countries.” Referring to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Morawiecki pointed out that the Ukraine war will end only with the defeat of Vladimir Putin.


“We have warned that Russia’s colonial ambitions are a threat to eastern European countries and the entire EU,” said Morawiecki, adding that Europe must do everything to aid Ukraine, as the fall of Kyiv would open the way for Russia to conquer Europe. “Together with [Italian] Prime Minister Meloni, we stand to defend Ukraine. We realistically assess the threat posed by the Russian Federation,” the Polish leader added. According to Morawiecki, some European nations are more acutely aware of the Russian threat due to their past experiences. “That is why we all think about armaments and protecting against the threat from the East,” he explained Meloni often refers to policies pursued by Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) government, using them as a model and an example. She often mentions that European conservative parties need to cooperate, previously saying: “We will transform ideas into a government policy, just as our friends from the Czech and Polish republics have done.”

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It’s one big party.

Republican Senators Turn On Leader Mitch McConnell Over $1.7t Omnibus (DM)

Donald Trump tore into his Republican rival, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, on Monday over his role in helping pass a bipartisan $1.7 trillion ‘omnibus’ spending bill to keep federal government agencies and the military funded through September 2023. The former president dusted off an old favorite monicker of his for McConnell, calling him an ‘Old Crow,’ while also claiming that Democrats ‘must have something’ on the Kentucky legislator after he was one of 18 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the bill. He had stopped using the nickname for a time after McConnell said ‘Old Crow’ was his favorite brand of Kentucky bourbon, and even once gifted bottles in a veiled dismissal of Trump’s taunts. Trump made his thoughts on the spending bill clear, deriding it as ‘ominous’ and claiming it would not have been passed under his administration.

He also hurled a racist insult he previously lodged at McConnell’s wife, his own former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. ‘The Marxist Democrats must have something really big on Mitch McConnell in order to get him and some of his friendly “Republican” Senators to pass the horrendous “All Democrat, All the Way” OMINOUS Bill,’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social app. ‘It gives Border Security to other countries, but ZERO $’s to the U.S., it fully funds the corrupt “Justice” Department, FBI (which RIGGED the Presidential Election!), and even the Trump Hating Special “Prosecutor.” It is also a massive giveaway & capitulation to CHINA, making COCO CHOW so happy!’ He wrote in a follow-up post, ‘If the Old Crow waited just 10 days, the Republican Majority in the House could have made the “Ominous” Bill MUCH, MUCH, MUCH BETTER.’

‘Just another win for the Democrats, Mitch, that wouldn’t have happened if “Trump” were President!’ Trump concluded. A pair of Republican senators loudly denounced McConnell on Sunday over his shepherding through the $1.7 trillion bill. The funding package includes fiscal victories for both parties. Many on the right who voted for it made clear that it was not the fiscal agenda they preferred but believed it was necessary to keep the military and other critical aspects of the government running smoothly. But federal spending priority talks have divided the GOP. Many on the right having opposed working with Democrats on where the government spends dollars next year.

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“..it still doesn’t explain how these outfits became the enemies of truth itself, and by extension, enemies of reality.”

What It’s Really About (Kunstler)

Not so many years ago, the force counter-balancing criminal misconduct in the government was the news media, even if the reporters and editors claimed to be on the political Left. Or, shall we say, especially if they were on the Left, because the Left in those days fervently championed free speech. Reporters of that long-ago day (Seymour Hersh, John Sack, and Michael Herr) would be out digging up the true facts of a big event — say, the US Military’s deadly blunders and scams in Vietnam — and editors would plaster screaming headlines about it on the front page: GENERAL SAYS “WE HAD TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT!” When the venerable news-spieler Walter Cronkite of CBS began to hint that the war was a fiasco, public opinion across the country shifted decisively against it.

Of course, those crimes and sins were committed against people in distant lands. Now, the administrative weight of the US is rolling over its own citizens, and over the Constitution — and the news media is uniformly and enthusiastically in favor of suppressing the news about it. How that happened is one of several cosmic mysteries of our time, along with who exactly runs “Joe Biden,” and how did the many nations of Western Civ adopt in lock-step Covid-19 policies aimed at harming their own people? No reporter even of the alt.news division even tried to get inside the head of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet during the years of RussiaGate. Did he believe all that crap his paper was putting out? Now, you realize, it’s established fact (in the federal court record) that the Steele Dossier and everything spun off of it was a flim-flam confected by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

But even at the time, say 2017 to 2019, independent journalists were reporting the truth about it — for example, the FBI’s long-running fraud in the FISA Court — while The New York Times ardently inveighed against any emerging fact-pattern that broke through its wall of propaganda. The Times was showered with awards for that, including the Pulitzer Prize for its completely fallacious RussiaGate coverage. One easy answer is that The Times and many of its “legacy” cohorts — The WashPo, CBS, NBC, and ABC — have volunteered to be the public relations office of the Democratic Party, covering-up anything and everything the Party does against the public interest. And while that appears to be the case, it still doesn’t explain how these outfits became the enemies of truth itself, and by extension, enemies of reality.

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Julian Claus

 

 

 

 

Montreal 2010

 

 

 

 

Cobalt

 

 

Piano stairs

 

 

 

 

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